Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver (20)

Heaven is hot water. Heaven is soap.

Salvage—which is what we always called this homestead—consists of four rooms. There is a kitchen; a large storage space, almost the size of the whole rest of the house; and a cramped sleeping room (filled with rickety and clumsily constructed bunk beds).

The last room is for bathing. Various metal tubs are sitting on a raised platform fitted with a large grate; beneath it, there is an area of flat stone, and bits of charred wood, remnants of the fires we kept burning through the winter, to heat the room and the water at once.

After I’ve fumbled through the darkness and found a battery-operated lantern, I light a fire, using the wood piled high in one corner of the storage shed, while Julian wanders with a glass lantern through the other parts of the house, exploring. Then I crank water from the well. I’m weak, and I can only fill half of one tub before my arms are shaking. But it’s enough.

I take a bar of soap from storage, and I even find a real towel. My skin is itching, crawling with dirt. I can feel it everywhere, in my eyelids, even.

Before I begin undressing, I call out, “Julian?”

“Yes?” His voice is muffled. From the sound of it, he is in the sleeping space.

“Stay where you are, okay?”

There is no door on the bathing room. It is unnecessary, and things that are unnecessary in the Wilds do not get built, made, or used.

There is a slight pause. “Okay,” he says. I wonder what he is thinking. His voice sounds high, strained, although that might be the effect of distortion through the tin and plywood walls.

I place the gun on the floor, then strip out of my clothes, enjoying the heavy thud of my jeans on the ground. For a moment my body looks alien, even to myself. There was a time when I was a little bit round everywhere, despite the muscles in my thighs and calves from running. My stomach had swell to it, my breasts were full and heavy.

Now I am all carved inward—wire and rope. My breasts are two small, hard peaks; my skin is crisscrossed with bruises. I wonder if Alex would still find me beautiful. I wonder if Julian thinks I am ugly.

I push away both thoughts. Unnecessary; irrelevant.

I scrub every last inch of my body: under my fingernails, behind my ears, inside my ears—between my toes, and between my legs. I lather my hair and let soap run into my eyes, burning. When I finally stand up, still slippery with soap, like a fish, the tub is ringed with dirt. I’m once again grateful that we have no mirrors here; my reflection is darkly indistinct on the surface of the water, a shadow-self. I don’t want to see more clearly what I look like.

I dry myself and put on clean clothes: sweatpants, heavy socks, and a large sweatshirt. My bath has rejuvenated me, and I feel strong enough to draw more water from the well and fill another tub for Julian.

I find him in the storage room. He is squatting in front of a low shelf. Someone has left a dozen books, all of them banned long ago. He is leafing through one of them.

“Your turn,” I say, and he jerks, slamming the book shut. He straightens up, and when he turns to me his face is guilty. Then his eyes shift, an expression I can’t identify.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You can read what you like here.”

“I—” He starts to speak, then breaks off, shaking his head. He is still watching me with that strange look on his face. My skin feels hot. The bath must have been too warm. “I remember this book,” he says finally, but I get the sense that is not what he was going to say originally. “It was in my father’s study. His second study. The one I told you about.”

I nod. He holds up the book. It’s a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

“I haven’t read it yet,” I confess. “Tack always said it was one of his favorites—” I suck in a quick breath. I shouldn’t have said Tack’s name. I’ve been trusting Julian, letting him in. But he is still Julian Fineman, and the resistance’s strength depends on its secrets.

Fortunately, he doesn’t comment on it. “My brother—” He coughs and begins again. “I found this book with his things. After he died. I don’t know why; I don’t know what I was looking for.”

A way back, I think, but I don’t say it.

“I kept it.” Julian twists one side of his mouth into a smile. “I cut a slit in my mattress; I used to store it in there, so my dad wouldn’t find it. I started reading it that day.”

“Is it good?” I ask him.

“It’s full of illegal things,” Julian says slowly, as though he’s reevaluating the meaning of the words. His eyes slide away from mine, and for a moment there’s a heavy pause. Then his eyes click back to mine, and this time when he smiles, it’s full of light. “But yes. It’s good. It’s great, I think.”

For some reason I laugh; just that, the way he says it, breaks up the tension in the room, makes everything seem easy and manageable. We were kidnapped; we were beaten and chased; we have no way to get home. We come from two different worlds, and we belonged to two different sides. But everything will be okay.

“I filled a bath for you,” I say. “It should be hot by now. You can take clean clothes.” I gesture to the shelves, neatly stacked and labeled: MEN’S SHIRTS, WOMEN’S PANTS, CHILDREN’S SHOES. Raven’s work, of course.

“Thanks.” Julian grabs a new shirt and pants from the shelves, and, after a moment of hesitation, replaces Great Expectations among the books. Then he straightens up, hugging the clothes to his chest. “It’s not so bad here, you know?”

I shrug. “We do what we can,” I say, but I’m secretly pleased.

He starts to move around me, toward the bathing room. When we’re side by side he stops abruptly. His whole body stiffens. I see a tremor run through him, and for a terrifying second I think, Oh my God, he’s having an attack.

Then he says simply, “Your hair…”

“What?” I’m so surprised I can barely croak out the word.

Julian’s not looking at me, but I can feel an alertness in his whole body, an absorption, and it makes me feel even more exposed than if he were staring.

“Your hair smells like roses,” he says, and before I can respond, he wrenches away from me and into the hall, and I am left alone, with a fluttering in my chest.

While Julian bathes, I set out dinner for us. I’m too tired to light up the old woodstove, so I set out crackers, and open up two cans of beans, and one each of mushrooms and tomatoes; whatever doesn’t need to be cooked. There’s salted beef, too. I take only a small tin of it, even though I’m so hungry I could probably eat a whole cow myself. But we have to save for others. That is a rule.

There are no windows in Salvage and it is dark. I turn off the lantern; I don’t want to waste battery power. Instead I find a few thick candles—already burned down almost to stubs—and set those out on the floor. There is no table in Salvage. When I lived here with Raven and Tack, after Hunter had gone with the others even farther south, to Delaware, we ate like this every night, bent over a communal plate, knees bumping, shadows flickering on the walls. I think it was the happiest I’d been since leaving Portland.

From the bathing room I hear watery, sloshing sounds, and humming. Julian, too, is finding heaven in small things. I go to the front door and crack it. The sun is already setting. The sky is pale blue and threaded with pink and gold clouds. The metal detritus around Salvage—the junk and the shrapnel—smolders red. I think I see a flicker of movement to my left. It must be the cat again, picking its way through the junk.

“What are you looking at?”

I whirl around, slamming the door accidentally. I didn’t hear Julian come up behind me. He is standing very close. I can smell his skin, soapy and yet somehow still boy. His hair curls wetly around his jawline.

“Nothing,” I say, and then because he just stands there, staring at me, I say, “You look almost human.”

“I feel almost human,” he says, and runs a hand through his hair. He has found a plain white T-shirt and jeans that fit.

I’m glad Julian doesn’t ask too many questions about this homestead, and who stays here, and when it was built. I know he must be dying to. I light the candles and we sit cross-legged on the ground, and for a while we’re too busy eating to talk about much of anything. But afterward we do talk: Julian tells me about growing up in New York and asks me questions about Portland. He tells me about wanting to study mathematics in college, and I tell him about running cross-country.

We don’t talk about the cure, or the resistance, or the DFA, or what happens tomorrow, and for that hour while we’re sitting across from each other on the floor, I feel as though I have a real friend. He laughs easily, like Hana did. He’s a good talker, and an even better listener. I feel weirdly comfortable around him—more comfortable, even, than I did with Alex.

I don’t mean to think the comparison, but I do, and it’s there, and I stand up abruptly, while Julian is in the middle of a story, and carry the plates to the sink. Julian breaks off, and watches me clatter the dishes into the basin.

“Are you okay?” Julian asks.

“Fine,” I say too sharply. I hate myself in that moment, and I hate Julian, too, without knowing why. “Just tired.”

That, at least, is true. I am suddenly more tired than I have ever been in my life. I could sleep forever; I could let sleep fall over me like snow.

“I’ll find us some blankets,” Julian says, and stands up. I feel him hesitating behind me, and I pretend to be busy at the sink. I can’t bear to look at him right now.

“Hey,” he says. “I never got to thank you.” He coughs. “You saved my life down there—in the tunnels.”

I shrug, keeping my back toward him. I am gripping the edges of the sink so tightly my knuckles are white. “You saved my life too,” I say. “I almost got stuck by a Scavenger.”

When he speaks again, I can tell that he’s smiling. “So I guess we saved each other.”

I do turn around then; but Julian has already taken up a candle and disappeared with it into the hall, so I am left with the shadows.

Julian has selected two lower bunks, and made them up as best he can, with sheets that don’t quite fit and thin woolen blankets. He has placed my backpack at the foot of my bed. There are a dozen beds in the room, and yet he has chosen two right next to each other. I try not to think about what this means. He is sitting on his bunk, head ducked, wrestling off his socks. When I enter with the candle, he looks up at me, his face so full of open happiness that I almost drop the candle, and the flame sputters out. Now we are left in darkness.

“Can you find your way?” he says.

“Yes.” I feel my way toward his voice, using the other bunks to guide me.

“Easy.” His hand skates across my back, briefly, as I pass him and find my own bunk. I lie down beneath the sheet and the woolen blanket. Both of them smell like mildew and, very faintly, like mouse shit, but I’m grateful for the warmth. The heat from the fire in the bathing room didn’t penetrate this far. When I exhale, small clouds of breath crystallize in the darkness. It will be hard to sleep. The exhaustion that hit after dinner has evaporated just as quickly as it came. My body is on high alert, full of a twinkling frost. I am incredibly aware of Julian’s breathing, his long body almost next to mine in the pitch dark. I can feel that he is awake too.

After a while he speaks. His voice is low, a little bit hoarse.

“Lena?”

“Yeah?” My heart is beating high and fast in my throat and chest. I hear Julian roll over to face me. We are only a few feet apart—that is how close the beds have been built together.

“Do you ever think about him? About the boy who infected you?”

Images flash in the darkness: a crown of auburn hair, like autumn leaves burning; the blur of a body, a shape running next to me; a dream-figure. “I try not to,” I say.

“Why not?” Julian’s voice is quiet.

I say, “Because it hurts.”

Julian’s breath is rhythmic, reassuring.

I ask, “Do you ever think of your brother?”

There is a pause. “All the time,” Julian says. Then, “They told me it would be better after I was cured.” There are a few more moments of silence. Then Julian speaks again. “Can I tell you another secret?”

“Yes.” I pull my blanket tighter around my shoulders. My hair is still wet.

“I knew it wouldn’t work. The cure, I mean. I knew it would kill me. I—I wanted it to.” The words come out in a low rush. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

Suddenly I could cry. I want to reach over and grab his hand. I want to tell him it’s okay, and feel the softness of his seashell ear against my lips. I want to curl up against him, as I would have done with Alex, and let myself breathe in his warm skin.

He is not Alex. You don’t want Julian. You want Alex. And Alex is dead.

But that’s not quite true. I want Julian, too. My body is filled with aching. I want Julian’s lips on mine, full and soft; and his warm hands on my back and in my hair. I want to lose myself in him, dissipate into his body, feel our skin melting together.

I squeeze my eyes shut, willing away the thought. But with my eyes closed, Julian and Alex melt together. Their faces merge and then separate, then collapse again, like images reflected in a stream, passing over each other until I am no longer sure which of them I am reaching for—in the dark, in my head.

“Lena?” Julian asks again, this time even more quietly. He makes my name sound like music. He has moved closer to me. I can feel him, the long lines of his body, a place where the darkness has been displaced. I have shifted too, without meaning to. I am on the very edge of my bed, as close to him as possible. But I won’t roll over to face him. I will myself still. I freeze my arms and legs, and try to freeze my heart, too.

“Yes, Julian?”

“What does it feel like?”

I know what he is talking about, but still I ask, “What does what feel like?”

“The deliria.” He pauses. Then I hear him slide slowly out of bed. He is kneeling in the space between our bunks. I cannot move or breathe. If I turn my head, our lips will be six inches apart. Less. “What does it feel like to be infected?”

“I—I can’t describe it.” I force the words out. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe. His skin smells like smoke from a wood fire, like soap, like heaven. I imagine tasting his skin; I imagine biting his lips.

“I want to know.” His words are a whisper, barely audible. “I want to know with you.”

Then his fingers are tracing my forehead, ever so gently—his touch, too, is a whisper, the lightest breath, and I am still paralyzed, frozen. Over the bridge of my nose, and over my lips—the slightest bit of pressure here, so I taste the saltiness of his skin, feel the ridges and swirls of his thumb on my lower lip—and then over my chin, and around my jaw, and up to my hair, and I am full of a roaring hot whiteness that roots me to the bed, holds me in place.

“I told you”—Julian swallows; his voice is full, throaty now—“I told you I once saw two people kissing. Will you…?”

Julian doesn’t finish his question. He doesn’t have to. All at once my whole body unfreezes; the whiteness, the heat, breaks in my chest and loosens my lips and all I have to do is turn my head, just a little, and his lips are there.

Then we are kissing: slowly, at first, because he doesn’t know how and it has been so long for me. I taste salt and sugar and soap; I run my tongue along his lower lip and he freezes for a second. His lips are warm and full and wonderful. His tongue traces my lips and then suddenly we both let go; and we are breathing into each other, and he is holding my face with his hands, and I am riding a wave of pure joy—I could almost cry, I’m so happy. His chest is solid, pressed against mine. I have drawn him up into the bed without meaning to, and I don’t ever want it to end. I could kiss him and feel his fingers in my hair, listen to him say my name, forever.

For the first time since Alex died, I have found my way to a truly free space: a space unbounded by walls and uninhibited by fear. This is flying.

And then, suddenly, Julian breaks off and pulls away. “Lena,” he gasps hoarsely, as if he has just been running a long distance.

“Don’t say it.” I still feel like I could cry. There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass. “Don’t ruin it.”

But he says it anyway. “What’s going to happen tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.” I draw his head down toward the pillow next to mine. For a second I think I sense a presence next to us in the dark, a moving figure, and I whip my head to the left. Nothing. I am imagining ghosts beside us. I am thinking of Alex. “Don’t worry about that now,” I say, as much to myself as to Julian.

The bed is very narrow. I turn onto my side, away from Julian, but when he puts his arm around me I relax backward into him, cupped in the long curve of his body as though I have been shaped for it. I want to run away and cry. I want to beg Alex—wherever he is, whatever otherworld now holds him—for forgiveness. I want to kiss Julian again.

But I do not do any of those things. I lie still, and feel Julian’s steady heartbeat through my back until my heart calms in response, and I let him hold me, and just before I fall asleep, I say a brief prayer that the morning never comes.

But the morning does come. It finds its way in through the cracks in the plywood, the fissures in the roof: a murky grayness, a slight ebbing of the dark. My first moments of awareness are confused: I believe I am with Alex. No. Julian. His arm is around me, his breath hot on my neck. I have kicked the sheets to the bottom of the bed in the night. I see a flicker of movement from the hall; the cat has gotten into the house somehow.

Then suddenly, a driving certainty—no, I closed the door last night, I locked it—and terror squeezing my chest.

I sit up, say, “Julian—”

And then everything explodes: They are streaming through the door, bursting through the walls, yelling, screaming—police and regulators in gas masks and matching gray uniforms. One of them grabs me and another one pulls Julian off the bed—he is awake now, calling to me, but I can’t hear over the tumult of sound, over the screaming that must be coming from me. I grab the backpack, still balled at the foot of my bed, and swing at the regulator but there are three more, flanking me in the narrow space between beds, and it’s hopeless. I remember the gun: still in the bathing room, and useless to me now. Someone pulls me by the collar and I choke. Another regulator wrenches my arms behind my back and cuffs me, then pushes me forward, so I am half dragged, half marched through Salvage and out into the bright, streaming sunshine, where more police are gathered, more members of the SWAT team carrying guns and gas masks—frozen, silent, waiting.

Setup. Those are the words drilling through me, through my panic. Setup. Has to be.

“Got ’em,” someone announces into a walkie-talkie, and all of a sudden the air comes to life, vibrates with sound: People are shouting to one another, gesturing. Two police officers gun the engines of their motorcycles, and the stink of exhaust is everywhere. Walkie-talkies cackle around us—buzzing, a cacophony.

“Ten-four, ten-four. We got ’em.”

“Twenty miles outside of regulated land … looked like some kind of hideout.”

“Unit 508 to HQ…”

Julian is behind me, surrounded by four regulators; he has been cuffed too.

“Lena! Lena!” I hear him calling my name. I try to turn around and am shoved forward by the regulator behind me.

“Keep moving,” the regulator says, and I’m surprised to hear a woman’s voice, distorted through the gas mask.

A caravan of vehicles is parked on the road Julian and I walked, and there are more police officers here, and more members of the SWAT team. Some of them are in full gear, but others are leaning casually against their cars, dressed in civilian clothing, chatting and blowing on Styrofoam mugs of coffee. They barely glance at me as I am hauled, struggling, down the line of cars. I’m full of blind rage, a fury that makes me want to spit. This is routine for them. They will go home at the end of the day, to their orderly houses and their orderly families, and they will give no thought to the girl they saw screaming and kicking and dragged away, probably to her death.

I see a black town car; Thomas Fineman’s white, narrow face watches me impassively as I go by. If I could shake a fist loose I would plunge it through the window. I’d watch all the glass explode into his face, see how calm he would stay then.

“Hey, hey, hey!” A policeman is waving to us from up ahead, gesturing with his walkie-talkie toward a police van. Black words stand out vividly against its sparkling white paint: CITY OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION, REFORM, AND PURIFICATION. In Portland, we had a single prison, the Crypts. It housed all the criminals and resisters, plus the resident loonies, many of them driven crazy by botched or early cures. In New York and its sister cities there is a web of interrelated jails, a network stretching all across the sister cities, with a name almost as bad as the one Portland gave its prison: the Craps.

“Over here, this way!” Now another policeman is waving us over to a different van, and there is a momentary pause. The whole scene is a mass of confusion, more chaotic than the raids I’ve seen. There are too many people. There are too many cars choking the air with exhaust, too many radios buzzing at once, people talking and shouting over one another. A regulator and a member of the SWAT team are arguing about jurisdiction.

My head hurts; the sun is burning my eyes. All I see is glittering, glaring sunshine; a metal river of cars and motorcycles, exhaust turning the air to mirage, to thickness and smoke.

Suddenly panic crests inside of me. I don’t know what happened to Julian. He isn’t behind me anymore, and I can’t see him in the crowd. “Julian!” I scream out, and get no answer, although one policeman turns at the sound of my voice and then, shaking his head, hocks a brown glob of saliva onto the ground by my feet. I’m fighting against the woman behind me again, trying to tear myself out of her grasp, but her hands are a vise around my wrists and the more I struggle, the tighter she holds.

“Julian! Julian!”

No response. The panic has turned to a solid lump, and it is clotting my throat. No, no, no, no. Not again.

“All right, keep going.” The woman’s distorted gas-mask voice urges me forward. She pushes me past the line of waiting cars. The regulator who has been leading the procession is speaking rapidly into his walkie-talkie, some argument with Command about who is to take me in, and he barely glances at us as we thread through the crowd. I’m still fighting the woman behind me with every bit of strength I have, even though the way she is holding my arms sends a fiery pain from my wrists to my shoulders, and even if I did break free, I’m still handcuffed and wouldn’t get more than a few feet without getting tackled.

But the rock in my throat is there, and the panic, and the certainty. I need to find Julian. I need to save him.

Beneath that, older words, more urgent words, continue to surge through me: Not again, not again, not again.

“Julian!” I strike backward with my foot and connect with the woman’s shins. I hear her curse, and for just a second her grip loosens. But then she is once again restraining me, jerking my wrists so sharply that I gasp.

And then, as I tipped backward to give relief to my arms, trying to catch my breath, trying not to cry, she bends forward a little so the mouth of her mask bumps once against my ears.

“Lena,” she says, low. “Please. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m a freedom fighter.”

That word freezes me: That’s a secret code sympathizers and Invalids use to indicate their allegiances. I stop trying to fight her off, and her grip relaxes. But she continues to propel me forward, past the caravan of cars. She walks quickly, and with such purpose that nobody stops her or interferes.

Up ahead I see a white van straddling the gutter that runs next to the dirt road. It is also stenciled with the CRAP sign, but the markings seem slightly off—they are a tiny bit too small, I realize, although you’d have to be staring to notice it. We’ve rounded a bend in the road and are concealed from the rest of the security detail by an enormous pile of twisted metal and shattered concrete.

Suddenly the woman releases my arms. She springs forward to the van and produces a set of keys from one of her pockets. She swings open the back doors; the interior of the van is dark, empty, and smells faintly sour.

“In,” she says.

“Where are you taking me?” I’m sick of this helplessness; for days I’ve been left with a swirling confusion, a sense of secret allegiances and complex plots.

“Somewhere safe,” she says, and even through the mask I can hear the urgency in her voice. I have no choice but to believe her. She helps me into the van and instructs me to turn around while she unlocks my handcuffs. Then she tosses in my backpack and slams the doors shut. My heart flips a little as I hear her slide a lock into place. I’m trapped now. But it can’t be worse than what I would have faced outside the van, and my stomach bottoms as I think of Julian. I wonder what will happen to him. Maybe—I feel a brief flicker of hope—they’ll go easy on him, because of his dad. Maybe they’ll decide it was all just a mistake.

And it was a mistake: the kissing, the way we touched.

Wasn’t it?

The van lurches forward, sending me tumbling onto an elbow. The van floor rattles and shakes as we bump along the pitted road. I try to mentally chart our progress: We must be near the dump now, headed past the old train station and toward the tunnel that goes into New York. After ten minutes we roll to a stop. I crawl to the front of the truck bed and press my ear against the pane of glass—painted black, completely opaque—that separates me from the driver’s seat. The woman’s voice filters back to me. I can make out a second voice, too: a man’s voice. She must be talking to Border Control.

The waiting is an agony. They’ll be running her SVS card, I think. But the seconds tick away, and stretch into minutes. The woman is silent. Maybe SVS is backed up. Even though it’s cold in the cab, my underarms are damp with sweat.

Then the second voice is back, barking a command. The engine cuts off, and the silence is sudden and extreme. The driver’s door opens and slams shut. The van sways a little.

Why is she getting out? My mind is racing: If she is a part of the resistance, she may have been caught, recognized. They’re sure to find me next. Or—and I’m not sure which is worse—they won’t find me. I’ll be trapped here; I’ll starve to death, or suffocate. Suddenly I’m having trouble breathing. The air is thick and full of pressure. More sweat trickles down my neck and beads on my scalp.

Then the driver’s door opens, the engine guns to life, and the van sails forward. I exhale, almost a sob. I can somehow feel it as we enter the Holland Tunnel: the long, dark throat around the van, a watery, echoey place. I imagine the river above us, flecked with gray. I think of Julian’s eyes, the way they change like water reflecting different kinds of light.

The van hits a pothole, and my stomach lurches as I rocket into the air and down onto the floor again. Then a climb, and through the metal walls I can hear sporadic sounds of traffic: the distant whirring of a siren, a horn bleating nearby. We must be in New York. I’m expecting the van to stop at any minute—every time we do stop, I half expect the doors to slide open and for the woman in the mask to haul me into the Craps, even though she told me she was on my side—but another twenty minutes passes. I have stopped trying to keep track of where we are. Instead I curl up in a ball on the dirty floor, which vibrates under my cheek. I am still nauseous. The air smells like body odor and old food.

Finally the van slows, and then stops altogether. I sit up, heart pounding in my chest. I hear a brief exchange—the woman says something I can’t make out, and somebody else says, “All clear.” Then there is a tremendous creaking, as of old doors scraping back on their hinges. The van advances forward another ten or twenty feet, then stops again. The engine goes silent. I hear the driver climb out of the van and I tense, gripping my backpack in one hand, preparing to fight or run.

The doors swing open, and as I slide cautiously out of the back, disappointment is a fist in my throat. I was hoping for some clues, some answer to why I’ve been taken and by whom. Instead I am in a featureless room, all concrete and exposed steel beams. There is an enormous double door, wide enough to accommodate the van, in one wall; in another wall is a second single door, this one made of metal and painted the same dull gray as everything else. At least there are electric lights. That means we are in an approved city, or close to one.

The driver has removed her gas mask but is still wearing a tight-fitting nylon cloth over her head, with cut-away holes for her mouth, nose, and eyes.

“What is this place?” I ask as I straighten up and swing the backpack onto one shoulder. “Who are you?”

She doesn’t answer me. She is watching me intently. Her eyes are gray, a stormy color. Suddenly she reaches out, as though to touch my face. I jerk backward, bumping against the van. She, too, takes a step backward, balling up her fist.

“Wait here,” she says. She turns to leave through the double doors, the ones that admitted us, but I grab her wrist.

“I want to know what this is about,” I say. I am tired of plain walls and closed rooms and masks and games. I want answers. “I want to know how you found me, and who sent you to get me.”

“I’m not the one who can give you the answers you need,” she says, and tries to shake me off.

“Take off your mask,” I say. For a second, I think I see a flash of fear in her eyes. Then it passes.

“Let go of me.” Her voice is quiet, but firm.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll take it off myself.”

I reach for her mask. She swats me away but not quickly enough. I manage to lift a corner of the fabric back, peeling it away from her neck, where a small tattooed number runs vertically from her ear toward her shoulder: 5996. But before I can wrangle the mask any higher, she gets hold of my wrist and pushes me away.

“Please, Lena,” she says, and again I hear the urgency in her voice.

“Stop saying my name.” You don’t have a right to say my name. Anger surges in my chest, and I swing at her with my backpack, but she ducks. Before I can go at her again, the door opens behind me and I spin around as Raven strides into the room.

“Raven!” I cry out, running to her. I throw my arms around her impulsively. We’ve never hugged before, but she allows me to squeeze her tightly for several seconds before she pulls away. She’s grinning.

“Hey, kid.” She runs a finger lightly along the cut on my neck, and scans my face for other injuries. “You look like shit.”

Tack is behind her, leaning in the doorway. He’s also smiling, and I can barely keep myself from flying at him, too. I settle for reaching forward and squeezing the hand he offers me.

“Welcome back, Lena,” he says. His eyes are warm.

“I don’t understand.” I’m overwhelmingly happy; relief makes waves in my chest. “How did you find me? How did you know where I would be? She wouldn’t tell me anything, I—” I turn around, gesturing to the masked woman, but she is gone. She must have ducked out the double doors.

“Easy, easy.” Raven laughs, and slings an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get you something to eat, okay? You’re probably tired, too. Are you tired?” She’s piloting me past Tack, through the open door. We must be in some kind of a converted warehouse. I hear other voices, talking and laughing, through the flimsy dividing walls.

“I was kidnapped,” I say, and now the words bubble out of me. I need to tell Tack and Raven; they’ll understand, they’ll be able to explain and make sense of everything. “After the demonstration I followed Julian into the old tunnels. And there were Scavengers, and they attacked me—only I think the Scavengers must have been working with the DFA, and—”

Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Tack speaks up soothingly. “Listen, Lena. We know you’ve been through a lot. Just relax, okay? You’re safe now. Eat up, and rest up.” They’ve led me into a room dominated by a large metal folding table. On it are foods I haven’t had in forever: fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, cheese. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The air smells like coffee, good and strong.

But I can’t sit and eat yet. First, I need to know. And I need them to know—about the Scavengers, and the people who live underground, and the raid this morning, and about Julian.

They can help me rescue Julian: The thought comes to me suddenly, a deliverance. “But—,” I start to protest. Raven cuts me off, laying a hand on my shoulder.

“Tack’s right, Lena. You need to get your strength up. And we’ll have plenty of time to talk on the road.”

“On the road?” I repeat, looking from Raven to Tack. They are both smiling at me, still, and it makes a nervous prickling feeling in my chest. It is a form of indulgence, the smile doctors give children when they administer painful shots. Now I promise, this will only pinch for a second. . . .

“We’re heading north,” Raven says in a too-cheerful voice. “Back to the homestead. Well, not the original homestead—we’ll spend the summer outside of Waterbury. Hunter has been in touch. He heard about a big homestead by the perimeter of the city, lots of sympathizers on the other side, and—”

My mind has gone blank. “We’re leaving?” I say dumbly, and Raven and Tack exchange another look. “We can’t leave now.”

“We have no other choice,” Raven says, and I start to feel anger rising in my chest. She’s using her singsong voice, like she’s speaking to a baby.

“No.” I shake my head, ball my fists against my thighs. “No. Don’t you get it? I think the Scavengers are working with the DFA. I was kidnapped with Julian Fineman. They locked us underground for days.”

“We know,” Tack says, but I barrel on, coasting on the fury now, letting it build.

“We had to fight our way out. They almost—they almost killed me. Julian saved me.” The rock in my stomach is migrating up into my throat. “And now they’ve taken Julian, and who knows what they’ll do. Probably drag him straight to the labs, or maybe throw him in prison, and—”

“Lena.” Raven puts her hands on my shoulders. “Calm down.”

But I can’t. I’m shaking from panic and rage. Tack and Raven must understand; they need to. “We have to do something. We have to help him. We have to—”

“Lena.” Raven’s voice turns sharper, and she gives me a shake. “We know about the Scavengers, okay? We know they’ve been working with the DFA. We know all about Julian, and everything that happened underground. We’ve been scouting for you around all the tunnel exits. We were hoping you would make it out days ago.”

This, at last, makes me shut up. Raven and Tack have finally stopped smiling. Instead they are looking at me with twin expressions of pity.

“What do you mean?” I pull away from Raven’s touch and stumble a bit; when Tack draws a chair out from the table, I thud into it. Neither of them answers right away, so I say, “I don’t understand.”

Tack takes a chair across from me. He examines his hands, then says slowly, “The resistance has known for a while that the Scavengers were being paid off by the DFA. They were hired to pull off that stunt you saw at the demonstration.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I feel like my brain is covered in thick paste; my thoughts flounder, come to nothing. I remember the screaming, the shooting, the Scavengers’ glittering blades.

“It makes perfect sense.” Raven speaks up. She is still standing, keeping her arms wrapped around her chest. “Nobody in Zombieland knows the difference between the Scavengers and the rest of us—the other Invalids. We’re all the same to them. So the Scavengers come and act like animals, and the DFA shows the whole country how terrible we are without the cure, how important it is to get everyone treated for deliria immediately. Otherwise the world goes to hell. The Scavengers are the proof.”

“But—” I think of the Scavengers swarming into the crowd; faces monstrous with screaming. “But people died.”

“Two hundred,” Tack says quietly. He still won’t look at me. “Two dozen officers. The rest citizens. They didn’t bother to tally the Scavengers who were killed.” He shrugs his shoulders, a quick convulsion. “Sometimes it is necessary that individuals are sacrificed for the health of the whole.” That’s straight out of a DFA pamphlet.

“Okay,” I say. My hands are shaking, and I grip the sides of my chair. I’m still having trouble thinking straight. “Okay. So what are we going to do about it?”

Raven’s eyes flick to Tack, but he keeps his head bowed. “We’ve already done something about it, Lena,” she says, still in that baby-voice, and once again I get a weird prickling in my chest. There is something they aren’t telling me—something bad.

“I don’t understand.” My voice sounds hollow.

There are a few seconds of heavy silence. Then Tack sighs, and says over his shoulder to Raven, “I told you, we should have clued her in from the start. I told you we should have trusted her.”

Raven says nothing. A muscle twitches in her jaw. And suddenly I remember coming downstairs a few weeks before the rally and hearing Tack and Raven fighting.

I just don’t understand why we can’t be honest with each other. We’re supposed to be on the same side.

You know that’s unrealistic, Tack. It’s for the best. You have to trust me.

You’re the one who isn’t trusting. . . .

They were fighting about me.

“Clued me in to what?” The prickling is becoming a heavy thud, painful and sharp.

“Go ahead,” Raven says to Tack. “If you want to tell her so badly, be my guest.” Her voice is biting, but I can tell, underneath that, she’s afraid. She’s afraid of me and how I will react.

“Tell me what?” I can’t stand this anymore—the cryptic glances, the impenetrable web of half phrases.

Tack passes a hand over his forehead. “Okay, look,” he says, speaking quickly now, as though eager to end the conversation. “It wasn’t a mistake that you and Julian were taken by the Scavengers, okay? It wasn’t an error. It was planned.”

Heat creeps up my neck. I lick my lips. “Who planned it?” I say, though I know: It must have been the DFA. I answer my own question, saying, “The DFA,” just as Tack grimaces and says, “We did.”

Ticking silence. One, two, three, four. I count off the seconds, take a deep breath, close my eyes, and reopen them. “What?”

Tack actually flushes. “We did. The resistance planned it.”

More silence. My throat and mouth have gone to dust. “I—I don’t understand.”

Tack is avoiding my eyes again. He walks his fingers across the edge of the table, back and forth, back and forth. “We paid the Scavengers to take Julian. Well, the resistance did. One of the higher-ups in the movement has been posing as a DFA agent—not that it matters. The Scavengers will do anything for a price, and just because they’ve been in the DFA’s pocket for a while now doesn’t mean their loyalties aren’t for sale.”

“Julian,” I repeat. Numbness is creeping through my body. “And what about me?”

Tack hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “They were paid to hold you, too. They were told that Julian was being tailed by a girl. They were told to hold both of you together.”

“And they thought they’d get a ransom for us,” I say. Tack nods. My voice sounds foreign, as though it’s coming from far away. I can hardly breathe. I manage to gasp out, “Why?”

Raven has been standing still, staring at the ground. Suddenly she bursts out, “You were never in any danger. Not really. The Scavengers knew they wouldn’t get paid if they touched you.”

I think back to the argument I overheard in the tunnels, the wheedling voice urging Albino to stick with the original plan, the way they tried to pump Julian for information about his security codes. The Scavengers were obviously getting impatient. They wanted their payday sooner.

“Never in any danger?” I repeat. Raven won’t look at me either. “I—I almost died.” Anger is spreading hot tentacles through my chest. “We were starved. We were jumped. Julian was beaten half to death. We had to fight—”

“And you did.” Finally Raven looks at me, and to my horror her eyes are shining; she looks happy. “You escaped, and you got Julian out safely too.”

For several seconds I can’t speak. I am burning, burning, burning, as the true meaning of everything that happened slams into me. “This … this was all a test?”

“No,” Tack says firmly. “No, Lena. You have to understand. That was part of it, but—”

I push back from the table, turn away from the sound of his voice. I want to curl into a ball. I want to scream, or hit something.

“It was bigger than that, what you did. What you helped us do. And we would have made sure you were safe. We have our own people underground. They’d been told to look out for you.”

The rat-man and Coin. No wonder they helped us. They were paid to.

I can’t speak anymore. I am having trouble swallowing. It takes all my energy just to stay on my feet. The containment, the fear, the bodyguards who were killed in the subway—the resistance’s fault. Our fault. A test.

Raven speaks up again, her voice filled with quiet urgency: a salesman trying to convince you to buy, buy, buy. “You did a great thing for us, Lena. You’ve helped the resistance in more ways than you know.”

“I did nothing,” I spit out.

“You did everything. Julian was tremendously important to the DFA. A symbol of everything the DFA stands for. Head of the youth group. That’s six hundred thousand people alone, young people, uncured. Unconvinced.”

My blood goes all at once to ice. I turn around slowly. Tack and Raven are both looking at me hopefully, as though they expect me to be pleased. “What does Julian have to do with this?” I say.

Once again Raven and Tack exchange a glance. This time I can read what they are thinking: I am being difficult, obtuse. I should understand this by now.

“Julian has everything to do with it, Lena,” Raven says. She sits down at the table, next to Tack. They are the patient parents; I am the troublemaking teen. We could be discussing a flunked test. “If Julian’s out of the DFA, if he’s cast out—”

“Even better, if he chooses out,” Tack interjects, and Raven spreads her hands as if to say, Obviously.

She continues, “If he’s cast out or he wants out, either way, it sends a powerful message to all the uncureds who have followed him and seen him as a leader. They might rethink their loyalties—some of them will, at least. We have a chance to bring them over to our side. Think about that, Lena. That’s enough to make a real difference. That’s enough to turn the tide in our favor.”

My mind is moving slowly, as though it has been encased in ice. This morning’s raids—planned. I thought it was a setup, and I was right. The resistance was behind it: They must have tipped off the police and the regulators. They gave up the location of one of their own homesteads just to ensnare Julian.

And I helped ensnare him. I think of his father’s face, floating in the window of the black town car: tight, grim, determined. I think of the story Julian told me about his older brother—how his father locked him in a basement, injured, to die alone and in the dark. And that was just for participating in a demonstration.

Julian was in bed with me. Who knows what they’ll do to him as punishment.

Blackness surges inside of me. I close my eyes and see Alex and Julian’s faces, merging together and then separating, like they did in my dream. It’s happening again. It’s happening again, and again it’s my fault.

“Lena?” I hear a chair scrape away from the table and suddenly Raven is next to me, slipping an arm around my shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“Can we get you something?” Tack asks.

I shake out of Raven’s grasp. “Get off of me.”

“Lena,” Raven croons. “Come on. Have a seat.” She is reaching for me again.

“I said, get off of me.” I pull away from her, stumble backward, bump against a chair.

“I’m going to get some water,” Tack says. He pushes away from the table and heads into a hall that must lead to the rest of the warehouse. For a moment I hear a surge in conversation, raucous, welcoming; then silence.

My hands are shaking so badly I can’t even squeeze them into fists. Otherwise I might hit Raven in the face.

She sighs. “I understand why you’re mad. Maybe Tack was right. Maybe we should have told you the plan from the beginning.” She sounds tired.

“You—you used me,” I spit out.

“You said you wanted to help,” Raven says simply.

“No. Not like that.”

“You don’t get to choose.” Raven takes a seat again and lays her hands flat on the table. “That isn’t how it works.”

I can feel her willing me to yield, to sit, to understand. But I can’t, and I won’t.

“What about Julian?” I force myself to meet her eyes, and I think I see her flinch just slightly.

“He’s not your problem.” Raven’s voice turns slightly harder.

“Yeah?” I think of Julian’s fingers running through my hair, the encircling warmth of his arms, how he whispered, I want to know. I want to know with you. “What if I want to make him my problem?”

Raven and I stare at each other. Her patience is running out. Her mouth is set in a line, angry and tight. “There’s nothing you can do,” she says shortly. “Don’t you get it? Lena Morgan Jones doesn’t exist anymore. Poof—she’s gone. There’s no way back in for her. There’s no way in for you. Your job is done.”

“So we leave Julian to be killed? Or thrown in prison?”

Once again Raven sighs, as though I’m a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. “Julian Fineman is the head of the youth division of the DFA—,” she begins again.

“I know all that,” I snap. “You made me memorize it, remember? So, what? He gets sacrificed for the cause?”

Raven looks at me in silence: an assent.

“You’re just as bad as they are,” I squeeze out, through the tightness of the fury in my throat, the heavy stone of disgust. That is the DFA’s motto too: Some will die for the health of the whole. We have become like them.

Raven stands again and moves toward the hallway. “You can’t feel guilty, Lena,” she says. “This is war, you know.”

“Don’t you get it?” I fire back at her the very words she used on me a long time ago, back at the burrow, after Miyako died. “You can’t tell me what to feel.”

Raven shakes her head. I see a flash of pity on her face. “You—you really liked him, then? Julian?”

I can’t answer. I can only nod.

Raven rubs her forehead tiredly and sighs again. For a moment I think she is going to relent. She’ll agree to help me. I feel a surge of hope.

But when she looks at me again, her face is composed, emotionless. “We leave tomorrow to go north,” she says simply, and just like that the conversation is ended. Julian will go to the gallows for us, and we will smile, and dream of victory—hazy-red, soon to come, a blood-colored dawn.

The rest of the day is a fog. I drift from room to room. Faces turn to me, expectant, smiling, and turn away again when I do not acknowledge them. These must be other members of the resistance. I recognize only one of them, a guy Tack’s age who came once to Salvage to bring us our new identity cards. I look for the woman who brought me here but see no one who resembles her, hear no one who speaks the way she did.

I drift and I listen. I gather we are twenty miles north of New York, and just south of a city named White Plains. We must be skimming our electricity from them: We have lights, a radio, even an electric coffeemaker. One of the rooms is piled with tents and rolled-up sleeping bags. Tack and Raven have prepared us for the move. I have no idea how many of the other resisters will be joining us; presumably, at least some of them will stay. Other than the folding table and chairs, and a room full of sleeping cots, there is no furniture. The radio and the coffeemaker sit directly on the cement floor, nested in a tangle of wires. The radio stays on for most of the day, piping thinly through the walls, and no matter where I go, I can’t escape it.

“Julian Fineman … head of the youth division of Deliria-Free America and son of the group’s president…”

“… himself a victim of the disease…”

Every radio station is the same. They all tell an identical story.

“… discovered today…”

“… currently under house arrest…”

“Julian … resigned his position and has refused the cure…”

A year ago, the story would not have been reported at all. It would have been suppressed, the way the very existence of Julian’s brother was no doubt slowly and systematically expunged from public records after his death. But things have changed since the Incidents. Raven is right about one thing: It is war now, and armies need symbols.

“… emergency convention of the Regulatory Committee of New York … swift judgment … scheduled for execution by lethal injection at ten a.m. tomorrow…”

“… some are calling the measures unnecessarily harsh … public outcry against the DFA and the RCNY…”

I sink into a dullness, a place of suspension: I can no longer feel anything. The anger has ebbed away, and so has the guilt. I am completely numb. Julian will die tomorrow. I helped him die.

This was the plan all along. It is no comfort to think that had he been cured, he would have in all probability died as well. My body is chilled, frozen to ice. At some point someone must have handed me a sweatshirt, because I am wearing one. But still I can’t get warm.

“… Thomas Fineman’s official statement…

“The DFA stands behind the Regulatory Committee’s decision… They say: ‘The United States is at a critical juncture, and we can no longer tolerate those who want to do us harm … we must set a precedent…’”

The DFA and the United States of America can no longer afford to be lenient. The resistance is too strong. It is growing—underground, in tunnels and burrows, in the dark, damp places they cannot reach.

So they will make a bloody example for us in public, in the light.

At dinner, I manage to eat something, and even though I still can’t bring myself to look at Raven and Tack, I can tell they take this as a sign that I have relented. They are forced-cheerful, too loud, telling jokes and stories to the four or five other resisters who have assembled around the table. Still, the radio-voice infiltrates, seeps through the walls, like the sibilant hiss of a snake.

“… No other statement from either Julian or Thomas Fineman…”

After dinner, I go to the outhouse: a tiny shed fifty feet from the main building, across a short expanse of cracked pavement. It is the first time I’ve been outside all day, and the first chance I’ve had to look around. We are in some kind of old warehouse. It sits at the end of a long, winding concrete drive surrounded by woods on both sides. To the north I can make out the twinkling glow of city lights: This must be White Plains. And to the south, against the blush-pink evening sky, I can just detect a hazy, halo glow, the artificial crown of lights that indicates New York City. It must be around seven o’clock, still too early for curfew or mandatory blackout. Julian is somewhere among those lights, in that blur of people and buildings. I wonder whether he’s scared. I wonder whether he’s thinking of me.

The wind is cold but carries with it the smell of thawing earth and new growth: a spring smell. I think of our apartment in Brooklyn—packed up now, or perhaps ransacked by regulators and police. Lena Morgan Jones is dead, like Raven said, and now there will be a new Lena, just like every spring the trees bring forth new growth on top of the old, on top of the dead and the rot. I wonder who she will be.

I feel a sharp stab of sadness. I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of the things and people I have cared for: My mom. Grace. Hana. Alex.

And now Julian.

This is not who I wanted to be.

An owl hoots somewhere, sharply, in the gathering darkness, like a faint alarm. That’s when it really hits me, the certainty like a concrete wall going up inside of me. This is not what I wanted. This is not why I came to the Wilds, why Alex wanted me to come: not to turn my back and bury the people I care about, and build myself hard and careless on top of their bodies, as Raven does. That is what the Zombies do.

But not me. I have let too many things decay. I have given up on enough.

The owl hoots again, and now its cry sounds sharper, clearer. Everything seems clearer: the creaking of the dry trees; the smells in the air, layered and deep; a distant rumbling, which swells on the air, then fades again.

Truck. I’ve been listening without thinking, but now the word, the idea, clarifies: We can’t be far from a highway. We must have driven from New York City, which means there must be a way back in.

I don’t need Raven, and I don’t need Tack. And even if Raven was right about Lena Morgan Jones—she doesn’t exist anymore, after all—fortunately, I don’t need her, either.

I go back into the warehouse. Raven is sitting at the folding table, packing food into cloth bundles. We will strap them to our packs, and hang them from tree branches when we camp at night, so the animals won’t get at them.

At least, that is what she will do.

“Hey.” She smiles at me, over-friendly, as she has been all evening. “Did you get enough to eat?”

I nod. “More than I’ve had in a while,” I say, and she winces slightly. It’s a dig, but I can’t help it. I lean up against the table, where small, sharp knives have been laid out to dry on a kitchen towel.

Raven draws one knee to her chest. “Listen, Lena. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you earlier. I thought it would be—well, I just thought it would be better this way.”

“It was a purer test, too,” I say, and Raven looks up quickly. I lean forward, place my palm over the handle of a knife, feel its contours pressing into my flesh.

Raven sighs, and looks away again. “I know you must hate us right now,” she starts to say, but I cut her off.

“I don’t hate you.” I straighten up again, bringing the knife with me, slipping it into my back pocket.

“Really?” For a moment Raven looks much younger than her age.

“Really,” I say, and she smiles at me—small, tight, relieved. It’s an honest smile. I add, “But I don’t want to be like you either.”

Her smile falters. As I’m standing there, looking at her, it occurs to me that this may be the last time I ever see her. A sharp pain runs through me, a blade in the center of my chest. I am not sure that I ever loved Raven, but she gave birth to me here, in the Wilds. She has been a mother and a sister, both. She is yet another person I will have to bury.

“Someday you’ll understand,” she says, and I know that she really believes it. She is staring at me wide-eyed, willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

But it isn’t her fault. Not really. Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water.

“I hope not,” I say, as gently as I can, and that is how I say good-bye to her.

I tuck the knife into my backpack, feeling to make sure I still have the small bundle of ID cards I stole from the Scavengers. They will come in handy. I take a wind breaker from next to one of the cots, and, from a small nylon backpack, already packed up for tomorrow, I steal granola bars and a half-dozen bottles of water. My backpack is heavy, even after I’ve removed The Book of Shhh—I won’t need that anymore, not ever—but I don’t dare take out any supplies. If I do manage to spring Julian, we will need to run fast and far, and I have no idea how long it will be before we stumble on a homestead.

I move quietly back through the warehouse, toward the side door that opens onto the parking lot and the outhouse. I pass only one person—a tall, lanky guy with fire-red hair who looks me over once and then lets his gaze slide off me. That is one skill I learned in Portland that I have never forgotten: how to shrink into myself, and turn invisible. I scoot quickly past the room in which most of the resisters, including Tack, are lounging around the radio, laughing and talking. Someone is smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Someone is shuffling a deck of cards. I see the back of Tack’s head and think a good-bye in his direction.

Then I’m once again slipping out into the night, and I am free.

New York is still casting its halo glow into the sky south of us—probably a good hour from curfew, and blackout for most of the city. Only the very richest people, the government officials and scientists and people like Thomas Fineman, have unlimited access to light.

I start jogging in the general direction of the highway, pausing every so often to listen for the sound of trucks. Mostly there is silence, punctuated by hooting owls and small animals scurrying in the darkness. Traffic is sporadic. It is no doubt a road used almost exclusively for supply trucks.

But all of a sudden it is there, a long, thick river of concrete, lit silver by the rising moon. I turn south and slow to a walk, my breath steaming in front of me. The air is fresh, thin, and cold, slicing my lungs every time I take a breath. But it’s a good feeling.

I keep the highway on my right, careful not to venture too close. There may be checkpoints along the way, and the last thing I need is to be caught by a patrol.

It is roughly twenty miles to the northern boundary of Manhattan. It’s hard to keep track of time, but I think it has been at least six hours before I see, in the distance, the high concrete wall that marks the city’s border. The going was slow. I have no flashlight, and the moon was often lost beyond the thick tangle of tree branches above me, all interlocked, skeletal fingers clasped together tightly. At times I was practically feeling my way. Thankfully the highway to my right reflected some light, and served to orient me. Otherwise I’m sure I would have gotten lost.

Portland was enclosed entirely in a cheap chain-link fence, rumored to be electrified. In New York, portions of the boundary are built of concrete and loops of barbed wire, with high watchtowers interspersed at intervals along the wall, beaming floodlights into the dark, lighting up the silhouettes of the trees on the other side, in the Wilds. I am still several hundred feet from the border—its lights are just visible, winking through the trees—but I drop into a crouch and move toward the highway slowly, listening for any sounds of movement. I doubt that there are patrols on this side of the border. But then again, things are changing now.

You can never be too careful.

There’s a long, shallow gully fifteen feet from the highway, coated in a thin covering of rotting leaves, and still patchy with puddles from rain and melting snow. I maneuver down into the gully and press myself flat on my stomach. This should make me pretty much invisible from the highway, even if someone is patrolling. Dampness seeps through my sweatpants, and I realize I’ll need to find a place to change and something to change into when I make it into Manhattan. There’s no way I can walk the city streets like this without arousing suspicion. But I’ll have to deal with that later.

It’s a long time before I hear the rumble of a truck engine in the distance. Then headlights bloom from the dark, lighting up swirling mist. The truck rattles by me—enormous, white, and stamped with the logo of a grocery chain—slowing as it approaches the border. I prop myself onto my elbows. There is a gap in the border wall, through which the highway extends like a silver tongue; it is barred by a heavy iron gate. As the truck comes to a stop, two dark figures emerge from a guardhouse. Backlit by the floodlights, they are nothing but etched shadows and the black shape of rifles. I’m too far away to make out what they are saying, but I imagine they are checking the driver’s papers. One of the guards circles the truck, inspecting it. He does not open the truck bed, though, and check the interior. Sloppy. Sloppiness is good.

Over the next few hours, I watch an additional five trucks pass. In each case, the ritual is repeated, although one truck, marked EXXON, is opened and thoroughly searched. As I wait, I plan. I move closer to the border, keeping low to the ground, moving only when the highway is empty and the moon has skated behind one of the heavy, massed clouds in the sky. When I am no farther than forty feet from the wall, I once again hunker down to wait. I am so close, I can make out individual features of the guards—both men—as they emerge periodically from the guard hut to circle the approaching trucks. I can hear snatches of conversation, too: They ask for ID, they verify license and registration. The ritual lasts no longer than three or four minutes. I will have to act quickly.

I should have worn something warmer than a wind breaker. At least the cold keeps me awake.

By the time I see an opportunity to move, the sun is already rising behind a thin covering of fleecy dark clouds. The floodlights are still illumined, but their power is diminished in the murky dawn, and they’re not nearly so blinding.

A garbage truck, with a ladder that extends up one of its sides and onto its metal roof, shudders to a halt in front of the metal gate. I move into a crouch and wrap my fingers around the rock I selected earlier from the ditch. I have to flex my fingers a few times just to get the blood flowing. My limbs are stiff, and aching with cold.

One guard circles the vehicle, completing his inspection, cradling his rifle. The other stands at the driver’s window, blowing air onto his hands, asking the usual questions. Where are you coming from? Where are you headed?

I stand up, cupping the rock in my right hand, and thread quickly through the trees, careful to step only where the leaves have been trampled to wet mulch—a good muffler for my footsteps. My heart is drumming so hard in my throat I can hardly breathe. The guards are twenty feet to my right, maybe less. I have only one chance.

When I’m close enough to the wall to be sure of my aim, I wind up and rocket the stone toward one of the floodlights. There’s a miniature explosion when it hits, and the sound of falling glass. Instantly I’m retracing my steps, circling backward as both guards whip around.

“What the hell?” one of them says, and starts jogging toward the damaged floodlight, shouldering his rifle. I’m praying that the second guard follows. He hesitates, shifting his gun from his left hand to his right. He spits.

Go, go, go.

“Wait here,” he says to the driver, and then he, too, moves away from the garbage truck.

This is it: This is my chance, while the guards are distracted, examining the shattered light forty feet down the wall. I have to approach the truck at an angle, from the passenger’s side. I double over and try to make myself as small as I can. I can’t risk letting the driver get a look at me in his side mirror. For twenty terrifying seconds I’m on the road, totally exposed, free of the trees and gnarled brown bushes that have been serving as cover, and just then I have a memory of the first time Alex took me to the Wilds—how scared I was sneaking over the fence, how exposed I felt—raw and terrified, as though I’d been cut open.

Ten feet, five feet, two feet. And then I’m swinging myself up onto the ladder, the metal freezing, biting my fingers. When I get up to the roof I press myself perfectly flat, belly-down on a coating of bird shit and rust. Even the metal smells sick and sweet, like rotten garbage, a smell that must have seeped over the years into the truck frame. I turn my face toward the cuff of my wind breaker to keep from coughing. The roof is slightly concave, and ringed by a two-inch metal rail, which means at least I won’t be in danger of slipping off when the truck begins to move. I hope.

“Hey!” the driver is calling out to the guards. “Can you let me through or what? I’m on a schedule.”

There’s no immediate response. It feels like an eternity before I hear footsteps returning to the truck, and one of the guards says, “All right, go ahead.”

The iron gate clanks open, and the truck begins to move. I slide backward as the truck picks up speed, but manage to wedge my hands and feet against the metal railing; I must look like a giant starfish from above, suctioned to the roof. The wind whips by me, stinging my eyes: a biting cold that carries with it the smells of the Hudson River, which I know must be close. On our left, just off the highway, is the city: billboards and dismantled streetlights and ugly apartment buildings with purple-gray faces, bruised complexions turned toward the horizon.

The truck rattles down the highway, and I strain just to hang on, to keep myself from getting bounced off and onto the road. The cold is an agony now, a thousand needles on my face and my hands, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut because they’re watering so badly. The day comes dark and slow. The red glow at the horizon quickly smolders and burns out, getting sucked up behind the woolen clouds. It begins to drizzle. Each drop of rain is a tiny shard of glass on my skin, and the roof of the truck becomes slick and difficult to hold on to.

Soon, thankfully, we are slowing and bumping off the highway. It is still very early, and the streets are mostly silent. Above me, apartment buildings loom, enormous fingers pointing toward the sky. Now I can smell food scents carried out onto the street through open windows: gasoline and wood smoke; the closeness of millions and millions of people.

This is my stop.

As soon as the truck slows at a light, I retreat down the ladder—scanning the street to make sure no one is watching—and jump lightly onto the pavement. The garbage truck continues its lumbering journey as I try to stamp some feeling into my toes and blow hot air onto my fingers. Seventy-second Street. Julian lives on Charles Street, he told me, which is all the way downtown. Judging from the quality of the light, it must be a little before seven—maybe a little later, since the thick cloud cover makes it hard to tell time accurately. I can’t risk being seen on a bus looking the way I look—water-spotted, covered with mud.

I double back toward the West Side Highway, and the footpath that cuts north to south through the long, well-tended park that runs parallel to the Hudson. It will be easier to avoid people here. No one will be strolling on a rainy day this early in the morning. At this point exhaustion is burning the back of my eyes, and my feet feel leaden.

But every step brings me closer to Julian, and to the girl I pledged to become.

I’ve seen pictures of the Finemans’ house on the news, and once I reach the tangle of narrow streets in the West Village—so different from the ordered grid that defines the rest of Manhattan, and in some ways a surprising choice for Thomas Fineman—it does not take me long to find it. The rain is still coming down, moisture squelching in my sneakers. The Finemans’ townhouse is impossible to mistake: It is the largest house on the block, and the only one that is encircled by a high stone wall. An iron gate, hung with brown nests of ivy, gives a partial view of the front path and a tiny brown yard, churned mostly to mud. I walk the street once, checking the house for signs of activity, but all the windows are dark, and if there are guards watching Julian, they must be inside. I get a surge of pleasure from the graffiti someone has scrawled on the Finemans’ stone wall: murderer. Raven was right: Every day, the resistance is growing.

One more turn around the block, and this time I’m scanning the whole street, keeping my eyes up, looking for witnesses, nosy neighbors, problems, escape routes. Even though I’m soaked through, I’m grateful for the rain. It will make things easier. At least it keeps people off the streets.

I step up to the Finemans’ iron gate, trying to ignore the anxiety buzzing through me. There’s an electronic keypad, just like Julian said: a tiny LCD screen requests that I type in a PIN. For a moment, despite the rain and the desperate scrabbling of my heart in my chest, I can’t help but stand there, amazed by the elegance of it: a world of beautiful, buzzing things, humming electricity, and remote controls, while half the country flounders in dark and closeness, heat and cold, sucking up shreds of power like dogs picking gristle from a bone.

For the first time it occurs to me that this, really, might have been the point of the walls and borders, the procedure and the lies: a fist squeezing tighter and tighter. It is a beautiful world for the people who get to play the fist.

I let hatred tighten inside of me. This, too, will help.

Julian said that his family kept clues embedded in or around the gate—reminders of the code.

It doesn’t take me long to figure out the first three numbers. At the top of the gate, someone has tacked a small metal plate engraved with a quotation from The Book of Shhh: HAPPY ARE THEY WHO HAVE A PLACE; WISE ARE THEY WHO FOLLOW THE PATH; BLESSED ARE THEY WHO OBEY THE WORD.

It’s a famous proverb—one that comes, incidentally, from the Book of Magdalena, a passage of the Book I know well. Magdalena is my namesake. I used to scour those pages, looking for traces of my mother, for her reasons and her message to me.

Book 9, Proverb 17. I type 917 into the keypad: If I’m right, I have only one number to go. I’m about to try final digits at random, when something within the yard flutters, catches my eye. Four white paper lanterns, stamped with the DFA logo, have been strung up above the porch. They are flapping in the wind, and one has been stripped almost loose of the string; it dangles awkwardly, like a semi-severed head, tapping a rhythm against the front door. Except for the DFA logo, the lanterns look like decorations you might find at a child’s birthday party. They look strangely incongruous above the massive stone porch, swaying high above the bleak yard.

A sign. Has to be.

9174. The gate clicks as the locks retract, and I’m in.

I slip into the front yard quickly, closing the gate behind me, taking in as much as I can. Five floors, including a sunken basement level; curtains all drawn, everything dark. I don’t even bother with the front door. It will be locked, and if there are guards anywhere, they are no doubt waiting in the hall. Instead I slip around the side of the house and find the concrete stairs that lead to a warped wooden door: the basement entrance. A small window set in the brick should allow me to see inside, but a set of heavy wooden window slats obscures the view completely. I will have to go in blind, and pray that there are no guards at this entrance.

This door is also locked, but the doorknob is old and loose, and should be relatively easy to pick. I drop to my knees and take out my knife. Tack showed me how to pick locks once with the narrow tip of a razor, not knowing that Hana and I had perfected the skill years ago. Her parents used to keep all the cookies and sweets locked in a pantry. I wedge the knife tip in the narrow space between the door and its frame. It takes just a few moments of twisting and jiggling before I feel the lock release. I tuck the knife into the pocket of my wind breaker—I’ll need it close now—take a breath, and push through the door and into the house.

It is very dark. The first thing I notice is the smell: a laundry smell, of lemon-scented towels and dryer sheets. The second thing I notice is the quiet. I lean against the door, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. Shapes begin to assert themselves: a washer and dryer in the corner, a room crisscrossed with laundry lines.

I wonder whether it was here that Julian’s brother was kept; whether he died here, alone, curled on the cement floor, under dripping sheets with the smell of moisture clotting his nostrils. I push the image quickly from my mind. Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

I exhale a little bit. There is no one with me down here—I can feel it.

I move through the laundry room, ducking under several pairs of men’s briefs, which are clipped to a line. The thought flashes through my mind that one of them might be Julian’s.

Stupid how the mind will try to distract itself.

Beyond the laundry room is a small pantry stacked with household cleaning supplies, and beyond that, a set of narrow wooden stairs that leads to the first floor. I ease my way onto the stairs, moving at a crawl. The stairs are warped and look like they will be loud.

At the top is a door. I pause, listening. The house is silent, and a feeling of creeping anxiety starts snaking over my skin. This is not right. It’s too easy. There should be guards, and regulators. There should be footsteps, muffled conversation—something other than this deadweight silence, hanging heavy like a thick blanket.

The moment I ease open the door and step out into the hallway, the realization hits me: Everyone has gone already. I’m too late. They must have moved Julian early this morning, and now the house is empty.

Still, I feel compelled to check every room. A panicked feeling is building inside of me—I’m too late, he’s gone, it’s over—and the only thing I can do to suppress it is to keep moving, keep slipping soundlessly across the carpeted floors and searching every closet, as though Julian might appear within one.

I check the living room, which smells of furniture polish. The heavy curtains are pulled shut, keeping out a view of the street. There is a pristine kitchen and a formal dining room that looks unused; a bathroom, which smells cloyingly of lavender; a small den dominated by the largest television screen I have ever seen in my life. There is a study, stacked with DFA pamphlets and other pro-cure propaganda. Farther down the hall, I come across a locked door. I remember what Julian told me about Mr. Fineman’s second study. This must be the room of forbidden books.

Upstairs, there are three bedrooms. The first one is unused, sterile, and filled with the smell of must. I feel, instinctively, that this was Julian’s brother’s room, and that it has remained shut up since his death.

I inhale sharply when I reach Julian’s room. I know it is his. It smells like him. Even though he was a prisoner here, there are no signs of struggle. Even the bed is made, the soft-looking blue covers pulled haphazardly over green-and-white-striped sheets.

For a second I have the urge to climb into his bed and cry, to wrap his blankets around me the way I let him wrap his arms around my waist at Salvage. His closet door is open a crack; I see shelves filled with faded denim jeans, and swinging button-down shirts. The normalcy of it almost kills me. Even in a world turned upside down, a world of war and insanity, people hang their clothing; they fold their pants; they make their beds.

It is the only way.

The next room is much larger, dominated by two double beds, separated by several feet of space: the master bedroom. I catch a glimpse of myself in a large mirror hanging over the bed and recoil. I haven’t seen my reflection in days. My face is pale, my skin stretched tight over my cheekbones. My chin is smeared with dirt, and my clothing is covered with it too. My hair is frizzing from the rain. I look like I belong in a mental institution.

I rummage through Mrs. Fineman’s clothing and find a soft cashmere sweater and a pair of clean, black denim jeans. They’re too big around the waist, but once I belt the pants I look almost normal. I remove my knife from my backpack and wrap the blade in a T-shirt so I can safely carry it in the pocket of my wind breaker. I ball up the rest of my clothes and stuff them into the very back of the closet, behind the shoe rack. I check the clock on the bedside table. Eight thirty a.m.

On my way downstairs, I spot a bookshelf in a hallway alcove, and the small statue of a rooster perched on the highest shelf. I can’t explain what overcomes me, or why it matters, but all of a sudden I need to know whether Thomas Fineman has been keeping the key to the second study there all these years. He’s the kind of man who would do that, even after the hiding place had been discovered by his son. He would trust that the beating had served as a sufficient deterrent. He would do it as a test and a tease, so that every time Julian saw the stupid thing, he would remember, and regret.

The bookshelf isn’t particularly big, and the last shelf isn’t very high—I’m sure Julian could easily reach it now—but I have to stand on a footstool to get at the rooster. As soon as I pull the porcelain animal toward me, something rattles in its belly. The head of the rooster unscrews, and I tip a metal key into my palm.

Just then I hear the muffled sound of footsteps, and someone saying, “Yes, yes, exactly.” My heart stops: Thomas Fineman’s voice. At the far end of the hallway, I see the handle on the front door begin to rattle as he works a key in the lock.

Instinctively, I jump off the footstool, still clutching the key in my palm, and whirl around to the locked door. It takes me a few seconds of fumbling before I can make the key fit, and in that time I hear the front door locks slide open, two of them, and I am frozen in the hallway, terrified, as the door opens a crack.

Then Fineman says, “Damn it.” Pause. “No, Mitch, not you. I dropped something.”

He must be on the phone. In the time it takes him to pause and scoop up whatever he has dropped, I manage to get the key in the lock, and I slip quickly into the forbidden study, closing the door a split second before the front door closes as well, a double-heartbeat rhythm.

Then the footsteps are coming down the hall. I back away from the door, as though Fineman will be able to smell me. The room is very dim—the heavy velvet curtains at the window are imperfectly closed, allowing a bare ribbon of gray light to penetrate. Towers of books and artwork spiral toward the ceiling like twisted totems. I bump into a table and have to spin around, catching a heavy, leather-bound volume at the last second, before it thuds to the floor.

Fineman pauses outside the study door, and I could faint. My hands are shaking.

I do not remember whether I put the head back on the rooster.

Please, please, please, keep moving.

“Uh-huh,” he is saying into the phone. His voice is flinty, clipped: not at all the upbeat drawl he uses when he speaks on radio interviews and at DFA meetings. “Yes, exactly. Ten a.m. It’s been decided.”

Another pause, and then he says, “Well, there really is no choice, is there? How would it look if I tried to appeal?”

His footsteps retreat up the stairs and I exhale a little, although I’m still too afraid to move. I’m terrified I’ll bump into something again and disrupt one of the piles of books. Instead I wait, frozen, until Fineman’s footsteps once again pound down the stairs.

“I got it,” he is saying, as his voice grows fainter: He is leaving. “Eighteenth and Sixth. Northeastern Medical.”

Then, faintly, I hear the front door open and shut, and I am once again left in silence.

I wait another few minutes before moving, just to be absolutely sure that I’m alone, that Fineman won’t be coming back. My palms are so sweaty I can barely return the book to its place. It is an oversized volume, stamped with gold lettering, perched on a table next to a dozen identical books. I think it must be a kind of encyclopedia until I see the words EASTERN SEABOARD, NEW YORK—TERRORISTS, ANARCHISTS, DISSENTERS etched on one of the spines.

I feel, suddenly, as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. I squat down, peering at the spines more closely. They are not books, but records: an enumerated list of all the most dangerous incarcerated criminals in the United States, divided by area and prison system.

I should leave. Time is running out, and I need to find Julian, even if I’m too late to help him. But the compulsion is there, equally strong, to find her—to see her name. It’s a compulsion to see whether she has made it onto the list, even though I know she must have. My mother was kept for twelve years inside Ward Six, a place of solitary confinement reserved exclusively for the most dangerous resisters and political agitators.

I don’t know why I care. My mother escaped. She scratched through the walls, over years, over a decade—she tunneled out like an animal. And now she is free somewhere. I have seen her in my dreams, running through a portion of the Wilds that is always sunny and green, where food is always abundant.

Still, I have to see her name.

It doesn’t take me long to find Eastern Seaboard, Maine—Connecticut. The list of political prisoners who have been incarcerated in the Crypts in the past twenty years spans fifty pages. The names are not listed alphabetically, but by date. The pages are handwritten, in chicken scrawls of varying legibility; this book has obviously passed through many hands. I have to move closer to the window, to the thin fissure of light, to read. My hands are shaking, and I steady the book on the corner of a desk—which is, itself, almost completely concealed with other books, forbidden titles from the days before the cure. I’m too focused on the list of names—each one a person, each one a life, sucked away by stone walls—to care or look closer. It gives me only marginal comfort to know that some of these people must have escaped after the bombing of the Crypts.

I easily find the year my mother was taken—the year I turned six, when she was supposed to have died. It is a section of five or six pages, and probably two hundred names.

I track my finger down the page, feeling dizzy for no reason. I know she will be in the book. And I know, now, that she is safe. But still, I must see it; there is a piece of her that exists in the faded ink traces of her name. Her life was taken by those pen-strokes—and my life was taken too.

Then I see it. My breath catches in my throat. Her name is written neatly, in large, elegant cursive, as though whoever was in possession of the log at the time enjoyed the looping curls of all the l’s and a’s: Annabel Gilles Haloway. The Crypts. Ward Six, Solitary Confinement. Level 8 Agitator.

Next to these words is the prisoner’s intake number. It is printed carefully, neatly: 5996.

My vision tunnels, and in that moment the number seems lit up by an enormous beam. Everything else is blackness, fog.

5996. The faded green number tattooed on the woman who rescued me from Salvage, the woman with the mask.

My mother.

Now my impressions of her are shuffling back, but disjointed, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite interconnect: her voice, low and desperate and something else. Pleading, maybe? Sad? The way she reached out, as though to touch my face, before I swatted her away. The way she kept using my name. Her height—I remember her being so tall, but she is short, like me, probably no more than five-four. The last time I saw her, I was six years old. Of course she seemed tall to me then.

Two words are blazing through me, each one a hot hand, wrenching my insides: impossible and mother.

Guilt and twisting disbelief: shredding me, turning my stomach loose. I didn’t recognize her. I always thought that I would. I imagined she would be just like the mother in my memories, in my dreams—hazy, red-haired, laughing. I imagined she would smell like soap and lemons, that her hands would be soft, smoothed with lotion.

Now, of course, I realize how stupid that is. She spent more than a decade in the Crypts, in a cell. She has changed, hardened.

I slam the book closed, quickly, as though it might help—as though her name is a scurrying insect between the pages, and I can stamp it back into the past. Mother. Impossible. After all that, my hoping and wishing and searching, we were so close. We were touching.

And still she chose not to reveal herself. Still, she chose to walk away.

I am going to be sick. I stumble blindly down the hall, out into the drizzle. I am not thinking, can hardly breathe. It is not until I’ve made it to Sixth Avenue, several blocks away, that the cold begins to clear the fog from my mind. At that point I realize I’m still clutching the key to the forbidden study in one hand. I forgot to lock it again. I’m not even sure I closed the front door behind me—for all I know I have left it swinging open.

It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters. I am too late to help Julian. I am too late to do anything but watch him die.

My feet carry me toward 18th Street, where Thomas Fineman will be attending his son’s execution. As I walk, head down, I grip the handle of the knife in my wind breaker pocket.

Perhaps it is not too late for revenge.

Northeastern Medical is one of the nicer lab complexes I’ve seen, with a stone facade and scrolled balconies, and only a discreet brass sign above the heavy wooden door indicating that it is a medical facility. It was probably once a bank or a post office, from the days when spending wasn’t regulated; from the days when people communicated freely across unbounded cities. It has that look of stateliness and importance. But of course Julian Fineman would not be put to death among commoners, in one of the city wards or hospital wings of the Craps. Only the best for the Finemans, until the very end.

The drizzle is finally letting up, and I pause on the corner, ducking into the alcoved doorway of a neighboring building, and shuffle quickly through the stack of ID cards I stole from the Scavengers. I select Sarah Beth Miller, a girl who resembles me pretty closely in age and looks, and use my knife to put a deep gouge in her height—five-eight—so you can’t read it clearly. Then I whittle away at the identification number below her picture. I have no doubt that the number has been invalidated. In all probability, Sarah Beth Miller is dead.

I smooth down my hair, praying that I look at least halfway decent, and push through the front door of the lab.

Inside is a waiting room decorated tastefully, with a plush green carpet and mahogany furniture. An enormous clock, ostentatiously antique or made to look like it, ticks quietly on the wall, pendulum swinging rhythmically. A nurse is sitting at a large desk. Behind her is a small office: a series of metal filing cabinets, a second desk, and a coffee machine, half filled. But the clock, the expensive furniture, and even the scent of freshly brewed coffee can’t conceal the normal lab smell of chemical disinfectant.

At the right-hand side of the room are double doors with curved brass handles; these must lead to the procedural rooms.

“Can I help you?” the nurse asks me.

I walk directly to her, laying both hands on the counter, willing myself to seem confident, calm. “I need to speak with someone,” I say. “It’s very urgent.”

“Is this regarding a medical issue?” she asks. She has long fingernails, perfectly filed into rounds, and a face that reminds me of a bulldog—heavy, low-hanging jowls.

“Yes. Well, no. Kind of.” I’m making it up as I go; she frowns, and I try again. “It’s not my medical issue. I need to make a report.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “Unauthorized activity. I think—I think my neighbors have been infected.”

She drums her fingernails, once, against the counter. “The best thing to do is make an official report at the police station. You can also go to any of the municipal regulatory stations—”

“No.” I cut her off. Sign-in sheets, clipped together, are stacked next to me, and I straighten them, scanning the list of doctors, patients, problems—poor sleep/dreaming!, deregulated moods, flu—and pick a name at random.

“I insist that I speak to Dr. Branshaw.”

“Are you a patient of the doctor’s?” She drums her nails again. She is bored.

“Dr. Branshaw will know what to do. I’m extremely upset. You have to understand. I’m living underneath these people. And my sister—she’s uncured. I’m thinking about her, too, you know. Isn’t there some kind of—I don’t know—vaccination Dr. Branshaw might give her?”

She sighs. She turns her attention to the computer monitor, makes a few quick keystrokes. “Dr. Branshaw is completely booked up today. All of our medical specialists are booked. An exceptional event has made it necessary—”

“Yeah, I know. Julian Fineman. I know all about it.” I wave my hand.

She frowns at me. Her eyes are guarded. “How did you know—”

“It’s all over the news,” I interrupt her. I’m getting into my role now: the rich, spoiled daughter of a politician, maybe a senior member of the DFA. A girl used to getting her way. “Of course, I guess you wanted to keep the whole thing hush-hush. Don’t want the press charging in. Don’t worry, they’re not saying where. But I have friends who have friends and … well, you know how these things get around.” I lean forward, placing both hands on the desk, like she’s my best friend and I’m about to tell her a secret. “Personally, I think it’s a little bit silly, isn’t it? If Dr. Branshaw had just given him the cure early, when he was already in there—a little cut, a little snip, that’s how it works, isn’t it?—this whole thing could have been avoided.” I lean back. “I’m going to tell him I think so, too, when I see him.” I say a silent prayer that Dr. Branshaw is, in fact, male. It’s a decently safe bet. Medical training is long and rigorous, and many intelligent women are expected to spend their time fulfilling their procreative and child-rearing duties instead.

“It isn’t Dr. Branshaw’s case,” the nurse says quickly. “He can’t be blamed.”

I roll my eyes the way that Hana used to when Andrea Grengol said something especially stupid in class. “Of course it is. Everyone knows Dr. Branshaw is Julian’s primary.”

“Dr. Hillebrand is Julian’s primary,” she corrects me.

I feel a quick pulse of excitement, but I hide it with another eye roll. “Whatever. Are you going to page Dr. Branshaw or not?” I fold my arms and add, “I won’t go until I’ve seen him.”

She gives me the look of an injured animal—reproachful, as though I’ve reached out and pinched her nose. I’m disrupting her morning, the routine stillness of her hours. “ID, please,” she says.

I fish Sarah Beth Miller’s ID from my pocket and pass it to her. The sound of the clock seems to have amplified: The ticking is overloud, and the air in the room vibrates with it. All I can focus on are the seconds, ticking away, ticking Julian closer to death. I force myself not to fidget as she looks it over, frowning again.

“I can’t read this number,” she says.

“It went through the dryer last year.” I wave the issue away. “Look, I’d appreciate it if you could just speak to Dr. Branshaw for me—if you could tell him I’m here.”

“I’ll have to call you into SVS,” she says. Now the expression of unhappiness is deepened. She casts a doleful look behind her at the coffeepot, and I notice a magazine halfhidden underneath a stack of files. She is no doubt thinking about the evaporation of her peaceful morning. She hauls herself to her feet. She is a heavy woman. The buttons on her technician’s uniform seem to be hanging on for dear life, barely keeping the fabric closed over her breasts and stomach. “Have a seat. This will take a few minutes.”

I incline my head once, and she waddles through the rows of filing cabinets and disappears. A door opens, and for a moment I hear the sound of a telephone, and the swelling of voices. Then the door shuts, and everything is quiet except for the ticking of the clock.

Instantly, I push through the double doors.

The look of money does not extend this far. Here, at last, are the same dull linoleum tiling, the same dingy beige walls, of so many labs and hospitals. Immediately to my left is another set of double doors, marked EMERGENCY EXIT; through a small glass panel, I see a narrow stairwell.

I move quickly down the hall, my sneakers squeaking on the floor, scanning the doors on either side of me—most of them closed, some of them gaping open, empty, dark.

A female doctor with a stethoscope looped around her neck is walking toward me, consulting a file. She looks up at me curiously as I pass. I keep my eyes locked on the ground. Fortunately, she doesn’t stop me. I palm the back of my pants. My hands are sweating.

The lab is small, and when I reach the end of the hall, I see that it is laid out simply: Only a single corridor runs the length of the building, and an elevator bank in the back gives access to the remaining six floors. I have no plan except to find Julian, to see him. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to achieve, but the weight of the knife is reassuring, pressed against my stomach, a hard-edged secret.

I take an elevator to the second floor. Here there is more activity: sounds of beeping and murmured conversation, doctors hurrying in and out of examination rooms. I duck quickly into the first door on my right, which turns out to be a bathroom. I take a deep breath, try to focus, try to calm down. There is a tray on the back of the toilet, and a stack of plastic cups meant for urine samples. I grab one and fill it partially with water, then head back into the hall.

Two lab techs, both women, are standing outside one of the examination rooms. They fall silent as I approach, and even though I am deliberately avoiding eye contact, I can feel them staring at me.

“Can I help you?” one of them asks, as I am passing. Both women look identical, and for a moment I think they are twins. But it is just the influence of the scraped-back hair, the spotless uniforms, the identical look of clinical detachment.

I flash the plastic cup at them. “Just need to get my sample to Dr. Hillebrand,” I say.

She withdraws a fraction of an inch. “Dr. Hillebrand’s attendant is on six,” she says. “You can leave it with her.”

“Thanks,” I say. I can feel their eyes trailing me as I continue down the hall. The air is dry, overheated, and my throat hurts every time I try to swallow. At the end of the hall, I pass a doorway paneled in glass. Beyond it, I see several patients sitting in armchairs, watching television in white paper gowns. Their arms and legs are strapped to the furniture.

At the end of the hall, I push through the doors into the stairwell. In all probability, Dr. Hillebrand will be presiding over Julian’s death, and if his attendant is on the sixth floor, there’s a good chance that is where he conducts the majority of his work. My legs are shaking by the time I get to six, and I’m not sure whether it’s nerves, or lack of sleep, or a combination of both. I ditch the plastic cup, then pause for a second to catch my breath. Sweat is tracing its way down my back.

Please, I think, to nobody in particular. I’m not sure what I’m asking for, exactly. A chance to save him. A chance, even, to see him. I need him to know that I came for him.

I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.

Please.

The moment I emerge from the stairwell, I know that I have found it: Fifty feet down the hall, Thomas Fineman is standing outside the door to an examination room, arms crossed, with several bodyguards, speaking in low tones to a doctor and three lab techs.

Two, three seconds. I have only a few seconds until they’ll turn, until they’ll spot me and ask me what I’m doing here.

Their conversation is indecipherable from this distance—they are speaking practically in whispers—and for a second my heart bottoms out and I know that it’s too late, and it has already happened, and Julian is dead.

Then the doctor—Dr. Hillebrand?—consults his watch. The next words he speaks are louder—impossibly loud, in the space and the silence, as though he is shouting them.

“It’s time,” he says, and as the group starts to unknot, my three seconds are up. I rocket into the first door I see. It’s a small examination room, thankfully empty.

I don’t know what to do next. Panic is building in my chest. Julian is here, so close, and totally unreachable. There were at least three bodyguards with Thomas Fineman, and I have no doubt there are more inside. I’ll never make it past them.

I lean against the door, willing myself to focus, to think. I’ve ended up in a small antechamber. In one wall is a door that I know must lead to a larger procedural room, where complex surgeries and the procedure to cure deliria take place.

A paper-draped table dominates the small space: On it are folded gowns, and a tray of surgical instruments. The room smells like bleach and looks identical to the room in which I undressed for my evaluation, almost a year ago, on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future. For a second I feel dizzy and have to close my eyes. When I open them, I have the feeling of looking at two mirrors that have been placed face-to-face, of being pushed from the past to the now and back again. Memories begin budding, welling up—the walk to the labs in the sticky Portland air, the wheeling seagulls, the first time I saw Alex, the dark cavern of his mouth as he looked at me from the observation deck, laughing…

It hits me: the observation deck. Alex was watching me from an observation deck that ran the length of the procedural room. If this lab is laid out like the one in Portland, I might be able to access Julian’s room from the seventh floor.

I move cautiously into the hall again. Thomas Fineman is gone, and only a single bodyguard remains. For a moment I debate whether I should take my chances on him—the knife is there, heavy, waiting, like an urge—but then he turns his eyes in my direction. They are colorless, hard, like two stones; they make me draw back, as though he has reached down the length of the hall and hit me.

Before he can say anything, before he has time to register my face, I slip around the corner and into the stairwell.

The seventh floor is darker and dingier than any of the others. It is perfectly silent: no conversations humming behind closed doors, no steady beep of medical machinery or lab techs squeaking down the halls in white sneakers. Everything is still, as though the air up here is not often disturbed. A series of doorways extends down the hall on my right. My heart leaps when I see the first one is labeled OBSERVATION DECK A.

I ease down the hall on tiptoe. There’s obviously no one up here, but the quiet makes me nervous. There is something ominous about all the closed doors, the air heavy and hot like a blanket; I get the creeping feeling that someone is watching me, that all the doors are mouths, ready to open and scream out my presence.

The last door in the hall is marked OBSERVATION DECK D. My palms are sweating so badly, I can barely twist open the door handle. At the last second I remove my knife from the front pocket of my wind breaker, just in case, and uncoil Mrs. Fineman’s T-shirt from around the blade. Then I drop into a crouch and scuttle through the door onto the observation deck. I’m gripping the knife so tightly, my knuckles ache.

The deck is big, dark, and empty, and shaped like an L, extending along two whole walls of the procedural room below. It is completely enclosed in glass and contains four tiered rows of chairs, all of which look down over the main floor. It smells like a movie theater, like damp upholstery and gum.

I ease down the stairs of the deck, keeping close to the ground, grateful that the lights in the observation deck are off—and grateful, too, that the low plaster wall that encircles the deck, underneath the heavy panels of glass, should conceal me at least partially from the view of anyone below me. I ease off my backpack and place it carefully next to me. My shoulders are aching.

I have no idea what to do next.

The lights in the procedural room are dazzling. There is a metal table in the center of the room, and a couple of lab techs circulating, adjusting equipment, moving things out of the way. Thomas Fineman and a few other men—the men from the hall—have been moved into an adjacent room; it, too, is enclosed in glass, and although chairs have been set up for them, they are all standing. I wonder what Fineman is thinking. I think, briefly, of Julian’s mother. I wonder where she is.

I don’t see Julian anywhere.

A flash of light. I think explosion—I think run—and everything in me knots up, tight and panicked, until I notice that in one corner is a man with a camera and a media badge clipped to his tie. He is taking pictures of the setup, and the glare of the flash bounces off all the polished metal surfaces, zigzagging up the walls.

Of course. I should have known that the media would be invited to take pictures. They must record it, and broadcast it, in order for it to have any meaning.

The hatred surges, and with it, a cresting, swelling wave of fury. All of them can burn.

There is motion from the corner, from the part of the room concealed underneath the deck. I see Thomas Fineman and the other men swivel in that direction. Behind the glass, Thomas wipes his forehead with a handkerchief, the first sign of discomfort he has shown. The cameraman swivels too: flash, flash. Two moments of blinding white light.

Then Julian enters the room. He is flanked by two regulators, although he is walking on his own, without prompting. They are tailed by a man wearing the high white collar of a priest; he holds a gold-bound copy of The Book of Shhh in front of his chest, like a talisman to protect him from everything dirty and terrible in the world.

The hatred is a cord, tightening around my throat.

Julian’s hands have been handcuffed in front of him, and he is wearing a dark blue blazer and neatly pressed jeans. I wonder if that was his choice, or whether they made him dress up for his own execution. He is facing away from me and I will him, silently, to turn around, to look up. I need him to know that I’m here. I need him to know he’s not alone. I reach my hand out unthinkingly, grope along the glass. I want to smash it to pieces, to jump down and swoop Julian away. But it would never work. I could not get more than a few feet, and then it would be a double execution.

Maybe it no longer matters. I have nothing left, nothing to return to.

The regulators have stopped at the table. There is a swelling of conversation—I hear Julian say, “I’d rather not lie down.” His voice is muffled and indistinct—from the glass, from the height—but the sound of it makes me want to scream. Now my whole body is a heartbeat, a throbbing urge to do something. But I’m frozen, heavy as stone.

One of the regulators steps forward and unchains Julian’s hands. Julian pivots so I can see his face. He circles his wrists, forward and back, wincing a bit. Almost immediately, the regulator clips his right wrist to one of the legs of the metal table, pushing down on Julian’s shoulder so he is forced to sit. He has not once looked at his father.

In the corner of the room, the doctor is washing his hands in a large sink. The water drumming against the metal is overloud. It is too quiet. Surely executions can’t happen here, like this, in the bright and the silence. The doctor dries his hands, works his fingers into a pair of latex surgical gloves.

The priest steps forward and begins to read. His voice is a low drone, a monotone, muffled through the glass.

“And so Isaac grew and was the pride of his aged father, and for a time a perfect reflection of Abraham’s will…”

He is reading from the Book of Abraham. Of course. In it, God commands Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac, after Isaac becomes sick with the deliria. And so he does. He takes his son to a mountain and plunges a knife straight through his chest. I wonder whether Mr. Fineman requested that this passage be read. Obedience to God, to safety, to the natural order: That is what the Book of Abraham teaches us.

“But when Abraham saw that Isaac had become unclean, he asked in his heart for guidance…”

I am swallowing back Julian’s name. Look at me.

The doctor and two lab techs step forward. The doctor has a syringe. He is testing it, flicking its barrel with a finger, as a lab tech rolls Julian’s shirt to his elbow.

Just then there is a disturbance from below. It ripples through the room at once. Julian looks up sharply; the doctor steps away from him and replaces the syringe on the metal tray one of the lab techs carries. Thomas Fineman leans over, frowning, and whispers something to a bodyguard, as another lab tech bursts into the room. I can’t make out what she’s saying—I can tell it’s a she, even though she’s wearing a paper mask and a bulky, too-big lab coat, because of the braid swinging down her back—but she is gesturing agitatedly.

Something is wrong.

I inch closer to the glass, straining to hear what she is saying. A thought is fluttering in the back of my mind, an idea I can’t quite hold on to. There’s something familiar about the lab tech, about the way she keeps using her hands, gesturing emphatically as she points the doctor out into the hall. He shakes his head, removes his gloves, and balls them up into his pocket. He barks a short command before striding out of the procedural room. One of the lab techs scurries after him.

Thomas Fineman is pushing his way to the door that gives entry to the lab. Julian is pale, and even from here I can tell that he is sweating. His voice is higher than normal, strained.

“What’s going on?” His voice floats up to me. “Someone tell me what’s happening.”

The lab tech with the braid has moved across the room and is opening the door for Thomas Fineman. She reaches into her lab coat as he bursts into the room, red-faced.

And just when the idea breaks, washes over me—the braid, the hands, Raven—there is a single explosion, a cracking noise, and Thomas Fineman’s mouth falls open, and he teeters ackward and slumps to the ground as red petals of blood bloom outward across his shirt front.

For a moment, everything seems to freeze: Thomas Fineman, splayed on the ground like a rag doll; Julian, white-faced on the table; the journalist with the camera still raised to his eye; the priest in the corner; the regulators next to Julian, weapons still strapped to their belts; Raven holding a gun.

Flash.

The lab tech, the real one, screams.

And everything is chaos.

More gunshots, ricocheting around the room. The regulators are screaming, “Down! Get down!”

Crack. A bullet lodges in the thick glass directly above my head, and from it a web of fissures begins to grow. That’s all I need. I grab a chair from behind me and swing it, hard, in an arc, praying that Julian has his head down.

The sound is tremendous, and for a split second everything is silent again except for the cascade of glass, a sharp-pointed rain. Then I vault over the concrete wall and drop to the floor below me. Glass crunches under my sneakers as I land, off balance, tipping down onto one hand to steady myself, which comes up smeared with blood.

Raven is a blur of motion. She twists her body out of reach of a regulator, doubles back, cracks down hard on his knee with the butt of her gun. As he bends forward, she plants a foot in his back and pushes: a crack as his head collides with the metal sink. And she is already turning toward the room that contains Fineman’s bodyguards, shoving a small metal scalpel into the keyhole of the door, jamming it. She wedges a metal rolling tray in front of the door for good measure. Medical instruments scatter everywhere as they push, shouting, tilting the table several inches. But the door won’t open, at least not just yet.

I’m ten feet from Julian—shouting, gunshots, and now an alarm is wailing, shrieking—then five feet, then next to him, grabbing his arms, his shoulders, wanting simply to feel him, to make sure he’s real.

“Lena!” He has been struggling with the handcuff that keeps one of his wrists clipped to the table, trying to pry it off. Now he looks up, eyes bright, shining, blue as sky. “What are you—”

“No time,” I tell him. “Stay low.”

I sprint toward the regulator still slumped by the sinks. Dimly, I am aware of shouting, and Raven still turning, spinning, ducking—from a distance, she might be dancing—and muffled explosions. The journalist is gone; he must have run.

The regulator is barely conscious. I kneel down and slice off his belt, quick, then grab the keys and sprint back toward the table. My right palm is wet with blood, but I can barely feel the pain. It takes me two tries to fit the key in the lock on the handcuffs; then I do, and Julian pulls his wrist free of the table, and draws me toward him.

“You came,” he says.

“Of course,” I say.

Then Raven is next to us. “Time to move.”

A minute, maybe less, and Thomas Fineman is dead, and the room is chaos, and we are free.

We sprint through the antechamber just as there is a shuddering, tinny crash, a clattering of metal, and a crescendo of shouts—the bodyguards must have gotten out. Then we duck into the hall, where the alarms are blaring and already we can hear pounding feet from the stairwell.

Raven jerks her head to the right, toward a door marked ROOFTOP ACCESS, EMERGENCIES ONLY. We move quickly, in silence, wound up—through the door and onto the fire escape. Then we pound down the metal stairs, single file, toward the street level. Raven wrestles out of her oversized lab coat and slips off the paper mask, discarding them in a Dumpster just underneath the stairs. I wonder where she got them, and I flash to the heavy woman at the front desk, her breasts nearly exploding out of her lab coat.

“This way,” Raven says shortly, as soon as we’re on the ground. When she turns her head, I see that she has several small cuts on her cheek and neck; the glass must have skimmed her.

We’ve ended up in a small, dingy courtyard, dominated by a set of rusted patio furniture and a patch of wiry brown grass. It is enclosed in a low chain-link fence, which Raven climbs easily. It is a little harder for me, and Julian, who is following, puts a hand up to steady me. My hand has started throbbing, and the chain-link is slick. It’s raining harder now.

On the other side of the fence is another tiny courtyard, nearly identical to the first, and another bleak brown building. Raven charges right through the door, which has been propped open with a cinder block, and we pass into a dark hall, and more closed doors affixed with gold placards. For a second I panic that we’ve ended up back in the labs. But then we emerge into a large lobby, also dark, and outfitted with several fake potted plants and various signs that point the way to EDWARD WU, ESQ. and METROPOLITAN VISION ASSOCIATES.. A set of glass revolving doors gives us a blurry view of the street outside: people streaming by, carrying umbrellas, jostling one another.

Raven heads right for the doors, pausing just long enough to scoop up a backpack she must have stashed earlier behind one of the plants. She turns around and tosses Julian and me an umbrella each. She slips on a yellow rain slicker and pulls the hood up over her head, cinching it tight so the cuts on her face are concealed.

Then we are flowing out into the street, moving into the blur of people on their way to or from somewhere—a faceless crowd, a mass of moving bodies. Never have I been more grateful for the hugeness of Manhattan, for its appetite; we are swallowed in it and by it, we become no one and anyone: a woman in a yellow poncho; a short girl in a red wind breaker; a boy with his face concealed by an enormous umbrella.

We make a right on Eighth Avenue, then a left on 24th Street. By now we have escaped the crowd: The streets are empty, the buildings blind, curtains drawn and shutters closed against the rain. Light smolders behind tissue-thin curtains above us; rooms turned inward, with their backs up against the street. We go undetected, unobserved, through the gray and watery world. The gutters are gushing, swirling with trash, bits of paper and cigarette butts. I have dropped Julian’s hand, but he walks close to me, adjusting his stride to the rhythm of my walk, so we are almost touching.

We come to a parking lot, empty except for a white van I recognize: the van outfitted like a CRAP cruiser. I think once again of my mother, but this is no time to ask Raven about her. Raven unlocks the double doors at the back of the van and flips off her hood.

“In,” she says.

Julian hesitates for a second. I see his eyes skating over the words: CITY OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION, REFORM, AND PURIFICATION.

“It’s okay,” I say, and climb into the back, sitting cross-legged on the dirty floor. He follows me in. Raven nods at me and shuts the door behind us. I hear her climb into the passenger seat. Then there is silence except for the drumming rain on the thin tin ceiling. Its rhythm sends a humming vibration through my whole body. It’s cold.

“What—,” Julian asks, but I shush him. We are not out of danger, not yet, and I will not relax until we are safely out of the city. I use the wind breaker to wipe the blood off my palm, ball up its hem, and squeeze.

We hear pounding footsteps, the driver’s door opening, and Tack’s voice, a grunt. “Got ’em?”

Raven’s reply: “Would I be here if I hadn’t?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“Just a scratch.”

“Let’s roll, then.”

The engine shudders to life, and all of a sudden I could shout for joy. Raven and Tack are back—snapping at each other, as they have always done and will always do. They came for me, and now we will go north: We are on the same side again. We will return to the Wilds, and I’ll see Hunter again, and Sarah, and Lu.

We will curl back into ourselves, like a fern folding up against the frost, and leave the resistance to its guns and its plans, and the Scavengers to their tunnels, and the DFA to their cures, and the whole world to its sickness and blindness. We will let it fall to ruin. We will be safe, shielded under the trees, nesting like birds.

And I have Julian. I found him, and he followed me. I reach out in the half dark, wordlessly, and find his hands. We interlace our fingers, and though he doesn’t say anything either, I can feel the warmth and energy passing between us, a soundless dialogue. Thank you, he is saying, and I am saying, I am so happy, I am so happy, I needed you to be safe.

I hope he understands.

I have not slept in twenty-four hours, and despite the jerking motion of the van, and the thunderous sound of the rain, at some point, I fall asleep. When I wake, it is because Julian is speaking my name quietly. I am resting on his lap, inhaling the smell of his jeans. I sit up quickly, embarrassed, rubbing my eyes.

“We’ve stopped,” he says, although it’s obvious. The rain has faded to a gentle patter. The van doors slam; Raven and Tack are hooting, exuberant and loud. We must have made it well past the border.

The double doors swing open and there Raven is, beaming, and Tack behind her, arms crossed, looking pleased with himself. I recognize the old warehouse from the cracked surface of the parking lot, and the peaked outhouse behind Tack.

Raven offers me her hand, helping me scoot out of the van. Her grip is strong.

“What’s the magic phrase?” she says, as soon as my feet hit the pavement. She is relaxed now, smiling and easy.

“How did you find me?” I ask. She wants me to say thank you, but I don’t. I don’t have to. She gives my hand a squeeze before pulling away, and I know she knows how grateful I am.

“There was only one place you would be,” she says, and her eyes flick behind me, to Julian, and then back to me. And I know that is her way of making peace with me, and admitting she was wrong.

Julian has climbed out of the van too, and he is staring around him, wide-eyed, mouth hanging open. His hair is still wet, and has started to curl just a little at the ends.

“It’s okay,” I say to him. I reach back and take his hand. The joy surges through me again. Here it is okay to hold hands, to huddle together for warmth, to mold ourselves together at night, like statues designed to fit side by side.

“Come on!” Tack is walking backward, half skipping, toward the warehouse. “We’re packing up and moving out. We’ve lost a day already. Hunter will be waiting with the others in Connecticut.”

Raven hitches her backpack a little higher and winks. “You know how Hunter gets when he’s cranky,” she says. “We better get moving.”

I can sense Julian’s confusion. The patter of dialogue and strange names, the closeness of the trees, untrimmed and untended, must be overwhelming. But I will teach him, and he will love it. He will learn and love, and love to learn. The words stream through me—calming, beautiful. There is time for absolutely everything now.

“Wait!” I jog after Raven as she starts to follow Tack into the warehouse. Julian hangs back. I keep my voice low so Julian can’t hear.

“Did—did you know?” I say, swallowing hard. I feel out of breath, though I’ve run less than twenty feet. “About my mom, I mean.”

Raven looks at me, confused. “Your mom?”

“Shhh.” For some reason I don’t want Julian to overhear—it is too much, too deep, too soon.

Raven shakes her head.

“The woman who came for me at Salvage,” I say, persisting despite Raven’s look of total confusion. “She has a tattoo on her neck—5996. That’s my mother’s intake number, from the Crypts.” I swallow. “That’s my mother.”

Raven reaches out two fingers as though to touch my shoulder, then thinks better of it and drops her hand. “I’m sorry, Lena. I had no idea.” Her voice is uncharacteristically gentle.

“I have to talk to her before we go,” I say. “There are—there are things I need to say.” Really, there is only one thing I want to say, and just thinking of it makes my heart speed up: Why, why, why? Why did you let them take you? Why did you let me think you were dead? Why didn’t you come for me?

Why didn’t you love me more?

Once you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces—and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to keep you permanently awake. The DFA is right about that, at least.

Raven draws her eyebrows together. “She’s gone, Lena.”

My mouth goes dry. “What do you mean?”

Raven shrugs. “She left this morning with some of the others. They’re higher-level than I am. I don’t know where they were headed. I’m not supposed to ask.”

“She’s … she’s part of the resistance, then?” I ask, even though it’s obvious.

Raven nods. “Top-top,” she says gently, as though that makes up for anything. She spreads her hands. “That’s all I know.”

I look away, biting my lip. To the south, the clouds are breaking up, like wool slowly unraveling, revealing patches of bare blue sky. “For most of my life, I thought she was dead,” I say. I don’t know why I tell her, or what difference it will make.

She does touch me then, skimming my elbow. “Someone arrived from Portland last night—a fugitive. Escaped the Crypts after the bombing. He hasn’t said much, hasn’t even given his name. I’m not sure what they did to him up there, but—” Raven breaks off. “Anyway, he might know something about your mom. About her time there, at least.”

“Okay,” I say. Disappointment makes me feel heavy, dull. I don’t bother telling Raven that my mom was kept in solitary the whole time she was in prison—and besides, I don’t need to know what she was like then. I want to know her now.

“I’m sorry,” Raven repeats, and I can tell she means it. “But at least you know she’s free, right? She’s free and she’s safe.” Raven smiles briefly. “Like you.”

“Yeah.” She’s right, of course. The disappointment breaks apart a little. Free and safe—me, Julian, Raven, Tack, my mom. We’re all going to be okay.

“I’m going to see if Tack needs help,” Raven says, turning businesslike again. “We leave tonight.”

I nod. Despite everything that has happened, it feels good to talk to Raven, and to see her like this—in go mode. That’s how it should be. She pushes into the warehouse, and I stand for a moment, closing my eyes, inhaling the cold air: smells of damp earth and wet bark; a moist, wet smell of renewal. We’ll be okay. And someday, I’ll find my mom again.

“Lena?” Julian’s voice pipes up quietly, behind me. I turn. He’s standing near the van, arms hanging heavily at his sides, as though he’s afraid to move in this new world. “Are you okay?”

Seeing him there—with the trees spread out darkly on all sides of us, and the clouds retreating—joy wells up in me again. Suddenly I am closing the space between us, not thinking, and barreling into his arms with so much force he almost topples backward. “Yes,” I say. “I’m okay. We’re okay.” I laugh. “Everything’s going to be fine now.”

“You saved me,” he whispers. I can feel his mouth moving against my forehead. The touch of his lips makes heat dance through me. “I couldn’t believe—I never thought you would come.”

“I had to.” I pull away so that I can look up at him, keeping my arms looped around his waist. He rests his hands on my back. Even though I have spent a long time in the Wilds, it strikes me again that it is a miracle to stand this way with someone. No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other, and the rest of the world can go to hell.

Julian reaches up and brushes a piece of hair out of my eyes. “What happens now?” he asks.

“Anything we want,” I say. The joy is a surge: I could soar away on it, ride it all the way to the sky.

“Anything?” Julian’s smile spreads slowly from his lips to his eyes.

“Anything and everything,” I say, and Julian and I move at the same time, and find each other’s lips. At first, it’s clumsy: His nose bumps my lips, and then my chin bumps his chin. But he’s smiling, and we take our time, and find each other’s rhythm. I run my lips lightly over his, explore his tongue, softly, with mine. He puts his fingers in my hair. I inhale the smell of his skin, fresh and also woodsy, like soap and evergreen trees, mixed. We kiss slowly, gently, because now we have all the time in the world—nothing but time, and the space to get to know each other freely, and to kiss as much as we want. My life is beginning again.

Julian pulls away to look at me. He traces my jaw with one finger. “I think—I think you’ve given it to me,” he says, slightly out of breath. “The deliria.”

“Love,” I say, and squeeze his waist. “Say it.”

He hesitates for just a second. “Love,” he says, testing the word. Then he smiles. “I think I like it.”

“You’ll grow to love it. Trust me.” I raise myself on my tip-toes and Julian kisses my nose, then skims his lips over my cheekbones, brushing against my ear, planting tiny kisses across the crown of my head.

“Promise me we’ll stay together, okay?” His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. “You and me.”

“I promise,” I say.

Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: “Don’t believe her.”

The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.

I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pressure and chaos. My head is about to explode.

He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a small tattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes—once a sweet, melted brown, like syrup—have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.

Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.

Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.

Alex.