“Always listen to Raven. And Raven says bedtime. Now. Go.”
Blue shoots me a last, regretful look and then scurries away.
Raven sighs, rolls her eyes, and pulls the chair up to the bed. “Sorry,” she says. “Everyone is dying to see the new girl.”
“Who’s everyone?” I say. My throat is dry. I haven’t been able to stand and make it over to the basin, and it’s clear that the pipes don’t work anyway. There wouldn’t be any plumbing in the Wilds. All those networks—the water, the electricity—were bombed out years ago, during the blitz. “I mean, how many of you are there?”
Raven shrugs. “Oh, you know, it changes. People go in and out, pass between homesteads. Probably twenty or so, right now, but in June we’ve had as many as forty floaters, and in the winter we close up this homestead completely.”
I nod, even though her talk of homesteads and floaters confuses me. Alex told me the barest little bit about the Wilds, and of course we crossed once together successfully: the first and only time I’d ever been in unregulated land before our big escape.
Before my big escape.
I dig my fingernails into my palms.
“Are you okay?” Raven’s peering at me closely.
“I could use some water,” I say.
“Here,” she says. “Take this.” She passes me the plate she’s been holding: two small round patties, like pancakes but darker and grainier, are sitting at its center. She removes a dented tin soup can from a shelf in the corner, uses it as a ladle to scoop a bit of water from one of the buckets under the sink, and carries it back to me. I can only hope that bucket doesn’t do double duty as a vomit basin.
“Hard to find glass around here,” she says when I raise my eyebrows at the soup can, and then adds, “Bombs.” She says it as though she’s in a grocery store and saying Grapefruit, as though it’s the most everyday thing in the world. She sits again, braiding a bit of hair between her long brown fingers absentmindedly.
I lift the soup can to my lips. Its edges are jagged, and I have to sip carefully.
“You learn to make do out here,” Raven says with a kind of pride. “We can build out of nothing—out of scraps and trash and bones. You’ll see.”
I stare at the plate in my lap. I’m hungry, but the words trash and bones make me nervous about eating.
Raven must understand what I’m thinking, because she laughs. “Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s nothing gross. Some nuts, a bit of flour, some oil. It’s not the best thing you’ll ever eat in your life, but it will keep your strength up. We’re running low on supplies; we haven’t had a delivery in a week. The escape really screwed us, you know.”
“My escape?”
She nods. “They’ve had the borders running live in all the cities for a hundred miles for the past week, doubled security at the fences.” I open my mouth to apologize, but she cuts me off. “It’s all right. They do this every time there’s a breach. They always get worried there’ll be some mass uprising and people will rush the Wilds. In a few days they’ll get lazy again, and then we’ll get our supplies. And in the meantime…” She jerks her chin toward the plate. “Nuts.”
I take a nibble of the pancake. It’s not bad, actually: toasty and crunchy and just a little bit greasy, leaving a sheen of oil on my fingertips. It’s a lot better than the broth, and I say so to Raven.
She beams at me. “Yeah, Roach is the resident cook. He can make a good meal out of anything. Well, he can make an edible meal out of anything.”
“Roach? Is that his real name?”
Raven finishes a braid, flicks it over her shoulder, starts on another one. “As real as any name,” she says. “Roach has been in the Wilds his whole life. Originally comes from one of the homesteads farther south, close to Delaware. Someone down there must have named him. By the time he got up here, he was Roach.”
“What about Blue?” I ask. I make it through the whole first pancake without feeling queasy, then set the plate on the floor next to the bed. I don’t want to push my luck.
Raven hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “She was born right here, at the homestead.”
“So you named her for her eyes,” I say.
Raven stands abruptly, and turns away before saying, “Uh-huh.” She goes to the shelves by the sink and clicks off one of the battery-operated lanterns, so the room sinks even further into darkness.
“How about you?” I ask her.
She points to her hair. “Raven.” She smiles. “Not the most original.”
“No, I mean—were you born here? In the Wilds?”
The smile disappears just like that, like a candle being snuffed out. For a second she looks almost angry. “No,” she says shortly. “I came here when I was fifteen.”
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself from pressing. “By yourself?”
“Yes.” She picks up the second lantern, which is still emitting a pale bluish light, and moves toward the door.
“So what was your name before?” I say, and she freezes, her back to me. “Before you came to the Wilds, I mean.”
For a moment she stands there. Then she turns around. She is holding the lantern low so her face is in darkness. Her eyes are two bare reflections, glittering, like black stones in the moonlight.
“You might as well get used to it now,” she says with quiet intensity. “Everything you were, the life you had, the people you knew … dust.” She shakes her head and says, a little more firmly, “There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.”
Then she heads into the hallway with her lantern, leaving me in total darkness, my heart beating very fast.
The next morning, I wake up starving. The plate is still there with the second pancake, and I half tumble out of bed reaching for it, banging onto my knees on the cold stone floor. A beetle is exploring the surface of the pancake—normally, before, this would have grossed me out, but now I’m too hungry to care. I flick the insect away, watch it scurry into a corner, and eat the pancake greedily with both hands, sucking on my fingers. It saws off only the barest corner of my hunger.
I climb slowly to my feet, leaning on the bed for support. It’s the first time I’ve stood in days, the first time I’ve done more than crawl to a metal basin in the corner—placed there by Raven—when I’ve had to use the bathroom. Crouching in the dark, head down, thighs shaking, I am an animal, not even human anymore.
I’m so weak I’ve hardly made it to the doorway before I have to take a break, leaning against the doorjamb. I feel like one of the gray herons—with their swollen beaks and bellies, and tiny spindly legs—I used to see sometimes at the cove in Portland, totally out of proportion, lopsided.
My room opens into a long, dark hallway, also windowless, also stone. I can hear people talking and laughing, the sounds of chairs scraping and water sloshing: kitchen sounds. Food sounds. The hallway is narrow, and I run my hands along the walls as I move forward, getting a sense of my legs and body again. A doorway on my left, missing its door, opens into a large room, stacked, on one side, with medical and cleaning supplies—gauze, tubes and tubes of bacitracin, hundreds of boxes of soap, bandages—and, on the other, with four narrow mattresses laid directly on the floor, heaped with an assortment of clothes and blankets. A little farther I see another room that must be used entirely for sleeping: This one has mattresses laid from wall to wall, covering almost every inch of the floor, so the room looks like an enormous patchwork quilt.
I feel a pang of guilt. I’ve obviously been given the nicest bed, and the nicest room. It still amazes me to think how wrong I was all those years, when I trusted in rumors and lies. I thought the Invalids were beasts; I thought they would rip me apart. But these people saved me, and gave me the softest place to sleep, and nursed me back to health, and haven’t asked for anything in return.
The animals are on the other side of the fence: monsters wearing uniforms. They speak softly, and tell lies, and smile as they’re slitting your throat.
The hallway takes a sharp left and the voices swell. I can smell meat cooking now, and my stomach growls loudly. I pass more rooms, some for sleeping, one mostly empty and lined with shelves: a half-dozen cans of beans, a half-used bag of flour, and, weirdly, a dusty coffeemaker are piled in one corner; in another corner, buckets, tins of coffee, a mop.
Another right and the hallway ends abruptly in a large room, much brighter than the others. A stone basin, similar to the one in my room, runs along one whole wall. Above it, a long shelf holds a half-dozen battery-operated lanterns, which fill the space with a warm light. In the center of the room are two large, narrow wooden tables, packed with people.
As I enter, the conversation stops abruptly: Dozens of eyes sweep upward in my direction, and I’m suddenly aware that I am wearing nothing more than a large, dirty T-shirt that reaches just to mid-thigh.
There are men in the room too, sitting elbow-to-elbow with women—people of all ages, everyone uncured—and it is so strange and upside down, it nearly takes my breath away. I’m petrified. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing emerges. I feel the weight of silence, the heavy burn of all those eyes.
Raven comes to my rescue.
“You must be hungry,” she says, standing and gesturing to a boy sitting at the end of the table. He’s probably thirteen or fourteen—thin, wiry, with a smattering of pimples on his skin.
“Squirrel,” she says sharply. Another crazy nickname. “You finished eating?”
He stares dolefully at his empty plate as though he could telepathically force more food to materialize there.
“Yeah,” he says slowly, looking from the empty plate to me and back again. I hug my arms around my waist.
“Then get up. Lena needs a place to sit.”
“But—,” Squirrel starts to protest, and Raven glares at him.
“Up, Squirrel. Make yourself useful. Go check the nests for messages.”
Squirrel shoots me a sullen look, but he stands up and brings his plate to the sink. He releases it clatteringly onto the stone—which makes Raven, who has sat down again, call out, “You break, you buy, Squirrel,” and provokes a few titters—then stomps dramatically up the stone steps at the far end of the room.
“Sarah, get Lena something to eat.” Raven has returned to her own food: a pile of grayish mush lumped in the center of her plate.
A girl pops up eagerly, like a jack-in-the-box. She has enormous eyes, and a body as tight as a wire. Everyone in the room is skinny, actually—all I see are elbows and shoulders everywhere, edges and angles.
“Come on, Lena.” She seems to relish saying my name, as though it’s a special privilege. “I’ll fix you a plate.” She points to the corner: an enormous dented iron pot and a warped covered pan are set over an old-fashioned wood-burning stove. Next to it, mismatched plates and platters—and some cutting boards—are stacked haphazardly.