In the beginning, there is fire.
Fire in my legs and lungs; fire tearing through every nerve and cell in my body. That’s how I am born again, in pain: I emerge from the suffocating heat and the darkness. I force my way through a black, wet space of strange noises and smells.
I run, and when I can no longer run, I limp, and when I can’t do that, I crawl, inch by inch, digging my fingernails into the soil, like a worm sliding across the overgrown surface of this strange new wilderness.
I bleed, too, when I am born.
I’m not sure how far I’ve traveled into the Wilds, and how long I’ve been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods, when I realize I’ve been hit. At least one regulator must have clipped me while I was climbing the fence. A bullet has skimmed me on the side, just below my armpit, and my T-shirt is wet with blood. I’m lucky, though. The wound is shallow, but seeing all the blood, the missing skin, makes everything real: this new place, this monstrous, massive growth everywhere, what has happened, what I have left.
What has been taken from me.
There is nothing in my stomach, but I throw up anyway. I cough up air and spit bile into the flat, shiny leaves on either side of me. Birds twitter above me. An animal, coming to investigate, scurries quickly back into the tangle of growth.
Think, think. Alex. Think of what Alex would do.
Alex is here, right here. Imagine.
I take off my shirt, rip off the hem, and tie the cleanest bit tightly around my chest so it presses against my wound and helps stanch the bleeding. I have no idea where I am or where I’m going. My only thought is to move, keep going, deeper and deeper, away from the fences and the world of dogs and guns and—
Alex.
No. Alex is here. You have to imagine.
Step by step, fighting thorns, bees, mosquitoes; snapping back thick, broad branches; clouds of gnats, mists hovering in the air. At one point, I reach a river: I am so weak, I am nearly taken under by its current. At night, driving rain, fierce and cold: huddled between the roots of an enormous oak, while around me unseen animals scream and pant and rattle through the darkness. I’m too terrified to sleep; if I sleep, I’ll die.
I am not born all at once, the new Lena.
Step by step—and then, inch by inch.
Crawling, insides curled into dust, mouth full of the taste of smoke.
Fingernail by fingernail, like a worm.
That is how she comes into the world, the new Lena.
When I can no longer go forward, even by an inch, I lay my head on the ground and wait to die. I’m too tired to be frightened. Above me is blackness, and all around me is blackness, and the forest sounds are a symphony to sing me out of this world. I am already at my funeral. I am being lowered into a narrow, dark space, and my aunt Carol is there, and Hana, and my mother and sister and even my long-dead father. They are all watching my body descend into the grave, and they are singing.
I am in a black tunnel filled with mist, and I am not afraid.
Alex is waiting for me on the other side; Alex standing, smiling, bathed in sunlight.
Alex reaching out his arms to me, calling—
Hey. Hey.
Wake up.
“Hey. Wake up. Come on, come on, come on.”
The voice pulls me back from the tunnel, and for a moment I’m horribly disappointed when I open my eyes and see not Alex’s face, but some other face, sharp and unfamiliar. I can’t think; the world is all fractured. Black hair, a pointed nose, bright green eyes—pieces of a puzzle I can’t make sense of.
“Come on, that’s right, stay with me. Bram, where the hell is that water?”
A hand under my neck, and then, suddenly, salvation. A sensation of ice, and liquid sliding: water filling my mouth, my throat, pouring over my chin, melting away the dust, the taste of fire. First I cough, choke, almost cry. Then I swallow, gulp, suck, while the hand stays under my neck, and the voice keeps whispering encouragement. “That’s right. Have as much as you need. You’re all right. You’re safe now.”
Black hair, loose, a tent around me: a woman. No, a girl—a girl with a thin, tight mouth, and creases at the corners of her eyes, and hands as rough as willow, as big as baskets. I think, Thank you. I think, Mother.
“You’re safe. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
That’s how babies are born, after all: cradled in someone else’s arms, sucking, helpless.
After that, the fever pulls me under again. My waking moments are few, and my impressions disjointed. More hands, and more voices; I am lifted; a kaleidoscope of green above me, and fractal patterns in the sky. Later there is the smell of campfire, and something cold and wet pressed against my skin, smoke and hushed voices, searing pain in my side, then ice, relief. Softness sliding against my legs.
In between are dreams unlike any I’ve ever had before. They are full of explosions and violence: dreams of skin melting and skeletons charred to black bits.
Alex never comes to me again. He has gone ahead of me and disappeared beyond the tunnel.
Almost every time I wake she is there, the black-haired girl, urging me to drink water, or pressing a cool towel to my forehead. Her hands smell like smoke and cedar.
And beneath it all, beneath the rhythm of the waking and sleeping, the fever and the chills, is the word she repeats, again and again, so it weaves its way into my dreams, begins to push back some of the darkness there, draws me up out of the drowning: Safe. Safe. Safe. You’re safe now.
The fever breaks, finally, after I don’t know how long, and at last I float into consciousness on the back of that word, gently, softly, like riding a single wave all the way into the shore.
Before I even open my eyes, I’m conscious of plates banging together, the smell of something frying, and the murmur of voices. My first thought is that I’m at home, in Aunt Carol’s house, and she’s about to call me down for breakfast—a morning like any other.
Then the memories—the flight with Alex, the botched escape, my days and nights alone in the Wilds—come slamming back, and I snap my eyes open, trying to sit up. My body won’t obey me, though. I can’t do more than lift my head; I feel as though I’ve been encased in stone.
The black-haired girl, the one who must have found me and brought me here—wherever here is—stands in the corner, next to a large stone sink. She whips around when she hears me shift in my bed.
“Easy,” she says. She brings her hands out of the sink, wet to the elbow. Her face is sharp, extremely alert, like an animal’s. Her teeth are small, too small for her mouth, and slightly crooked. She crosses the room, squats next to the bed. “You’ve been out for a whole day.”
“Where am I?” I croak. My voice is a rasp, barely recognizable as my own.
“Home base,” she says. She is watching me closely. “That’s what we call it, anyway.”
“No, I mean—” I’m struggling to piece together what happened after I climbed the fence. All I can think of is Alex. “I mean, is this the Wilds?”
An expression—of suspicion, possibly—passes quickly over her face. “We’re in a free zone, yes,” she says carefully, then stands and without another word moves away from the bed, disappearing through a darkened doorway. From deeper inside the building I can hear voices indistinctly. I feel a brief pang of fear, wonder if I’ve been wrong to mention the Wilds, wonder if these people are safe. I’ve never heard anyone call unregulated land a “free zone” before.
But no. Whoever they are, they must be on my side; they saved me, have had me completely at their mercy for days.
I manage to haul myself into a half-seated position, propping my head up against the hard stone wall behind me. The whole room is stone: rough stone floors, stone walls on which, in places, a thin film of black mold is growing, an old-fashioned stone basin fitted with a rusted faucet that clearly hasn’t functioned in years. I’m lying on a hard, narrow cot, covered with ratty quilts. This, in addition to a few tin buckets in the corner underneath the defunct sink, and a single wooden chair, is the room’s only furniture. There are no windows in my room, and no lights, either—just two emergency lanterns, battery-operated, which fill the room with a weak bluish light.
On one wall is tacked a small wooden cross with the figure of a man suspended in its middle. I recognize the symbol—it’s a cross from one of the old religions, from the time before the cure, although I can’t remember which one now.
I have a sudden flashback to junior-year American history and Mrs. Dernler glaring at us from behind her enormous glasses, jabbing the open textbook with her finger, saying, “You see? You see? These old religions, stained everywhere with love. They reeked of deliria; they bled it.” And of course at the time it seemed terrible, and true.
Love, the deadliest of all deadly things.
Love, it kills you.
Alex.
Both when you have it…
Alex.
And when you don’t.
Alex.
“You were half-dead when we found you,” the black-haired girl says matter-of-factly as she re-enters the room. She’s holding an earthenware bowl with both hands, carefully. “More than half. We didn’t think you were going to make it. I thought we should at least try.”
She gives me a doubtful look, as though she’s not sure I’ve been worth the effort, and for a moment I think of my cousin Jenny, the way she used to stand with her hands on her hips, scrutinizing me, and I have to close my eyes quickly to keep all of it from rushing back—the flood of images, memories, from a life that is now dead.
“Thank you,” I say.
She shrugs, but says, “You’re welcome,” and seems to mean it. She draws the wooden chair to the side of the bed and sits. Her hair is long and knotted above her left ear. Behind it, she has the mark of the procedure—a three-pronged scar—just like Alex did. But she cannot be cured; she is here, on the other side of the fence: an Invalid.
I try to sit up all the way but have to lean back after only a few seconds of struggle, exhausted. I feel like a puppet halfway come to life. There’s a searing pain behind my eyes, too, and when I look down I see my skin is still crisscrossed with a web of cuts and scrapes and scratches, insect bites and scabs.
The bowl the girl is holding is full of mostly clear broth, tinged with just a bit of green. She starts to pass it to me, then hesitates. “Can you hold it?”
“Of course I can hold it,” I say, more sharply than I’d meant to. The bowl is heavier than I thought it would be. I have trouble lifting it to my mouth, but I do, finally. My throat feels as raw as sandpaper and the broth is heaven against it, and even though it has a weird mossy aftertaste, I find myself gulping and slurping down the whole bowl.
“Slowly,” the girl says, but I can’t stop. Suddenly hunger yawns open inside me, black and endless and all-consuming. As soon as the broth is gone I’m desperate for more, even though my stomach starts cramping right away. “You’ll make yourself sick,” the girl says, shaking her head, and takes the empty bowl from me.
“Is there any more?” I croak.
“In a little while,” she says.
“Please.” The hunger is a snake; it is lashing at the pit of my stomach, eating me from the inside out.
She sighs, stands, and disappears through the darkened doorway. I think I hear a crescendo in the hallway voices, a swelling of sound. Then, abruptly, silence. The black-haired girl returns with a second bowl of broth. I take it from her and she sits again, drawing her knees up to her chest, like a kid would. Her knees are bony and brown.
“So,” she says, “where did you cross from?” When I hesitate, she says, “That’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, no. It’s fine.” I sip from this bowl of broth more slowly, savoring its strange, earthy quality: as though it has been stewed with stones. For all I know, it has been. Alex told me once that Invalids—the people who live in the Wilds—have learned to make do with only the barest provisions. “I came over from Portland.” Too soon the bowl is empty again, even though the snake in my stomach is still lashing. “Where are we now?”
“A few miles east of Rochester,” she says.
“Rochester, New Hampshire?” I ask.
She smirks. “Yup. You must have been hoofing it. How long were you out on your own?”
“I don’t know.” I rest my head against the wall. Rochester, New Hampshire. I must have looped around the northern border when I was lost in the Wilds: I’ve ended up sixty miles southwest of Portland. I’m exhausted again, even though I’ve been sleeping for days. “I lost track of time.”
“Pretty ballsy of you,” she says. I’m not really sure what “ballsy” means, but I can guess. “How did you cross?”
“It wasn’t—it wasn’t just me,” I say, and the snake lashes, seizes up. “I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be just me.”
“You were with somebody else?” She’s staring at me penetratingly again, her eyes almost as dark as her hair. “A friend?”
I don’t know how to correct her. My best friend. My boy-friend. My love. I’m still not totally comfortable with that word, and it seems almost sacrilegious, so instead I just nod.
“What happened?” she asks, a little more softly.
“He—he didn’t make it.” Her eyes flash with understanding when I say “he”: If we were coming from Portland together, from a place of segregation, we must have been more than just friends. Thankfully she doesn’t push it. “We made it all the way to the border fence. But then the regulators and the guards…” The pain in my stomach intensifies. “There were too many of them.”
She stands abruptly and retrieves one of the water-spotted tin buckets from the corner, places it next to the bed, and sits again.
“We heard rumors,” she says shortly. “Stories of a big escape in Portland, lots of police involvement, a big cover-up.”
“So you know about it?” I try once again to sit up all the way, but the cramping doubles me back against the wall. “Are they saying what happened to … to my friend?”
I ask the question even though I know. Of course I know.
I saw him standing there, covered in blood, as they descended on him, swarmed him, like the black ants in my dream.
The girl doesn’t answer, just folds her mouth into a tight line and shakes her head. She doesn’t have to say anything else—her meaning is clear. It’s written in the pity on her face.
The snake uncoils fully and begins thrashing. I close my eyes. Alex, Alex, Alex: my reason for everything, my new life, the promise of something better—gone, blown away into ash. Nothing will ever be okay again. “I was hoping…” I let out a little gasp as that terrible, lashing thing in my stomach comes riding toward my throat on a surge of sickness.
She sighs again and I hear her stand up, scrape the chair away from the bed.
“I think—” I can barely force the words out; I’m trying to swallow back the nausea. “I think I’m going to—”
And then I’m tipping over the bed, throwing up into the bucket she has placed beside me, my body gripped by waves of sickness.
“I knew you would make yourself sick,” the girl says, shaking her head. Then she disappears into the dark hallway. A second later, she pops her head back into the room. “I’m Raven, by the way.”
“Lena,” I say, and the word brings with it a new round of vomiting.
“Lena,” she repeats. She raps on the wall once with her knuckles. “Welcome to the Wilds.”
Then she disappears, and I am left with the bucket.
Later in the afternoon, Raven reappears, and I again try the broth. This time I sip slowly and manage to keep it down. I’m still so weak I can barely lift the bowl to my lips, and Raven has to help me. I should be embarrassed, but I can’t feel anything: Once the nausea subsides it is replaced by a numbness so complete it is like sinking under ice water.
“Good,” Raven says approvingly after I’ve made it through half the broth. She takes the bowl and disappears again.
Now that I’m awake, and conscious, all I want is to sleep again. At least when I’m sleeping I can dream myself back to Alex, can dream myself into a different world. Here, in this world, I have nothing: no family, no home, no place to go. Alex is gone. By now even my identity will have been Invalidated.
I can’t even cry. My insides have been turned to dust. I think over and over of that final moment, when I turned and saw him standing behind that wall of smoke. In my head I try and reach back, through the fence, past the smoke; I try and grab his hand and pull.
Alex, come back.
There is nothing to do but sink. The hours close around me, encase me completely.
A bit later I hear scuffling footsteps, and then echoes of laughter and conversation. This, at least, gives me something to focus on. I try to differentiate the voices, take a guess at how many speakers there are, but the best I can do is separate out a few low tones (men, boys) and some high-pitched giggling, the occasional burst of laughter. Once I hear Raven cry out, “All right, all right,” but for the most part, the voices are waves of sound, tones only, like a distant song.
Of course it makes sense that girls and boys would be sharing a house in the Wilds—that’s the whole point, after all: freedom to choose, freedom to be around one another, freedom to look and touch and love one another—but the idea is very different from the reality, and I can’t help but start to panic a little.
Alex is the only boy I’ve ever known or really spoken to. I don’t like to think of all those male strangers, just on the other side of the stone wall, with their baritone voices and their snorts of laughter. Before I met Alex, I lived almost eighteen years believing fully in the system, believing 100 percent that love was a disease, that we must protect ourselves, that girls and boys must stay rigorously separate to prevent contagion. Looks, glances, touches, hugs—all of it carried the risk of contamination. And even though being with Alex changed me, you don’t shake loose the fear all at once. You can’t.
I close my eyes, breathe deeply, again try and force myself down through layers of consciousness, to let myself be carried away by sleep.
“All right, Blue. Out of here. Bedtime.”
I snap my eyes open. A girl, probably six or seven, has been standing in the doorway, watching me. She’s thin and very tan, wearing dirty jean shorts and a cotton sweater about fourteen sizes too big for her—so big it is slipping off her shoulders, showing shoulder blades as peaked as bird wings. Her hair is dirty blond, falling almost all the way to her waist, and she isn’t wearing any shoes. Raven is trying to maneuver around her, carrying a plate.
“I’m not tired,” the girl says, keeping her eyes locked on me. She hops around from foot to foot but won’t come any farther into the room. Her eyes are a startling shade of blue, a vivid sky color.
“No arguing,” Raven says, bumping Blue playfully with her hip as she passes. “Out.”
“But—”
“What’s rule number one, Blue?” Raven’s voice turns sterner.
Blue brings her thumb to her mouth, rips at her thumbnail. “Listen to Raven,” she mumbles.
“Always listen to Raven. And Raven says bedtime. Now. Go.”
Blue shoots me a last, regretful look and then scurries away.
Raven sighs, rolls her eyes, and pulls the chair up to the bed. “Sorry,” she says. “Everyone is dying to see the new girl.”
“Who’s everyone?” I say. My throat is dry. I haven’t been able to stand and make it over to the basin, and it’s clear that the pipes don’t work anyway. There wouldn’t be any plumbing in the Wilds. All those networks—the water, the electricity—were bombed out years ago, during the blitz. “I mean, how many of you are there?”
Raven shrugs. “Oh, you know, it changes. People go in and out, pass between homesteads. Probably twenty or so, right now, but in June we’ve had as many as forty floaters, and in the winter we close up this homestead completely.”
I nod, even though her talk of homesteads and floaters confuses me. Alex told me the barest little bit about the Wilds, and of course we crossed once together successfully: the first and only time I’d ever been in unregulated land before our big escape.
Before my big escape.
I dig my fingernails into my palms.
“Are you okay?” Raven’s peering at me closely.
“I could use some water,” I say.
“Here,” she says. “Take this.” She passes me the plate she’s been holding: two small round patties, like pancakes but darker and grainier, are sitting at its center. She removes a dented tin soup can from a shelf in the corner, uses it as a ladle to scoop a bit of water from one of the buckets under the sink, and carries it back to me. I can only hope that bucket doesn’t do double duty as a vomit basin.
“Hard to find glass around here,” she says when I raise my eyebrows at the soup can, and then adds, “Bombs.” She says it as though she’s in a grocery store and saying Grapefruit, as though it’s the most everyday thing in the world. She sits again, braiding a bit of hair between her long brown fingers absentmindedly.
I lift the soup can to my lips. Its edges are jagged, and I have to sip carefully.
“You learn to make do out here,” Raven says with a kind of pride. “We can build out of nothing—out of scraps and trash and bones. You’ll see.”
I stare at the plate in my lap. I’m hungry, but the words trash and bones make me nervous about eating.
Raven must understand what I’m thinking, because she laughs. “Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s nothing gross. Some nuts, a bit of flour, some oil. It’s not the best thing you’ll ever eat in your life, but it will keep your strength up. We’re running low on supplies; we haven’t had a delivery in a week. The escape really screwed us, you know.”
“My escape?”
She nods. “They’ve had the borders running live in all the cities for a hundred miles for the past week, doubled security at the fences.” I open my mouth to apologize, but she cuts me off. “It’s all right. They do this every time there’s a breach. They always get worried there’ll be some mass uprising and people will rush the Wilds. In a few days they’ll get lazy again, and then we’ll get our supplies. And in the meantime…” She jerks her chin toward the plate. “Nuts.”
I take a nibble of the pancake. It’s not bad, actually: toasty and crunchy and just a little bit greasy, leaving a sheen of oil on my fingertips. It’s a lot better than the broth, and I say so to Raven.
She beams at me. “Yeah, Roach is the resident cook. He can make a good meal out of anything. Well, he can make an edible meal out of anything.”
“Roach? Is that his real name?”
Raven finishes a braid, flicks it over her shoulder, starts on another one. “As real as any name,” she says. “Roach has been in the Wilds his whole life. Originally comes from one of the homesteads farther south, close to Delaware. Someone down there must have named him. By the time he got up here, he was Roach.”
“What about Blue?” I ask. I make it through the whole first pancake without feeling queasy, then set the plate on the floor next to the bed. I don’t want to push my luck.
Raven hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “She was born right here, at the homestead.”
“So you named her for her eyes,” I say.
Raven stands abruptly, and turns away before saying, “Uh-huh.” She goes to the shelves by the sink and clicks off one of the battery-operated lanterns, so the room sinks even further into darkness.
“How about you?” I ask her.
She points to her hair. “Raven.” She smiles. “Not the most original.”
“No, I mean—were you born here? In the Wilds?”
The smile disappears just like that, like a candle being snuffed out. For a second she looks almost angry. “No,” she says shortly. “I came here when I was fifteen.”
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself from pressing. “By yourself?”
“Yes.” She picks up the second lantern, which is still emitting a pale bluish light, and moves toward the door.
“So what was your name before?” I say, and she freezes, her back to me. “Before you came to the Wilds, I mean.”
For a moment she stands there. Then she turns around. She is holding the lantern low so her face is in darkness. Her eyes are two bare reflections, glittering, like black stones in the moonlight.
“You might as well get used to it now,” she says with quiet intensity. “Everything you were, the life you had, the people you knew … dust.” She shakes her head and says, a little more firmly, “There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.”
Then she heads into the hallway with her lantern, leaving me in total darkness, my heart beating very fast.
The next morning, I wake up starving. The plate is still there with the second pancake, and I half tumble out of bed reaching for it, banging onto my knees on the cold stone floor. A beetle is exploring the surface of the pancake—normally, before, this would have grossed me out, but now I’m too hungry to care. I flick the insect away, watch it scurry into a corner, and eat the pancake greedily with both hands, sucking on my fingers. It saws off only the barest corner of my hunger.
I climb slowly to my feet, leaning on the bed for support. It’s the first time I’ve stood in days, the first time I’ve done more than crawl to a metal basin in the corner—placed there by Raven—when I’ve had to use the bathroom. Crouching in the dark, head down, thighs shaking, I am an animal, not even human anymore.
I’m so weak I’ve hardly made it to the doorway before I have to take a break, leaning against the doorjamb. I feel like one of the gray herons—with their swollen beaks and bellies, and tiny spindly legs—I used to see sometimes at the cove in Portland, totally out of proportion, lopsided.
My room opens into a long, dark hallway, also windowless, also stone. I can hear people talking and laughing, the sounds of chairs scraping and water sloshing: kitchen sounds. Food sounds. The hallway is narrow, and I run my hands along the walls as I move forward, getting a sense of my legs and body again. A doorway on my left, missing its door, opens into a large room, stacked, on one side, with medical and cleaning supplies—gauze, tubes and tubes of bacitracin, hundreds of boxes of soap, bandages—and, on the other, with four narrow mattresses laid directly on the floor, heaped with an assortment of clothes and blankets. A little farther I see another room that must be used entirely for sleeping: This one has mattresses laid from wall to wall, covering almost every inch of the floor, so the room looks like an enormous patchwork quilt.
I feel a pang of guilt. I’ve obviously been given the nicest bed, and the nicest room. It still amazes me to think how wrong I was all those years, when I trusted in rumors and lies. I thought the Invalids were beasts; I thought they would rip me apart. But these people saved me, and gave me the softest place to sleep, and nursed me back to health, and haven’t asked for anything in return.
The animals are on the other side of the fence: monsters wearing uniforms. They speak softly, and tell lies, and smile as they’re slitting your throat.
The hallway takes a sharp left and the voices swell. I can smell meat cooking now, and my stomach growls loudly. I pass more rooms, some for sleeping, one mostly empty and lined with shelves: a half-dozen cans of beans, a half-used bag of flour, and, weirdly, a dusty coffeemaker are piled in one corner; in another corner, buckets, tins of coffee, a mop.
Another right and the hallway ends abruptly in a large room, much brighter than the others. A stone basin, similar to the one in my room, runs along one whole wall. Above it, a long shelf holds a half-dozen battery-operated lanterns, which fill the space with a warm light. In the center of the room are two large, narrow wooden tables, packed with people.
As I enter, the conversation stops abruptly: Dozens of eyes sweep upward in my direction, and I’m suddenly aware that I am wearing nothing more than a large, dirty T-shirt that reaches just to mid-thigh.
There are men in the room too, sitting elbow-to-elbow with women—people of all ages, everyone uncured—and it is so strange and upside down, it nearly takes my breath away. I’m petrified. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing emerges. I feel the weight of silence, the heavy burn of all those eyes.
Raven comes to my rescue.
“You must be hungry,” she says, standing and gesturing to a boy sitting at the end of the table. He’s probably thirteen or fourteen—thin, wiry, with a smattering of pimples on his skin.
“Squirrel,” she says sharply. Another crazy nickname. “You finished eating?”
He stares dolefully at his empty plate as though he could telepathically force more food to materialize there.
“Yeah,” he says slowly, looking from the empty plate to me and back again. I hug my arms around my waist.
“Then get up. Lena needs a place to sit.”
“But—,” Squirrel starts to protest, and Raven glares at him.
“Up, Squirrel. Make yourself useful. Go check the nests for messages.”
Squirrel shoots me a sullen look, but he stands up and brings his plate to the sink. He releases it clatteringly onto the stone—which makes Raven, who has sat down again, call out, “You break, you buy, Squirrel,” and provokes a few titters—then stomps dramatically up the stone steps at the far end of the room.
“Sarah, get Lena something to eat.” Raven has returned to her own food: a pile of grayish mush lumped in the center of her plate.
A girl pops up eagerly, like a jack-in-the-box. She has enormous eyes, and a body as tight as a wire. Everyone in the room is skinny, actually—all I see are elbows and shoulders everywhere, edges and angles.
“Come on, Lena.” She seems to relish saying my name, as though it’s a special privilege. “I’ll fix you a plate.” She points to the corner: an enormous dented iron pot and a warped covered pan are set over an old-fashioned wood-burning stove. Next to it, mismatched plates and platters—and some cutting boards—are stacked haphazardly.
This means actually entering the room, walking past both tables. If my legs felt unsteady before, now I’m worried they’ll actually buckle at any second. Strangely, I can feel the texture of the men’s eyes differently. The women’s eyes are sharp, evaluating; the men’s eyes are hotter, stifling, like a touch. I’m having trouble breathing.
I go haltingly toward the stove, where Sarah is standing, nodding at me encouragingly, as though I’m a baby—even though she can’t be more than twelve herself. I stay as close as possible to the sink—just in case I do stumble, I want to be able to reach out and steady myself quickly.
The faces in the room are mostly a blur, a wash of color, but a few stand out: I see Blue watching me, wide-eyed; a boy, probably my age, with a crazy thatch of blond hair, who looks like he might start laughing any second; another boy, a little older, scowling; a woman with long auburn hair hanging loose down her back. For a moment our eyes meet and my heart stutters: I think, Mom. It hasn’t occurred to me until now that my mother could be here—that she must be here, somewhere, in the Wilds, in one of the homesteads or camps or whatever they’re called. Then the woman shifts slightly and I see her face and realize that no, of course it’s not her. She’s far too young, probably the age of my mother when I last saw her twelve years ago. I’m not sure I’d even recognize my mother if I saw her again; my memories of her are so fuzzy, distorted through layers of time and dream.
“Slop,” Sarah says as soon as I make it to the stove. I’m exhausted from the walk across the room. I can’t believe that this is the same body that used to do six-mile runs on an easy day, sprint up and down Munjoy Hill like it was nothing.
“What?”
“Slop.” She lifts the cover off the tin pot. “That’s what we call it. It’s what we eat when supplies run low. Oatmeal, rice, sometimes some bread—whatever grains we have left. Boil the shit out of it, and there you go. Slop.”
It startles me to hear a curse word come from her mouth.
Sarah takes a plastic plate—with ghostly silhouettes of animals still faintly visible on its surface, a kid’s plate—and piles a big serving of slop at its center. Behind me, at the tables, people have started talking again. The room fills with the low buzz of conversation, and I start to feel slightly better; at least that means some of the attention is off me.
“The good news,” Sarah continues cheerfully, “is that Roach brought home a present last night.”
“What do you mean?” I’m struggling to absorb the lingo, the pattern of speech. “He got supplies?”
“Better.” She grins at me, slides the top off the second covered pan. Inside is golden-brown meat, seared, crispy: a smell that almost brings me to tears. “Rabbit.”
I’ve never eaten rabbit before—never thought of it as something you could eat, especially not for breakfast—but I gratefully accept the plate from her, and can hardly stop myself from ripping into the meat right there, standing. I’d prefer to stand, actually. Anything would be better than having to sit down among all those strangers.
Sarah must sense my anxiety. “Come on,” she says. “You can sit next to me.” She reaches out and takes my elbow, steering me toward the table. This, too, is surprising. In Portland, in bordered communities, everyone is very careful about touching. Even Hana and I hardly ever hugged or put our arms around each other, and she was my best friend.
A cramp runs through me, and I double over, almost dropping my plate.
“Easy.” Across the table is the blond-haired boy, the one who looked as though he could hardly contain his laughter earlier. He raises his eyebrows; they’re the same pale blond as his hair, practically invisible. I notice that he, like Raven, has a procedural mark behind his left ear, and like hers, it must be fake. Only uncureds live in the Wilds; only people who have chosen, or been forced, to flee the bordered cities. “You okay?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. A whole lifetime of fears and warnings beat through me, and words flash rapidly in my mind: illegal, wrong, sympathizer, disease. I take a deep breath, try to ignore the bad feeling. Those are Portland words, old words; they, like the old me, have been left behind the fence.
“She’s fine,” Sarah jumps in. “She’s just hungry.”
“I’m fine,” I echo about fifteen seconds too late. The boy smirks again.
Sarah slides onto the bench and pats the empty space next to her, which Squirrel has just vacated. At least we’re at the very end of the table, and I don’t have to worry about being sandwiched next to someone else. I sit down, keeping my eyes on my plate. I can feel everyone watching me again. At least the conversation continues, a comforting blanket of noise.
“Go ahead.” Sarah looks at me encouragingly.
“I don’t have a fork,” I say quietly. The blond guy does laugh then, loud and long. So does Sarah.
“No forks,” she says. “No spoons. No nothing. Just eat.”
I risk glancing up and see that the people around me are watching, smiling, apparently amused. One of them, a grizzled, gray-haired man who must be at least seventy, nods at me, and I drop my eyes quickly. My whole body is hot with embarrassment. Of course they wouldn’t care about silverware and things like that in the Wilds.
I take the piece of rabbit with my hands, tear a tiny bit of flesh from the bone. And then I think I really might cry: Never in my whole life has anything tasted this good.
“Good, huh?” Sarah says, but I can’t do anything but nod. Suddenly I forget about the roomful of strangers and all the people watching me. I tear at the rabbit like an animal. I shovel up a bit of slop with my fingers, suck them into my mouth. Even that tastes good to me. Aunt Carol would absolutely flip if she could see me. When I was little, I wouldn’t even eat my peas if they were touching my chicken; I used to make neat compartments on my plate.
All too soon the plate is clean, except for a few bones. I drag the back of my hand across my mouth. I feel a surge of nausea and I close my eyes, willing it away.
“All right,” Raven says, standing abruptly. “Time for rounds.”
There’s a flurry of activity: people scraping away from their benches, bursts of conversations I can’t follow (“Laid traps yesterday,” “Your turn to check Grandma”), and people are passing behind me, releasing their plates noisily into the basin, then stomping up the stairs to my left, just past the stove. I can feel their bodies, and smell them, too: a flow, a warm, human river. I keep my eyes closed, and as the room empties, the nausea subsides somewhat.
“How are you feeling?”
I open my eyes and Raven is standing across from me, leaning both hands on the table. Sarah is still sitting next to me. She has brought one leg to her chest, on the bench, and is hugging her knee. In this pose, she actually looks her age.
“Better,” I say, which is true.
“You can help Sarah with the dishes,” she says, “if you’re feeling up to it.”
“Okay,” I say, and she nods.
“Good. And afterward, Sarah, you can take her up. You might as well get a feel for the homestead, Lena. But don’t push it, either. I don’t want to have to drag your ass out of the woods again.”
“Okay,” I repeat, and she smiles, satisfied. She’s obviously used to giving orders. I wonder how old she is. She speaks with such easy command, even though she must be younger than half the Invalids here. I think, Hana would like her, and the pain returns, knifing just below my ribs.
“And Sarah”—Raven is heading for the stairs—“get Lena some pants from the store, okay? So she doesn’t have to prance around half-naked.”
I feel myself going red again, and reflexively start fiddling with the hem of my shirt, tugging it lower down my thighs. Raven catches me and laughs.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.” Then she takes the stairs two at a time, and is gone.
I used to be on dish duty every night at Aunt Carol’s house, and I got used to it. But washing dishes in the Wilds is another story. First there’s the water. Sarah leads me back through the hall, to one of the rooms I passed on my way to the kitchen.
“This is the supply room,” she says, and for a moment frowns at all the empty shelves and the mostly used bag of flour. “We’re running a little low,” she explains, as though I can’t see that for myself. I feel a twist of anxiety—for her, for Blue, for everyone here, all that bone and thinness.
“Over here is where we keep the water. We pull it in the mornings—not me, I’m too small still.” She’s over in the corner by the buckets, which now I see are full. She hefts one up by its handle with both hands, grunting. It’s oversized, nearly as big as her torso. “One more should do it,” she says. “A small one should be okay.” She toddles out of the room, straining, with the bucket in front of her.
I find, to my embarrassment, that I can barely lift one of the smallest buckets. Its metal handle digs painfully into the palms of my hands—which are still covered in scabs and blisters from my time alone in the Wilds—and before I’ve even reached the hallway I have to set the bucket down and lean against the wall.
“You okay?” Sarah calls back.
“Fine!” I say, a little too sharply. There’s no way I’m going to let her come to my rescue. I heave the bucket in the air again, advance forward a few halting steps, place it on the ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. By the time I reach the kitchen, I’m out of breath and sweating; salt stings my eyes. Fortunately, Sarah doesn’t notice. She’s squatting at the stove, poking around at the fire with the charred end of a wooden stick, coaxing it higher.
“We boil the water in the mornings,” she says, “to sanitize it. We have to, or we’ll be shitting a river from breakfast to dinner.” In her last words, I recognize Raven’s voice; this must be one of her mantras.
“Where does the water come from?” I ask, grateful that she has her back to me so that I can rest, momentarily, on one of the nearest benches.
“Cocheco River,” she says. “It’s not too far. A mile, a mile and a half, tops.”
Impossible: I can’t imagine carrying those buckets, full, for a mile.
“The river’s where we get our supplies, too,” Sarah rattles on. “Friends on the inside float them down to us. The Cocheco crosses into Rochester and then out again.” She giggles. “Raven says that someday they’ll make it fill out a Purpose of Travel form.”
Sarah feeds the stove wood from a pile stacked in the corner. Then she stands up, nodding once. “We’ll just warm the water a little bit. It cleans better when it’s hot.”
On one of the high shelves above the sink is an enormous tin stockpot, big enough for a child to bathe in comfortably. Before I can offer to help, Sarah hefts herself onto the basin—balancing carefully on its rim, like a gymnast—and stands, removing the pot from the shelf. Then she hops off the sink, landing soundlessly. “Okay.” She brushes hair out of her face; it has come loose from its ponytail. “Now the water goes into the pot, and the pot goes on the stove.”
Everything in the Wilds is process, slow steps, shuffling forward. Everything takes time. While we wait for the water in the pot to heat, Sarah lists the people in the homestead, a blur of names I won’t remember: Grandpa, the oldest; Lu, short for Lucky, who lost a finger to a bad infection but managed to keep her life, and the rest of her limbs, intact; Bram, short for Bramble, who appeared miraculously in the Wilds one day, in the middle of a tangle of brambles and thorns, as though deposited there by wolves. There’s a story for almost everyone’s name, even Sarah’s. When she first came to the Wilds seven years ago with her older sister, she begged the homesteaders to give her a cool new name. She pulls a face, remembering—she wanted something tough, like Blade, or Iron—but Raven had only laughed, put a hand on her head, and said, “You look just like a Sarah to me.” And so Sarah she remained.
“Which one is your sister?” I ask. I think briefly of my sister, Rachel—not the Rachel I left behind, the cured one, all blank and curtained off, but the Rachel I can still remember from my childhood—and then let the image skitter away.
“Not here anymore. She left the homestead earlier in the summer; joined the R. She’s going to come back for me as soon as I’m old enough to help.” There’s a note of pride in her voice, so I nod encouragingly, even though I have no idea what the “R” is.
More names: Hunter, the blond boy who was sitting across from me at the table (“That’s his before name,” Sarah says, pronouncing the word before in a kind of hush, like a curse word—“He can’t actually hunt for nothing”); Tack, who came from up north a few years ago.
“Everyone says he has a bad attitude,” she says, and again I hear the echo of Raven’s voice in her words. She is worrying the fabric of her T-shirt, which is worn so thin it is practically translucent. “But I don’t think so. He’s always been nice to me.”
From her description, I’ve matched Tack with the black-haired guy who was scowling at me when I came into the kitchen. If that’s his normal look, I can see why people think he has a bad attitude.
“Why’s he called Tack?” I ask.
She giggles. “Sharp as,” she says. “Grandpa named him.”
I decide to stay away from Tack, if I remain at the homestead at all. I can’t see that I have much of a choice, but I can feel that I don’t belong here, and a part of me wishes that Raven had left me where she found me. I was closer to Alex then. He was just on the other side of that long, black tunnel. I could have walked through its blackness; I could have found him again.
“Water’s ready,” Sarah announces finally.
Process, agonizingly slow: We fill up one of the basins with the hot water, and Sarah measures soap into the sink slowly, not wasting a drop. That’s another thing I can see about the Wilds: Everything gets used, reused, rationed, measured.
“So what about Raven?” I ask as I submerge my arms in the hot water.
“What about her?” Sarah’s face brightens. She loves Raven, I can tell.
“What’s her story? Where did she come from before?” I don’t know why I’m pushing the issue. I’m just curious, I guess, curious to know how you become someone like that: confident, fierce, a leader.
Sarah’s face clouds over. “There is no before,” she says shortly, then falls silent for the first time in an hour. We wash the dishes without speaking.
Sarah turns talkative again when the dishes are done and it’s time to outfit me with clothes.
She leads me to a small room I mistook for one of the bedrooms before. There are clothes strewn everywhere, masses of them, all over the floor and shelves. “This is the store,” she says, giggling a little and gesturing grandly with one hand.
“Where did all the clothes come from?” I move carefully into the room, stepping on shirts and balled-up socks as I do. Every inch of floor space is covered in fabric.
“We find them,” Sarah says vaguely. And then, turning suddenly fierce, “The blitz didn’t work like they said, you know. The zombies lied, just like they lie about everything else.”
“Zombies?”
Sarah grins. “That’s what we call the cureds, after they’ve had the procedure. Raven says they might as well be zombies. She says the cure turns people stupid.”
“That’s not true,” I say instinctively, and nearly correct her: It’s the passions that turn us stupid, animal-like. Free from love is close to God. That’s an old adage from The Book of Shhh. The cure was supposed to free us from extreme emotions, bring us clarity of thought and feeling.
But when I think about Aunt Carol’s glassy eyes, and my sister’s expressionless face, I think that the term zombies is actually pretty accurate. And it’s true that all the history books, and all our teachers, lied about the blitz; the Wilds were supposed to have been wiped absolutely clean during the bombing campaign. Invalids—or homesteaders—aren’t even supposed to exist.
Sarah shrugs. “If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”
“Did Raven tell you that, too?”
She smiles again. “Raven’s super smart.”
It takes me a little bit of digging, but I finally find a pair of army-green pants and a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt. It feels too weird to wear someone else’s old underwear, so I keep on the pair I’ve been wearing. Sarah wants me to model my new outfit—she’s enjoying this, and keeps begging me to try on different things, acting like a normal kid for the first time—and when I ask her to turn around so I can change, she stares at me like I’m crazy. I guess there isn’t much privacy in the Wilds. But finally she shrugs and swivels to face the wall.
It feels good to get out of the long T-shirt, which I’ve been wearing for days. I know I smell bad, and I’m desperate for a shower, but for now I’m just grateful for some relatively clean clothes. The pants fit well, low on my hips, and they don’t even drag too badly after I roll them at the waist a few times. The T-shirt is soft and comfortable.
“Not bad,” Sarah says when she turns around to face me again. “You look almost human.”
“Thanks.”
“I said almost.” She giggles again.
“Well, then, almost thanks.”
Shoes are harder. Most people in the Wilds go without during the summer, and Sarah proudly shows me the bottoms of her feet, which are brown and hardened with calluses. But finally we find a pair of running shoes that are just a tiny bit too big; with thick socks, they’ll be fine.
When I kneel down to lace up the sneakers, another pang goes through me. I’ve done this so many times—before cross-country meets, in the locker rooms, sitting next to Hana, surrounded by a blur of bodies, joking with each other about who’s a better runner—and yet somehow I always took it for granted.
For the first time the thought comes to me—I wish I hadn’t crossed—and I push it away instantly, try to bury it. It’s done now, and Alex died for it. There’s no point in looking back. I can’t look back.
“Are you ready to see the rest of the homestead?” Sarah asks.
Even the act of undressing and redressing has exhausted me. But I’m desperate for air, and space.
“Show me,” I say.
We go back through the kitchen and up the narrow stone stairs beyond the stove. Sarah darts ahead of me, disappearing as the stairs make a sharp turn. “Almost there!” she calls back.
A final serpentine twist, and suddenly the stairs are no more: I step into a blazing brightness, and soft ground underneath my shoes. I stumble, confused and temporarily blinded. For a second I feel as though I’ve walked into a dream and I stand, blinking, struggling to make sense of this otherworld.
Sarah is standing a few feet away from me, laughing. She lifts her arms, which are bathed in sunshine. “Welcome to the homestead,” she says, and performs a little skipping dance in the grass.
The place where I’ve been sleeping is underground—that I could have guessed from the lack of windows and the quality of dampness—and the stairs have led upward, aboveground, and then released us abruptly. Where there should be a house, an over-structure, there is just a large expanse of grass covered in charred wood and enormous fragments of stone.
I was not prepared for the feeling of the sunshine, or the smell of growth and life. All around us are enormous trees, leaves just tinged with yellow as though they are catching fire slowly from the outside, patterning the ground with alternating spots of light and shadow. For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides.
Sarah explains, “This used to be a church.” She points behind me, to the splintered stones and the blackened wood. “The bombs didn’t reach the cellar, though. There are plenty of underground places in the Wilds where the bombs didn’t touch. You’ll see.”
“A church?” This surprises me. In Portland, our churches are made of steel and glass and clean white plaster walls. They are sanitized spaces, places where the miracle of life, and God’s science, is celebrated and demonstrated with microscopes and centrifuges.
“One of the old churches,” Sarah says. “There are lots of those, too. On the west side of Rochester there’s a whole one, still standing. I’ll show you someday, if you want.” Then she reaches forward and grabs the bottom of my T-shirt, tugging at me. “Come on. Lots to see.”
The only other time I’ve been to the Wilds was with Alex. We snuck across the border once so that he could show me where he lived. That settlement, like this one, was situated in a large clearing, a place once inhabited, an area the trees and growth had not yet reclaimed. But this clearing is massive, and filled with half-tumbled-down stone archways and walls that are partially standing, and—in one place—a series of concrete stairs that spiral up from the ground and end in nothing. On the last step, several different birds have made their nests.
I can barely breathe as Sarah and I make our way slowly through the grass, which is damp and almost knee-high in places. It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place. Doors that open nowhere; a rusted truck, wheel-less, sitting in the middle of a stretch of pale green grass, with a tree growing straight through its center; bits of glittering, twisted metal everywhere, melted and bent into unrecognizable shapes.
Sarah walks next to me, practically skipping, excitement bubbling out of her now that we’re outside. She easily dodges the stones and the metal detritus littering the grass, while I have to keep my eyes constantly on the ground. It is slow going, and tiring.
“This used to be a town,” Sarah says. “This was probably the main street. The trees are still young in a lot of places around here, but there aren’t hardly any buildings left at all. That’s how you know where the houses were. Wood burns a lot easier. Obviously.” She drops her voice to a hush, eyes growing wide. “It wasn’t even the bombs that did the worst damage, you know. It was the fires that came after.”
I manage to nod.
“This was a school.” She gestures to another enormous area of low growth, roughly the shape of a rectangle. The trees around its perimeter are marked from the fire: seared white, and practically leafless, they remind me of tall, spindly ghosts. “Some of the lockers were just sitting there, hanging open. Some of them had clothes in them and stuff.” She looks momentarily guilty, and then it hits me—the clothing in the storage room, the pants and shirt I am wearing—all of those clothes must have come from somewhere, must have been scavenged.
“Stop for a second.” I’m feeling out of breath, and so we stand for a moment in front of the old school while I rest. We’re in a patch of sunshine, and I’m grateful for the warmth. Birds twitter and zip overhead, small, quick shadows against the sky. Distantly I can make out sounds of good-natured shouting and laughter, Invalids tromping through the woods. The air is full of whirling, floating golden-green leaves.
A squirrel sits back on its haunches, working a nut quickly between its paws, on the top step of what must have been an entrance to the school. Now the stairs run aground, into soft earth and a covering of wildflowers. I think of all the feet that must have stepped right there, where the squirrel is. I think of all the small, warm hands spinning out locker combinations, all the voices, the rush and patter of movement. I think of what it must have been like during the blitz—the panic, the screaming, the running, the fire.
In school we always learned that the blitz, the cleansing, was quick. We saw footage of pilots waving from their cockpits as bombs dropped on a distant carpet of green, trees so small they looked like toys, narrow plumes of smoke rising, featherlike, from the growth. No mess, no pain, no sounds of screaming. Just a whole population—the people who had resisted and stayed, who refused to move into the approved and bordered places, the nonbelievers and the contaminated—deleted all at once, quick as the stroke of a keyboard, turned into a dream.
But of course it wouldn’t really have been like that. It couldn’t have been. The lockers were still full: of course. The children wouldn’t have had time to do anything but fight and claw for the exits.
Some of them—very few—may have escaped and made their home in the Wilds, but most of them died. Our teachers told us the truth, at least, about that. I close my eyes, feel myself swaying on my feet.
“Are you okay?” Sarah asks. She puts her hand on my back. “We can turn around.”
“I’m okay.” I open my eyes. We’ve only gone a few hundred feet. Most of the old main street still stretches in front of us, and I’m determined to see all of it.
We walk even slower now, as Sarah points out the empty spaces and broken foundations where buildings must once have existed: a restaurant (“a pizza restaurant—that’s where we got the stove”); a deli (“you can still see the sign—see? Kind of buried over there? ‘Sandwiches made to order’”); a grocery store.
The grocery store seems to depress Sarah. Here the ground is churned up, the grass even newer than everywhere else; the site of years and years of digging. “For a long time we kept finding things to eat, buried all around here. Cans of food, you know, and even some packaged stuff that made it through the fires.” She sighs, looks wistful. “It’s all gone now, though.”
We walk on. Another restaurant, marked by an enormous metal counter, and two metal-backed chairs sitting side by side in a solid square of sunlight; a hardware store (“saved our lives plenty of times”). Next to the hardware store is an old bank: here, too, there are stairs that disappear into the earth, a yawning mouth cut into the ground. The dark-haired boy—the glarer—is just emerging into the sunshine. He has a rifle slung casually over one shoulder.
“Hey, Tack,” Sarah says shyly.
He ruffles her hair as he passes. “Boys only,” he says. “You know that.”
“I know, I know.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m just showing Lena around. That’s where the boys sleep,” Sarah explains to me.
So even the Invalids have not entirely done away with segregation. This small piece of normalcy—of familiarity—is a relief.
Tack’s eyes click to me, and he frowns.
“Hi.” My voice comes out as a squeak. I try, unsuccessfully, to smile. He’s very tall and, like everyone else in the Wilds, thin; but his forearms are roped with muscle, and his jaw is square and strong. He, too, has a procedural mark, a three-pronged scar behind his left ear. I wonder if it is a fake, like Alex’s was; or whether, perhaps, the cure didn’t work on him.
“Just stay out of the vaults.” The words are directed at Sarah, but he keeps his eyes locked on me. They are cold, appraising.
“We will,” Sarah says. As he stalks away, she whispers to me, “He’s like that with everyone.”
“I can see what Raven means about the attitude problem.”
“Don’t feel bad, though. I mean, you can’t take it personally.”
“I won’t,” I say, but the truth is that the brief encounter has shaken me. Everything is wrong here, upside down and inverted: the door frames that open into air, invisible structures—buildings, signposts, streets, still casting the shadow of the past over everything. I can feel them, can hear the rush of hundreds of feet, can hear old laughter running underneath the birdsong: a place built of memory and echo.
I am suddenly exhausted. We have made it only halfway down the old street, but my earlier resolution to walk the whole area now seems absurd. The brightness of the sun, the air and space around me—all of it feels disorienting. I turn around—too quickly, clumsily—and trip over a slab of limestone spattered in bird shit; for one second I am in free fall and then I’m landing, hard, facedown in the dirt.
“Lena!” Sarah is next to me in a second, helping to pull me to my feet. I’ve bitten down on my tongue and my mouth tastes like metal. “Are you okay?”
“Just give me a second,” I say, gasping a little. I sit back on the limestone. Something occurs to me: I don’t even know what day it is, what month. “What’s today’s date?” I ask Sarah.
“August twenty-seventh,” she answers, still looking at me with her face all creased up, worried. But she’s keeping her distance.
August 27. I left Portland on August 21. I’ve lost almost a week in the Wilds, in this upside-down place.
This is not my world. My world is unfolding miles away: a world of doors that lead to rooms, and clean white walls, and the quiet hum of refrigerators; a world of carefully plotted streets, and pavement that is not full of fissures. Another pang shoots through me. In less than a month, Hana will have her procedure.
Alex was the one who understood things here. He could have built up this collapsed street for me, turned it into a place of sense and order. He was going to lead me through the wilderness. With him, I would have been okay.
“Can I get you anything?” Sarah’s voice is uncertain.
“I’ll be all right.” I can barely force the words out, past the pain. “It’s just the food. Not used to it.”
I’m going to be sick again. I duck my head between my knees, coughing to force down the sob that shudders through me.
Sarah must know, though, because she says, in the quietest voice, “You get used to it after a while.” I get the sense she’s talking about more than the breakfast.
After that there is nothing to do but make our way back: down the bombed-out road, through the shards, metal glittering in the high grass like snakes lying in wait.
Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.
Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.