Authors: Hillary Jordan
She navved to her bank account, saw the number on the screen: $100,465.75. “Damn you,” she said. As unpalatable as the thought of taking his money was, she knew he was right: she’d need it to survive. Even with it, life would be precarious, especially if she were alone. The fact of her solitude struck her then, bludgeoning her with its absoluteness. She was lost to everyone who’d ever loved her, and they to her.
Except Kayla. The thought of her friend was a spar, and Hannah grasped it.
“Search for all Reds in the state of Texas named K-A-Y-L-A.” There was only one: Kayla Mariko Ray, serving five years for attempted murder. Her photo had the telltale look of the Chrome ward: haggard red face, glassy eyes.
“Locate,” Hannah said. A satellite image of East Dallas appeared, zoomed in on the intersection of Skillman and Mockingbird, then on a figure crossing the street. As the overhead image sharpened, Hannah recognized Kayla. She was running, Hannah saw, and there was someone else running behind her.
A man, chasing her.
K
AYLA WAS FAST
, but her pursuer was faster. Hannah could do nothing but watch with mounting dread as he narrowed the gap between them and finally caught her. She flailed out, hitting him in the face. He gripped her by both arms. The two of them struggled. He said something to her, and she stopped resisting him, her arms falling to her sides. Still holding on to one of them, he led her back down the street in the direction they’d come from. It was clear that she went unhappily; whether she went willingly or not, Hannah couldn’t tell. They walked for several blocks and then went inside a house on Kenwood Avenue.
Hannah watched for another ten minutes, but no one emerged. She memorized the address and hurriedly logged herself out. She’d take the train to Mockingbird and walk from there, which would take her a couple of hours. She didn’t allow herself to think about what she’d do if Kayla was gone when she got there.
It was dusk when she left the library, and the rain had stopped. Darkness fell quickly, which she was glad of; it made her less conspicuous. The train station was a couple of miles away, and by the time Hannah reached it she felt weak from hunger and thirst. There was a McDonald’s across the street. She went to the entrance and was about to open the door when she saw the sign: C
HROMES
M
UST
U
SE
D
RIVE
-T
HRU
. She followed the driveway around to the back and entered her order onto the touchscreen, then paid with her NIC.
One Happy Meal, hold the happiness,
she thought. The pimply teenager at the pickup counter handed her the bag gingerly, careful not to touch her. He did, however, remember to thank her and wish her a McWonderful day.
She carried the bag to the train station and ate sitting on one of the benches on the platform. The salty, greasy food tasted as good as anything she’d ever eaten in her life. She heard footsteps and saw another Chrome—a young male Yellow—walking toward her with an ostentatious outlaw strut. Not a threat, she decided. As he passed her he gave her a slow, insolent appraisal, followed by a wink. There was a loud bang from the street below. Hannah was a little startled, but the Yellow jumped as if he’d been shot and whirled toward the entrance, dropping into a fearful crouch, muscles tensed for fight or flight. It took him a few seconds to register his mistake. He stood up, scowled at Hannah as if it were her fault, then reassumed his mask of insouciance and sauntered down the platform. The cheap food roiled in her stomach, pushing up into the back of her throat. Was this her future then, to sit on public benches, shoveling food in her mouth like a starved animal and waiting for some violence to befall her?
The train arrived. It was the end of rush hour, and most people were leaving rather than entering the city, so Hannah’s car was only a third full. She took a seat apart from the other passengers, but even so, the ones nearest her moved away, scooting farther down the bench and, in the case of a mother with a toddler in her arms, getting up and going to the next car. Hannah found herself in a kind of magic circle of ignominy. Her first instinct was to try to make herself invisible, but then a sudden defiance rose in her, and she looked directly into the faces of her fellow passengers, these people who felt so repelled by and morally superior to her. Most avoided her gaze, but a few glared back at her, affronted that she’d dared to rest her eyes on them. She wondered how many of them were liars, their outer purity masking crimes as dark or darker than her own. How many would be Chromes themselves, if the truth in their hearts were revealed?
She got off at Mockingbird Station and descended the steps, recalling with a pang her long-ago visit to the SMU library. She shoved the memory aside and headed in the opposite direction, toward Greenville. When she reached it she turned right, following the path Kayla and her abductor—if that’s what he was—had taken, then left onto Kenwood.
Hannah stopped on the sidewalk in front of the small brick house she’d seen on the vid. Old-fashioned iron sconces flanked the steps that led to the porch, casting a friendly glow over the neatly tended yard. Chrysanthemums bloomed in pots on either side of the front door. The windows were shuttered, but she found it almost impossible to imagine anything sinister happening behind them. Still. She thought of Mrs. Henley’s sweet, dimpled smile and told herself to stay on her guard.
The door was opened by a young man in his early twenties wearing a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. He put Hannah in mind of a cherub, if cherubs could be six and a half feet tall: tousled light brown curls, long-lashed blue eyes, a heart-shaped face that registered something between surprise and shock when he saw her.
“I’m here to see Kayla,” Hannah said, without preamble.
“Oh.” He looked over his shoulder, a quick, furtive movement. “Are you a . . . friend of hers?”
His transparent unease deepened Hannah’s own. “Yes. Is she here?” She tried to peer into the room behind him, but his body blocked her view.
He considered her for a moment, then yelled, “Kayla!” There was no answer. “Kayla, there’s someone to see you.” To Hannah he said, “Come in. I’m TJ.”
She relaxed a little and stepped inside. “I’m Hannah. Nice to meet you.”
“Who is it?” Kayla called out from another room. She sounded quavery and congested, like she’d been crying.
“Is she all right?” Hannah asked TJ. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at his feet. She was about to barge down the hall and find out for herself when Kayla appeared. Her eyes were puffy, and she was holding a wad of tissue in one hand. When she saw Hannah she burst into tears. Hannah went to her, shooting a look at TJ.
“Uh, I’m gonna run and pick us up some supper,” he said. He grabbed his jacket from the front closet and made a hasty exit.
Kayla sobbed inconsolably, her slender body jerking against Hannah’s, threatening to pull away like a kite string in a high wind. She held her until she calmed down enough to confirm what Hannah had already guessed: “You were right about him. Bastard’s leaving me, moving to Chicago in three days. He started job-hunting a month ago, didn’t even have the balls to write and tell me.”
Hannah led her to the couch. Haltingly, between outbursts of fresh tears, Kayla related the events of the last twelve hours. She’d come to TJ’s directly from the center, but no one was home, so she’d waited on the back porch. He showed up a few hours later carrying an armload of moving boxes, which he promptly dropped when he saw her appear from behind the house.
“Is this his place?” Hannah asked. The house had a feminine sophistication that was at odds with her idea of a bachelor pad.
“No, his mom’s. He lives with her. She’s a flight attendant, she’s gone a lot.”
“She’s away now?”
“Yeah, but she’s coming home day after tomorrow. To see him off.” More tears. “TJ works for a biotech company, supposedly he’s being transferred. I know jobs are scarce, but I feel like if he really loved me, he’d look for something here in Texas.”
Hannah couldn’t disagree, but Kayla was so forlorn. “Maybe he did, and he couldn’t find anything,” she offered.
“Don’t,” Kayla said, with a hint of her old spirit. “I don’t need any more false hope.”
“Well, he must care something about you, or he wouldn’t have chased after you the way he did.”
“How do you know that?”
Hannah explained how she’d found Kayla on geosat. “I almost had a stroke. I thought you were being kidnapped.”
“When he told me he was leaving, I was so upset I just took off running. He talked me into staying, at least for tonight and tomorrow.” Kayla blew her nose loudly. “Why’d you leave the center, anyway? I thought you were gonna tough it out.”
The anger and determination that had carried Hannah through the day vacated her all at once. She felt like her bones had been extracted, leaving only a sac of shapeless, inert flesh. “Can I tell you later? I just can’t go back there right now.”
“You all right?”
“Not really, no. But I’m alive. I’m beginning to think that’s as good as it gets for people like us.”
“Oh, Hannah. What are we gonna do?”
Hannah heard the fear in Kayla’s voice as from a great distance. She knew her friend needed reassurance, but she was too tired to give it, too tired even to feel afraid herself, though she knew she would later. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Eat and then sleep. I can’t think any further ahead than that.”
TJ returned with a twelve-pack of beer and a pizza and salad from Campisi’s. Hannah declined the beer, but Kayla knocked back several over the course of the meal, which they ate in strained silence. A few times Hannah caught TJ looking at Kayla the way Becca had looked at her earlier: like he was trying, and failing, to find the woman he once loved in the woman she’d become. Would Aidan’s face look like that if he saw Hannah? Would he even recognize her? She shut down that train of thought. Even if she could bear to find out the answers, there was no point in speculating on something that would never happen.
As they were finishing, Kayla stood abruptly. “Hannah’s staying here tonight,” she said.
“Uh, sure,” TJ replied. He looked at Hannah. “You’re welcome to stay tomorrow night too if you want.”
“Thank you,” Hannah said, relieved.
“She can sleep with me in your mom’s room,” Kayla said.
“Okay. Whatever you want.”
Kayla’s eyes ignited. “Really, TJ?
Whatever
I want?”
“Kayla—”
Hannah got to her feet. She’d had all the confrontation she could handle today. “I’m beat. I think I’ll hit the sack.”
“Good idea,” Kayla said. She stalked from the room.
“Thank you for letting me stay,” Hannah said to TJ.
“I’m glad you came. She needs someone.”
“She needs
you.
She was counting on you.”
He shook his head. The unhappiness on his sweet face was incongruous. “I can’t,” he said. And she could see it: that he’d tried, truly tried, to rise to this situation, and failed. She could see the little cracks in his character that had made his failure inevitable; could see that though it would haunt him for a while, he would get past it eventually, would shrug off his guilt and, except for the occasional unbidden and quickly suppressed memory, put Kayla from his mind. Not because he was a bad person, but because that was his essential nature. Cherubs weren’t meant to be unhappy.
In the bedroom Hannah found Kayla rummaging through a bureau for sleepwear. TJ’s mother’s tastes ran to the sensual; the search yielded half a dozen scanty silk nightgowns in assorted colors and a black lace teddy that made Hannah’s face hot just to look at it. Kayla held it up and wiggled it suggestively. “Wouldn’t you love to walk into breakfast at the center wearing this? Reverend Henley’s eyes would pop right out of his big fat head.” They laughed, an unfettered sound that dispelled some of the ugliness of the day.
Hannah chose the least revealing of the nightgowns and took it into the bathroom to change. She slid it over her head, enjoying the feel of the silk against her skin after months of coarse cotton. Remembering, inevitably, the time she’d worn the violet silk for Aidan: the feel of his fingers digging into her hips, of the wall against her back, hard and unyielding, as he had been. It was the only time he was ever rough with her. Afterward he was contrite: Had he hurt her? Frightened her? She lied and said no. There
had
been pain, but it had been threaded with a dark pleasure she’d never experienced before. Her last thought before she’d fallen into a dead sleep was how strange it was, and how unsettling, that the one could coexist with and even intensify the other.
She’d awoken later to find Aidan staring down at her pensively. “What?” she asked.
“Did you make that?” He nodded his head in the direction of the dress lying crumpled on the floor.
“Yes.”
“For me?”
“No. For myself. It’s something I’ve been doing for years. No one knows about it.”
“Are they all . . . like that?”
Hannah hesitated. Would he think ill of her for creating things so sensual, so at odds with their faith? “Yes,” she admitted.
“Why do you do it?”
She shrugged uncomfortably. “I’m not sure you’d understand.”
“Try me,” he said, with an odd intensity.
“It’s like I have to make them, or I’ll explode. Like they’re . . .” She put her hand to her chest and tapped it.
“Like they’re an essential part of you. A part you can’t express any other way.”
“Exactly,” she said, surprised.
“For me it’s murder weapons and red herrings.”
“What?”
“I’ve been writing mystery stories since I was a kid,” Aidan said. “I tried to stop when I was in seminary, but I missed it too much.” His expression was bashful, almost childlike. She felt a welling of tenderness for him.
“Have you ever had one published?”
“No. I’ve never shown them to anyone.”
Not even Alyssa?
Hannah didn’t voice the question, but she hoped the answer was no. She wanted to have something of him no one else had. “Why not?”
“They’re not that good.”