by Лорен Оливер
In school we were always taught that other countries—places without the cure—had been ravaged by the disease and turned into wastelands. But this, like most other things we were taught, was no doubt a lie. Gordo has heard stories from trappers and drifters about Canada, and he makes it sound like Eden in The Book of Shhh.
“I say Cape Cod,” Pike says. He has white-blond hair, ruthlessly trimmed down to the scalp. “If the bombing begins again—”
“If the bombing begins again, we won’t be safe anywhere,” Tack interrupts him. Pike and Tack are constantly butting heads.
“We’re safer the farther we are from a city,” Pike argues. If the resistance turns into a full-on rebellion, we can expect swift and immediate reprisals from the government. “We’ll have more time.”
“To what? Swim across the ocean?” Tack shakes his head. He is squatting next to Raven, who is repairing one of our traps. It’s amazing how happy she looks here, sitting in the dirt, after a long day of hiking and trapping—happier than she did when we lived together in Brooklyn, posing as cureds, in our nice apartment with shiny edges and polished hard surfaces. There, she was like one of the women we studied in history class, who laced themselves up in corsets until they could barely breathe or speak: white-faced, stifled. “Look, we can’t outrun this. We might as well join forces, build our numbers as best we can.”
Tack catches my eye across the campfire. I smile at him. I don’t know how much Tack and Raven have deciphered about what has happened between Alex and me, and what our history is—they’ve said nothing to me about it—but they have been nicer to me than usual.
“I’m with Tack,” Hunter says. He tosses a bullet into the air, catches it on the back of his hand, then flips it into his palm.
“We could split up,” Raven suggests for the hundredth time. It’s obvious she doesn’t like Pike, or Dani, either. In this new group, the lines of dominance haven’t been so clearly drawn, and what Tack and Raven say doesn’t automatically pass for gospel.
“We’re not splitting up,” Tack says firmly. But immediately he takes the trap from her and says, “Let me help you.”
This is how Tack and Raven work: It’s their private language of push and return, argument and concession. With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered.
Freedom is exhausting.
“What do you think, Lena?” Raven asks, and Pike, Dani, and the others swivel around to look at me. Now that I’ve proven myself to the resistance, my opinion carries weight. From the shadows, I can sense Alex looking at me too.
“Cape Cod,” I say, feeding more kindling into the fire. “The farther we are from the cities, the better, and any advantage is better than none. It’s not like we’ll be alone. There will be other homesteaders there, other groups to join with.” My voice rings out loudly in the clearing. I wonder if Alex has noticed this change: I have gotten louder and more confident.
There’s a moment of quiet. Raven looks at me thoughtfully. Then, abruptly, she turns and shoots a glance over her shoulder. “What about you, Alex?”
“Waterbury,” he answers immediately. My stomach knots up. I know it’s stupid—I know the stakes are higher than the two of us—but I can’t help but feel a flash of anger. Of course he disagrees with me. Of course.
“It’s no advantage to be cut off from communication and information,” he says. “There’s a war on. We can try to deny it, we can try to bury our heads in the sand, but that’s the truth. And the war will find us either way eventually. I say we meet it head-on.”
“He’s right,” Julian pipes up.
I turn to him, startled. He hardly ever speaks in the evenings around the campfire. I don’t think he feels comfortable yet. He is still the newbie, the outsider—and even worse, a convert from the other side. Julian Fineman, son of the late Thomas Fineman, founder and head of Deliria-Free America, and enemy to everything we stand for. It doesn’t matter that Julian turned his back on his family and cause—and nearly gave up his life—to be here with us. I can tell that some people don’t trust him.
Julian speaks with the measured cadence of a practiced public speaker. “There’s no point in using avoidance tactics. This won’t blow over. If the resistance grows, the government and the military will do anything they can to stop it. We’ll have a better chance of fighting back if we put ourselves in the middle of things. Otherwise we’ll just be rabbits in a hole, waiting to be flushed out.”
Even though Julian agrees with Alex, he is careful to keep his eyes trained on Raven. Julian and Alex never speak to or even look at each other, and the others are careful not to comment on it.
“I say Waterbury,” Lu puts in, which surprises me. Last year, she didn’t want anything to do with the resistance. She wanted to disappear into the Wilds, make a homestead as far as possible from the Valid cities.
“All right, then.” Raven stands up, brushing off the back of her jeans. “Waterbury it is. Any other objections?”
We’re all silent for a minute, looking at one another, our faces consumed by shadow. No one speaks. I’m not happy with the decision, and Julian must sense it. He puts a hand on my knee and squeezes.
“Then it’s decided. Tomorrow we can—”
Raven is cut off by the sound of shouting, a sudden flurry of voices. We all rise—an instinctive response.
“What the hell?” Tack has shouldered his rifle and is scanning the mass of trees that surround us, a tangled wall of branches and vines. The woods have fallen silent again.
“Shhh.” Raven holds up a hand.
Then: “I need help out here, guys!” And then, “Shit.” There is a collective release, a relaxation of tension. We recognize Sparrow’s voice. He wandered away earlier to do his business in the woods.
“We got you, Sparrow!” Pike calls out. Figures race into the trees, turning to shadow as soon as they leave the small circumference of brightness cast by the fire. Julian and I stay where we are, and I notice that Alex does too. There is a confusion of voices and instructions—“Her legs, her legs, grab her legs”—and then Sparrow, Tack, Pike, and Dani are emerging once again into the clearing, each pair saddled with a body. At first I think they are each hauling an animal, bundled in tarps, but then I see a pale white arm, dangling toward the ground, starkly illuminated by the fire, and my stomach turns.
People.
“Water, get water!”
“Grab the kit, Raven, she’s bleeding.”
For a moment, I’m paralyzed. As Tack and Pike place the bodies down on the ground, near the fire, two faces are revealed: one old, dark, weather-beaten; a woman who has been in the Wilds for most of her life, if not all of it. Saliva is bubbling at the corners of her mouth, and her breathing is hoarse and full of fluid.
The other face is unexpectedly lovely. She must be my age or even a little younger. Her skin is the color of the inside of an almond, and her long, dark-brown hair is fanned out behind her in the dirt. For a moment I am jettisoned back to my own escape to the Wilds. Raven and Tack must have found me exactly this way—more dead than not, beaten and bruised.
Tack swivels around and catches me staring.
“A little help, Lena,” he says sharply. His voice snaps me out of my trance. I go and kneel beside him, next to the older woman. Raven, Pike, and Dani are taking care of the girl. Julian hovers behind me.
“What can I do?” he asks.
“We need clean water,” Tack says, without looking up. He has his knife out and is cutting away her shirt. In places it seems almost melded with her skin—and then I see, horrified, that her lower half is badly burned, and her legs covered with open sores and infection. I have to close my eyes for a second and will myself not to be sick. Julian brushes my shoulder once with his hand, then goes off in search of the water.
“Shit,” Tack mutters, as he uncovers yet another wound; this one a long, ra
gged cut along her shin, deep and welling with infection. “Shit.” The woman lets out a gurgled moan and then falls silent. “Don’t tap out on me now,” he says. He whips off his wind breaker. Sweat glistens on his forehead. We are close to the fire, which the others are stoking higher.
“I need a kit.” Tack grabs a hand towel and begins ripping it into strips, expertly and quickly. These will be tourniquets. “Someone get me a damn kit.”
The heat is a wall next to us. The dark smoke blots out the sky. It weaves its way into my thoughts, too, distorting my impressions, which begin to take on the quality of dream: the voices, the movement, the heat and the smell of bodies, all fractured and senseless. I can’t tell whether I am kneeling there for minutes or hours. At some point Julian returns, carrying a bucket of steaming water. Then he leaves and returns again. I am helping to clean the woman’s wounds, and after a time I stop seeing her body as skin and flesh, but as something twisted and warped and weird, like the dark pieces of petrified wood we turn up in the forest.
Tack tells me what to do and I do it. More water, cold this time. Clean cloth. I stand, move, take the objects that are given to me and return with them. More minutes pass; more hours.
At some point I look up and it is not Tack next to me, but Alex. He is sewing up a cut on the woman’s shoulder, using a regular sewing needle and long, dark thread. He is pale with concentration, but he moves fluidly and quickly. He has obviously had practice. It occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him—his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.
Our elbows touch. He draws away.
The smoke is coating my throat now, making it difficult to swallow. The air smells like ash. I continue cleaning the woman’s wooden legs and body, the way I used to help my aunt polish the mahogany table once a month, carefully and slowly.
Then Alex is gone, and Tack is next to me again. He puts his hands on my shoulders and draws me gently backward.
“It’s okay,” he’s saying. “Leave it. It’s all right. She doesn’t need you anymore.”
For a second I think, We did it, she’s safe now. But then, as Tack pilots me toward the tents, I see her face lit up in the glow of the fire—white, waxen, eyes open and staring blindly at the sky—and I know that she’s dead, and everything we did was for nothing.
Raven is still kneeling by the younger girl’s side, but her ministrations are less frantic now, and I can hear that the girl is breathing regularly.
Julian is already in the tent. I’m so tired, I feel as though I’m sleepwalking. He moves over and makes a space for me, and I practically collapse into him, into that little question mark formed by his body. My hair reeks of smoke.
“Are you okay?” Julian whispers, finding my hand in the dark.
“Fine,” I whisper back.
“Is she okay?”
“Dead,” I say shortly.
Julian sucks in a breath, and I feel his body stiffen behind me. “I’m sorry, Lena.”
“You can’t save them all,” I say. “That’s not how it works.” That is what Tack would say, and I know it’s true, even if, deep down, I still don’t quite believe it.
Julian squeezes me, and kisses the back of my head, and then I let myself tunnel down into sleep, and away from the smell of burning.
Hana
For a second night, the fog of my sleep is disturbed by an image: two eyes, floating up through darkened murk. Then the eyes are disks of light, headlights bearing down on me—I’m frozen in the middle of the road, surrounded by the heavy smells of garbage and car exhaust . . . gripped, motionless, in the roaring heat from an engine. . . .
I wake up just before midnight, sweating.
This can’t be happening. Not to me.
I stand up and fumble toward the bathroom, bumping my shin against one of the unpacked boxes in my room. Even though we moved in late January, more than two months ago, I haven’t bothered to unpack anything other than the basics. In less than three weeks I’ll be married, and I’ll have to move again. Besides, my old belongings—the stuffed animals and books and funny porcelain figurines I used to collect as a kid—don’t mean very much to me anymore.
In the bathroom, I splash cold water on my face, trying to shock out the memory of those headlight-eyes, the tightness in my chest, the terror of being flattened. I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, that the cure works a little bit differently for everyone.
Outside the window, the moon is round and improbably bright. I press my nose up to the glass. Across the street is a house nearly identical to ours, and next to it is another mirror-image house. On and on they go, dozens of replicas: the same gabled roofs, newly constructed and meant to look old.
I feel a need to move. I used to get the itch all the time, when my body was crying out for a run. I haven’t run more than once or twice since I was cured—the few times I tried, it just wasn’t the same—and even now, the idea has no appeal. But I want to do something.
I change into a pair of old sweatpants and a dark sweatshirt. I put on an old baseball cap, too, which belonged to my father—partly to keep my hair back, and partly so that if anyone does happen to be out, I won’t be recognized. Technically, it isn’t illegal for me to be out past curfew, but I have no desire to field questions from my parents. It’s not something that Hana Trent, soon-to-be Hana Hargrove, would do. I don’t want them to know I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I can’t give them a reason to be suspicious.
I lace up my sneakers and tiptoe to the bedroom door. Last summer, I used to sneak out all the time. There was the forbidden rave in the warehouse behind Otremba’s Paints and the party in Deering Highlands that was raided; there were nights on the beach at Sunset Park and illegal meet-ups with uncured boys, including the time at Back Cove when I let Steven Hilt put a hand on the inside of my bare thigh and time seemed to stop.
Steven Hilt: dark eyelashes, neat straight teeth, the smell of pine needles; the drop in my stomach whenever he looked at me.
The memories seem like snapshots from someone else’s life.
I ease downstairs in near-total silence. I find the latch on the front door and turn it by minuscule increments, so that the bolt withdraws soundlessly.
The wind is chilly and rustles the holly shrubs that encircle our yard, just inside the iron gate. The shrubs, too, are a feature of WoodCove Farms: For security and protection, the real estate brochures said, and a real measure of privacy.
I pause, listening for sounds of passing patrols. Nothing. But they can’t be too far off. WoodCove advertises a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week volunteer guard corps. Still, the community is large, and full of dozens of offshoots and cul-de-sacs. With any luck, I’ll be able to avoid them.
Down the front walk, down the flagstone path, to the iron gate. A blur of black bats skirts past the moon, sending shadows skating across the lawn. I shiver. Already, the itch is draining out of me. I think about returning to bed, burrowing under the soft blankets and the pillows scented faintly of detergent; waking up refreshed to a nice big breakfast of scrambled eggs.
Something bangs in the garage. I spin around. The garage door is partially open.
My first thought is of a photographer. One of them has jumped the gate and camped out in the yard. But I quickly dismiss the idea. Mrs. Hargrove has carefully orchestrated all our press opportunities, and so far, I haven’t been an object of attention unless I’m with Fred.
My second thought is gas thief. Recently, because of government-mandated restrictions, especially in the poorer parts of the city, there has been a rash of break-ins throughout Portland. It was especially bad during the winter: Furnaces were drained of oil, and cars of gas; houses were raided and vandalized. In February, there were two hundred burglaries alone, the largest number of crimes since the cure was made mandatory forty years ago.
&nbs
p; I consider heading inside and waking my dad. But that would mean questions, and explanations.
Instead I cross the yard toward the garage, keeping my eye on the half-open door, checking for signs of movement. The grass is coated with dew, which soaks rapidly into my sneakers. I have a prickly, all-over body feeling. Someone is watching me.
A twig snaps behind me. I whirl around. A ripple of wind again disturbs the holly. I take a deep breath and turn back to the garage. My heart drums high in my throat, an uncomfortable and unfamiliar feeling. I have not been afraid—really afraid—since the morning of my cure, when I couldn’t even unknot the hospital gown because my hands were shaking so badly.
“Hello?” I whisper.
Another rustle. Something—or someone—is definitely in the garage. I stand a few feet outside the door, struck rigid with fear. Stupid. This is stupid. I’ll go into the house and wake Dad. I’ll say I heard a noise, and I’ll deal with questions later.
Then, faintly: a mewling sound. A cat’s eyes blink momentarily at me in the open door.
I exhale. A stray cat—nothing more. Portland is lousy with them. Dogs, too. People buy them, and then can’t afford or don’t care to keep them, and dump them in the streets. For years they’ve been breeding. I’ve heard there are whole packs of wild dogs that roam around the Highlands.
I move forward slowly. The cat watches me. I put my hand on the garage door, ease it open a few more inches.
“Come on,” I coo. “Come on out of there.”
The cat bolts back into the garage. It darts past my old bike, knocking against the kickstand. The bike starts to totter, and I spring forward and grab it before it can crash to the ground. The handlebars are dusty; even though it’s practically pitch-dark, I can feel the grime.
I keep one hand on the bike, steadying it, and feel for the switch on the wall. I flick on the overhead lights. Immediately, the normalcy of the garage reasserts itself: the car, the trash cans, the lawn mower in the corner; cans of paint and extra tanks of gas stacked neatly in the corner, in a pyramid formation. The cat is crouched among them. At least the cat looks relatively clean—it’s not frothing at the mouth or covered with scabs. Nothing to be afraid of. One more step toward her, and she bolts again; this time shooting around the car and circling past me, out into the yard.
