“Evidence of a fire,” Raven says, and then adds, a little more quietly, “Bone.”
“I knew it.” Coral’s voice sounds high and slightly hysterical. “They were here. I knew it.”
“They’re gone now,” Raven says soothingly. “They won’t be back.”
“It wasn’t Scavengers.”
All of us whip around. Alex is standing in the doorway. Something red—a ribbon, or strip of fabric—is balled loosely in his fist.
“I told you not to go down there,” Raven says. She is glaring at him—but beneath the anger, I see fear as well.
He ignores her and passes into the room, shaking out the fabric as he does, holding it up for us to see: It’s a long strip of red plastic tape. At intervals it is imprinted with an image of a skull and crossbones, and the words CAUTION: BIOHAZARD.
“The whole area’s cordoned off,” Alex says. He keeps his face neutral, but his voice has a strangled quality, as though he is speaking through a muffler.
Now I feel like the statue. I want to speak, but my mind has gone blank.
“What does it mean?” Pike says. He has been in the Wilds since he was a child. He knows hardly anything about life inside the bordered places—about the regulators and the health initiatives, the quarantines and the prisons, the fears of contamination.
Alex turns to him. “The infected aren’t buried. They’re either kept apart, in the prison yards, or they’re burned.” For just a second, Alex’s eyes slide to mine. I am the only person here who knows that his father’s body was buried in the tiny prison courtyard of the Crypts, unmarked, uncelebrated; I am the only person who knows that for years Alex visited the makeshift grave and wrote his father’s name in marker on a stone, to keep him from being forgotten. I’m sorry, I try to think to him, but his eyes have already passed over me.
“Is it true, Raven?” Tack asks sharply.
She opens her mouth, then closes it again. For a second I think she’ll deny it. But at last she says, in a tone of resignation, “It looks like regulators.”
There’s a collective inhale.
“Fuck,” Hunter mutters.
Pike says, “I don’t believe it.”
“Regulators . . .” Julian repeats. “But that means . . .”
“The Wilds aren’t safe anymore,” I finish for him. The panic is building now, cresting in my chest. “The Wilds aren’t ours anymore.”
“Happy now?” Raven asks Alex, shooting him a dirty look.
“They had to know,” he says shortly.
“All right.” Tack holds up his hands. “Settle down. This doesn’t change anything. We already knew the Scavengers were on the prowl. We’ll just have to be on our guard. Remember, the regulators don’t know the Wilds. They’re not used to wilderness or open territory. This is our land.”
I know Tack is doing his best to reassure us, but he’s wrong about one thing: Something has changed. It’s one thing to bomb us from the skies. But the regulators have broken through the barriers, real and imagined, that have been keeping our worlds apart. They’ve torn through the fabric of invisibility that has cloaked us for years.
Suddenly I remember one time coming home to find that a raccoon had somehow worked its way into Aunt Carol’s house and chewed through all the cereal boxes, scattering crumbs in every room. We cornered it in the bathroom and Uncle William shot it, saying it probably carried disease. The raccoon had left crumbs in my sheets; it had been in my bed. I washed the sheets a full three times before I would sleep in them again, and even then I had dreams of tiny claws digging into my skin.
“Let’s get some of this mess cleared out,” Tack says. “We’ll fit as many people inside as we can. The rest will camp outside.”
“We’re staying here?” Julian bursts out.
Tack stares at him hard. “Why not?”
“Because . . .” Julian looks helplessly at everyone else. No one will meet his gaze. “People were killed here. It’s just . . . wrong.”
“What’s wrong is heading back into the Wilds when we’ve got a roof, and a pantry stocked with food, and better traps here than the pieces of crap we’ve been using,” Tack says sharply. “The regulators have been here once. They won’t be back again. They did their job the first time around.”
Julian looks to me for help. But I know Tack too well, and I know the Wilds, too. I just shake my head at Julian. Don’t argue.
Raven says, “We’ll get the smell out faster if we break open some more windows.”
“There’s firewood stacked and split out back,” Alex says. “I can get a fire started.”
“All right, then.” Tack doesn’t look at Julian again. “It’s settled. We camp here for the night.”
We pile the debris out back. I try not to look too much at the shattered bowls, the splintered chairs, or think about the fact that six months ago I sat in them, warm and fed.
We scrub the floors with vinegar we find in the cupboards, and Raven gathers some dried grass from the yard outside and burns it in the corners, until the sweet, choking smell of rot is finally driven out.
Raven sends me out with a few small traps, and Julian volunteers to come with me. He’s probably looking for an excuse to get away from the house. I can tell that even after we’ve cleaned the rooms of almost all evidence of the struggle, he’s still uncomfortable.
We walk in silence for a bit, across the overgrown yard, into the thick tangle of trees. The sky is stained pink and purple, and the shadows are thick, stark brushstrokes on the ground. But the air is still warm, and several trees are crowned with tiny green leaves.
I like seeing the Wilds this way: skinny, naked, not yet clothed in spring. But reaching, too, grasping and growing, full of want and a thirst for sun that gets slaked a little bit more every day. Soon the Wilds will explode, drunk and vibrant.
Julian helps me place the traps, tamping them down in the soft dirt to conceal them. I like this feeling: of warm earth; of Julian’s fingertips.
When we’ve positioned all three traps and marked their locations by tying a length of twine around the trees that encircle them, Julian says, “I don’t think I can go back there. Not yet.”
“Okay.” I stand up, wiping my hands on my jeans. I’m not ready to go back either. It’s not just the house. It’s Alex. It’s the group, too, the fighting and factions, resentments and push-back. It’s so different from what I found when I first came to the Wilds at the old homestead: There, everyone seemed like family.
Julian straightens up too. He runs a hand through his hair. Abruptly he says, “Remember when we first met?”
“When the Scavengers—?” I start to say, and he cuts me off.
“No, no.” He shakes his head. “Before that. At the DFA meeting.”
I nod. It’s still strange to imagine that the boy I saw that day—the poster child for the anti-deliria cause, the embodiment of correctness—could be even remotely connected to the boy who walks beside me, hair tangled across his forehead like twisted strands of caramel, face ruddy from cold.
This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must invent themselves, too.
“You left your glove. And you came in and found me looking at photographs. . . .”
“I remember,” I say. “Surveillance images, right? You told me you were looking for Invalid camps.”
“That was a lie.” Julian shakes his head. “I just—I liked seeing all that openness. That space, you know? But I never imagined—even when I dreamed about the Wilds and the unbordered places—I didn’t think it could really be like this.”
I reach out and take his hand, give it a squeeze. “I knew you were lying,” I say.
Julian’s eyes are pure blue today, a summer color. Sometimes they turn stormy, like the ocean at dawn; other times they are as pale as new sky. I am learning them all. He traces my jaw with one finger. “Lena . . .”
He’s looking at me so intently, I begin to feel anxious. “What’s wrong?” I say, trying to keep my voice light.
“Nothing.” He reaches for my other hand too. “Nothing’s wrong. I—I want to tell you something.”
Don’t, I want to say, but the word breaks apart in a fizz of laughter, the hysterical feeling I used to get just before tests. He has accidentally smudged a bit of dirt across his cheekbone, and I start to giggle.
“What?” He looks exasperated.
Now that I’ve started laughing, I can’t stop. “Dirt,” I say, and reach out to touch his cheek. “Covered in it.”
“Lena.” He says it with such force, I finally go quiet. “I’m trying to tell you something, okay?”
For a second we stand there in silence, staring at each other. The Wilds are perfectly still for once. It’s as though even the trees are holding their breath. I can see myself reflected in Julian’s eyes—a shadow self, all form, no substance. I wonder what I look like to him.
Julian sucks in a deep breath. Then, all in a rush, he says, “I love you.”
Just as I blurt out, “Don’t say it.”
There’s another beat of silence. Julian looks startled. “What?” he finally says.
I wish I could take the words back. I wish I could say I love you, too. But the words are caught in the cage of my chest. “Julian, you have to know how much I care about you.” I try to touch him, and he jerks backward.
“Don’t,” he says. He looks away from me. The silence stretches long between us. It is growing darker by the minute. The air is textured with gray, like a charcoal drawing that has begun to smudge.
“It’s because of him, isn’t it?” he says at last, clicking his eyes back to mine. “Alex.”
I don’t think Julian has ever said his name.
“No,” I say too forcefully. “It’s not him. There’s nothing between us anymore.”
He shakes his head. I can tell he doesn’t believe me.
“Please,” I say. I reach for him again, and this time he lets me run my hand along his jaw. I crane onto my tiptoes and kiss him once. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t kiss me back, either. “Just give me time.”
.Finally he gives in. I take his arms and wind them around my body. He kisses my nose, and then my forehead, then traces his way to my ear with his lips.
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” he says in a whisper. And then: “I’m scared.”
I can feel his heart beating through the layers of our clothing. I don’t know what, exactly, he is referring to—the Wilds, the escape, being with me, loving someone—but I squeeze him tightly, and rest my head on the flat slope of his chest.
“I know,” I say. “I’m scared too.”
Then, from a distance, Raven’s voice echoes through the thin air. “Grub’s on! Eat up or opt out!”
