I open my eyes into pain. For a second everything is swirling color, and I have a moment of total panic—Where am I? What happened?—but then shapes and boundaries assert themselves. I am in a windowless stone room, lying on a cot. In my confusion I think that perhaps I’ve made it back to the burrow, and found myself in the sickroom.
But no. This room is smaller and dingier. There are no sinks, and only one bucket in the corner, and the mattress I’m lying on is stained and thin and without sheets.
Memories return: the rally in New York; the subway entrance, the horrible vision of the bodyguards. I remember the rasping voice in my ear: Not so fast.
I try to sit up and instantly have to lay back again, overwhelmed by the surge behind my eyes, like the pressure of a knife.
“Water helps.”
This time I do sit up, whipping around despite the pain. Julian Fineman is sitting on a narrow cot behind me, leaning his head against the wall, watching me through heavy-lidded eyes. He is holding a tin cup, which he extends toward me.
“They brought it earlier,” he says. There is a long, thin gash that runs from his eyebrow to his jaw, caked with dried blood, and a bruise on the left side of his forehead, just beneath his hairline. The room is outfitted with a small bulb, set high in the ceiling, and in its white glow, his hair is the color of new straw.
My eyes go immediately to the door behind him, and he shakes his head. “Locked from the outside.”
So. Prisoners.
“Who’s they?” I ask, even though I know. It must be Scavengers who brought us here. I think of that hellish vision in the tunnels, a guard strung up, another knifed in his back … no one but the Scavengers could have done that.
Julian shakes his head. I see, too, that he has bruises around his neck. They must have choked him. His jacket is gone and his shirt is ripped; there’s more blood ringing his nostrils, and some of it has dripped onto his shirt. But he seems surprisingly calm. The hand holding the cup is steady.
Only his eyes are electric, restless—that vivid, improbable blue, alert and watchful.
I reach out to take the cup from him, but at the last second he draws it away a fraction of an inch.
“I recognize you,” he says, “from the meeting.” Something flickers in his eyes. “You lost your glove.”
“Yeah.” I reach again for the cup.
The water tastes mossy, but it feels amazing on my throat. As soon as I have a sip, I realize I’ve never been so thirsty in my life. There isn’t enough to take more than a bare edge off the feeling; I gulp most of it down in one go before realizing, guiltily, that Julian might want some. There’s a half inch of water left, which I try to return to him.
“You can finish it,” he says, and I don’t argue. As I drink, I can feel his eyes on me again, and when I look at him, I see that he has been staring at the three-pronged scar on my neck. It seems to reassure him.
Amazingly, I still have my backpack. For some reason, the Scavengers have let me keep it. This gives me hope. They may be vicious, but they’re obviously not very practiced at kidnapping people. I remove a granola bar from my bag, then reconsider. I’m not starving yet, and I have no idea how long I’m going to be trapped in this rat hole. I learned in the Wilds: It’s better to wait when you still can. Eventually, you’ll be too desperate to have self-control.
The rest of the things I’ve brought—The Book of Shhh, Tack’s stupid umbrella, the water bottle, which I drank dry on the bus ride into Manhattan, and a tube of mascara, probably Raven’s, nestled at the very bottom of the bag—are useless. Now I know why they didn’t bother confiscating the backpack. Still, I take everything out, lay it carefully on my bed, and overturn the backpack—shaking it hard, as though a knife or a lock pick or some other kind of salvation might suddenly materialize.
Nothing. Still, there’s got to be a way out of here.
I stand up and go to the door, bending my left arm. The pain in my elbow has faded to a dull throb. It isn’t broken, then: another good sign.
I try the door: locked, like he said, and made of heavy iron. Impossible to break down. There’s a smaller door—about the size of a cat flap—fitted into the larger one. I squat down and examine it. The way its hinges are fitted allows it to be opened from their side, but not from ours.
“That’s where they put the water through,” Julian says. “Food, too.”
“Food?” This surprises me. “They gave you food?”
“A little bit of bread. Some nuts, too. I ate it all. I didn’t know how long you’d be out.” He looks away.
“That’s all right.” I straighten up, and scan the walls for cracks or fissures, a hidden door, or a weak place we might be able to push through. “I would have done the same thing.”
Food, water, an underground cell: Those are the facts. I can tell we’re underground because of the pattern of mold at the top of the walls—it’s a particular kind that we used to get all the time in the burrow. It comes from the dirt all around us.
It means, essentially, that we’re buried.
But if they’d wanted us dead, we’d have been dead already. That is a fact also.
Still, it is not particularly comforting. If the Scavengers have kept us alive so far, it can only be because they’re planning something far worse for us than death.
“What do you remember?” I ask Julian.
“What?”
“What do you remember? About the attack? Noises, smells, order of events?” When I look directly at Julian, he clicks his eyes away from mine. Of course, he has had years of training—segregation, principles of avoidance, the Protective Three: Distance, Detachment, Dispassion. I’m tempted to remind him that it isn’t illegal to make eye contact with a cured. But it seems absurd to have a conversation about right and wrong here.
He must be in denial. That’s why he’s staying so calm.
He sighs, runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t remember anything.”
“Try.”
He shakes his head, as though trying to dislodge the memory, leans back again, and stares at the ceiling. “When the Invalids came during the rally…”
I wince unconsciously as he pronounces the word. I have to bite my lip to keep from correcting him: Scavengers. Not Invalids. We’re not all the same.
“Go on,” I prompt him. I’m moving down the walls now, running my hands along the concrete. I don’t know what I’m hoping to find. We’re trapped, pure and simple. But it seems to make it easier for Julian to speak when I’m not looking at him.
“Bill and Tony—those are my dad’s bodyguards—grabbed me and dragged me toward the emergency exit. We’d planned it earlier, in case something went wrong; we were supposed to go into the tunnels and reconvene, wait for my father.” His voice catches the slightest bit on the word father, and he coughs. “The tunnels were dark. Tony went looking for the flashlights. He’d stashed them earlier. Then we heard—then we heard a shout, and a cracking noise. Like a nut.”
Julian swallows hard. For a moment I feel bad for him. He has seen a lot, and quickly.
But I remind myself that he and his father are the reason that the Scavengers exist—the reason they’re forced to exist. The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.
But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come.
“Then Bill went ahead, to make sure Tony was okay. He told me not to move. I waited there. And then—I felt someone squeezing my throat from behind. I couldn’t breathe. Everything went blurry. I saw someone approaching but couldn’t make out any features. Then he hit me.” He gestures to his nose and shirt. “I passed out. When I woke up, I was in here. With you.”
I’ve finished my tour of our makeshift cell. But I’m filled with nervous energy and can’t bring myself to sit down. I continue pacing, back and forth, keeping my eyes trained on the ground.
“And you don’t remember anything else? No other noises or smells?”
“No.”
“And nobody spoke? Nobody said anything to you?”
There’s a pause before he says, “No.” I’m not sure whether he’s lying or not. But I don’t push it. A feeling of complete exhaustion overwhelms me. The pain comes slamming back into my skull, exploding little points of color behind my eyelids. I thump down hard on the ground, draw my knees up to my chest.
“So what now?” Julian says. There’s a small note of desperation in his voice. I realize that he isn’t in denial. He isn’t calm, either. He’s scared, and fighting it.
I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes. “Now we wait.”
It is impossible to know what time it is, and whether it is night or day. The electric bulb fitted high in the wall casts a flat white light over everything. Hours pass. At least Julian knows how to be quiet. He stays on his cot, and whenever I am not looking at him, I can feel him watching me. This is, in all probability, the first time he has ever been alone with a girl his age for an extended period of time, and his eyes travel over my hair, and legs, and arms, as though I am a strange species of animal at the zoo. It makes me want to put on my jacket again, to cover up, but I don’t. It’s hot.
“When did you have your procedure?” he asks me at a certain point.
“November,” I answer automatically. My mind is turning the same questions over and over again. Why bring us here? Why keep us alive? Julian, I can understand. He’s worth something. They must be after a ransom.
But I’m not worth anything. And that makes me very, very nervous.
“Did it hurt?” he asks.
I look up at him. I’m once again startled by the clarity of his eyes: now a clear river color, threaded with purple and navy shadows.
“Not too bad,” I lie.
“I hate hospitals,” he says, looking away. “Labs, scientists, doctors. All that.”
A few beats of silence stretch between us. “Aren’t you kind of used to it by now?” I say, because I can’t help it.
The left corner of his mouth twitches upward: a tiny smile. He looks at me sideways.
“I guess there are some things you never get used to,” he says, and for no reason at all, I think of Alex and feel a tightening in my stomach.
“I guess so,” I say.
Later on there is a change, a shift in the silence. I have been lying on the cot, preserving my strength, but now I sit up.
“What is it?” Julian says, and I hold up my hand to quiet him.
Footsteps on the other side of the door, coming closer. Then a grinding sound, as the hinges on the small metal cat flap squeak open.
Instantly I dive to the ground, trying to catch a glimpse of our captors. I land hard on my right shoulder just as a tray clatters through the opening and the metal door bangs shut again.
“Damn.” I sit up, kneading my shoulder. The plate holds two thick chunks of bread and several ropes of beef jerky. They’ve given us a metal bottle filled with water as well. Not bad, considering some of the stuff I used to eat in the Wilds.
“See anything?” Julian asks.
I shake my head.
“It wouldn’t help us much, I guess.” He hesitates for a second and then slides off the bed, joining me on the ground.
“Information always helps,” I say, a little too sharply. That’s something else I learned from Raven. Of course Julian wouldn’t understand. People like Julian don’t want to know, or think, or choose anymore; that is part of the point.
We both reach for the water, and our hands collide over the tray. Julian jerks back as though he has been burned.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“You first,” he says.
I take the water and begin sipping, watching Julian the whole time. He tears the bread into pieces. I can tell he’s trying to make it last; he must be starving.
“Have my bread,” I say. I’m not sure why I offer it to him. It isn’t smart. I’ll need my strength to break out of here.
He stares at me. Strangely, despite the rest of his coloring—caramel-and-wheat-blond hair, blue eyes—his lashes are thick and black. “Are you sure?”
“Take it,” I say, and almost add, Before I change my mind.
The second piece he eats greedily, with both hands. When he’s finished, I pass him the water bottle, and he hesitates before bringing it to his mouth.
“You can’t catch it from me, you know,” I tell him.
“What?” He starts a little, as though I’ve interrupted a long period of silence.
“The disease. Amor deliria nervosa. You can’t catch it from me. I’m safe.” Alex told me that very same thing, once. I push the memories of him away, willing them deep into the darkness. “And besides, you can’t catch it from sharing water and food, anyway. That’s a myth.”
“You can get it from kissing,” Julian says, after a pause. He hesitates before he says the word kissing. It’s not a word that gets used very much anymore, except in private.
“That’s different.”
“Anyway, I’m not worried about that,” Julian says forcefully, and takes a big slug of water as if to prove it.
“What are you worried about, then?” I take my rope of jerky, lean back against the wall, and start working it with my teeth.
He won’t meet my eyes. “I just haven’t spent that much time with—”
“Girls?”
He shakes his head. “Anyone,” he says. “Anyone my own age.”
We make eye contact for a second then, and a little jolt goes through me. His eyes have changed: Now the crystal waters have deepened and expanded, become an ocean of swirling color—greens and golds and purples.
Julian seems to feel he has said too much. He stands up, walks to the door, and returns. This is the first sign of agitation I’ve seen from him. All day he has been remarkably still.
“Why do you think they’re keeping us here?” he asks.
“Ransom, probably.” It’s the only thing that makes sense.
Julian fingers the cut on his lip, considering this. “My father will pay,” he says after a beat. “I’m valuable to the movement.”
I don’t say anything. In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.
“He won’t like dealing with the Invalids, though,” he adds.
“You don’t know they’re responsible for this,” I say quickly, and then regret it. Even here, Lena Morgan Jones must act the way she is supposed to.
Julian frowns at me. “You saw them at the demonstration, didn’t you?” When I don’t answer, he goes on, “I don’t know. Maybe what happened is a good thing. Maybe now people will understand what the DFA is trying to do. They’ll understand why it’s so necessary.” Julian is using his public voice, as though he’s addressing a large crowd. I wonder how many times he has had the same words, the same ideas, drilled into his head. I wonder whether he ever doubts.
I’m suddenly disgusted with him, and his calm certainty about the world, as though all of life can be dissected and neatly labeled, just like a specimen in a laboratory.
But I don’t say any of this. Lena Morgan Jones keeps her mask on. “I hope so,” I say fervently, and then I go to my cot, curling up toward the wall so he’ll know I’m done talking to him. For revenge I mouth words, silently, into the concrete—old, forbidden words Raven taught me, from one of the old religions.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul: he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yes, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…
At a certain point, I drift off to sleep. I open my eyes into blackness, suppressing a cry. The electric light has been switched off, leaving us in perfect darkness. I feel hot and sick, and push the woolen blanket all the way to the foot of the cot, enjoying the cool air on my skin.
“Can’t sleep?”
Julian’s voice startles me. He is not in his cot. I can barely see him. He is a large black shape against the darkness.
“I was sleeping,” I say. “What about you?”
“No,” he answers. His voice sounds softer now, less precise—as though the darkness has somehow melted its edges. “It’s stupid, but…”
“But what?” Dream images are still fluttering through my head, skirting the edges of consciousness. I was dreaming of the Wilds. Raven was there; Hunter was too.
“I have bad dreams. Nightmares.” Julian speaks the words in a rush, obviously embarrassed. “I always have.”
For a split second I feel a little hitch in my chest, like something hard there has loosened. I will the feeling down and away. We are on opposite sides, Julian and I. There can never be any sympathy between us.
“They say it will get better after the procedure,” he says, almost like an apology, and I wonder if he is thinking the obvious: If I even make it through.
I don’t say anything, and Julian coughs, then clears his throat.
“What about you?” he asks. “Did you ever have nightmares? Before you were cured, I mean.”
I think of hundreds of thousands of cureds, sleeping dreamlessly in their marital beds, their heads enveloped in fog, a sweet and empty smoke.
“Never,” I say, and roll over, drawing the covers over my legs again, and pretend to sleep.