Once We Were

“Eva?” Henri smiled when I startled.

“Sorry,” I said. I was already moving back toward the door. “I’ll come back later.”

“No, wait.” Henri ran a hand against his dark, close-cropped hair, then motioned to the table. “Talk with me? We’ll speak softly.”

I hesitated, then nodded. When Addie and I had first met Henri, we’d been too nervous to talk with him. He’d come visit Peter, and we’d sneak looks at him from across the room, flushing when he caught us. Other than Peter, we’d never met anyone who’d traveled beyond American borders. And Henri hadn’t just traveled. He’d lived his whole life overseas. He had the answers to so many questions we’d never dreamed we’d have the opportunity to ask. How did the hybrids live? Did any of them really go crazy, like the pamphlets at the hospitals claimed? What was it like, the hybrids and the single-souled mingling everywhere? Could people really be happy like that?

Henri had taken the time to tell us stories about his home, a small country in central Africa. He’d traced for us the journeys he’d taken to the Middle East and to Europe, where he now worked for a newspaper. He’d always loved to travel, he said. He’d always wanted to see the world, know its people. And with everywhere he’d gone, he’d come to learn that people are able to accept all kinds of normal.

The rest of Henri’s apartment was spartan, but his table was always strewn with papers, haphazard legal pads, and manila folders that reminded me of the ones we’d seen at Nornand. The ones reducing us patients to photographs, test results, and hastily scribbled notes. To progress or failure. To experiments.

“Peter tells me the city has calmed down about what happened at Lankster Square,” Henri said. “But they still don’t know who did it.”

I met his eyes. “Do you think they will? Find out, I mean?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. He must have misread my concern, because he continued with, “You don’t need to worry about it, Eva.”

What had Josie said? That the government wouldn’t just frame somebody, because getting it wrong would make them look stupid. It made sense. But never finding out would make them look stupid, too. Their only solution was to find the true perpetrators.

To find us.

They wouldn’t find us. The possibility was too terrifying to think about.

“Overseas,” I said, “they’ve found a way to get to the moon. Have they found a way to cure hybridity? One that doesn’t end up killing the majority of its patients?”

Henri hesitated. He took a moment to think, carefully rolling down his shirtsleeves from his elbows. It was so early in the morning Ryan hadn’t even woken yet, but Henri looked as put together as if he were heading out to a nice dinner. He always dressed like that; no matter that he hardly left the building. “Not yet. There aren’t many people researching it now. Some think we should research it more. Some think we should stop. Some think we shouldn’t focus on the hybrids at all, but the people who aren’t hybrid. Find a way to save all the little children who die before they reach double digits.”

All the recessive souls. The ones who hadn’t been lucky, like me.

“Maybe it’s better not knowing,” I said. “Maybe all the intricacies of who survives and who doesn’t . . . why some people are hybrids and some aren’t . . . maybe it’s just not something we’re supposed to know.”

Henri paused, watching me carefully. I struggled not to fidget. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

I thought about Eli and Cal. About Jaime with his broken sentences and lost half.

“Too much knowledge can do terrible things,” I said.

For a long moment, Henri didn’t reply. His eyes didn’t leave our face. Our lips pressed together.

“People do terrible things,” Henri murmured. “Knowledge is only knowledge.” He hesitated. “What if they could find a true cure? Not just killing one of the souls, but . . . transferring it?”

<Transferring it?> Addie echoed.

I frowned. “You mean like taking me out of my body and just sticking me into another one? That’s impossible. Where would you even get a—an empty body?”

“I’m only speculating,” Henri said. “But bodies can be built.”

“Built?”

“Yes. Cloned. It’s been done with animals already. It makes sense that it would be possible with humans.”

I could only stare and stare.

<They could build me another body> I echoed.

Addie didn’t reply. Dimly, I was aware that she was shielding her emotions from me. But my own feelings —my own thoughts—were in too much disarray for me to focus on hers.

To build a body from nothing . . . could you do that? Could you create a fully functioning human being, minus whatever it was that sparked it? That thought, and felt, and dreamed?

And how could you transfer me? My thoughts? My memories? What if something got lost on the way over? Could I still be me if I were in another body? Would they make the second body just like my old one? Would I still have the scars on my hands from the coffee I’d spilled as a child?

Lyle with a new kidney was still Lyle. Lyle would be Lyle even if they had to replace all his organs—I felt that with unbreakable certainty.

But was this different? Would I still be me?

Would I still be me without Addie sharing my heart?

“You know this—this kind of thing is not possible now, right?” Henri said quickly. “It will not be possible in five years or ten or, I imagine, twenty or thirty years, either. I am not a scientist. But I only wonder. If there were the possibility of finding this kind of cure, would you wish them to do the research? Even with the harm some people might do with the knowledge?”

I just stared at him. I didn’t know how to answer.

Addie was the one, in the end, who whispered <It wouldn’t be a cure, Eva. Nothing can be a cure to being hybrid, because being hybrid isn’t a disease.>

And she was, of course, right. These procedures Henri was talking about—they wouldn’t fix us, wouldn’t make us right. They would just make us different than we were now. They would change us.

Would I want that sort of change? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I would. It would be nice, perhaps, to have the choice, even if Addie and I decided in the end that it wasn’t for us. Even if we didn’t want to change, perhaps some other hybrid would.

Henri forced a smile that wasn’t really a smile, just a tightening of the lips. “Don’t worry about it. This isn’t what I meant to talk with you about, Eva, when I asked you to stay. I wanted you to tell me: Is something wrong?”

My mind still whirled with the idea of building bodies. From what? The dead? Or grown from cells? More and more, I realized just how little Addie and I knew. How little we’d been content with knowing.

We’d had no reason to doubt the truth of what our teachers taught us: that the Great Wars had swept across the rest of the world, bringing it to its knees. That the Americas were a haven of peace and prosperity. That this peace and prosperity was contingent on keeping the country hybrid-free.

Why would we have believed differently? These were the things written in our history books and our newspapers, the things our parents told us. It was what our classmates and our classmates’ parents believed. It was what the president said, and he’d been in office for over two decades. His uncle had guided the country through the start of the Great Wars and the invasions that had occurred on American soil. He should know.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“They try to hide it, but I hear Lissa and Ryan arguing. About something bigger, I think, than the things they usually fight about.”

<Concentrate, Eva> Addie said.

She was right. I could think about Henri’s ideas later. “I don’t know what they’re arguing about.”

Henri studied our expression. I turned away, letting our hair fall into our face, and stared at the other papers on the table. Buried beneath two of the legal pads was a world map identical to the one he’d given us.

I ran our fingers across the glossy surface. “Why don’t they help us? They know about us, don’t they? About the hybrids? How we’re treated?”