“Be careful,” I say. “Don’t push it.”
“When were you in Massachusetts?” he repeats painstakingly slowly, so that each word is clear.
Maybe it’s the way that Julian looks, with the blood-spotted strip of shirt knotted around his forehead and his eyes swollen practically shut: the look of a bruised animal. Or maybe it’s because I realize, now, that the Scavengers are going to kill us—if not tomorrow, then the next day or the day after that.
Or maybe I’m just hungry, and tired, and sick of pretending.
In a flash, I decide to tell him the truth. “Listen,” I say, “I’m not who you think I am.”
Julian gets very still. I’m reminded again of an animal—one time we found a baby raccoon, foundering in a mud pit that had opened up in the ground after a thaw. Bram went to help it, and as he approached, the raccoon went still just like that—an electric stillness, more alert and energetic than any kind of struggle.
“All that stuff I told you—about growing up in Queens and getting held back—none of that was true.”
Once I was on the other side, in Julian’s position. I stood, battered between currents, as Alex told me the same thing. I’m not who you think I am. I still remember the swim back to shore; the longest and most exhausting of my life.
“You don’t need to know who I am, okay? You don’t need to know where I really come from. But Lena Morgan Jones is a made-up story. Even this”—I touch my fingers to my neck, running them over the three-pronged scar—“this was made-up too.”
Julian still doesn’t say anything, although he has inched backward even farther and used the wall to pull himself into a seated position. He keeps his knees bent, hands and feet flat on the floor, as though if he could, he would spring forward and run.
“I know you don’t have a lot of reason to trust me right now,” I say. “But I’m asking you to trust me anyway. If we stay here, we’ll be killed. I can get us out. But I’m going to need your help.”
There is a question in my words, and I stop, waiting for Julian’s answer.
For a long time there is silence. At last he croaks out, “You.”
The venom in his voice surprises me. “What?”
“You,” he repeats. And then, “You did this. To me.”
My heart starts beating hard against my chest, painfully. For a second I think—I almost hope—that he’s having some kind of attack, a hallucination or fantasy. “What are you talking about?”
“Your people,” he says, and then I get a sick taste in my mouth and I know that he’s perfectly lucid. I know exactly what he means, and what he thinks. “Your people did this.”
“No,” I say, and then repeat it a little more emphatically. “No. We had nothing to do with—”
“You’re an Invalid. That’s what you’re telling me, right? You’re infected.” Julian’s fingers are trembling lightly against the ground, with a noise like the patter of rain. He’s furious, I realize, and probably scared, too. “You’re sick.” He nearly spits out the word.
“Those aren’t my people out there,” I say, and now I have to stop the anger from coming and dragging me under: It is a black force, a current tugging at the edges of my mind. “Those people aren’t…” I almost say, They aren’t human. “They’re not Invalids.”
“Liar,” Julian snarls. There it is. Just like the raccoon when Bram finally went to lift it from the mud and it leapt, snapping, and sank its teeth into the flesh of his right hand.
The sick taste in my throat comes all the way from my stomach. I stand up, hoping Julian won’t see that I, too, am shaking. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “You don’t know anything about us, and you don’t know anything about me.”
“Tell me,” Julian says, still with that undercurrent of rage and coldness. Each word sounds hard-edged and cutting. “When did you catch it?”
I laugh, even though none of it is funny. The world is upside down and everything is shit and my life has been cleaved and there are two different Lenas running parallel to each other, the old and the new, and they will never, ever be whole again. And I know Julian won’t help me now. I was an idiot to think that he would. He’s a zombie, just like Raven has always said. And zombies do what they were built to do: They trundle forward, blindly obedient, until they rot away for good.
Well, not me. I fish the knife out from under the mattress and sit on the cot, then begin running the blade quickly along the metal bedpost, sharpening it, taking pleasure in the way it catches the light.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say to Julian. “None of it matters.”
“How?” he persists. “Who was it?”
The black space inside me gives a tiny shudder, widens another inch. “Go to hell,” I say to Julian, but calmly now, and I keep my eyes on the knife, flashing, flashing, flashing, like a sign pointing the way out of the dark.
then
We stay four days at the first encampment. On the night before we are supposed to set out again, Raven takes me aside.
“It’s time,” she says.
I’m still angry at her for what she said to me at the traps, although the rage has been replaced by a dull, thudding resentment. All this time, she has known everything about me. I feel as though she has reached into me, to a deep place, and broken something.
“Time for what?” I say.
Behind me, the campfire is burning low. Blue and Sarah and some of the others have fallen asleep outside, a tangle of blankets and hair and legs. They have begun to sleep this way a lot, like a human patchwork: It keeps them warm. Lu and Grandpa are conversing in low voices. Grandpa is chewing some of his last tobacco, working it in and out of his mouth, spitting occasionally into the fire and causing a burst of green flame. The others must have gone into the tents.
Raven gives me the barest trace of a smile. “Time for your cure.”
My heart jumps in my chest. The night is sharply cold, and it hurts my lungs to breathe deeply. Raven leads me away from the camp, one hundred feet down along the stream, to a broad, flat stretch of bank. This is where we’ve broken through the thick layer of ice every morning to pull water.
Bram is already there. He has built another fire. This one is burning high and hot, and my eyes sting with ash and smoke when we’re still five feet away. The wood is arranged in a teepee formation, and at its crown, blue and white flames are licking up toward the sky. The smoke is an eraser, blurring the stars above us.
“Ready?” Raven asks.
“Just about,” Bram says. “Five minutes.” He is squatting next to a warped wooden bucket, which is nestled between pieces of wood on the periphery of the fire. He will have soaked it with water so it doesn’t catch and burn. The proximity of the fire will eventually cause the water in the bucket to boil. I see him remove a small, thin instrument from a bag at his feet. It looks like a screwdriver, with a thin, round shaft, a sharp and glittering tip. He drops it into the bucket, handle down, and then stands up, watching as the tip of the plastic handle makes slow revolutions in the simmering water.
I feel sick. I look to Raven, but she is staring at the fire, her face unreadable.
“Here.” Bram steps away from the fire and presses a bottle of whiskey into my hands. “You’ll want to drink some of this.”
I hate the taste of whiskey, but I uncap the bottle anyway, close my eyes, and take a big swig. The alcohol sears my throat going down, and I have to fight back the urge to gag. But five seconds later, a warmth radiates up from my stomach, numbing my throat and mouth and coating my tongue, making it easier to take a second sip, and a third.
By the time Bram says, “We’re ready,” I’ve polished off a quarter of the bottle and above me, through the smoke, the stars make slow revolutions, all of them glittering like pointed metal tips. My head feels detached from my body. I sit down heavily.
“Easy,” Bram says. His white teeth flash in the dark. “How you feeling, Lena?”
“Okay,” I say. The word is harder to get out than usual.
“She’s ready,” Bram says, and then, “Raven, grab the blanket, will you?” Raven moves behind me, and then Bram tells me to lie back, which I do, gratefully. It helps the woozy, spinning feeling in my head.
“You take her left arm,” Raven says, kneeling next to me. Her earrings—a feather and a silver charm, both threaded through one ear—sway together like a pendulum. “I’ll take her right.”
Their hands grip me tightly from both sides. Then I start to get scared.
“Hey.” I struggle to sit up. “You’re hurting me.”
“It’s important that you stay very still,” Raven says. Then she pauses. “It’s going to hurt for a bit, Lena. But it will be over quickly, okay? Just trust us.”
The fear is causing a new fire in my chest. Bram is holding the metal tool, newly sterilized, and its blade seems to catch all the light from the fire behind him, and glow hot and white and terrible. I’m too frightened to try and struggle, and I know it wouldn’t do any good. Raven and Bram are too strong.
“Bite on this,” Bram says, and suddenly there is a strip of leather going into my mouth. It smells like Grandpa’s tobacco.
“Wait—,” I try to say, but I can’t choke the word out past the leather. Then Bram places one hand on my forehead, angling my chin up to the sky, hard, and he’s bending over me, blade in hand, and I can feel its tip just pressing into the space behind my left ear, and I want to cry out but I can’t, and I want to run but I can’t do that, either.
“Welcome to the resistance, Lena,” he whispers to me. “I’ll try to make this quick.”
The first cut goes deep. I am filled with burning. And then I find my voice, and scream.
Lena.”
My name pulls me out of sleep. I sit up, heart careening in my chest.
Julian has moved his cot toward the door, pressed it against the wall, as far away from me as possible. Sweat is beading on my upper lip. It has been days since I’ve showered, and the room is full of a close, animal smell.
“Is that even your real name?” Julian asks, after a pause. His voice is still cold, although it has lost some of its edge.
“That’s my name,” I say. I squeeze my eyes closed, tight, until little bursts of color appear behind my eyelids. I was having a nightmare. I was in the Wilds. Raven and Alex were there, and there was an animal, too, something enormous we had killed.
“You were calling for Alex,” Julian says, and I feel a small spasm of pain in my stomach. More silence, then: “It was him, wasn’t it? He’s the one who got you sick.”
“What does it matter?” I say. I lie down again.
“So what happened to him?” Julian asks.
“He died,” I say shortly, because that is what Julian wants to hear. I picture a tall tower, smooth-sided, stretching all the way to the sky. There are stairs cut in the side of the tower, winding up and up. I take the first step into the coolness and shade.
