“No,” Edgar interrupts. “No, he said you were killed in an experiment that went awry.”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“That’s why he’s doing this. He opposes the research labs.”
“That couldn’t have been Rhine’s brother, then,” Linden says. “You said on your broadcast that there are imposters, right? People who claim to be the children of experiments?”
“Only one way to find out,” Edgar says. He ushers us into the room where all the wires lead. I feel as though my insides have been scooped out. My heart beats in a dark, empty space, and I think I’ll be sick.
I see the television that’s mounted to the wall, and I know what it means. Just when I’m sure I have no energy left, a moment before I’m about to collapse, Linden grabs one of my hands and Cecily takes the other.
Edgar fumbles through a box of video discs in a cardboard box.
When he finds the one that means something to him, he inserts it into the video player.
My body feels a rush of hot, then cold, hot, then cold.
The screen goes to static, and then there’s an image of a crowd. It’s amateur footage, which isn’t uncommon for the nationwide news. Someone with a camera can make good money risking his life to film news footage.
I think it’s the same clip we heard last night on the radio. Bodies blur out of focus as the camera tries to adjust. Eventually it does, and I see that the crowd isn’t as big as I thought. It looks like new generations, from young children to those in their final year. There are two figures standing at a distance, not high up on a stage like I pictured, but on overturned wooden crates. I see the ocean behind them. This must be near the shoreline; bitterly I wonder how close my brother is to where Gabriel and I stood a few months earlier.
I recognize my brother immediately. There’s a girl standing beside him that I don’t recognize. She has chaotic black hair and eyes to match. Both of them are smeared with dirt.
No, not dirt. Ash.
The girl looks wild and dangerous. And then I realize Rowan does too. This is what happened to him when I left. Losing our parents had already taken away his hope, but losing me took away his reason.
The crowd knows him; they’re saying his name, asking him to speak.
And then calmly, methodically, he begins to tell his story. Long ago he was a bright-eyed child with stupid delusions that the world could be saved. He had parents and a sister. His parents, trying to save the world, were killed in a bombing much like the ones he and his partners are responsible for now. So then, he asks the crowd, is it wrong of him to take away someone else’s parents? Is it wrong to set fire to these buildings?
The crowd is silent, waiting for his response, because the venom has left the voice of this vigilante warrior. He seems so painfully, vulnerably human.
“No,” he says. “A long time ago, maybe. But this is a world without right and wrong. This is a world that was someone’s idea of perfection, and when that perfection didn’t happen, this world was abandoned, and we were all left to run wild.
“And as for my sister,” he says. “She was the opposite of me. While I was trying to keep us both alive, she was in a dead garden, trying to make dead things bloom. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought, ‘What’s the harm? Why not let her pretend?’ ”
The girl standing beside him touches his arm. She’s heard this story before. She noticed that falter in his voice.
He shrugs her off.
“Because I let her pretend, her imaginary faith in this cesspool of a world grew. Behind my back she signed up for an experimental procedure. She was lured into some primitive makeshift laboratory by promises of life.” Any hint of an emotional edge has left him now. He speaks as though reading from a textbook. “Her heart began to palpitate first. And then her throat swelled shut; her eyes started to bleed. And when she died, several agonizing minutes later? Her body was dissected for even more research.”
This has been Rowan’s reality. While I was being laced into a wedding dress and was sucking on June Beans and napping comfortably on a fluffy blanket with my sister wives and daydreaming of home, that’s the image of me he has carried.
My vision is tunneling around me, and I can’t feel my legs, but somehow I’m still standing.
“Breathe,” Linden whispers, reminding me.
“I’m here to take away your hope,” Rowan says, “because hope will kill you. Every moment of this research is pointless. All this madness trying to find a cure is more dangerous to us than the virus itself. It kills people. It killed my sister.”
I try to hear his next words, but the cheering crowd cuts him off. They’re in support of what he’s doing, clearly. I almost can’t blame them. A story like that is convincing; hope is so hard to come by and even harder to hold on to. Better to throw it away. Easier. After all, in his story there is the twin who tried to survive, and the twin who fell victim to silly hopes.
The film goes to static.
Edgar puts the disc back into its place.
“So you see,” he says, “you’re dead.”
“Obviously she’s alive,” Cecily snaps. “Or are you even crazier than you look?”
Nobody chastises her for this.