Defy the Dark (16 page)

“Twenty-four thousand three hundred and eighty-six,” Harley whispers in my ear, grinning, and I finally understand that the number is a promise, not a sentence.

“Look at that,” Kayleigh crows triumphantly. Harley shushes her.

“That's the ship's diagram,” Elder says, his eyes growing round. “You're not supposed to be looking at that.”

“Are you going to stop me, little leader?” Kayleigh asks. She bends down, and although there's a smile twitching up the corners of her lips, her question is serious.

Elder shakes his head no.

“I just wanted to look is all,” Kayleigh says, her eyes scanning the complicated diagram. I can barely make heads or tails of it: there are lines and numbers everywhere. Kayleigh, though, is the inventor: she must know what it means.

The entryway grows silent. Kayleigh reads the diagram with a sort of desperate fierceness. Harley stares at her, wonder in his eyes. I glance at Elder; we're the outsiders here, watching something neither of us understands.

“What are you
doing
?” The voice bellows so loudly that I feel as if the giant globes should fall from the ceiling and shatter at our feet.

Orion, the Recorder, strides toward us. Elder takes one look at him and scampers, his feet skidding across the smooth floor. The heavy door slams behind him.

Harley laughs at Elder's childish flight, but a part of me wants to chase after him. I've never seen Orion look so furious before. He's wearing nothing but trousers and his hair is a mess; clearly he was already in bed. There's a hardness to his jaw, and I can see the muscles on his chest tightening.

“You frexing idiots! Do you know what you've done?”

Even Harley looks cowed now, but Kayleigh dances up to Orion, still laughing. “I was only
looking
,” she says.

Orion grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her until the smile slips from her face. “There are people in the fields right now who are there for ‘only looking,'” he sneers. “You want to be one of them?”

“Let him try to send me to the fields,” Kayleigh says. No laughter now. Just determination. My heart swells. She's like a flame burning brightly—a flame almost out of control.

“He can do worse than send you to the fields.” Orion's voice is low. He means these words to cut down Kayleigh's challenging posture, but it doesn't work. On her, anyway. The thought of Kayleigh being punished by Eldest instills within me a heart-thudding sort of terror I've never felt for anyone else, even myself.

Harley catches my eye and jerks his head to the door. This is something that Kayleigh has planned, something that Orion's caught her doing before. We are just witnesses. With enough time and rage, maybe Orion can make her finally see how dangerous her whims can be.

I take the stairs two at a time, already on the path before I notice Harley's sitting on the steps. “Go without me,” he says. “I'm going to wait on Kayleigh.”

I stop.

I know the way Harley's been watching Kayleigh—for years now. She's been just a friend to both of us, never quite willing to take it further. There was a time when I thought they were growing more serious, but that was just before Selene was banished. Once Eldest sent her to the fields, Kayleigh withdrew. She was quicker to smile, but it took longer for the smile to reach her eyes. She was more daring, though, and I worried about that, about what that would mean for her. For us. For them.

“Go on,” Harley says again. His voice is dismissive. He doesn't even think that I might want to stay behind, that I might want to be the one to comfort Kayleigh after Orion's chewed her out. He just assumes that it's him she wants to see.

And, probably, it is.

Acid roils in my stomach.

Who am I kidding?

One night swimming with her in the pond, and I expect her to turn to me? One night realizing that she fills my mind and heart in ways I never thought possible, and suddenly she's mine?

I plod down the path, away from the Recorder Hall. Away from Kayleigh.

But not all the way. As soon as the garden starts up, I veer left. I don't stop at the pond. Its still surface mocks me. I keep going, even though there's nothing out here. Nothing but the wall.

I sit down. Underneath me is dirt and grass. But behind me, pressing against my back, is the curving steel wall of the ship. I let my head fall back, a dull thud of my skull against metal. I'm such a frexing chutz.

I don't know how long I stay there, staring at nothing but darkness. It gets cooler—the allotted ten degrees cooler dictated by the ship's program—and I think about going back to my room in the Ward. Before I can move, though, I hear voices.

Kayleigh.

And Harley.

And a splash.

He's calling to her—he jumped in first. Kayleigh squeals with delight and I see the outline of her body diving into the pond.

She comes up for air, gasping and laughing.

And then there's no sound. I see his arms around her body and her arms around his and they're swimming and not swimming and the water slips over their bodies and I hear the flutter of a gasp and I see, I see, I see.

And I know.

This is the second thing I learned in the nighttime:

I may love Kayleigh, but she will never ever love me.

 

H
arley counts the days until the ship will land, one by one.

24,385 . . . 24,384 . . . 24,383 . . .

 

I
count the nights.

On the 24,302nd night, Kayleigh purposefully waited until I (and Elder and everyone else) was gone before she and Harley snuck out. I know. I waited in the corner of the hallway, and I saw them go.

On the 24,287th night, Kayleigh and Harley went outside and didn't come back until the morning.

On the 24,245th night, Kayleigh didn't bother going out at all: she stayed in. In Harley's room.

 

O
n the 24,238th day, Harley quits counting down the days. He and Kayleigh quit pretending that there is nothing going on between them.

“Gross,” Elder complains as Kayleigh leans over the couch and gives Harley an upside-down kiss.

I agree but keep my mouth shut.

I'm writing again, and that's good, at least. Long, rambling, angry poems that amount to nothing, but they're words. I hunch over my little book—I don't like writing on the membrane screens, I prefer paper—and scrawl out my latest poems.

I tried not caring. I gave up somewhere around the 24,290th night.

“What's wrong?” Kayleigh asks.

I immediately smooth down my face: I had not realized that I was scowling at her. At the two of them. She slips down beside me on the couch and wraps her arms around mine. “What is it?” she asks again, so much concern in her voice that I know she's sincere.

I shake my head.

Kayleigh stares at me a moment longer, then shoots Harley a look. There is a message in her eyes, though, a message that Harley must be able to read, because he jumps up from his seat. “Come on, Elder,” he says. “I'll show you the art gallery in the Recorder Hall.”

Elder—eager to be included—follows immediately. I wait until the elevator doors close behind him before I dare to look at Kayleigh.

Her eyes are kind, and sad, and knowing.

“You wouldn't understand,” I say immediately, hoping to stave off her pity. I want nothing of her pity.

“Maybe not,” she concedes. “But you look sad; I don't want you to be sad.”

She brushes a lock of hair out of my face. Her fingertips barely touch my skin, but I feel as if there's a trail of fire following her touch.

I don't mean to, but I find myself staring into her eyes. I can see it then: she loves me. But her love for me is nothing like my love for her. My love eats away at me until I'm hollow inside, filling me with bitterness at every moment she spends with Harley. But her love is kind and good. She loves me as a friend, a true friend, and the purity of her emotion leaves me breathless. In this moment, she wants nothing but to make me happy again. For the past 149 days, I have wanted nothing but for Harley to disappear—and I would have reveled in Kayleigh's misery.

The selfishness of my feelings makes me ashamed. I swallow hard, and with that, I resign myself to this simple fact: I can love her, and she can never love me back. But what I feel for her is real, even if she doesn't feel it. And what I feel for her is good, as long as I remember that I care more about keeping the love and light in her eyes, even if it isn't for me.

“Nothing's wrong,” I tell her, and I mean it.

She squeezes my arm and smiles. “Good.”

A shadow passes over her face.

“Now it's my turn to ask,” I say. “What's wrong?”

Kayleigh bites her lip. “The way you've been sad and grumpy lately—Doc's noticed.”

This is beyond anything I expected to hear. I don't try to deny my negative attitude, even though I hadn't realized she'd been aware of it for so long. What really surprises me is the way she brings up Doc. I swallow again, this time remembering the way the blue-and-white pill I take every day tastes.

“I've been thinking a lot about Selene,” Kayleigh says. “Before she was sent back to the fields, she was sad, remember?”

“She had every reason to be.” Selene's story was a miserable one, but it was her story nevertheless.

Kayleigh nods again. “But the thing is . . . do you remember the way Doc switched her meds when she was sad?”

I shake my head.

“He did,” Kayleigh continues. “She showed them to me. And the longer she was on those pills, the more she seemed . . . different.”

“Different?”

“Come on,” Kayleigh says, standing. “I'll show you.”

 

W
e ignore the siren, and neither of us pauses when the solar lamp blinks out. This trek seems different from our other outings. Kayleigh is on a mission here, with a clear goal.

She leads me away from the Hospital, toward the fields. The Feeder Level is ten square acres, most of it taken up with farmlands. Corn and wheat grow closest to the Hospital, but Kayleigh strides down the path between the two with confidence. I wonder how many times she's visited Selene.

“It was after she was . . . you know, and Eldest decided not to punish her attacker,” Kayleigh says. “That's when Selene started being depressed. And soon after that, Doc changed her meds.”

“So?”

“When he changed her meds, he changed her.”

“Obviously,” I said. “We're loons. Without meds, we'd be crazier.”

Kayleigh stops dead. “No. I don't think that's true. I think the mental meds are what keep us sane. I think—it's the others who are different.”

I shake my head. This is crazy, even for Kayleigh.

She doesn't waste time arguing with me. She grabs my hand—my heart can't help but race at her touch—and pulls me toward the rabbit farm. She bends the thin wire fence down to climb over it. The rabbits look up, their ears pointed toward us and their noses twitching. A few hop languidly away as we steal across the field to the small house lined with rabbit hutches.

Kayleigh doesn't bother knocking or announcing her presence. She pokes her head into the door and whispers loudly, “Selene!”

I hear murmuring inside. Kayleigh jerks her head, and I follow her into the little house.

Selene is sitting up in bed. Her quilt pools at her lap. It's obvious that she just sat up as soon as Kayleigh called for her.

“Selene,” Kayleigh says again.

Selene turns her head to Kayleigh, and in that simple motion, I'm reminded of the girl I used to know. Vivacious but reserved, usually quiet, but when she opened her mouth, music came out.

“Yes?” she says in a dead voice. “I am Selene.”

Air leaves my lungs.

“Selene, are you happy?”

“I am here.”

“But are you happy?”

“It is darktime. Night. I should be sleeping.”

“Selene, do you feel anything at all?” Kayleigh is insistent, her voice rising with each question.

“I feel sleepy. It is time for sleeping.”

“Do you know who I am?” Kayleigh asks.

“You are residents of the Ward. You should be in the Hospital.”

“Yes. We are. And we used to be your friends.”

Selene frowns—the first time she's shown any emotion at all. Kayleigh seizes on it, leaning forward, her eyes sparkling. “Do you remember us? Do you remember what it was like before? What happened to you? What did Doc do to you to make you like this?”

Selene blinks.

“Doc did nothing,” she says in a hollow voice. “I am sleepy because it is night.”

She leans back down into her pillow. She doesn't adjust her body or pull the covers up. She just closes her eyes. A moment later, I can see by the even rhythmic rise and fall of her chest that she's asleep.

I start to leave, but Kayleigh pauses to tuck the quilt over Selene's shoulders.

We don't talk until we're back on the path away from the fields.

“See?” Kayleigh rages. “That is
nothing
like the way Selene once was.”

“Maybe she's still depressed.”

“No!” Kayleigh stops. The Recorder Hall is a dark outline to our left, the Hospital to our right. Maybe, if someone squinted and knew where to look, we'd be noticed despite the darkness.

“Don't you understand?” she asks. “Those blue-and-white pills we take every day. They don't keep us from being crazy. They keep us
sane
. There must be some reason Eldest needs at least some of the people on the ship
normal
, and he uses the label ‘crazy' to keep us separated. It's them—the workers—they're the ones not normal. They don't feel anything, they don't think anything. I bet they're easier to control; that must be why Eldest does it.”