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.
