Iceling Read online

  “Lorna . . .” says Stan, tentatively, quietly, and the sound of my name pulls me up out of myself. A bit.

  I don’t say anything, though, because I’m still trying really hard to draw all of the sounds into my body. Except I don’t actually have the capacity to manipulate sound waves. Or to pretend that that phone call never happened. Or to deal with any of this at all right now.

  So I stop trying to deal with things. Because obviously I can’t. Stan is still waiting patiently for me to be ready to speak. I need to tell him about the phone call. Of course I need to tell him. It’s all trying to get out anyway, so why not, why not just weep all over the passenger seat, and on Stan too.

  “I talked to my mom. I was hoping for my dad, but I got my mom instead. And, um . . .” And of course I can’t stop my face from trembling here.

  “It’s okay, Lorna, just—”

  “It’s not okay, Stan, okay?” He flinches when I snap at him, and I immediately feel bad. “I’m sorry. Just listen. Please?”

  He nods, and I thank him.

  “I wanted to call my dad because he’s the only one who cares about Callie like I do. I think. Jesus, I don’t know anything anymore. Hold on.” I blow my nose into my sleeve as hard as I can to mask the fact that I’m choking down sobs. “Anyway,” I go on, “my mom picks up instead, because my dad is out at the research site, and we talk, and I tell her . . . everything.” Stan starts a bit in his seat, and his eyes go wide and panicked. “I know, I know, but please, just wait, okay? I told her everything.

  “And she completely freaks out. She does a one eighty, and it’s not even that she’s mad, she’s just freaked. Out. She said the government is after Callie? That Hospital Jane is a government liaison, and that the government thinks they’re weapons. She kept telling me, over and over, that we shouldn’t take them back there, that they were definitely trying to get us to take them back up north, where they came from. She said not to get between them and the government, or we’ll basically die.” And now I’m just full-on crying and not even trying to stop or hide it. “What the hell, Stan? What the hell are we supposed to do with this?”

  “Jesus,” says Stan quietly.

  And I look back at Callie and Ted and see them sitting there quietly, one sweet and one brooding, and I wait for the world to end around us.

  And then nothing happens. The world doesn’t end. Ted yawns. Callie yawns. Then I yawn, and I realize we’re no longer moving. Maybe the world did end.

  Either way, Stan pulls over. We’re sitting here in a car on the side of the highway while all around us other cars with other people in them pass us by, their lives untroubled by the kinds of trouble we’re dealing with in here. The sheer incomprehensible impending disaster that my mom’s phone call painted the world to be. Because I know my mom isn’t messing with me. Because my mom has never really ever messed with me, and on the rare occasions she attempts a joke, she uses this voice, like she shifts her voice so I know she’s messing with me, like she always wants me to know where she stands. My mom is a dedicated research scientist. Her whole life is about gathering data and then sitting down with that data and finding ways to see what the data is trying to tell her about the universe. She’s told me that the world is a series of narratives and that all you need to do is listen to the story it’s telling you. That science isn’t about deciding which story you like best; it’s about listening to all the stories as they’re told. When you’re little, you test the hypothesis. You have an idea, and then you try to figure out if your idea is right, and if it’s not then you change your idea to figure out what the right one is. You don’t change the data to fit the assumption. When you do that, you fail the science fair.

  Which is all just to say that I believe her. Every word she said. Which is totally and compellingly terrifying.

  “Are you sure . . .” starts Stan, after an uncomfortable span of silence. “Are you sure you heard her right, or—”

  “You mean, did her voice come through over the completely clear satellite connection?”

  “Or are you sure that this wasn’t maybe your mom’s idea of a joke?”

  “Please,” I snort. “My mom’s jokes aren’t, like, jokes. I mean just that she doesn’t invent stuff. Her ‘jokes’ are always, like, facts that strike her as ridiculous. Like the kinds of things you see on the insides of Snapple caps. And anyway, the main reason I know she wasn’t joking is because when I was listening to her, something happened. On my end. Where I put everything together—that night at the hospital, the party, this trip, the bear—and I feel like it’s all true. The government, the danger.” Stan has his head in his hands now, and he’s slumped against the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else to think, Stan! Either my parents have been lying to me my whole life or they’ve just decided to choose the scariest and cruelest possible moment—when their terrified daughter calls them looking for comfort—to start lying to me and messing with my head. I mean, which one is harder to believe?”

  “So your parents are government agents,” says Stan.

  “What?”

  “I mean, think about it. If what your mom said was true, then for them to even know all of this . . . They’d know this because they were contracted, right? Maybe? The government wouldn’t just tell anyone something like that. Right?” He’s looking straight ahead and setting his jaw all rigid, and he smells like sweat and fear, like scared wet salt on a knife, and I’m sure that I must too.

  “Well, then, that means your dad’s one of them too,” I say.

  “What?”

  “If my parents are in on it, like you said, and if this is really happening, then . . .”

  “Lorna—”

  “Stan, I just saw your brother smash a bear’s head into a highway wall. My mother just told me to let my sister die because the government thinks she’s a weapon. Callie, who is right there, in the backseat, weaving a crown out of grass as we speak, a weapon. Because apparently my parents, and probably every single other parent who adopted an Iceling, are not who they say they are and don’t work where they say they work, because they actually work for the government.” My sobs come out in short choking bursts now, until I’m still deeply crying, but there’s no sound or water, and my face is just twisting itself into all these distorted shapes.

  He takes a deep breath. “You’re right,” Stan admits. “My dad’s probably on the inside of this too. He’s been looking at Ted this whole time like he might be a weapon, not because he has a kind of anger problem, which could happen to any teenage kid, but because he knows how they were found.”

  “We know how they were found too. My dad was the one who found them. He told me all about it.”

  “And did he tell you the government has thought Callie is a weapon from the start and that he worked for the government too? Did he tell you that they were monitoring their every mood and moment? Did he tell you we were probably—shit, I’m sorry.” He stops as he looks up at me, noticing that I’m sobbing. Cool. This is great. This is the most fun road trip in the history of the whole world. Four stars, would embark on again. “I’m sorry, Lorna. I know I’m being a jerk.”

  “It’s fine. This situation is sucky as hell, but you’re fine. You’re not being any more of a jerk than anyone else would be, considering we just found out our parents probably work for the government, and the government thinks Ted and Callie are deadly weapons. And so our parents have also definitely been lying to us, about stuff way bigger than the tooth fairy or the democratic process, for our entire lives.”

  “So our parents have been in cahoots with the government about our weird Orphan Icelings, about our families, our whole lives. And according to your mom, they have some sort of nefarious plan for them. So we just need to figure out what, if anything, we can do about it. Right?”

  “So you think we should take them to their home, right? No matter what? Even if that’s the o
ne thing my mom said not to do? We’re taking them back to where they were found—really found, wherever that is. That’s where we’re going. That’s what we’re doing.”

  And then I look to the backseat, where our Icelings are. What do I do here? How do I ask if this is really what they want? How do I make them know that if we keep going north, a serious threat might be lying in wait? Do they already know and don’t care? Or are their minds as free from suspicion as their faces seem to suggest?

  I look back at Stan, and he’s just staring straight ahead, looking as perplexed as I feel. Then I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn around. Callie, reaching out to me. She touches my tears, which makes me start crying again, and then she just nods over at the road, like hey, let’s get going, sister. Stan and I switch shifts. I turn the key and then signal to merge. And lo, we have merged.

  So that was that. Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning, or ’til the government blows us up and our parents pull off their parent masks and are complete strangers, and everything around us crumbles and burns.

  FOURTEEN

  SO BASICALLY EVERYTHING is completely terrible and also a total disaster right now.

  This is how it feels, for me, at least, to be alive, in Maine, which is huge, by the way.

  Dave keeps texting me, and now that I know what I know, I have no idea what to say to him anymore. It’s not as if I feel like I’m talking to a stranger now, but rather like he’s talking to a stranger whom neither of us know. I just keep answering that everything is fine, then tell him about the clouds I can see from the car, or type something cute and witty, because what else can I tell him that won’t put both of us in danger?

  My phone lights up with a buzz, and I think how quickly I went from loving when that happens to absolutely dreading it.

  How’re u feeling bae? It’s Mimi.

  tired//hungry//great, I text back. The first two items on that list are true, but as to the last one, my plan right now is that maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone what I am feeling, because what I am feeling is basically that all my authority figures are liars, and the government wants to kill my sister, and my parents are at least half-fine with that. And maybe if we get Callie where she’s going safe and sound, she’ll find somewhere she belongs more than with me. Which is great, but also the worst thing ever to have happened. And how do you say that to your best friend, or to the boy with whom you do homework, plus other stuff too? I know that Mimi and Dave only want to help and that they’re worried about me. But they can’t help, no one can help, because I can’t tell them all the things I’ve just learned.

  The one thing I do know is that Stan and I have to get Callie and Ted to wherever they’re going. I can’t think about anything else— especially the part about maybe we’ll be killed if Stan and I get Callie and Ted to wherever they’re going. And this is what’s churning around and around in my head when Stan nearly crashes into the guardrail. We stop abruptly. After I turn to make sure Callie’s okay and all buckled in, I whip right around to face Stan.

  “What the hell!” I shout.

  “Sorry! Sorry! It’s this idiot guy! He’s been, like, waving at me, at us, viciously. What the hell is he doing?”

  I look. A car is parked right behind us, and the driver’s side door is open. A guy in his twenties or early thirties gets out, and then I look closer and see a girl sitting inside the car in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.

  The guy approaches and sticks his head in Stan’s window.

  “Hi!” he says. “I’m Bobby.”

  “Uh, hey, Bobby,” we say, tentative as all heck.

  “I see you guys have some Orphans in there,” he says, blocking the sun with one hand and putting his forehead against the back window. “Or AROs, as you might call them?”

  “Um,” we say. Stan looks at me, and all I can do is stare blankly back.

  “So let’s go somewhere and talk!” says Bobby.

  “You want us to go somewhere with you?” I say, every protective instinct in me firing up on all cylinders.

  “Wait a second, dude. Why would we follow a complete stranger who nearly just ran us off the highway? What do you want?” says Stan.

  “Huh! Good point! Fair enough,” Bobby says, putting his hands up and smiling. “Let’s start over? I’m Bobby, and it’s very nice to meet the both of you. I’m a grad student in anthropology. That’s Greta,” he says, gesturing with a nod toward the girl sitting in his car. We follow his nod and then look back at Bobby. “Greta used to be real close with my younger brother, Alex,” he goes on. “But now it’s just me and Greta. My stipend covers off-campus housing, so she stays with me. Anyway, the other day, Greta built this amazing island.” Stan and I look at each other while trying to make it look like we’re not looking at each other. “And after that, things got what I’d call vaguely . . . nuts. She dragged me to the car, and here we are, headed north. And your friends in the backseat there have that same look.”

  “What look?” Stan says. I can feel his defensive feathers ruffling.

  “Same as Greta there. Sandy blond hair, pale eyes with that look in them that says that language, or what we call language, doesn’t mean anything to them. Then of course there’s the whole steering the car north thing and all.”

  “Could you hold on for just a sec?” I say to Bobby, holding up a finger and smiling weirdly, and then I pull Stan out of the car through my door and walk him around to the hood, as far away from Bobby as I can get without losing sight of Callie.

  “Who the hell is this guy?” I ask as quietly as possible.

  “I don’t know,” Stan whispers back. “But he’s basically narrating our day back to us, minus a bear attack. And”—he doesn’t look happy saying this—“his sister sounds like she’s probably an Iceling too.”

  “So what do we do? Just go with him? He could be anyone.”

  “I mean . . . should we just go get a bite and see what this guy is about?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay, I guess.”

  “We’ll be somewhere public. With people . . .”

  “So if he tries anything . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  Bobby is still whistling inconspicuously. Stan pokes his head out and says, “Okay, dude. Let’s go get something to eat. Separate cars.”

  “Of course!” says Bobby. “This’ll be great.”

  We get back in the car and wait just long enough for Bobby to get his car started, then we pull onto the freeway with this stranger and his sister, his purported Iceling sister, in the backseat, and we all head, convoy-style, toward the nearest rest stop.

  WE FIND A pavilion that has Burger King and Sbarro and Starbucks. We’re all grateful to be stopping to eat and rest, and plus Bobby’s buying. It really seems like Bobby wants us to like him. Imagine that.

  Bobby tells us he’s a linguist. He “got into the field” after something happened to his little brother, Alex, who was incredibly close to Greta, who is currently disassembling her salad on the plate and then reassembling it, piece by piece, on her fork. It’s not really clear what happened with his brother, the way he tells it.

  And what he keeps repeating, really stressing, is how inseparable Alex and Greta used to be. He tells us a story about how, one day, when Alex and Greta were around eight or nine years old, they wandered off to the greenhouse. After a few hours, their mom asked Bobby to go check on them. And when he did, there was just Greta. But she wasn’t at the greenhouse. She was about a mile away, in the woods. Bobby’d seen the start of their tracks and followed them easily enough, but then the wind carried them away. “They found Alex a few hours later,” he says, but exactly how they found him, Bobby doesn’t seem to want—or be able—to say.

  “I’d rather not talk more about that, if that’s all right,” he says, but then after a few deep breaths during which he stares down at his plate in front of him, he sta
rts talking about it more. “It was winter. I couldn’t see their tracks because of the fresh snow, so we had no idea where to start looking for them. All we knew was they got at least twenty feet from the greenhouse. When we got to Greta, she was warm. No frostbite. No hypothermia, no shaking, no loss of color. Nothing. She looked like she always looks. She didn’t have a jacket on. It was the strangest thing,” he says so quietly, then looks away.

  I look over at Callie. “Hey, kid sister,” I say. She doesn’t turn to look at me; instead she gulps down her Sprite, closes her eyes, then smiles quietly to herself.

  Bobby tells us he misses his brother. “Every day, I miss him. And it’s weird how you hold on to memories. You know? How you start to wonder if the things that happened happened exactly how you remembered them or if that’s just the story you tell yourself to keep going. But I get Greta. And she and Alex were so close, it’s almost like there’s a piece of him still here as long as she’s around. So that’s something.” He stops, then takes a long gulp of his iced tea, the ice at the bottom of the glass rattling around.

  It’s hard to tell, only spending the greater part of an hour with her, but Greta seems to be somewhere between Ted and Callie, temperament-wise. If Callie is shy yet sociable, and if Ted is antisocial and rather aggressive when provoked, then Greta’d be categorized as relatively sociable and mildly assertive. She eats more slowly and with more patience than Ted and Callie, who tend to approach their meals in random bursts of hunger. We used to keep track of Callie’s eating patterns on these worksheets we got from Jane, which were, apparently, for the freaking government to use to determine whether or not my sister is a monster.