Fever (The Chemical Garden #2)(22)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

“Rhine,” he whispers. “Look out.”

The seat in front of us is empty, so Maddie makes a game of hooking her knees over the back of it and hanging like a bat. It seems to entertain her, at least, even if she is annoying some of the first generations that are eyeing her. I can feel the stigma they’ve placed on Maddie. And on me, and on Gabriel. For our youth. For our looming deaths. As though it’s our fault we were born into this world.

Still, I don’t want us to draw attention to ourselves, especially after Vaughn was able to find me at Madame’s carnival.

“Maddie,” I say. “Come and read with me.”

We read from her worn children’s book, and after that we read the pamphlet in the pocket of the seat before us. We read about how many miles it is from a top-rated hotel to the water, and where to get the best seafood. But eventually that gets old too, and we’re back to the book. Only this time Maddie opens it to the page with the crayon scribbles. She traces each letter with purpose. G-R-A-C-E L-O-T-T-N-E-R. Then she turns the page, and she follows the blue scribbles for a while, and traces the other words too. C-L-A-I-R-E L-O-T-T-N-E-R. I stare at the address, which would only be a few miles from my district of Manhattan. I think it once used to be called Queens. But it could be a coincidence. This book is probably secondhand, something given to Lilac by one of Madame’s customers who couldn’t pay in cash. A small trade for a piece of her flesh.

Still, I ask, “Maddie, who is that?”

Of course she doesn’t answer.

The bus has only just stopped, and its brakes are still squealing when I shake Gabriel awake. “We’re here.” I’m pressing, as though if we don’t run from this bus to the next, we’ll never leave this spot. The next bus will take us straight through to Manhattan. Manhattan. The word sends chills and prickles through every nerve in my body, making me shudder with it. I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck bristling. I cannot remember the last time I was so excited.

I ignore the other thing too, intermingled with all this exhilaration. Some dark worry that has been within me this past year, threatening to turn my giddiness to anxiety, my hopefulness to fear. “Gabriel!”

He swats me away at first, muttering, “I hear you, okay?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry. But we have to get off now. The next bus leaves in ten minutes and this is the only pit stop.”

“What’s a pit stop?” he asks. We’re shuffling down the aisle now, him yawning as I resist the urge to push him along.

“I don’t know, something my parents used to say. Rest stop. Bathroom break. Food break.”

Gabriel is hardly interested in food, though. While we’re standing outside waiting for the next bus to arrive, I manage to coax some warm soda into him. His trembling hand is rattling the can, and I put my hand over his to steady it.

This is the last of it, I think. These small tremors are the drug leaving his blood. I’m about to suggest we throw away the bottle still in Lilac’s bag, when the bus appears. It stops with a squeaky, whinnying sigh, and the doors open for us. I’m ahead of everyone, already sitting, my fists squished between my jumping knees, by the time Gabriel drops beside me.

It is late in the day. The interior of the bus is full of searing yellow light, like we’re inside a halogen lamp. Gabriel squints. He is bronzed, the fine hairs on his arm glowing with white as he traces his finger along the curve of the seat before him. His lower lip is held between his teeth, and pink with color again. Fine brown hairs along his face have frizzed like tiny baby versions of my own curls.

I watch his finger move, first along the edge of the seat but then away from it, making shapes, charting paths.

“Where are you?” I ask softly.

“Sailing,” he answers. “Right here are the waters of Europe.” I lean close to him, my chin on his shoulder, and I watch. “This is the North Sea, and then here is Germany.” He trails his finger down, down. “And the Swiss Alps.”

He is remembering Linden’s atlas. I can see it in his faraway expression, not lost to drugs but to something captivating. Lost like me when I am dreaming of what the world once was, what it should be.

“I’m following the Rhine River,” he says.

“Am I there with you?” I ask.

The concentration leaves his face. He looks at me, and I raise my head from his shoulder. “You’re everywhere,” he says.

“Because there is no more Germany,” I say. “No more Swiss Alps.” Just bits of river broken off into the choppy sea; like Gabriel said, everywhere.

Neither of us gets any sleep. Maddie, who is not used to being made to sit still, begins crawling under the seats, much like the way she crawled from tent to tent at Madame’s carnival, stealing berries from the garden and biting the ankles of customers.

Gabriel and I do nothing to stop her. She has lost her mother, and she has quietly put up with being dragged around, ripped from sleep, and huddling in dark places for hours at a time. I have a feeling that if we took this one harmless liberty from her, she’d throw a fit, and I can’t say I’d blame her. So the annoyance of the other passengers is meaningless to me. Some of them don’t seem to mind her; they say “Hello, little one” and “What an unusual ribbon,” meaning the length of toilet paper she took from the bathroom and fashioned into a sorry-looking flower for her hair.

It’s all I can do to sit still. I try not to think of Manhattan, because that will make the ride there feel even longer. Instead I start thinking of the page Gabriel opened to in Linden’s atlas. France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands climbing one another like a ladder alongside the English Channel and the North Sea. Those flat illustrations could never do justice to what once stood in that part of the earth, what is now just waves.

Somehow this leads to thoughts of my mother, part poet, part dreamer, but all scientist. She wore a small wooden globe the size of a grape on a silver chain. My father had carved it for her. When she’d lean forward to kiss me good night, it would swing down and hit my chin.

I think of the way her brows knitted, magnified and stretched out when she held a beaker to her face. She worked so hard, and was so passionate, that at times her eyes turned a different shade of blue. I remember worrying for her, that she might be too eager and too sad sometimes. That the globe around her neck really did bear the weight of the world she wanted to save. I remember a time when I found my mother sitting on the bottom step, just staring into her open hands like they’d failed her.

Maddie emerges from under our seat, killing my daydream. She climbs over me, kneeing my thigh, elbowing my stomach as she wedges herself between the window and me. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was excited too.

It’s going to take a lot of convincing for my brother to accept Maddie. He’ll want to stick her into an orphanage, which is a death sentence, since she’s malformed. He’ll say she’s not our problem. Then again, maybe he’ll be so happy to see me that he’ll let it slide.

Or he’ll be infuriated by my absence. We’ve never been apart for this long, and I don’t know how he’ll react. I don’t know how this past year has changed him. It startles me even to think how this past year has changed me.

“We’ll figure out a plan for you,” I tell Maddie. She looks at me, no expression, her finger tapping her lips. Then she turns away, presses her hands to the glass, and watches as our bus ascends over the ocean on a bridge. Manhattan is in the distance, all gray, like a thought starting to emerge.

Chapter 16

IT’S DARK when our bus stops at the station, which is grimier than the ones before it. The neon lights are struggling, full of moth wings. There is the dull, persistent smell of ocean, and of exhaust, and there’s the roar of delivery trucks lumbering through the night. My brother used to drive among them in the daytime. Does he still?

There are other vehicles too, of course. But I prefer not to think about those.

A quick look at the map on the wall confirms that I am not very far from home. Home. The word fills me with so much hope that I can’t bring myself to say it aloud. “We can make it there tonight” is all I say.

But Gabriel is against it. We have enough money for a night in the motel that faces the bus station, its neon M flickering, its L out entirely. It’s not ideal, he says, but it’s safer than taking our chances at night. He doesn’t need to say anything more than that. I know exactly how dangerous the venture would be.

I don’t sleep. Maddie burrows herself under the double bed and uses the emergency flashlight to read her book.

I sit on the window ledge, watching the lighthouse gleam moving across the water. I can tell by Gabriel’s breathing that he isn’t asleep, but he says nothing, lying in the darkness. I know he’s exhausted, that he’s being strong to help me hold it together.

“You should come to bed,” he whispers after what feels like an hour has passed. The mattress creaks as he sits up. “Or is something on your mind?”

Lots of things are on my mind. My brother. The state he’ll be in. This sick feeling of dread that won’t go away. The world hanging around my mother’s neck, and the feeling that, somehow, her death passed that world on to me.

I don’t know how to explain these things in a way that makes sense. Maybe that’s because they don’t. So, without saying anything, I get into the bed beside Gabriel. We don’t get under the blanket, because the sheets are questionable, and we use our extra clothes as blankets.

He drifts off, and his breathing is more even. I listen to him for a while, worrying when a breath catches or a limb thrashes, but his dreams don’t seem to escalate into nightmares. I lie on my side and stroke his forearm for a while, noting that his muscles are no longer clenched. Eventually I settle down and close my eyes, and when I open them, suddenly it’s morning. Gabriel lets me take a shower first, and when I turn the knob, the pipes shudder and the water comes out yellow. After nearly a year as Linden Ashby’s bride, the reality beyond the holograms and bright gardens is bleary. Only my wedding ring seems to shine.

This is home, though, and as I struggle to wash my hair under the thin trickle of water, I’m smiling.

We’re close enough to my neighborhood that we can walk. It’s windy and cold, but not freezing, at least. Gabriel asks why the snow is so gray. “It’s not snow,” I tell him. “It’s ash from the factories and the crematorium.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so honest about that last part, because he winces, and I catch him rolling up his collar as though he could use it as a mask. “Is it safe to be breathing it in?” he asks.

“You get used to it,” I promise him.