This is the first time I’ve heard anyone in an official capacity acknowledge the existence of the people in the Wilds, and I suck in a sharp breath. I know it must be painful for Alex to stand there, talking dismissively about a friend who has been caught for being a sympathizer. The punishment must have been swift and severe, especially since he was on the government payroll. Most likely he was hanged or shot or electrocuted, or thrown into one of the cells to rot—if the courts were merciful and decided against a verdict of death by torture. If he even had a trial.
Amazingly, Alex’s voice doesn’t falter. “What was the tip-off?”
Frank keeps massaging his gun, and something about the motion—gentle, almost, like he’s willing it to life— makes me feel sick. “No tip-off, exactly.” He sweeps his hair off his face, revealing a splotchy red forehead, shiny with sweat. It’s much hotter here than it was in the other wards. The air must get trapped in these walls, rotting and festering like everything else in this place. “It figures he must have known something about the escape. He was in charge of cell inspections. And the tunnel didn’t just sprout up overnight.”
“The escape?” The words fly out of my mouth before I can help it. My heart starts jolting painfully in my chest.
Nobody has ever escaped the Crypts, not ever.
For a moment Frank’s hand pauses on the gun, his fingers once again performing a dance on the trigger.
“Sure,” he says, keeping his eyes on Alex, as though I’m not even there. “You must have heard about it.”
Alex shrugs. “A little of this, a little of that. Nothing confirmed.”
Frank laughs. It’s a terrible sound. It reminds me of the time I saw two seagulls fighting in midair over a scrap of food, screeching as they tumbled toward the ocean. “Oh, it’s confirmed,” he says. “Happened back in February.
We got the alarm from Thomas, as a matter of fact.
’Course if he was in on it, she might have had a lead time of six, seven hours.”
When he says the word she the walls seem to collapse around me. I take a quick step backward, bumping up against a wall. It could be her, I think, and for one horrible, guilty second I’m disappointed. Then I remind myself that she might not be here at all—and in any case, it could have been anyone who escaped, any female sympathizer or agitator. Still, the dizziness does not subside. I’m filled with anxiety and fear and a desperate craving, all at once.
“What’s wrong with her?” Frank asks. His voice sounds distant.
“Air,” I manage to force out. “It’s the air in here.”
Frank laughs again, that unpleasant cackling sound.
“You think it’s bad out here,” he says. “It’s paradise compared to the cells.” He seems to take pleasure in this, and it reminds me of a debate I had a few weeks ago with Alex, when he was arguing against the usefulness of the cure. I said that without love, there could also be no hate: without hate, no violence. Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.
Alex starts talking. His voice is low and still casual, but there’s an undertone of force to it: the kind of voice street peddlers lapse into when they are trying to get you to buy a carton of bruised berries or a broken toy.
It’s okay, I’ll give you a deal, no problem, trust me.
“Listen, just let us in for a minute. That’s all it will take:
a minute. You can tell she’s already scared out of her mind. I had to come all the way out here for this, day off and everything, I was going to go to the pier, maybe try out some fishing. Point is, if I bring her home and she’s not straightened out . . . well, you know, chances are I’ll just have to haul out here again. And I only have a couple days off, and summer’s almost over. . . .”
“Why all the trouble?” Frank says, jerking his head in my direction. “If she’s causing problems, there’s an easy way to fix her up.”
Alex smiles tightly. “Her father’s Steven Jones, commissioner at the labs. He doesn’t want to do an early procedure, no trouble, no violence or mess. Looks bad, you know.”
It’s a bold lie. Frank could easily ask to see my ID card, and then Alex and I are screwed. I’m not sure what the punishment would be for infiltrating the Crypts under false pretenses, but it can’t be good.
Frank appears interested in me for the first time. He looks me up and down like I’m a grapefruit he’s evaluating in the supermarket for ripeness, and for a moment he doesn’t say anything.
Then, finally, he stands, slipping the gun onto his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “Five minutes.”
As he’s fiddling with the keypad, which requires both that he type a code and scan his hand on some kind of fingerprint-matching screen, Alex reaches out and takes my elbow.
“Let’s go,” he says, making his voice gruff, like my little fit has left him impatient. But his touch is gentle, and his hand warm and reassuring. I wish he could keep it there, but after only a second he lets me go again. I can read a plea, loud and clear, in his eyes: Be strong. We’re almost there. Be strong for just a little while longer.
The locks on the door release with a click. Frank leans his shoulder against it, straining, and it slides open just enough for us to squeeze by into the hallway beyond.
Alex goes first, then me, then Frank. The passage is so narrow we have to go single file, and it’s even darker than the rest of the Crypts.
But the smell is what really hits me: a horrible, rotting, festering stink, like the Dumpsters by the harbor, the place where all the fish intestines get discarded, on the hottest day. Even Alex curses and coughs, covering his nose with his hand.
Behind me, I can imagine Frank grinning. “Ward Six has its own special perfume,” he says.
As we walk I can hear the barrel of his gun, slapping against his thigh. I’m worried I might faint, and I want to reach out and steady myself against the walls, but they are coated with fungus and moisture. On either side of us, bolted metal cell doors appear at intervals, each outfitted with a single grimy window the size of a dinner plate. Through the walls we can hear low moaning, a constant vibration. It’s worse, somehow, than the screeches and screams of earlier: This is the sound people make when they’ve long ago given up hope that anyone is listening, a reflexive sound, meant just to fill the time and the space and the darkness.
I’m going to be sick. If Alex is correct, my mother is here, behind one of these terrible doors—so close that if I could rearrange the particles and make the stone melt away, I might put my hand out and touch her. Closer than I ever thought I would be to her again.
I am filled with competing thoughts and desires: My mother cannot be here; I would rather she was dead; I want to see her alive. And filled, too, with that other word, pressing itself underneath all my other thoughts:
escape, escape, escape. A possibility too fantastic to contemplate. If my mother had been the one to break out, I would have known. She would have come for me.
Ward Six consists of just the one long hallway. As far as I can tell, there are about forty doors, forty separate cells.
“This is it,” Frank says. “The grand tour.” He pounds on one of the very first doors. “Here’s your boy Thomas, if you want to say hello.” Then he laughs again, that awful cackling sound.
I think about what he said when we first entered the vestibule: He’s always here, nowadays.
Ahead of us, Alex does not respond, but I think I see him shudder.
Frank nudges me sharply in the back with the barrel of his gun. “So what do you think?”
“Awful,” I croak out. My throat feels like it has been encircled with barbed wire. Frank seems pleased.
“Better to listen and do as you’re told,” he says. “No use ending up like this guy.”
We’ve paused in front of one of the cells. Frank nods toward the tiny window, and I take a hesitant step forward, pressing my face up to the glass. It’s so grimy it’s practically opaque, but if I squint I can just make out a few shapes in the obscurity of the cell: a single bed with a flimsy, dirty mattress; a toilet; a bucket that looks like it might be the human equivalent of a dog’s water bowl. At first I think there’s a pile of old rags in the corner too, until I realize that this thing is the “guy” Frank was pointing out: a filthy, crouching heap of skin and bones and crazy, tangled hair. He’s motionless, and his skin is so dirty it blends in with the gray of the stone walls behind him. If it weren’t for his eyes, rolling continuously back and forth as though he is checking the air for insects, you would never know he was alive.
You would never even know he was human.
The thought flashes again: I would rather she be dead.
Not in this place. Anywhere but here.
Alex has continued down the hall, and I hear him draw in his breath sharply. I look up. He is standing perfectly still, and the expression on his face makes me afraid.
“What?” I say.
For a moment he doesn’t answer. He is staring at something I cannot see— some door, presumably, farther down the hall. Then he turns to me abruptly, a quick, convulsive shake.
“Don’t,” he says, his voice a croak, and the fear surges, overwhelms me.
“What is it?” I ask again. I start down the hall toward him. It seems, all of a sudden, that he is very far away, and when Frank speaks up behind me, his voice too sounds distant.
“That’s where she was,” he is saying. “Number one- eighteen. Admin hasn’t coughed up the dough to get the walls patched, yet, so for now we’re just leaving it as is.
Not a lot of money around here for improvements. . . .”
Alex is watching me. All his control and confidence has vanished. His eyes are blazing with anger, or maybe pain; his mouth is twisted into a grimace. My head feels full of noise.
Alex holds up his hand like he’s thinking of blocking my progress. Our eyes meet for just a second and something flashes between us—a warning, or an apology, maybe— and then I am pushing beyond him into cell 118.
In almost every way it is identical to the cells I’ve glimpsed through the tiny hallway windows: a rough cement floor; a rust-stained toilet, and a bucket full of water, in which several cockroaches are revolving slowly; a tiny iron bed with a paper-thin mattress, which someone has dragged into the very center of the room.
But the walls.
The walls are covered— crammed —with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.
Love.
Looped huge and scratched, just barely, in the corners; inscribed in graceful script and solid block lettering; chipped, scratched, picked away, as though the walls are slowly melting into poetry.
And on the ground, lying curled up against one wall, is a dull silver chain with a charm still attached to it: a ruby- encrusted dagger whose blade has been worn down to a small nub. My father’s charm. My mother’s necklace.
My mother.
All this time, during every long second of my life when I believed her dead, she was here: scratching, burrowing, chipping away, encased in the stone walls like a long- buried secret.