“I have plans when I get out of here,” William said one day as they were hiding behind the dumpster. “I’ve been recruited by someone very important. No one should ever have to live like this, Mikael.” And he pulled out the letter and showed him. It read:
“A man with nothing left to lose is a very dangerous man and his energy/anger can be focused toward a common/righteous goal. What I’m asking you to do, then, is sit back and be honest with yourself. Is this the life you want? Would you back out at the last minute to care for family or friends? Would you be willing to use your skills for something bigger than yourself? I’m not looking for talkers, I’m looking for fighters… And if you are a Fed, think twice. Think twice about the Constitution you are supposedly enforcing (isn’t ‘enforcing freedom’ an oxymoron?) and think twice about catching us with our guard down — you will. Your family will lose. Make the righteous choice.”
Mikael received a couple of letters from William after the boy was released, but they said nothing of any substance, leaving him to believe that what he’d bragged about before he left was true: that a major building had become a target, that William’s ideas would become actions, and that people were going to die. It was that simple. There were boys like William everywhere, their hearts hollowed out by the world around them, willing to join or do anything to disrupt the landscape they’d been handed.
When Mikael thought of dead people, he thought about Vera. He thought about Indigo. He wondered if the targeted building might be full of women and children. If anyone had threatened Vera or Indigo, he knew, he would have killed them.
—
Inside his room now, inside his teen body barely existing in time and space, nothing: no pencils or pens, no shoestrings or sheets. Even the sink fixtures had been dismantled since he’d tried — or so they thought — to use the faucet parts to make a weapon. In truth, he’d been trying again to fashion something he could draw with. Now, instead of providing running water, they brought him a plastic jug with his meals, and he had to return the jug each night. Recently, after being tormented by another boy, he’d taken the blue plastic lid of his jug and jammed it into the boy’s forehead, so hard that doctors had to be brought in to remove it and suture the wound.
Lying down on the cool of the concrete floor, Mikael stretched one hand out in front of his face and studied the lines of his own veins that crisscrossed the back of his hands. He thought about how veins carried blood to the heart, the motherload.
He closed his eyes and waited for this woman, who — like every caseworker before her — would mean nothing. No woman was coming to save him.
He dreamed the same dream as always: the sound of an infant, just out of reach. Only this time, in the dream, there was a blast as big as a building.
The Floating Boy and the Butcher’s Daughter
In the detention center meeting room, Lilly stared at the feckless, rattling dark-green fan, moving less air toward her than a person would standing there blowing. The fan, the table in front of her, even the walls reminded her of high school — like a teen institution that had thrown up on itself.
The door opened. A pair of guards stepped into the room, holding Mikael by the elbows, and shoved him into the chair across from her.
The boy stared at her. Or not at her exactly, but at her cheek. His jaw looked like it could crack a wrist. His forearms were covered with marks — not the feathery traces of a serial cutter, but the gouged valleys of someone far beyond giving a shit. The guards chain-harnessed him to his chair, locked his handcuffs to a metal ring on the table, and stepped away.
Several seconds of quiet.
Then the sound of metal screaming and he lunged at her from across the table.
She flinched but didn’t yelp, thank Christ.
He laughed, a kind of fuck-you growl.
She had the impression that they could sit like that for hours unless she did something to surprise him, catch him off his stride. She had exactly one move.
She reached into her bag, pulled out the object, and placed it on the table between them.
His laugh caved in.
The object sat between them, as silent as anything had ever been.
Lilly watched Mikael stare at the strange twist of flesh, dried into a husk, wound into a shape something between a letter S and a spiral staircase. She had expected the silence; she’d been reminded over and over again that the boy had long since stopped speaking. What she didn’t expect was that, when she drew a breath to speak, she would be interrupted.
“Where did you get that?”
She recalibrated. “It was in with the artifacts and evidence left after the fire,” she lied. “They said it was found inside—”
“A lockbox.”
“Yes.” In her head, a clicking sound. How was she sounding: Neutral? Aggressive? Benevolent? She had no idea. She looked at this boy-going-to-man in front of her, coiled in a spring of heated rage and dislocated want. Without permission, she thought: brother. How do you get a boy like that to open? How long had it been since this boy had even seen a woman? She hadn’t seen a single one since she’d arrived.
She knew she had next to no shot. All she had going for her was adulthood, and her own reckless instincts.
“I have a recurring dream about a box,” she said. She opened her shirt collar wider, exposing her neck. “A bad dream.” He didn’t move. “Really fucking bad.”
He didn’t speak. His eyes were fixed on her chin. Was there some danger in telling her secrets to this kid, about to disappear into a prison system that didn’t give a fuck who he’d been or what he might be? He had nowhere to go but down. And she lived in a liminal space where no one gets saved.
Now or never.
“Yeah. The dreams are about my father. He was… a war criminal.” Her throat was thick. She’d never said that out loud. Even in group therapy she’d lied, said her father had gone to jail for murdering someone. But her father had tortured and murdered thousands. He had turned her brother into a killing machine. Even the phrase war criminal barely covered it.
She stood up and walked over to the triple-barred security window in the cinder-block box of a room. She wondered if he was watching her ass, but when she turned around to look, he was staring at the ceiling. She could see a scar at the side of his neck. A big one. His Adam’s apple, ungainly like any boy’s, made her heart hurt.
“What’s your last name?” Mikael did not stop looking at the ceiling.
Her breath cut short against her ribs—he is speaking he is speaking don’t fuck this up. She remained near the anti-window, holding as still as a statue. “Why?”
“I can hear your accent. You think it’s gone, but it’s not.”
“Bullshit.” She palmed the scar at her own neck. Her skin felt cold, like uncooked chicken. A year of failed group therapy spent covertly cutting the thinnest line imaginable over and over and over again, just the whisper of a line, just to feel something besides nothing. She had no accent. Her mother had successfully escaped and relocated her, thanks to her American uncle at the State Department, long before her father was global news. She. Had. No. Accent. God. Damn. It.
But now he looked her dead in the eye. Could he see her scar? Was he smiling?
“Tell me your dream,” he said. In Serbo-Croatian.
Little prick, she thought. And yet she realized she had no other game but this. She wet her lips with her tongue. The air between them crackled a little. Fuck group therapy. Roll the dice. In her own half-assed Serbo-Croatian, she continued.