Iceling Page 14

“Yeah,” Stan says. “Me too. All of it. At once. The fear and the exhilaration. I’ve been feeling that this entire time.”

  “Phew. I’m glad it’s not just me. But we’re going to have to try really hard to remember that. I mean, you take everything that’s gone down over the last few days—the bear, my mom, the cops being creepy with families at the checkpoint, these cars traveling this road with us carrying the same kind of trouble we are.”

  “What, those two?” he says, looking at them in the rearview and smiling.

  Callie is smiling too, but in her sleep and not at us, and Ted makes a little nose twitch like he’s having a dream that he’s a rabbit, and Stan and I start to laugh as quietly as possible so that we don’t wake them. Then Ted’s nose stops twitching and he settles in a bit more, finally finding a comfortable position with his head on Callie’s shoulder, and his mouth relaxes into a gentle grin.

  Our Icelings, our brother and sister, are sitting right behind us, smiling. Even Ted is smiling. And I have to say, it looks weird, Ted smiling, like nobody ever taught him how. Like his whole face is learning it for the first time, seizing this moment when he’s asleep to work this problem out.

  It’s totally possible this will work out terribly. But we’re here, and they’re happy, and something about this feels right. Like we’re on the right course. Bobby’s right in front of us, and I can see both him and Greta, sitting in the passenger seat, through their rearview mirror. And I can see that Greta’s smiling. And I’m thinking we’re where we’re supposed to be. And whatever this is, we’re going to meet it head-on. Grass crowns and all.

  Stan points to a sign on the highway.

  ISLAND FERRY, 100 MILES

  EIGHTEEN

  IT’S AMAZING WHAT a police escort can do in terms of getting you up into Canada.

  We’ve been driving for, roughly, forever. At some point we all sort of decided to carpool, or at least the people who weren’t already carpooling, like Stan and me, so that we can all sleep in shifts. After our car-to-car chat with Jayson, which happened around midnight, more and more people started rolling down their windows to introduce themselves, sort of like a game of telephone but with really scary life stakes on the line. Anyway, the two things all of us on the road have in common is that A of all, we all have Iceling siblings, and B of all, we are all exhausted.

  So for the past long stretch we’ve been sleeping and driving in shifts all through the night. I imagine this is the kind of thing that, under normal circumstances, would look very suspicious—a bunch of teenagers taking over an entire highway, all of us driving together on the same route with identical siblings in our backseats, not even stopping to sleep in proper beds—but our circumstances are nothing like normal, and it’s actually kind of liberating not to have to worry about being stopped and punished just for being under eighteen. I don’t know about the other cars, but I know that both Stan and I could really use a shower. Or a rainstorm to stand in for one. Applying drugstore pore cleanser in a truck stop bathroom will only get you so far.

  All of a sudden, we glide into a stop. Once again, we’ve become just one in an expanse of red taillights. All around us, Icelings are opening car doors or else being stymied by child locks, and it’s so foggy and packed with cars that I can’t see a thing except taillights and Icelings everywhere. So I open the passenger door and step out to get a better look, and then I climb up on the front tire to get an even better one. I shiver and brace myself against the wind, feeling absurdly grateful for the extra parkas and winter gear Bobby had stored in his car—my “warmest parka” feels more like a base layer up here, and in the rush of leaving I forgot about a whole category of clothing called “accessories.” I don’t care that Bobby’s gear is old and smells like mothballs. I tug my new, borrowed fur hat tighter against my ears and squint, then widen, my eyes. We’re stopped at the edge of the sea.

  This is it.

  Not it it. But this is where we’ve been driving to. This is where the road led. To a parking lot in a place (horrifyingly) called Meat Cove. I see a pier, some docks, and a lineup of several industrial-looking and paint-chipped boats and ships and freighters, and everything looks very, very old. Standing on the dock is a grumpy old sailor wearing a peacoat, a watch cap, and, I kid you not, from what I can see from my vantage point, he has an eye patch and a cane.

  Callie’s going home, I think to myself, and I gasp. I cover my mouth, and I cry.

  I turn and duck back into the car to see her, to hold her hand. She’s sitting there patiently, looking out to the dock, to whatever lies beyond it. Ted’s clamoring at the child lock. Stan lets him out. I go to open the door for Callie, and, as soon as I do, she’s off and running, along with Ted, toward the other Icelings who’ve already bolted and are now down by the pier.

  We others, we siblings, bleary- and blank-eyed, as if in a fever, shepherd the Icelings forward, while our adopted brothers and sisters zoom to and fro, from clique to clique, moving against or herding, reminding me of what a high school reunion might be like if you actually liked high school and missed your classmates.

  “Huh,” says Stan. “They all have the same kind of hair.”

  “What?”

  “That weird dirty blond. Like faded dirt.”

  “Yeah. I mean, they’ve got similar cheekbones, they’re all the same size.” Three run by, all of them about five foot eight, which is to say all of them roughly Callie’s height. “They’re related. All of them. They have to be, right? They’re all the same age and the same size with the same hair, and they all look related.”

  We, on the other hand, unlike the happily reunited, seem to be engaging in a contest to find out who’s the most awkward and standoffish. All around us, kids are comparing notes on what they know, what they don’t know, what they think is going on, what they hope is going on, what they hope isn’t going on. At least three people are walking around replaying voice messages from their parents screaming about the things the government will do to them if they find they’ve taken the Orphans “back there.” It soon becomes clear that some of them have had conversations with their parents similar to the one I had with my mom, but that most of them haven’t. You can tell the ones who have from the ones who haven’t by how they respond to the rumor that the government is out to get our siblings. Those who’ve had the conversation react somberly but calmly, and those who haven’t have this horrifying look of surprise on their faces. Like the whole world just took off its mask and the real face underneath belongs to a monster.

  “Um, guys,” says Bobby, sidling over to us as fast as he can through this disoriented mob, “you might want to look at that.”

  Bobby points, and we follow his finger with our eyes until what we’re looking at is so many Icelings.

  What I mean is, while we’ve all been standing around, numb from driving and perplexed by our destination, the Icelings have been gathering. Earlier, they were running around, but swiftly and silently, they slipped away from us completely and segregated themselves on the other side of the marina.

  Callie’s gone.

  How could I lose track of her? Here, of all places, now? I turn around in circles unproductively as heat rises to my forehead, and I get so hot that I almost rip my hat off and expose my skin to this frigid air, but then someone nudges me.

  “Hey,” says Bobby, and he points.

  And there’s my Callie.

  Over there, with all the other Icelings, who are calmly milling about and among each other, staring up close in each other’s eyes. She’s moving around like they all are, getting up into each other’s faces, looking for what, I can’t say. Themselves is my guess. They’re looking to see what they can see of themselves in one another’s faces. They hold their hands up, as if asking the Iceling across from them to hold their hand up too. Sometimes they do, and then both Icelings make this face that says: Finally. Some of them don’t, and then those Icelings just kee
p trying.

  “They’re pairing off,” I say. “Right? It’s like they’re checking to see which person will be their mirror.”

  “Ho-ly . . .” says Bobby, then trails off as he watches Greta lock hands with an Iceling girl who jumped when she jumped.

  “Huh,” Stan says. I look, and there’s Ted, standing in front of another broody-seeming Iceling. They glare at each other, raise their hands in sync, and then embrace. It’s a quick embrace, maybe even warm—in other words, nothing like what I’d expect a hug from Ted to be like. “Well,” Stan says. “I guess he’s found his other half.”

  “You hear that, Callie?” I ask, forgetting she isn’t there. I look out to where I last saw her in the gathering of Icelings, but she’s not there either. I lost her.

  But after a minute of frantic searching, there she is. Way down by the landing, standing with a girl who looks uncomfortably just like her. They’re smiling, holding their hands up, mirrors for one another. And now their hands are trembling, and they’re touching each other’s hair (Callie’s is long, down past her shoulders, and this other’s is lopped off around her chin), feeling it out for all the ways it is and isn’t theirs.

  Someone taps me on the shoulder. I jump and reel around to see a girl around my age, dark hair and curvy, with cool glasses. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you,” she says with a bit of a Southern accent.

  “It’s fine, you didn’t,” I say, not sure whether I mean it or I’m just being polite.

  “I’m Emily,” she says, holding out her hand. I take it and shake it and tell her my name, and she smiles. “Nice to meet you! Under the weirdest circumstances ever? Anyway, that’s my sister over there.” She points with her shoulder to where Callie is standing. “Her name’s Tara. The girl she’s . . . uh . . . talking to. Is that your sister?”

  Tara. So that’s the name of the girl with whom Callie is, right now, probably forging a bond that’s deeper than anything we have ever or could have ever had.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s Callie.”

  “I guess they found their Others,” Emily says.

  “Their whats?”

  “Others.” She points to the Iceling side of the marina. “That’s just what some kids are calling the Orphans their siblings are pairing off with.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “It’s like they’re . . . sisters,” says Emily. “They look so much alike.”

  “I know,” I say, and I can tell she feels maybe as bad as I do about all of this.

  “What do you think they’re doing? Are they talking to each other?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But they definitely seem to understand each other.” I almost add, “Like I guess in all the ways we never could,” but I don’t. Something tells me, though, that I maybe could have.

  “Yeah,” Emily says, then turns from Callie and Tara to fix her gaze on me. “Am I a terrible person for feeling jealous?”

  “If that makes you terrible, then I’m the poster child on a series of propaganda ads celebrating war crimes,” I say, and she laughs a little.

  “Yeah. I mean, my heart’s totally broken. But I’m also happy for her,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I mean, this is all I ever wanted for her—a language she can understand and someone who can understand her. I just wanted it to be me.”

  “Yeah,” Emily says. “Same.”

  “Hey,” I say, “you and me, we could slice our palms open and become blood sisters or something, you know?” She stares at me like I’m some sort of crazed freak.

  And then she bursts out laughing, and I do too, and we’re so tired from traveling, and sitting for hours and hours and hours, and the ground is so slick that we almost let our legs give way and fall down, but then we hold on to each other and just collapse a bit into the laughter.

  “That was funny,” she says, her face kind of breaking with this smile, one hand on her stomach and the other still on my shoulder, and if I hadn’t just seen her laugh, I don’t think I’d believe her. “You don’t even know how much I needed to laugh like that.”

  “Not a lot of laughs lately, huh?” I say, my own smile receding back into the furrowed face of concern I’ve been wearing since we got here.

  “Have you heard these voice mails going around? My dad called the other day, right after that completely insane checkpoint. I didn’t pick up, obviously. But he left this voice mail that was like, Emily, return yourself and that Orphan at once. If you cannot or will not return Tara, then at least return yourself. I am warning you. The government is warning you. There will, my child, be consequences.”

  “I had a pretty similar conversation with my mom,” I say. “I’ve never heard her so . . . scared before. It was this terrible combination of serious and scared that I never want to hear again. Except the scariest part isn’t that she sounded like that. It’s that I haven’t heard from her—or my dad—since.”

  “Oh my God—same. Actually, I’m a little less freaked out now that I know it’s the same for you . . .”

  “Likewise,” I say. I spot two Icelings on the other side of the marina. They start running at each other. Gradually, they slow down, until they come to this eventual, almost eternal halt. They’re face-to-face. They look like one guy transformed into two by a mirror, but there’s no mirror. One guy moves his arm. The other guy moves the same arm. They do this for maybe a minute, moving different limbs identically, then they stop, and they sort of smile and just stand there.

  “They’re all so . . . different,” I say. “From each other. I mean, that probably sounds really stupid, right? Like, that’s like being surprised that a whole bunch of humans who grew up in the same place aren’t exactly the same.”

  “No,” Emily says. “I know what you mean. And then our sisters—they’re so alike. It’s like they’re different and alike, but to crazy extremes.”

  “Exactly,” I say, and I feel some kind of strange relief, because it’s nice to look around and see a whole bunch of people who know you without you ever having met them.

  But it’s short-lived. Because, yes, it’s nice to look around and see a whole bunch of people who you know without ever having met them. But the reason you feel that way is that you’ve all spent your whole lives with these siblings who happen to look alike, and move alike, and none of them can communicate with anything approaching the sounds and gestures and inflections we interpret as language, and apparently the government thinks they’re maybe some sort of weapon, and you know that the only reason you know that is because your parents told you, because your parents have known it for maybe as long as you’ve been alive, maybe longer, because your parents are colluding with or in the employ of the government and have been spying on your siblings since forever.

  And wherever it is we are out here in the most forbidding swath of Canada, Callie is acting in a way I’ve never seen. All of our siblings, these Icelings, are acting in a way that none of us has ever seen. Maybe this is them coming alive. And maybe it’s this weird moonlike place that’s allowing them to do it. It’s as if something long dormant inside of them is getting up and stretching and taking a look around.

  Someone is calling my name. For one completely insane moment, I think, for no reason other than pure and desperate desire, that it’s Callie, but then that crazy thought is squashed when I see Stan running up to us, still shouting, “Hey, Lorna!”

  “Emily, this is Stan,” I say. “We rode up together; his brother is that big guy over there, Ted.”

  “Hey,” Stan says, and I can’t help but notice a little extra color rise up into his cheeks.

  “Emily’s sister is Callie’s . . . Other,” I say, and Emily smiles and nods.

  “Ah,” Stan says. “I’m still looking for whoever brought Ted’s guy up. Anyway, listen. Bobby says someone found a ferry to charter.”

  “Over there?” I ask, pointing to th
e fleet of old metal clunkers parked over at the dock. “It’s one of those?”

  Stan nods his head.

  “A ferry?” says Emily. “To where?”

  “The island, I guess,” Stan says. “Their island.”

  “Jesus,” Emily says. “So this is really happening, huh?”

  “Yep,” Stan says.

  “Are we . . . going over there with them?” Emily asks.

  “We better be,” I say and exchange a hard look with Stan, who doesn’t seem as sure as I do about heading over to the island.

  “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go find Bobby.”

  We make our way down to the landing, where all those industrial-looking boats and rigs are stationed. Only one looks big enough to carry a hundred Icelings and their hundred adoptive siblings, so I’m assuming that one’s ours. Bobby and another guy are standing on the dock in front of this huge barge-looking thing, talking to the grizzled guy I saw when we first pulled up, the one who looks exactly like a cartoon version of a captain, who I’m assuming is the captain. Seeing him up close, I realize he doesn’t actually have an eye patch—must have been a shadow—but he does have a cane, which makes me break into a small smile. Stan, Emily, and I push through and join Bobby in the powwow.

  “And you’re sure you want to go . . . there?” the captain says, pointing to a barely discernible dot on the horizon.

  “Yes,” Bobby says, and a whole chorus of yeses follow, rippling back through the crowd of people.

  The captain gives us one more long, skeptical look before he relents. “Well,” he says. “So long as you’re sure.” He lifts up his chin and puffs his chest and puts his hands around his mouth. “All aboard!” he shouts, and maybe it’s just the way the cold air is affecting our vocal cords, but I think I hear a little bit of sadness in his tone.

  After much corralling and coaxing, we herd our Icelings on board, and now we’re traveling again, having traded in our cars for a completely luxury-free boat built to withstand the Arctic. It’s really more of a freighter than a ferry. There’s a top deck, where the winds are awful. There’s below deck, which is still very cold but warmer than up top. It’s damp down here, like an old unfinished basement, all wet metal and bad pipes.