Into Darkness

3

Oh—wait ’til you hear this! At Assignations today, I got Hospice Aid. How hilarious is that? I purposely ganked the aptitude tests so I’d be allowed to work with Father in the grow light fields, but the Administrator thought I showed “advanced intuitive capacity,” “highly honed observational skills,” and a “great propensity for compassion.”

Compassion. Ha! If only they knew about the market fire. Even though no one was killed, I was ecstatic about Annika’s hair burning off.

The joke’s on me, though, because now I’ll be spending the rest of my days tending to the condemned elderly.

I hate my life.

15 October, 2036

11:37pm IFST

Diary Entry #2553

For the first time in many, many years, I heard the Girl.

I was in Mr. Kirchmann’s room, reading to him from Essays on Enlightenment—the IF’s quarterly propaganda treatise about the glory and necessity of the global unified government—and trying not to grit my teeth too hard as the crusty old goat nodded in agreement to every word I spoke as he lay feebly wheezing in his bed, when suddenly I felt as if a door kicked open inside my head, and someone barged in.

Her presence is electric, and overwhelming. And, if I’m being honest, dark. She’s much stronger now than when I last heard her, as a child, and she’s much more . . .

Angry. In fact, this Girl is really tweaked. She started shouting straight off, the words tumbling over each other in her rush to get them out.

Hope for f**k’s SAKE wake UP get off your sorry ass we NEED you here come and—

And what? I don’t know, because I threw up a mental wall and shut her out. I’ve been cloaking my mind forever—nothing slips in, nothing slips out, it’s a simple matter of survival—but when I’m tired, overly emotional, or inattentive, sometimes the cloak gets loose. The doors come unlocked, and the world in all its terrible, greedy enormity comes rushing in.

She comes rushing in. The Girl, whose name I know, from many prior rush-ins, is Honor.

Even from behind the wall I hear her muffled, angry shouts. I retreat, turn the volume down to zero, then she’s gone. But the questions remain.

Who is she? What does she want from me? And why, like my dream lover Magnus, does she insist on calling me Hope?

I think it’s time Father and I sat down and had a little chat.

Later that night

He said what he always says when I ask questions. “Stop asking so many questions, Lu.” Then he went and sat on the porch, and smoked his entire week’s tobacco ration while sitting in the dark.

Here’s what I know for sure: I can light things on fire. I can get inside people’s minds. I can vanish into a cloud of mist, and smell, hear, and feel things others don’t. I can move things without touching them, and God Thorne help you if I do touch you, because you might find yourself stripped of any special talent you have.

Father found that out the hard way. I accidentally stole his ability to play the piano and speak Czech before he figured it out and started making me wear gloves.

So even if Father won’t answer my questions, they all add up to the same thing I’ve known since I was little.

I’m different. I’m dangerous. I’m almost certainly not human.

And, if I want to stay alive, no one can know.

24 December, 2037

11:37pm IFST

Diary Entry #2987

Father is afraid.

He won’t say it, but I smell it on him. Fear smells like something sour and rotting, the same stench of decay I can never wash out of my hair and clothes after work. I overheard him on the telecom with the Prefect tonight, and his voice shook so badly I thought he might cry. When I asked him what was wrong he said “nothing,” but he looked guilty. He hates to lie.

An odd misfortune for him, since his entire life is built around doing exactly that.

In other news, I had another “incident.”

It wasn’t fire this time. It was actually worse, because at least fire is a natural phenomenon. A fire can be started by a million different things; the fire that caused the credit market to burn to the ground, for instance, was thought to have started from faulty wiring in a fan in the butcher’s stall. That was the official explanation, anyway. The rumors have never really stopped circulating. But a bunch of knives flying through the air and stopping just before they embed themselves into someone’s head . . . well, that’s not exactly something that can be explained so easily.

Talk about a red flag.