“Amara’s here,” Jorn barked.
Cilla opened her eyes. The skin underneath them was swollen and dark.
“Your hair,” was the first thing Cilla said.
Amara tugged at a lock by her ears. Her fingers ran through it too soon. “My neck is much colder,” she signed.
Cilla’s eyes dropped to rest on Amara’s neck. Cilla had seen her tattoo a million times, but Amara still wanted to turn away or fluff up her topscarf. She felt naked.
“What do they want with me?” Cilla asked. Her voice came close to cracking.
“I don’t know.” Amara kept her signs low, though it wouldn’t hide them from Ruudde or Jorn. “They won’t tell me. They want Nolan to keep you alive.”
“But first they want you to tell me to eat.”
Amara looked at Cilla’s soft wrists, at the fullness of her cheeks. She didn’t look any thinner yet. Amara wondered how long that would last.
“They sent in Jorn first.” Cilla sounded dreamy. “I almost listened to him, too. I guess it’s hard to quit lifetime habits.”
“You have to eat.” It felt like a betrayal. Whatever Ruudde and Jorn wanted, she ought to want the opposite—but looking at Cilla like this, she had no choice.
“Do you know …”
“No.” Amara swallowed. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know why they need you.”
“Maybe I’m just that pretty. Do you think that’s it?” A hollow laugh.
“I don’t want you to die.”
“No one does, apparently. Big difference from before, isn’t it?” Another laugh. “Maybe I’m not hungry.”
“At the farm, you said you didn’t want to die.”
“I didn’t,” Cilla said quietly.
“We’ll … Ruudde wants us to go back to how things were before. We’d have more freedom. We’d have the ministers’ support. It’d be easier.” Amara couldn’t go back. But maybe—maybe if Cilla made the choice for her—
No. That wouldn’t be right, either.
“First you run because of me,” Cilla said, “then you want to go back because of me.”
“I didn’t run because of you.” Amara wished it were just the two of them, talking like before, but Ruudde and Jorn watched their every movement. They stood close enough for her to smell the sweat on their clothes and hear their every breath, and she felt their eyes on her hands as she spoke. “You simply made my choice easier. I didn’t want to leave, but I wanted to stay even less.”
“Good.” Cilla’s smile wavered. “Look where it got us.”
“Yeah.”
They watched each other from across the length of the cell.
“Which do you want to do less now?” Cilla asked. “Go back? Or stay like this?”
Cilla didn’t know about Ruudde’s threats. Staying wasn’t an option. Sooner or later, Nolan would cave, or Ruudde would run out of patience. “It’s not that simple.”
“Apparently it never is.”
“Eat,” Amara said. “I … I need you to eat.”
Ruudde took her arm and led her back to her cell.
31
Nolan couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t go to school. His parents had been watching him, and he couldn’t prove he was getting better, and soon … Nolan didn’t think they’d fill the rest of the prescription. He’d heard them fight about it. Inside the house his parents usually talked in Spanish, with Dad throwing in what little Nahuatl he knew, and fights were no exception. This time they peppered their shouts with English words, which was how Nolan knew it was serious. They used whatever words came to mind.
Mom said Nolan was getting worse, not better, and that Grandma Pérez said they needed to be tougher on him. Dad said that unless Dr. Campbell agreed the pills were harmful, it was Nolan’s opinion that mattered most—if he said he felt better, they couldn’t force him to stop.
At the dining table on Friday, Nolan thought they’d agreed with each other. Apparently not.
“What’s going on with you?” Pat stood in the doorway to his bedroom. Her eyes spat fire, but the rest of her seemed reserved. The way she used to be around him.
Nolan had been screwed up for most of Pat’s life; he didn’t know when she’d first given up on him. He thought this might be the second time.
Pat held out his old notebook. “Explain. You’re not writing a book.”
“How would you know?” He put the notebook on his desk, next to the new one that lay open in front of him. He’d have to keep the last half of the old notebook empty; if he wrote anything new after already breaking in the other one, he’d mess up the order.
“You don’t even read,” Pat said. “And you would’ve told Mom and Dad. You know it’d make them happy.”
“I’m not writing a book,” he agreed.
Pat blinked as if she hadn’t expected that answer. “I asked Mom and Dad who Amara and Maart and those others were. They wouldn’t tell me.”
“Don’t—don’t say that name.” Nolan shook his head. “You know those hallucinations I used to have? Amara was in them.”
“So that means you’re still having those hallucinations?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“But what about the part where you write about how all of a sudden you can change things because of the pills? And where you’re talking about, oh, is this a hallucination or isn’t it? Your doctors always said the way you acted wasn’t right for seizures. And the pain? And walking off at dinner? Stop lying,” she pleaded.
“Should I say it’s real? You wouldn’t believe that.”
“No. You need to tell Mom and Dad you’re still seeing things.” She pointed at the notebook. “It’s not healthy. And now you’re acting like this and … in the journal you wrote … I’m worried, OK?”
“Do you think it’s real?”
“Of course not.” Her pointed finger went from the notebook to him, accusatory. “But I think you think it’s real. Don’t you?”
And just like that, tears burned in his eyes. His face flushed with heat. As if all of a sudden he couldn’t breathe.
“Nolan, I didn’t mean—”
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. It didn’t help. “I really—” he said, and gasped in a breath, “I really wish I didn’t.”
“Didn’t believe it’s real, you mean?” Pat sounded quieter.
On the Saturday Amara had scratched her arm in that cell, Nolan had shakily tried to make himself breakfast. He’d dropped a cheap jar of peanut butter when the wood tore Amara’s skin. He’d screamed and squeezed his arm, whole and uninjured but hurting like hell.
He thought of Ruudde’s threats.
“It would be a lot easier if it wasn’t real,” he whispered—
—and when he closed his eyes the moment Pat left his room, Ruudde was there, standing outside the cell’s bars. His arms were crossed, obscuring part of his tattoo, which glowed so fiercely it pulsed.
“Oh, good,” Ruudde said. “Talking to Amara can be so exhausting. Why do you bother going home, anyway? I always thought the moment you learned control, you’d either stay on Earth or claim Amara permanently.”
If Nolan were in his own body, he’d narrow his eyes, clench his jaw.
Amara did it for him.
“Talk to me, kid.”
Amara was waiting for Nolan to take over. She expected him to push her to the back of her mind and step forward. He supposed he deserved that. He’d taken over at the farm in Roerte. He did it whenever he went to sleep or woke up, to warn her, like he’d promised, and he felt her despair every time. He’d felt it two days ago, in the form of wood stabbing her arms.