Annex Page 4

  He pelted for the parkade and the othermother pelted after him, head bobbing, brushing a waster aside with one swinging arm. She gained, and gained, and Bo’s muscles were searing. He’d spent too many months getting fattened up like a cow, maybe he wasn’t the fastest in his grade anymore, maybe he wasn’t fast enough to—

  One last push onto the ramp, and a breath behind him the othermother slammed into the hanging bar that said LOW CLEARANCE: 2.8 METERS. Bo scrambled backward, watching her thrash against the tangled chain.

  “It’s your sister’s birthday,” she said. “Come home for dinner. Honey. I missed you!”

  She pulled free, but Bo was already off and running.

  Bo shot up the top of the ramp with the othermother millimeters behind. Violet stepped from the corner and blindsided the spindly leg as it came down. The aluminum baseball bat made a bone-deep crack and the othermother went sprawling, skidding across the tarmac and leaving a wet smear under herself. The cornflower-blue dress was the same rubbery flesh as the rest of her. Violet felt a slight urge to vomit.

  Instead, she set to work on the other leg, smashing the joint to pulp, working with methodical blows while the othermother writhed and chirped. One of her shoulders had come dislocated in the fall and she waggled the boneless arm in Bo’s direction. Bo was getting to his feet, breathing hard and fast, tears tracking down his face in a torrent. Violet spared him a glance but didn’t stop with the bat until she was sure the othermother wouldn’t be able to stand. A black fluid like engine grease was leaking from the shattered limbs.

  “Boniface, give your mom a hug,” the othermother trilled. “It’s your sister’s birthday. I know you love her deep down. Deep deep down. Come home for dinner. Dinner’s at six.”

  Tears were still rolling down Bo’s face, but he picked a jagged rock off the concrete all the same. His mouth was set. Violet watched, intent. Bo stared at the rock in his hand, unmoving, for a beat and then another. The othermother writhed.

  “We can cover her face,” Violet offered.

  Bo looked up. “They never really hurt us,” he said thickly. “In the warehouses.”

  “They care about what they put inside you,” Violet said, dropping the bat with a tinny clang. “Not you. Never think they care about you, Bo.”

  “But they know about her,” Bo said. His face worked. “My sister. She’s still in the warehouse.” He stared at the rock again. “It’s not her birthday. Her birthday’s in summer.”

  “Boniface, honey, Boniface, honey, Boniface. Honey!”

  “They won’t hurt her,” Violet said, trying to sound certain. “They don’t think how we do.” She halfway wanted to take the rock out of Bo’s hand and send him away, tell him that she would finish it. But every Lost Boy had to kill their othermother. Wyatt would know if she did it for him. He always knew those things.

  Violet watched Bo’s face. She knew that something broke and slid once you killed your first othermother, that something shifted like cartilage inside you. It slipped a little more for the next one, and a little more for the next one after that, until there was just a hollow. Some days, Violet wished she hadn’t let Wyatt hand her the knife.

  Bo cocked his arm.

  Violet stopped him. “You said you used the Parasite to escape,” she said. “To get through the fence.” She nodded at the othermother. “Show me.”

  “Can’t,” Bo said. “Can’t decide when it happens.”

  “You’re pumped full of fight-or-flight chemicals right now,” Violet said. “Try.” She plucked the rock out of his fingers and tossed it aside. “Focus on it hard. Focus on how much you want it to, you know, to shift. You have to really want it.”

  Bo shook himself, then took a breath. Through his thin shirt, Violet could see his Parasite pulsate. He screwed up his eyes, staring at the broken othermother, and suddenly Violet’s hair was standing on end, wreathed in static. She took a step backward.

  The othermother started to shimmer, to ripple, and then all at once she was gone. Vanished, leaving only the stains on the tarmac.

  “Holy shit.” Violet walked forward, gingerly prodded her foot into the place the fallen othermother had sprawled. “Holy shit.” She paused. “I can’t do that,” she said. “Nobody can. I can shift things for a bit, but I can’t flat-out disappear stuff.”

  “Didn’t know I could either,” Bo said. His voice was still numb.

  Violet tried to inject some enthusiasm into her next words. “She’s gone. That means you’re in, Bo. You’re a Lost Boy.”

  “What will they do?” Bo asked.

  “Normally one of the flying pods comes and picks up the dead one,” Violet said, looking at the empty space again. “Then maybe a week later, they send another. And another after that.” She stuck the aluminum bat back into her bag and slung it over her shoulders. “Eventually it gets so you don’t even recognize her.”

  Bo said nothing, staring out at the ruined city. Violet could guess he was thinking of the docks where the warehouses squatted like black coffins. He turned back and his face crumpled all at once.

  “I shouldn’t have left without her,” he choked. “Mom said to stay together. But I left. It’s because we made a deal, me and Lia both agreed on it, but I didn’t think …” His voice broke then pitched up, thin and desperate. “We have to get her out. We have to get her out now.”

  Violet tried to assess. Bo was nearly hyperventilating, his scrawny chest heaving. There was usually some panic on the mother hunt, but this was different. Guilt and fear were written all over his screwed-up face. Scared for his sister, even more scared to be without her. Ashamed he’d left her behind.

  Violet was an only child, but she knew all about guilt and fear. She felt the first one now as she leaned in close, putting her hand on Bo’s shoulder. “Wyatt will have a plan,” she whispered. “He’s always got one.” She turned him toward the exit ramp. “We’ll get your sister out by summer. Before her birthday.”

  Aside from Wyatt, Violet could lie to anyone. Bo wasn’t the only Lost Boy who’d left someone behind in the warehouse, but for all Wyatt’s talk, Violet knew the Lost Boys weren’t saviors. Just survivors.

  5

  Bo’s head was a blur. He followed Violet back to the rundown theater on automatic. When they came in, and she nodded to Wyatt, all the other kids made a ragged line to hug him one by one. He had his arms slack at his sides and he didn’t look them in the face. Gilly, the little girl with eyes the color of a Sprite bottle, hugged longer than most, in a way that might have made Bo peel her off if he hadn’t been thinking of her floral-printed othermother taking jerky birdlike steps and singing her name.

  Wyatt was last in line. He wrapped him in a tight hug, then stepped back. “Bo. Look at me.”

  Bo blinked hard, to be sure the tears were all gone. He looked.

  “You’re one of us now,” Wyatt said, serious but kind-eyed. “You’re family.” He pulled him in again with one long arm, so their foreheads pressed together. “It gets easier,” he said quietly. “My first was tough too.” He gave a half smile. His hand trailed on Bo’s arm for a moment, just above the elbow, before it vanished.

  With the line finished, some of the kids drifted away, but some stayed. They asked about which warehouse he’d been in, how he’d gotten out. Bo didn’t know the answer to the first question, and barely knew the answer to the second. He explained about the power outage and how he’d run through the wormy wall. His mouth moved on autopilot.

  Once he might have bragged, but he still had the image stamped hard behind his eyes of his mother—no, his othermother—writhing on the concrete while Violet dismantled her legs. All of these kids had seen that, and they hadn’t made her just disappear. They’d used the rock. Bo kept thinking about the weight of it in his hand. Maybe he wouldn’t have had the guts to use it.

  Some of the younger kids pushed little gifts into his hands: chocolate bars, smooth stones, one tiny plastic dinosaur. Some of the older kids, in hushed voices, asked about
certain names. Mostly Bo shook his head, and even when he recognized a name, there was nothing to say. They were alive, they were drinking the water, they were following the whirlybird to food and to bed and to food and to bed. Bo asked them about Lia, but none of them remembered meeting her. One girl, Bree, asked about Ferris.

  “She’s twelve,” Bree said. “Same height as me. Blonde hair. Talks fast.”

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “I know her. She was in my group.”

  Bree sucked in a breath. “She’s my cousin. We were supposed to find each other. Get out and find each other.”

  “She tried,” Bo said. He told her how Ferris had tried to escape through the emergency door, how the whirlybirds had taken her away. Bree bit her lip while she listened. She didn’t cry, but she walked away with an empty kind of look.

  Bo had lost all track of time, but when Violet offered to show him his bed, he went. The lobby was scattered with sleeping bags and nests of pillows, some of them on their own, most of them clumped in groups. A few had little makeshift curtains around them using broomsticks and blankets. It all looked a million times better than the thin orderly cots of the warehouse.

  When Bo came to the sleeping bag he’d taken from the camping store, he found it built up with fleece blankets and pillows with no cases. He sank down onto it and closed his eyes.

  “Night,” Violet’s scratchy voice said.

  She was gone when Bo opened his eyes again. He wormed his way into the sleeping bag and stared up at the shadowy ceiling. The othermother was still stuck in his head, the way her mouth hadn’t moved properly when she said Boniface, honey, it’s your sister’s birthday. Lia was still stuck in the warehouses, still catching water drops off the pipes, still looking for a way out. And his real mother, Bo didn’t want to think about.

  But Wyatt would have a plan, Violet had said. Wyatt, who’d cut out his own Parasite with a butcher knife and lived to tell the tale. Wyatt, who said they had a weapon now. Bo had a weapon now. He focused hard and tried to coax the static again, the tingling storm that had made the mother disappear. Bone weary, he was asleep before he could elicit so much as a twitch.

  He slipped in and out of dreams, sometimes half waking when other kids made their way to bed. They had low whispery conversations. He heard the slither of nylon shells as some kids rearranged themselves, dragging their beds together. It was the dead of the night when Bo came awake again. Everyone was sleeping, breathing deep and even, except for one boy peeling off his baggy orange shirt. Bo recognized his skinny face and floppy brown hair and remembered his name was Elliot.

  Elliot was slow with the shirt, careful, and when it came up over his head Bo saw, in the dim glow of the battery lamps, angry red marks on his back. He drifted to sleep again, wondering what sort of whirlybird could have made them.

  Up on the roof of the theater, Violet and Wyatt sat on the dented electrical box. Violet swung one leg, near enough to graze Wyatt’s if he wanted them to graze, as they stared out over the shadowed city. There were no streetlamps anymore, and no lights in windows. The streets were a blackout maze. The only illumination came from the ship. At night its underbelly peeled open, exposing pale yellow tubing that reminded Violet of glowing veins. The flying pods swarmed to the light, maybe feeding off it somehow, maybe just drawn to it how insects were.

  Sort of spooky, Violet thought. Sort of romantic. But Wyatt hadn’t so much as looked at her. She patted the flashlight and the fresh batteries in her pocket, about to give up and leave, when he finally broke the quiet.

  “So it didn’t come back at all,” he said.

  Violet made a face he couldn’t see in the dark. She didn’t want to talk about Bo and the othermother again. “No,” she said. “Straight vanished. Didn’t come back. We waited.”

  “Where’d he shift it to, I wonder,” Wyatt murmured.

  “It’s late,” Violet said, standing up, making the batteries clack.

  Wyatt looked at her, sharply. “You going to bed?”

  “No,” Violet said, pulling out her flashlight. Wyatt never asked her where she sometimes went at night, the same way he didn’t ask her about the pills she took or anything else. She was glad for that. So long as he never asked, she never had to try lying to him. He could always tell when she was lying.

  She lingered for just a second, in case Wyatt was going to tell her to stay, the way he sometimes did in her head.

  “Alright,” he said. “Goodnight.”

  “Night.”

  Violet left down the fire escape, making it clatter and sway. The rungs’ flaking paint crackled under her palms. She used to get vertigo climbing, a queasy helium feeling in her stomach, but ever since the Parasite went in she hadn’t noticed it. One good thing they’d done for her. As soon as her shoes touched the pavement, she set off on a familiar route.

  It was safer at night than it used to be. Before the aliens, Violet was always jumpy after midnight, walking quick and focused, trying not to be seen. She used to wish she could make everyone else disappear, so she could walk how she wanted, dress how she wanted, talk how she wanted. Now that everyone was gone, she took graffitied alleyways and hopped over fences and didn’t duck her head for anyone. The wasters who were still awake, no matter how close she got to them, their bloodshot eyes slid right off.

  She came up on a small brown house through the overgrown backyard, clambering the fence with her hands wrapped in her sleeves to avoid splinters. The dandelions were thick around the porch. The backdoor was bright red—her mom had painted it one summer for no reason her dad could figure out, but she’d done it with a fierce kind of pride, glowering at the paintbrush, wearing a sleeveless old T-shirt and a rag tying back her hair. Violet liked it more than she’d let on.

  She pulled open the unlocked door and stepped inside, raking the shadows away with her flashlight. The living room still had its lingering smell of cheap beer and cats who were now long gone; she didn’t know where to. Her dad’s lolling head was visible over the back of the chair parked in front of the dead television. If it weren’t for the clamp glinting in her flashlight’s beam, it would’ve looked normal, just him near passing out.

  Violet thought of all the times she’d stared at his dark head silhouetted against the bright plasma screen, at the beer bottles lined up at his feet like a firing squad, and wished that his liver would give out or that he’d choke on his own vomit. Even now that the bruises were long gone, she still felt sick and anxious and angry looking at him. It made the Parasite flex in her stomach.

  She scanned the floor for broken glass or dropped knives, anything dangerous to a waster, then checked for spoiled food. All the wasters had some sort of survival programming, she knew that much. They managed to stay hydrated and eat enough to function. But sometimes they tried to eat rotting food and got sick, or hurt themselves and didn’t disinfect it. She’d already seen dead wasters in the street and figured there would be more and more as time went on.

  Wyatt would be angry if he could see her doing this. She could hear him in her ear: Clamp’s in the head, better off dead.

  Violet ghosted down the hall, past her old bedroom, past the mold-smelling bathroom. She trailed her fingertips along the edge of a family photo, leaving it crooked. It didn’t really have her in it, anyway. It had Ivan, dark hair cropped short like his dad’s, puffing out his chest, not quite smiling.

  At the end of the hall: her parents’ bedroom, door cracked open. She took a step inside, flashlight off. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom she could see the shape of her mom wrapped up in the sheets, twisting them around her legs how she always did, but her chest was rising and falling too fast to actually be asleep. She didn’t know if the wasters ever really slept, or if they only pretended like how they pretended to talk on the phone, or watch the TV, or buy drugs at the pharmacy.

  But her chest was rising and falling, and that meant she was still alive. Violet turned around and slipped back down the hallway, back through the living room, back out the door. She
was stepping off the porch when a mewling noise startled her. Perched on one of the sunken fence posts, bony tail looping side to side, was Anise.

  “Anise,” Violet said, grinning. “You little anus. Come here, Anise.”

  She crouched, rubbed her fingers together, tried a bit of a whistle. Anise’s ear flicked around like a satellite dish. She didn’t move. Violet bit her lip. Anise was their oldest cat, and their smartest, and she always came when Violet called. For a second she imagined a tiny cat-sized clamp on the nape of Anise’s furry neck.

  “Come here, Anise, come here,” Violet repeated.

  Anise made a graceful pirouette and disappeared back over the fence. Violet had what felt like hard plastic in her throat. She wanted to cry, like she hadn’t cried yet over her mom, or her aunt, or all the dead people, and it was because their stupid cat didn’t recognize her anymore. Maybe she’d been on the hormones long enough that she smelled different.

  Violet swung herself over the fence and headed back toward the theater. She didn’t cry.

  6

  The buzzing whine of the whirlybird jerked Bo awake. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, wishing he could slip back into the dream or nightmare where he’d escaped the warehouse and met the other kids and killed the thing that was not his mother. He tried to burrow deeper into his cot and realized it wasn’t a cot. The unfamiliar fabric of the sleeping bag rustled underneath him, and the sound of the whirlybird wasn’t quite right either. He winched his eyes open.

  Bree, the girl with nearly buzzed hair, the one who was cousins with Ferris, was standing over him with an electric toothbrush tugging her cheek back off pink gums. She switched it off, spitting a glob of toothpaste and saliva into the plastic Coke cup in her hand.

  “Wyatt wants to talk to you when you’re awake,” she said. “He’s outside.”