Lena.”
My name pulls me out of sleep. I sit up, heart careening in my chest.
Julian has moved his cot toward the door, pressed it against the wall, as far away from me as possible. Sweat is beading on my upper lip. It has been days since I’ve showered, and the room is full of a close, animal smell.
“Is that even your real name?” Julian asks, after a pause. His voice is still cold, although it has lost some of its edge.
“That’s my name,” I say. I squeeze my eyes closed, tight, until little bursts of color appear behind my eyelids. I was having a nightmare. I was in the Wilds. Raven and Alex were there, and there was an animal, too, something enormous we had killed.
“You were calling for Alex,” Julian says, and I feel a small spasm of pain in my stomach. More silence, then: “It was him, wasn’t it? He’s the one who got you sick.”
“What does it matter?” I say. I lie down again.
“So what happened to him?” Julian asks.
“He died,” I say shortly, because that is what Julian wants to hear. I picture a tall tower, smooth-sided, stretching all the way to the sky. There are stairs cut in the side of the tower, winding up and up. I take the first step into the coolness and shade.
“How?” Julian asks. “Because of the deliria?” I know if I say yes he’ll feel good. See, he’ll think. We’re right. We’ve been right all this time. Let people die so that we can be right.
“You,” I say. “Your people.”
Julian sucks in a quick breath. When he speaks again, his voice is softer. “You said you never had nightmares.”
I wall myself up inside. From the tower, the people on the ground are no more than ants, specks, punctuation marks: easily smudged out.
“I’m an Invalid,” I say. “We lie.”
In the morning my plan has hardened, clarified. Julian is sitting in the corner, watching me the way he did when we were first taken. He is still wearing the rag around his head, but he looks alert now, and the swelling in his face has gone down.
I wrestle the umbrella apart, pulling the nylon shell away from its hinged metal arms. Then I lay the nylon flat and cut it into four long strips. I tie the strips together into a makeshift cord and test its strength. Decent. It won’t hold forever, but I don’t need longer than a few minutes.
“What are you doing?” Julian asks me, and I can tell he’s trying hard not to seem too curious. I don’t answer him. I no longer care what he does, or whether he comes with me or remains here to rot forever, as long as he stays out of the way.
It doesn’t take me long to remove the hinges from the flap door, just some wiggling and working with the point of the knife: the hinges are rusted and loose anyway.
Once the hinges are off, I manage to push the door outward, so it falls, clattering into the hall. That will bring someone, and soon. My heart speeds up. It’s showtime, as Tack used to say, right before heading out on a hunt. I pull The Book of Shhh onto my lap and tear out a page.
“You’ll never fit through that space,” Julian says. “It’s too small.”
“Just stay quiet,” I say. “Can you do that for me? Just don’t speak.”
I unscrew the mascara that made its way into my backpack, silently send a message of thanks to Raven—now that she is on the other side, in Zombieland, she can’t get enough of its little trinkets and comforts, its well-lit stores stocked with rows and rows of things to buy.
I can feel Julian watching me. I scrawl out a note on the blank side of the page.
The girl is violent. Worried she might kill me. Ready to talk if you let me out NOW.
I slip the note through the cat-flap door and into the hallway. Then I repack my backpack with The Book of Shhh, the empty water bottle, and pieces of the dismantled umbrella. I grip the knife in my hand, stand by the door, and wait, trying to slow my breathing, every so often flipping the knife into my other hand and wiping sweat from my palms onto my pants. Hunter and Bram once took me deer hunting with them, just to watch, and this was the part I couldn’t stand: the stillness, the waiting.
Fortunately, I don’t wait long. Someone must have heard the flap door fall. Pretty soon I hear another door close—more information; information is good; that means there’s another door somewhere, another room underground—and footsteps coming toward me. I hope it’s the girl who comes, the one with the wedding ring threaded through her nose.
I hope, above all, it’s not the albino.
But the boot steps are heavy, and when they stop just outside the door, it’s a man who mutters, “What the hell?”
My whole body feels wound up, coiled like an electrical wire. I’ll have only one shot to get this right.
Now that I’ve disabled the flap door, I have a solid view of mud-splattered combat boots and baggy green trousers, like the kind lab techs and street sweepers wear. The man grunts, and moves the flap door a few inches with a boot, as though toeing a mouse to see whether it is alive. Then he kneels down and snatches up the note.
I tighten my grip on the knife. Now my heart feels as though it is barely going at all. I am not breathing, and the space between heartbeats is an eternity.
Open the door. Don’t call for backup. Open the door now. Come on, come on, come on.
Finally there’s a heavy sigh, and the sound of keys jingling; a clicking, too, as I imagine him sliding the safety off his gun.
Everything is sharp and very slow, as though funneled through a microscope. He’s going to open the door.
The keys turn in the lock and Julian scrabbles, alarmed, to his feet, letting out a short cry. For a second the guard hesitates. Then the door begins to push inward, inward, toward me—toward where I am standing, pressed up against the wall, invisible.
Just like that the seesaw has swung: The seconds are banging together so fast I can hardly keep track of them. Everything is instinct and blur. Things happen in one collapsed moment: The door swings fully open, just a few inches from my face, as he takes a step into the cell, saying, “All right, I’m all ears,” and as he does I push against the door with both hands, slamming it toward him, hear a small crack and his short exclamation, a curse and a groan. Julian is saying, “Holy shit, holy shit.”
I leap out from behind the door—all instinct now, no more thinking—and land on the Scavenger’s back. He is staggering on his feet, clutching his head, where the door must have hit him, and my momentum carries him off his feet and onto the ground. I drive a knee into his back and press the knife into his throat.
“Don’t move.” I’m shaking. I hope he can’t feel it. “Don’t scream. Don’t even think about screaming. Just stay where you are, nice and easy, and you won’t get hurt.”
Julian watches me, wide-eyed, silent. The Scavenger is good. He stays still. I keep my knee in his back and the tip of my knife at his throat, take one end of the nylon rope in my teeth, and twist his left hand behind his back, and then his right, keeping them both stabilized with my knee.
Julian wrenches away from the wall suddenly and comes over to me.
“What are you doing?” My voice is a snarl, through the nylon and my gritted teeth. I can’t take Julian and the Scavenger at once. If he interferes, it’s all over.
“Give me the rope,” he says calmly. For a second I don’t move, and he says, “I’m helping you.”
I pass the cord to him wordlessly, and he kneels down behind me. I keep the Scavenger pressed to the ground as Julian binds his hands and feet.
I press my knee harder into the Scavenger’s back, holding him still. I picture the spaces between the ribs, the soft skin and layers of fat and flesh—and beneath it all, the heart, squeezing and pumping out life. It would only take one quick jab. . . .
“Give me the knife,” Julian says.
I tighten my grip on the handle. “For what?”
“Just give it to me,” he says.
I hesitate, then pass it back to him. He cuts off the excess nylon cord—he is clumsy with the knife, and it takes him a minute—and then passes both the knife and the strip of nylon back to me.
“You should gag him,” Julian says matter-of-factly. “So he won’t be able to call for help.”
He is amazingly calm. I tip the Scavenger’s head up and wrestle the makeshift gag into his mouth. He kicks out with his legs, thrashing like a fish pulled onto land, but I manage to get the fabric knotted behind his head. The bonds are flimsy—he’ll get his hands free in ten, fifteen minutes—but that should be enough time.
I climb quickly to my feet and sling my backpack over my shoulders. The door to the cell is still gaping open. Just that—the open door—fills me with a sense of joy so complete I could shout. I imagine Raven and Tack, watching me approvingly.
I won’t let you down.
I look back. Julian has gotten to his feet.
“You coming, or what?” I say.
He nods. He still looks like shit, his eyes bare cracks, but his mouth is set tight in a line.
“Let’s go, then.” I tuck the knife, sheathed, into the waistband of my pants. I can’t worry about whether Julian will slow me down. And he may even be helpful. At least he’s another target; if I get pursued or jumped, he’ll be a distraction.
We close the cell door carefully behind us, which quiets the sounds of the Scavenger’s muffled cries, the scuffing of his shoes against the floor. The hall outside the cell is long, narrow, and well lit: four doors, all of them closed and all of them metal, run along the wall to our left, and at the end of the hall is another steel door. This throws me a bit. I’ve been assuming our cell was simply annexed off one of the old subway tunnels, and we would emerge into darkness and dankness. But we’re obviously in a space that is far more elaborate, an underground complex.
The voices I heard earlier are coming from behind one of the closed doors on our left. I think I recognize the low, flat growl of Albino. I pick up only a few words of conversation: “… waiting … bad idea from the start.” A staccato response follows: another man’s voice. At least I know where the albino is now, although that makes the girl with the piercings unaccounted for. That means at least four Scavengers were involved in our kidnapping. They’re obviously getting organized: a very, very bad thing.
As we progress, the voices get louder and clearer. The Scavengers are arguing.
“Stick with the original agreement…”
“Don’t owe … to anyone…”
My heart has lodged in my throat, making it difficult to breathe. Just as I’m about to scoot past the door I hear a loud bang from inside the room. I freeze, thinking immediately of gunfire. The door handle rattles. My insides go loose and I think, This is it, right here.
Then the voice I don’t recognize says loudly, “Come on, don’t be upset. Let’s talk about this.”
“I’m tired of talking.” That’s Albino: So whatever happened inside, it wasn’t a gunshot I heard.
Julian has frozen beside me. We’ve both instinctively flattened ourselves against the wall—not that it will help us, if the men come bursting out into the hall. Our arms are just touching, and I can feel the light fuzz of blond hair on his forearms. It seems to be conducting a current, small electrical pulses. I inch away from him.
The door handle gives a final rattle and then Albino says, “All right, I’m listening.” His footsteps retreat back into the room, and the spasm in my chest relaxes. I make a motion to Julian. Let’s go. He nods. He has been clenching his fists. His knuckles are tiny white half-moons.
All the remaining doors in the hallway are closed, and we hear no more voices, and see no evidence of other Scavengers. I wonder what the rooms contain: Maybe, I think, there are prisoners in all of them, lying in twin cots, waiting to be ransomed or killed. The idea makes me sick, but I can’t think about it too long. That’s another rule of the Wilds: You have to take care of yourself first.
The flip side of freedom is this: When you’re completely free, you’re also completely on your own.
We reach the door at the end of the hallway. I grab the door handle and pull. Nothing. That’s when I see the small keypad fitted just above the door handle, like the kind Hana used to have on her front gate.
The door requires a code.
Julian must notice it at the same time I do, because he mutters, “Shit. Shit.”
“All right, let’s think about this,” I whisper back, trying to sound calm. But my mind has turned to snow: the same idea coming down like a blizzard, freezing my blood. I’m screwed. I’ll be trapped here, and when I’m found, I’ll have a bruised and bound guard to atone for. They won’t be so careless anymore either. No more flap doors for me.
“What do we do?” Julian asks.
“We?” I shoot him a look over my shoulder. The crown of his head is encircled with dried blood, and I look away so I don’t start feeling sorry for him. “We’re in this together now?”
“We have to be,” he says. “We’ll need to help each other if we’re going to escape.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and moves me gently but firmly out of the way. The touch surprises me. He must really mean what he said about setting our differences aside for now. And if he can do it, so can I.
“You won’t be able to pick it,” I say. “We need a code.”
Julian runs his fingers over the keypad. Then he takes a step back and squints up at the door, runs his hands along the doorjamb as though testing its sturdiness. “We have a keypad like this on the gate at home,” he says. He’s still running his fingers along the doorjamb, tracing cracks in the plaster. “I can never remember the code. Dad’s changed it too many times—too many workers in and out. So we had to develop a system, a series of clues. A code within a code—little signs embedded in and around the gate so whenever the code is changed, I’ll know it.”
Suddenly it clicks: the point of his story, and the way out.
“The clock,” I say, and I point to the clock hanging above the door. It’s frozen: The small hand hovers slightly above the nine, and the big hand is stuck on the three. “Nine and three.” But even as I say it, I’m uncertain. “But that’s only two numbers. Most keypads take four numbers, right?”
Julian punches in 9393, then tries the door. Nothing. 3939 doesn’t work, either. Neither does 3399 or 9933, and we’re running out of time.
“Shit.” Julian pounds the keypad once with his fist in frustration.
“Okay, okay.” I take a deep breath. I was never good at codes and puzzles; math was always one of my worst subjects. “Let’s think about this.”
At that second, the voices down the hall resurge. A door opens a few inches.
Albino is saying, “I’m still not convinced. I say if they don’t pay, we don’t play…”
My throat seizes with sudden terror. Albino is coming into the hall. He’ll see us at any second.
“Shit,” Julian breathes again, a bare exhale. He’s jogging a little on his feet, back and forth, as though he’s cold, but I know he must be as scared as I am. Then, suddenly, he freezes.
“Nine fifteen,” he says, as the door opens another couple of inches, and the voices spill into the hall.
“What?” I grip the knife tightly, whipping my head back and forth between Julian and the door: opening, opening.
“Not nine-three. Nine fifteen. Zero-nine-one-five.” He has already bent over the keypad again, punching the numbers in hard. There’s a quiet buzz, and a click. Julian leans into the door and it opens, as the voices grow clearer and edged with sharpness, and we slip into the next room just as the door behind us swings open, and the Scavengers take their first steps into the hall.
We’re in yet another room, this one large, high-ceilinged, and well lit. The walls are lined with shelves, and the shelves are crammed so tightly with things that in places the wood has begun to sag and warp under the weight of it all: packages of food, and large jugs of water, and blankets; but also knives, and silverware, and nests of tangled jewelry; leather shoes and jackets; handguns and wooden police batons and cans of pepper spray. Then there are things that have no purpose whatsoever: scattered radio bits lying across the floor, an old wooden wardrobe, leather-topped stools, and a trunk filled with broken plastic toys. At the opposite end of the room is another concrete door, this one painted cherry red.
“Come on.” Julian grabs my elbow roughly, pulling me toward it.
“No.” I wrench away from him. We don’t know where we are; we have no idea how long it will be before we escape.
“There’s food here. Weapons. We need to stock up.”
Julian opens his mouth to respond when from the hallway comes the stuttered cadence of shouting, and the pounding of feet. The guard must have given the alarm somehow.
“We’ve got to hide.” Julian pulls me toward the wardrobe. Inside it smells like mouse droppings and mold.
I swing the wardrobe doors closed behind me. The space inside is so small, Julian and I practically have to sit on top of each other. I ease my backpack onto my lap. My back is pressed up against his chest, and I can feel its rise and fall. Despite everything, I’m glad he’s with me. I’m not sure I would have made it even this far on my own.
The keypad gives another buzz; the door of the stockroom bursts open, slamming against the wall. I flinch involuntarily, and Julian’s hands find my shoulders. He squeezes once, a quick pulse of reassurance.
“Goddammit!” That’s Albino; the raspy voice, the anger running through his words, like a live wire. “How the hell did this happen? How did they—”
“They can’t have gone very far. They don’t have the code.”
“Well, then, where the hell are they? Two goddamn kids, for shit’s sake.”
“They might be hiding in one of the rooms,” the other one, the not-Albino, says.
Another voice—female, this time, probably Piercing—chimes in. “Briggs is checking on it. The girl jumped Matt, tied him up. She has a knife.”
“Damn it.”
“They’re in the tunnels by now,” the girl says. “Have to be. Matt must have given up the code.”
“Does he say he did?”
“Well, he wouldn’t say it, would he?”
“All right, look.” Albino again; he’s obviously the one in charge. “Ring, you search the containment rooms with Briggs. We’ll clear out to the tunnels. Nick, take east; I’ll get west with Don. Tell Kurt and Forest they’re on north, and I’ll find someone to cover south.”
I’m tabulating names, numbers: So, we’re dealing with at least seven Scavengers. More than I expected.
Albino is saying: “I want those pieces of shit back here in the next hour. No way I’m losing payday over this, okay? Not because of some eleventh-hour screwup.”
Payday. An idea squirms at the edges of my consciousness; but when I try to fixate on it, it blurs into fog. If it’s not about ransom, what kind of pay can the Scavengers be expecting? Maybe they’re assuming Julian will roll, give up the security info they’ll need to get into his house. But it’s an elaborate—and dangerous—procedure for a run-of-the-mill break-in, and it’s not standard Scavenger operating procedure, either. They don’t plan. They burn, and terrorize, and take.
And I still don’t see how I fit in.
Now there’s the sound of shuffling, of guns being loaded and straps being snapped into place. That’s when the fear comes gunning back: On the other side of a one-inch plywood door are three Scavengers with an army-style arsenal. For a second I think I might faint. It’s so hot and close. My shirt is soaked with sweat. We’ll never make it out of here alive. There’s no way. It’s not possible.
I close my eyes and think of Alex, of pressing close to him on the motorcycle and having the same certainty.
Albino says, “We’ll meet back here in an hour. Now go find those little shits and skewer them for me.” Footsteps move toward the opposite corner. So—the red door must lead to the tunnels. The door opens and closes. Then there’s quiet.
Julian and I stay frozen. At one point I start to move, and he draws me back. “Wait,” he whispers. “Just to be sure.”
Now that there are no voices and no distractions, I’m uncomfortably aware of the heat from his skin, and the tickle of his breath on the back of my neck.
Finally I can’t take it anymore. “It’s fine,” I say. “Let’s go.”
We push out of the wardrobe, still moving cautiously, just in case there are any other Scavengers sniffing around.
“What now?” Julian asks me, keeping his voice low. “They’re looking for us in the tunnels.”
“We have to risk it,” I say. “It’s the only way out of here.” Julian looks away, relenting.
“Let’s load up,” I say.
Julian moves to one of the shelves and starts pawing through a heap of clothing. He tosses a T-shirt back to me. “Here,” he says. “Looks like it should fit.”
I find a pair of clean jeans, too, a sports bra, and white socks, stripping down quickly behind the wardrobe. Even though I’m still dirty and sweaty, it feels amazing to put on clean clothes. Julian finds a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. They’re a little too big, so he holds them up with an electrical wire he uses as a belt. We stuff my backpack with granola bars and water, two flashlights, some packages of nuts, and jerky. I come across a shelf filled with medical supplies, and pack my bag with ointment and bandages and antibacterial wipes. Julian watches me wordlessly. When our eyes meet, I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
Underneath the medical supplies is a shelf empty but for a single wooden box. Curious, I squat down and swing open its lid. My breath catches in my throat.
ID cards. The box is filled with hundreds and hundreds of ID cards, rubber-banded together. There is a pile of DFA badges too, gleaming brightly under the lights.
“Julian,” I say. “Look at this.”
He stands next to me, staring wordlessly as I sift past all the laminated cards, a blur of faces, facts, identities.
“Come on,” he says, after a minute. “We have to hurry.”
I select a half-dozen ID cards quickly, trying to pick girls who look roughly my age, and rubber-band them together, slipping them into a pocket. I take a DFA badge too. It might be useful later.
Finally it’s time for the weapons. There are crates of them: old rifles heaped together like a tangle of thick thorns, gathering dust; well-palmed and well-oiled handguns; heavy clubs and boxes of ammunition. I pass Julian a handgun after checking to see that it’s loaded. I dump a box of bullets in my backpack.
“I’ve never shot one before,” Julian says, handling it gingerly, as though he’s worried it will explode on its own. “Have you?”
“A few times,” I say. He sucks his lower lip into his mouth. “You take it,” he says. I slip the handgun into my backpack, even though I don’t like the idea of being weighed down.
Knives, on the other hand, are useful, and not just for hurting people. I find a switchblade and stick it under the strap of the sports bra. Julian takes another switchblade, which he also pockets.
“Ready to go?” he asks me, after I’ve shouldered my backpack.
That’s when it hits me: The shimmering worry at the edge of my thoughts swells and breaks over me. This is wrong—all wrong. This is too organized. There are too many rooms, too many weapons, too much order.
“They must have had help,” I say, as the idea occurs to me for the first time. “The Scavengers could never have done this on their own.”
“The who?” Julian asks impatiently, casting an anxious look at the door.
I know we have to go, but I can’t move; a tingling feeling is working its way from my toes up into my legs. There’s another idea flickering in the back of my mind now—a brief impression, something seen or remembered. “Scavengers. They’re uncureds.”
“Invalids,” Julian says flatly. “Like you.”
“No. Not like me, and not Invalids. Different.” I squeeze my eyes shut and the memory crystallizes: pressing the point of my knife into the flesh below the Scavenger’s jaw, just above faint blue markings that looked somehow familiar…
“Oh my God.” I open my eyes. My chest feels as though someone is pounding on it.
“Lena, we have to go.” Julian reaches out to grab my arm, but I pull away from him.
“The DFA.” I can barely croak out the words. “The guy—the guard back there, the one we tied up—he had a tattoo of an eagle and a syringe. That’s the DFA crest.”
Julian stiffens. It’s as though a current has run through his whole body. “It must be a coincidence.”
I shake my head. Words, ideas, are tumbling through my head, a stream: Everything flows one way. Everything makes sense: talk of payday; all this equipment; the tattoo; the box of badges. The complex, the security—all of it costs money. “They must be working together. I don’t know why, or what for, or—”
“No.” Julian’s voice is low and steely. “You’re wrong.”
“Julian—”
He cuts me off. “You’re wrong, do you understand me? It’s impossible.”
I force myself not to look away from him, even though there’s something strange going on behind his eyes, a roiling and swirling that makes me feel dizzy, as though I’m standing on the edge of a cliff and in danger of falling.
That’s how we’re standing—frozen like that, a tableau—when the door bangs open and two Scavengers burst into the room.
For a second nobody moves, and I have just enough time to register the basics: one guy (middle-aged), one girl (blue-black hair, taller than I am), both of them unfamiliar. Maybe it’s the fear, but I fixate, too, on the strangest details: the way the man’s left eyelid droops, as though gravity is pulling on it, and the way the girl stands there, mouth open, so I can see her cherry-red tongue. She must have been sucking on something, I think. A lollipop or candy; my mind flies to Grace.
Then the room unfreezes, and the girl goes for her gun, and there’s no thinking anymore.
I lunge at her, knocking the gun from her hand before she has the chance to level it at me. Behind me, Julian shouts something. There’s a gunshot. I can’t look to see who fired. The girl swings at me, clipping me on the jaw with her fist. I’ve never been punched before, and it’s the shock of it, more than the pain, that stuns me. In that split second she manages to get her knife out, and the next thing I see is the blade whistling toward me. I duck, drive hard into her stomach with my shoulders.
She grunts. The momentum carries us both off our feet, and we tumble backward into a box of old shoes. The cardboard collapses under our weight. We’re grappling so close I can taste her hair, her skin in my mouth. First I’m on top, straining, then she is, flipping me down onto my back so my head slams against the concrete, her knees hard in my ribs, thighs gripping me so tight the air is getting squeezed from my lungs. She’s wrestling another knife free of her belt. I’m scrabbling on the floor for a weapon—any weapon—but she’s on me too hard, is gripping me too tightly, and my fingers are closing on air and concrete.
Julian and the man are locked in a shuffling embrace, both straining for an advantage, heads down, grunting. They swivel hard and hit a low wooden bookshelf filled with pots and pans. It teeters, teeters, and then falls: the pots spill everywhere, a cacophony of ringing and dinging metal. The girl glances backward and just that, that little shift, gives me enough room to move. I rocket my fist up, connecting with the side of her face. It can’t hurt too badly, but it sends her sideways and off me, and I’m up and rolling on top of her, ripping the knife out of her grip. My hatred and fear is flowing hard and electric and hot, and without thinking about it I lift the blade and drive it hard down into her chest. She jerks once, lets out a cry, and then goes still. My mind is a loop, an endless refrain: your-fault-your-fault-your-fault. There’s a mangled sobbing sound coming from somewhere, and it takes me a long time to realize I’m the one crying.
Then everything goes black for a moment—the pain comes a split second after the darkness—as the other Scavenger, the man, catches me on the side of my head with a baton. There’s a thunderous crack; I’m tumbling, and everything is a blur of disconnected images: Julian lying facedown near the toppled shelf; a grandfather clock in the corner I hadn’t noticed before; cracks in the concrete floor, expanding like a web to embrace me. Then a few seconds of nothing. Jump-cut: I’m on my back, the ceiling is revolving above me. I’m dying. Weirdly enough, I think of Julian. He put up a pretty good fight.
The man is on top of me, breathing hot and hard into my face. His breath smells like something spoiling in a closed place. A long, jagged cut runs under his eye—nice one, Julian—and some of his blood drips onto my face. I feel the razor-bite of a knife under my chin, and everything in my body freezes. I go absolutely still.
He’s staring at me with such hatred I suddenly feel very calm. I will die. He will kill me. The certainty relaxes me. I am sinking into a white snow. I close my eyes and try to picture Alex the way I used to dream of him, standing at the end of a tunnel. I wait for him to appear, to reach out his hands to me.
I’m fading in and out. I’m hovering above the ground; then I’m on the floor again. There’s the taste of swamp in my throat.
“You gave me no choice,” the Scavenger pants out, and I snap my eyes open. There’s a note of something there—regret, maybe, or apology—that I didn’t anticipate. And with that, the hope comes rushing back, and the terror, too: Please-please-please-let-me-live.
But just then he inhales and tenses, and the point of the knife breaks through my skin and it’s too late—
Then he jerks, suddenly, on top of me.
The knife clatters out of his hand. His eyes roll up to the ceiling, terrible, a doll’s blank gaze. He falls forward slowly, on top of me, knocking the air out of my chest. Julian is standing above him, breathing hard, shaking. The handle of a knife is sticking out of the Scavenger’s back.
A dead man is lying on top of me. A hysterical feeling builds in my chest, then breaks, and suddenly I am babbling, “Get him off of me. Get him off of me!”
Julian shakes his head, dazed. “I—I didn’t mean to.”
“For God’s sake, Julian. Get him off of me! We have to go now.”
He starts, blinks, and focuses on me. The Scavenger’s weight is crushing.
“Please, Julian.”
Finally Julian moves. He bends down and heaves the body off me, and I scramble to my feet. My heart is racing and my skin is crawling; I have the desperate urge to bathe, to get all that death off me. The two dead Scavengers lie so close to each other they are almost touching. A butterfly pattern of blood spreads across the floor between them. I feel sick.
“I didn’t mean to, Lena. I just—I saw him on top of you and I grabbed a knife and I just…” Julian shakes his head. “It was an accident.”
“Julian.” I reach out and put my hands on his shoulders. “Look. You saved my life.”
He closes his eyes for one second, then opens them again.
“You saved my life,” I repeat. “Thank you.”
He seems about to say something. Instead he nods and shoulders the backpack. I reach forward impulsively and seize his hand. He doesn’t pull away, and I’m glad. I need him to steady me. I need him to help keep me on my feet.
“Time to run,” I say, and together we stumble out of the room and, finally, into the cool mustiness of the old tunnels, into the echoes, and the shadows, and the dark.