“What?” Kess was so startled she reflexively leaned back away from Elias. “They’re all Grays? How could you possibly tell?”
“That is what you were hinting at, right? You noticed that no one in the restaurant was laughing or talking loud. We know that’s what the Grays are like with their, um…” He waved his hand in front of his face to indicate a blank expression. “Their grayness.”
“Well, I thought maybe… I wasn’t sure. I just knew something was wrong.”
“You didn’t think they were Grays?”
She almost had. She had hovered on the edge of thinking they were Grays. To actually all-the-way think so would have been… too much. To bold a conclusion to rest on something as silly as intuition.
When she didn’t say anything, Elias continued. “That’s what the salads are about, too. Grays don’t care how things taste so they just eat what’s healthy.”
“How do you know that? And what did telling the waiter I thought he was cute have to do with anything?”
“You have to admit he didn’t react like a normal person.”
“Well, no.” She remembered the waiter’s calm, composed face. “I imagine that’s how Silver would have reacted if you’d tried to flirt with her.”
“Back when my anonymous Internet friend first contacted me, he said he was worried I was ‘one of them.’ He must have meant the Grays. To prove I wasn’t one, he asked me what I liked about you.”
“Oh. Um… What did you say?”
“Grays must not understand what makes people like people. They can’t even fake it.”
“But wasn’t your anonymous Internet friend Silver?”
“Maybe not. Maybe the Grays hacked his account or something. He never seemed like a Gray all the time I was talking to him, and the Grays don’t seem able to pretend very well.”
Kess started walking down the sidewalk toward the car, which they had parked at the street corner. She tried to move quickly, tried not to look like she was moving quickly. “We have to get out of here. I know we said we’d stay and keep investigating, but we know they’re here. I don’t know if they filled that place because they knew we were coming or what, but we have to—”
“Kess.” Elias grabbed her arm. “Kess, look.”
A cop waited by Elias’s car. He was a mustached middle-aged man, perfectly cop-like in every respect, leaning against the hood of the car. He looked very different from Silver and Stone with their business attire and calm twenty-something faces, but now they knew that Grays could look like anyone. They could look like awkwardly-proportioned teenaged boys. Which meant everyone on the street could be a Gray. Everyone in the town.
Elias took her hand and pulled her closer. He whispered in her ear like he was whispering something nice. “We walk the other direction. We walk until we find somewhere to wait for a few hours, then we come back. He can’t stay there forever.”
“I get the feeling Grays can be patient,” she whispered back at him.
He put his arm around her shoulders and moved away from the car and the cop. Her eyes were drawn to every person they walked past. A middle-aged couple. An older man. A boy maybe thirteen. Not a single one was smiling.
#
Kess leaned into Elias and turned her face toward his shoulder, not watching where they were going, letting him lead her. That made it easier not to look at people.
“Maybe we’re wrong,” she murmured. “Maybe the waiter was just weird. Maybe those people in the restaurant were just healthy. Maybe the cop is just a cop.”
He rubbed her arm, and they kept walking. They turned off of the main street and found that a residential neighborhood pressed up against the backs of the businesses.
“They could have hurt us already,” she said. “There’s nothing to stop them, if they’re everyone. They must not be everyone, or they must not know who we are, or they must not want to hurt us.”
He kissed her on the top of her head, and they kept walking.
A dozen people jogged past on the street, all running in step, in neat rows. It was unnerving, how their feet all hit the pavement at the same time.
“Well, if we don’t learn anything else today at least we know they’re not all bad,” said Elias. “They at least understand the importance of good cardiovascular health.”
Kess held down a laugh, not wanting to draw attention. The aborted laughter still felt nice bubbling in her throat. And maybe they really were being paranoid. Maybe nothing bad was going to happen.
Elias stopped walking. There was a little girl in the middle of the street.
The girl was drawing on the asphalt with white chalk. She was probably four years old, and she looked a lot like Priya in Kess’s earliest memories of her sister—brown skin, fine black hair, big black cartoon eyes.
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“I don’t see any parents,” said Elias.
Kess looked up and down the street for cars. She didn’t see any, but that didn’t make her any less nervous. The little girl was staring down at the pavement and wouldn’t notice anything coming.
“Hey,” said Kess. The girl didn’t look up. Kess walked out onto the street.
The girl was drawing squares. Tiny, white squares in neat rows, each white line of chalk running perfectly straight across the bumpy asphalt. She looked up at Kess with sweet-beautiful eyes. She blinked once and didn’t say anything.
“You need to get out of the street,” said Kess. “It’s dangerous.”
“Not really,” said the girl. “People here always watch out when they’re driving.”
“Why do you need to be in the street, anyway? You can draw on the sidewalk.”
“My head is small.”
“What?”
“My head is small,” the girl repeated. “There’s not enough room for a complete network.” Those words didn’t fit in her small girl voice. The effect was eerie. “That causes artifacts,” she continued. “Sometimes I want things for no good reason.”
“You want to draw in the middle of the street.”
“Yes.”
Elias stepped forward next to Kess and stared down at the white chalk drawings. “You like making straight things, don’t you? And things with corners.”
“Yes.”
“Where are your parents?” asked Kess.
“Probably at their jobs.”
“They’re probably at their jobs? Don’t you know? Do they know where you are? Should you be in daycare?”
The girl blinked again. “Yes. No. No. No.”
Kess could feel something inside of her pulling tight against itself. “What’s your name?”
“Cara.”
“Cara, can you come out of the street?”
“Yes.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
“Don’t you think your parents would want you to get out of the street?”
The girl shook her head. “Their heads are big. They don’t want things for no reason.”
Kess couldn’t stand it anymore. She turned away.
“Kess,” said Elias, horrified, “are you crying?”
When people ask “are you crying?” like that, with an incredulous stress on the word, they’re not asking. They’re accusing.
“I’m sorry,” she said, pressing her voice down to the bottom of her mouth to avoid squeaks. “I’m sorry. It’s just… I have a thing about little children.”
Ahead of them, a black car came around the corner.
“Cara,” said Kess. “A car’s coming. You have to move now.”
The girl turned her eyes back to the asphalt and resumed drawing.
The car kept coming.
“Elias.”
“She’s actually right,” he said. “We’re standing right here. It’s not like it’s going to run over us.”
“Elias.”
He grabbed the girl by her shoulders, lifted her, and hauled her onto the sidewalk. She didn’t squirm like you would expect a kid to, just hung limply from his hands. When he let go of her she immediately sank to the ground and started drawing squares on the sidewalk as if she’d never been interrupted.
The car stopped, just feet away from them, and Silver and Stone got out.
#
Kess raised her hands toward Silver and Stone, ready to let the electricity flow.
“We are not going to touch you,” said Stone, “or hurt you in any way.”
“Sure you’re not,” snapped Kess.
“If it would calm you down,” said Silver, walking around from the passenger side of the black car, “we could raise our hands in a symbol of surrender.”
“That’s not necessary,” said Elias. “What do you want?”
“We would like to know why you are here.”
“We want to figure out what’s going on with… everything,” said Kess. “You knew that already.”
“Why aren’t you going to hurt us?” asked Elias.
“We have no reason to hurt you,” said Stone.
“You didn’t have a reason before,” said Kess.
“Yes, we did. When we tried to take custody of your sister, Miss Carpenter—”
“You know my name?”
“When we tried to take custody of your sister, we thought she was the only subject affected. We thought they hadn’t yet spread from her.”
“They?” Elias’s tone was suddenly aggressive. “What are they?”
“The machines,” said Silver.
Machines. The powers came from machines. But what kind of machines? How did they work, how did they “spread,” how…?
“But capturing or harming you now, Miss Carpenter, would do nothing to stop the spread. There is no point to it.”
“As for Mr. Kaplan,” said Stone, “everything we wanted done to him we have done already.”
“You should go home now,” said Silver.
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, we would have a reason to hurt you.”
Kess felt a cold shot of fear mixed with anger. She wouldn’t let them hurt her. She was fully charged, she would shock them unconscious. But—she glanced down at Cara, who was ignoring them to draw neat patterns on the sidewalk—she didn’t have enough charge to knock out the entire town.
“Alright,” said Elias. “We’ll go home.”
“But we still don’t know anything,” said Kess in a low voice, leaning toward Elias. “You wanted so bad to figure this out.”
“If we’re in a corner we’re in a corner,” said Elias. He looked at her but spoke loud enough for the Grays to hear. “We’ll go. And we won’t come back.”
Stone held out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation Elias took it. They exchanged a solid, businessman handshake.
We’re in a corner, thought Kess. We’re cornered. Like wild animals.
#
On the drive home, they played no music. Kess’s body was heavy with the exhaustion of defeat. She felt like she was melting into the car seat. Neither of them spoke until they were back on the other side of the state line.
“So why did you cry?” asked Elias. “When we were talking to that girl.”
“I, well…” It made her too uncomfortable to say real things while she was looking at Elias’s face. She stared straight ahead at the road instead. “I was in an orphanage until I was four years old. You know. In Russia. Sometimes I have nightmares where I’m back there. Isn’t that crazy? Nightmares still? And I barely remember the place. I remember this one gray-green wall. I remember this light that wouldn’t come on. I remember being cold.
“They say I wasn’t touched enough. They say everything would be different, if I had had people who paid attention to me, touched me. They say I would probably even be smarter.
“So now it gets me when I see little kids who can’t find their mothers, or who look like someone should be holding them and no one is. It gets me in the... in the getting place. Do you… understand?”
“No,” said Elias. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Kess looked over at him, then. She liked the way he looked so much.
“You’re turning into a Gray, aren’t you?”
“I think so, yeah.”
She reached out and touched Elias’s face. She stroked the fine dark hair on the back of his neck with her fingertips. She remembered the night when she had met him, and kissed him, and shocked him, how in the car afterwards Priya had touched her just like this. “We’ll stop it.”
Elias sighed. “The only reason to say something like that would be to comfort me.”
“That was the idea, yeah.”
“Grays aren’t comforted by lies.”
###
NOTE PASSED FROM CHRISTOPHER STONE TO ELIAS KAPLAN:
DO NOT SHOW HER THIS.
If what you want is knowledge, call the number on the back of this note. Ask your questions. If it is something you can know, I will tell you. If it something you cannot know, I will tell you that you cannot know it.
If you tell her about this, you will learn nothing.
- Jonathan Akiyama