Lies

trying to glean enough clues to figure out how to fly a helicopter. Off a boat. Next to a cliff.
    Loaded with everyone he cared about.

SEVENTEEN
15 HOURS, 59 MINUTES
    “ MOTHER MARY? CAN I get up and be with you?”
    “No, hon. Go back to sleep.”
    “But I’m not tired.”
    Mary put her hand on the four-year-old’s shoulder. She led him back to the main room. Cots on the floor. Filthy sheets. Not much she could do about that anymore.
    Your mother says that you have done enough, Mary.
    Mother Mary, they called her. Like she was the Virgin Mary. Kids always professed admiration for her. They admired her all to pieces. Big deal. Not really very helpful as Mary trudged through the daily, nightly, daily, nightly grind.
    Sullen “volunteers.” Endless battles between the kids over toys. Older siblings constantly trying to dump their brothers or sisters off on the day care. Scratches, scrapes, sniffles, bloody noses, loose teeth, and ear infections. Kids who just wandered off, like Justin, the latest. And endless, endless series of questions to be answered. A demand for attentionthat never let up, ever, not even for a second.
    Mary kept a calendar. She’d had to make her own, carefully drawing it out on a big piece of butcher paper. She needed big spaces to write endless reminders and notes. Every child’s birthday. When a kid first complained of an ear infection. Reminders to get more cloth for diapers. To get a new broom. Things she needed to tell John or one of the other workers.
    She stared at the calendar now. Stared at a note she’d made to give Francis a day off in honor of three months’ worth of great work.
    Francis had given himself his own time off.
    On the schedule a note from weeks earlier to find “P.” That was code for Prozac. She hadn’t found any Prozac. Dahra Baidoo’s medicine cabinet was just about empty. Dahra had given Mary a couple of different antidepressants, but they were having side effects. Vivid, absurd dreams that left Mary feeling unsettled all day long and made her dread sleep.
    She was eating what she was supposed to.
    But she had started vomiting again. Not every time. Just some of the time. Sometimes it came to a choice between not eating and allowing herself to stick her finger down her throat. Sometimes she couldn’t control both impulses, so she had to choose one.
    And then sobbing, filled with hatred for her own mind, for the little cancers that seemed to eat at her soul night and day and night and day.
    Your mother misses you….
    On the calendar, Mother’s Day was a mark in red, “15thb’day!” She twisted Francis’s watch around and checked the time. Could it really be that late? Sixteen hours now. Sixteen hours until she would be fifteen years old.
    Not long. Had to be ready for that, the big fifteen.
    Had to be ready to fight the temptation that came to each kid in the FAYZ as they reached that deadly date.
    Everyone knew by now what happened. Time would seem to freeze. And while you hung in a sort of limbo, a tempter would come to you. The one person you wanted most to please. The one you wanted most to be reunited with. And they would offer you escape. They would beg you to come across with them, to step out of the FAYZ.
    There were a hundred theories of why it happened. Mary had heard numerological theories, conspiracy theories, astrological theories, every variation on aliens, government scientists….
    Astrid’s explanation, the “official explanation,” was that the FAYZ was a freak of nature, an anomaly no one could understand, with rules the kids inside the FAYZ should try to discover and understand.
    The weird psychological effect of the big fifteen was just a distortion in the mind. There was no reality to the “tempter” and no reality to the demon that followed it.
    “Just your mind’s way of dramatizing a choice between life and death,” Astrid had explained with her usual slightly superior tone.
    Mostly kids didn’t think about it. To a ten-or a twelve-year-old, age fifteen seemed a long way off. When your fifteenthstarted getting closer you started thinking about it, but Astrid—back when they still had electricity and printers—had actually printed up a handy little instruction sheet called “Surviving 15.”
    Mary didn’t think Astrid would ever deliberately lie. No matter what Nerezza said. But she didn’t think Astrid was infallible, either.
    Mostly Mary didn’t have time to waste on philosophical inquiries. To put it