Once We Were by Kat Zhang Read Free Book Online

lens hovering above our bed, filming the apparently fascinating movie of
Addie & Eva Asleep
.
    The video camera was enormous and heavy, but that didn’t seem to dissuade Nina. She and Kitty had gone through two Super 8 film cartridges already, keeping them in our dresser drawer in hopes Emalia might go through with her promise to develop them. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Emalia would probably wait months before deeming it safe enough—if she ever did.
    “Eee-va.”
Nina drew out my name on a two-toned pitch. “Come on. Get up.” When I didn’t move, she sighed. “Fine. I’ll just look through Addie’s sketchbook, then.”
    This jerked Addie into control. “Nina—”
    Nina pulled the sketchbook from the nightstand drawer and flipped it open with stubborn glee. After years of hiding her drawings, Addie still disliked people looking through her sketches.
    “Who’s this?” The sketchbook had fallen open to a picture of a young boy, light-haired and eager-eyed.
    “Lyle.” Addie slipped from our bed and crossed to Nina’s. The younger girl leaned against us, like it was automatic.
    “Why’s he dressed like that?”
    Our lips crooked in a smile. Addie had drawn him in a soldier’s uniform right out of one of his spy-and-adventure novels. “Because he always wanted to have adventures. For a while, he was convinced he was going to be a soldier when he grew up. He taught himself Morse code and everything. By the time he moved on to the next thing, I’d practically memorized it, too.”
    “Do you still remember it?”
    Addie nodded. Nodding was easier than speaking around the sudden lump in our throat. She picked up the pencil and reached for her sketchbook, drawing a line and a dot; then two dots; another line and dot; and finally a dot followed by a line.
    “N-I-N-A,”
she said, and tapped the letters out with the pencil.
    Nina stared down at the pattern, her own fingers moving slowly. “Can you teach us the whole alphabet?”
    Addie grinned wryly. “Sure. Numbers, too.”
    Nina tapped out her name again, a little faster. “What’s
Kitty
?”
    Addie wrote and tapped it for her. Funny how we remembered it even better than I thought we would. Mom and Dad had learned a few words, too, but we were the ones Lyle tapped messages to after we went to bed, rapping on the wall between our rooms long after he was supposed to be asleep. He never stopped until Addie tapped something back.
    Addie shut her sketchbook and slipped off the bed, pulling Nina after us. “Come on, have you eaten breakfast?”
    “Nope. I was waiting for you. I’ll make you pancakes, if you want.”
    “That would be great.” Addie smiled as Nina grabbed her camcorder and headed for the kitchen.
    We glanced, one last time, at the map stuck to the ceiling.
    The world maps we’d studied in school had always come with the disclaimer that they were old, made before or shortly after the Great Wars began.
World War I
and
World War II
, as Henri called them.
    The Great Wars
had always smashed through our history classes like a giant’s fist, leaving the rest of the world fragmented, unworthy of mapping. We’d been told country lines were muddled, contested to the point of being barely existent. They shifted constantly, as some desperate people attacked another and were assaulted in turn.
    Lies. So much of it lies.
    World War I
and
World War II
seemed so neat in comparison.
    Wars can destroy a country completely,
Henri told us
. But they can also shape it, push it forward. Some of the world was destroyed. Some was shaped. And some was pushed forward.
    What do they have that we don’t?
I’d asked.
Flying cars?
    Henri laughed.
No, no flying cars. But faster cars. And cell phones. Internet.
    We’d never heard of them. He told us about tiny, cordless phones everyone carried around in their pockets, so widespread that pay phones were all but extinct. He tried to describe some sort of information network that connected computers,