The Invisible (8 page)

I look through an open crimp in my tangle of blinds and see that all over the neighborhood, far below my room on the eighty-seventh floor of the tallest building in Bedlam, it is the same as in here. Everywhere there is a half-open curtain or tangled-up blind, every unobstructed view inside an apartment or a house or an office building reveals a tiny screen twitching with static.

A moment more and the static stops. Then up pops the same masked man. Sitting at the same desk. “Good morning, Bedlam. Wakey wakey, eggs and bakie. We are the Invisible, and we are everywhere. The girl in the white nightgown was unfortunate collateral damage. These things happen, and they make us sad. A moment of silence, then, for the city’s daughter.” Long pause, bowed head. I glare at his curly brown hair.

“But enough about her,” he continues, his voice bright again. “This is a special transmission for the girl in black, Bedlam’s New Hope.”

Oh no. I peek out the blinds again and see him on every TV. Everyone in Bedlam is being woken up with this. I think of my parents in their room. They must be hearing it too. A message broadcast to the whole city, but meant just for me.

“Whoever you are. I’m looking for you. I hope we find one another before things get a whole lot darker.” And then that same insane giggle warbles out from behind the mask. My arms prickle with gooseflesh as the computer goes static again and shuts off.

In the blackness of my monitor, I see my own face. My mouth pressed thin with determination. Fury burning in my too-bright eyes.

I crawled back into bed eventually, my heart racing. I closed my eyes, knowing full well I would not sleep. But when my mother shakes me awake from a dead sleep at eight, I’m surprised to realize that somehow, I slept. While Martha’s body was loaded into a van and driven to the morgue, I slept.

“We need to talk,” my mother says, her eyes calm and Viviraxed, but her voice strong, her posture erect. “There’s been another video. Did you see it?”

Oh god.
My stomach recoils and all traces of my heavy sleep dissolve.
They know it’s me.
“I . . . uh, I saw some of it. I was half-asleep.”

My mother nods. “Harris, come in here,” she calls out to my father, then stares at me anxiously as she perches lightly on the corner of my bed. She is in full makeup. Her injection sites have healed and the skin of her face is frozen and taut, her body Pilates-perfect, her blazer pressed. She is cloaked in the full Helene Fleet armor. I sit up in bed when my father comes in, balancing two espressos on a little tray.

“From Lily,” he says, courtly as he bends to present us with the steaming china cups.

“Thanks.” I take it, grateful for the caffeine.

“Anthem. We don’t want you to be alarmed or scared. But you need to know that some strange things happened last night,” my mother says, her words breathy and careful as if she’s bracing herself for my reaction.

I nod, trying my best to look like I don’t know what’s coming.

“Martha has been killed,” my mother goes on, wincing at the awful words. “They shot her, execution style.”

“What? That’s . . .” I shake my head, feigning disbelief. “No.”

“It’s awful, I know. Unthinkable. What Manny and Belinda must be going through, well, it’s . . .” Her voice cracks. She’s been through a dead child. Before I was born, my sister, Regina, drowned in Lake Morass. They never figured out why. My mother squeezes my hand.

I change the subject. “Where were they?”

“Who?” My mother looks at me blankly.

“Manny and Belinda,” I clear my throat, sitting up straighter. “Were they there when it happened?”

“They were at a conference in West Exurbia, staying in a hotel,” my father cuts in. “And they’ll regret that conference for as long as they live.” My father’s voice cracks when he says this. His eyes are red and puffy, I notice. I’ve never seen him this emotional, not even at our yearly trips to the cemetery to visit Regina’s grave.

“And the girl who was turning in all those criminals a few months ago? The one they were calling the New Hope? They believe she was involved somehow. All the surveillance at the mayor’s house was erased by the killers somehow. They can’t figure it out. But they have footage of some men running away, what looks like a girl coming later, moving very fast so it’s hard to see her. She was trying to stop it, by the sound of it, and going by what they said to her last night in their . . . what do they call it?”

“Transmission,” I mutter, my voice husky and raw. “I think they call them transmissions.”

“It’s awful, what’s happened to Martha,” my father says. “But what they’ve done to the museum shows us how much muscle they actually have.”

“The art museum?” Have they done something else?

My father nods. “They’ve . . .” His mouth squeezed into an angry knot, he can’t seem to get the words out.

“What?”

“Maybe we’d better just show you,” my mother says. She gets up and moves to my windows, pulling up my blinds. I follow her. When I reach the window and see, I gasp. Several blocks over, we have a perfect aerial view of the museum, and half of it is just . . . gone. Charred to a black crisp. Nothing but the burnt concrete foundations remain, metal rods extending from it like ganglia, like the frozen tentacles of sea anemones. Through a gray haze of smoke and pollution, half the dome sticks out, along with half the plaster wings. The other half—nothing but foundations—crawls with tiny people. Police, I assume.

My father moves to join me at the window. “There are two museum guards still missing—suspects, I’m sure—but that’s it. Nobody saw a thing until the museum imploded. Think of all the art they destroyed. Irreplaceable.”

I nod, my chest thrumming so fast and hard that I regret having downed the espresso. “But why?”

But even as I say these words, my thoughts latch on to the logic of the act.
Half your money
. Taking away half of the North’s excess.

“Why do scum like this do anything?” my dad says under his breath. “Need for attention. Insanity. Who knows?”

“As chair of the gala,” my mother says, “I’m going to do what I can to redirect the funds to the museum this year. God knows they’ll need all the help they can get. We can’t have a gaping hole there. Whatever’s left of the structure will be destroyed.”

I nod, numb to what she’s saying as I stare out at the festering hole in the city’s skyline, the black smoke and char like a wound.

“Anyway, kitten,” my dad cuts in, “the city is on high alert. Serge is driving you today. And he’ll be there to pick you up. Dance class will be cancelled, I’m sure. You’re to come straight home after school, okay? Just until they figure this out and catch these creeps.”

“Okay.” I nod as if I actually believe the city and its useless, bought police can do anything at all to catch Invisible. I think of Gavin’s handwritten list, the names of all those cops he paid off. People like that can’t be trusted to care about anything.

You want something done around here, you have to do it yourself.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

At school, everyone looks ashen. Eyelids are swollen from crying. Martha’s locker has become a shrine—teddy bears, horse memorabilia, pictures, notes, candles, and dozens of bouquets spill out onto the floor, the pile six lockers wide.

“Attention, students, please report to the cathedral for a special morning assembly,” Principal Bang’s monotone bleats through the loudspeakers. It’s going to be about Martha, of course. I skirt around the edge of the flower pile, wishing I’d thought to bring something.

Everywhere, girls are crying in the hallways. I feel sick when I see Team Ice, the group of juniors who were Martha’s closest friends, hugging each other, shoulders shaking. I run to the bathroom and make it into a stall just before heaving up whatever’s in my stomach.

Afterward, I flush it down and grimace at the bitter taste. While I’m crouching in the stall on the cold tile floor, I eavesdrop on a conversation between two girls standing at the sinks.

“Still, I bet he’s hot.”

“Wasn’t
him
who offed her. One of his people. The thing at the museum was ridiculous. I mean, that took guts.”

“Serious guts. He’s like Robin Hood or whatever. Evening the scales.”

“I heard he’s only twenty-one.”

My empty stomach lurches when I hear one of them emit what sounds like a dreamy sigh. I push open the stall door and size them up. They’re barely pubescent fourteen-year-old girls, freshmen, one of them brandishing a pink lipstick, the other brushing on a shimmery eye shadow.

“I heard he’s forty and has a deformed face,” I say. “Also that he likes to shoot young girls in the head.” I bring my index finger up to the shorter, blonder one’s forehead and press an imaginary trigger. “Bang bang. Serious guts.”

“Stop it.” She steps away from me, glaring. “Leave us alone.”

“If you don’t like the idea of a gun to your head,” I say as I wash my hands, “you might want to reevaluate crushing on a killer. It’s a great way to ruin your life. It’s also stupid and sad.”
Trust me. I know.
Gavin was exciting and dangerous, and look how much fun that turned out to be.

“Whatever,” they mutter and hurry out. The taller girl drops her lipstick and doesn’t notice, and I stare at the black tube as it skitters across the tile. The bathroom door swings shut on its stoppered spring, leaving me alone with my reflection: hollowed-under eyes, colorless cheeks. But my eyes glow that vibrant green again. The color they get when violence courses through my mind and limbs.

I’m moving with the mob of other Cathedral students toward the chapel, everyone’s conversation a little more muted than normal, when I catch sight of Olive Ann flipping her blond hair to one side and reaching out to embrace someone. A tall boy with blond curls.
Oh no
. Of all the days in the calendar,
today
is the day Will returns from Weepee Valley?

I speed up, cutting through groups of students, careful to keep along the rightmost edge of the crush of people filing through the courtyard, and catch him in profile.

It’s definitely him. I circled it weeks ago on my calendar at home, but I must have forgotten. Will was released from rehab over the weekend. He looks calm and clean-cut and, if I’m not mistaken, a little bit tentative in his movements. As if he’s nervous to be back.

Scared he’ll spot me, I peel away from the group and squeeze between two benches toward an overhanging section of roof to the right of the chapel. I wait there, my eyes glued to the back of Will’s head, until he and Olive have gone inside.

All I can think is that he’ll find a way to get his revenge on me, for what I did to send him there.

I pull out my phone.
Where R U?
I type, sending the message to Zahra.

Panties on, Fleet. Nearly there.

It’s ten more minutes before Z shows up, but I’m happy to be waiting out here instead of in the echo-filled cathedral full of crying kids. I can hear through the crack under the door: Principal Bang makes a speech about Martha being taken from us too soon, then goes on for a long time about grief counseling. Next, Martha’s best friend, Jojo, gets up to say a few words and basically cries through the whole speech.

It’s awful. I feel like I might throw up again, except there’s nothing left in me but white-hot fury.

When Z finally comes clomping over the cobblestones of the courtyard, she looks upset.

“This is bullshit, huh?” she says, waving her hand toward the chapel, then circling it to encompass the courtyard, the whole school, the city, the world. I’m surprised to see her violet eyes are red and her eyelids swollen. Zahra never gets emotional. “Poor freaking Martha. Of all the people on Team Ice, she was the best of them.”

“She was,” I agree. My voice is hoarse with tears, but I swallow them down.

“Remember when she was like seven and our dads were all doing that charity golf game and she crawled inside a golf bag and got stuck?”

I laugh and it sounds like a wail. “I remember a lot of things about Martha.” Especially the way she died, I think, trying to push the image of her frozen eyes out of my thoughts. I can’t make the memory go away, not really, but I have to try not to dwell on it or I’ll fall apart.

“And to think I thought Invisible was going to make things interesting.” Zahra rolls her eyes.

“You couldn’t know that this would happen.” Nobody could. Not even me, who doesn’t trust anyone and who sees danger everywhere.

“Zahra.” I change the subject. “I saw Will.”

She raises her eyebrows. “How’d he look? Still psycho?”

I motion to the chapel. “Weirdly calm. Deer in headlights.”

“An act, I’m sure,” Z sighs. “He’s milking the rehab thing. Still the same douche on the inside.”

We finally head into the chapel and scoot into the last row, where there are a few seats left. Debbie Lunelle is sobbing at the altar, eulogizing Martha.

“She was so good, never talked bad about anyone, it was like she was an angel, and now . . . and now—” Debbie breaks down, the sound of quiet crying breaths pushing into the mic.

I look around. All the teachers’ eyes are shining with emotion. Mrs. Perkins, the junior World Civ teacher, is openly weeping into a pink hankie.

Just then, something white passes in front of my face and lands on my knee, between the folds of my plaid Cathedral uniform skirt. A flower. I pick it up and examine it. It’s a cut daisy, the stem about an inch long. I look up at the ceiling. There’s a black tarp hanging there, in the very center of the chapel, fastened at three corners. A few more daisies spill from one of the corners.

It isn’t like Cathedral to do something like this. Especially not inside the chapel, which is reserved for solemn morning masses and dignified graduations and award ceremonies.

Was this Principal Bang’s idea? I turn to Z and point upward, rolling my eyes. But then another corner of the tarp comes undone, and we’re all doused in daisies. And along with the daisies, tiny slips of paper.

Debbie is still making her speech, but I’m not listening until she stops and screams out, “WHAT IS THIS?”