Once We Were

Read Once We Were for Free Online Page B

Book: Read Once We Were for Free Online
Authors: Kat Zhang
Tags: sf_history
they’d been down there, right?”
    I couldn’t speak. I could only think
Oh, God. Oh, God.
    Kitty and Nina having nightmares was nothing new. But neither had brought up their old roommate since leaving Nornand. Had the meeting earlier tonight sharpened old memories? Or had they been silently wondering all this time, too frightened to ask?
    I’d forgotten that they didn’t know Sallie and Val’s fate. I hadn’t stopped to imagine what it might be like for them, not knowing.
    Still, I didn’t want to answer.
    Go back to sleep,
I wanted to say.
    It was only a dream,
I wanted to say.
    But sleep wouldn’t solve anything, and this—this horror that had happened at Nornand—was not a dream.
    How were we supposed to tell an eleven-year-old girl that her friend was dead?
    That she had been, for all intents and purposes, murdered?
    That no justice had been exacted?
    But Kitty and Nina were waiting.
    
Addie whispered.
    I crushed Kitty against us, not knowing if we were doing the right thing, if we were doing it the right way. “Yes, they are.”
    She didn’t reply. Her hands tangled in our shirt.
    
I said helplessly.

    But she hadn’t been all right, any more than we’d been all right, or Ryan, or Hally, or Jaime. We’d been out of Nornand for six weeks, and sometimes, I wasn’t sure what
all right
really meant anymore.
    Kitty and Nina weren’t the only one with nightmares.
    “You’re safe,” I whispered fiercely in Kitty’s ear. “Nothing will happen to you. I promise.”
    I stayed with her for nearly an hour in the darkness, until she drifted back to sleep.
     
    Henri had given us a world map three weeks ago, when Addie and I first arrived at Emalia’s apartment.
Since you love it so much,
he’d said in his lilting, accented voice, and laughed when Addie fixed it above our bed with sticky tack. He’d brought the map from overseas, so it was like no map Addie and I had ever seen. We’d been fascinated since we first found it rolled up in a corner of his apartment.
    Now, as dawn broke, sunlight seeped through the yellow curtains and crawled across the ceiling. Bit by bit, the map came into view. Our eyes took in the neatly labeled countries, each stained a different color. Russia, with its bulk, its eastern mountain ranges and great, thick, blue river veins. Australia, lonely in the southeast, a country and a continent. I thought of Australia most often. Despite the distance between us, there was a comforting familiarity to its loneliness.
    The Americas were alone, too. Almost all the other countries of the world shared continents. A few were nearly the size of our northern half, but most were hardly a hundredth our size. How strange it must be to live in a country so small, surrounded so claustrophobically by other nations. The Americas dominated the entire western half of the map, two continents attached by a thread.
    A familiar whirring and clicking came from Nina’s side of the room, and I shifted to face her.
    “Nina Holynd.” I kept my tone light even as I examined her, searching her expression for signs of the pain she and Kitty had crumpled beneath last night. Nina had always been better than Kitty at hiding pain. The mornings after the girls had a particularly bad dream, it was almost always Nina who took control. Who got out of bed smiling like the nightmares had never happened. “You have
got
to find somebody else to film.”
    “There’s nobody else to film.” Nina directed her video camera right at our face, giggling. I groaned and pulled our covers over our head. “You move a lot in your sleep, you know that?”
    “No.” The blankets muffled my words. “And I don’t need cinematographic proof, thank you very much.”
    Nina’s camcorder really belonged to Emalia, who had accidentally broken it years back. Nina had unearthed it in a cabinet, and Ryan had fixed it. Since then, Addie and I woke far too often to a camera

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