It’s still raining in the morning.
I sit up slowly. I have a wicked headache, and I’m dizzy. Julian is no longer next to me. The rain is pouring through the grates, long, twisting gray ribbons of it, and he is standing underneath them.
His back is turned to me, and he has stripped down to a pair of faded cotton shorts he must have found when we scavenged for clothing and supplies. My breath catches in my throat. I know I should look away, but I can’t. I’m transfixed by the sight of the rain coursing over his back—broad and muscled and strong, just like Alex’s was—the rolling landscapes of his arms and shoulders; his hair, now dark with water; the way he tips his head back and lets the rain run into his open mouth.
In the Wilds, I finally got used to seeing men naked or half-naked. I got used to the strangeness of their bodies, the bits of curling hair on their chests, and sometimes on their backs and shoulders, to the broad, flat panes of their stomachs and wings of their hipbones, arcing over the waistband of their pants. But this is different. There is a perfect stillness to him, and in the pallid gray light he seems to glow slightly, like a statue carved out of white rock.
He is beautiful.
He shakes his head a bit and water pinwheels from his hair, a glittering semicircle: Happy and unaware, he starts to hum quietly. All of a sudden I am horribly embarrassed: I’m trespassing on a private moment. I clear my throat loudly. He whips around. When he sees me awake, he jumps out of the stream of water and scoops his clothes up off the platform lip, covering himself with them.
“I didn’t know you were awake,” he says, fighting to get his T-shirt on, even though he’s soaking wet. He accidentally gets his head caught in an armhole and has to try again. I would laugh if he didn’t look so desperate.
Now that he has cleaned away the blood, I can see his face clearly. His eyes are no longer swollen, but they are ringed with deep purple bruises. The cuts on his lip and forehead are scabbing over. That’s a good sign.
“I just woke up,” I say as he finally gets his shirt on. “Did you sleep at all?”
Now he’s wrestling with his jeans. His hair makes a pattern of water spots around the neck of his T-shirt.
“A little,” he says guiltily. “I didn’t mean to. I must have dropped off around five. It was already getting light.” His jeans are on. He hauls himself up onto the platform, surprisingly graceful. “Ready to move on?”
“In a bit,” I say. “I’d like—I’d like to get clean, like you did. Under the grates.”
“Okay.” Julian nods, but doesn’t move. I can feel myself blushing again. It has been a long time since I’ve felt this way, so open and exposed. I’m losing the thread of the new Lena, the hard one, the warrior made in the Wilds. I can’t seem to pull myself back into her body.
“I’ll need to get undressed,” I blurt out, since Julian doesn’t seem to be taking the hint.
“Oh—oh, right,” he stammers, backing away. “Of course. I’ll just—I’ll go scout ahead.”
“I’ll be quick,” I say. “We should get moving again.”
I wait until Julian’s footsteps are a faint echo in the cavernous space before stepping out of my clothes. For a minute it’s possible to forget that the Scavengers are somewhere out there in the dark, looking for us. For a minute it’s possible to forget what I’ve done—what I’ve had to do—to escape, to forget the pattern of blood seeping across the storeroom floor, the Scavenger’s eyes, surprised, accusatory. I stand naked on the lip of the platform, reaching my arms up toward the sky, as ribbons of water continue twisting through the grates: liquid gray, as though the sky has begun to melt. The cold air raises goose bumps on my skin. I lower myself to a crouch and ease myself off the platform, splashing into the tracks, feeling the bite of metal and wood on my bare feet. I slosh my way over to the grates. Then I tip my head back so the rain hits me square in the face and courses down my hair, my back, my aching shoulders and chest.
I have never felt anything so amazing in my life. I want to cry out for joy, or sing. The water is icy cold, and smells fresh, as though it has carried some of the scents of its spiraling journey past stripped branches and tiny, new March buds.
When I’ve let the water drive over my face and pool in my eyes and mouth, I lean forward and feel it beat a rhythm on my back, like the drumming of a thousand tiny feet. I haven’t realized until right now how sore I am all over: Everything hurts. My legs and arms are covered with dark bruises.
I know I’m as clean as I’m going to get, but I can’t bring myself to move out of the stream of water, even though the cold makes me shiver. It’s a good cold, purifying.
Finally I wade back to the platform. It takes me two tries to heave myself up off the tracks—that’s how weak I am—and I’m dripping water everywhere, leaving a person-sized splatter pattern on the dark concrete. I wrap the long coil of my hair around one hand and squeeze, and even this brings me joy; the normalcy of the action, routine and familiar.
I step into the jeans I took from the Scavengers, rolling them once at the waist to keep them from falling off; even so, they hang loose from my hipbones.
Then: footsteps behind me. I whip around, covering my breasts with my arms.
Julian steps out of the shadows.
Keeping one arm wrapped around my chest, I grab for my shirt.
“Wait,” he calls out, and something about the tone of his voice—a note of command, and also of urgency—stops me.
“Wait,” he repeats, more softly.
We’re separated by twenty feet of space, but the way he’s looking at me makes me feel as though we’re chest to chest. I can feel his eyes on my skin like a prickling touch. I know I should put on my shirt, but I can’t move. I can hardly even breathe.
“I’ve never been able to look before,” Julian says simply, and takes one more step toward me. The light falls differently across his face, and now I can see a softness in his eyes, a blur, and it makes the roaring heat in my body melt away into warmth, a steady, wonderful feeling. At the same time, a tiny voice in the back of my head pipes up: Danger, danger, danger. Beneath it, a fainter echo: Alex, Alex, Alex.
Alex used to look at me like that.
“Your waist is so small.” That’s all Julian says: in a voice so quiet I barely hear him.
I force myself to turn away from him. My hands are shaking as I wrestle the sports bra, and then my shirt, over my head. When I turn around again, I feel afraid of him for some reason. He has come even closer. He smells like rain.
He saw me topless, exposed.
He looked at me like I was beautiful.
“Feeling better?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, dropping my eyes. I finger the cut along my neck carefully. It is about a half-inch long, and clotted with dried blood.
“Let me see.” Julian reaches out and then hesitates, his fingers an inch from my face. I look up at him. He seems to be asking permission. I nod, and he slips his hand, gently, under my chin, tipping it up so he can look at my neck. “We should bandage it.”
We. We are on the same side now. He is refusing to say anything more about the fact that I lied to him, and the fact that I’m uncured. I wonder how long it will last.
Julian moves over to the backpack. He rummages for the first-aid materials we stole, and returns to me with a large bandage, a bottle of peroxide, some antibacterial ointment, and several cotton puffs.
“I can do it,” I say, but Julian shakes his head.
“Let me,” he says. First he dips the cotton balls in the peroxide and dabs the cut carefully. It stings and I jerk back, yelping. He raises his eyebrows. “Come on,” he says, hitching his mouth into a smile. “It doesn’t hurt that badly.”
“It does,” I insist.
“Yesterday you went head-to-head with two homicidal maniacs. Now you can’t take a little burn?”
“That’s different,” I say, glaring at him. I can tell he’s making fun of me, and I don’t like it. “That was a question of survival.”
Julian raises his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything. He blots my cut one more time with the cotton ball, and this time I grit my teeth and bear it. Then he squeezes a thin line of ointment onto the bandage and affixes it carefully to my neck. Alex fixed me once, just like this. It was on raid night, and we were hiding in a tiny tool shed, and a dog had just taken a chunk out of my leg. I haven’t thought about that night in a long time, and as Julian’s hands skate over my skin, I feel suddenly breathless.
I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other’s wounds; they repair the broken skin.
“There. As good as new.” His eyes have taken on the gray of the sky above the grates. “You okay to move on?”
I nod, even though I’m still weak, and pretty dizzy.
Julian reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. I wonder what he thinks when he touches me, whether he feels the electric pulse that runs through my body. He is unused to having contact with girls, but he doesn’t seem bothered by it. He has crossed a boundary. I wonder what he’ll do when we finally get out of here. He’ll no doubt go back to his old life—to his father, to the DFA.
Maybe he’ll have me arrested.
I feel a surge of nausea and close my eyes, swaying a little on my feet.
“Are you sure you’re okay to move?”
Julian’s voice is so gentle, it makes my chest break up into a thousand fluttering pieces. This was not part of the plan. This was not supposed to happen.
I think about what I told him last night: You’re not supposed to know. The hard, unbearable, beautiful truth.
“Julian”—I open my eyes, wishing my voice sounded less shaky—“we’re not the same. We’re on different sides. You know that, right?”
His eyes get a little harder, more intense: even in the half-light, a blazing blue. But when he speaks, his voice is still soft and quiet. “I don’t know what side I’m on anymore,” he says.
He takes another step toward me.
“Julian—” I can barely squeeze out his name.
That’s when we hear it: a muffled shout from one of the tunnels, the sound of drumming feet. Julian stiffens and in that second, when we look at each other, there’s no need to speak at all.
The Scavengers are here.
The terror is a sudden jolt. The voices are coming from one of the tunnels we came through last night. Julian scoops up the backpack, and I stuff my feet quickly into my sneakers, not even bothering with socks. I grab the knife from the ground; Julian reaches for my other hand and pulls me forward, past the wooden crates and to the far end of the platform. Even fifty feet away from the grates, it’s almost impossible to see. We are swallowed again in murk and darkness. It feels like stepping into a mouth, and I try to beat back the feeling of terror winging through me. I know I should be grateful for the darkness and all the chances to hide, but I can’t help thinking of what the darkness could be hiding: stealthy, silent steppers; bodies swinging from the pipes.
At the far end of the platform there’s a tunnel, so low Julian and I have to stoop to enter. After ten feet, we reach a narrow metal ladder, which takes us down into a broader tunnel, this one studded with old train tracks but free, thankfully, of running water. Every few feet Julian pauses, listening for the Scavengers.
Then we hear it, unmistakably, and closer now: a voice grunting, “This way.” Those two words knock the breath out of me, exactly as if I’d been punched. It’s Albino. I mentally curse myself for putting the handgun in the backpack—stupid, stupid, and no way of getting it now, in the dark, while Julian and I are pushing forward. I squeeze the handle of the knife, taking some reassurance from the smooth grain of its wood, from its weight. But I’m still weak, dizzy, and hungry, too; I know I won’t do well in a fight. I say a silent prayer that we can lose them in the darkness.
“Down here!”
But the voices grow louder, closer. We hear feet ringing against the metal ladder, a sound that makes my blood sing with terror. Just then I see it: light zigzagging against the walls, flashing yellow tentacles. They’re using flashlights, of course. No wonder they’re coming so fast. They don’t have to worry about being seen or heard. They are the predators.
And we are the prey.
Hide. It’s our only hope. We need to hide.
There’s an archway on our right—a cutout of even blacker darkness—and I squeeze Julian’s hand, pulling him back, directing him through it, into another tunnel, a foot or so lower than the one we’ve been traveling, and this one dotted with puddles of stagnant, stinking water. We grope our way through the dark. The walls on both sides of us are smooth—no alcoves, no piled wooden crates, nothing to conceal us—and the panic is building. Julian must be feeling it too, because he loses his footing, stumbles, and splashes heavily into one of the narrow beds of still water.
Both of us freeze.
The Scavengers, too, freeze. Their footsteps stop; their voices fall silent.
And then the light seeps through the archway: a creeping, sniffing animal, roving the ground, ravenous. Julian and I don’t move. He pulses my hand, once, then releases it. I hear him shift the backpack from his shoulder and know that he must be fumbling for a weapon. There’s no longer any point in running. There’s no point in fighting, either—not really—but at least we can take a Scavenger or two down with us.
My vision goes suddenly blurry and I’m startled. Tears sting my eyes, and I have to wipe them away with the inside of my wrist. All I can think is—Not here, not like this, not underground, not with the rats.
The light widens and expands; a second beam joins it. The Scavengers are moving silently now, but I can feel them taking their time, and enjoying it, the way a hunter draws his bow back the last few inches before releasing an arrow—those final moments of quiet and stillness before the kill. I can feel the albino. Even in the dark, I know he is smiling. My palms are wet on the knife. Next to me, Julian is breathing heavily.
Not like this. Not like this. My head is full of echoes now, fragments and distortions: the heady smell of honeysuckle in the summer; fat, droning bees; trees bowed low under the weight of heavy snowfall; Hana running ahead of me, laughing, her blond hair swinging in an arc.
And strangely, what strikes me then—in that exact second, as I know with solid certainty that I am going to die—is that all the kisses I have ever had are behind me. The deliria, the pain, all the trouble it has caused, everything we have been fighting for: for me it is done, washed away on the tide of my life.
And then, just as the beams of light grow to headlights—huge, blinding, bearing down on us, and the shadows behind them unfold and become people—I am filled with desperate rage. I can’t see; the light has dazzled me, and the darkness has melted into explosions of color, spots of floating brightness, and dimly, as I leap forward, thrusting blindly with my knife, I hear shouting and roaring and a scream that bursts through my chest, whines through my teeth like the reverberation of a metal blade.
Everything is chaos: hot bodies and panting. There’s an elbow in my chest and thick arms encircling me, choking out my breath. I get a mouthful of greasy hair, a blade of pain in my side; foul breath in my face, and guttural shouts. I can’t tell how many Scavengers there are—three? four?—and don’t know where Julian is. I am striking without looking, struggling to breathe, and everything is bodies—hardness and enclosure, no way to run, no way to break free—and the slashing of my knife. I hit flesh, and flesh, and then the knife gets wrenched from my hand, wrist twisted until I cry out.
Enormous hands find my neck and squeeze, and the air goes out of the tunnel, and shrivels to the point of a pen in my lungs. I open my mouth to gasp and find that I can’t. In the darkness above me I see a tiny bubble of light, of air, floating high above me—I am reaching for it, fighting my way out of a thick, consuming murk—but there is nothing but mud in my lungs and I am drowning.
Drowning. Dying.
Faintly I hear a tiny drumming, a constant pitter-patter, and think that it must once again be raining. Then there are lights blazing again on either side of me: dancing, mobile light, twisting and live. Fire.
Suddenly the circle around my neck breaks. The air is like cold water washing into me, making me gasp and splutter. I sink to my hands and knees, and for one confused second I think I must be dreaming—I fall into a stream of fur, a blur of tiny bodies.
Then my head begins to clear and the world returns from the fog and I realize the tunnel is filled with rats. Hundreds and hundreds of them: rats leaping over one another, wriggling and writhing, colliding with my wrists and nipping at my knees. Two gunshots explode; someone cries out in pain. Above me there are shapes, people, grappling with the Scavengers; they have enormous, smoldering torches, stinking like dirty oil, and they scythe through the air with their fire like farmers cutting through fields of wheat. Various images are frozen, briefly illuminated: Julian doubled over, one hand on the tunnel wall; one of the Scavengers, face contorted, screaming, her hair lit up with fire like one of the torches.
This is a new kind of terror. I’m frozen on my knees as the rats rush around me, drumming me with their bodies, squeaking and slithering and whipping my skin with their tails. I’m sickened and paralyzed with fear.
This is a nightmare. It must be.
A rat crawls up onto my lap. I shout and swat it away, nausea rising in my throat. It hits the wall with a sickening thud, squeaking; then it scrabbles back to its feet and joins the stream again, blurring past me. I’m so disgusted I can’t even move. A whimper works its way out of my throat. Maybe I’ve died and gone to hell, to be punished for deliria and all the terrible things I’ve done—to live in squalor and chaos, just like The Book of Shhh predicts for the disobedient.
“Stand up.”
I raise my head. Two monsters stand above me, holding torches. That’s what they look like: beasts from the underground, only half-human. One of them is enormous, practically a giant. One of his eyes is milky white, blinded; the other is as darkly glittering as an animal’s.
The other figure is hunched over, back as crookedly swollen as the warped hull of a boat. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Long, greasy hair mostly conceals the person’s face. She—or he—has twisted Julian’s hands behind his back and bound them with a cord. The Scavengers are gone.
I stand. The bandage on my neck has come loose, and my skin feels slick and wet.
“Walk.” The rat-man gestures with his torch toward the darkness behind me. I see that he is slightly doubled over and is clutching his right side with the hand not holding the torch. I think of the gunshots and hearing someone shout. I wonder if he was hit.
“Listen.” My voice is shaking. I hold up both hands, a gesture of peace. “I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but we’re just trying to get out of here. We don’t have much, but you can take whatever you want. Just—just let us go. Please, okay?” My voice breaks a little. “Please let us go.”
“Walk,” the rat-man repeats, and this time jabs so close to me with his torch I can feel the heat from the flames.
I look at Julian. He gives a minute shake of his head. The expression in his eyes is clear. What can we do?
I turn, and walk. The rat-man goes behind me with his torch, and in front of us, hundreds of rats disappear into the darkness.