I look into the room again. “Where are the mothers?” I ask. Does one of these babies belong to the girl we saw in the attic?
“Vanya believes the kids are hers. The mothers stay in the main house. The older ones are upstairs. If they survive, they’ll be brought over when they’re twelve. Vanya’s only been doing this eight years. She thinks she’s creating a better breed of human.”
“She’s mad.”
A shadow blocks the light coming from the window. “We should shut these blinds,” a splintery voice says. The light dims, as the window is screened over. I squash myself against the wall.
“You brought Jo back here and you let us stay when you knew all this,” I hiss.
“Jo needed to give birth somewhere. And I didn’t know the extent of things until Jo told me a couple of days ago.”
“She knew?”
“Maks took great pleasure in filling her in when she got back,” he says uneasily.
“So now what?” I ask. The windows are impossibly narrow and we can’t simply saunter through the front door.
“Maks has keys,” he says. “If we could get them. . . .” He trails off.
“Are you joking?” He isn’t the kind of person to leave keys lying around.
“There’s no other way, Alina,” he says. He sounds tough, but he would—it’s not his neck on the line.
“Well, if we do this, we aren’t leaving any benefactors behind. And definitely not the kids.”
Abel gapes at me. “What? No. We can’t take all of them. We’ll be caught.”
I pause and listen to the cry of a baby. The cry gets louder and louder until it finally subsides and the night is silent again. “Did you think we’d help you rescue Jo and no one else?” Abel shakes his head. He looks guilty. And afraid. As he should. “Have you always been in love with her?” I ask.
He sighs. “It isn’t like that. Jo’s my best friend. I’ve known her a long time,” he says. “You and me, we never had a chance to get to know each other. If we did . . .”
I want to tell Abel to go to hell. If he thinks he’s going to get me to help him by promising something like that, he’s right—he doesn’t know me very well. “Let’s get back before someone notices we’re missing,” I say. “I’ll tell everyone tomorrow what we have to do.”
We head through the door leading into the main house, and Abel clutches my arm. His touch still makes my legs wilt, and I hate myself for being so weak. “Why do you have to act so hard-nosed all the time? You don’t make it easy to love you.”
I almost laugh, but rage tears through me, and I shove him so hard, he staggers backward. He has no idea what I’ve been through since he was caught and because of his lies. I look at him squarely. “I’m running out of energy,” I say. “I’m going to focus on this one last thing and then I’m retiring from saving the world. Maybe we’ll talk about how unlovable I am then. Okay?”
40
BEA
Ronan’s attic studio is covered in paintings and drawings and a rainbow of color is splattered across the floor and walls. A large board with bands of gray and red smeared across it in thick, irregular lines is sitting on an easel. It looks wet, but it’s dry to the touch.
“What does it mean?” I ask, approaching the easel.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need my therapist,” he says, and grins.
“I like it,” I tell him. Something about the fury of the strokes speaks to me. Maybe I could paint. In the future. If I have one.
“Every color I use, I find in the sky,” he says. He points at the wide skylight in the roof. The only thing visible through it is the pod’s glass surface and the sun. The space is completely private. A refuge. If I were Ronan, I’d never leave it. But now that we know the Ministry is planning to cut off the oxygen in all empty apartments, he’s giving it up to hide Harriet, Gideon, and any other Resistance members on the Ministry’s hit list—there’s been no way for him to secretly get hold of enough airtanks to keep the wanted Resistance members alive in airless apartments.
“You’re a good person,” I tell him, in case he doesn’t already know it.
“Sometimes,” he says.
He collects the cans of paint, plaster, and glue, piles them in the corner, and hangs the paintings resting against the walls on crooked nails to get them off the floor. He stops when we hear a light tap on the door and puts his ear against it. When Ronan unlocks the door, Wendy bundles into the studio carrying a stack of sheets and blankets. “This is all I have spare,” she says, throwing the bedding on the floor. “I’ll look in your room, too. We have to get a move on though. Niamh will be back soon. And what about food? How am I going to justify the expense?”
“I can sort that out,” Ronan says. Considering what he’s doing, he’s very calm. It’s not even my house, and my heart is racing.
“And what if they need the bathroom?” Wendy asks. She grimaces and I find myself doing the same. Ronan remains unruffled.
He picks up a drop cloth from the floor and hangs one side to a hook in the ceiling, the other to a screw sticking out from the wall. “It’ll be no more than a bucket with a lid, and I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to empty it every hour with Niamh prowling around, but it’s the best we can do,” he says.
“How many are there?” Wendy asks. She prods the bedding with her toe. They both look at me.
“Around fifteen,” I say.
“Once Niamh’s gone to bed, we’ll bring them up. But I still think it’s an awful risk hiding them here,” Wendy says. Keeping me in her annex overnight has been stressful enough, but the idea of hiding hordes of Resistance members in the house, right above Niamh and any visiting ministers, has Wendy on edge.
Ronan picks up a blanket and shakes it out. “No one will think of looking here,” he says. “Would you?”
Wendy shakes her head. Still, keeping everyone fed, clean, and quiet won’t be easy.
“Did you bring up my stuff?” I ask Wendy.
She blinks and looks at Ronan. “There’s no need for you to sleep here with everyone else, love,” she says. “After what you’ve been through, a little privacy is what you need.” Ronan coughs and Wendy stops talking. She pulls her lips into her mouth. He must have told her what happened with the drifters.
“It wouldn’t be fair if I got special treatment,” I mumble. I wish he hadn’t said anything. Quinn never would have. He knows how to keep a secret.
“I’ll see if I can dig out more sheets,” Wendy says, opening the door and tiptoeing away. Ronan locks the door behind her. “You don’t have to be a martyr, you know.”
What? Is that how he thinks I behave? “I act like a martyr?”
“Bea . . . I don’t mean it like that. Please stay in the annex with Wendy.” He tilts his head and looks inconsolably sad.
I turn away from him and step closer to one of his paintings: a series of blue circles along with smaller, seemingly arbitrary turquoise splotches. “You don’t paint real things. And there’s a violence to them. Why?”
“People see what they want,” he says. “And you see violence.”
I ignore him and reach out to touch the painting. The color looks like it might drip down the board and onto the floor, but it’s hard and rubbery. “Do you think we can recruit enough people to make a difference?”
He squats next to me. “We have to try, don’t we?” he says.
“No, Ronan. We have to win.”
“And we will,” he says.
Ronan powers up a radio and a thick beat thunders through the studio. Everyone looks at him. “I play music when I paint,” he tells us.
“Well, you were right. Two hours ago the air in the apartment got siphoned off,” Harriet says. She unrolls her sleeping bag next to Gideon’s, then puts her hands on her hips and studies the other Resistance members unpacking their meager belongings. A group of girls is beneath the skylight setting up. When they see me, they smile. Some men and boys are at the far end of the studio whispering and arranging.