I don’t say anything.
“You have until tomorrow to choose,” she says.
The next morning, Raven shakes me awake from a nightmare. I sit up, gasping. I remember a fall through the air, and a mass of black birds. All the other girls are still sleeping, and the room is full of their rhythmic breathing. There must be a candle burning out in the hall, casting a tiny bit of light into the room. I can just make out Raven’s shape, squatting in front of me, and register the fact that she is already dressed.
“What did you choose?” she whispers.
“I want to work,” I whisper back, because it’s the only thing I can say. My heart is still beating, hard, in my chest.
I can’t see her smile, but I think I hear it: her lips cracking, a small exhalation that could be a laugh. “Good for you.” She holds up a dented bucket. “It’s water time.”
Raven withdraws, and I fumble for my clothes in the dark. When I first arrived at the homestead, the sleeping room looked like a mess, an explosion of fabric and clothing and miscellaneous belongings. Over time I’ve realized it isn’t actually so disorganized. Everyone has a little area, a space circumscribed for their things. We’ve drawn invisible circles around our little beds, or blankets, or mattresses, and people guard those spaces fiercely, like dogs marking out their territory. You must keep everything you own and need inside your little circle. Once it leaves, it is no longer yours. The clothes I’ve picked out from the store are folded at the very bottom of my blanket.
I fumble out of the room and feel my way down the hall. I find Raven by the kitchen, surrounded by empty buckets, coaxing last night’s fire up with the blunt, charred end of a large stick. She hasn’t turned on the lanterns here, either. It would be a waste of battery power. The smell of smoking wood, the low, flickering shadows, Raven’s shoulders touched by an orange glow: It makes me feel as though I haven’t yet woken from my dream.
“Ready?” She straightens up when she hears me, loops a bucket over each arm.
I nod, and she jerks her head toward the remaining buckets.
We wind our way upstairs and then get coughed out into the outside world: The release from inside, from the air and the closeness, is just as startling and abrupt as it was the time I explored the rest of the homestead with Sarah. The first thing that strikes me is the cold. The wind is icy and drives right through my T-shirt, and I let out a gasp without meaning to.
“What’s the matter?” Raven asks, speaking at a normal volume now that we’re outside.
“Cold,” I reply. The air smells like winter already, though I can see that the trees still have their leaves. At the very edge of the horizon, over the ragged and frayed skyline of the trees, there is a bare, golden glow where the sun is edging upward. The world is all grays and purples. The animals and birds are just beginning to stir.
“Less than a week until October,” Raven says, shrugging, and then, as I trip over a piece of twisted metal siding half-embedded in the ground, she says, “Watch your step.”
That’s when it really hits me: I’ve been following the rhythm of the days, keeping mental track of the date. But really I’ve been pretending that while I stayed buried underground, the rest of the world stayed motionless as well.
“Let me know if I’m walking too fast,” Raven says.
“Okay,” I say. My voice sounds strange in the empty, thin air of this autumn world.
We pick our way down the old main street. Raven walks easily, avoiding the torn-up bits of concrete and the twisted metal litter almost instinctively, the way that Sarah did. At the entrance to the old bank vault, where the boys sleep, Bram is waiting for us. Bram has dark hair and mocha-colored skin. He’s one of the quieter boys, one of the few who doesn’t scare me. He and Hunter are always together; in Zombieland, we would have called them Unnaturals, but here their relationship seems normal, effortless. Seeing them reminds me of pictures of Hana and me: one dark, one light. Raven passes him several buckets wordlessly, and he falls in next to us in silence. But he smiles at me, and I’m grateful for it.
Even though the air is cold, soon I’m sweating and my heart pushes painfully against my ribs. It has been more than a month since I’ve walked more than sixty feet at a time. My muscles are weak, and carrying even the empty buckets makes my shoulders ache after a few minutes. I keep shifting the handles in my palms; I refuse to complain or ask Raven to help, even though she must see that I’m having trouble keeping up. I don’t even want to think about how long and slow the way back will be, once the buckets are full.
We’ve left the homestead and the old main street behind, and veered off into the trees. All around us, the leaves are different shades of gold, orange, red, and brown. It is as though the whole forest is burning, a beautiful slow smolder. I can feel the space all around me, unbounded and unwalled, bright open air. Animals move, unseen, to our left and right, rustling through the dry leaves.
“Almost there,” Raven calls back. “You’re doing good, Lena.”
“Thanks,” I puff out. Sweat is dripping into my eyes, and I can’t believe I was ever cold. I don’t even bother to elbow or swat the stray branches out of my way. As Bram pushes through them ahead of me, they rebound and thwack me hard on my arms and legs, leaving tiny stinging lashes all over my skin. I’m too tired to care. I feel as though we’ve been walking for hours, but that’s impossible. Sarah said the river was a little over a mile away. Besides, the sun has only just risen.
A little bit farther and we hear it, over the twittering of the birds and the rush of the wind in the trees: the low, babbling sound of moving water. Then the trees break apart, and the ground turns rocky, and we’re standing at the edge of a wide, flat stream. Sunlight glints off the water, giving the impression of coins laid underneath its surface. Fifty feet to our left is a miniature waterfall, where the stream comes churning over a series of small, black, lichen-spotted rocks. All of a sudden I have to fight the desire to cry. This place has always existed: While cities were bombed and fell into ruins, while walls went up—the stream was here, running over the rocks, full of its own secret laughter.
We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control; we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Book of Shhh.
Raven and Bram are already wading into the stream, holding their buckets, crouching to fill them.
“Come on,” Raven says shortly. “The others will be waking up.”
They have both come barefoot; I crouch down to untie my shoes. My fingers are swollen from the cold, even though I can no longer feel it. Heat drums through my body. I have a hard time with the laces, and by the time I edge close to the water, Raven and Bram have their buckets full, lined up on the bank. Pieces of grass and dead insects swirl over their surface; we will pick them out later, and boil the water to sterilize it.
My first step into the stream nearly takes me off my feet. Even this close to the bank, the current is much stronger than it looks. I pinwheel my arms wildly, trying to stay upright, and drop one of the buckets. Bram, who is waiting on the bank, starts to laugh. His laugh is high and surprisingly sweet.
“All right.” Raven gives him a push. “That’s enough of a show. We’ll see you at the homestead.”
He touches two fingers obediently to his temple. “See you later, Lena,” he says, and I realize it’s the first time somebody other than Raven, Sarah, or Hunter has spoken to me in a week.
“See you,” I say.
The streambed is coated in tiny pebbles, slick and hard on the underside of my feet. I retrieve the fallen bucket and crouch low, as Raven and Bram did, letting it fill. Lugging it back to the bank is harder. My arms are weak, and the metal handles dig painfully into my palms.
“One more to go,” Raven says. She is watching me, arms crossed.
The next one is slightly larger than the first, and more difficult to maneuver once it’s full. I have to carry it with both hands, half bent over, letting the bucket bang against my shins. I wade out of the stream and set it down with a sigh of relief. I have no idea how I’ll make it back to the homestead carrying both buckets at once. It’s impossible. It will take me hours.
“Ready to go?” Raven asks.
“Just give me a second,” I say, resting my hands on my knees. My arms are already trembling a little. I want to stay here for as long as possible, with the sun breaking through the trees, and the stream speaking its own, old language, and the birds zipping back and forth, dark shadows. Alex would love it here, I think without meaning to. I’ve been trying so hard not to think his name, not to even breathe the idea of him.
On the far side of the bank there is a small bird with ink-blue feathers, preening at the edge of the water; and suddenly I have never wanted anything more than to strip down and swim, wash off all the layers of dirt and sweat and grime that I have not been able to scrub away at the homestead.
“Will you turn around?” I ask Raven. She rolls her eyes, looking amused, but she does.
I wiggle out of my pants and underwear, strip off my tank top and drop it on the grass. Wading back into the water is equal parts pain and pleasure—a cutting cold, a pure feeling that drives through my whole body. As I move toward the center of the stream, the stones underneath my feet get larger and flatter, and the current pushes at my legs more strongly. Even though the stream isn’t very wide, just beyond the miniature waterfall there’s a dark space where the streambed bottoms out, a natural swimming hole. I stand shivering with the water rushing around my knees, and at the last second can’t quite bring myself to do it. It’s so cold: The water looks so dark, and black, and deep.
“I won’t wait for you forever,” Raven calls out, with her back to me.
“Five minutes,” I call, and I spread my arms and dive forward into the deepness of the water. I am slammed—the cold is a wall, frigid and impenetrable, and tears at every nerve in my body—there’s a ringing in my ears, and a rushing, rushing all around me. The breath goes out of me and I come up gasping, breaking the surface, as above me the sun rises higher and the sky deepens, becomes solid, to hold it.
And just as suddenly the cold is gone. I put my head under again, treading water, and let the stream push and pull at me. With my head underwater I can almost understand its accents, the babbling, gurgling sound. With my head underwater I hear it say the name I’ve tried so hard not to think—Alex, Alex, Alex—and hear it, too, carrying the name away. I come out of the stream shivering and laughing, and dress with my teeth chattering, my fingernails edged with blue.
“I’ve never heard you laugh before,” Raven says, after I’ve pulled on my clothes. She’s right. I haven’t laughed since coming to the Wilds. It feels stupidly good. “Ready?”
“Ready,” I say.
That first day, I have to carry one bucket at a time, lugging with both hands, sloshing water as I go, sweating and cursing. A slow shuffle; set one bucket down, go back and get the other bucket. Forward a few feet. Then pause, rest, panting.