Wilder Girls

by Rory Power

  It takes us a minute because it’s been a long time since we broke ourselves up like this into seven lines. Back before there’d be fourteen or fifteen girls in each line, but now it’s like some of them never existed, and we used to start when we were eleven, but now the youngest of us is thirteen. So many girls are ghosts now, and the lines are short and ragged, and this is why we don’t stand like this anymore, because it hurts too much.

  I’m Chapin, so I’m first, then Reese. Beyond her, Dana Kendrick, Cat Liao, Lauren Porter, and Sarah Ross. I can’t help looking at the space at the end of the line, empty, where Byatt would be.

  “Thank you,” says Headmistress when we’ve finished shuffling into place. “Now, as you all apparently already know”—and I can hear a crack widening in her voice—“early this morning the fence suffered a breach. Nobody is allowed out onto the grounds until further notice.”

  I close my eye. I have to get used to it, to this guilt twisting inside me. I don’t think it’s ever going away.

  “To work on our emergency preparedness,” she continues, “we’ll be conducting a safety drill this morning. Follow me, please.”

  It’s ridiculous. Of course it is. But we follow her down the north hallway, past classrooms and faculty offices, around the corner and all the way back to the music room. It’s big, high ceilings and no windows, with risers built in along one wall. We reform our lines across the wide, empty floor.

  There were music stands, before, and a piano. Some girls had violins they brought from home. But everything’s long gone. Only the teacher’s desk left, bolted to the floor at the front of the room. Next to me, Cat shivers. It’s cold in here, where the sun never reaches.

  Once we’re inside, Headmistress counts us and counts us again. I wait for her to explain, but she stands in front of us with her lips moving silently, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was shaking. And then she nods to Taylor, who takes a step out of line.

  My stomach drops. I should have known. I should have seen it coming. She was the one carrying Mona to the Harker house. I thought she was ours, but she’s not. She’s theirs.

  “Take her,” Headmistress says.

  Taylor pushes toward me, and it must be me, it must be—they know I broke the quarantine. Headmistress must have found out. But Taylor strides past me, her eyes fixed on someone else.

  “Wait,” I say, but it’s all I have time for, and then Taylor is wrapping Reese’s braid around her fist and dragging her to the ground. Reese cries out, but Taylor wrestles her onto her front, pins her arms behind her back. It jerks her injured shoulder, and she screams something that sounds like my name.

  Somebody yells, and I’m pushing past Cat, fighting to get to Reese through a crowd of confusion as Taylor cuffs Reese on the back of the head. I see her go limp, blood blooming fresh as her eyes flutter. Before I can blink, Taylor has Reese heaved over her shoulder and she’s making for the door. What the hell is going on? Where are they taking her?

  “Hey,” I call, and lurch after them. I’m almost to Taylor when somebody grabs my collar and yanks me back, tosses me to the floor. Headmistress stands over me, her outline blurred as my vision swims and clears.

  And then they’re out of the room, Headmistress shutting the door behind them. I struggle to my feet, pull at the handle, but there’s the heavy click of a lock being turned.

  “Reese!” I yell. “Reese!” But they’re moving down the hallway, quick footsteps until they’re gone. Why would they take her? What will they do to her?

  Julia comes up next to me, worry written clearly on her face. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, shit, I—”

  Suddenly, a hissing noise above us, and with a sputter the safety sprinkler system turns on.

  It’s a fine sort of mist, light and clinging. I squint up into it, feel my hair getting heavy with the damp. Too thick to be just water, the scent too clean, too chemical.

  What the hell is this?

  But I know. It’s whatever was in that canister. Carson and Julia and me, we carried it back in our own hands. We signed our own death warrant, laid our heads on the chopping block and handed Headmistress the ax.

  Around me girls are covering their heads with their jackets as the mist thickens to fog, chatter rising. Somebody starts coughing, and it’s getting harder to see, harder to think. Droplets stick to my lashes, scattering light across my vision, and I run my hands over my face. They come away almost sticky, the pale, sickly cast of skin muted and flattened underneath the clinging fog. My chest thick, stuffed with cotton, and the deeper I breathe, the less air I can find.

  We have to get out of here. We have to get out of here now.

  The door is brand-new, built a few years ago, with a big square of glass set into it, run through with security wire. I know Headmistress locked it, but I test the handle anyway. Throw my whole body against it, and no give.

  “Here,” Julia says, “my knife.” I step aside, and she crouches in front of the door, slides her knife out of her belt, and starts working it into the keyhole on the handle, trying to get it to turn.

  It’s panic now, electric. Not just in us but everywhere, and whipping us into havoc. I can barely think over the shouting, can barely see through the fog. I tug my shirt up over my mouth and breathe through it. It helps at first. I can feel my head clear and my thoughts come whirring back, but there’s too much of it, still spraying out of the sprinklers, and there’s no place for it to go but into us.

  That’s when the first of us drops. Fast, there one second and down on the ground the next, angled all wrong, eyes open and staring.

  “Oh my God,” Cat says, and then she’s out too.

  “Julia,” I say, “you have to hurry.”

  Sarah bends over Cat, shakes her shoulders. On the other side of the room somebody short and rail-thin is cradled in Landry’s arms. Someone crying, someone screaming, and if we stay in here much longer, there won’t be any of us left.

  “This isn’t working,” I say. Breath too short, too shallow. “Can we break the glass?”

  Julia stands up, looking faint. “With what?”

  And she’s right. There’s nothing in here, not even a music stand, and the security wire in the window would shred the hand of anybody who broke through it. But that may be the only choice we have left. My head is clouding, my vision going. I don’t have long before I pass out. This has to be quick.

  I take off my jacket and wrap it around my left hand, grip the fabric tight in my fist. I know this will hurt, but the fog is burning in my lungs, and it’s now or never.

  I hit the glass, hit it hard, once, twice, and again.

  It smashes open. There’s a second after the break where I don’t feel anything, just the cold rush of new air, and then the pain slams into me, explodes up from my hand and knocks me out at the knees. I slump forward against the door, work my other hand through the gap in the window, and fumble for the lock. The metal turning in my slick grip, and I think I’m gonna be sick.

  I lean against the handle. The world tilts wildly. Door swinging open, and above me a gray plain, wavering, blurring. I can’t feel my hand anymore, and I close my eye, sink to the floor.

  “Hey, hey. Come on, now.”

  I fight awake. Julia is kneeling over me. “Did it work?” I croak.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “The air’s clearing. Here, lift your arm. I think you’re supposed to keep it elevated. You’re bleeding pretty bad.”

  She hoists my arm up by the elbow and peels my jacket from around my shattered hand. It feels like skin ripping off me, but it’s nothing, just more pain, and I have enough of that already.

  The rest of the room is coming back into focus, and around me, I’m starting to see. All of us girls, collapsed and sprawled out where we fell. Julia and me by the door, the others spread out a
cross the room. Every one of us, some more awake than others and starting to stir, but all with the same hazy nothingness behind our eyes.

  “Outside,” I say. “We have to get out of this room.”

  Slowly, the sprinklers stop spitting down, and Julia helps me cradle my arm across my chest as I get to my feet. Glass scattered, blood staining the checkered floor. I watch the girls left living drag the bodies past me, out into the hallway, and I stagger after them.

  How could Headmistress do this to us? After all this time, after everything we’ve survived, how could she give up on us now?

  CHAPTER 21

  Sixteen dead. We take stock in the main hall, away from what’s left of the gas, Julia binding up my hand with strips of cloth ripped from a dead girl’s jacket. It’s mostly the little ones, only Emmy left from the youngest year, but Dara from my year is gone, and so are three from the year above. We line up their bodies and close their eyes.

  When we’ve finished, everyone’s quiet, just the sound of muffled crying breaking the stillness. About forty of us left, and we feel so small. I see Emmy sitting by the bodies of the girls in her year, combing their hair out with careful fingers, and my heart catches in my chest.

  “This is Headmistress,” Cat says, her voice cracking. “She did this to us. We can’t let her get away with it, with killing our friends. With trying to kill us.”

  “What is there to do about it?” Lauren says, and I look over to where she’s standing by her friend Sarah’s body. “She’s gone.”

  “I can find her,” I say, ignoring the throbbing pain in my hand. I have to. If I find her, I find Reese. And Reese is depending on me.

  “And then what?” Lauren laughs harshly. “We kill her?”

  “Yes,” says Cat. “That’s exactly what we do.”

  There’s a murmur of agreement, starting low and building, but Lauren shakes her head. “There’s still a bear outside. The gate’s open. This house is done for and so are we. Isn’t that what we should be worried about?”

  Cat starts yelling, and the room fractures into sound. I look to Julia, who hasn’t said a word. She’s got her arm around Carson, whose head is tucked in the hollow of Julia’s neck. She has her girl. I’m missing both of mine.

  “Hey,” I say softly. “What do you think?”

  Julia looks at Cat and Lauren as they argue, and then back at me. “Go find Reese,” she says. “She doesn’t have time for this.”

  I smile gratefully, give her hand a squeeze with my working one before backing up slowly, inching toward the door. When nobody gives me a second glance, I duck through, and step out into the corridor. Hurry back to the main hall, my gait uneven, head still clearing from the fog. My left hand is pulsing in time with my heart, blood still seeping through my bandages, and I know it’ll never straighten and bend the way it used to.

  Through the windows the day is bright, full of sun, and if I listen close, I can hear the bear, huffing sharp breaths just outside the door. It must have finished with Lindsay’s body. And now it’s coming for the rest of us.

  There are only a few places secure enough for Headmistress to use to hold Reese. One of them is her office, but I can see from here that the door is open, and so I don’t bother checking. Just hurry up to the second floor, every step stronger than the last. Headmistress tried to take me down and she couldn’t—I’m not letting her take Reese, either.

  There, the door to the infirmary staircase. It’s ajar, swinging slightly like somebody just went through. But I don’t hear anybody up on the third floor. Maybe Taylor and Headmistress are lying in wait, ready to lock me up just like Reese. Nothing for it, though, no plan to make. I don’t have anything left. I start up the stairs, leaning heavily against the wall as the pain in my hand gets worse.

  The infirmary is dark, shut doors blocking the morning’s sun. The last time I was here I was looking for Byatt, and it felt like the answers were just out of reach. Now I have them—I know they’ve taken her off the island, and I know Welch was tied up in all of it—and it’s drained the fight from me. I don’t need the truth anymore. I just want to live.

  Nowhere to hide down the narrow corridor. I think I’m alone up here. I stumble from door to door, listening for something, anything. Until there, the last door in the corridor, to the room where I found Byatt’s needle and thread. The locks done up, and a muffled sound from inside, like the springs of a mattress.

  Reese.

  Easy, I tell myself. If she’s there, someone else might be too. I lie down on the floorboards, my left eye to the ground. I can see under the door, through a gap maybe an inch or two tall. There are the legs of the cot, and what looks like a stool pulled up next to it. No Headmistress and no Taylor.

  I start at the top, undo the deadbolts one by one. They’re driven deep into the wall, and with only my right hand working, it takes all my strength to slide them back. I’ve just finished the first one when I hear it. Soft, hardly there.

  “Hetty?”

  I press my forehead against the door. It’s her. It’s really her. “Hey. Are you okay?”

  A beat of silence and then: “I think so.”

  “What did they do to you? What did they want you for?”

  “They wanted…,” she says, trailing off, and she sounds woozy. “They wanted a way off the island.”

  The blow to the head she took back in the music room must have her dazed still, and the way she’s talking is strange, like she’s not all there. I pull at the next deadbolt, and it barely moves. “Hang in there,” I say. “I’m getting you out.”

  I hear her take a catching breath, and I think she’s about to say something when somebody, somebody not Reese, says my name from down the hall.

  Taylor.

  I turn around slowly. The edges of her are smudged in the darkness of the hallway, but there she is. Watching me.

  “Back up,” she says. “Get away from the door.”

  “Taylor?”

  She takes a few steps toward me, and I can see her face now, can see the stubborn set of her jaw and the knife in her belt. I turn more fully toward her, make sure the makeshift bandage on my hand is visible. If she thinks I’m not a threat, maybe we can find a way out of this.

  “I just wanted to talk to her,” I lie. “Just to make sure she’s okay.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Taylor’s voice is flat, harsh. “I said get away from the door.”

  “Is she all right? Can you tell me that, at least?”

  “Back up. Right now.”

  Taylor used to be one of us. Underneath everything, she has to care at least a little. If I can just keep pushing, maybe I’ll get her to crack. Maybe I’ll get myself another chance. “What did you do to her? What did you want her for? Tell me that and I’ll go. We can pretend I was never here.”

  Taylor shakes her head. “You know I can’t let you leave, Hetty.”

  I put on my best smile. “Sure, you can. You can do whatever you want.”

  “I am.” She takes another step closer. “Headmistress and I are getting off this fucking island. And if anybody knows how, it’s your friend.”

  I remember what she said at the Harker house that night. How she said she left Boat Shift because we deserved better. What kind of bullshit. This is what she really did it for, why she knocked Reese out, why she left us in that room to die. To get away.

  “You really think they’ll just let you leave? The Navy and the CDC?” She can’t be that naive. I used to be, and look what happened.

  She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. We’re not about to stay here.”

  “But what about the rest of us?”

  “I am so sick of that question,” Taylor growls. “What about me, huh? What about me?”

  I can’t argue with it, can’t push past the guilt sitting in my stomach. “Listen, you can’t just kill me,
” I say instead. Taylor scoffs, but I smile like Byatt would. “You want a way off the island. So come with me—we’ll find it together.”

  Another step closer. “You’re lying,” Taylor says.

  “I’m not, I’m not. I promise.” But Taylor isn’t listening to me anymore, and she reaches for the knife stuck in her belt.

  “Put that away. Come on, you don’t have to,” I say, sugar words already crumbling apart. My hand is trembling as I hold it out, try to ward her off.

  “Yes, I do.”

  I have to go now. But she’s blocking the way, and there’s no escape, and Taylor, she lunges to grab me.

  CHAPTER 22

  Fast, so fast it blurs. I see her reaching, I see the white of her hand and the white of her knife, and I don’t know which is which so I grab the one that’s near me, force the other one away. Stamp down hard on her foot.

  Taylor smashes her elbow into my nose, and I’m staggering back against the wall, pain exploding in my injured hand, my hair in my eye, blood in my mouth and smearing everywhere, up over my cheeks and into my ears.

  Her knife darting out, and I yank her in closer, press the blade flat against me so she can’t use it, and she’s trying to turn it, she’s trying to drag it across me, trying to open a canyon in my chest so I—it doesn’t take much, I just—I tilt and push—and it goes in easy. Like she was waiting for it.

  “Oh my God,” I say. “Oh my God.”

  She slides off the knife. She falls. The knife does too. She’s leaking everywhere, and I don’t know how to make her stop.

  “Hetty.”

  I don’t know if anything could make her stop. Taylor’s eyes are fluttering. There are choking noises in the air as she twitches and shudders, one hand grabbing at nothing, the other pressed to her ribs. And Taylor is Welch, and Welch is Mr. Harker, and everything is always happening over and over again.

  A voice from behind me, from somewhere else. “Hetty. Hetty.”