“Whaddya think, fellas?” Bradley sneered.
“I’d give her ten seconds,” Geoff said.
“Nah, she’s never lasted that long.” Gabi drew deeper into the dark as the stars began to sing. From outside herself, Gabi saw her eyes roll back in her head as she fell backward.
“Now!” Bradley screeched, and the three boys released her. Falling well was important, even with the cushion of snow. Gabi tucked her chin so she wouldn’t bash her head on the ground. “Yes!” Bradley cheered. He kicked a tuft of snow over Gabi, and it sifted down onto her like the precious ration of cinnamon sugar Grammy used to dust her apple cake.
“Hey, I think we’re good here,” Noel ventured. “It’s not even dark yet, and this is Brother Lowell’s house.”
“I say when we’re good, Noelle,” Bradley sneered. “We’re doing Brother Lowell a favor, not to mention the fellowship. No one else can stomach culling the weak from the herd, but it still needs to be done.”
“Yeah,” Geoff echoed, kicking a heavy clump of snow onto Gabi’s chest. “The chosen do the choosing, guided by the Will, like the translations say.” The front porch light of the Lowell house flickered on, causing all three boys to startle and dart back down the street as though flushed by gunshot.
The yellow light shone through Gabi’s closed eyelids and drew her back through the hatch into her body as she opened them. Grammy Low stepped into the circle of light on the porch, clutching at the thin cardigan of her Minder’s uniform as arctic air barreled into the house behind her. Her legs were chapped above the woolen knee-highs she favored in the cold months.
“Hello? Who’s there?” Gram called, her voice raw from the chronic cough that had dogged her since the Strain. Gabi knew that Gram would come out searching for her among the drifts, risking pneumonia or a fall or worse if Gabi didn’t drag herself to the house on her own. Her head throbbed, and her spindly arms were sore from the boys’ rough handling, but nothing was broken.
“It’s me, Gram, I’m here,” she answered, her breath barely making a wisp of fog in the frozen air.
“What on earth, Gabriela?” Gram fretted as Gabi limped onto the porch. “Get yourself inside before you catch your death!”
Gabi attempted a smile and patted her grandmother’s creased cheek. “Stop fussing, Gram, I’m fine. I’m way too slow to catch anything, death included.” Grammy Low smelled of yeast and butter and another thing that radiated from beneath Gabi’s own clothes—the vinegar tang of someone who knew herself to be alone. Grammy Low’s friends were all gone, and Gabi had never had any. Gram pulled Gabi into her cushioned warmth and left a streak of flour in her dark curls as she smoothed the hair from her granddaughter’s face.
“Go put on something dry while I put out your pills with some tea and cake. It’s already thirty minutes past time.” Gram’s hair stood out in white shocks from her head, adding drama to the urgency in her voice. When it came to the pills, every minute mattered. Taken as a powder mixed into formula when Gabi was a baby, then swallowed whole with water when she was old enough to manage pills, the medicine was a fact of Gabi’s life. The pills, her father explained, were the only things keeping Gabi’s lungs working. According to him, missing a dose or taking one too late could cause her entire respiratory system to shut down, like sealing a whale’s blowhole shut and holding it deep underwater.
Gabi took her first relaxed inhale since leaving the house that morning and released it on a sigh as she entered her room and shut the door behind her. The walls were painted in blended shades of blue and green, an abstract rendering of seaweed-swirled water. Her books, hundreds of them, were crammed into bookcases and milk crates and stacked into wobbly towers that deterred anyone but Gabi from entering for fear of triggering an avalanche. She was not a hoarder, Gabi insisted when her father and brother ribbed her for her trove of books. She was simply starved for information. Sometimes she thought she would rather have words than air.
As she peeled off her dripping socks and leggings, Gabi’s gaze wandered to the carefully marked books on cetacean biology piled within easy reach of her bed. She had been eating, sleeping, and breathing whales in preparation for her presentation that day, certain that if she just knew her subject matter well enough, the words would flow effortlessly out of her. She was wrong.
Whales were a peculiar fascination for a girl who was afraid of water. The mere thought of being close to more than a bucketful of the stuff was enough to make Gabi shake, a phobia her father didn’t discourage. Recreational swimming had been forbidden since before Gabi was born anyhow. Water resources were scarce, and every available drop that fell or condensed was immediately sequestered for purification and municipal use. Anyone who violated these practices risked heavy fines and even imprisonment. Immersion in water was illegal. All bathing was done from a small ration delivered in measured containers three times weekly around Alder, just as it was in every other branch of the Unitas Fellowship.
The fellowship had no real need to deter residents from collecting their own water stores. Thanks to years of unchecked emissions and nuclear meltdowns during the Great Strain, which attacked technologies as well as life-forms, no one dared use or ingest water before trained professionals treated it. Though she gobbled up any small morsel of information she could about the mysteries of marine biology, Gabi couldn’t imagine actually seeing the ocean, watching it swell and threaten to consume her. But something drew her back to her books time and again and compelled her to recreate her own dry-land version of the sea in her tiny
