Of course, Rebecca and Thomas don’t really exist, any more than Lena Morgan Jones exists: a thin-faced girl, also unsmiling in her official ID. My ID goes next to Rebecca’s. You never know when there might be a raid, or a census. It’s better if you don’t have to go digging for your documents. It’s best, actually, if nobody ever goes digging around here.
It wasn’t until I moved to New York City that I understood Raven’s obsession with order in the Wilds: The surfaces must look right. They must be smooth. There must never be any crumbs.
That way there is never any trail to follow.
The curtains are closed in the living room. This keeps the heat in and also the eyes—of the neighbors, of the regulators, of passing patrols—out. In Zombieland, someone is always watching. There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire for control. So they watch, and poke, and pry.
At the back of the apartment is the kitchen. Hanging on the wall above the table is a photograph of Thomas Fineman, and another of Cormac T. Holmes, the scientist credited with performing the first-ever successful cure.
Past the stove is a little alcove pantry. It is lined with narrow shelves and absolutely packed with food. The memory of a long hunger is difficult to shake, and all of us—the ones who know—are secret hoarders now. We pack granola bars in our bags and stuff our pockets with sugar packets.
You never know when the hunger will be back.
One of the pantry’s three walls is, in fact, a hidden door. I ease it open to reveal a set of rough wooden stairs. A light glows dimly in the basement, and I hear the staccato rhythm of voices. Raven and Tack are fighting—nothing new there—and I hear Tack, sounding pained, say, “I just don’t understand why we can’t be honest with each other. We’re supposed to be on the same side.”
Raven responds sharply, “You know that’s unrealistic, Tack. It’s for the best. You have to trust me.”
“You’re the one who isn’t trusting—”
His voice cuts off sharply as I shut the door behind me, a little louder than I normally would, so they’ll know I’m there. I hate listening to Tack and Raven fight—I’d never heard any adults fight until I escaped to the Wilds—though over time I’ve grown more used to it. I’ve had to. It seems like they’re always bickering about something.
I go down the stairs. As I do, Tack turns away, passing a hand over his eyes. Raven says shortly, “You’re late. The meeting ended hours ago. What happened?”
“I missed the first round of buses.” Before Raven can start lecturing, I quickly add, “I left a glove and had to go back for it. I spoke to Julian Fineman.”
“You what?” Raven bursts out, and Tack sighs and rubs his forehead.
“Only for, like, a minute.” I almost tell them about the pictures and decide, at the last minute, that I won’t. “It’s cool. Nothing happened.”
“It’s not cool, Lena,” Tack says. “What did we tell you? It’s all about staying under the radar.”
Sometimes it feels as though Tack and Raven take their roles as Thomas and Rachel—strict guardians—a little bit too seriously, and I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes.
“It was no big deal,” I insist.
“Everything’s a big deal. Don’t you get it? We—”
Raven cuts him off. “She gets it. She’s heard it a thousand times. Give her a break, okay?”
Tack stares at her mutely for a second, his mouth a thin white line. Raven meets his gaze steadily. I know they’re angry about other things—that it’s not just me—but I feel a hot rush of guilt anyway. I’m making things worse.
“You’re unbelievable,” Tack says. I don’t think he means for me to hear.
Then he brushes past me and pounds up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Raven demands, and for a moment something flares in her eyes—some need, or fear. But it’s gone before I can identify it.
“Out,” Tack says without stopping. “There’s no air down here. I can hardly breathe.” Then he’s pushing into the pantry and the door closes at the top of the stairwell, and Raven and I are left alone.
For a second we stand in silence. Then Raven barks a laugh. “Don’t mind him,” she says. “You know Tack.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling awkward. The fight has soured the air; Tack was right. The basement feels heavy, clotted. Normally it’s my favorite place in the house, this secret space—Tack and Raven’s, too. It’s the only place where we can shed the false skins, fake names, fake pasts.
At least this room feels inhabited. The upstairs looks like a normal house, and smells like a normal house, and is full of normal-house things; but it’s off somehow, as though it were tipped just a few inches on its foundations.
In contrast to the rest of the apartment, the basement is a wreck. Raven can’t clean and straighten as fast as Tack can accumulate and unravel. Books—real books, banned books, old books—are piled everywhere. Tack collects them. No, more than that. He hoards them, the way the rest of us hoard food. I tried to read a few of them, just to find out what it was like before the cure, and before all the fences, but it made my chest ache to imagine it: all that freedom, all that feeling and life. It’s better, much better, not to think about it too much.
Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That’s another reason I can’t read anymore.
Raven sighs and starts shuffling some papers piled haphazardly on a rickety wooden table in the center of the room. “It’s this goddamn rally,” she says. “It’s got everybody all twitchy.”
“What’s the problem?” I ask.
She waves away the question. “Same as always. Rumors about a riot. The underground is saying the Scavengers will show, try to pull something major. But nothing’s confirmed.”
Raven’s voice takes on a hard edge. I don’t even like to say the word Scavengers. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, of things rotting, of ash. All of us—the Invalids, the resistance—hate the Scavengers. They give us a bad name. Everyone agrees that they’ll ruin, have already ruined, so much of what we are working to achieve. The Scavengers are Invalids, like us, but they don’t stand for anything. We want to take down the walls and get rid of the cure. The Scavengers want to take down everything—burn everything to dust, steal and slaughter and set the world to flame.
I’ve only run into a group of Scavengers once, but I still have nightmares about them.
“They won’t be able to pull it off,” I say, trying to sound confident. “They’re not organized.”
Raven shrugs. “I hope not.” She stacks books on top of one another, making sure their corners are aligned. For a second I feel a rush of sadness for her: standing in the middle of so much mess, stacking books as though it means something, as though it will help.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Raven gives me a tight smile. “That’s my job, okay?”
That is another one of Raven’s catchphrases. Like her insistence that the past is dead, it has become a kind of mantra. I worry; you do what I say. We all need mantras, I guess—stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.
“Okay.” For a moment we stand there. It’s strange. In some ways Raven does feel like family—she’s the closest thing I have to it, anyway—but at other times it occurs to me I don’t really know her any better than I did in August, when she first found me. I still don’t know much about the person she was before coming to the Wilds. She has closed that part of herself down, folded it back to some deep, unreachable place.
“Go on,” she says, jerking her head toward the stairs. “It’s late. You should eat something.”
As I head up the stairs I brush my fingers, once, against the metal license plate we’ve tacked onto the wall. We found it in the Wilds, half buried in the mud and slush, during the relocation; we were all close to dead at that point, exhausted and starving, sick and freezing. Bram was the one who spotted it; and as he lifted it out of the ground, the sun had burst through the cloud cover, and the metal had flared a sudden white, almost blinding me so I could barely read the words printed underneath the number.
Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees.
Live free or die.
Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips.
Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.
then
It gets colder by the day. In the morning, the grass is coated in frost. The air stings my lungs when I run; the edges of the river are coated thinly with ice, which breaks apart around our ankles as we wade into the water with our buckets. The sun is sluggish, collapsing behind the horizon earlier and earlier, after a weak, watery swim across the sky.
I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire. My muscles are ropes, my legs are wooden. My palms are calloused—the bottoms of my feet, too, are as thick and blunt as stone. I never miss a run. I volunteer to cart the water every day, even though we’re supposed to rotate. Soon I can carry two buckets by myself the whole way back to camp without once pausing or stopping.
Alex passes next to me, weaving in and out of the shadows, threading between the crimson-and-yellow trees. In the summer he was fuller: I could see his eyes, his hair, a flash of his elbow. As the leaves begin to whirl to the ground and more and more trees are denuded, he is a stark black shadow, flickering in my peripheral vision.
I am learning, too. Hunter shows me how the messages are passed to us: how the sympathizers on the other side alert us to an arriving shipment.
“Come on,” he says to me one morning after breakfast. Blue and I are in the kitchen, scrubbing dishes. Blue has never quite opened up to me. She answers my questions with simple nods or shakes of her head. Her smallness, her shyness, the thinness of her bones: When I’m with Blue, I can’t help but think of Grace.
That’s why I avoid her as much as possible.
“Come on where?” I ask Hunter.
He grins. “You a good climber?”
The question takes me by surprise. “I’m okay,” I say, and have a sudden memory of scaling the border fence with Alex. I replace it quickly with another image: I am climbing into the leafy branches of one of the big maples in Deering Oaks Park. Hana’s blond hair flashes underneath the layers of green; she is circling the trunk, laughing, calling up for me to go higher.
But then I must take her out of the memory. I’ve learned to do that here, in the Wilds. In my head I trim her away—her voice, the flashing crown of her head—and leave only the sense of height, the swaying leaves, the green grass below me.
“It’s time to show you the nests, then,” Hunter says.
I’m not looking forward to being outside. It was bitterly cold last night. The wind shrieked through the trees, tore down the stairs, probed all the cracks and crevices of the burrow with long, icy fingers. I came in half-frozen from my run this morning, my fingers numb and blunt and useless. But I’m curious about the nests—I’ve heard the other homesteaders use the word—and I’m anxious to get away from Blue.