'I'm just lucky that what's wrong with me doesn't stop me from being able to work,' Sam remarks, his voice not quite achieving the nonchalant tone he's obviously going for.
'There's nothing wrong with you,' Olivia snaps in reply before she knows she's going to speak. Anger is like a bullet from a gun, tearing through her so fast that she's ripped apart before she knows the shot's gone off.
Even after Hannah, after the kidnapping, Olivia's world was so little, so safe. She never... She never thought…
She doesn't know how to think. The rage inside her, the sheer injustice of Sam lying here alone and miserable, of what that means about every other thrive she's ever heard about, that they weren't monsters or less than human, they were just kids, just others like Sam, just people.
She wants to cry. At least crying would be a reaction. It's like she's going to explode with the force of what she feels.
Sam's gaze has drifted over to one of the towering stacks of books along the edges of his room, to a decrepit hardcover marked Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World.
'It's comparatively gentle. In Sparta, babies that didn't measure up were left on hillsides, or thrown off cliffs. We had a guaranteed place in the shelters to sleep until we were ten. The older ones are kind to the younger ones — children that can eat without too much help almost never starve. A lot of cultures have been far harsher.'
Olivia wants to say that this is the coldest of cold comforts she's ever heard of, but she thinks Sam knows that already. Instead, she tries to steady her breathing, to push down the anger boiling through her, and asks, 'Do you still not want to be touched, or can I get in?'
'No, it's okay. I'm okay now.' He shifts to make what room he can on the narrow mattress.
Olivia climbs in next to him and curls herself against his side, hugging her arm across his chest. She wishes she could travel through time, be with him through every moment of hunger or cold or loneliness. But she can't. He had to go through all of it without her, without anyone. All she can do is be here now.
'There's nothing wrong with you,' she says again, her voice quieter now but no less fierce. Sam strokes her hair, as if she's the one that deserves to be comforted.
13
A few weeks later, when the weather turns too hot to cope with, Olivia gets the idea to sneak into her school's indoor pool at night and swim through the worst of the evening warmth. It's humid but rarely breaks into rain, staying at a horribly uncomfortable in-between of almost breaking instead. After a couple of weeks of that, Sam is ready to agree to anything that might offer relief — even a plan that makes Olivia's eyes light up in a way he says is "never a comforting sign".
He's never swum before, so she stays down the shallow end with him, where they can stand on the bottom of the pool and have their heads and shoulders above the surface. Being in the cold, clean water after the sticky and smog-filled afternoon outside makes Olivia so happy that she feels like singing.
She wants to stay at the shallow end and be a good friend. She does. But the allure of the depths is too strong, the thought of ducking her head under and pushing off from the wall and gliding all the way to the other end under the power of a few kicks. Olivia doesn't swim much when the class comes to the pool because she feels gangly and self-conscious and clumsy, but now only Sam is here, so she's not afraid.
She does a few laps, then comes back to him in the shallows. 'Do you want to try? I'll help,' she offers. Sam makes a face.
'We've only been in the water five minutes,' he says. 'Expecting me to do laps already is faster than I'd like to go.'
'Pfft.' Olivia makes a noise of dismissal and splashes the water at him with her hands. 'When I was learning how to swim, my father threw me straight in the deep end.'
'Yes, but your father's an asshole.'
The words make Olivia pause, uncertain about whether it's okay for her to smile at them. Nobody's said that to her since Hannah.
Olivia misses Hannah. Having a new friend in Sam doesn't replace her feelings about her old one. There's room in her heart for both.
She once told Hannah that it'd be nice to see the ocean with her someday. She imagines that, sometimes, the two of them off on an adventure. Maybe Sam can be there too, all three of them living wild on an abandoned island with clean beaches.
No place like that exists in the real world, of course, but that doesn't stop her dreaming.
If they're going to run away to the ocean, though, then first Olivia has to teach Sam to swim.
'Come on,' she says. 'Try to copy what I do.'
14
The next book that Olivia loves, another ratty paperback she buys from Sam, is called It and is by somebody named Stephen King. The horror and fear of the story, the unhappy children and the terrible, bloodthirsty clown, are a huge and unexpected comfort to Olivia's hungry heart. The idea of frightening things hiding in the dark is a security blanket for her. Better a nightmare than nobody.
Sam has three ports in his wrist. Olivia has almost never seen anybody with a port before, apart from in movies and shows. And Hannah. Hannah had five.
The ports in movies and shows are mostly prosthetics, stuck on with spirit gum and peeled off when the actors are finished playing. If any actors in the shows and movies have real ports, the ports are hidden with bracelets or watchbands. Paparazzi photographers sneak around trying to get a picture to sell to the entertainment sites for lots and lots of money. Nothing sells as well as shame and secrets. No rich person wants the world to remember how poor they used to be. To have a port is to be marked forever.
'Which is complete nonsense,' Sam points out when she muses aloud on the subject. 'Sixty-five percent of the population is ported, and a full hundred percent use port-interfaced technology in their everyday lives, whether we make use of that aspect of it or not.'
She tells Sam about Hannah, about the whole horrible, thrilling, weird experience that altered something inside Olivia forever, made her who she is now.
'I worry about what Hannah had to do to get away. Who the people she called were, and how much they cost her. It feels like it was my fault she had to do that, because my father hired the men.'
'I'm not going to insult your intelligence by explaining Stockholm Syndrome to you,' he replies in a dry voice, giving her a pointed look. 'But even accounting for that, feeling guilty because you got rescued from being kidnapped is pretty outrageous.'
Olivia sighs. 'Shut up.'
'She probably didn't call anyone. I bet if you'd asked to see the phone logs, it would have been a dead number.'
'No, it was definitely someone. She told them her name was Lissa, and then that's what the lady at the hospital called her.'
'She would have used a phrase or word, a trigger that connected the call to a monitoring station. That's how spies do it, isn't it? And government agencies. The machinery picks up the trigger and starts listening in.'
'Oh.' Olivia thinks hard, trying to remember Hannah's hoarse, rapid words. 'She called someone "little red riding hood". That might have been it. So that clicked the connection on, and then she pretended to be talking while someone listened, and had to trust that they'd understand and help her?'
'Yeah.' Sam nods. 'I hear about things like that sometimes, from my suppliers. I never use them. Reliability like that — knowing for almost certain that someone will come pick you up on nothing more than a hospital name muttered down the phone ten minutes before the needed rescue — that comes at very, very high prices, from what I hear. It would have to. I don't want anything to do with that.'
Olivia's stomach is leaden, cold and heavy. She wishes she knew what happened to Hannah. If she wound up safe and okay. She may never know for sure, and this new piece of information — the first