I am awakened by a voice barking, “Tray!” I sit up, and see that Julian has gone to the door. He is crouching on his hands and knees, as I did yesterday, trying to get a look at our captor.
“Bucket!” is the next sharp command, and I feel both relieved and sorry when Julian picks up the tin bucket in the corner, which is making the room stink sharply of urine. Yesterday we took turns with it. Julian made me promise I would keep my back turned and my ears covered and, additionally, hum. When it was my turn I only asked him to turn around—but he covered his ears and sang anyway. He has a terrible voice, totally off-key, but he sang loudly and cheerfully, like he didn’t know or didn’t care—a song I hadn’t heard in forever, one that used to be part of a kids’ game.
A new tray comes through, followed by a clean bucket. Then the flap door clangs shut, the footsteps recede, and Julian stands.
“Did you see anything?” I ask, although I know the answer will be no. My throat is hoarse, and I feel weirdly awkward. I shared too much last night. We both did.
Julian is having trouble looking at me again. “Nothing,” he says.
We share the meal—this time, a small bowl filled with nuts, and another large piece of bread—in silence. Under the bright light of the ceiling bulb, it feels strange to sit on the floor, so close together, so I eat while pacing the room. There is a tension in the room that did not exist before. Unreasonably, I resent Julian for it. He made me speak last night, and he shouldn’t have. At the same time, I was the one who reached for his hand. This seems unimaginable now.
“Are you going to do that all day?” Julian says. His voice is strained, and I can tell he is feeling the tension too.
“If you don’t like it, don’t watch,” I snap back.
More moments of silence. Then he says, “My father will get me out of here. He’s bound to pay soon.”
Hatred for him blooms again inside of me. He must know that there is no one in the world who will spring me. He must know that when our captors—whoever they are—realize this, I will either be killed or left here to rot.
But I don’t say anything. I climb the steep, smooth walls of the tower. I enclose myself deep inside its casements; I build stone between us.
The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other. They smell sour and musky, like the breath of someone who is starving. They move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down, endlessly down.
And then, without warning, the light clicks off and plunges us once again into darkness. I feel a sense of relief so strong it borders on joy: I’ve made it through another day. With the darkness, some of my unease begins to dissipate. In the daylight Julian and I are edges, set awkwardly and at odds with each other. But in the dark, I’m happy when I hear him settle on his cot, and know that we’re separated by only a few feet of space. There’s comfort in his presence.
Even the silence feels different now—more forgiving.
After a while, Julian says, “Are you asleep?”
“Not yet.”
I hear him roll over to face me. “You want to hear another story?” he asks.
I nod, even though he can’t see me, and he takes my silence for assent.
“There once was a really bad tornado.” Julian pauses. “This is a made-up story, by the way.”
“I got it,” I say, and close my eyes. I think of being back in the Wilds, my eyes stinging from campfire smoke, and Raven’s voice coming through the haze.
“And there was this girl, Dorothy, and she fell asleep in her house. And the whole house was lifted off the ground by the tornado and went spinning into the sky. And when she woke up, she was in a strange land filled with little people, and her house had landed on this evil witch. Flattened her. So all the little people—the Munchkins—were really grateful, and they gave Dorothy a pair of magical slippers.” He lapses into silence.
“So?” I say. “What comes next?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I say.
Rustling, as he shifts on his cot. “That’s as far as I got,” he says. “I never read the rest.”
I suddenly feel very alert. “You didn’t make it up, then?”
He hesitates for a second. Then: “No.”
I keep my voice calm. “I’ve never heard that story before,” I say. “I don’t remember it from the curriculum.” Very few stories get approved for Use and Propagation; at most two to three per year, and sometimes none. If I haven’t heard it, chances are that’s because it was never approved.
Julian coughs. “It wasn’t. On the curriculum, I mean.” He pauses. “It was forbidden.”
My skin gets a prickly feeling. “Where did you find a forbidden story?”
“My father knows a lot of important people in the DFA. Government people, priests, and scientists. So he has access to things … confidential documents and things that date from the time before. The days of sickness.”
I stay quiet. I can hear him swallow before he goes on.
“When I was little, my dad had this study—he had two studies, actually. A normal study, where he did most of his work for the DFA. My brother and I would sit and help him fold pamphlets all night long. It’s funny. To this day, midnight always smells like paper to me.”
I’m startled by the reference to a brother; I’ve never heard one mentioned before, never seen his image on DFA materials or in the Word, the country’s newspaper. But I don’t want to interrupt him.
“His other study was always locked. No one was allowed inside, and my father kept the key hidden. Except…” More rustling. “Except one day I saw where he put it. It was late. I was supposed to be asleep. I came out of my room for a glass of water, and I saw him from the landing. He went to a bookcase in the living room. On the uppermost shelf he kept a little porcelain statue of a rooster. I watched him lift the neck away from the body and put the key inside.
“The next day I pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school. And after my mom and dad had left for work and my brother had gone to get the bus, I snuck downstairs, got the key, and unlocked my dad’s second study.” He gives a short laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. My hands were shaking so bad I dropped the key three times before I could even fit it in the lock. I had no idea what I would find inside. I don’t know what I was imagining—dead bodies, maybe, or locked-up Invalids.”
I stiffen, as always, when I hear the word, then relax, let it skate by me.
He laughs again. “I was pissed when I finally got the door open and saw all those books. What a letdown. But then I saw they weren’t regular books. They weren’t anything like the books we saw in school and read in church. That’s when I realized it was—they must be forbidden.”
I can’t help it: A memory blooms now, long buried; stepping into Alex’s trailer for the first time and seeing dozens and dozens of strange titles, moldering spines glowing in the candlelight, learning the word poetry for the first time. In approved places, every story serves a purpose. But forbidden books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch.
And some of them—the best ones—are doors.
“After that I used to sneak down to the study every time I was home alone. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. There was music, too, totally different from the approved stuff on LAMM. You wouldn’t believe it, Lena. Full of bad words, all about the deliria … but not all of them bad or hopeless at all. Everyone was supposed to be unhappy in the time before, right? Everyone was supposed to be sick. But some of the music…” He breaks off and sings, quietly, “All you need is love…”
A shiver runs through me. It’s strange to hear that word pronounced out loud. Julian falls into silence for a bit. Then he continues, even more quietly, “Can you believe it? All you need…” His voice withdraws, as though he has realized how close we were lying and has moved away. In the dark he is barely an outline. “Anyway, my dad caught me eventually. I was just a little ways into that story I was telling you about—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it was called. I’ve never seen him so angry in my life. He’s pretty calm most of the time, you know, thanks to the cure. But that day he dragged me into the living room and beat me so hard I blacked out.” Julian tells me this flatly, without feeling, and my stomach tightens with hatred toward his father, toward everyone like his father. They preach solidarity and sanctity, and in their homes and in their hearts they pound, and pound, and pound.
“He said that would teach me what forbidden books could do,” Julian says, and then, almost musingly, “The next day I had my first seizure.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“I don’t blame him or anything,” Julian says quickly. “The doctors said the seizure might have saved my life, actually. That’s how they discovered the tumor. Besides, he was only trying to help me. Keep me safe, you know.”
My heart breaks for him in that second, and rather than be carried away on the tide of it, I think of those smooth walls of hatred, and I think of climbing a set of stairs and taking aim at Julian’s father from my tower, and watching him burn.
After a while Julian says, “Do you think I’m a bad person?”
“No,” I say, squeezing the word past the rock in my throat.
For a few minutes we breathe together, in tandem. I wonder if Julian notices.
“I never figured out why the book was banned,” Julian says after a bit. “That part must have come later, after the witch, and the shoes. I’ve been wondering about it ever since. Funny how certain things stay with you.”
“Do you remember any of the other stories you read?” I ask.
“No. None of the songs, either. Just that one line… ‘All you need is love.’” He sings the notes again.
We lie in silence for a bit, and I begin to float in and out of consciousness. I am walking the shimmering silver ribbon of a river winding through the forest, wearing shoes that sparkle in the sun as though they are made out of coins…
I am passing under a branch and there is a tangle of leaves in my hair. I reach up and feel a warm hand—fingers…
I startle into awareness again. Julian’s hand is hovering an inch above my head. He has rolled over to the very edge of his cot. I can feel the warmth from his body.
“What are you doing?” My heart is beating very fast. I can feel his hand trembling ever so slightly by my right ear.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, but doesn’t move his hand. “I …”
I can’t see his face. He is a long, curved shadow, frozen, like something made of polished wood. “You have nice hair,” he says finally.
My chest feels like it is being squeezed. The room seems hotter than ever.
“Can I?” he asks, so quietly I barely hear him, and I nod because I can’t speak. My throat, too, is being squeezed.
Softly, gently, he lowers his hand that final inch. For a moment he leaves it there and again I hear that quick exhale, a release of some kind, and everything in my whole body goes still and white and hot, a starburst, a silent explosion. Then he runs his fingers through my hair and I relax, and the squeezing goes away, and I’m breathing and alive and it’s all fine and everything will be okay. Julian keeps running his hand through my hair—twisting it around his fingers, curling it up and over his wrist and letting it drop onto the pillow again—and this time when I close my eyes and see the shining silver river I walk straight into it, and let it carry me down and away.
In the morning I wake up to blue: Julian’s eyes, staring at me. He turns away quickly but not quickly enough. He has been watching me sleep. I feel embarrassed and angry and flattered at the same time. I wonder if I’ve said anything. I used to call Alex’s name sometimes, and I’m pretty sure he was in my dreams last night. I don’t remember any of them, but I woke up with that Alex-feeling, like a hollow carved in the center of my chest.
“How long have you been awake?” I ask. In the light everything feels tense and awkward again. I can almost believe last night was a dream. Julian put his fingers in my hair. Julian touched me. I let him touch me.
I liked it.
“A while,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Nightmares?” I ask. The air in the room is stifling. Each word is an effort.
“No,” he says. I expect him to say something else, but the silence stretches long between us.
I sit up. The room is hot, and it smells. I feel nauseous. I’m reaching for something to say, something to bleed out the tension in the room.
And then Julian says, “Do you think they’re going to kill us?” and the swollenness deflates at once. We’re on the same side today.
“No,” I say, with more confidence than I feel. As each day has passed I’ve grown more and more uncertain. If they—the Scavengers—were planning to ransom Julian, surely they would have done it by now. I think about Thomas Fineman, and the polished metal of his cuff links, and his hard, shiny smile. I think of him beating his nine-year-old son into unconsciousness.
He might have decided not to pay. The thought is there, a needling doubt, and I try to ignore it.
Thinking of Thomas Fineman reminds me: “How old is your brother now?” I ask.
“What?” Julian sits up so his back is toward me. He must have heard me, but I repeat the question anyway. I watch his spine stiffen: a tiny contraction, barely noticeable.
“He’s dead,” he says abruptly.
“How—how did he die?” I ask gently.
Again, Julian nearly spits the word out. “Accident.”
Even though I can tell Julian’s uncomfortable talking about it, I just don’t want to let it drop. “What kind of accident?”
“It was a long time ago,” he says shortly, and then, suddenly whirling on me, “Why do you care, anyway? Why are you so curious? I don’t know shit about you. And I don’t pry. I don’t bother you about it.”
I’m so startled by his outburst, I nearly snap back. But I’ve been slipping too much; and so instead I take refuge in the smoothness, the roundness, of Lena Morgan Jones’s calm: the calm of the walking dead; the calm of the cured.
I say smoothly, “I was just curious. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
For a second I think I see panic on Julian’s face; it flashes there like a warning. Then it’s gone, replaced by a sternness I have seen in his father. He nods once, curtly, and stands, begins pacing the room. I take a perverse pleasure in his agitation. He was so calm at first. It’s gratifying to see him lose it just a little: Down here the protection and certainty offered by the DFA mean nothing.
Just like that we are on opposite sides again. There’s comfort in the morning’s stony silence. It is how things should be. It is right.
I should never have let him touch me. I shouldn’t have even let him get close. In my head, I repeat an apology: I’m sorry. I’ll be careful. No more slipping. I’m not sure whether I’m speaking to Raven or Alex or both.
The water never comes; neither does the food. And then, midmorning, a subtle change in the air: echoes different from the sounds of dripping water and the hollow flow of underground air. For the first time in hours, Julian looks at me.
“Do you hear—,” he starts to say, and I shush him.
Voices in the hall, and heavy boot steps—more than one person is approaching. My heart speeds up, and I look around instinctively for a weapon. Other than the bucket, there isn’t much. I’ve already tried to unscrew the metal bedposts from the cots, with no success. My backpack is on the other side of the room, and just as I’m thinking of making a dive for it—any weapon is better than no weapon at all—locks scrape open and the door swings inward and two Scavengers step into the room. Both of them are carrying guns.
“You.” The Scavenger in front, middle-aged, with the whitest skin I’ve ever seen, points to Julian with the butt of his rifle. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Julian asks, although he must know they won’t answer. He is standing, keeping his arms pressed to his sides. His voice is steady.
“We’ll be asking the questions,” the pale man says, and smiles. He has dark-spotted gums, and yellow teeth. He is wearing heavy military-style pants and an old military jacket, but he is a Scavenger beyond a shadow of a doubt. On his left hand I see a faint pattern of a blue tattoo, and as he steps farther into the room, circling Julian like a jackal looping around its prey, my blood goes cold. He has a procedural scar, too, but his is terribly botched: three slashes on his neck, red like gaping wounds. He has tattooed a black triangle between them. Decades ago the procedure was much riskier than it is now, and growing up we heard stories about the people who weren’t cured at all, but turned crazy, or brain-dead, or totally and utterly ruthless—incapable of feeling anything for anyone else, ever.
I try to fight the panic that’s building in my chest, sending my heart into a skittering, erratic rhythm. The second Scavenger, a girl who might be Raven’s age, is leaning in the door frame, blocking my exit. She’s taller than I am but thinner, too. Her face is heavily pierced—I count five rings in each eyebrow, and gems studded into her chin and forehead—as well as what looks like a wedding ring looped through her septum. I don’t want to think about where she got it. She has a handgun strapped to a belt hanging low on her hips. I try to estimate how quickly she could have it out and pointed at my head.
Her eyes flick to mine. She must interpret the expression on my face because she says, “Don’t even think about it.”
Her voice is strange and slurry, and when she opens her mouth to yawn I see it is because her tongue is glinting with metal. Metal studs, metal rings, metal wires: all of it looping on and around her tongue, making her look like she has swallowed barbed wire.
Julian hesitates for only a moment more. He jerks forward—a sudden, wrenching movement—and then recovers. As he passes through the door, flanked on one side by the pierced girl and on the other by the albino, he goes gracefully, as though he’s strolling to a picnic.
He does not look at me, not even once. Then the door grates shut again, and the locks click into place, and I am left alone.
The waiting is an agony. My body feels like it’s on fire. And although I’m hungry, and thirsty, and weak, I can’t stop pacing. I try not to think about what they’ve done with Julian. Maybe he has been ransomed and released after all. But I didn’t like the way the albino smiled and said, We’ ll be asking the questions.
In the Wilds, Raven taught me to look for patterns everywhere: the orientation of the moss on the trees; the level of undergrowth; the color of the soil. She taught me, too, to look for the inconsistencies—an area of sudden growth might mean water. A sudden stillness usually means a large predator is nearby. More animals than usual? More food.
The appearance of the Scavengers is inconsistent, and I don’t like it.
To keep myself busy I unpack and repack my backpack. Then I unpack it again and lay its contents on the ground, as though the sad collection of items is a hieroglyph that might suddenly yield new meaning. Two granola bar wrappers. A tube of mascara. One empty water bottle. The Book of Shhh. One umbrella. I get up, turn a circle, and sit down again.
Through the walls, I think I hear a muffled shout. I tell myself it’s just my imagination.
I pull The Book of Shhh onto my lap and flip through the pages. Even though the psalms and prayers are still familiar, the words look strange and their meanings are indecipherable: It’s like returning somewhere you haven’t been since you were a child, and finding everything smaller and disappointing. It reminds me of the time Hana unearthed a dress she had worn every day in first grade. We were in her room, bored, messing around, and she and I laughed and laughed, and she kept repeating, I can’t believe I was ever that small.
My chest begins to ache. It seems impossibly, unbelievably long ago—when I could sit in a room with carpet, when we could spend days messing around, doing nothing in each other’s company. I didn’t realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.
Halfway through The Book of Shhh a page has been dog-eared. I stop, and see several words in one paragraph have been emphatically underlined. The excerpt comes from Chapter 22: Social History.
When you consider how society may persist in ignorance, you must also consider how long it will persist in delusion; all stupidity is changed to inevitability, and all ills are made into values (choice turned to freedom, and love to happiness), so there is no possibility of escape.
Three words have been forcefully underscored: You. Must. Escape.
I flip forward another few chapters and find another dog-eared page where words have been circled, seemingly sloppily and at random. The full passage reads:
The tools of a healthy society are obedience, commitment, and agreement. Responsibility lies both with the government and with its citizens. Responsibility lies with you.
Someone—Tack? Raven?—has circled various words in the paragraph: The tools are with you.
Now I’m checking every page. Somehow, they knew this would happen; they knew I might be—or would be—taken. No wonder Tack insisted I bring The Book of Shhh; he left clues for me in it. A feeling of pure joy wells up inside of me. They didn’t forget about me, and they haven’t abandoned me. Until now, I haven’t realized how terrified I’ve been—without Tack and Raven, I have no one. Over the past year, they have become everything to me: friends, parents, siblings, mentors.
There is only one other page that has been marked up. A large star has been drawn next to Psalm 37.
Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain;
The calm shall be buried inside of me;
A warm stone, heavy and dry;
The root, the source, a weapon against pain.
I read through the psalm several times as disappointment comes thudding back. I was hoping for some kind of encoded message, but no deeper meaning is immediately apparent. Maybe Tack only meant for me to stay calm. Or maybe the star was penned in earlier, and is unrelated; or maybe I’ve misunderstood and the markings are random, a fluke.
But no. Tack gave me the book because he knew I might need it. Tack and Raven are meticulous. They don’t do things randomly or without purpose. When you are living on a razor’s edge, there is no room at all for fumbling.
Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain…
Rain.
Tack’s umbrella—the one he pushed into my hands, and insisted I bring, on a cloudless day.
My hands are shaking as I pull the umbrella onto my lap and begin to examine it more closely. Almost immediately, I spot a tiny fissure—imperceptible, had I not been looking for it—that runs the length of the handle. I slide my fingernail into the miniscule crack and try to pry the handle apart, but it won’t budge.
“Shit,” I say out loud, which makes me feel a little better. “Shit, shit, shit.” Each time I say it, I try to pull and twist the umbrella apart, but the wood handle stays cleanly intact, polished and pretty.
“Shit!” Something inside me snaps—it’s the frustration, the waiting, the heavy silence. I throw the umbrella, hard, against the wall. It hits with a crack. As it lands, the halves of the handle come neatly apart, and from between them a knife clatters to the ground. When I pull it from its leather sheath, I recognize it as one of Tack’s. It has a carved bone handle and a viciously sharp blade. I once saw Tack gut an entire deer with it, cleanly, from throat to tail. Now the blade is polished so brightly that I can see my reflection in it.
Suddenly there is noise from the hallway: clomping footsteps, and a heavy grating sound, too, as though something is being dragged toward the cell. I tense up, gripping the knife, still in a crouch—I could make a run for it when the door opens; I could lunge at the Scavengers, swipe, swipe, take out an eye or get in at least one cut, make a run for it—but before I have time to plan or choose, the door is swinging open and it’s Julian who comes toppling through, half-conscious, so bruised and bleeding I recognize him only by his shirt, and then the door slams shut again.
“Oh my God.”
Julian looks as though he has been mauled by a wild animal. His clothes are stained with blood, and for one terrifying second I am jettisoned back in time, back to the fence, watching red seep across Alex’s shirt, knowing he will die. Then the vision retreats and it’s Julian again, on his hands and knees, coughing and spitting blood onto the floor.
“What happened?” I slip the knife quickly under my mattress and kneel down next to him. “What did they do to you?”
A gurgling sound emerges from the back of his throat, followed by another round of coughing. Julian thuds onto his elbows, and my chest is full of a winging fear. He’s going to die, I think, and the certainty is carried on a wave of panic.
No. This is different. I can fix this.
“Forget it. Don’t try to talk,” I say. He has now slid onto the ground, almost in a fetal position. His left eyelid flutters, and I’m not sure how much he hears or understands. I slide his head onto my lap gently and help him roll over onto his back, biting back the cry that rises to my lips when I see his face: undifferentiated flesh, a beaten, bloody thing. His right eye is swollen completely shut, and blood is flowing rapidly from a deep cut above his right eyebrow.
“Shit,” I say. I’ve seen bad injuries before, but I’ve always been able to get some kind of medical supplies, however rudimentary. Here, I’ve got nothing. And Julian’s body is making strange, twitchy motions. I’m worried he might have an attack.
“Stick with me,” I say, trying to keep my voice low and calm, just in case he’s conscious and listening. “I need to get you out of your shirt, okay? Stay as still as you can. I’m going to make you a compress. It will help with the bleeding.”
I unbutton Julian’s filthy shirt. At least his chest is unmarked, apart from a few large and mean-looking bruises. All of the blood must be from his face. The Scavengers have worked him over, but they haven’t tried to do serious harm. When I ease his arms out of the sleeves he moans, but I manage to get the shirt off. I press it tightly to the wound on his forehead, wishing I had a clean cloth. He moans again.
“Shhh,” I say. My heart is pounding. Waves of heat are radiating from his skin. “You’re okay. Just breathe, all right? Everything’s going to be fine.”
There’s a little bit of water left in the bottom of the cup they brought for us yesterday. Julian and I were making it last. I dampen Julian’s shirt and blot his face with it; then I remember the antibacterial wipes the DFA was distributing at the rally. For the first time, I’m grateful to the DFA for their obsession with cleanliness. I still have the wipe folded into one of my back jeans pockets; as I unwrap it, the astringent smell of alcohol makes me wince, and I know it’s going to hurt. But if Julian gets an infection, there’s no way we’ll make it out of here.
“This is going to sting a little bit,” I say, and bring the wipe into contact with Julian’s skin.
Instantly he lets out a roar. His eyes fly open—as much as they can, anyway—and he jerks upright. I have to wrestle him by his shoulders to the ground again.
“Hurts,” he mutters, but at least he’s awake now, and alert. My heart leaps in my chest. I realize I’ve barely been breathing.
“Don’t be a baby,” I say, and continue cleaning his face while he tenses his whole body and grits his teeth. Once I’ve cleaned most of the blood away, I get a better sense of the damage they’ve done. The cut on his lip has opened up again, and he must have been hit repeatedly in the face, probably with a fist or a blunt object. The cut on his forehead is the most trouble some. It’s still bubbling blood. But all in all, it could be much worse. He’ll live.
“Here,” I say, and lift the tin cup to his lips, supporting his head on my knees. There’s a half inch of water left. “Drink this.”
When he’s finished with the water, he closes his eyes again. But his breathing is regular now, and his tremors have stopped. I take the shirt and rip off a long strip of fabric, trying to will away the memories that are pressing and resurging: I learned this from Alex. At one point, in another lifetime, he saved me when I was hurt. He wrapped and bandaged my leg. He helped me escape from the regulators.
I fold the memory carefully inside of me. I bury it down deep.
“Lift your head a little,” I say, and Julian does, this time soundlessly, so I can work the fabric around it. I tie the length of shirt low on his forehead, knotting it tightly close to the gash, so it forms a kind of tourniquet. Then I lower his head back onto my thighs. “Can you talk?” I ask, and Julian nods. “Can you tell me what happened?”
The right corner of his lip is so swollen that his voice sounds distorted, like he’s having to squeeze the words past a pillow. “Wanted to know things,” he says, then sucks in a deep breath and tries again. “Asked me questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“My family’s apartment. Charles Street. Security codes. Guards—how many and when.”
I don’t say anything. I’m not sure Julian realizes what this means, and how bad it is. The Scavengers have grown desperate. They’re trying to launch an attack on his house now, use him to find a way in. Maybe they’re planning to kill Thomas Fineman; maybe they’re just looking for the typical goods: jewelry, electronics that might be bartered on the black market, money, and, of course, weapons. They are always amassing weapons.
This can only mean one thing: Their plan to ransom Julian has failed. Mr. Fineman didn’t bite.
“Wouldn’t tell them anything,” Julian huffs out. “They said … a few more days … more sessions… I’d talk.”
There’s no longer any doubt. We have to get out as soon as possible. Whenever Julian decides to talk—which he will, eventually—neither he nor I will serve any purpose to the Scavengers. And they are not known for their policy of catch-and-release.
“All right, listen.” I try to keep my voice low, hoping he won’t read the urgency there. “We’re getting out of here, okay?”
He shakes his head, a tiny gesture of disbelief. “How?” he croaks out.
“I’ve got a plan,” I say. This isn’t true, but I figure I will have a plan. I’ve got to. Raven and Tack are counting on me. Thinking of the messages they left me, and the knife, fills me once again with warmth. I am not alone.
“Armed.” Julian swallows, then tries again. “They’re armed.”
“We’re armed too.” My brain is skipping ahead now, into the hallway: Footsteps come down, they go back up, one at a time. One guard only at mealtime. That’s a good thing. If we can somehow get him to unlock the door… I’m so consumed with the planning, I don’t even pay attention to the words coming out of my mouth.
“Look, I’ve been in bad situations before. You’ve got to trust me. This one time in Massachusetts—”
Julian interrupts me. “When … you… Massachusetts?”
That’s when I realize I’ve screwed up. Lena Morgan Jones has never been to Massachusetts, and Julian knows it. For a moment I debate telling another lie, and in that pause Julian struggles onto his elbows, swiveling around and scooting backward to face me, grimacing the whole time.
“Be careful,” I say. “Don’t push it.”
“When were you in Massachusetts?” he repeats painstakingly slowly, so that each word is clear.
Maybe it’s the way that Julian looks, with the blood-spotted strip of shirt knotted around his forehead and his eyes swollen practically shut: the look of a bruised animal. Or maybe it’s because I realize, now, that the Scavengers are going to kill us—if not tomorrow, then the next day or the day after that.
Or maybe I’m just hungry, and tired, and sick of pretending.
In a flash, I decide to tell him the truth. “Listen,” I say, “I’m not who you think I am.”
Julian gets very still. I’m reminded again of an animal—one time we found a baby raccoon, foundering in a mud pit that had opened up in the ground after a thaw. Bram went to help it, and as he approached, the raccoon went still just like that—an electric stillness, more alert and energetic than any kind of struggle.
“All that stuff I told you—about growing up in Queens and getting held back—none of that was true.”
Once I was on the other side, in Julian’s position. I stood, battered between currents, as Alex told me the same thing. I’m not who you think I am. I still remember the swim back to shore; the longest and most exhausting of my life.
“You don’t need to know who I am, okay? You don’t need to know where I really come from. But Lena Morgan Jones is a made-up story. Even this”—I touch my fingers to my neck, running them over the three-pronged scar—“this was made-up too.”
Julian still doesn’t say anything, although he has inched backward even farther and used the wall to pull himself into a seated position. He keeps his knees bent, hands and feet flat on the floor, as though if he could, he would spring forward and run.
“I know you don’t have a lot of reason to trust me right now,” I say. “But I’m asking you to trust me anyway. If we stay here, we’ll be killed. I can get us out. But I’m going to need your help.”
There is a question in my words, and I stop, waiting for Julian’s answer.
For a long time there is silence. At last he croaks out, “You.”
The venom in his voice surprises me. “What?”
“You,” he repeats. And then, “You did this. To me.”
My heart starts beating hard against my chest, painfully. For a second I think—I almost hope—that he’s having some kind of attack, a hallucination or fantasy. “What are you talking about?”
“Your people,” he says, and then I get a sick taste in my mouth and I know that he’s perfectly lucid. I know exactly what he means, and what he thinks. “Your people did this.”
“No,” I say, and then repeat it a little more emphatically. “No. We had nothing to do with—”
“You’re an Invalid. That’s what you’re telling me, right? You’re infected.” Julian’s fingers are trembling lightly against the ground, with a noise like the patter of rain. He’s furious, I realize, and probably scared, too. “You’re sick.” He nearly spits out the word.
“Those aren’t my people out there,” I say, and now I have to stop the anger from coming and dragging me under: It is a black force, a current tugging at the edges of my mind. “Those people aren’t…” I almost say, They aren’t human. “They’re not Invalids.”
“Liar,” Julian snarls. There it is. Just like the raccoon when Bram finally went to lift it from the mud and it leapt, snapping, and sank its teeth into the flesh of his right hand.
The sick taste in my throat comes all the way from my stomach. I stand up, hoping Julian won’t see that I, too, am shaking. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “You don’t know anything about us, and you don’t know anything about me.”
“Tell me,” Julian says, still with that undercurrent of rage and coldness. Each word sounds hard-edged and cutting. “When did you catch it?”
I laugh, even though none of it is funny. The world is upside down and everything is shit and my life has been cleaved and there are two different Lenas running parallel to each other, the old and the new, and they will never, ever be whole again. And I know Julian won’t help me now. I was an idiot to think that he would. He’s a zombie, just like Raven has always said. And zombies do what they were built to do: They trundle forward, blindly obedient, until they rot away for good.
Well, not me. I fish the knife out from under the mattress and sit on the cot, then begin running the blade quickly along the metal bedpost, sharpening it, taking pleasure in the way it catches the light.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say to Julian. “None of it matters.”
“How?” he persists. “Who was it?”
The black space inside me gives a tiny shudder, widens another inch. “Go to hell,” I say to Julian, but calmly now, and I keep my eyes on the knife, flashing, flashing, flashing, like a sign pointing the way out of the dark.