Here are the top three things I’ve learned in my twenty-two years on the planet:
1) Never wipe your butt with poison ivy.
2) People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.
3) There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.
Of all of them, number three is really the only one you have to keep in mind.
“This is stupid,” Tack says. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
I don’t bother replying. He’s right, anyway. This is stupid, and we shouldn’t be doing it. But we are.
“If anything goes wrong, we abort,” Tack says. “I mean anything. I won’t miss out on Christmas for this shit.”
“Christmas” is code for the next big mission. We’ve only heard rumors about it so far. We don’t know when, and we don’t know where. All we know is that it’s coming.
I feel a sudden wave of nausea, a tide rolling up to my throat, and swallow it.
“Nothing will go wrong,” I say, even though of course I can’t know that. That’s what I said about migration this year. Nobody dies, I said, over and over, like a prayer.
I guess God wasn’t listening.
“Border patrol,” I say, as though Tack can’t see the solid cement wall, darkened by rain, and the checkpoints ahead. He eases on the brakes. The van is like an old man: always hacking and shuddering and taking forever to do what you want it to. But as long as it gets us where it needs to go.
“We could have been halfway to Canada by now,” Tack says, which is, of course, an exaggeration. That’s how I know he’s upset. Tack hardly ever exaggerates. He says exactly what he means, only when he means it.
It’s one of the reasons I love him.
We get through the border without any trouble. Eight years of living in the Wilds and four of working actively with the resistance, and I’ve learned that half the country’s security is for show. It’s all a big song and dance, a stage production: a way of keeping the tiny ants in line, cowed by fear, heads bent to the dirt. Half the guards are barely trained. Half the walls unpatrolled. But it’s the image that matters, the impression of constant surveillance, of containment.
Ants are driven by fear.
Tack is quiet as we drive down the West Side Highway, empty of traffic. The river and the sky are the same slate-gray color, and the rain sends sheets of water across the road. The clouds have the same low-down, swollen-belly look they did on the day, years ago, when I Crossed.
The day I found her.
I still can’t say her name.
I used to be an ant too. Back when I lived before, back when I had a different name, back when the only scar I had was a small, thin fissure on my abdomen, where the doctors had had to remove my appendix.
I can still remember my old house: the gauzy curtains that smelled like gardenias and plastic; the carpet sprinkled with baking soda and vacuumed daily; the quiet, heavy as a hand. My festa hand.ather liked quiet. Noise made the buzzing start up in his brain—like a storm of bees, he once told me. The louder the buzzing got, the more he couldn’t think. The more he couldn’t think, the angrier he got. Until he had to break, he had to stop it, he had to smash back all that sound with a fist, until there was quiet again.
We were a whirlpool, circling constantly around him, trying to keep the buzzing from coming back.
I almost drowned in that house.
“Raven?”
I turn to Tack, realizing he’s been trying to get my attention. “What?” I say, a little too sharply.
“Here?”
Tack has slowed down in front of a parking lot on Twenty-Fourth Street, unattended, empty except for two cars. The street is lined with identical apartments, stiff as sentinels, blinds pulled down against the rain: a whole street of darkened red brick and bird-shit-stained front steps and blindness.
“We’re early,” he says.
“She had seven hours on us, at least,” I say.
“Still, if she was walking . . .” He shrugs.
“So we wait,” I say. “Turn left on Nineteenth. I want to scout the block.”
Northeastern Medical, the clinic where Julian Fineman is scheduled to die, is on Eighteenth Street; we can thank the radio for letting that little detail slip. I’m surprised there’s not more press. Then again, they might be inside already, angling for a good view. Tack circles the block twice—not enough times to look suspicious, in case anyone is watching—and we talk over the plan together. He helps me think it out, then parks and waits for me while I walk the perimeter on foot, scanning the entrances and the exits, checking out nearby buildings, potential pitfalls, dead ends, and hiding places.
Several times I have to stop, breathe, struggle not to puke.
“Did you find a place for the backpack?” Tack asks when I climb back into the van.
I nod. He inches carefully into nonexistent traffic. Another thing I love about Tack: how careful he is. Meticulous, in some ways. And in others, totally free—quick to laugh, full of crazy ideas. Hardly anyone gets to see that side of him. How he speaks in a rush when he’s excited. How he likes to say the word love, over and over.
Love. I love you. I’ll always love you, my love. You are the love of my life.
We keep these things for each other, the deepest parts. In valid cities it’s those places that get stomped out firglemped oust, even before the cure—the wounds and weirdness and the pieces we carry like misshapen gifts, waiting for a person to welcome them.
Love is still hard for me to say sometimes, even when we’re alone, even after all this time. So we’ve made up our own language, in the way we press chest to chest and the way we touch noses when we kiss. I get to say his name—his real name. A name that brings a taste of sunshine, and of sunshine raising mist from the trees, and of mist reaching toward the sky.
His secret name, which belongs to me, and to him, and to no one else.
Michael.
Did I ever tell her I loved her?
I don’t know.
I can’t remember.
I thought it every day.
I’m sorry.
The nausea is near constant now. It rolls me up and down. Thinking of her is too much, and the acid comes up from my stomach and burns the back of my throat.
“Pull over,” I tell Tack.
I puke behind a car that looks like it hasn’t been moved in years, next to a small pharmacy, its battered blue awning pooling the rain. The vertical neon sign advertising consultation and diagnosis is dark, but a small orange sign hangs beyond the grungy door: open. For a second I debate going in, making up some story, trying to get another test, just to be sure. But it’s too risky, and I need to stay focused on Lena.
I tent my jacket above my head as I run back to the van, feeling a little better now that I’ve thrown up.
The gutters are running with trash, whipping small bits of paper and disposable cups into the drain. I hate the city. Wish I was out with the rest of the group at the warehouse, packing up, counting heads, measuring supplies. Wish I was anywhere, really—fighting through the Wilds, which are always changing, always growing; fighting the Scavengers, even.
Anywhere but this towering gray city, where even the sky is held at bay.
Where we are as small as ants.
The van smells like mildew and tobacco and, weirdly, like peanut butter. I crack open a window.
“Wh teRoman">at was that about?” Tack asks.
“Didn’t feel good,” I say, staring straight ahead, willing him not to ask any more questions. Two straight weeks of getting sick in the mornings. At first I thought it was just the stress—Lena captured, the whole plan out of our hands. Waiting. Watching. Hoping she’d get it right.
Patience was never my strong suit.
“You don’t look good,” he says. And then, “What’s going on, Raven? Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. “My stomach’s just fucked up, that’s all. It’s that goddamn jerky we’ve been eating.”
Tack relaxes a little. He stops white-knuckling the wheel, and the muscle in his jaw goes still. I feel a wave of guilt, a surge even worse than the nausea. Lying is a defense, like a porcupine’s quills or a bear’s claws. And my time in the Wilds has made me very good at it. But I don’t like lying to Tack.
He’s practically the only person I have left.
“Is she yours?”
Those were Tack’s first words to me. I can still see him the way he was then: skinnier, even, than he is now. Big hands. Two nose rings. Eyes half-closed but alert, like a lizard’s; hair falling practically to the bridge of his nose. Sitting in the corner of the sickroom, hands and ankles bound. Pockmarked with mosquito bites and bloody with scratches.
I’d been in the Wilds for only a month. I was lucky, and found my way to a homestead within six hours of crossing from Yarmouth. Double lucky, actually. Only a week later, the homestead relocated, moved into New Hampshire, just south of Rochester. Rumors of a raid on the Wilds had everyone jumpy. I’d made it just in time.
I had to. Blue was barely alive, and I had no way of feeding her. I’d run in a panic, blind to anything but the need to disappear; had no supplies, no knowledge, no hope of making it on my own. My shoes were too tight and left raw, bloody blisters the size of quarters after only a few hours of walking. I didn’t know how to navigate. Didn’t keep track of where I was going. Got thirsty but didn’t think of sipping from a stream because I was worried it would make me sick.
Idiot. If I hadn’t wandered into the homestead, I would have died. And she would have too.
Little baby Blue.
I hadn’t believed in God since I was a little kid and saw my dad take my mom by the hair and slam her face-first into the kitchen counter, watched a spray of blood on the linoleum and saw one of her teeth skitter across the floor, white and shiny as a die. I knew then there was no one watching over us.
But my first night in the Wilds, when the forest opened up like a jaw and I saw lights glowing fuzzily in the darkness, small halos beyond the rain, and heard voicekin heard s—when Grandma put a blanket around my shoulders, and Mari, twenty-two years old, who’d just given birth to her second stillborn, took Blue in her arms and to her breast and cried silently the whole time she was suckling, when I knew we’d both been saved—that night, I thought I knew God, just for a second.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” I said to Tack. Only I didn’t know his name then. He didn’t have a name then. Didn’t have a group, or a homestead; didn’t belong anywhere. We called him the Thief.
The Thief laughed. “You aren’t, huh? What about all the freedom on the other side of the walls?”
“You’re a Scavenger,” I said, even though I hardly knew what the term meant. I hadn’t seen one yet, thank God, and wouldn’t for two years, during a relocation that wiped out half our number. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
He flinched. “I’m not a Scavenger.” Then he lifted his chin and stared at me. That was the first time I realized he was probably my age. His clothes, the dirtiness of him, his attitude—I’d assumed he was older. “I’m not anything.”
“You’re a thief,” I said, looking away. Only a month in the Wilds—I hadn’t even begun to shake my fear of them. Boys.
He shrugged. “I’m a survivor.”
“You were stealing our food,” I said. I didn’t add: Everyone thought I was to blame. “That makes you a Scavenger in my opinion.”
For the past several weeks, the homesteaders had noticed supplies gone missing, some traps empty that should have been full, a jug or two of clean water mysteriously emptied overnight. The group had grown tense, suspicious, and I became the prime suspect. I was the newest, after all. No one knew who I was or where I’d come from or what I was about, and the thefts had started soon after I’d arrived with Blue.
So this guy named Gray, who was kind of the group leader at the time, had started surveillance without telling anyone. In the middle of the night he got out of bed and circulated to all the snares and traps, checked the storerooms, made sure everyone from the homestead was exactly where they should be. On the second day of his rounds, he caught Tack wrestling a rabbit out of one of our traps. Stealing. Tack nearly put a knife through Gray, trying to escape. But he missed and just sliced off a chunk of Gray’s shoulder blade, and Gray managed to shout and pin Tack to the ground, and since then he’d been our prisoner and everyone had been debating what to do about him.
“Welcome to freedom,” he said. And he spit. Right next to his feet, on the ground. “Everyone has an opinion.”
I turned my attention back to Blue. Grandma had told me not to get too attached. So many of them don’t make it out here, she’d said. But I was already attached. From the second I found her; fnd found hrom the second I felt the skating pressure of her heartbeat beneath her tiny ribs. I knew she was mine—my job, my duty to protect.
At first she’d barely taken any food from Mari, but after two weeks she was eating better and beginning to gain weight. When Mari nursed, I sat next to her, sometimes with an arm around Blue, like I could absorb them both. Like I was the one sending life out through my fingertips and into Blue’s veins and heart and mouth. I kept Blue with me all the time. Grandma gave me an old baby carrier, faded to a dull and genderless gray from so many washings, so I could strap her to my chest when I was helping the others with the rounds.
But then she’d gotten sick again. She fussed and wouldn’t stay asleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Her nose was always running, and on the second day, her fever was so bad, I could feel the heat of her body when I held my hand six inches from her chest. She stopped feeding, and she cried for hours at a time. Everyone told me it was just a cold, and she’d get over it.
For three days, I’d been moving through a thick fog of exhaustion, a relentless tiredness like nothing I’d ever known. At night, I stayed awake and whispered to her, rocking her even as she tried to push me off, keeping her cool with wet cloths. We had moved, both of us, into the sickroom. Tack had been placed there too, temporarily, while the other homesteaders convened in the main room and talked about whether to let him go and trust that he wouldn’t steal from us again, or whether he should be punished, even killed.
The law of the Wilds was just as harsh, in its way, as the law on the other side of the fence.
Tack watched me as I bent over Blue, murmuring to her, wiping the sweat from her forehead. She wasn’t crying anymore. Her eyes were half-closed, and she barely stirred when I touched her. Her breathing was short and shallow.
“It’s RSV,” Tack spoke up suddenly. “She needs medicine.”
“You some kind of doctor?” I fired back. But I was scared. I wished she would cry, open her mouth, respond to me in any way. But she was just lying there, fighting for breath. And I knew then that it wasn’t just a cold. Whatever she had was getting worse.
“My mother was a nurse,” Tack said calmly. This startled me. It was weird to think of the Thief, the wild and lawless boy, as having a mother—as having a past at all. I looked at him.
“Untie me,” he said, his voice low, convincing, “and I’ll help you.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
There’s a part of me—a big part—that’s hoping Lena won’t show up. She might have gotten stuck at the border, or caught by a patrol without an ID. She might have gotten lost. She might just be too late. Then Tack and I won’t have to get involved, won’t risk a big fat stinking mess.
But we’ve trained her too well, and at a couple of minutes before te" fes befon a.m., I spot her moving up the street, head down against the rain, which has petered out to a slow drizzle. She’s wearing clothes that don’t belong to her, except for the wind breaker, which she must have taken from the safe house. Still, her walk is unmistakable: light on her feet, kind of bouncing on her toes, as if she might break into a run at any second.
Tack spots her the same time I do and sinks down a little in the front seat, as if worried she might spot us. But she’s totally focused. She barely pauses at the entrance to the clinic. She slips inside.
Any moment now. The air inside the van is humid, and my skin feels sticky. The windows are fogged from our breath. I feel another roll of nausea and fight it back. No time for that.
After a few minutes, Tack sighs and reaches for the jacket balled up on the seat between us. He shakes it out and shoves his arms, hard, into the sleeves. He looks funny in a suit jacket, like a bear dressed up in a costume for the circus. I would never tell him that, though.
“Ready?” he says.
“Don’t forget this.” I pass him a small laminated ID. It’s so old and stained, the picture is nearly indistinguishable—which is good, because its original owner, Dr. Howard Rivers, was about twenty pounds heavier than Tack and had a decade on him.
Then again, Howard Rivers wasn’t actually Howard Rivers, but Edward Kauffman, a respected doctor in Maine who worked to keep the deliria out of our schools and homes, who had ties to the governor, who subsidized medical centers in poorer parts of town. Secretly, though, he was a radical and controversial resister, famous for performing under-the-table abortions on uncureds who’d gotten pregnant and were desperate to conceal it.
Over the years he established identities for a dozen fake doctors so he could increase his shipments of medicine and antibiotics, which he then distributed to Invalids in the Wilds.
Edward Kauffman, the original, is dead now—has been dead for two years. He was outed in a police sting operation and executed only two weeks later. But many of his pseudonyms, his fake identities, survived. They’re healthy and practicing still.
Tack clips the ID to his jacket. “How do I look?” he says.
“Medical,” I answer.
He checks his reflection in the rearview and tries unsuccessfully again to mash down his hair. “Don’t forget,” he says. “Parking lot on Twenty-Fourth. I’ll be waiting for you.”
“We’ll be there,” I say, ignoring the weird feeling in my stomach. More than nausea. Nerves. I hate being nervous. It’s a weakness. It reminds me of the person I used to be, and the ticking quiet of the old house, my father brewing, growing his anger like a storm.
Every time I have to kill someone, s pll someI pretend he has my father’s face.
“Be careful, Rae.” For a second, I get a glimpse of Michael, the boy no one sees. Face open like a kid’s. Scared. “I wish you’d let me do the heavy lifting.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I press my fingers against my lips, bring them to his chest. It’s our sign. Neither one of us is super touchy-feely, and besides, it’s too risky to kiss in Zombieland. “See you on the other side.”
“On the other side,” he parrots, then slips out of the van, jogging across the street pooled with rain.
I count off sixty seconds, make some last-minute adjustments to my gear, flip down the mirror, and check my teeth. Feel for the gun concealed in my jacket and check the supplies in my right jeans pocket. All good. All there. Count another sixty seconds, which helps me ignore the nerves. Nothing to be afraid of.
I know what I’m doing. We all do. Too well.
Sometimes I imagine that Tack and I will just crap out—flake on the whole war, the struggle, the resistance. Say good-bye and see you never. We’ll go up north and build a homestead together, far away from everyone and everything. We know how to survive. We could do it. Trap and hunt and fish for our food, grow what we can, pop out a whole brood of kids and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Let it blow itself to pieces if it wants to.
Dreams.
It has been two and a half minutes. I open the van door and hop down to the curb. The rain is nothing more than a mist now, but the gutters are still overflowing, swirling eddies of crushed coffee cups and cigarette butts and flyers.
When I push open the door to the clinic, it’s like a different world: thick green carpet, and furniture polished so it shines. Big, showy clock in the corner, ticking away the minutes. Not a bad place to die, if you had to choose.
Tack is standing at reception, drumming his fingers against the desk. He barely glances at me when I come in.
“I’m so sorry, doctor.” The lab tech behind the desk is punching buttons frantically. Her fingers are fat and weighted down with rings cut deep into her flesh. “An inspection—today—there must be a mistake.”
“It’s on the books,” Tack says, in a voice that belongs to someone older and fatter and cured. “Every clinic is subjected to an annual regulatory—”
“Excuse me,” I say loudly, interrupting him, as I come toward the desk. I make sure to walk a little funny, just for show. Tack and I can laugh about it later. “Excuse me,” I repeat, a little louder. Too loud for the space.
“You’ll have to hold on,” the receptionist says to me, picking up the phone and angling her chin awayes er chin from the receiver. She turns immediately back to Tack. “I’m so sorry. You have no idea how embarrassed—”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “Just get somebody down here who can help me.”
“Hey.” I lean forward over the counter. “Look, I’m talking to you.”
“Ma’am.” She’s losing it. She’s probably shitting bricks, thinking she’s going to get the whole clinic shut down because she screwed up the review dates. “I’m in the middle of something. If you have an appointment, you’re going to have to sign in and take a seat in the—”
“I don’t have an appointment.” I’m really putting it on, now, practically yelling. Tack does a good job of looking disgusted. “And I won’t wait. I got this rash, okay? It’s driving me crazy. I can’t hardly even sit.”
I undo my belt and start to hitch my pants down over my waist, like I’m about to moon her. Tack draws back with a noise of disgust, and the nurse slams down the phone and practically hurls herself around the desk.
“This way, ma’am, please.” She clamps a hand on my arm. I can smell the sweat underneath her perfume. She pilots me quickly out of the reception area—away from Dr. Howard Rivers, medical inspector, where I can’t do any harm, where I won’t embarrass the clinic any further—and through a set of double doors into a long white hallway. I feel a hitch of excitement in my chest, a slight break, like I always do when a plan is going off like we expected. With my free hand I fumble in my right jeans pocket for the small glass bottle, uncork it with a thumb, let the contents spill out into the rag stuffed in my pocket. Acetone, bleach, and heat.
Not as good as manufactured chloroform, but good enough.
“The doctor will be in to see you shortly,” she says, huffing from the exertion of piloting me forward. She practically shoves me into a small examination room and stands, breasts heaving against her uniform, with one hand on the doorknob. The hall behind her is empty. “If you’ll just wait here . . .”
“I hate waiting,” I say, and step forward, bringing the rag to her face.
She is very heavy as she goes down.
Untie me, and I’ll help you.
The words were stuck in my mind, a taunt and a promise. I didn’t think I could trust him. And it would be a betrayal—of Grandma, and of the other homesteaders who had taken in Blue and me. If I got caught, if the Thief screwed us over, I’d have to pay for it. Maybe I’d get tied up in the sickroom, waiting for the group to decide what should be done with me.
But Blue wasn’t getting any better.
I was so afraid—afraid of everything back then, just a skinny little shit who’d made a snap-dash decision to run away and who had no idea what she was doing. My dad had always told me I was stupid in the head, pathetic, one of the losers. And back then, maybe he was right.
I knew the Thief wasn’t afraid. I could just tell. Wasn’t afraid of me or the other homesteaders, wasn’t afraid of dying.
When Blue started gurgling and rasping in her sleep—then went ten seconds at a time, still, not breathing, before taking in a gasp of air—I stole a knife from the kitchen and brought it back to the sickroom. My hands were shaking. I remember, because I kept thinking of my mom’s hands, rattling her silverware, fluttering like birds, a wild, frantic part of her. I wondered if she’d been thinking of me at all since I’d left.
It was late. Everyone else was asleep—now that the Thief had been caught, even Gray didn’t feel the need to patrol.
The Thief’s smile was like a sickle blade in the dark. I squatted down in front of him.
“You promised,” I told him. “You promised to help me.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. I didn’t like the sound of his voice—like he was laughing at me—but I cut him loose anyway, feeling sick the whole time, knowing Blue would die otherwise. Might die just the same.
He stood up, groaning a little. I hadn’t realized how tall he was. I hadn’t seen him except sitting or lying down since he was brought in. I took a step backward, flinching, when he raised his arms above his head.
His smile vanished, turned into something harder. “You don’t trust me, do you?” he said.
I shook my head. He extended his hand for the knife, and after a second’s hesitation, I gave it to him.
“I’ll be back by noon,” he said. My heart was beating hard in my throat, a rhythm saying, Please, please. I’m counting on you. He jerked his chin in Blue’s direction. “Keep her alive until then.”
Then he was gone, moving soundlessly through the darkened halls, vanishing into the shadows. And I sat holding Blue, with terror sitting like a black mist in my chest, and waited.
Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.
I learned to tell stories from my mom. “Your dad’s not feeling well today,” she’d say. She’d say, I had an accident.She’d say, Remember what happened. You’re a clumsy girl. You walked into a door. You tripped and stumbled down a staircase. My favorite story: He doesn’t mean to.
She was so good at telling stories that I started to believe them after a while. Maybe I was clumsy. Maybe it was my fault, for provoking him.
Maybe he really didn’t mean to.
There were stories, too, about a girl who got pregnant before her cure. Caroline Gormely—she lived down the street from me, in our neighborhood of boxy, identical-looking houses. Her parents only found out after she swallowed half a bottle of bleach and was taken to the emergency room. One day she was around, riding the bus home from school, pressing her nose to the glass, the window fogging with her breath. And one day she wasn’t anymore.
My mom told me she’d been taken somewhere to be cured, shipped off to a different city where she could start again. Her parents had disowned her. She would likely end up working sanitation somewhere, never paired, carrying the blight of the disease around her like a scar. You see what happens, my dad said, when you don’t listen?
What about the baby? I’d asked my mom.
She hesitated for only a second. The baby will be taken care of, she said. And she meant it: just not in the way I thought.
The lab tech’s uniform is big on me, so big I feel like a kid playing dress-up. But it will work. I don’t rush. A good story needs pacing, deliberateness. I take my time finding a small fabric mask, which I slip over my face, and rubber gloves. I lock the doorknob before I slip back out into the hall. No sense in risking the discovery of the nurse, who is now curled up on the linoleum, breathing deeply, like a child.
I clip her ID on my uniform, knowing no one will check it. You need to give people the broad strokes, the things they’re expecting: the main characters and the buildup.
And the climax, of course. A good story always needs a climax.
None of the homesteaders blamed me for the Thief’s escape, as I had worried they would, even after the kitchen knife was discovered to be missing. Everyone assumed he had broken out somehow, that he had managed to loosen the restraints himself and had stolen the knife before sneaking out. The hard-liners, the ones who had wanted to see him killed, gloated: he was no good, he might be back to murder them in their sleep, they’d hn r, theyave to keep constant tabs on the food stores now. Should have offed the no-good Scavenger when they’d had a chance.
I almost spoke up. I would have confessed, but I was too scared that I would get turned out, abandoned in the Wilds.
The Thief had promised to be back by noon, but noon came and went, and by the time the homesteaders were finished with their rounds and Blue’s breathing sounded like a rattle in her chest, when she was breathing at all, I knew that he had lied to me. He would never be back, and Blue would die, and it was all my fault. I couldn’t cry about it because I’d learned never to cry, even as a little girl. Crying was one of the things that set my dad off, just like laughing too loud, or smiling at a joke that didn’t include him, or acting happy when he was miserable, or miserable when he was happy.
I remember Lu watched Blue while I went for some air, even though I could tell she didn’t think it would do any good. Everyone was walking around me like I had some kind of disease, or like I was in detonator mode and might fracture at any second into shrapnel. That was the worst: knowing they thought she was going to die too.
I still wasn’t used to the Wilds, and I didn’t like them then. I was used to rules and fences, rivers of pavement and parking lots, order everywhere. The Wilds were vast and dark and unpredictable, and reminded me of back home and my dad’s rage, hanging like a low weight over everything, leaving no room to breathe, pressing us into submission. Later, I learned that the Wilds did obey certain rules, did contain a certain kind of order—raw and bare and beautiful.
Only humans are unpredictable.
I remember: a high moon, the weight of fear, the strangle-squeeze of guilt. A cold wind, bringing unfamiliar smells.
The crack of a branch. A footstep.
And suddenly there he was: The Thief emerged from the woods, looking ten years older than he had when he left, soaking wet. He was carrying a backpack. For a second, I couldn’t believe he was real. I thought I must be dreaming.
“Albuterol,” he said, lifting the backpack. “For the girl. And supplies for the others. Penance for my crime.”
Tylenol, Sudafed, Band-Aids, antibiotics, bacitracin, Neosporin, penicillin. It was a jackpot. No one could believe that he’d returned. No one could believe that he’d risked his life, made a crossing to the other side, to stock up on supplies so desperately needed. He said nothing about the agreement we’d made. His earlier crimes were forgiven.
He told the homesteaders about a small, plain storage facility, minimally secure and totally unmarked, on the banks of the Cocheco River. The man who owned it, Edward Kauffman, was a sympathizer, and doled out medication and even certain treatments to uncureds on the sly. Tack had moved upstream, fighting a heavy current, and crossed just east of Kauffman’s clinic. He’d had to hide out for a while before crossing back, however, waiting for a patrol to move on.
“How’d you know about the clinic?” I asked him.
“My sister,” he told me shortly. He didn’t say, but I guessed: She’d had some kind of procedure there, something he didn’t want me to know about. Later on, I understood.
“Sharp as a tack, that one,” Grandpa announced after the Thief had finished speaking; and so the Thief received a name, and became one of us.
Beyond the waiting room, the hospital looks like any other: bleak, ugly, overly scrubbed. I don’t like places that are too clean. It always makes me think about what’s getting covered up and scrubbed off.
I walk, head down, not too quick, not too slow. Hardly anyone in the halls, and the only doctor I pass barely glances at me. Good. People mind their own business here.
I get a break when I hit the bank of elevators: a guy standing, tapping his foot, checking his watch, a poster boy for impatience, with a large camera slung around his neck and the look of someone who hasn’t slept in a week. Press.
“You here for Julian Fineman?” is all I have to say.
“It’s six, right? The woman at the front desk told me it was on six.” He must be in his thirties, but he has a big pimple right on the tip of his nose, angry as a blister. His whole vibe is a little like a pimple, actually: ready to explode.
I follow him into the elevator, reach out, and punch six with a knuckle. “It’s six,” I say.
The first time I ever killed someone I was sixteen. It was almost two years since I’d escaped to the Wilds, and by then the homestead had changed. Certain people had left or died; others had showed up. We’d had a bad winter my first year, four weeks of almost straight snow, no hunting, no trapping, making do on scraps left over from the summer—dried strips of meat, and, when that ran out, plain rice. But worse than that was the freeze, the days snow piled up so quick and so heavy it wasn’t safe to go outside; when the homestead reeked of unwashed bodies and worse; when the boredom was so bad it crawled down into your skin and made a constant itch.
Mari didn’t make it past that winter. The second stillborn had hit her hard; even before the winter she sometimes spent days curled up on her cot, one arm crooked around the negative space where a baby should have been. That winter, it was like something brittle finally snapped inside of her, and one morning we woke up and found her swinging from a wooden beam in the food room.
It was snowing too hard to bring her up, so for two days we had to live alongside her body.
We lost Tiny, too, who went out one day to try and hunt, even though we told him it was no use and the animals wouldn’t be out and it was too risky. But he was going crazy from being penned in so long, crazy from the constant hunger gnawing like a rat from the inside nwa the inout. He never came back. Probably got lost and froze to death.
So my second year we decided to move. It was Gray’s decision, actually, but we were all on board. Bram, who’d arrived earlier in the summer, told us about some homesteads farther south, friendly places where we would find shelter. In August, Gray sent out scouts to chart routes and look for campsites. In September, we started relocation.
The Scavengers hit in Connecticut. I’d heard stories about them, but never concrete stuff: more whispers and myths, like the monster stories my mom had told me as a kid to make me behave. Shhh. Be quiet or you’ll wake the dragon.
It was late and I was sleeping when Squirrel, who was scouting, gave the alarm: two shots fired into the darkness. But it was too late. Suddenly everyone was screaming. Blue—already big, beautiful, with the eyes of a grown-up and a pointed chin like mine—woke up bawling, terrified. She wouldn’t leave the tent. She was clinging to the sleeping bag, kicking me off, saying, No, no, no over and over again.
By the time I managed to get her up, get her into my arms and out of the tents, I thought the world was ending. I’d grabbed a knife, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d once skinned an animal and it had nearly made me puke.
I found out later that there were only four of them, but at the time it seemed like they were everywhere. That’s one of their tricks. Chaos. Confusion. There was fire—two tents went up just like that, like two match heads exploding—and there were shots and people screaming.
All I could think was run. I had to run. I had to get Blue away from there. But I couldn’t move. I felt terror like a cold weight inside me, rooting me in place, the same way it always had when I was a little girl—when my dad would come down the stairs, stomp, stomp, stomp, his anger like a blanket meant to suffocate us all. Watching from the corner while he kicked my mom in the ribs, in the face, unable to cry, unable to scream, even. For years I’d fantasized that the next time he touched me, or her, I’d stick a knife straight in through the ribs, all the way up to the handle. I’d thought about the blood bubbling from the wound and how good it would feel to know that he, like me, was made out of real stuff, bones and tissue, skin that could bruise.
But every time I was frozen, empty as a shell. Every time I did nothing but take it: red starburst explosions to the face, behind the eyes; pinches and slaps; hard shoves to the chest.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Tack was shouting from the other side of the camp. I started running to him without thinking, without watching where I was going, still clotted up with panic, with Blue soaking my neck with snot and tears and my heart drilling out of my chest, and when the Scavenger came from the left I didn’t even see him until he was swinging a club at my head.
un>I dropped Blue. Just let her fall to the ground. And I went down behind her, knees hard in the dirt, trying to shield her. I got a hand around her pajama bottoms and managed to pick her up and get her on her feet.
“Run,” I said. “Go on.” I pushed her. She was crying, and I pushed her. But she ran, as well as she could, on legs that were still too short for her body.
The Scavenger drove a foot between my ribs, exactly the spot where my dad had fractured them when I was twelve. The pain made everything go black for a second, and when I rolled over on my back, everything was different. The stars weren’t stars but a ceiling spotted with water stains. The dirt wasn’t dirt but a nubby carpet.
And the Scavenger wasn’t a Scavenger but Him. My dad.
Eyes small as cuts, fists as fat as leather belts,breath hot and wet in my face. His jaw, his smell, his sweat. He’d found me. He raised a fist and I knew it was starting all over again, that it would never stop, that he would never leave me alone and I would never escape.
That Blue would never be safe.
Everything went dark and silent.
I didn’t know I’d reached for the knife until it was deep between his ribs.
That’s all I’ve ever heard: silence. The times I’ve killed. The times I’ve had to kill. If there is a God, I guess he has nothing to say about it.
If there is a God, he must have gotten tired of watching a long time ago.
There is silence in Julian Fineman’s execution room, except for the occasional click-click of a camera, except for the drone of the priest’s voice. But when Abraham saw that Isaac had become unclean, he asked in his heart for guidance . . .
Silence like whiteness: like things painted over and concealed, or left unsaid.
Silence except for the squeak, squeak of my sneakers on the linoleum floor. The doctor turns to look at me, annoyed. Confused. My voice, in that big, vast white room, sounds unfamiliar.
The first gunshot is very loud.
I’m remembering: all those years ago, sitting with Tack when he was newly named. The red-ember glow of the fire in the old woodstove, and Blue, breathing easier already, heavy in my arms. Sleep sounds from the other rooms, and somewhere above us, the hiss of the wind through the trees.
“You came back,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he admitted. He looked different, wearing clothes Grandpa had found for him in the storeroom—much younger, much skinnier. His eyes were huge dark hollows in his face. I thought he was beautiful.
I hugged Blue a little closer. She was still hot, still fussing in her sleep. But her breaths came even and slow, and there was no trapped rattle in her chest. For the first time, it struck me that I’d been lonely. Not just at the homestead, where everyone was too busy surviving to worry about making friends, where most of the Invalids were older or half-soft in the head or just liked to keep to themselves. Even before that. At home I’d never had friends either. I couldn’t afford to, couldn’t let them see what my house was like, didn’t want anyone paying attention or asking questions.
Alone. I’d been alone my whole life. “Why did you change your mind?” I said.
He smiled a little. “Because I knew you thought I’d bail.”
I stared at him. “You crossed over to the other side—you risked your life—just to prove a point?”
“Not to prove a point,” he said. “To prove you wrong.” He smiled, bigger this time. His hair smelled like smoke from the fire. “You seem like you might be worth it.”
Then he kissed me. He leaned over and just touched his lips to mine with Blue held between us like a secret, and I knew then that I would not be so alone anymore.
“How did you—?” Lena is breathless, white in the face. Shock, maybe. Her palms are cut up, and there’s blood on her jacket. “Where did you—?”
“Later,” I say. My cheek is stinging. Got a face full of glass when Lena decided to break through the observation deck, but it’s nothing a pair of tweezers can’t fix. I’m lucky the glass missed my eyes.
Julian, up close, looks different than he does in all the DFA literature. Younger, and kind of sad and overeager, like a puppy begging for attention—even a swift kick.
Luckily, he asks no questions, just falls in behind me, walking quickly, saying nothing. He must be use to obeying. If it wasn’t for Lena, if she hadn’t switched up the rules, the needle would be in his arm by now, and he’d be dead. It would have been better for us, and for the movement.
No point in thinking about that now. Lena took a stand, and so I took a stand with her.
That’s what you do for family. Anything.
We go out the emergency exit to the fire escape, which leads down into the little courtyard I scouted earlier. So far, so good. Lena’s breathing fast and hard behind me, but m clnd me, y breath is easy, even, and slow.
This is my favorite part of the story: the escape.
Tack is waiting with the van on Twenty-Fourth Street, just like he said he would be. I open the cargo door and shut Lena and Julian inside.
“You got ’em?” Tack asks when I climb into the passenger seat.
“Would I be here if I didn’t?” I answer.
He frowns. “You’re cut.”
I flip down the mirror and take a look: a few uneven cuts on my cheek and neck, beaded with blood. “Just a scratch,” I say, blotting the blood with the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“Let’s roll, then,” Tack says, and sighs.
He guns the engine and pulls out into the street, gray and blurry with old rain. I keep my sleeve pressed to the side of my face to stanch the bleeding. We make it all the way to the West Side Highway before Tack speaks again.
“It’s a risk, taking him back with us,” he says in a low voice. “Julian Fineman. Shit. A big risk.”
“I’ll take responsibility.” I turn my face to the window. I can see the ghost-outlines of my reflection, feel the hum of cold air through the glass.
“She’s important to you, isn’t she? Lena, I mean.” Tack’s voice stays quiet.
“She’s important to the movement,” I answer, and see the ghost-girl speak too, her teeth flashing, superimposed over passing images of the city.
Tack doesn’t say anything for a second. Then I feel his hand on my knee. “I would have done it for you, too,” he says, even quieter. “If you’d been taken. I would have gone back. I would have risked it.”
I turn to look at him. “You already did come back for me,” I say. I remember that first kiss, and Blue’s warmth between us, and Tack’s lips, dry as bone, soft as shadow. I still can’t say her name, but I think he knows what I’m thinking. “You came back for us.”
Recently I’ve been having the fantasy more and more: the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars—sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.
And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to liveg we neo live—like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.
We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.
We have four kids. Maybe five. The first one is a girl, stupid beautiful, and we call her Blue.
“Where the hell were you?” Pike’s in my face as soon as we make it back to the warehouse.
I don’t like Pike. He’s moody and mean and he thinks he can boss me—and everyone else—around.
I put a hand on his chest, easing him backward. “Get out of my airspace.”
“I asked you a question.”
“Don’t talk to her that way,” Tack jumps in, already wound up, ready to go.
“It’s all right.” I’m suddenly too tired to argue. I keep thinking of Lena’s last words to me. The woman who came for me at Salvage . . . That’s my mother. Did you know? Like I should have known. Like it’s my fault Lena’s mom moved on without a So long, see you later.
But I know it’s deeper than that. I’ve always thought of Lena as alone, like me. I always saw myself in her a little bit. But she isn’t alone. She has a mother, a free mother, a fighter. Someone to be proud of. She has family.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, think of a stone cottage all wrapped in a haze of snow. I open my eyes again.
“We had to take care of something,” Tack is saying.
“But we’re all set now,” I say quickly. I glance over at Tack, trying to communicate with my eyes—let it go, drop it, let’s get out of here.
“We almost left without you,” Pike says, still not ready to forgive us.
“Give us twenty minutes,” I say, and at last Pike shifts aside and lets us pass.
The room where we’ve been sleeping has been stripped down: cots dismantled, gear packed up. Everyone’s getting ready to move on. Once the regulators fig . Igulatorure out it was Invalids who sprang Julian—maybe they’ve already figured it out—they’ll do a sweep. They’ll come looking up here eventually.
There’s no sign of the boy who arrived late last night, the escapee from the Crypts. Young. Quiet type. Barely said a word before falling into bed. He looked like he’d been worked over pretty bad.
He’s from Lena’s part of the world. I can’t help but wonder.
“One of my knives is missing,” Tack says. He peels the mattress of the cot away from the frame. That’s where we stash the stuff that matters, the stuff we don’t want other people poking at and looking through. It’s not exactly a hiding place, since everyone does it—more like a boundary. Tack starts going crazy, pulling off the thin blankets, thumping out the pillows. “One of my best knives.”
For a second, the need to tell is overwhelming. It builds like a bubble in my chest. Let’s go, I almost say. Just you and me. Let’s leave the fight behind.
Instead I say, “How about you check the van.”
When Tack leaves the room, I’m left alone. Suddenly I need to see it again, need to know that it’s true. I squat down and stick my hand in the space between my mattress and the cheap metal frame. After a minute of fumbling, I find it: a small meter, barely bigger than a spoon, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. It cost me one of Tack’s knives and a silver-and-turquoise necklace Lena gave to me when she first crossed over; the trader who agreed to get it for me kept emphasizing the risks. Everyone knows it’s impossible to get a pregnancy test nowadays, she was saying. You have to have documentation. Letters of approval from the regulatory board. Blah, blah, blah.
I paid. I had to. I needed to know.
I sit back on my heels and smooth down the thin plastic, so I can read the results: two faint parallel lines, like a ladder leading somewhere.
Pregnant.
Footsteps sound in the hallway. I quickly stuff the test back under the mattress. My heart is beating heavy, quick. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I feel another heartbeat, a faint pulse somewhere beneath my rib cage, answering.
The first one, we’ll name Blue.