The Lost Girl Page 2

  She smoothes hair off my brow. “There are many things I don’t have to do. But I am going to do them anyway.”

  She waits until a real smile tugs at the corners of my mouth before getting up to examine the window. She makes sure it’s bolted fast, with only a slim panel at the top left open to let fresh air in. She measured the panel herself. She wanted to make sure no one could slip an arm through. I used to think she was worried about burglars, until the day I realized she was afraid of hunters.

  There is a pistol hidden away in her bedside table. She once told me the Weavers gave it to her for my protection. I still find that hard to believe. The Weavers have always been something dark and wicked on the edges of my life. The idea that there could be something more frightening out there is ridiculous. The Weavers are the beginning and end of me. They made me. They can unmake me, too.

  Mina Ma gives the window bolts a shake, testing them for weakness. When she’s satisfied, she turns back. We eat a scone each, and I ask her a question.

  “What would you have named me if I’d been yours?”

  “This again!” She blows a breath, her cheeks puffed out. “What good are these what-if games to either of us?”

  I don’t answer. She scowls. “I don’t know,” she says, in a tone that suggests she’s heartily sick of the subject.

  My name is Amarra. Like my other. It means “immortal one.” I have always wanted to choose a name of my own. I hate it when my guardians call me Amarra.

  Just last year, I had to read the old Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Inspired by it, I wished I had been named Draupadi. After all, she, too, had been born differently, even abnormally. She had stepped out of fire, a gift from the old gods to her father the king. There had been no Hindu gods involved in my birth, but the loose parallels gave me a delightful sense of grandeur.

  Sean didn’t bother to hide his dismay. I had known him only a few weeks then, but he had no qualms about telling me that he, Erik, and Ophelia would only end up pronouncing it “Drow-puddy,” and there was nothing grand about that.

  Fortunately for him, Mina Ma put her foot down. “Sad life, that one. Five husbands at the same time, ay Shiva, what a scandal! And have you forgotten all that bloodshed? No, thank you. No sense absorbing such a legacy.”

  “Maybe I want five husbands,” I said, laughing.

  “Maybe you won’t have a choice in the matter,” Mina Ma retorted.

  I stopped laughing and scowled. It made Sean laugh. “Five husbands?” he said. “With a temper like yours, Drow-puddy, you’ll be lucky to find one.”

  That was when I decided he and I were going to be friends.

  After a second scone and a long monologue about the fact that nobody sells good mangoes in England, Mina Ma gets up. “It’s late,” she says. “Rest.”

  “I still have homework. And I don’t think I could sleep yet anyway.”

  “Fine,” she says. An unholy gleam of humor flashes over her face. “I might as well teach you something useful.”

  Ten minutes later, she’s exasperated. “Stand still!” she cries. “I’ve never known a child as fidgety as you.”

  I do my best to comply as she wraps a long section of chiffon around my waist. I try to hide my complete lack of interest as she shows me how to form crisp, neat pleats out of the cloth. I’m not very good at obeying people. I try, but all kinds of inconvenient questions and objections pop into my head.

  “Mina Ma,” I say, “if you want to know what I think—”

  “Which I do not,” she says.

  I bite my lip, but almost immediately burst out with, “If you were to ask me what I thought, I would say this was pointless. Why do I need to know how to put on a sari?”

  She tugs hard on the blouse. I gasp as it tightens across my chest. I look at her reproachfully, but she only says, “You are going to need this knowledge. You will need to know how to wear a sari if you go to a wedding, say.”

  “I’m never going to go to a wedding,” I tell her.

  “You will, if you’re her.”

  “But she’s young and healthy. It’s never going to happen.”

  “Young and healthy people have accidents, don’t they? Trip down the stairs, fall off trees, get mauled by panthers.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  Mina Ma pulls at the chiffon, draping it over my shoulder. “I want you to live until you are old and grumpy,” she says. “I don’t want you removed in ten or twenty years’ time because your other wants to get rid of you, or because you have upset your familiars, or even just because no one thinks they’ll need you anymore. There are so many ways to lose you. I won’t have it. I won’t have someone passing the Sleep Order on you.”

  Erik told me about the Sleep Order years ago. Officially it’s called a Request for Removal, but most people call it the Sleep Order. Someone thought it sounded nicer. Whatever you call it, though, it boils down to the same thing. When a familiar passes the Sleep Order on an echo, they’re signing away the echo’s life. Returning the faulty toy to its creator. And when that happens, he or she comes back to the Weavers, who always have the last word. They could keep the echo, they could do whatever they want, but instead they always shrug and say it’s a pity, and the echo dies.

  “Crushed like a mosquito,” says Mina Ma, as though I had put my thoughts into words. “You exist by the Weavers’ grace. Only as long as you are what they expect of you. Do you not understand how fragile that is? But if you replace your other, you might be safe. You might make your familiars happy, and then they will always keep you. So if only for my sake, child, hope that happens.”

  “I won’t wish for her to die!”

  “Then I will wish it,” she replies, ruthlessly, “because I don’t know or love her.”

  We gaze fiercely at each other. She is unapologetically stout and sturdy. I am quite small and slight. Her skin is a rich brown, darker than mine. My face is delicate, while hers is round and impish. But in spite of these differences I think we could be related. We both have dark hair. Hers is cropped to below her ears, mine is longer to match my other’s. We have dark brown eyes with soft eyelashes and neat dark eyebrows. And our eyes are ferocious. She can make a grown man cower with a single look. I learned to be fierce from her.

  She looks away before I do, which is rare. She tweaks the last folds of the sari into place and takes a step away.

  “It will do,” she says.

  I take off the sari, and she gathers it up into her arms. She turns to the door. I can’t shake her outburst. She must worry constantly that at any moment I might be taken away from her. That my familiars might decide they no longer want me and I will be destroyed.

  “Mina Ma?”

  Her beady eyes focus on mine, resigned. She knows that tone. She knows it means I’m about to ask a question.

  “Do you ever . . .” I hesitate. “Do you ever wish we could run away?”

  Mina Ma stares at me for a long time. Then she sits down next to me, her face very tight. “It would kill you if we did.” She brushes a lock of hair off my face. In her touch, there is a universe of words and thoughts and emotions that narrow to a fierce point, like light shining into the sky to find a single star. “Running away would mean giving up your right to live. The Weavers, they would feel they could no longer trust you. They wouldn’t even have to consult your familiars. They would send their seekers after you, and they would destroy you.” I hear her voice in my ear, almost desperate. “Don’t run.”

  “I won’t,” I say. “It’s just that with this tattoo, and everything, sometimes it feels like it’s too much. I wondered if you ever felt like that too. But I don’t mean to go anywhere. I know about that girl. The echo, years ago, the one who ran. I know the seekers found her and the Weavers unstitched her.”

  Mina Ma huffs. “I suppose you ‘accidentally’ overheard me talking to Erik about her.”

  I blush.

  But she only nods. “Good,” she says, her eyes so intent they could
have pierced holes through me. “At least you know what it would cost you.”

  Before she leaves, I ask one more thing.

  “Why did my familiars bother having me made? They could go to prison. For all they know, I could be nothing like her. So why risk that?”

  Mina Ma smiles slightly. “You’ve asked me that a thousand times.”

  I wait.

  “Because they cannot bear the thought of losing her.”

  But like all the other times I asked that question, that answer isn’t enough. If Amarra died, what would her family get? Me. Not her. How is that worth the risk they’ve taken?

  I know that’s not how it’s supposed to be. I’m imperfect. We all are, all the echoes who exist right now. We’re a stepping-stone. What the Weavers really want is to be able to transfer the human soul from one body to another. One day there will be echoes who are vessels for the human soul. They will lie peacefully, like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, for years, perhaps forever. Unless their others die while they are still wanted. And if those others do, their bodies will die, but their minds, their souls, will survive. They will awaken in the echo. Their spare body. But we are not like that. We have our own thoughts, feelings. It’s a flaw. The Weavers haven’t yet figured out how to make us perfect. But we have their faces, their voices, bits of their skin, threads of their mind. That has to be enough for now.

  I watch the door close behind Mina Ma. I push thoughts of imperfection and tattoos and Sleep Orders away. I pick up another scone, lick the clotted cream at the edges, and go back to finishing my homework.

  When I’ve made my notes for my Romeo and Juliet essay, I read over Amarra’s journal pages. There are events that happened this past week that I have to memorize. One of her aunts fell down the stairs and broke an ankle, her physics test went badly, and her little sister, Sasha, had a fever.

  I put the pages aside and study the new Lists. Some of the books are new; others we’ve both read before. Maybe this time she’ll actually finish Bridget Jones’s Diary. I could have killed her a few months ago, when she picked it off her mother’s bookshelf, read half, got distracted, and never went back to it. Mina Ma had to physically wrestle the book out of my hands.

  I notice Sense and Sensibility is on the list of movies. I sigh. This will be the third time I’ve had to watch Sense and Sensibility. My other has a passion for Jane Austen that I don’t share. I can’t help thinking that if they transplanted us into the story, she’d undoubtedly be Sense and I’d be Sensibility. And no matter how many times I watch it, Sense always wins.

  I reread the journal to make sure I haven’t missed anything, stopping right before the bit about the tattoo. When Erik or Ophelia asks me questions about the journal in our next lesson, I’ll be able to give all the right answers.

  “What did she eat at Coffee Day?” one of them will ask. If it’s Ophelia, she’ll probably add, “What’s this Coffee Day place anyway, love? Is it nice?”

  “She ate a brownie with vanilla ice cream. It’s the place she often goes with her friends; she’s talked about it before.”

  “Who spilled half a bottle of juice on her leg at school?”

  “Sonya, by accident. They laughed so hard they got scolded by one of the teachers.”

  “Which teacher?”

  And on it will go. It’s about as exciting as brushing my teeth. I never forget, never give them a wrong answer. When we’re finished with the questions, Ophelia will go make a cup of tea, or Erik and I will play cards, and we’ll pretend for a while that it’s a normal house and I’m a normal person.

  I drop the pages onto the floor and turn off the light. I crawl beneath the covers of my bed. I try to sleep, but behind my eyelids I see the town kids bloodying my lip and a lady at the supermarket shuddering and backing away when Mina Ma accidentally let slip what I was. I see a murky mirror and a tattoo and a girl with eyes like bruises. Me? Or the echo who ran away all those years ago and died for it? I shiver in the dark.

  It’s so quiet I can hear Mina Ma’s bed squeaking in the room above, the gurgling of water in the pipes, an owl, something creaking softly. I open my eyes again and glance at the window. Beyond is the back garden, and the creaking is the sound of the swing, my swing, swaying back and forth.

  My guardians made me the swing as a gift on my seventh birthday. I woke in the morning and it was there, like magic. I’ve spent hours in it, kicking myself high into the air or simply lying back to stare into the sky.

  In the dark I think about the fight. I think of Mina Ma telling me she wants a girl to die because she believes that will save me. I think about the swing. It was a kindness my guardians didn’t have to show, a gesture of their affection in spite of what I am. It was a gift, rare and precious, and gifts don’t come often to echoes in this world that despises us.

  3

  Name

  “There you are,” says Sean.

  I turn around and look at him, standing at the top of the path. The sun is a hard orange ball behind him, and he looks like he’s only a shadow.

  I’ve known him about a year. Before that his father, Jonathan, was my guardian instead. Then they found cancer in Jonathan’s brain and he had to stop working. Somehow Erik and Jonathan got the Weavers to agree to take his fifteen-year-old schoolboy of a son on as his replacement. When Jonathan died nine months ago, I thought Sean wouldn’t have to come anymore, and my grief doubled. I didn’t want to lose them both. But he came. He turned up the weekend after his father’s funeral, and I tiptoed around him, terrified of saying something wrong, until he snapped at me and told me not to treat him like he had smallpox. And on every other weekend since then, like clockwork, he’s here.

  It takes him a few seconds to come down the path to the bottom and meet me by the edge of the lake. I wasn’t expecting him.

  “I thought you weren’t going to come this weekend,” I say. “Isn’t your girlfriend’s birthday tomorrow?”

  His girlfriend’s name is Lucy and she’s in his year at school. They’re both sixteen, a year older than I am. After much badgering, he showed me a photograph last time he was here, and she looks older than I am. Gorgeous. Confident. Mature. They’ve been going out three weeks now. She likes dogs and volunteers at a local thrift store, and after once hearing her on the phone with Sean, I discovered she has a way of making every sentence turn up at the end like a question. I try and talk like that just to wind Sean up, but he never reacts.

  “She’s doing something with her friends,” Sean says vaguely.

  He has the perfect poker face. It drives me crazy because I can’t mask a single thing I think or feel. But I’ve learned to read his eyes and the little ups and downs in his voice.

  “Erik told you about the tattoo.”

  Sean nods.

  I glance up at him. “Thank you. For coming.”

  One corner of his mouth crooks upward. “You’re welcome.”

  We stand there for a minute, facing the water. Sean’s hands are in the pockets of his jeans; his short, untidy dark hair flickers in the wind. He is tall and lean, with his shirt rolled up past his elbows and green eyes the exact color of the marbles I had to play with when I was little. I look down at the skin on his forearms, lightly tanned from PE and after-school soccer with his friends. He has a scar below his left elbow. I wonder how he got it. I wonder why he cares more about an echo and her tattoo than his human girlfriend’s birthday.

  “I hate those words sometimes,” I mutter under my breath.

  He doesn’t ask me which words I mean. I think he knows. Sean always knows. He can see what move I’m planning to make in chess and counters before I can do it. He always knows who the killer is in a detective story. I think he could make a career out of detecting, but he wants to write plays for theater. Maybe he could be a Shakespeare instead of a Sherlock. He could be anything. Anything he wants to be.

  “We’d better go back inside,” I say, trying to shake off visions of Sean growing up and Lucy kissing him when he gets home
, their kids running up to hug him—

  He watches me turn away, eyes narrow. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I say with painstaking cheer.

  He doesn’t push it. He follows me back up to the cottage, and possibly to distract me, he kicks off one of our lessons: grilling me about social groups and stereotypes and etiquette. What is a goth? What is “emo” short for, and what kind of music would I classify as emo? I need to give him examples. What words might an average teenager’s parents disapprove of hearing from their child? And would these parents frown upon similar words in Amarra’s India and Sean’s England alike, given that they both come from English-speaking families, go to English-speaking schools, and live in towns or cities that are largely if not entirely English-speaking and are subjected to similar TV shows, movies, news, sports, and music?

  I get all the answers right.

  “Well done, you!” he says, in an exaggeratedly hearty tone of voice. “You can have a cookie for being so good!”

  I throw a dishcloth at him.

  Sean goes to help Mina Ma with dinner. I’d help too, but I have to finish reading Wuthering Heights and email Erik an essay on whether Nelly Dean is a reliable narrator. I love Wuthering Heights, one of the few things I share with Amarra, so this assignment has been far more fun for both of us than the one on Romeo and Juliet. While Sean and Mina Ma mash potatoes and fry sausages, I sit at the kitchen table with the book and my notepad.

  “Nelly”—I read my words out loud, scribbling my introduction—“obviously hates Cathy and Heathcliff, so her judgment is far from objective. Quite frankly, she’s also a bitch.”

  Mina Ma and Sean burst out laughing. Mina Ma hastily stops herself and shouts at me for my language.

  I’m halfway through the essay when Mina Ma goes out of the kitchen to take the washing off the line and Sean sits down at the table across from me.