Chrysalis

Chapter 1: The Straight Line Fractures

For a questionable stretch of my life, insomnia had me in its jaws. The kind that nails the eyes to the slow drift of the moon framed by a sliver of sky. The kind that makes a person crave the boredom of books, hoping they’ll ferry one gently into Morpheus’s arms. The kind that forces thinking. Too bad back then there was neither a window to peek at the world nor books un-precious enough to touch. Thoughts remained. Only thoughts.

On those nights, the hunt was for the instant that had led me to ruin. Everyone must have that moment, I imagined: the point where the straight line hairline-cracks and, before noticing, a person finds herself elsewhere, in a fate she doesn’t recognize. I longed for that moment: to find it, the exact instant when my life stopped being only mine and fused with the destinies of many others. One night, years after the events that made my story known, I found it—my moment.

It all began with a thunderstorm.

Low clouds piled above us, grayed and swollen with rain. The rain was almost invisible, revealed only in the cones of the streetlamps: each drop appeared for a heartbeat, then vanished, swallowed by the asphalt dozens of meters below. The sky, a slate shadow, clashed with the brazen hues of buildings competing to be the loudest. Water drummed thickly across terraced rooftops and broke at different heights, meeting edges and ledges, until it became a single staircase of water, a torrent spilling from the city center to smash against the monolithic walls surrounding us. The walls that kept us safe.

“Fauve, are you still here?” my mother asked. I didn’t answer. I watched nature wake. Sometimes I wondered how the planet could keep working its magic despite centuries of human plunder and wreckage. That rain gave me hope: it whispered that not all was lost, that someday we might cross the walls without shaking.

“Sonje, walk your sister. With this weather she could get lost.” She said it in a softer tone, as if I weren’t in the room. That happened often. It was my last day in that housing unit, the last with the people I still stumbled to call family after seventeen years. The last day in that reality. Everything was about to change, and I didn’t know whether to fear it.

My sister appeared behind me, a shadow slicing the air without sound since she’d returned from the Program. Her reflection in the glass smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. “You can’t be late for the appointment,” she whispered. “You’ll make a bad impression and start at a disadvantage before you’ve even begun.” I knew it: not even one’s own death justified being late.

I grabbed a lobster-red coat and left. Sonje snatched her lemon-yellow umbrella. “See you later, Agnese,” I yelled toward the kitchen. No reply.

The city squared off against rain: it was considered an affront to communal cheerfulness, and the answer was color. Not that black was allowed under the sun either.

We lived on the thirteenth floor—low, for those who measured worth in meters—and when the freight elevator stalled, the stairs stole my breath. Under the umbrella we pressed so close our elbows bumped at every step. Silence, except for the patter on the paving and the damp that hugged us. On rainy days there were no queues and no electric cars skimming along the curb. Arm number three looked deserted, and I liked that.

“So, Fauve,” Sonje said. “Nervous about the tests?” She smiled from behind the umbrella’s shaft. Black hair framed her pale face; the widow’s peak faked a heart shape, softening her natural hauteur. Kohl-dark eyes were warm; since she’d returned, though, a new hardness lurked deep down. I looked away. “Not really. How different can they be from the quarterly ones? A prick here, a pat there, and done. The problem comes tomorrow.” The day when it would all be over. Or begin.

Sonje took a few steps before answering. “You’re right. Today is nothing compared to what comes next.” Not exactly what I meant, but fair enough.

A few more beats of silence. I thought the topic closed, but it was only the wind-up before the jump. “Listen: I can’t spoil the Program, but I won’t let you go in unprepared. In there, everything is different. The reality you know loses meaning, rules evaporate, even we will evaporate. The Program is designed to change its own nature, to corner you: no one comes out the winner.” Her words piled up; her knuckles on the umbrella handle blanched. “Remember: what you do there clings to you forever. And when you come back, you can’t forget. You… you…” Her voice wavered. Her voice did not waver. She had bedrock, quake-proof foundations.

She turned and hugged me, the umbrella’s shaft wedged between us. I went rigid: displays of affection took up a whole section of the unwritten rules, and that hug was breaking nearly all of them. Not done. Not in public. Ever. A siren in my head lit up. Could they detect affection? I imagined a device calibrated to embarrassment. I dried my sweaty palms on my skirt, secretly.

After a moment—or an hour—she let go. No one cried scandal. Maybe the affection-detector was only the passersby’s outrage: without passersby, anything could be seen differently. “I didn’t mean to,” she murmured. “We’ve been back together only nine months and now you’re leaving for years. And when you return you won’t be little Fauve.” I stretched a smile. “You didn’t change that much after the Program. You seem the same.” She arched her brows. “Maybe. Maybe you knew me better than I did. What I became is the Sonje you always saw.” She started walking again, spine straight.

What did she see different in herself? The hard light in her eyes? The agility? Or something deeper?

Would I change too? I wasn’t attached to the girl I was: ordinary, disarmingly average, someone no gaze lingered on for more than a few seconds. Change could be therapeutic. That’s what I thought then. Today, I would shake that Fauve: hold on to yourself, because the one you’ll become will be more known, yes, but not for reasons you’d want. Anonymity would have been balm for the jagged future waiting for me.

It took almost an hour to reach the hospital of arm three, the only one permitted to us. Never cross the borders of one’s own arm: not a social rule—law. In front of the sliding doors we were two tulips with drooping stems and soaked petals. Sonje had worn her pre-Program cotton clothes in a gesture of solidarity she regretted when, drenched, they weighed double. Umbrellas are little use when rain falls sideways.

The doors opened and the noise of the downpour cut out. We didn’t get to scan for an umbrella stand: the nurse at the desk bulged her eyes, pointed, and howled, “Decontamination showers! Now!” I would have told her it was water. Just water. From the sky. My sealed lips and her hungry eyes stopped me.

A sliding door, a row of white cubicles. I stepped into the first. Being naked among strangers didn’t help. I undressed fast: off with the carbon-fiber boots, the coat, the vermilion skirt, the orange blouse. Skin as the only blanket. I tossed everything into the bin that gulped with a ravenous suck. Then the shower: every trace of rain, gone. Sonje already waited outside, dry, neat, eyes on the clock.

“What time was the appointment?”

“18:23.” That three irked me.

Sonje didn’t comment; she nudged me down the hallway. “You’re late. Move.” I wasn’t.

In the Program’s exam room three kids waited. They glanced up, then dropped their eyes to the midnight-blue floor: discretion required. I sat apart from a girl wearing the puffiest skirt I’d ever seen. Sonje took the seat beside me, and in one day she seemed to distribute seventeen years’ worth of smiles.

A petite girl came out of one of four doors. In tears. The nurse behind the counter skimmed her screen and called, “Fauve Lancaster? The doctor is expecting you.” My name settled in the room like a drop into silence.