The Gift (4 page)

How can you make peace with something when you don’t even know what that “something”
is? We can’t know whether our parents are alive or dead or being interrogated in a New Order prison or… banished to the Shadowland
like Celia.
Are they suffering? Is there anything we can do about it? Or are we as helpless and useless as I feel right now?

I punch the billboard so hard my fist goes right through the pressboard backing.

Then I pull my hand out and try to pretend it didn’t happen. Wisty gives me a concerned look, and I shrug. I’m sure my knuckles
are bleeding, but I don’t feel a thing.

I glance at her worried, grief-strained face and quickly look away. I have an urge to hug her, but I need to show her that
I’m not letting my emotions take over. I swallow a
golf ball–size lump in my throat and take Wisty’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

There are no people on the outskirts of this eerie town. Just broken windows in warehouses. Streets strewn with rubble. The
only new construction appears to be enormous video billboards and loudspeaker towers.

As we make our way to the town center, I imagine what it might have once been like here. Quaint. I see a redbrick high school,
jungle gyms, a park with a gazebo, an overturned tricycle. A pang of sadness grips me. It reminds me of our old town—church
steeples, neighborhood grocery stores, and actual
trees.

Now I’m even more homesick. For Mom, Dad, home—even school. A little.

“I wonder where everybody is,” Wisty whispers.

“I don’t,” I answer, maybe a little too quickly. “I mean… I don’t really
want
to know.”

And then I hear this:
“You don’t?… don’t?… don’t?… don’t?… Why, Whit?”

I whirl my head around. Wisty stares at me.

There was definitely a voice. And it wasn’t Wisty’s. Or mine.

It was Celia’s voice.

Maybe this is a ghost town.
Literally.

Whit

I’M OFF LIKE a missile to find her. It’s as if I don’t even have a choice. As if this is my fate.

“Celia!” I run through barren streets, past empty shops, a police station with no police, a boarded-up middle school, a movie
theater.… I don’t see her, or anyone else actually. Everything seems so unreal here.
Is it real? Am I dreaming up all of this desolation?

“Celia!”

“Whit, wait!” I hear Wisty’s voice coming from behind. The slapping of her sneakers against pavement. She’s trying to keep
up.

“Stop! Whit, please! You don’t know it’s her! It could be a trap!”

I
do
know it’s her. You never, ever forget the voice of the one you love. Whether it’s a whisper or a scream or a distant memory,
I know when it’s Celia. I guess Wisty doesn’t understand that. She’s never been in love.

And then I hear Celia again. But not from too far away. It feels as if she’s all around me somehow.

“You don’t want to
know?
… know?… know?… What
happened
to us?… us?… us?…”

I can’t stand it—
Celia feels so close now.

Her voice is so loud that it’s as if she’s broadcasting right into my head. It’s unbearable… but also the most beautiful,
incredible kind of pain. Torture I’d beg for. Does that make any sense?

“I
do!
I do want to know!” I halt in my tracks, then I sink to my knees in the middle of the town square. “Where are you, Celes?
I need to see you again.
”

“Look
up,
Whit. She’s right there.”

It’s Wisty’s voice, to my left. And when I raise my head, I see what she sees.

There is my girlfriend—on-screen.
Celia,
on a New Order propaganda board. Her gorgeous face is more than twice my height, and every inch of it is as smooth and perfect
and beautiful as I remember it. It’s as if she’s a movie star.

Whit

“DID YOU FORGET about us, Whit? Did you forget about me?” Celia looks sad, making this even more painful for me. “I guess I can’t blame you
for moving on.”

“What are you talking about, Celia? I never forget you. Everybody knows that. I never stop thinking about you, trying to find
you. People think I’m crazy!”

“Maybe you haven’t totally forgotten me, Whit. But I’m talking about
us.
The lost, the kidnapped, the murdered. The Half-lights.” I shiver at her mention of the sad souls in the Shadowland. “I’m
really not…
me
anymore. I’m part of something… bigger.”

“Celia, you’ll always be you. The Shadowland can’t destroy you. Not for me. Where are you? The
real
you —?”

“You don’t get it, Whit.” Celia breaks into my words and smiles wistfully. “I’ve got to give you credit, baby. You really
are the most sensitive football hero who ever walked the face of this world. But you’re like a lot of guys in other
ways, Whit. You’re such a boy. You see and care about and protect only what’s right in front of you.”

“No.” I shake my head in disbelief at her words. “That’s not true. You know it isn’t.”

Why is she trying to hurt me?

“Yes, it is,” Celia says, her eyes boring into mine. “Case in point. Where’s your sister?”

I whirl around in a three-sixty. Wisty is…

Gone?

“What the…?” I start tearing around the square, looking down alleyways frantically.
“Wisty!”

This can’t be. Has she been kidnapped?

“You have to start thinking bigger, Whit.” It’s torture—Celia’s voice is coursing through me like a living force, and all
I want to do is capture it, surrender to it. But my sister…

“I know you’re scared,” she goes on, strangely unmoved by Wisty’s disappearance. “You just lost someone you cared about, and
you don’t know how to deal with it. Think about that, Whit. It’s the key.”

“Wisty!”
I scream. The only response is the whisking sound of an empty plastic bag skimming across the town square.

“Whit—
up here. Look at me.
I’m here to tell you more that you don’t want to hear. You and Wisty need to stop running away from the New Order. Stop running
from The One.”

“
Never!
I’m going to find Wisty, and we’re going back to the Shadowland—to find you. Not an image on a screen!”

Celia’s thick, wavy black hair starts streaming out, tickling her lips. Almost as if it’s responding to the wind in the plaza.
The plastic bag blows into my face. I tear it away in frustration.

“Whit, are you listening to me? Do I need to get any louder?”

My head will explode if she does. “I can hear you, trust me. You’re just not making sense at the moment.”

“You and Wisty need to turn yourselves in, to save your parents—and the rest of us. It’s the only way. I think Wisty understands
that… right, Wisty?”

Celia turns her head, and there—behind her,
up on the screen
—is my sister.
How can that be?

“Wisty!”
I yell. “How —?”

“It’s okay, Whit,” Wisty says. “Everything is okay now. I understand our role.”

Celia looks back at me, and her long hair starts
reaching out of the screen,
flowing toward me. I feel pulled in by it. I have no resistance to her. I feel as if I’m airborne, flying toward the screen
to be swallowed by her eyes, her lips, her soft, soothing voice.

“I have to go now, Whit. Turn yourselves in. Save us. You can do this, Whit.”

Then the screen fuzzes out, and I’m falling into blackness that seems to have no end.

Wisty

NOW THAT WAS MAYBE the strangest thing that has happened to us so far. Another mystery inside a mystery inside a mystery.

I remember almost nothing. At least, nothing after I told Whit to look up at the screen—and Celia. Now I’m flat on my face
in the middle of the town plaza, and my head is pounding.

I turn to find Whit in a similar state, only he’s holding his head with both hands and sobbing. There’s not much that’s worse
than seeing your older brother cry. Except maybe seeing your parents that way.

I scramble over to him and hold him as he tells me what happened. It’s a pretty incoherent jumble, but one thing is clear:
Celia said we had to turn ourselves in.
Nice one, Celes. I’ll chew on that. First let’s go over your connection to the New Order one more time. How did you get up
on the propaganda board?

“We’re not turning ourselves in,” I tell him dismissively. “It’s a video trick. The N.O. is getting desperate.”

“It’s BS!” he says indignantly, suddenly straightening. “I know it now. That wasn’t Celia talking. It couldn’t have been.
We’re going to destroy this regime, and we can’t do it if we’re prisoners. Or dead.”

I pull myself up. “Wow,” I say, brushing the dust off. “Got knocked back by charging testosterone, there.”

Whit manages to laugh at my lame joke, then surprises me with a fake bull charge, shoulder to gut.

“Yeah! We’re gonna take ’em down!” he yells.

“Yee-ha!” a bunch of little voices shout.
What now?

We turn and see the most ragamuffiny band of ragamuffins poking their heads out of the doorway of a boarded-up video-game
store.

“Who are you?” I ask, wide-eyed. They’re clearly not so nervous that they don’t want to be seen, but not so trusting that
they want to be in arm’s reach.

One little boy with an incredible burr-tangled mane of brown-blond hair steps forward.

“Are you guys
regular
people?” he asks. He can’t be much past the third grade.

“If you mean we’re
not
brainwashed by the New Order, yeah,” I say. “We’re not. Where are your parents?”

“They’re gone. We don’t know where. Taken.”

“Taken?”

“The soldiers put them in trucks and stole ’em away,”
he says. Some of the smaller boys and girls start to rub tears from their eyes.

A flash of emotion crosses Whit’s face. Sympathy, empathy—call it what you will. My brother’s not exactly a softy, except
when he ought to be. He takes off his knapsack and puts it on the ground in front of him, then rests his hands on it for a
moment with his eyes closed.

And then—it’s the most surreal thing—a puppy and two kittens poke their heads out of the bag.

The children’s sorrow turns to wonder and laughter as the puppy and kittens scamper out of the bag. The kids who can’t get
in to pet the animals are looking back at Whit with awe. Frankly, so am I.
“Whoa!”
I say.

Now he’s pulling back on his collar, and white doves are fluttering out of his shirt and up into the sky. And now—gross!—he
sneezes and a cloud of yellow bees comes out of his nose and zooms up after the doves. The kids are laughing hysterically.

“Where’d you learn the parlor tricks?” I ask Whit. “Sweet. You’re becoming a rather charming wizard.”

He shrugs. “I thought I should do something nice for someone else for a change, instead of just worrying about us all of the
time,” he says, and turns back to the merrymaking kids. “You guys want to come with us?” he offers.

Wow. The things that can happen when you black out for a few minutes. Suddenly my brother’s become Mr. Whitford Fountain-of-Charity
Allgood, Esq.