by Лорен Оливер
My father is already here; I see that he is talking to Patrick Riley, the man who took over as the head of Deliria-Free America after Thomas Fineman was assasinated last month. Riley must have come up from New York, where the group is headquartered.
I think of what Cassandra told me—that the DFA worked with the Invalids, that Fred has too, that both attacks were planned—and feel as if I’m going crazy. I no longer know what to believe. Maybe they’ll lock me in the Crypts with Cassandra and take away my shoelaces.
I have to swallow back the sudden urge to laugh.
“Excuse me,” I say as soon as Fred’s grip on my elbow loosens and I see the opportunity to escape. “I’m going to get a drink.”
Fred smiles at me, although his eyes are dark. The warning is plain: Behave. “Of course,” he says lightly. As I make my way across the living room, the crowd presses tightly around him, blocking him from view.
A linen-draped table has been set up in front of the large bay windows, which look out onto the Hargroves’ well-manicured lawn and impeccable flower beds, where blooms have been organized by height, type, and color. I ask for water and try and make myself as inconspicuous as possible, hoping to avoid conversation for at least a few minutes.
“There she is! Hana! Remember me?” From across the room, Celia Briggs—who is standing next to Steven Hilt, wearing a dress that makes it look as though she has stumbled accidentally into an enormous pile of blue chiffon—is frantically trying to get my attention. I look away, pretending not to have seen her. As she begins barging toward me, pulling Steven by the sleeve, I push into the hall and speed toward the back of the house.
I wonder whether Celia knows what happened last summer: how Steven and I breathed into each other’s mouths, and let feelings pass between each other’s tongues. Maybe Steven has told her. Maybe they laugh about it now, now that we are all safely on the other side of those roiling, frightening nights.
I head to the screened-in porch at the back of the house, but this, too, is packed with people. As I’m about to pass the kitchen, I hear the swell of Mrs. Hargrove’s voice: “Grab that bucket of ice, will you? The bartender’s almost out.”
Hoping to avoid her, I duck into Fred’s study, shutting the door quickly behind me. Mrs. Hargrove will only pilot me firmly back to the party, back to Celia Briggs, and the room full of all those teeth. I lean against the door, exhaling slowly.
My eyes land on the single painting in the room: the man, the hunter, and the butchered carcasses.
Only this time, I don’t look away.
There’s something wrong with the hunter—he’s dressed too well, in an old-fashioned suit and polished boots. Unconsciously, I take two steps closer, horrified and unable to look away. The animals strung from meat hooks aren’t animals at all.
They’re women.
Corpses, human corpses, strung from the ceiling and piled on the marble floor.
Next to the artist’s signature is a small, painted note: The Myth of Bluebeard, or, The Dangers of Disobedience.
I feel a need I can’t exactly name—to speak, or scream, or run. Instead I sit down on the stiff-backed leather chair behind the desk, lean forward, and rest my head on my arms, and try to remember how to cry. But nothing comes except for a faint itch in my throat and a headache.
I don’t know how long I have been sitting like that when I become aware of a siren drawing closer. Then the room is thrown, suddenly, into color: flashes of red and white burst intermittently through the windowpane. The sirens are still going, though—and then I realize that they are everywhere, both near and close, some wailing shrilly just down the street and some no louder than an echo.
Something is wrong.
I move out into the hall, just as several doors slam at once. The murmur of conversation and the music have stopped. Instead I hear people shouting over one another. Fred bursts into the hall and comes striding toward me, just after I’ve closed the door to his study.
He stops when he sees me. “Where were you?” he asks.
“The porch,” I say quickly. My heart is beating hard. “I needed some air.”
He opens his mouth; just then my mother comes into the hall, her face pale.
“Hana,” she says. “There you are.”
“What happened?” I ask. More and more people are flowing out of the living room: regulators in their pressed uniforms, Fred’s bodyguards, two solemn-faced police officers, and Patrick Riley, wrestling on his blazer. Cell phones are ringing, and bursts of walkie-talkie static fill the hall.
“There’s been a disturbance at the border wall,” my mother says, her eyes flitting nervously to Fred.
“Resisters.” I can tell from my mother’s expression that my guess is right.
“They’ve been killed, of course,” Fred says loudly, so everyone can hear.
“How many were there?” I ask.
Fred turns to me as he’s shoving his arms into his suit coat, which a gray-faced regulator has just passed him. “Does it matter? We’ve taken care of it.”
My mother shoots me a look and gives me a minute shake of the head.
Behind him, a policeman murmurs into his walkie-talkie. “Ten-four, ten-four, we’re on our way.”
“You ready?” Patrick Riley asks Fred.
Fred nods. Instantly, his cell phone starts blaring. He removes it from his pocket and silences it quickly. “Shit. We better hurry. The office phones are probably going crazy.”
My mom places an arm around my shoulders. I’m momentarily startled. It’s very rare that we touch like this. She must be more worried than she seems.
“Come on,” she says. “Your father’s waiting for us.”
“Where are we going?” I ask. She’s already moving me toward the front of the house.
“Home,” she says.
Outside, the guests are already amassing. We join the line of people waiting for their cars. We see seven and eight people piling into sedans, women in long gowns squeezing on top of one another in backseats. It’s obvious that no one wants to walk the streets, which are filled with the distant sounds of wailing.
My father ends up riding in the front with Tony. My mom and I squeeze into the backseat with Mr. and Mrs. Brande, who both work in the Department of Sanitization. Normally, Mrs. Brande can’t stop running her mouth—my mom has always speculated that the cure left her with no verbal self-control—but tonight we drive in silence. Tony goes faster than usual.
It begins to rain. The streetlamps pattern the windows with broken halos of light. Now, alert with fear and anxiety, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. I make a sudden decision: no more going to Deering Highlands. It’s too dangerous. Lena’s family is not my problem. I have done all I can do.
The guilt is still there, pressing at my throat, but I swallow it down.
We pass under another streetlamp, and the rain on the windows becomes long fingers; then once again the car is swallowed in darkness. I imagine I see different figures moving through the dark, skating next to the car, faces merging in and out of the shadow. For a second, as we move beneath another streetlamp, I see a hooded figure emerging from the woods at the side of the road. Our eyes meet, and I let out a small cry.
Alex. It’s Alex.
“What’s the matter?” my mother asks tensely.
“Nothing, I—” By the time I turn around, he is gone, and then I’m sure I only imagined him. I must have imagined him. Alex is dead; he was taken down at the border and never made it into the Wilds. I swallow hard. “I thought I saw something.”
“Don’t worry, Hana,” my mother says. “We’re perfectly safe in the car.” But she leans forward and says, sharply, to Tony, “Can’t you drive any faster?”
I think of the new wall, lit up by a spinning light, stained red with blood.
What if there are more of them? What if they’re coming for us?
I have a vision of Lena moving out there, sneaking through the streets, ducking between shadows, holding a knif
e. For a moment my lungs stop moving.
But no. She doesn’t know I was the one who gave her and Alex away. No one knows.
Besides, she is probably dead.
And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.
Would she?
Lena
The planning goes late into the night. The sandy-haired man, whose name is Colin, remains sequestered in one of the trailers with Beast and Pippa, Raven and Tack, Max, Cap, my mother, and a few others he has handpicked from his group. He assigns a guard to watch the door; the meeting is invite-only. I know that something big is in the works—as big as, if not bigger than, the Incidents that blew part of a wall out of the Crypts and exploded a police station. From hints that Max has let slip, I’ve gathered that this new rebellion is not simply confined to Portland. As in the earlier Incidents, in cities all across the country, sympathizers and Invalids are gathering and channeling their anger and their energy into displays of resistance.
At one point Max and Raven emerge from the trailer to pee in the woods—their faces drawn and serious—but when I beg Raven to let me join the meeting, she cuts me down immediately.
“Go to bed, Lena,” she says. “Everything’s under control.”
It must be almost midnight; Julian has been asleep for hours. I can’t imagine lying down right now. I feel like my blood is full of thousands of ants—my arms and legs are crawling, itching to move, to do something. I walk in circles, trying to shake the feeling, and fuming—annoyed with Julian, furious with Raven, thinking of all the things I’d like to say to her.
I was the one who got Julian out of the underground. I was the one who risked my life to sneak into New York City and save him. I was the one who got into Waterbury; I was the one who found out Lu was a fraud. And now Raven tells me to go to bed, like I’m an unruly five-year-old.
I take aim at a tin cup that has been lying, half-buried in ash, at the edge of a burned-out campfire, and watch as it rockets twenty feet and pings off the side of a trailer. A man calls out, “Take it easy!” But I don’t care if I’ve woken him up. I don’t care if I wake the whole damn camp up.
“Can’t sleep?”
I spin around, startled. Coral is sitting a little ways behind me, knees hugged to her chest, next to the dying remains of another fire. Every so often she prods it halfheartedly with a stick.
“Hey,” I say cautiously. Since Alex left, she has gone almost completely mute. “I didn’t see you.”
Her eyes go to mine. She smiles weakly. “I can’t sleep either.”
Even though I’m still antsy, it feels weird to be hovering above her, so I lower myself onto one of the smoke-blackened logs that ring the campfire. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”
“Not really.” She gives the fire another prod, watches as it flares momentarily. “It doesn’t matter for me, does it?”
“What do you mean?” I look at her closely for the first time in a week; I’ve been unconsciously avoiding her. There is something tragic and hollow about her now: Her cream-pale skin looks like a husk—empty, sucked dry.
She shrugs and keeps her eyes on the embers. “I mean that I have no one left.”
I swallow. I’ve been meaning to speak to her about Alex, to apologize in some way, but the words never quite come. Even now they grow and stick in my throat. “Listen, Coral.” I take a deep breath. Say it. Just say it. “I’m really sorry that Alex left. I know—I know it must have been hard for you.”
There it is: the spoken admission that he was hers to lose. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I feel weirdly deflated, as though they’ve been swollen, balloonlike, in my chest this whole time.
For the first time since I sat down, she looks at me. I can’t read the expression on her face. “That’s okay,” she says at last, returning her gaze to the fire. “He was still in love with you, anyway.”
It’s as though she’s reached out and punched me in the stomach. All of a sudden, I can’t breathe. “What—what are you talking about?”
Her mouth crooks up into a smile. “He was. It was obvious. That’s okay. He liked me and I liked him.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t mean Alex, anyway, when I said I had no one left. I meant Nan, and the rest of the group. My people.” She throws down the stick and hugs her knees tighter to her chest. “Weird how it’s just hitting me now, huh?”
Even though I’m still stunned by what she has just said, I manage to keep control of myself. I reach out and touch her elbow. “Hey,” I say. “You have us. We’re your people now.”
“Thanks.” Her eyes flick to mine again. She forces a smile. She tilts her head and stares at me critically for a minute. “I can see why he loved you.”
“Coral, you’re wrong—” I start to say.
But just then there’s a footfall behind us, and my mother says, “I thought you went to sleep hours ago.”
Coral stands up, dusting off the back of her jeans—a nervous gesture, since we are all covered in dirt, caked grime that has found its way from our eyelashes to our fingernails. “I was just going,” she says. “Good night, Lena. And . . . thanks.”
Before I can respond, she spins around and heads off toward the southern end of the clearing, where most of our group is clustered.
“She seems like a sweet girl,” my mother says, easing herself down onto the log Coral has vacated. “Too sweet for the Wilds.”
“She’s been here almost her whole life.” I can’t keep the edge from my voice. “And she’s a great fighter.”
My mother stares at me. “Is something wrong?”
“What’s wrong is that I don’t like being kept in the dark. I want to know what the plan is tomorrow.” My heart is going hard. I know I’m not being fair to my mother—it isn’t her fault I wasn’t allowed in to plan—but I feel like I could scream. Coral’s words have shaken something loose inside me, and I can feel it rattling around in my chest, knifing against my lungs. He was still in love with you.
No. It’s impossible; she got it all wrong. He never loved me. He told me so.
My mother’s face turns serious. “Lena, you have to promise me that you’ll stay here, at the camp, tomorrow. You have to promise me you won’t fight.”
Now it’s my turn to stare. “What?”
She rakes a hand through her hair, making it look as though it has been styled with an electric current. “Nobody knows exactly what we can expect inside that wall. The security forces are estimates, and we’re not sure how much support our friends in Portland have drummed up. I was urging a delay, but I was overruled.” She shakes her head. “It’s dangerous, Lena. I don’t want you to be a part of it.”
The rattling piece in my chest—the anger and sadness over losing Alex, and also, more than that, even, over this life that we string together from scraps and tatters and half-spoken words and promises that are not fulfilled—explodes suddenly.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” I am practically shaking. “I’m not a child anymore. I grew up. I grew up without you. And you can’t tell me what to do.”
I half expect her to snap back at me, but she just sighs and stares at the smoldering orange glow still embedded in the ash, like a buried sunset. Then she says abruptly, “Do you remember the Story of Solomon?”
Her words are so unexpected that for a moment, I can’t speak. I can only nod.
“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me what you remember.”
Alex’s note, still tucked into the pouch around my neck, seems to be smoldering too, burning against my chest. “Two mothers are fighting over a child,” I say cautiously. “They decide to cut the baby in half. The king decrees it.”
My mother shakes her head. “No. That’s the revised vers
ion; that’s the story in The Book of Shhh. In the real story, the mothers don’t cut the baby in half.”
I go very still, almost afraid to breathe. I feel as though I’m teetering on a precipice, on the verge of understanding, and I’m not yet sure if I want to go over.
My mother goes on, “In the real story, King Solomon decides that the baby should be cut in half. But it’s only a test. One mother agrees; the other woman says that she’ll give up claim to the baby altogether. She doesn’t want the child injured.” My mother turns her eyes to me. Even in the dark, I can see their sparkle, the clarity that has never gone away. “That’s how the king identifies the real mother. She’s willing to sacrifice her claim, sacrifice her happiness, to keep the baby safe.”
I close my eyes and see embers burning behind my lids: blood-red dawn, smoke and fire, Alex behind the ash. All of a sudden, I know. I understand the meaning of his note.
“I’m not trying to control you, Lena,” my mother says, her voice low. “I just want you to be safe. That’s what I’ve always wanted.”
I open my eyes. The memory of Alex standing behind the fence as a black swarm enfolded him, recedes. “It’s too late.” My voice sounds hollow, and not like my own. “I’ve seen things . . . I’ve lost things you can’t understand.”
It’s the closest I’ve come to speaking about Alex. Thankfully, she doesn’t pry. She just nods.
“I’m tired.” I push myself to my feet. My body, too, feels unfamiliar, as though I’m a puppet that has begun to come apart at the seams. Alex sacrificed himself once so that I could live and be happy. Now he has done it again.
I’ve been so stupid. And he is gone; there is no way for me to reach him and tell him I know and understand.
There is no way for me to tell him that I am still in love with him, too.
“I’m going to get some sleep,” I tell her, avoiding her eyes.
“I think that’s a good idea,” she says.
I’ve already started to move away from her when she calls out to me. I turn around. The fire has now burned out completely, and her face is swallowed in darkness.
