The temperature drops sharply on the way to the second encampment. Even when I sleep in the tents, I’m freezing. When it’s my turn to sleep outside, I often wake up with shards of ice webbed in my hair. Sarah is stoic, silent, and pale-faced.
Blue gets sick. The first day she wakes up sluggish. She has trouble keeping up, and at the end of our day of hiking, she falls asleep even before the fire is built, curling up on the ground like a small animal. Raven moves her into her tent. That night I wake to a muffled shouting. I sit up, startled. The night sky is clear, the stars razor-sharp and glittering. The air smells like snow.
There is rustling from Raven’s tent, some whimpering; the sound of whispered reassurances. Blue is having bad dreams.
The next morning, Blue comes down with a fever. There is no choice: She must walk anyway. The snow is coming, and we are still thirty miles from the second camp, and many more miles than that from the winter homestead.
She cries as she walks, stumbling more and more. We take turns carrying her—me, Raven, Hunter, Lu, and Grandpa. She is burning. Her arms around my neck are electric wires, pulsing with heat.
The next day, we reach the second encampment: an area of loose shale set underneath an old, half-tumbled-down brick wall, which forms a kind of barrier and shields us somewhat from the wind. We set to work digging up the food, pitching traps, and scavenging the area, which once must have been a decent-sized town, for canned goods and useful supplies. We’ll stay here for two days, possibly three, depending on how much we can find. Beyond the hooting of the owls and the rustling of nighttime creatures, we hear the distant sounds of rumbling trucks. We are less than ten miles from one of the inter-city highways.
It’s strange to think how close we have been to the valid places, established cities filled with food, clothing, medical supplies; and yet we may as well be in a different universe. The world is bifurcated now, folded cleanly in half like the pitched steep sides of a tent: the Valids and the Invalids live on different planes, in different dimensions.
Blue’s nighttime terrors get worse. Her cries are piercing; she babbles nonsense, a language of gibberish and dream-words. When it is time to start toward the third encampment—the clouds have moved in, heavy-knitted through the sky, and the light is the dull, dark gray of an imminent storm—she is almost unresponsive. Raven carries her that day; she won’t let anyone help, even though she, too, is weak, and often falls behind.
We walk in silence. We are weighed down by fear; it blankets us thickly, making it feel as though we are already walking through snow, because all of us know that Blue is going to die. Raven knows it too. She must.
That night Raven builds a fire and places Blue next to it. Even though Blue’s skin is burning, she shivers so hard that her teeth knock together. The rest of us move around the fire as quietly as possible; we are shadows in the smoke. I fall asleep outside, next to Raven, who stays awake to rake the fire and make sure Blue stays warm.
In the middle of the night, I wake up to the muffled sounds of crying. Raven is kneeling over Blue. My stomach caves, and I am filled with terror; I have never seen Raven cry before. I’m afraid to speak, to breathe, to move. I know that she must think everyone is asleep. She would never allow herself to cry otherwise.
But I can’t stay silent, either. I rustle loudly in my sleeping bag, and just like that the crying stops. I sit up.
“Is she…?” I whisper. I can’t say the last word. Dead.
Raven shakes her head. “She’s not breathing very well.”
“At least she’s breathing,” I say. A long silence stretches between us. I’m desperate to fix this. I know, somehow, that if we lose Blue we lose a piece of Raven, too. And we need Raven, especially now that Tack is gone. “She’ll get better,” I say, to comfort her. “I’m sure she’ll be okay.”
Raven turns to me. The fire catches her eyes, makes them glow like an animal’s. “No,” she says simply. “No, she won’t.”
Her voice is so full of certainty, I can’t contradict her. For a moment, Raven doesn’t say anything else. Then she says, “Do you know why I named her Blue?”
The question surprises me. “I thought you named her for her eyes.”
Raven turns back toward the fire, hugging her knees. “I lived in Yarmouth, close to a border fence. A poor area. Nobody else wanted to live so close to the Wilds. Bad luck, you know.”
A shiver snakes through me, and I suddenly feel very alert. Raven has never spoken of her life before the Wilds. She has always repeated that there is no such thing. No before.
“I was like everybody else, really. Just accepted what people told me and didn’t think too much about it. Only cureds go to heaven. Patrols are for my own protection. The uncured are dirty; they turn into animals. The disease rots you from inside. Stability is godliness and happiness.” She shrugs, as though shaking off the memory of who she was. “Except that I wasn’t happy. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like everybody else.”
I think of Hana, spinning around once in her room, arms wide, saying, You think this is it? This is all there is?
“The summer I turned fourteen, they started new construction by the fence. They were projects, really, for the poorest families in Yarmouth: the badly matched ones, or families whose reputations had been ruined because of dissent, or even rumors of it—you know what it’s like. During the day, I used to play around the construction site. A bunch of us did. Of course, we had to be careful to stay separate, the boys and the girls. There was a line that divided us: Everything east of the waterline was ours, everything west of it was theirs.” She laughs softly. “It seems like a dream now. But at the time it seemed like the most normal thing in the world.”
“There was nothing to compare it to,” I say, and Raven shoots me a quick glance, nodding sharply.
“Then there was a week of rain. Construction came to a standstill, and nobody wanted to explore the site. I didn’t mind the rain. I didn’t like to be at home very much. My dad was—” There’s a hitch in her voice, and she breaks off. “He wasn’t totally right after the procedure. It didn’t work correctly. There was disruption of the mood-regulating temporal lobes. That’s what they called it. He was mostly okay, like everybody else. But every so often he flew into rages…” For a while she stares at the fire, silent. “My mom helped us cover the bruises, put on makeup and stuff. We couldn’t tell anyone. We didn’t want too many people knowing that my dad’s cure hadn’t worked properly. People get hysterical; he could have been fired. My mom said people would make things difficult. So instead we hid it. Long sleeves in summertime. Lots of sick days. Lots of lies, too—falling down, bumping my head, hitting the door frame.”
I have never imagined Raven as any younger than she is now. But I can see the wiry girl with the same fierce mouth, rubbing concealer over the bruises on her arms, shoulders, and face. “I’m sorry,” I say. The words seem flimsy, ridiculous.
Raven clears her throat and squares her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter,” she says quickly. She breaks a long, skinny twig into quarters and feeds it, one piece at a time, into the fire. I wonder whether she has forgotten about the original course of conversation—about Blue’s name—but then she starts speaking again.
“That week—the week of the rain—was one of my dad’s bad times. So I went out to the site a lot. One day, I was just picking around one of the foundations. It was all cinder block and pits; hardly any of the building had actually gotten done. And then I saw this little box. A shoe box.” She sucks in a breath, and even in the dark I see her tense.
The rest of her story comes out in a rush: “Someone must have left it there, wedged in the space underneath a part of the foundation. Except the rain was so bad it had caused a miniature mudslide. The box had rolled out into the open. I don’t know why I decided to look inside. It was filthy. I thought I might find a pair of shoes, maybe some jewelry.”
I know, now, where the story is going. I am walking toward the muddy box alongside her; I am lifting the water-warped cover. The horror and disgust is a mud too: It is rising, black and choking, inside of me.
Raven’s voice drops to a whisper. “She was wrapped in a blanket. A blue blanket with yellow lambs on it. She wasn’t breathing. I—I thought she was dead. She was … she was blue. Her skin, her nails, her lips, her fingers. Her fingers were so small.”
The mud is in my throat. I can’t breathe.
“I don’t know what made me try to revive her. I think I must have gone a little crazy. I was working as a junior lifeguard that summer, so I’d been certified in CPR. I’d never had to do it, though. And she was so tiny—probably a week, maybe two weeks old. But it worked. I’ll never forget how I felt when she took a breath, and all that color came rushing into her skin. It was like the whole world had split open. And everything I’d felt was missing—all that feeling and color—all of it came to me with her first breath. I called her Blue so I would always remember that moment, and so I would never regret.”
Abruptly, Raven stops speaking. She reaches down and readjusts Blue’s sleeping bag. The light from the fire is a low, red glow, and I can see that Blue is pale. Her forehead is beaded with sweat, and her breath comes slowly, raspingly. I am filled with a blind fury, undirected and overwhelming.
Raven isn’t finished with her story. “I didn’t even go home. I just took her and ran. I knew I couldn’t keep her in Yarmouth. You can’t keep secrets like that for long. It was hard enough to cover up the bruises. And I knew she must be illegal—some unmatched girl, some unmatched guy. A deliria baby. You know what they say. Deliria babies are contaminated. They grow up twisted, crippled, crazy. She would probably be taken and killed. She wouldn’t even be buried. They’d be worried about the spread of disease. She’d be burned, and packed up with the waste.” Raven takes another twig and throws it in the fire. It flares momentarily, a hot white tongue of flame. “I’d heard rumors about a portion in the fence that was unfortified. We used to tell stories about the Invalids coming in and out, feasting on people’s brains. Just the kind of shit you talk as a kid. I’m not sure whether I still believed it or not. But I took my chance on the fence. It took me forever to figure out a way over with Blue. In the end I had to use the blanket as a sling. And the rain was a good thing. The guards and the regulators were staying inside. I made it over without any trouble. I didn’t know where I was going or what I would do once I crossed. I didn’t say good-bye to either of my parents. I didn’t do anything but run.” She looks at me sideways. “But I guess that was enough. And I guess you know about that too.”
“Yeah,” I croak out. There’s a shredding pain in my throat. I could cry at any second. Instead, I dig my nails, as hard as I can, into my thighs, trying to break the skin beneath the fabric of my jeans.
Blue murmurs something indecipherable and tosses in her sleep. The rasping in her throat has gotten worse. Every breath brings a horrible grating noise, and the watery echoes of fluid. Raven bends forward and brushes the sweat-damp strands of hair from Blue’s forehead. “She’s burning up,” Raven says.
“I’ll get some water.” I’m desperate to do something, anything, to help.
“It won’t make any difference,” Raven says quietly.
But I need to move, so I go anyway. I pick my way through the frosty dark toward the stream, which is covered with a layer of thin ice, all webbed with fissures and cracks. The moon is high and full and reflects the silver surface and the dark flowing water underneath. I break through the ice with the bottom of a tin pail, gasping when the water flows over my fingers and into the bucket.
Raven and I don’t sleep that night. We take turns with a towel, icing Blue’s forehead, until her breathing slows and the rasping eases. Eventually she stops fidgeting and lies quiet and docile under our hands. We take turns with the towel until dawn breaks in the sky, a blush rose, liquid and pale, even though by that time, Blue has not taken a breath for hours.