The Darkest Legacy

ONCE UPON A TIME, I went months without saying a word. More than a year, in fact.

It happened by accident at first—or not by accident, exactly. I still struggled to explain it, to justify why I silenced myself. It was as if the barbed wire that surrounded the rehabilitation camp had cut me so deeply the night we escaped, all the words in me had just bled out. I’d been so empty under my skin. So cold. Weak enough for shock to spill in and take over.

The truth is, some things go beyond words: The sound of gunshots thundering through the night. Blood staining the backs of thin uniforms. Kids facedown, slowly buried by the snow falling from the dark sky. The feeling of being strangled by your own hope in that second it escaped the fencing and left you behind to die.

The next few days I was just…tired. Unsure. Questions would come at me, and I would nod. Shake my head. It took so much energy. I was afraid of picking the wrong words out of the messy darkness inside my head. Scared to say something the others, the boys who had saved me, wouldn’t like.

Every second we spent driving in the van, I could see it: I would tell them I was hungry or cold or hurt, and they would decide I was a problem, just like my parents once had. The boys would leave me behind somewhere just as quickly as they had decided to take me with them that night we’d escaped.

But they didn’t. And, pretty soon after, I realized that they wouldn’t. But by then, it felt more comfortable to pick up that ratty notebook we shared and carefully choose my words. I could spell out the exact response I wanted, no mistakes. I could choose when I wanted to say something. I could have that much control over my life.

The problem was that I kept choosing silence. Over and over again, I let myself fall into the safety of its depths. Painful things could stay buried, never needing to be understood or talked through. The past wouldn’t come back to hurt me if I never spoke of it. The memory of snow and blood and screams couldn’t rise up and bury me in its freezing pressure, its dark. I wouldn’t need to admit to being scared or hungry or exhausted and worry the others. My silence became a kind of shield.

That was years ago now. I became known to the world for what I had said, not as the silent little girl with the shaved head and oversize gloves. I appeared on television screens and in front of crowds. She became a ghost, abandoned in the memories I no longer wanted to remember.

Words still seemed to sit a little heavier in my mouth than they did for other people. It was all too easy to slip back into those comfortable depths inside me, where there was quiet. Especially on days like that one, with the last lick of adrenaline making me antsy to move on to the next event.

I couldn’t focus on any one thing, no matter how hard I tried. The two dozen rows of people in front of us became an indistinct haze of color and small, shifting movements. I lost the thread of whatever Penn State’s steely-haired dean of admissions was saying, the same way I struggled to keep up with the campus tour he’d given us earlier. Now even his dark skin and blue seersucker suit were smearing at the edge of my vision.

I tapped one high heel down, brought the other up, tapped that down, brought the other up, working off the lingering buzz of nerves from the car ride in. I closed my eyes against the warm sunlight, but opened them again just as quickly when I only found the image of the old woman’s snarling face there.

The air wept with moisture, so thick with late-summer heat it gave the sky a silky coating. My thick hair rebelled, swelling against the hold of the bobby pins, just at the edge of slipping out of its careful style. A drop of sweat rolled down the ridges of my spine, gluing my blouse to my skin.

Mel gripped my arm, her nails digging into me. I came back to myself all at once, pushing up onto my feet and letting the world open around me again.

The scattered applause wasn’t even loud enough to echo back off the columns of the large building behind us, the one the dean had called Old Main. Not a good sign when it came to their interest level, but I could win them over. Being a freak meant that people were more than willing to stare at you for a while.

I stepped through the shadow cast by Old Main’s clock tower. Setting my shoulders back, I licked my teeth to make sure there was no lipstick on them and lifted my hand in a wave.

The dean stepped away from the podium, which rested on top of a temporary platform that had been built out over the steps that led down to the grassy seating area. He swept his hands toward it as I approached, inviting me forward with an encouraging smile I forced myself to return.

The meager applause was lost again, this time to the music that poured through the speakers on either side of the bottom step down on the grass—some kind of fight song, I guessed. While I waited for the words to load on the teleprompter, I cast a quick glance around the audience, making sure to avoid looking directly into the fleet of news cameras positioned off to the right of the stairs.

“Good afternoon,” I said, my hands grasping the lip of the podium. I hated the way my voice sounded as it blasted out of speakers—like a little girl’s. “It’s an honor to be here with you today. Thank you, Dean Harrison, for giving me the opportunity to address your incredible new class and inviting me to celebrate the reopening of your illustrious university.”

I sincerely doubted there had been any invitations involved—Mel pitched all of these events based on population models and where she thought we would get the most media play. She always seemed to know just the right way to threaten someone to get a No magically transformed into an enthusiastic Yes.

Every speech was carefully altered at its beginning and end to fit the venue. These slight adjustments were the only variations in the usual routine. My grip on the podium relaxed as I settled into it. I swept my gaze back and forth, trying to take the crowd’s temperature. Beyond the row of reporters, all scribbling on notepads or half-hidden by the phones they were using to snap photos, there was an array of people, spanning almost the full range of ages.

Parents and other family members filled the very back rows. Farther in were the men and women a decade past what you might expect from typical college freshmen. All of them were trying to recover the educations they’d been forced to abandon when the majority of universities had gone bankrupt at the height of the Psi panic.

Then there were those my age, even a little younger. They sat behind the reporters, their thumb-size buttons visible on their shirts, as they were meant to be at all times. Many green buttons, fewer blues, and even fewer yellow ones like my own. And, scattered between them all, white.

I glanced down at the podium, pausing in my speech for a quick breath. Blank. The word slipped through my mind, as unwelcome as it was ugly. These were the ones who had elected—or had parents who had elected for them—to get the “cure” procedure. Specifically, the ones who had received surgical implants to halt and effectively neuter their brain’s access to the abilities they acquired when they survived IAAN.

“We truly are the lucky ones,” I continued. “We have survived the trials that the last decade has brought to our country, and they have united us in ways that no one could have predicted. Of course, we have all made sacrifices. We have struggled. And from that, we have learned much—including how to trust one another again, and how to believe in the future of this nation.”

There was a loud, sharp cough from the far left end of the front row. It was just pointed enough to draw my gaze as I took a quick sip from the sweating water glass that had been left for me.

Two teenagers sat just behind the police officer standing watch over the left side of the audience. One, a girl with brown skin, glowing in her yellow silk sundress, had stretched her long legs out in front of her. They were crossed at the ankles, just above her strappy sandals. Her head had lolled to the side, her long ponytail of curly black hair spilling over her shoulder. The metallic-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses had dipped down the bridge of her nose, revealing more of her features: full brows and high, slanted cheekbones. She also had what I assumed were beautiful, wide eyes, but there was no way to really confirm it, given that I’d apparently talked her right into a nice nap.

Irritation curled through me as I watched her mouth fall slightly open, and her breathing even out.

Beside her was a boy, also about my age, more or less. He was such a study in contrasts that my gaze naturally held on him a second longer. His chestnut-colored hair had a hint of wild curl and was barely tamed, glowing with a faint red sheen in the harsh sunlight. His face was lean, but his features were so strong, the lines so distinct, that I would have believed anyone who told me they had carefully designed his face on the pages of a sketchbook. Even the tan on his white skin only seemed to make his pale eyes burn brighter in comparison. He met my gaze directly, his unreadable expression never wavering, not until the corners of his mouth tipped down.

I straightened, glancing away. “I realize that much has been asked of my fellow Psi, but we must establish limits on those perceived to be limitless. Society can only function with boundaries and rules, and we must continue to work to find a way back into it—to not press so hard against those markers as to disturb the peace.”

The girl could get right up and leave if she was so bored with a talk about her future—but I let myself glance back toward them for a moment. She wore a green button, and he wore a yellow one.

I shifted my full attention back to the speech as I entered the homestretch. It was my least-favorite part: I’d plead with the Psi for patience with those who feared us, and plead with those who feared us to acknowledge the terror that we had lived in every day since IAAN was first recognized. It didn’t feel like a fair comparison, but this had come directly from professionals. What did I know, when it really came down to it?

I stumbled, just a tiny bit, as unfamiliar words loaded on the screen. “And as we enter this new beginning, I think it has become all the more important to acknowledge the past. We must honor the traditional American way.”

It was the new language that Mel had mentioned in the car. The teleprompter slowed, accommodating my unfamiliarity.

“That includes,” I read, “honoring our original Constitution, the core foundation of faith, and the requirements of citizenship in our democracy….”

TODAY, THE INTERIM GOVERNMENT HAS VOTED ON AND APPROVED A BILL THAT TEMPORARILY REMOVES PSI-BORN, INCLUDING THOSE OF LEGAL AGE, FROM CURRENT VOTER ROLLS. THIS IS TO ALLOW THEM MORE TIME TO HEAL FROM THEIR TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES BEFORE MAKING POTENTIALLY LIFE-ALTERING DECISIONS ON THEIR BALLOTS, AND SO THAT THEY MAY BETTER UNDERSTAND THE FULL WEIGHT AND IMPACT OF THIS SACRED CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY.

THIS IS ONLY A PROVISIONAL MEASURE, AND THE MATTER WILL BE REVISITED FOLLOWING THE ELECTION THIS NOVEMBER, AFTER THE NEW FULL CONGRESS IS SWORN IN.

A tremor worked its way up through my arms, even as my hands clenched the podium’s glossy wood. The silence stretched on, punctuated only by the muffled sigh of the breeze catching the microphone. The audience began to shift in their seats. A woman in the second row finally stopped using her program as a fan, leaning forward to give me a curious look.

That couldn’t be right. I wanted to look back at Mel, to signal that the wrong text had been loaded in. Whoever thought this was a funny joke deserved a fist to the throat.

No—this was…The Psi already had stricter ID requirements. We had to wait until we were twenty-one before we could get legal driver’s licenses. I’d given a whole speech about how it would be worth the delay, and how exciting it would be to finally be able to turn in a voter registration form with it. I filled mine out years ago, when Chubs and Vida were doing theirs. I hadn’t wanted to be left out.

This must have…This had to have slipped by him and the other Psi on Interim President Cruz’s council. They were probably already pushing back against it.

Except hadn’t Mel said the language had come directly from President Cruz’s chief of staff? Why spring it on me like this without any explanation or warning?

Because they know you’ll say it no matter what, a small voice whispered in my mind, like you’ve said everything else they’ve given you.

This time I did glance back over my shoulder. The crowd began to quietly murmur, clearly wondering what was going on. Mel didn’t rise out of her chair, didn’t take off her sunglasses. She motioned with her hands, pushing them forward, urging me to turn back to the audience. To keep going.

The boy in the front row, the one I’d noticed before, narrowed his eyes, cocking his head to the side slightly. The way his whole body tensed made me wonder if he’d somehow managed to read the words on the teleprompter, or if he could hear my heart hammering inside my chest.

Just say it, I thought, watching as the words rewound again, then paused. I’d promised them my voice, for whatever they’d need me to do. This was what I had agreed to, the whole point of coming here.

It would only be temporary. They promised. One election. We could sit out one election. Justice took time and sacrifice, but like the reparations had proven, it was best won through cooperation. We were working toward a better forever for the Psi, not just one year.

My throat burned. The podium trembled under my hands, and I couldn’t understand why. Why now—why this announcement, and not any of the others?

The girl, the ghost from the past, was back, her gloved hands wrapping around my neck.

“Thank you for your time,” I choked out, “it was an honor to speak to you today, and I wish you the best as you begin a new chapter of your lives—”

The teleprompter’s screen blanked out. A second later, a single line of text appeared.