“Are you hurt?” I straighten up, keeping my hands on her shoulders. I don’t see any blood, but she’s trembling slightly under my hands. She opens her mouth and then closes it again. Her eyes are wide and vacant. “Lu. Talk to me.” I lift my hands from her shoulders to her face, giving her a gentle shake, trying to snap her out of it. As I do, my fingertips skim the skin behind her left ear.
My heart stops. Lu lets out a small cry and tries to jerk away from me. But I keep my hands wrapped tightly around the back of her neck. Now she is bucking and twisting, trying to fight her way from my grasp.
“Get away from me,” she practically spits.
I don’t say anything. I can’t speak. All my energy is in my hands now, and my fingers. She is strong, but she has been taken by surprise, and I manage to haul her to her feet and pin her back against a stone column. I drive my elbow into her neck, forcing her to turn, coughing, to the left.
Dimly I’m aware of Coral’s voice. “What the hell are you doing, Lena?”
I wrench Lu’s hair away from her face, so that her neck is exposed, white and pretty.
I can see the frantic flutter of her pulse—just beneath the neat, three-pronged scar on her neck.
The mark of the procedure. A real one.
Lu is cured.
The past few weeks cycle back to me: Lu’s quietness, and her changes in temperament. The fact that she grew her hair long and brushed it carefully forward every day.
“When?” I croak out. I still have my forearm pressed against her throat. Something black and old is rising up inside of me. Traitor.
“Let me go,” she gasps. Her left eye rolls back to look at me.
“When?” I repeat, and give her throat a nudge. She cries out.
“Okay, okay,” she says, and I ease the pressure, just a little. But I keep her pinned against the stone. “December,” she croaks. “Baltimore.”
My head is spinning. Of course. It was Lu I heard earlier. The regulator’s words come back to me with new, terrible meaning: I don’t know how you lived with that filth for so long. And hers: It wasn’t easy.
“Why?” I choke out the words. When she doesn’t answer me immediately, I lean into her again. “Why?”
She starts speaking in a hoarse rush. “They were right, Lena. I know that now. Think of all those people out there in the camps, in the Wilds . . . like animals. That’s not happiness.”
“It’s freedom,” I say.
“Is it?” Her eye is huge; her iris has been swallowed by black. “Are you free, Lena? Is this the life you wanted?”
I can’t respond. The anger is a thick, dark mud, a rising tide in my chest and throat.
Lu’s voice drops to a silken whisper, like the noise of a snake through the grass. “It’s not too late for you, Lena. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done on the other side. We’ll wipe that out; we’ll start clean. That’s the whole point. We can take all that away . . . the past, the pain, all your struggling. You can start again.”
For a second, we both stand there staring at each other. Lu is breathing hard.
“All of it?” I say.
Lu tries to nod, and grimaces as she once again encounters my elbow. “The anxiety, the unhappiness. We can make it go away.”
I ease the pressure off her neck. She sucks in a deep, grateful breath. I lean in very close to her and repeat something that Hana once said to me a lifetime ago.
“You know you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes, right?”
Lu’s face hardens. I’ve given her just enough space to maneuver, and when she goes to swing at me, I catch her left wrist and twist it behind her back, forcing her to double over. I wrestle her to the ground, press her flat, force a knee between her shoulder blades.
“Lena!” Coral shouts. I ignore her. A single word drums through me: Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.
“What happened to the others?” I say. My words are high and strangled, clutched in the web of anger.
“It’s too late, Lena.” Lu’s face is half-mashed against the ground, but still she manages to twist her mouth into a horrible smile, a leering half grin.
It’s a good thing I don’t have a knife on me. I would drive it straight into her neck. I think of Raven smiling, laughing. Lu can come with us. She’s a walking good-luck charm. I think of Tack dividing his bread, giving her the largest share when she complained about being hungry. My heart feels like it’s crumbling to chalk, and I want to scream and cry at the same time. We trusted you.
“Lena,” Coral repeats. “I think—”
“Be quiet,” I say hoarsely, keeping my focus locked on Lu. “Tell me what happened to them or I’ll kill you.”
She struggles under my weight, and continues beaming that horrible twisted grin at me. “Too late,” she repeats. “They’ll be here before nightfall tomorrow.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her laughter is a rattle in her throat. “You didn’t think it would last, did you? You didn’t think we’d let you keep playing in your little camp, in your filth—” I twist her arms another inch toward her shoulder blades. She cries out, and then continues speaking in a rush. “Ten thousand soldiers, Lena. Ten thousand soldiers against a thousand hungry, thirsty, diseased, disorganized uncureds. You’ll be mowed down. Obliterated. Poof.”
I think I’m going to be sick. My head is thick, fluid-feeling. Distantly, I’m aware that Coral is speaking to me again. It takes a moment for the words to work their way through the murk, through the watery echoes in my head.
“Lena. I think someone’s coming.”
She has barely spoken the words when a regulator—probably the one we saw with Lu earlier—rounds the corner, saying, “Sorry that took so long. Shed was locked—”
He breaks off when he sees Coral and me, and Lu on the ground. Coral shouts and lunges for him but clumsily, off balance. He pushes her backward, and I hear a small crack as her head collides with one of the stone columns of the portico. The regulator lunges forward, swinging his flashlight at her face. She manages to duck, barely, and the flashlight crashes hard against the stone pillar and sputters into darkness.
The regulator has thrown too much weight into the swing, and his balance is upset. This gives Coral just enough time to break past him, away from the pillar. She’s swaying on her feet, and obviously unsteady. She staggers around to face him, but clutching one hand to the back of her head. The regulator regains his footing and his hand goes to his belt. Gun.
I rocket to my feet. I have no choice but to release Lu from underneath me. I dive at the regulator and grab him around the waist. My weight and momentum carry us both off our feet, and we hit the ground together, rolling once, arms and legs tangled together. The taste of his uniform and sweat is in my mouth, and I can feel the weight of his gun digging against my thigh.
Behind me, I hear a shout, and a body thudding to the ground. I pray that it’s Lu and not Coral.
Then the regulator breaks free of my grip and scrambles to his feet, pushing me off him roughly. He is panting, red-faced. Bigger than I am, and stronger—but slower, too, in bad shape. He fumbles with his belt, but I’m on my feet before he can get the gun from its holster. I grab his wrist, and he lets out a roar of frustration.
Bang.
The gun goes off. The explosion is so unexpected, it sends a jolt through my whole body; I feel it ringing all the way up into my teeth. I jump backward. The regulator screams out in pain and crumples; a dark black stain is spreading down his right leg and he rolls over onto his back, clutching his thigh. His face is contorted, wet with sweat. The gun is still in its holster—a misfire.
I step forward and take the gun off him. He doesn’t resist. He just keeps moaning and shuddering, repeating, “Oh shit, oh shit.”
“What the hell did you do?”
I whip around. Lu is standing, panting, staring at me. Behind her, I see Coral lying on the ground, on her side, her head resting on one arm and her legs curled up toward her chest. My heart stops. Please don’t let her be dead. Then I see her eyelids flutter, and one of her hands twitch. She moans. Not dead, then.
Lu takes a step toward me. I raise the gun, level it at her. She freezes.
“Hey, now.” Her voice is warm, easy, friendly. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay? Just hold on.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I say. I’m amazed to see how steady my hand is. I’m amazed that this—wrist, finger, fist, gun—belongs to me.
She manages to smile. “Remember the old homestead?” she says in that same smooth lullaby-voice. “Remember when Blue and I found all those blueberry bushes?”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about what I remember,” I practically spit. “And don’t talk about Blue, either.” I cock the gun. I see her flinch. Her smile falters. It would be so easy. Flex and release. Bang.
“Lena,” she says, but I don’t let her finish. I take a step closer to her, closing the distance between us, then wrap one arm around her neck and draw her into an embrace, shoving the muzzle of the revolver into the soft flesh of her chin. Her eyes begin rolling, like a horse’s when it’s frightened; I can feel her bucking against me, shaking, trying to wrestle away from me.
“Don’t move,” I say in a voice that doesn’t sound like my own. She goes limp—all except for her eyes, which keep rolling, terrified, from my face to the sky.
Flex and release. A simple motion; a twitch.
I can smell her breath, too: hot and sour.
I push her away from me. She falls back, gasping, as though I’ve been choking her.
“Go,” I say. “Take him”—I gesture to the regulator, who is still moaning, and clutching his thigh—“and go.”
She licks her lips nervously, her eyes darting to the man on the ground.
“Before I change my mind,” I add.
She doesn’t hesitate after that; she squats and slings the regulator’s arm around her shoulders, helping him to his feet. The stain on his pants is black, spreading from mid-thigh down to his kneecap. I find myself hoping, cruelly, that he’ll bleed out before they can find help.
“Let’s go,” Lu whispers to him, her eyes still locked on me. I watch as she and the regulator hobble off down the street. Each one of his steps is punctuated by a cry of pain. As soon as the darkness has swallowed them, I exhale. I turn around and see that Coral is sitting up, rubbing her head.
“I’m all right,” she says when I go to help her up. She climbs to her feet unsteadily. She blinks several times, as though trying to clear her vision.
“You sure you can walk?” I ask, and she nods. “Come on,” I say. “We’ve got to find our way out of here.”
Lu and the regulator will give us away at their first opportunity. If we don’t hurry, any minute we’ll be surrounded. I feel a deep spasm of hatred, thinking of the fact that Tack shared his dinner with Lu only a few days ago, thinking of the fact that Lu accepted it from him.
