First Girl Read online

  Gabi linked her arm through Mathew’s and pulled him toward home. “Gram’s doing okay,” she lied. Seeing Gram again tonight was a lost cause, but at least she’d have a little time to puzzle out her grandmother’s request before she saw her father again. “She told me to tell you she loves you and can’t wait to see you tomorrow. Come on, I’m freezing.”

  Mathew frowned.

  “That doesn’t sound like Gram. She doesn’t get all mushy like that. Doesn’t this whole thing feel off to you? I would think you’d notice it if anybody would.”

  “What do you mean?” Gabi asked, stiffening.

  “Well, the Minders, for one thing,” Mathew said, nodding toward the entrance of the Care Center where six of the hulking attendants were stationed.

  “Don’t they always have people on security?” Gabi said through chattering teeth. She hauled at Mathew’s arm, but he paid her no heed.

  “Not that many, and not Minders. That’s what the security officers are for, and there’s only ever one of those stationed in front.”

  “Seriously, Mathew, I’m dying out here. Literally dying.”

  “And why is it more important for people to ask Gram a bunch of questions than to let her own family spend time with her? What’s that about?”

  Gabi desperately wanted to tell him everything, starting from when she’d slipped behind the tapestry in the temple, but Gram had been so adamant about keeping it secret. She whipped off one of her mittens and placed her hand on the back of Mathew’s neck, which was still damp from his long-distance sprint. He yelped, grabbing her hand and noting its cobalt tinge before cramming it back into her glove. “All right, let’s get out of here. Sorry. I’m just worried about Gram.”

  THE HOUSE looked different, like a place where other people lived. The windows were dark, and when Gabi and Mathew walked in, Gabi noticed a strange detergent odor overlying the baking smells that clung to the rugs and upholstery. Everything felt slightly off-kilter.

  “Did you…?” Gabi asked as Mathew walked toward the kitchen.

  “What?” he said as he disappeared around the corner. No, that was a ridiculous question. Of course Mathew hadn’t cleaned, but someone had been there. Gabi was certain of it. In the kitchen her brother rummaged through the refrigerator, pulling out dishes of leftovers and condiments. Gram was a genius at making the most out of whatever came available from the distribution center, creating tasty meals out of the powdered mixes, dried pasta, bruised fruit, and limp root vegetables that came in their allotment every week. From the pots on the south-facing windowsill in her bedroom, Gram harvested what she could of fresh herbs, tiny lettuces, and spinach raised from seeds stashed in her old suitcase. The seeds were heirlooms that Gram let Gabi help her sprout in waxed cups, more valuable than any antique and far more rare. She watered them with the gray water left over from bathing and housework that was collected into small tanks beneath the drains. This water was supposed to be pumped out to the reclamation truck every two weeks so it could be filtered, treated, and redistributed, but Gram always kept some aside for the pots. There had been a standoff over this after Gram moved in, and Sam lost. He owed his mother much more than a few green leaves for the home she created for his children.

  Fortunately for their slim supply, Mathew was not interested in composing a square meal. It was more like a triangle, with the three points consisting of leftover spaghetti, reconstituted gravy, and a pink blob of tinned meat that had the texture of chewed gum.

  “Gross,” Gabi said, shuddering as he pushed a plate toward her. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Hff ttk wffpllz.” Gabi had no trouble understanding him even with his mouth full. He was reminding her that she needed to have something in her stomach to take her pill. Gabi recalled Gram’s suggestion that missing a few more doses might be a good idea, and noticed that her nail beds were faintly rosy. Normally Gabi’s hands took hours to warm up after coming in from the cold. Her chest wall, which usually felt as though it were clamped in a metal vise, ached pleasurably, and the delicate skin behind her ears pulsed. Maybe missing just one more dose wouldn’t be so bad.

  “I had something at the hospital and took my pill there.”

  Mathew grunted, appeased as he shoved another forkful of spaghetti into his mouth. It was truly remarkable how much he could consume. Gabi had no idea how Gram was able to stretch their ration far enough to satisfy his bottomless hunger. With that thought, she noticed an uncomfortable curling sensation in her own stomach, accompanied by a loud gurgle. Gasping, she put a hand on her scooped-out belly. Mathew sputtered, struggling to keep from spewing chewed food all over the kitchen.

  “What did you eat at the hospital, a house cat?” he choked out. “Sounds like kitty’s hungry.”

  “I think I will have something,” Gabi agreed. Her wasted body had never required much nourishment to keep up its halfhearted attempts at functioning, and she was rarely able to choke down more than a few mouthfuls at a time. Gabi rose from the stool by the counter and opened the refrigerator, where she found a cup of yogurt Gram had made from packets of powdered milk. She dipped a spoon into it and smiled as the cool, creamy stuff coated the inside of her mouth. Food actually tasted good when she was hungry!

  “Hey, Gab, did Gram tell you anything about what happened? Before you came out of the temple, Dad told me the alarm startled her and she had a heart attack. That it was probably a faulty wire that made it go off.”

  The yogurt curdled on Gabi’s tongue. She hated lying to Mathew, especially when he looked so vulnerable with his hair standing up in spikes and his cheeks flushed from his run.

  “Gram couldn’t talk a lot. She had an oxygen mask on, and she was pretty weak. She told me she went to get some supplies and that’s when it happened.” She must be careful. Mathew was tracking her words like an expert Translator. “She did get startled. That’s what she said.” The material of her shirt grew damp under her arms.

  As Mathew opened his mouth to speak, the front door opened and closed with a soft thump. Gabi startled at the unmistakable clatter of her father’s keys landing in the shallow basket on the foyer table where he kept his passcard. Sam was bound to notice the card was missing, yet his footsteps continued into the living room without pause. Reluctantly she followed Mathew into the living room to greet their father.

  Sam and Mathew sat on the worn velveteen sofa, and Gabi curled into an armchair across from them, taking in the lavender pouches under Sam’s eyes and the new sag to his stubbled cheeks.

  “Hi, honey.” Sam sighed, attempting a smile that slipped, then failed entirely as the rest of his face refused to cooperate. “You get something to eat?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Dad,” Mathew blurted, desperate to lift their father’s spirits. “I actually heard her stomach grumble. Then she went to the fridge, got a cup of yogurt, and ate the whole thing!”

  Sam’s face brightened. “Is that right? Proud of you, honey.”

  “Uh, Dad?” Mathew ventured. Sam threw an arm around his son’s shoulders and pulled him in for a hug.

  “I’m proud of you too. You really came through for me. I know you’re worried about your gram. She was stable when I left, but very tired. We’ll all go together tomorrow, okay?” Sam’s voice held tears, and he hugged Mathew more tightly to his rumpled shirtfront. “I told Gram why you couldn’t come, and she understood. She knows you love her, and she loves you too. Don’t either of you forget that.”

  Mathew nodded, his hands knotting and unknotting in his lap. Gabi wondered if he, too, had noticed the false chord in her father’s words.

  “But what happened, Dad?” Mathew asked. “Why did everyone want to talk to Gram so bad, and why were there Minders watching the outside of the Care Center? Is it because of who tripped the alarm?” Gabi’s spine straightened. Of course she was desperate to know the full story, but was she really ready to hear of the horror that had terrorized her grandmother? If her father’s ravaged face was any indication, she didn’t know
if she would ever be ready.

  Sam pretended to study a glass dish on the coffee table, but Gabi could sense his deep confusion, as though he was lost in his own backyard. She wanted to throw herself at Mathew and clap her hands over his ears to shield them both from what Gram’s story would surely take from them. She couldn’t have explained it, but as clearly as she’d ever known anything, she knew that the haze clouding the room like smoke was Loss itself. It had entered with her father, and now it was poised over her and Mathew like a hatchet.

  “It was the wiring,” Sam whispered hoarsely. A fist squeezed Gabi’s chest. No. Gram had said nothing about wiring. She’d said… what? Gabi struggled to remember, but the queer, robotic monotony of her father’s voice derailed her thoughts. “The Care Center building was the first one reclaimed when Alder became the governing seat of Unitas, and it hasn’t been upgraded in too long. We’ve put off renovations because it would take a total overhaul, since some of the materials originally used aren’t available anymore. Something like this was bound to happen.”

  Gram said not to tell anyone because she needed to speak to Sam herself. Maybe Gram had told him the truth but they’d decided to keep it secret until they could figure out whom to trust? Nothing made sense. Gabi wanted to push for answers, but she hardly knew where to begin. “But, Dad, if it was just wiring, then why all the security?” she pressed.

  Sam’s answer came as though he were reading it from note cards.

  “It was just a precaution in case there’s a liability issue. Since the alarm triggered Gram’s heart attack, they were worried someone might encourage her to take action against the council.”

  “You mean sue?” Mathew pressed. “But Gram wouldn’t do that, would she?”

  “No, of course not,” Sam said. “Like I told you, it was just a precaution.”

  “And the Minders?”

  “The council didn’t want everyone getting stirred up by false reports of someone snooping around unauthorized. A statement will go out in the bulletin tomorrow, and everything will be fine.” But there was nothing fine about it, not in Sam’s face, his voice, or his words. What about Gram’s story? What about what she’d seen?

  At the sound of a knock at the door, what little color remained in their father’s face drained away. He stayed Mathew with a touch on the arm. “I’ll get it.”

  But he didn’t move. Sam just kept his hand on Mathew’s arm, looking between his son and Gabi as though trying to memorize every detail. She didn’t know she was crying until she opened her mouth to speak and a tear slipped over her upper lip. “Dad?”

  The knock sounded again, more insistent this time. Sam moved toward the door with leaden feet. In the pause he took before he opened the door, head bowed and fists clenched, Gabi realized her father knew who it was. Gabi had thought her father would be the bearer of the message that invited Loss back into their home, but instead it was Messenger Nystrom, standing in the spot where Gram once called Gabi in from the cold. With every beat of her weak heart, Gabi knew that her gram was dead.

  Chapter FOUR

  GABI COULD hear Mathew’s strangled sobs through the door of his room, where he’d fled the minute Messenger Nystrom spoke the horrible words “She’s gone. I’m so sorry.” Sam had tried to follow him, but Mathew closed the door and turned his music up. The sound of his grief was louder to Gabi than the screeching guitar music and punishing bass that rattled his doorframe. It followed her down the hall as she floated away from her brother’s pain and the wooden wretchedness of her father as he spoke with Messenger Nystrom in terse whispers.

  Gabi pushed the door of her room open and froze at the sight that confronted her. Each and every one of her spindly, crooked book towers had toppled, leaving the floor of her room covered in a shin-deep sprawl. Without the towers, the room looked empty, yet there was not one clear spot of floor where she might place her foot to come inside. Gabi slid down the wall, staring dumbly at the mess. How could this have happened? She’d been careful to reconstruct the towers that fell the night before when she’d left her room. Had she closed the door with a bit too much gusto in her hurry to get to the temple and carry out her plan? Not that it mattered. The only person in their family who cared about tidiness and order was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

  Gabi was astonished that she had any tears left to cry, but the small salty drops just kept leaking out. She kicked her foot out from under her and used it to plow a small path in the books so she could scoot through. Inch by inch she uncovered glimpses of the colorful rug Gram had given her for her seventh birthday. It showed a scene from an old fairy tale called “The Little Mermaid.” Her father had objected to the rug, as such fables glorified a world dreamed up by humans rather than the one created by God. But as with the pots, Gram had won out, arguing that the rug had been gifted to her by a dear friend lost during the Strain who had no family of her own to leave it to. Gram had gone on to suggest that if Sam thought that something as harmless as an old rug could undermine the doctrine, perhaps that pointed to a problem with the doctrine, not the rug.

  The scene woven into the rug was of the Little Mermaid bidding farewell to her father and sisters as she joined her prince on land. Gabi had begged Gram to tell her the story many times, never tiring of hearing how the mermaid’s longing to experience a world beyond her own inspired her to withstand great suffering. Gabi loved how the rug’s weaver had made the sinuous bodies of the merfolk visible beneath the waves and included all manner of marine life in their underwater world. Before Gram explained the tale to Gabi, she’d thought the image was of a girl about to abandon her life on land for the mysteries of the deep. Looking at the scene now, Gabi wished she could disappear inside it and never return.

  “Gabriela? Honey?” Gabi’s father knocked softly at her door and poked his head in. “What happened in here? Are you okay?”

  Gabi realized that, seated amid all of it, she probably looked like she was literally drowning in a sea of books. “My stacks fell over.”

  “Well, you’re lucky you weren’t hurt.”

  “It happened while we were out,” she replied, tossing a textbook onto her bed. There was virtually no uncorrected material in it, and it occurred to her that she might as well get rid of it. Perhaps she should get rid of all of them. The uncorrected material could probably be condensed into half of that big reference text from the Corrections Facility. The one that was now missing a certain whale photo. For the first time since leaving the hospital, she was aware of the sharp corner of the stolen page digging into her skin beneath the waistband of her skirt. Gram had told her to keep it along with Sam’s passcard, even though she knew it could get Gabi into a lot of trouble. Why? Gabi badly wanted to pull out the photo and look at it again, but her father was still standing in the doorway, taking in the shambles of her room.

  “Do you want to talk about anything?” Sam asked, absently fiddling with the doorknob. Gabi did want to talk. She wanted to tell her father what Grammy Low had told her. She didn’t want to be the only one to know it, but she had made a promise. “You and Gram are—were very close,” Sam continued, his voice rough with emotion. “I know this is hard for you.”

  “She was your mom,” Gabi said. “Do you need to talk? And why did people come into our house when we weren’t here? They cleaned things, and they knocked my books over, did you know that?” She hadn’t meant to bring up the intruders, but the weight of so much secrecy was too much. Who else would answer her questions now that Gram was gone, and why was her father talking about Gram as though she’d been just another member of the fellowship?

  Sam’s head jerked back, and for the first time since the Care Center, he looked at Gabi. Really looked.

  “I know this might be hard for you to understand, Gabriela, but as a councilmember and Primary Translator, it’s my duty to hold all of my fellows equal and prioritize the highest good of Unitas above all else. I took an oath. What happened today was a tragedy, but it was also a security situation th
at had to be resolved through the proper channels. Your gram was involved, and so some investigators came to the house to do a routine search for clues to what happened. The safety of our community was at stake.” There was that tone again.

  “Was it?” Gabi countered. “I thought you said it was just a faulty wire. Why are you being like this? Don’t you care that she’s gone?”

  “Of course I’m sad. I loved her. She’s—was—” Sam worked his hand over his forehead as though trying to pull the words out manually.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Gabi murmured. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make this harder. I’m just trying to understand. I think I need to be alone for a little while. I’m pretty tired.”

  Her father took a lunging step over the books and kissed the top of her head. “Of course, honey. You rest. I’ll be down the hall if you need anything. I’ve got to make arrangements for tomorrow. There will be a service for Gram, so you should try to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”

  Gabi tried to smile, but the attempt hung falsely on her face as Sam tiptoed back over the books and closed the door behind him.

  The little-girl part of her yearned to follow her father, to curl up in his lap and demand he make everything right. She wanted him to explain what it meant that Gram wasn’t alive anymore, but she had never been that kind of child. From the moment she was old enough to understand that Sam was an important man in Unitas, she had ceased expecting him to be a parent first and a fellow second. That simply wasn’t how it worked. Their survival as a species depended upon the willingness of every individual to put the good of the whole first. The alternative was made all too vivid by the reports sent back by Witness teams working with the Tribes. Anarchy. Starvation. Chaos.