Once We Were

“What?” The word dropped, a startled, black stone from our mouth.

Kitty’s hand tightened around our wrist until it hurt. “Our old roommate at Nornand. Sallie and Val. The one we had before you and Addie. The one—the one they said had gone home. Like Jaime.”

I shifted, trying to see her face, but Kitty resisted. Our shirt muffled her words. “You rescued Jaime. And Hally. You would’ve rescued Sallie and Val if they’d been down there, right?”

I couldn’t speak. I could only think Oh, God. Oh, God.

Kitty and Nina having nightmares was nothing new. But neither had brought up their old roommate since leaving Nornand. Had the meeting earlier tonight sharpened old memories? Or had they been silently wondering all this time, too frightened to ask?

I’d forgotten that they didn’t know Sallie and Val’s fate. I hadn’t stopped to imagine what it might be like for them, not knowing.

Still, I didn’t want to answer.

Go back to sleep, I wanted to say.

It was only a dream, I wanted to say.

But sleep wouldn’t solve anything, and this—this horror that had happened at Nornand—was not a dream.

How were we supposed to tell an eleven-year-old girl that her friend was dead?

That she had been, for all intents and purposes, murdered?

That no justice had been exacted?

But Kitty and Nina were waiting.

<Tell her> Addie whispered.

I crushed Kitty against us, not knowing if we were doing the right thing, if we were doing it the right way. “Yes, they are.”

She didn’t reply. Her hands tangled in our shirt.

<She was all right before> I said helplessly. <Yesterday, she was laughing—>

But she hadn’t been all right, any more than we’d been all right, or Ryan, or Hally, or Jaime. We’d been out of Nornand for six weeks, and sometimes, I wasn’t sure what all right really meant anymore.

Kitty and Nina weren’t the only one with nightmares.

“You’re safe,” I whispered fiercely in Kitty’s ear. “Nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

I stayed with her for nearly an hour in the darkness, until she drifted back to sleep.

Henri had given us a world map three weeks ago, when Addie and I first arrived at Emalia’s apartment. Since you love it so much, he’d said in his lilting, accented voice, and laughed when Addie fixed it above our bed with sticky tack. He’d brought the map from overseas, so it was like no map Addie and I had ever seen. We’d been fascinated since we first found it rolled up in a corner of his apartment.

Now, as dawn broke, sunlight seeped through the yellow curtains and crawled across the ceiling. Bit by bit, the map came into view. Our eyes took in the neatly labeled countries, each stained a different color. Russia, with its bulk, its eastern mountain ranges and great, thick, blue river veins. Australia, lonely in the southeast, a country and a continent. I thought of Australia most often. Despite the distance between us, there was a comforting familiarity to its loneliness.

The Americas were alone, too. Almost all the other countries of the world shared continents. A few were nearly the size of our northern half, but most were hardly a hundredth our size. How strange it must be to live in a country so small, surrounded so claustrophobically by other nations. The Americas dominated the entire western half of the map, two continents attached by a thread.

A familiar whirring and clicking came from Nina’s side of the room, and I shifted to face her.

“Nina Holynd.” I kept my tone light even as I examined her, searching her expression for signs of the pain she and Kitty had crumpled beneath last night. Nina had always been better than Kitty at hiding pain. The mornings after the girls had a particularly bad dream, it was almost always Nina who took control. Who got out of bed smiling like the nightmares had never happened. “You have got to find somebody else to film.”

“There’s nobody else to film.” Nina directed her video camera right at our face, giggling. I groaned and pulled our covers over our head. “You move a lot in your sleep, you know that?”

“No.” The blankets muffled my words. “And I don’t need cinematographic proof, thank you very much.”

Nina’s camcorder really belonged to Emalia, who had accidentally broken it years back. Nina had unearthed it in a cabinet, and Ryan had fixed it. Since then, Addie and I woke far too often to a camera lens hovering above our bed, filming the apparently fascinating movie of Addie & Eva Asleep.

The video camera was enormous and heavy, but that didn’t seem to dissuade Nina. She and Kitty had gone through two Super 8 film cartridges already, keeping them in our dresser drawer in hopes Emalia might go through with her promise to develop them. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Emalia would probably wait months before deeming it safe enough—if she ever did.

“Eee-va.” Nina drew out my name on a two-toned pitch. “Come on. Get up.” When I didn’t move, she sighed. “Fine. I’ll just look through Addie’s sketchbook, then.”

This jerked Addie into control. “Nina—”

Nina pulled the sketchbook from the nightstand drawer and flipped it open with stubborn glee. After years of hiding her drawings, Addie still disliked people looking through her sketches.

“Who’s this?” The sketchbook had fallen open to a picture of a young boy, light-haired and eager-eyed.

“Lyle.” Addie slipped from our bed and crossed to Nina’s. The younger girl leaned against us, like it was automatic.

“Why’s he dressed like that?”

Our lips crooked in a smile. Addie had drawn him in a soldier’s uniform right out of one of his spy-and- adventure novels. “Because he always wanted to have adventures. For a while, he was convinced he was going to be a soldier when he grew up. He taught himself Morse code and everything. By the time he moved on to the next thing, I’d practically memorized it, too.”

“Do you still remember it?”

Addie nodded. Nodding was easier than speaking around the sudden lump in our throat. She picked up the pencil and reached for her sketchbook, drawing a line and a dot; then two dots; another line and dot; and finally a dot followed by a line.

“N-I-N-A,” she said, and tapped the letters out with the pencil.

Nina stared down at the pattern, her own fingers moving slowly. “Can you teach us the whole alphabet?”

Addie grinned wryly. “Sure. Numbers, too.”

Nina tapped out her name again, a little faster. “What’s Kitty?”

Addie wrote and tapped it for her. Funny how we remembered it even better than I thought we would. Mom and Dad had learned a few words, too, but we were the ones Lyle tapped messages to after we went to bed, rapping on the wall between our rooms long after he was supposed to be asleep. He never stopped until Addie tapped something back.

Addie shut her sketchbook and slipped off the bed, pulling Nina after us. “Come on, have you eaten breakfast?”

“Nope. I was waiting for you. I’ll make you pancakes, if you want.”

“That would be great.” Addie smiled as Nina grabbed her camcorder and headed for the kitchen.

We glanced, one last time, at the map stuck to the ceiling.

The world maps we’d studied in school had always come with the disclaimer that they were old, made before or shortly after the Great Wars began. World War I and World War II, as Henri called them.

The Great Wars had always smashed through our history classes like a giant’s fist, leaving the rest of the world fragmented, unworthy of mapping. We’d been told country lines were muddled, contested to the point of being barely existent. They shifted constantly, as some desperate people attacked