Once We Were. Kat Zhang
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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 lens hovering above our bed, filming the apparently fascinating movie of Addie & Eva Asleep.
The video camera was enormous and heavy, but that didn’t seem to dissuade Nina. She and Kitty had gone through two Super 8 film cartridges already, keeping them in our dresser drawer in hopes Emalia might go through with her promise to develop them. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Emalia would probably wait months before deeming it safe enough—if she ever did.
“Eee-va.” Nina drew out my name on a two-toned pitch. “Come on. Get up.” When I didn’t move, she sighed. “Fine. I’ll just look through Addie’s sketchbook, then.”
This jerked Addie into control. “Nina—”
Nina pulled the sketchbook from the nightstand drawer and flipped it open with stubborn glee. After years of hiding her drawings, Addie still disliked people looking through her sketches.
“Who’s this?” The sketchbook had fallen open to a picture of a young boy, light-haired and eager-eyed.
“Lyle.” Addie slipped from our bed and crossed to Nina’s. The younger girl leaned against us, like it was automatic.
“Why’s he dressed like that?”
Our lips crooked in a smile. Addie had drawn him in a soldier’s uniform right out of one of his spy-and-adventure novels. “Because he always wanted to have adventures. For a while, he was convinced he was going to be a soldier when he grew up. He taught himself Morse code and everything. By the time he moved on to the next thing, I’d practically memorized it, too.”
“Do you still remember it?”
Addie nodded. Nodding was easier than speaking around the sudden lump in our throat. She picked up the pencil and reached for her sketchbook, drawing a line and a dot; then two dots; another line and dot; and finally a dot followed by a line.
“N-I-N-A,” she said, and tapped the letters out with the pencil.
Nina stared down at the pattern, her own fingers moving slowly. “Can you teach us the whole alphabet?”
Addie grinned wryly. “Sure. Numbers, too.”
Nina tapped out her name again, a little faster. “What’s Kitty?”
Addie wrote and tapped it for her. Funny how we remembered it even better than I thought we would. Mom and Dad had learned a few words, too, but we were the ones Lyle tapped messages to after we went to bed, rapping on the wall between our rooms long after he was supposed to be asleep. He never stopped until Addie tapped something back.
Addie shut her sketchbook and slipped off the bed, pulling Nina after us. “Come on, have you eaten breakfast?”
“Nope. I was waiting for you. I’ll make you pancakes, if you want.”
“That would be great.” Addie smiled as Nina grabbed her camcorder and headed for the kitchen.
We glanced, one last time, at the map stuck to the ceiling.
The world maps we’d studied in school had always come with the disclaimer that they were old, made before or shortly after the Great Wars began. World War I and World War II, as Henri called them.
The Great Wars had always smashed through our history classes like a giant’s fist, leaving the rest of the world fragmented, unworthy of mapping. We’d been told country lines were muddled, contested to the point of being barely existent. They shifted constantly, as some desperate people attacked another and were assaulted in turn.
Lies. So much of it lies.
World War I and World War II seemed so neat in comparison.
Wars can destroy a country completely, Henri told us. But they can also shape it, push it forward. Some of the world was destroyed. Some was shaped. And some was pushed forward.
What do they have that we don’t? I’d asked. Flying cars?
Henri laughed. No, no flying cars. But faster cars. And cell phones. Internet.
We’d never heard of them. He told us about tiny, cordless phones everyone carried around in their pockets, so widespread that pay phones were all but extinct. He tried to describe some sort of information network that connected computers, allowing one to instantaneously send data to another. He kept running into words he didn’t know how to translate, and the entire concept baffled Addie and me, who could count the number of times we’d even sat down in front of a computer.
He told us mankind had been to the moon.
I laughed. You’re kidding.
But he wasn’t.
He said it had only happened once, a few decades ago, but after the end of the Second World War. It was a show of power by one of the countries that had emerged least scathed from the years of combat. The project had proven too financially costly to attempt again, though there were other countries still eager to try.
There were also satellites floating out there in the blackness, orbiting our planet. Henri showed us one of his devices, a satphone that seemed more miniature computer than phone. Using these satellites, the phone allowed him to both send information and make calls to his headquarters overseas.
There were satellites beaming information around in outer space. There had been men on the moon. I had never known the world beyond the Americas’ borders, but there were people out there who’d experienced life beyond our very planet.
How terribly insignificant we must all seem from the moon. Our battles. Our wars.
Addie sighed and pulled our blankets straight, tucking in the edges. The map was a comforting reminder of the rest of the world. One that included countries where hybrids like us weren’t vilified, weren’t feared or hated or locked away.
But sometimes, those bright, colorful countries seemed to mock us with their distance.
The phone shrilled, and Addie hurried into the living room to answer it. “Hello?”
“Hey,” a voice said. “This is Sabine. Did I wake you up?”
“I was awake,” Addie said. Nina watched us with obvious curiosity, arms cradling a mixing bowl.
“Good. I would’ve called later, but I’m about to leave for work. Do you want to meet up with me and a couple friends tonight?”
Addie frowned in confusion. “Sorry?”
“I wanted to introduce you to some people.” Sabine’s voice dropped a little. “You can sneak out, right? We can meet you right at the end of your block. There’s a fast-food place that’s open until two a.m. Can you be there at one thirty? There’ll be five of us; six if you get Ryan to come.”
Would Ryan go? He hadn’t been the warmest to Sabine and Jackson yesterday. But I thought