“She couldn’t come,” I whisper to myself.
“I tried too,” Riley says, quietly. “I was hurt for a while, but I tried. I just didn’t know where to look. Even following your mother’s directions, the ocean is just too big to search. I’m sorry. I wish I—”
I reach under the table and take his hand. It’s warm. I give it a squeeze.
“No one gave up on you,” my father says. “We haven’t given up on the other kids, either. We’ll rescue them, too, but right now it’s just not possible.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Maggie tosses me her hoodie, and I put it on as I open the back door. My mother is sitting on the steps, crying quietly. I sit down next to her and wrap my arm around her shoulders and pull her close to me.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
She sniffs and nods. “Sometimes. I prayed for you every day.”
I lean my head against her shoulder. It feels like home, and we sit quietly for a long time.
“I have to tell you what happened to me,” I say, finally breaking the silence, but before I can start, the back door opens and my father steps out to join us. He’s got my bowl of mac and cheese in his hand.
“Bex is about to go live,” he says to me. “I thought you might want to see it.”
“Go live?”
“Yeah, but be quiet. She’s very picky about the broadcasts. Oh, and please finish your dinner. I don’t like how thin you are.”
I stand and take the bowl, shoving an overpacked spoonful into my mouth like a petulant child. I get the desired result when he laughs.
“Three months underwater and still as sassy as ever,” he says. “C’mon.”
He leads us through the kitchen and down a hallway littered with extension cords. They snake into a family room, though most of the furniture has been pushed aside to make room for a tripod, a gray sheet hanging from the ceiling, and a chair. There are boom mics and lights on stands. Maggie is busy adjusting the camera and peering into its viewfinder while Jane angles a light to bounce off the wall. The windows are covered in black construction paper, and there are maps tacked to the walls, all of which have big circles and lines scribbled in bold red ink. Chloe has a bottle of water in her hand.
“Pretty cool, huh?” she says, gesturing to the setup.
“About what? What is this?”
“It’s the broadcast center,” Bex says as she enters and sits down in the chair.
“We call it the Batcave,” Riley says as he creeps in next to me. His hand brushes against mine. I reach out and take it, sliding my fingers into his, intertwined. He smiles, and I realize how much I’ve missed it.
“Nerd,” Bex says, poking Riley in the ribs as she pushes past us. “If anything, it’s the Bexcave. How is my look?”
“Foxy revolutionary,” Renee crows.
“You’re learning, kid,” Bex says, then sits in the chair in front of the camera. “So, I’m thinking we’re going to just tease that Lyric is here. I assume that photos of her return are out there, but I’d like to get those people living under a rock a reason to go looking for them. Plus, no offense, Walker, but you look like hell. A bath is in your future. Anyone want to volunteer to help her? Riley?”
Riley’s cocky grin slides off his face when my father lets out a low growl behind us.
Bex laughs at her own joke. “Are we almost ready, darlings?”
Maggie flips a switch on the camera, and a red light glows just above the lens. “In three, two, one. You’re live.”
“Hello, party people, I want to give a big shout-out to all of the protestors who are standing up to soldiers and cops today, and one to the peace marches that continue to sprout up across the country, including the one yesterday that faced down National Guardsmen in West Texas. There were also huge rallies in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Portland, Maine. Good work, everyone. Getting in faces and getting things done is how we roll. Don’t be intimidated by the arrests. It’s vital to our cause to show up and shout loud. Getting arrested isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Martin Luther King got arrested, and it didn’t hurt his reputation at all, so keep causing trouble, keep supporting our brothers and sisters who are looking down guns and brutality. I’d like to remind you to check out the video from January fifteenth that explains how to handle tear gas and pepper spray, and to remind you not to wear cotton and wool if you plan to get into a cop’s face. Pepper spray and mace are designed to stick to those materials. I know it ain’t exactly sexy, but polyester is your friend during a protest, and remember, be careful, be smart, and most of all, wild things, stay together. I can’t stress how important it is to stay together. Remember, peace is the word. Don’t fight back, just resist.
“I’m so proud of all you’re doing out there, folks. You’re demanding serious change in this country, and people are listening. And because I’m so proud of you, I have a special treat. If you haven’t seen the news, a little starfish just crawled out of the sea. I’m talking about you know who, the one the president likes to call a terrorist and a threat to humanity, the one he swears is dead. He doesn’t like it much when I contradict him with facts, no, sirree, Bob. He’s really going to blow his top when he hears what Public Enemy Number One has to say, because she’s back. Stay tuned. Soon she’ll get her say. Don’t blame me if minds are blown.”
Maggie turns off the camera. “You nailed it.”
“Thanks, Mags,” Bex says, then points to me. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
Without another word, she leads me up a flight of carpeted stairs. On the landing is a vintage pinball machine and a wooden sailing wheel mounted on the wall. There are framed photos of a family that look as if they all stepped out of a Lands’ End catalog. They’re athletic, outdoorsy, hiking and surfing folk who wear Tevas and lots of T-shirts from 5K runs.
“Whose house is this?” I ask.
“It belongs to the Douglas family—Manny and Luanne; their teen daughter, Katherine; and spunky son, Nicholas. They have a teenager named Dylan, but he’s been in some trouble with drugs so they Photoshopped him out of most of the family pictures.”
“Really?”
She chuckles. “No. I have no idea who owns this house.”
She opens a door to the bathroom and turns on the shower, running her hand under the spray for a few moments. On the floor, stacked against the wall, are clean towels. There’s a trash can in the corner filled with even more, all wet and dirty.
“Give the shower a minute. The generators are great, but getting warm water takes a little time,” she says.
She opens a linen closet and digs around on the top shelf. Hidden by a pack of toilet paper is a bottle of fancy shampoo and some conditioner, as well as a jar of apricot salt scrub from a swanky spa in Manhattan.
“I’ve got a secret stash. Chloe uses up all the good stuff with her bubble baths, so I have to hide the essentials. Get undressed. I should have mentioned that when the hot water comes, it doesn’t stick around long.”
“Bex, I . . .”
“What?”
I don’t want her to see what has happened to my body. I don’t want her to cringe at the bruises and cuts, or gasp at the state of my back. I take a step back, defensive, and she takes my hand and kisses me on the forehead.
“It’s gonna be all right,” she promises, then she carefully helps me out of the pajamas DeCosta and his men made me wear. I cry when the shirt comes off. She shushes me the way one does a child who has woken from a nightmare. “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not,” I whisper. “It’s bad. I haven’t seen it, but I know it’s bad.”
She removes the bandages Lima wrapped around me. I’m expecting her to gasp, some kind of pity, sympathy, shock, something that will make me cry even harder, but she says nothing and acts as if I’m perfectly healthy. She wads the old dressings up and tosses them into a waste bin, then helps me into the shower. Blood circles into the drain. I turn
my back to the spray and bear down on the pain until the water is clear.
“Some of the stitches broke in the rescue,” I explain.
“I’d hate to see the person who did this to you,” she whispers to me. She giggles a little, and then I laugh. I don’t know why it’s funny. Maybe it’s just so horrible I have to laugh, but my life has been so free of joy for so long that giggles are desperate for release.
Bex helps me clean the places I can’t reach, then busies herself rummaging through cabinets, leaving the room for a few minutes to return with packages of fresh bandages. I squirt shampoo into my hand and try to run it through my coarse, dry hair. I wash it again, then use some of Katherine’s bubblegum-scented conditioner. I repeat the whole process three times before my hair feels like something approaching soft.
By the time the hot water is gone, I’m clean and pruny and feeling considerably more human. Bex hands me a dry towel, lets me do my thing, then takes it to dab at my back. When she’s satisfied, she smears on some antibacterial ointment she found in the medicine cabinet and then redresses my back.
“You’re good at this,” I say, acknowledging the obvious.
“Lots of practice,” she admits. She’s been in the role of caregiver more than once. Her mom, Tammy, was in a steady stream of abusive relationships before she met the king of all pricks, Russell. One loser after another tossed her down flights of stairs, put cigarettes out on her arms, choked her, and slapped her. Russell once shoved her through a window in a restaurant when she teased him about his singing. Bex was her nurse, and their bathroom an emergency room. My friend might have made a good doctor if the world hadn’t imploded.
She wraps me up in the towel, and leads me into another room. There, she snaps on a lamp with an exposed bulb and closes the door behind us. I find myself in what must be Katherine’s room. It’s decorated in pink. There are posters of a boy band I don’t know from South Korea and a shelf with every one of the Twilight and Harry Potter books. A little white dresser with crystal knobs is in the corner, next to a full-size four-poster bed. The room is big and comfortable, but sparsely decorated. A half dozen sleeping bags litter the floor.
“There’s not much left in Katherine’s closet,” Bex apologizes. “The other girls have gone through most of it, and there wasn’t anything warm to begin with. I’d take you to Luanne’s closet, but it’s almost entirely Jimmy Buffett T-shirts and weird country bands. We’re gonna have to go on a run for some clothes, I think, but we can find something to get you through the night.”
I fall into the bed and marvel at how comfortable everything is here. The mattress is a pillow top. The sheets are flannel. The comforter is thick and downy. The pillows are made of clouds. I stare up at the popcorn ceiling, trying to relate to this luxury, not just the wealth this family has, but the easy quality of their lives. This was a beach house. They used it on the occasional weekend and in the summertime. Their real lives were somewhere else and were probably no less fancy. I feel so removed from this experience. My family never had a beach house. We didn’t even own our cramped, two-bedroom apartment, but there’s more than luxury to envy about Katherine’s life. She’s normal. Her greatest privilege was not having to consider much, a steady roll of days and weeks and months passing by without complications and obstacles.
“Katherine was lucky,” I say.
Bex shrugs.
“Did that sound bitter?”
She shrugs again.
We share a look and call Katherine a bitch at the same time, then we laugh.
“I wonder where she is right now.”
“Probably in a refugee camp,” she admits.
The stark truth makes me sick to my stomach.
“Things have gotten pretty messy since you disappeared,” Bex continues. “Hopefully she’s with her family. Lots of people were separated. I’ve let people use the site to find one another. You know, a wife can post where she is in hopes of finding her husband. We’ve had a few successes. Not that they can leave the camp they’re in to get back together, but at least they know where their loved ones are.”
“So, this site . . . Bex, they wanted to use me to get to you. What have you been doing?”
“That’s flattering. Usually you’re the criminal at large,” she says, then crosses the room to give me a pink Juicy hoodie and a skirt. She sits down while I get dressed. “I hijacked Shadow’s webpage.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’ve been posting videos on it.”
“About?”
“You.” She smiles big, her eyes full of pride. “There was so much crap out there, Lyric. The news just repeated whatever the government wanted them to say about you. Everyone knows they’re censoring things, but after a while, people just accept it as the truth because that’s all there is out there. I wanted to say what really happened. I wanted them to know you weren’t a terrorist. You didn’t stage the invasions. You fought to save us all on more than one occasion, and people needed to know it. The second we got settled, I broke into Shadow’s page. After all the time that had passed, and everything that has happened, people were still visiting it—hundreds of thousands of people. His videos were still some of the most viewed things on the entire Internet. People are fascinated by what happened in our neighborhood. So I had a captive audience, and a fancy, top-of-the-line military laptop, so the kids and I made a video and posted it. The next day I went back in, just to double-check that we did it right, and fifty million people had watched it. Can you even believe that? Fifty million! The comments section was insane.”
“Haters.”
“Yeah, but you know, that’s the Internet. There were lots of people supporting you too, but to be honest, it didn’t matter. They wanted more! So, we posted another video, this time about you and the hell we went through at Trident. Seventy-five million people watched it. Every time I posted something new, the number of views grew. Soon we had a hundred million people visiting the site every day, and they weren’t just here in the U.S.—they were watching all over the world. People wanted to hear your side of the story. They wanted to know the truth about what really happened. Lyric, in three months, I’ve flipped the script on your entire life. You’re no longer the terrorist from Coney Island. You’re, like . . . well, I’ll put it this way. People are starting to get tattoos of your face.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I sputter.
“You’re a hero, and our audience is helping you stay that way. They’re posting their own videos on the site. People had images of you from the first attack. A soldier posted one of you fighting the Undine. People we met in Texas came forward to talk about Trident and what you were trying to do. Others organized protests all on their own, so we started announcing the dates and times, and it grew and grew. If I said there should be a protest in San Francisco, one happened the next day. People were so excited to stir shit up. There’s, like, a massive protest along the fence near Coney Island. They show up every day and give the soldiers crap. They post videos. They wear T-shirts with your name on them. There are, like, thousands of teenage girls who try to dress like you.”
I look down at my pink hoodie and skirt, with my bruised legs and chalky skin. Any kid dressing like me is a sad creature.
“Now you’re back from the dead. You have to talk to them. You have to tell them what we’re going to do next.”
“What we’re going to do?”
“Yeah, you know, help the Alpha, unite everyone, get things back to some sense of normal. Everything is a disaster, and you have the influence to fix—”
“You think I’m a peacemaker.”
She nods. “Yeah, a hot seventeen-year-old Gandhi from Coney Island who just happens to be white and female and part fish, but yeah. Don’t worry! I know you suck at public speaking. Riley is a genius with words. He’ll write something for you to say; we’ll videotape it and upload it to the site. It’s going to be huge. With the right words, we could force the government to close the detention cent
er and lift the travel bans. People won’t stand for it any longer if you say so.”
“Bex, no.”
She looks at me in stunned silence.
“I can’t help you start some revolution. We have to leave here and get as far away as we can. There’s something in the water. It followed me to Panama and killed a lot of people. It’s probably on the news or—”
“The news is censored now,” she interrupts. “Nobody watches it.”
“Then ask one of your viewers if they have a tape. People need to see these things. They’re coming here to kill us. It’s not an invasion like the Rusalka. They don’t have any plans to take over. They just want to erase us. When they get here, we have to be long gone.”
“You want to tell everyone to fight?”
“No, Bex, I want to tell them to run. We need to take my parents and the kids somewhere safe. Denver was always my dad’s idea, and it’s in the mountains. It might work.”
She gets up and crosses the room to rummage through the closet again.
“Bex? Are you listening? Do you understand?”
“Gawd, all of Katherine’s stuff is so Old Navy. This will fit Jane,” she mumbles as she snatches a shirt off a hanger. “I miss your closet. All that stuff you used to find. Stella McCartney would have been so jealous.”
“Bex? Don’t stiff arm me. You need to listen.”
“Why don’t you take a nap? I’ll keep everyone away for a while, though you’re gonna be pretty popular, especially with Chloe. She never gave up on you, you know. No one did. If you need me, I’ll be in the studio. Nothing gets done if I disappear. Sweet dreams.”
And then she’s gone.
I lie down in the center of Katherine’s bed and stare up at the ceiling pressing down on me. My heart races, and I can’t breathe. I jump up and hurry to the window, forcing it open, and letting a frigid breeze invade the room. I can hear the distant waves in my ears and the faint voice of death growing louder and louder.