But there were other whispers too—some people said that Thomas Fineman, the DFA’s president, had known in advance what would happen, and had even allowed it. Then, two weeks later, Thomas Fineman was assasinated.
I don’t know what to believe. My chest is aching with a feeling I can’t remember how to name.
“I liked Mr. Hargrove,” Cassandra says. “He felt sorry for me. He knew what his son was. He used to visit every so often, after Fred had me locked up. Fred got people to testify that I was a lunatic. Friends. Doctors. They committed me to life in this place.” She gestures toward the small white room, her burial place. “But Mr. Hargrove knew I wasn’t crazy. He told me stories about the world outside. He found my mother and father a place to live in Deering Highlands. Fred wanted them silenced too. He must have thought I’d told them . . . he must have thought they knew what I knew.” She shakes her head. “But I hadn’t. They didn’t.”
So Cassie’s parents were forced into the Highlands, like Lena’s family.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s the only thing I can think of, even though I know how flimsy it sounds.
Cassie doesn’t seem to hear me. “That day—when the bombs went off—Mr. Hargrove was visiting. He brought me chocolate.” She turns to the window. I wonder what she is thinking; she is perfectly still again, her profile just traced with dull sunlight. “I heard he died trying to restore order. Then I felt sorry for him. Funny, isn’t it? But I guess Fred got us both in the end.”
“Here I am! Better late than never!”
Jan’s voice makes me jump. I spin around; she is pushing through the door, carrying a plastic tray with a plastic cup of water and a small plastic bowl of lumpy oatmeal. I step out of the way as she plunks the tray down on the cot. I notice that the silverware is plastic, too. Of course, there would be no metal. No knives, either.
I think of the man swinging by his shoelaces, close my eyes, and think of the bay instead. The image breaks away on the waves. I open my eyes again.
“So what do you think?” Jan says brightly. “You want to tuck in now?”
“Actually, I think I’ll wait,” Cass says softly. Her gaze is still directed out the window. “I’m not hungry anymore.”
Jan looks at me and rolls her eyes as though to say, Crazies.
Lena
We waste no time in leaving the safe house, now that it’s been decided: We go to Portland as a group, to join with the resistance there and add our strength to the agitators. Something large is in the works, but Cap and Max refuse to say a word about it, and my mother claims they all know only the sketchiest details, anyway. Now that the wall has come down between us, I’m no longer so resistant to returning to Portland. In fact, a small part of me even looks forward to it.
My mother and I talk around the campfire while we eat; we talk late into the night until Julian pokes his head out of the tent, sleepy and disoriented, and tells me I should really get some sleep; or until Raven yells at us to shut the hell up.
We talk in the morning. We talk as we walk.
We talk about what my life in the Wilds, and hers, have been like. She tells me that she was involved in the resistance even when she was in the Crypts—there was a mole, a resister, a cured who still had sympathies for the cause and worked as a guard in Ward Six, where my mother was imprisoned. He was blamed for my mother’s escape and became a prisoner himself.
I remember him: I saw him curled, fetus-like, in the corner of a tiny stone cell. I haven’t told my mother this, though. I haven’t told her that Alex and I gained admittance to the Crypts, because it would mean talking about him. And I can’t bring myself to speak about him—not with her, not with anyone.
“Poor Thomas.” My mother shakes her head. “He fought hard to get placed in Ward Six. He sought me out deliberately.” She looks at me sideways. “He knew Rachel, you know—long ago. I think he always resented that he had to give her up. He stayed angry, even after his cure.”
I squeeze my eyes shut against the sun. Long-buried images begin flashing: Rachel locked in her room, refusing to come out and eat; Thomas’s pale, freckled face floating at the window, gesturing for me to let him in; crouching in the corner on the day they dragged Rachel to the labs, watching her kick and scream and bare her teeth, like an animal. I must have been eight—it was only a year after my mom died, or after I was told she had died.
“Thomas Dale,” I blurt out. The name has stuck with me all these years.
My mom passes her hand absentmindedly through a field of waving grasses. In the sun, her age, and the lines on her face, are starkly obvious. “I barely remembered him. And of course, he had changed a great deal by the time I saw him again. It had been three, four years. I remember I caught him hanging around the house once when I came home early from work. He was terrified. He thought I would tell.” She barks a laugh. “That was just before I was . . . taken.”
“And he helped you,” I say. I try to force his face into clarity in my mind, to make the details resurface, but all I see is the filthy figure curled on the floor in a grimy cell.
My mom nods. “He couldn’t quite forget what he had lost. It stayed with him. It does, you know, for some people. I always thought it did for your father.”
“So Dad was cured?” I don’t know why I feel so disappointed. I didn’t even remember him; he died of cancer when I was one.
“He was.” A muscle twitches in my mom’s jaw. “But there were times I felt . . . There were times it seemed as though he could still feel it, just for a second. Maybe I only imagined it. It doesn’t matter. I loved him anyway. He was very good to me.” She brings her hand unconsciously to her neck, as though feeling for the necklace she wore—my grandfather’s military pendant, given to her by my dad. She used it to tunnel her way from the Crypts.
“Your necklace,” I say. “You still aren’t used to being without it.”
She turns to me, squinting. She manages a small smile. “There are some losses we never get over.”
I tell my mother about my life too, especially what has happened since crossing from Portland, and how I came to be involved with Raven, Tack, and the resistance. Occasionally we bring up memories from the time Before, too—the lost time before she went away, before my sister was cured, before I was placed in Aunt Carol’s house. But not too much.
As my mother said, there are some losses we never get over.
Certain subjects remain completely off-limits. She doesn’t ask what compelled me to cross in the first place, and I don’t volunteer to tell her. I keep Alex’s note in a little leather pouch around my neck—a gift from my mom, procured from a trader earlier in the year—but it is a memento from a past life, like carrying the picture of someone who is dead.
My mother knows, of course, that I have found my way into loving. Occasionally, I catch her watching me with Julian. The look on her face—pride, grief, envy, and love commingled—reminds me that she is not just my mother, but a woman who has fought her whole life for something she has never truly experienced.
My dad was cured. And you can’t love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.
It makes me ache for her, a feeling I hate and am somehow ashamed of.
Julian and I have found our rhythm again. It’s as though we have skated over the past few weeks, skated over Alex’s long shadow, and landed neatly on the other side. We can’t get enough of each other. I’m amazed by every part of him again: his hands, his low, gentle way of speaking, all his different laughs.
At night, in the dark, we reach for each other. We lose ourselves in the nighttime rhythm, in the hoots and cries and moans from the animals outside. And despite the dangers of the Wilds, and the constant threat of regulators and Scavengers, I feel free for the first time in what feels like forever.
One morning I emerge from the tents and find that Raven has overslept, and it is instead Julian and my mom who have been stoking the fire. Their backs are turned toward me, and they are laughing about something. Faint wisps of smoke twist up into the fine spring air. For a moment I stand perfectly still, terrified, feeling as though I am on the brink of something—if I move at all, take a step forward or back, the image will break apart in the wind, and they’ll scatter into dust.
Then Julian turns and sees me. “Morning, beauty,” he says. His face is still bruised and swollen in places, but his eyes are exactly the color of early-morning sky. When he smiles, I think he is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
My mom grabs a bucket and stands. “I was going for a shower,” she says.
“Me too,” I say.
As I wade into the still-freezing stream, the wind raises goose bumps on my body. A cloud of swallows skates across the sky; the water carries a slight taste of grit; my mother hums downstream. This is not any kind of happiness that I imagined. It is not what I chose.
But it’s enough. It is more than enough.
On the border of Rhode Island, we encounter another group of about two dozen homesteaders, who are on their way to Portland as well. All but two of them are on the side of the resistance, and the two who don’t care to fight don’t dare to be left alone. We are nearing the coast, and the detritus of old life is everywhere. We come across a massive cement honeycomb structure, which Tack identifies as an old parking garage.
Something about the structure makes me anxious. It’s like a towering stone insect, outfitted with a hundred eyes. The whole group falls silent as we pass under its shadow. The hair on my neck is standing up, and even though it’s stupid, I can’t shake the feeling that we are being watched.
Tack, who is leading the group, holds up his hand. We all come to an abrupt stop. He cocks his head, obviously listening for something. I hold my breath. It’s quiet, except for the usual rustle of animals in the woods, and the gentle sighing of the wind.
Then a fine spray of gravel lands on us from above, as though someone has accidentally toed it out of one of the upper levels of the parking garage.
Instantly, everything is blur and motion.
“Get down, get down!” Max yells as all of us are reaching for weapons, unshouldering rifles, and dropping into the underbrush.
“Coo-ee!”
The voice, the shout, freezes us. I crane my head toward the sky, shielding my eyes from the sun. For a second, I’m sure I’m dreaming.
Pippa has emerged from the dark caverns of the honeycomb structure and stands on a sun-drenched ledge, waving a red handkerchief down at us, grinning.
“Pippa!” Raven cries out, her voice strangled. Only then do I believe it.
“Hey, yourself,” Pippa shouts down. And slowly, from behind her, more and more people edge into view: masses of skinny, ragged people, packed into all the different levels of the garage.
When Pippa finally makes it to the ground, she is immediately engulfed by Tack, Raven, and Max. Beast is alive too; he lopes out into the sunshine directly behind Pippa, and it seems almost too much to believe. For fifteen minutes, we do nothing but shout and laugh and talk over one another, and not a single word gets said that anyone understands.
