Once We Were

One by one, everyone climbed up to join us. Cordelia turned on the lamp, which brightened the attic further. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. There was only one room, but it was large enough to fit many more than our six bodies. The heat-heavy air was cloying, but bearable.

“So,” Sabine said once we’d all settled down. She sat cross-legged on the green couch, looking more dancerlike than ever in a pair of dark gray leggings and a faded T-shirt. Her gaze fell on Devon, then Addie and me. “One of you, go first. Tell us about yourself.”

Of course, Devon said nothing. Addie cradled our milk-shake in our hands. “We’re both from Lupside. I—”

“Lupside?” Cordelia was half sitting, half curled against Sabine, her smile lazy but her eyes sharp. “Didn’t you live there for a while, Christoph?”

Christoph nodded. “For two years, back in elementary school.”

Before Addie and I moved there, then. We’d have still been living in our old apartment, just starting to realize how utterly strange it was—how truly awful—that we hadn’t settled.

“Did you ever go to the history museum?” Addie asked.

Christoph had a sweet face when he wasn’t scowling. He looked younger, with his slight frame and pale freckles. He had stopped twitching around so much, like a bomb that might go off any minute.

“Every year. Do they still have that god-awful poster? That supposedly authentic one from nineteen-whatever with the twisted-looking hybrids on them?” He screwed up his face and raised his hands like claws, making Cordelia laugh.

I remembered that poster. Christoph’s impression of it wasn’t terribly exaggerated. The entire museum was dedicated to the struggle between the hybrids and the non-hybrids. It covered everything from the servitude forced upon the single-souled when they were first shipped to the Americas, to the great Revolution that had followed, and the years of fighting on American soil at the start of the Great Wars.

Addie told the others about the flood and fire damage that had ruined portions of the museum during our last visit. She hesitated, then explained how everything had been blamed on a hybrid man. Described the mob that had gathered around his arrest, crushing and trampling and screaming like spectators at a blood fight.

“I’ve always wanted to visit the East Coast,” Cordelia said. “See the water there, you know?”

Sabine rolled her eyes, but indulgently. “I’m sure the ocean looks the same.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Cordelia said. “Does it, Addie?”

“I don’t know,” Addie admitted. “Lupside isn’t on the coast, and I never went.”

“Someday, I’ll go. Once I’ve got enough money to fly.” She looked to Jackson. “Maybe I’ll get Peter to send me. He flew you over to Nornand, after all.”

“He flew me to Nornand to work,” Jackson said.

Cordelia shrugged languorously. “Yes, well, I’m sure there are institutions on the East Coast. One day, however I get there, I’ll go.”

“Don’t you want to see the … I don’t know, the Indian Ocean instead?” Jackson asked. “Or the Adriatic?” He smiled at Cordelia’s raised eyebrow. “Adriatic Sea. I saw it on one of Henri’s maps. It’s in Europe. I liked the name.”

Cordelia shrugged. “As if I’ll ever get to leave the country.”

There was a storm cloud over Devon’s face that he didn’t bother to hide. I could guess what was running through his mind.

Addie said.

I remembered Jackson pulling us into the janitor’s closet at Nornand, babbling about Peter and secret plans. Telling us to keep hope. We’d been shocked and irritated by his smiles then, his almost lackadaisical air. But he hadn’t been flippant. Not truly.

I thought about the meeting we’d attended last night. The room silent with grief after Peter explained what had happened at Hahns. Christoph’s barely contained anger, and how Jackson had tried to keep him in check.

Sabine and Christoph had been in Anchoit for half a decade. What about Cordelia and Jackson?

I said quietly.

“When’s Peter’s next meeting?” Christoph sat the farthest from the standing lamp, and the fairy lights softened his features.

Sabine shrugged. “He’s talking with some people one-on-one. I don’t think he’ll be having a general meeting anytime soon, though. Not unless something big happens.”

Christoph snorted and looked up at the ceiling. “Something big has already happened.”

“And we had a meeting when it did,” Sabine said. “We’ll have another when—”

Christoph’s voice turned rough. “When the earth slows, and the seas rise, and Peter finishes making his plans and remaking his plans and—”

“And remaking those plans,” Sabine finished for him. She smiled, and he didn’t quite smile back, but he quieted. Sabine’s gaze flickered to Addie and me, then to Devon. “It isn’t that we don’t appreciate everything Peter’s done. We do. We’re here because his plans worked. But no one can deny that Peter’s slow. Meticulous, yes. Careful, yes. And that’s all good, but slow. He believes in taking his time, and sometimes—”

“Sometimes there isn’t any time,” Addie said.

Sabine nodded.

“That institution you mentioned at the meeting,” Devon said slowly. “Powatt. How long has it been open?”

There was a hiccup of silence. Sabine shifted in her seat. “It hasn’t opened yet. They’re still setting things up, I think. Powatt’s going to be one of the institutions spearheading the new hybrid-cure initiative. They’re going to be testing some kind of—some kind of new machine that’s supposed to make the surgeries more precise.”

The word surgeries flashed us back to Nornand’s basement. To the feeling of cold metal, to Jaime’s voice babbling through the door, and sallow-lit hallways.

“There’s this guy,” Sabine said, “Hogan Nalles—he’s lower-level government. He’ll be downtown next Friday at Lankster Square, going on about how proud we should be, and all that. A pep rally of sorts. Stage and balloons and a couple hundred people, most likely.”

“A big, screaming crowd,” Christoph said. “Cheering on the systematic, government-supported lobotomization of children.”

Sabine grinned wryly. “I don’t think lobotomization is quite the same thing. And if we don’t do anything … if we just sit here and let Powatt open in a couple months, are we really that much better than they are?”

“Say what you mean to say, Sabine,” Cordelia intoned in what was obviously supposed to be a mockery of Peter’s voice. She giggled quietly into Sabine’s shoulder, and the other girl wrapped an obliging arm around her.

When Sabine spoke, though, her voice was utterly serious. “We’re going to stop Powatt from ever opening.”

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