Humans, unregulated, are cruel and capricious; violent and selfish;
miserable and quarrelsome. It is only after their instincts and basic emotions
have been controlled that they can be happy, generous, and good.
—The Book of Shhh
I have a sudden dread of going any farther. That thing in the pit of my stomach squeezes up like a fist, making it hard to breathe. I can’t go on. I don’t want to know.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I say. “He said—he said we weren’t allowed.”
Alex reaches out for me like he’s thinking of touching me, then remembers where we are and forces his arms to his sides. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I have friends here.”
“It’s probably not even her.” My voice is rising a little, and I’m worried I might have a meltdown. I lick my lips, trying to keep it together. “It was probably just a big mistake. We shouldn’t have come in the first place. I want to go home.” I know I must sound like a toddler throwing a tantrum, but I can’t help it. Walking through those double doors seems absolutely impossible.
“Lena, come on. You have to trust me.” Then he does reach out, for just a second, skating one finger across my forearm. “Okay? Trust me.”
“I do trust you, it’s just . . .” The air, the stench, the darkness and the sensation of rot all around me: It makes me want to run. “If she isn’t here . . . Well, that’s bad. But if she is . . . I think—I think it might be even worse.”
Alex watches me closely for a second. “You have to know, Lena,” he says finally, firmly, and he’s right. I nod. He gives me the barest flicker of a smile, then reaches forward and heaves open the doors to Ward Six.
We step into a vestibule that looks exactly like what I imagine a cell in the Crypts might be like: The walls and floor are concrete, and whatever color they might once have been painted has now faded to a dingy, mossy gray. A single bulb is set high in the ceiling, and barely delivers enough light to illuminate the tiny space. There is a stool in the corner, occupied by a guard. This guard is actually normal-sized—skinny, even, with acne pockmarks and hair that reminds me of overcooked spaghetti. As soon as Alex and I step through the door, the guard makes a small, reflexive adjustment to his gun, drawing it closer toward his body and swiveling the barrel ever so slightly in our direction.
Alex stiffens beside me. All of a sudden, I feel very alert.
“Can’t be in here,” the guard says. “Restricted area.”
For the first time since entering the Crypts, Alex appears uncomfortable. He fiddles nervously with his badge. “I—I thought Thomas would be here.”
The guard gets to his feet. Amazingly, he’s not much taller than I am—he’s certainly shorter than Alex—but of all the guards I’ve seen today, he frightens me the most. There’s something strange about his eyes, a flatness and hardness that reminds me of a snake. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before, and staring into the long black tunnel of its barrel makes me feel like I’m going to faint.
“Oh, he’s here, all right. He’s always here, nowadays.” The guard smiles humorlessly, and his fingers dance against the trigger. When he speaks his lips curl upward, revealing a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth. “What do you know about Thomas?”
The room takes on the stillness and charge of the air outside, and reminds me of waiting for thunder to crack. Alex allows himself one small indication of nervousness: He curls and flexes his fingers against his thighs. I can almost see him thinking, trying to figure out what to say next. He must know that mentioning Thomas was a bad decision—even I heard the contempt and suspicion in the guard’s voice as he pronounced the name.
After what seems like a terribly long time—but is probably only a few seconds—the blank, official look sweeps down over his face again.
“We heard there was some kind of problem, that’s all.” The statement is sufficiently vague, and a decent assumption. Alex twirls his security badge idly between two fingers. The guard flicks his eyes to it, and I can tell he relaxes. Fortunately, he doesn’t try to look at it more closely. Alex has only Level One security clearance in the labs, which means he barely has the right to visit the janitor’s closet, much less parade around restricted areas, there or anywhere else in Portland, as though he owns them.
“Took you long enough,” the guard says flatly. “Thomas has been out for months. All the better for CID, I guess. It’s not the kind of thing we wanted to publicize.” The CID is the Controlled Information Department (or, if you’re cynical like Hana, the Corrupt Idiots Department or the Censorship Implementation Department), and goose bumps prick up on my arms. Something went very wrong in Ward Six if the CID got involved.
“You know how it is,” Alex says. He has recovered from his temporary slip-up; the confidence and ease return to his voice. “Impossible to get a straight answer from anyone over there.” Another vague statement, but the guard just nods.
“You’re telling me.” Then he jerks his head in my direction. “Who’s she?”
I can feel him staring at the unmarred skin on my neck, noticing that I have no procedural mark. Like many people, he unconsciously recoils—just a few inches, but enough so that the old feeling of humiliation, the feeling of being somehow wrong, creeps over me. I turn my eyes to the ground.
“She’s nobody,” Alex says, and even though I know he has to say it, it makes my chest ache dully. “I’m supposed to be showing her the Crypts, that’s all. A re-educational process, if you know what I mean.”
I hold my breath, certain that at any second he’ll boot us out, almost wishing he would. And yet . . . Just beyond the guard’s stool is a single door made out of a heavy, thick metal, and protected by an electronic keypad. It reminds me of the bank vault at Central Savings downtown. Through it I can just make out distant sounds—human sounds, I think, though it’s hard to tell.
My mother could be beyond that door. She could be in there. Alex was right. I do have to know.
For the first time, I begin to understand, fully, what Alex told me last night: All this time, my mother might have been alive. While I was breathing; she was breathing too. While I was sleeping, she was sleeping elsewhere. When I was awake thinking of her, she might have been thinking of me, too. It’s overwhelming, both miraculous and fiercely painful.
Alex and the guard eye each other for a minute. Alex continues spinning his badge around one finger, winding and unwinding the chain. It seems to put the guard at ease.
“I can’t let you back there,” he says, but this time he sounds apologetic. He lowers his gun and sits down on the stool again. I exhale quickly; I’ve been holding my breath without meaning to.
“You’re just doing your job,” Alex says, keeping his voice neutral. “So you’re Thomas’s replacement?”
“That’s right.” The guard flicks his eyes to me and again I can feel his gaze lingering on my unmarked neck. I have to stop myself from covering my skin with a hand. But he must decide that we aren’t going to be trouble, because he looks back to Alex and says, “Frank Dorset. Got reassigned from Three in February—after the incident.”
Something about the way he says incident sends chills up my spine.
“Tough breaks, huh?” Alex leans up against a wall, the picture of casualness. Only I can detect the edge in his voice. He’s stalling. He doesn’t know what to do from here, or how to get us inside.
Frank shrugs. “Quieter up here, that’s for sure. Nobody in or out. At least, almost nobody.” He smiles again, showing off those awful teeth, but his eyes maintain their strange flatness, as though there’s a curtain drawn over them. I wonder if this, for him, was a side effect of the cure, or whether he was always like that.
He tilts his head back, peering at Alex through narrowed eyes, and his resemblance to a snake grows even stronger. “So how’d you hear about Thomas?”
Alex keeps up the unconcerned act, smiling, twirling the badge. “Rumors floating here and there,” he says, shrugging. “You know how it is.”
“I know how it is,” Frank says. “But the CID wasn’t too happy about it. Had us on lock for a few months. What exactly did you hear, anyway?”
I can tell the question is an important one, some kind of test. Be careful, I think in Alex’s direction, as though he might somehow hear me.
Alex hesitates for only a second before saying, “Heard he might have sympathies on the other side.”
Suddenly, it all makes sense: the fact that Alex said, “I have friends here,” the fact that he has seemingly had access to Ward Six in the past. One of the guards must have been a sympathizer, maybe an active part of the resistance. Alex’s constant refrain plays in my head: There are more of us than you think.
Frank relaxes visibly. Apparently that was the right answer. He seems to decide that Alex is, after all, trustworthy. He strokes the barrel of his gun—which has been resting casually between his knees—as though it is a pet. “That’s right. Came as a total shock to me. ’Course I hardly knew him—saw him sometimes in the break room, once or twice in the shitter, that’s about it. Kept to himself, mostly. I guess it makes sense. Must have been getting chatty with the Invalids.”
This is the first time I’ve heard anyone in an official capacity acknowledge the existence of the people in the Wilds, and I suck in a sharp breath. I know it must be painful for Alex to stand there, talking dismissively about a friend who has been caught for being a sympathizer. The punishment must have been swift and severe, especially since he was on the government payroll. Most likely he was hanged or shot or electrocuted, or thrown into one of the cells to rot—if the courts were merciful and decided against a verdict of death by torture. If he even had a trial.
Amazingly, Alex’s voice doesn’t falter. “What was the tip-off?”
Frank keeps massaging his gun, and something about the motion—gentle, almost, like he’s willing it to life—makes me feel sick. “No tip-off, exactly.” He sweeps his hair off his face, revealing a splotchy red forehead, shiny with sweat. It’s much hotter here than it was in the other wards. The air must get trapped in these walls, rotting and festering like everything else in this place. “It figures he must have known something about the escape. He was in charge of cell inspections. And the tunnel didn’t just sprout up overnight.”
“The escape?” The words fly out of my mouth before I can help it. My heart starts jolting painfully in my chest. Nobody has ever escaped the Crypts, not ever.
For a moment Frank’s hand pauses on the gun, his fingers once again performing a dance on the trigger. “Sure,” he says, keeping his eyes on Alex, as though I’m not even there. “You must have heard about it.”
Alex shrugs. “A little of this, a little of that. Nothing confirmed.”
Frank laughs. It’s a terrible sound. It reminds me of the time I saw two seagulls fighting in midair over a scrap of food, screeching as they tumbled toward the ocean. “Oh, it’s confirmed,” he says. “Happened back in February. We got the alarm from Thomas, as a matter of fact. ’Course if he was in on it, she might have had a lead time of six, seven hours.”
When he says the word she the walls seem to collapse around me. I take a quick step backward, bumping up against a wall. It could be her, I think, and for one horrible, guilty second I’m disappointed. Then I remind myself that she might not be here at all—and in any case, it could have been anyone who escaped, any female sympathizer or agitator. Still, the dizziness does not subside. I’m filled with anxiety and fear and a desperate craving, all at once.
“What’s wrong with her?” Frank asks. His voice sounds distant.
“Air,” I manage to force out. “It’s the air in here.”
Frank laughs again, that unpleasant cackling sound. “You think it’s bad out here,” he says. “It’s paradise compared to the cells.” He seems to take pleasure in this, and it reminds me of a debate I had a few weeks ago with Alex, when he was arguing against the usefulness of the cure. I said that without love, there could also be no hate: without hate, no violence. Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.
Alex starts talking. His voice is low and still casual, but there’s an undertone of force to it: the kind of voice street peddlers lapse into when they are trying to get you to buy a carton of bruised berries or a broken toy. It’s okay, I’ll give you a deal, no problem, trust me. “Listen, just let us in for a minute. That’s all it will take: a minute. You can tell she’s already scared out of her mind. I had to come all the way out here for this, day off and everything, I was going to go to the pier, maybe try out some fishing. Point is, if I bring her home and she’s not straightened out . . . well, you know, chances are I’ll just have to haul out here again. And I only have a couple days off, and summer’s almost over. . . .”
“Why all the trouble?” Frank says, jerking his head in my direction. “If she’s causing problems, there’s an easy way to fix her up.”
Alex smiles tightly. “Her father’s Steven Jones, commissioner at the labs. He doesn’t want to do an early procedure, no trouble, no violence or mess. Looks bad, you know.”
It’s a bold lie. Frank could easily ask to see my ID card, and then Alex and I are screwed. I’m not sure what the punishment would be for infiltrating the Crypts under false pretenses, but it can’t be good.
Frank appears interested in me for the first time. He looks me up and down like I’m a grapefruit he’s evaluating in the supermarket for ripeness, and for a moment he doesn’t say anything.
Then, finally, he stands, slipping the gun onto his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “Five minutes.”
As he’s fiddling with the keypad, which requires both that he type a code and scan his hand on some kind of fingerprint-matching screen, Alex reaches out and takes my elbow.
“Let’s go,” he says, making his voice gruff, like my little fit has left him impatient. But his touch is gentle, and his hand warm and reassuring. I wish he could keep it there, but after only a second he lets me go again. I can read a plea, loud and clear, in his eyes: Be strong. We’re almost there. Be strong for just a little while longer.
The locks on the door release with a click. Frank leans his shoulder against it, straining, and it slides open just enough for us to squeeze by into the hallway beyond. Alex goes first, then me, then Frank. The passage is so narrow we have to go single file, and it’s even darker than the rest of the Crypts.
But the smell is what really hits me: a horrible, rotting, festering stink, like the Dumpsters by the harbor, the place where all the fish intestines get discarded, on the hottest day. Even Alex curses and coughs, covering his nose with his hand.
Behind me, I can imagine Frank grinning. “Ward Six has its own special perfume,” he says.
As we walk I can hear the barrel of his gun, slapping against his thigh. I’m worried I might faint, and I want to reach out and steady myself against the walls, but they are coated with fungus and moisture. On either side of us, bolted metal cell doors appear at intervals, each outfitted with a single grimy window the size of a dinner plate. Through the walls we can hear low moaning, a constant vibration. It’s worse, somehow, than the screeches and screams of earlier: This is the sound people make when they’ve long ago given up hope that anyone is listening, a reflexive sound, meant just to fill the time and the space and the darkness.
I’m going to be sick. If Alex is correct, my mother is here, behind one of these terrible doors—so close that if I could rearrange the particles and make the stone melt away, I might put my hand out and touch her. Closer than I ever thought I would be to her again.
I am filled with competing thoughts and desires: My mother cannot be here; I would rather she was dead; I want to see her alive. And filled, too, with that other word, pressing itself underneath all my other thoughts: escape, escape, escape. A possibility too fantastic to contemplate. If my mother had been the one to break out, I would have known. She would have come for me.
Ward Six consists of just the one long hallway. As far as I can tell, there are about forty doors, forty separate cells.
“This is it,” Frank says. “The grand tour.” He pounds on one of the very first doors. “Here’s your boy Thomas, if you want to say hello.” Then he laughs again, that awful cackling sound.
I think about what he said when we first entered the vestibule: He’s always here, nowadays.
Ahead of us, Alex does not respond, but I think I see him shudder.
Frank nudges me sharply in the back with the barrel of his gun. “So what do you think?”
“Awful,” I croak out. My throat feels like it has been encircled with barbed wire. Frank seems pleased.
“Better to listen and do as you’re told,” he says. “No use ending up like this guy.”
We’ve paused in front of one of the cells. Frank nods toward the tiny window, and I take a hesitant step forward, pressing my face up to the glass. It’s so grimy it’s practically opaque, but if I squint I can just make out a few shapes in the obscurity of the cell: a single bed with a flimsy, dirty mattress; a toilet; a bucket that looks like it might be the human equivalent of a dog’s water bowl. At first I think there’s a pile of old rags in the corner too, until I realize that this thing is the “guy” Frank was pointing out: a filthy, crouching heap of skin and bones and crazy, tangled hair. He’s motionless, and his skin is so dirty it blends in with the gray of the stone walls behind him. If it weren’t for his eyes, rolling continuously back and forth as though he is checking the air for insects, you would never know he was alive. You would never even know he was human.
The thought flashes again: I would rather she be dead. Not in this place. Anywhere but here.
Alex has continued down the hall, and I hear him draw in his breath sharply. I look up. He is standing perfectly still, and the expression on his face makes me afraid.
“What?” I say.
For a moment he doesn’t answer. He is staring at something I cannot see—some door, presumably, farther down the hall. Then he turns to me abruptly, a quick, convulsive shake.
“Don’t,” he says, his voice a croak, and the fear surges, overwhelms me.
“What is it?” I ask again. I start down the hall toward him. It seems, all of a sudden, that he is very far away, and when Frank speaks up behind me, his voice too sounds distant.
“That’s where she was,” he is saying. “Number one-eighteen. Admin hasn’t coughed up the dough to get the walls patched, yet, so for now we’re just leaving it as is. Not a lot of money around here for improvements. . . .”
Alex is watching me. All his control and confidence has vanished. His eyes are blazing with anger, or maybe pain; his mouth is twisted into a grimace. My head feels full of noise.
Alex holds up his hand like he’s thinking of blocking my progress. Our eyes meet for just a second and something flashes between us—a warning, or an apology, maybe—and then I am pushing beyond him into cell 118.
In almost every way it is identical to the cells I’ve glimpsed through the tiny hallway windows: a rough cement floor; a rust-stained toilet, and a bucket full of water, in which several cockroaches are revolving slowly; a tiny iron bed with a paper-thin mattress, which someone has dragged into the very center of the room.
But the walls.
The walls are covered—crammed—with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.
Love.
Looped huge and scratched, just barely, in the corners; inscribed in graceful script and solid block lettering; chipped, scratched, picked away, as though the walls are slowly melting into poetry.
And on the ground, lying curled up against one wall, is a dull silver chain with a charm still attached to it: a ruby-encrusted dagger whose blade has been worn down to a small nub. My father’s charm. My mother’s necklace.
My mother.
All this time, during every long second of my life when I believed her dead, she was here: scratching, burrowing, chipping away, encased in the stone walls like a long-buried secret.
I feel, suddenly, as though I am back in my dream, standing on a cliff as the solid ground disintegrates underneath me, transforms into the sand in an hourglass, running away under my feet. I feel the way I do in that moment when I realize that all the ground has vanished, and I am standing on a bare blade of air, ready to drop.
“It’s terrible, you see? Look at what the disease did to her. Who knows how many hours she spent scrabbling along these walls like a rat.”
Frank and Alex are standing behind me. Frank’s words seem to be muffled by a layer of cloth. I take a step forward into the cell, suddenly fixated on a shaft of light, extending like a long golden finger from a space in the wall that has been chipped clear away. The clouds must have begun to break apart outside: Through the hole, on the other side of the stone fortress, I see the flashing blue of the Presumpscot River, and leaves shifting and tumbling over one another, an avalanche of green and sun and the perfume of wild, growing things. The Wilds.
So many hours, so many days, looping those same four letters over and over: that strange and terrifying word, the word that confined her here for over ten years.
And, ultimately, the word that helped her escape. In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script—LOVE, each letter the size of a child—and gouged so deeply into the stone that the O has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.