She brushes a lock of hair out of my face. Her fingertips barely touch my skin, but I feel as if there’s a trail of fire following her touch.
I don’t mean to, but I find myself staring into her eyes. I can see it then: she loves me. But her love for me is nothing like my love for her. My love eats away at me until I’m hollow inside, filling me with bitterness at every moment she spends with Harley. But her love is kind and good. She loves me as a friend, a true friend, and the purity of her emotion leaves me breathless. In this moment, she wants nothing but to make me happy again. For the past 149 days, I have wanted nothing but for Harley to disappear—and I would have reveled in Kayleigh’s misery.
The selfishness of my feelings makes me ashamed. I swallow hard, and with that, I resign myself to this simple fact: I can love her, and she can never love me back. But what I feel for her is real, even if she doesn’t feel it. And what I feel for her is good, as long as I remember that I care more about keeping the love and light in her eyes, even if it isn’t for me.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I tell her, and I mean it.
She squeezes my arm and smiles. “Good.”
A shadow passes over her face.
“Now it’s my turn to ask,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
Kayleigh bites her lip. “The way you’ve been sad and grumpy lately—Doc’s noticed.”
This is beyond anything I expected to hear. I don’t try to deny my negative attitude, even though I hadn’t realized she’d been aware of it for so long. What really surprises me is the way she brings up Doc. I swallow again, this time remembering the way the blue-and-white pill I take every day tastes.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Selene,” Kayleigh says. “Before she was sent back to the fields, she was sad, remember?”
“She had every reason to be.” Selene’s story was a miserable one, but it was her story nevertheless.
Kayleigh nods again. “But the thing is . . . do you remember the way Doc switched her meds when she was sad?”
I shake my head.
“He did,” Kayleigh continues. “She showed them to me. And the longer she was on those pills, the more she seemed . . . different.”
“Different?”
“Come on,” Kayleigh says, standing. “I’ll show you.”
We ignore the siren, and neither of us pauses when the solar lamp blinks out. This trek seems different from our other outings. Kayleigh is on a mission here, with a clear goal.
She leads me away from the Hospital, toward the fields. The Feeder Level is ten square acres, most of it taken up with farmlands. Corn and wheat grow closest to the Hospital, but Kayleigh strides down the path between the two with confidence. I wonder how many times she’s visited Selene.
“It was after she was . . . you know, and Eldest decided not to punish her attacker,” Kayleigh says. “That’s when Selene started being depressed. And soon after that, Doc changed her meds.”
“So?”
“When he changed her meds, he changed her.”
“Obviously,” I said. “We’re loons. Without meds, we’d be crazier.”
Kayleigh stops dead. “No. I don’t think that’s true. I think the mental meds are what keep us sane. I think—it’s the others who are different.”
I shake my head. This is crazy, even for Kayleigh.
She doesn’t waste time arguing with me. She grabs my hand—my heart can’t help but race at her touch—and pulls me toward the rabbit farm. She bends the thin wire fence down to climb over it. The rabbits look up, their ears pointed toward us and their noses twitching. A few hop languidly away as we steal across the field to the small house lined with rabbit hutches.
Kayleigh doesn’t bother knocking or announcing her presence. She pokes her head into the door and whispers loudly, “Selene!”
I hear murmuring inside. Kayleigh jerks her head, and I follow her into the little house.
Selene is sitting up in bed. Her quilt pools at her lap. It’s obvious that she just sat up as soon as Kayleigh called for her.
“Selene,” Kayleigh says again.
Selene turns her head to Kayleigh, and in that simple motion, I’m reminded of the girl I used to know. Vivacious but reserved, usually quiet, but when she opened her mouth, music came out.
“Yes?” she says in a dead voice. “I am Selene.”
Air leaves my lungs.
“Selene, are you happy?”
“I am here.”
“But are you happy?”
“It is darktime. Night. I should be sleeping.”
“Selene, do you feel anything at all?” Kayleigh is insistent, her voice rising with each question.
“I feel sleepy. It is time for sleeping.”
“Do you know who I am?” Kayleigh asks.
“You are residents of the Ward. You should be in the Hospital.”
“Yes. We are. And we used to be your friends.”
Selene frowns—the first time she’s shown any emotion at all. Kayleigh seizes on it, leaning forward, her eyes sparkling. “Do you remember us? Do you remember what it was like before? What happened to you? What did Doc do to you to make you like this?”
Selene blinks.
“Doc did nothing,” she says in a hollow voice. “I am sleepy because it is night.”
She leans back down into her pillow. She doesn’t adjust her body or pull the covers up. She just closes her eyes. A moment later, I can see by the even rhythmic rise and fall of her chest that she’s asleep.
I start to leave, but Kayleigh pauses to tuck the quilt over Selene’s shoulders.
We don’t talk until we’re back on the path away from the fields.
“See?” Kayleigh rages. “That is nothing like the way Selene once was.”
“Maybe she’s still depressed.”
“No!” Kayleigh stops. The Recorder Hall is a dark outline to our left, the Hospital to our right. Maybe, if someone squinted and knew where to look, we’d be noticed despite the darkness.
“Don’t you understand?” she asks. “Those blue-and-white pills we take every day. They don’t keep us from being crazy. They keep us sane. There must be some reason Eldest needs at least some of the people on the ship normal, and he uses the label ‘crazy’ to keep us separated. It’s them—the workers—they’re the ones not normal. They don’t feel anything, they don’t think anything. I bet they’re easier to control; that must be why Eldest does it.”
“Does it?” I ask. “Does what?”
“Drugs them! Something! I don’t know, but he’s done something to make the people not be—not be themselves. Even when she was sad and depressed, Selene was never like that.” She spits out the word. “When Eldest had Doc send her away, he made sure there was something else done to her, another drug or something, to make her be like that. Empty. Dead inside.”
Kayleigh words are loons, but . . . I saw Selene with my own eyes. I know the way that pill sticks in my throat, the way Doc and the nurses watch us each swallow one every day. Even Elder, the future leader of the ship. They wouldn’t have Elder be heir to the ship if he was crazy. But if that blue-and-white pill actually kept him sane . . . then of course they’d give it to him.
Kayleigh must see the understanding dawning on my face because she grabs both my hands and leans forward, excited.
“There’s more. Remember the ship diagrams? Orion’s been giving me access—he was mad at first, but he realized that I understood them, understood the schematics. He’s shown me things, things Eldest doesn’t know we know. And I think—”
“Kayleigh!” The voice cuts through the night, and I could curse. Instead, I force a smile on my face.
“Oh! There you are!” Harley strolls up and wraps his arms around Kayleigh. In that simple motion, he claims her.