But that was really only the beginning of the cure. This—the pairing, the wedding, and Fred—is its conclusion.
The gates have been locked behind us again, and the barricades restored. Still, as I climb out of the car, I can feel the crowd pressing closer, closer—itching to come in, to watch, to see me pledge my life and future to the path that has been chosen for me. But the ceremony will not begin for another fifteen minutes, and the gates will remain closed until then.
Behind the revolving glass doors, I can see Fred waiting for me, unsmiling, arms folded. His face is distorted by the glare and the glass. From this distance, it looks as though his skin is full of holes.
“It’s time,” my mother says.
“I know,” I say, and I pass in front of her, into the building.
Lena
It’s time. The rifle shots explode simultaneously in the distance—a dozen of them at least—and just like that, we are moving as one. We are running out of the trees, hundreds of us, drumming up mud and dirt, the rhythm of our feet like a single, swollen heartbeat. Two rope ladders appear over the side of the wall, then another two, and then three more—so far, so good. The first of our group reaches a ladder, jumps, and swings upward.
In the distance, a band is playing a wedding march.
Hana
Outside the laboratories, the guards—nearly two dozen of them, arrayed in spotless uniforms—fire off their rifle salute, signaling that the ceremony can proceed. The large windows of the conference room are open, and through them we can hear the band begin to play a wedding march. Most of the onlookers have not been able to squeeze into the labs and will be clustered outside, listening, straining to see through the windows. The priest is wearing a microphone so his voice will be amplified, so it will reach every member of the assembled crowd, touch them with his words of perfection and honor, of duty and safety.
A platform has been erected in the center of the room, just in front of the podium where the priest will conduct the ceremony. Two participants, both dressed symbolically, in lab coats, help me onto it.
When Fred takes my hands in his and lays them on top of The Book of Shhh, a small sigh travels the room, an exhalation of relief.
This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.
Lena
I’m halfway up the ladder when the alarms begin to sound. A second later there is another explosion of gunfire. There is nothing coordinated about these shots; they explode in rapid staccato, deafeningly close, and just like that the air is a symphony of shouts and shots and screams. A woman straddling the wall topples backward and tumbles to the ground with a sickening thud, blood bubbling from her chest.
Only a tenth of our number has made it over the wall. The air is suddenly thick with gun smoke. People are yelling—go, stop, move, stop where you are or I’ll shoot! For a second I freeze on the ladder, swinging, petrified—my hands slip a little, and I barely manage to right myself before falling. I can’t remember how to move. At the top of the ladder, a regulator is hacking at the ropes with a knife.
“Go. Lena, go!” Julian is beneath me on the ladder. He reaches up and pushes, jolting me back into my body. I begin working my way upward again, ignoring the searing pain in my palms. Better to fight the regulators on the ground, where we have a chance—anything is better than swinging here, exposed, like a fish on a line.
The ladder shudders. The regulator is still working feverishly with his knife. He is young—he looks somehow familiar—and sweat is matting his blond hair to his forehead. Beast has just made it to the top of the wall. There’s a crack, and a small yelp, as he drives his elbow into the regulator’s nose.
The rest happens quickly: Beast gets his fist around the man’s knife and thrusts; the regulator slumps forward, eyes unseeing, and Beast heaves him unceremoniously over the wall, as though he is a sack of garbage. He, too, thuds when he hits the ground: Only then do I recognize him as a boy from Joffrey’s Academy, someone Hana once spoke to at the beach. My age—we were evaluated on the same day.
No time to think about that now.
Two more strong pulls get me to the top of the wall. I slide onto my stomach, pressing hard into the stone, trying to stay as small as possible. Compact. The inside of the wall is crisscrossed with scaffolding left over from construction. Only a few portions of the stone catwalk, meant for patrols, are complete: There are bodies tangled everywhere, people fighting, locked together, struggling for the advantage.
Pippa is working her way grimly up the ladder to my right. Tack has dropped into a crouch on the scaffolding; he is covering her, sweeping a gun from left to right, picking off the guards who are rushing us from the ground. Raven goes behind Pippa, the handle of a knife gripped in her mouth, a gun strapped to her hip. Her face is taut, and focused.
Everything registers in bursts, flashes:
Guards running at the wall, materializing from guard huts and warehouses.
Sirens wailing: police. They’ve been quick to respond to the alarms.
And beneath this, a squeeze in my gut—the landscape of roofs and roads; the grim-gray flow of pavement; Back Cove, shimmering in front of me; parks dotted in the distance; the sweep of the bay, beyond the distant white blot that is the laboratory complex: Portland. My home.
For a moment, I’m worried I’ll faint. There are too many people—bodies swarming and swinging, faces contorted and grotesque—and too much sound. My throat burns with smoke. A piece of the scaffolding has caught fire. And still we haven’t gotten more than a quarter of our number over the wall. I can’t see my mother; I don’t know what happened to her.
Then Julian has made it over, and he wraps an arm around my waist and forces me to my knees.
“Down! Down!” he’s shouting, and we thud hard onto our knees as a series of bullets lodge into the wall behind us, spraying us with fine dust and stone-spit. The scaffolding groans and sways beneath us. Guards have massed on the ground, heaving its supports, trying to topple it.
Julian shouts something. His words are lost, but I know he is telling me that we need to move—we need to get to the ground. Next to me, Tack has reached back to help Pippa over the wall. She moves clumsily, weighted down by the backpack she carries. For a second, I imagine that the bomb will go off right here, right now—the blood and fire, the sweet-smelling smoke and the ricocheting stone shrapnel—but then Pippa is safely over the wall and climbing to her feet.
Just then a guard on the ground swings his rifle toward Pippa, locks her in his sights. I want to scream—I want to warn her—but I can’t make a sound.
“Down, Pippa!” Raven launches herself over the wall, knocking Pippa out of the way just as the guard squeezes the trigger.
Pop. The littlest noise. A toy-firecracker sound.
Raven jerks and stiffens. For a second, I think she is only surprised: Her mouth goes round, her eyes wide.
Then she begins teetering backward, and I know that she is dead. Falling, falling, falling . . .
“No!” Tack lunges forward and grabs hold of her shirt before she can tumble back over the wall, pulling her down and onto his lap. People are swarming all around him, seething like rats over the scaffolding, but he just sits there, rocking a bit, cupping her face in his hands. He wipes her forehead, brushes the hair away from her face. She stares up at him sightlessly, her mouth open and wet, eyes shock-wide, black braid coiled against his thigh. His lips are moving—he’s speaking to her.
And now there is a scream inside me, silent and huge, like a black hole tunneling deep through my center. I can’t move, can’t do anything but stare. This is not how Raven dies—not here, not in this way, not in one flimsy second, not without a fight.
Pop goes the weasel. The child’s game comes back to me then, the way we used to chase one another around the park. Pop. You’re it.
This is all a child’s game. We are playing with shiny tin toys and loud noises. We are playing two-sides, like we used to when we were children.
Pop. White-hot pain blazes through me, past me. I bring my hand to my face instinctively and feel for injury; my fingers graze my ear and come away wet with blood. A bullet must have just clipped me.
The shock, even more than the pain, wakes me up, kicks my body into motion. There weren’t enough guns to go around, but I have a knife—old and blunted, but still better than nothing. I wrestle it out of the leather pouch around my hips. Julian is making his way down the scaffolding, swinging along the crisscrossed iron bars like a monkey. A guard tries to grab hold of one of Julian’s legs—Julian twists and brings his foot, hard, into the guard’s face. The guard staggers back, releasing him, and Julian drops the remaining few feet to the ground, into the chaos of bodies: Invalids and officers, our side and their side, merging into one enormous, writhing, bloody animal.
I scoot to the edge of the catwalk and make the jump. The few seconds I am airborne—and a target—are the most terrifying. I am totally exposed, totally vulnerable. Two seconds—three seconds, tops, but it feels like an eternity.
I hit the ground, nearly on top of a regulator, and take him down with me as my ankle twists and I tumble onto the gravel. We are a wild tangle—momentarily entwined, struggling to gain the advantage. He tries to aim his gun at me, but I get his wrist in my hand and twist backward, hard. He yelps and drops the gun. Someone kicks it, and the gun spins away from my fingers, into the gray-dust chaos.
Then I see it barely a foot away. The regulator spots it at the same time, and we reach for it simultaneously. He’s bigger than I am, but slower, too. I have it in my hand, close my fingers around the trigger a full second before him, and his fist connects with nothing but dirt. He roars, enraged, and lunges for me. I swing the gun up, catch him in the side of the head, hear a crack as the gun connects with his temple. He goes slack, and I launch myself to my feet before I can be trampled.
My mouth tastes like metal and dust, and my head has started to throb. I don’t see Julian. I don’t see my mother or Colin or Hunter.
Then: a rocking mortar-blast, an explosion of stone and white caulk-dust. The blow nearly takes me off my feet. At first I think one of the bombs must have been triggered accidentally and I look around for Pippa, trying to clear my head of the ringing, of the stinging, choking dust, just in time to see her slip, undetected, between two guard huts, heading for downtown.
Behind me, one of the scaffolds groans and begins to topple. There is a sharp swell in the screaming. Hands dig at my back as everyone presses forward, trying to break free from its path. Slowly, slowly, groaning, it teeters—and then accelerating, crashes to the ground, splintering, trapping the unlucky ones beneath its weight.
The wall is now sporting a gaping hole at its base; I realize this must have been the work of a pipe bomb, an explosion jerry-rigged by the resistance. Pippa’s bomb would have ripped the wall in two.
Still, it’s enough; our remaining forces are spilling through the opening, a current of people who have been pushed or forced out, dispossessed and diseased, flooding into Portland. The guards, a ragged line of blue-and-white uniforms, are swallowed up in the tide, pushed back, and forced to run.
The gates have been locked behind us again, and the barricades restored. Still, as I climb out of the car, I can feel the crowd pressing closer, closer—itching to come in, to watch, to see me pledge my life and future to the path that has been chosen for me. But the ceremony will not begin for another fifteen minutes, and the gates will remain closed until then.
Behind the revolving glass doors, I can see Fred waiting for me, unsmiling, arms folded. His face is distorted by the glare and the glass. From this distance, it looks as though his skin is full of holes.
“It’s time,” my mother says.
“I know,” I say, and I pass in front of her, into the building.
Lena
It’s time. The rifle shots explode simultaneously in the distance—a dozen of them at least—and just like that, we are moving as one. We are running out of the trees, hundreds of us, drumming up mud and dirt, the rhythm of our feet like a single, swollen heartbeat. Two rope ladders appear over the side of the wall, then another two, and then three more—so far, so good. The first of our group reaches a ladder, jumps, and swings upward.
In the distance, a band is playing a wedding march.
Hana
Outside the laboratories, the guards—nearly two dozen of them, arrayed in spotless uniforms—fire off their rifle salute, signaling that the ceremony can proceed. The large windows of the conference room are open, and through them we can hear the band begin to play a wedding march. Most of the onlookers have not been able to squeeze into the labs and will be clustered outside, listening, straining to see through the windows. The priest is wearing a microphone so his voice will be amplified, so it will reach every member of the assembled crowd, touch them with his words of perfection and honor, of duty and safety.
A platform has been erected in the center of the room, just in front of the podium where the priest will conduct the ceremony. Two participants, both dressed symbolically, in lab coats, help me onto it.
When Fred takes my hands in his and lays them on top of The Book of Shhh, a small sigh travels the room, an exhalation of relief.
This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.
Lena
I’m halfway up the ladder when the alarms begin to sound. A second later there is another explosion of gunfire. There is nothing coordinated about these shots; they explode in rapid staccato, deafeningly close, and just like that the air is a symphony of shouts and shots and screams. A woman straddling the wall topples backward and tumbles to the ground with a sickening thud, blood bubbling from her chest.
Only a tenth of our number has made it over the wall. The air is suddenly thick with gun smoke. People are yelling—go, stop, move, stop where you are or I’ll shoot! For a second I freeze on the ladder, swinging, petrified—my hands slip a little, and I barely manage to right myself before falling. I can’t remember how to move. At the top of the ladder, a regulator is hacking at the ropes with a knife.
“Go. Lena, go!” Julian is beneath me on the ladder. He reaches up and pushes, jolting me back into my body. I begin working my way upward again, ignoring the searing pain in my palms. Better to fight the regulators on the ground, where we have a chance—anything is better than swinging here, exposed, like a fish on a line.
The ladder shudders. The regulator is still working feverishly with his knife. He is young—he looks somehow familiar—and sweat is matting his blond hair to his forehead. Beast has just made it to the top of the wall. There’s a crack, and a small yelp, as he drives his elbow into the regulator’s nose.
The rest happens quickly: Beast gets his fist around the man’s knife and thrusts; the regulator slumps forward, eyes unseeing, and Beast heaves him unceremoniously over the wall, as though he is a sack of garbage. He, too, thuds when he hits the ground: Only then do I recognize him as a boy from Joffrey’s Academy, someone Hana once spoke to at the beach. My age—we were evaluated on the same day.
No time to think about that now.
Two more strong pulls get me to the top of the wall. I slide onto my stomach, pressing hard into the stone, trying to stay as small as possible. Compact. The inside of the wall is crisscrossed with scaffolding left over from construction. Only a few portions of the stone catwalk, meant for patrols, are complete: There are bodies tangled everywhere, people fighting, locked together, struggling for the advantage.
Pippa is working her way grimly up the ladder to my right. Tack has dropped into a crouch on the scaffolding; he is covering her, sweeping a gun from left to right, picking off the guards who are rushing us from the ground. Raven goes behind Pippa, the handle of a knife gripped in her mouth, a gun strapped to her hip. Her face is taut, and focused.
Everything registers in bursts, flashes:
Guards running at the wall, materializing from guard huts and warehouses.
Sirens wailing: police. They’ve been quick to respond to the alarms.
And beneath this, a squeeze in my gut—the landscape of roofs and roads; the grim-gray flow of pavement; Back Cove, shimmering in front of me; parks dotted in the distance; the sweep of the bay, beyond the distant white blot that is the laboratory complex: Portland. My home.
For a moment, I’m worried I’ll faint. There are too many people—bodies swarming and swinging, faces contorted and grotesque—and too much sound. My throat burns with smoke. A piece of the scaffolding has caught fire. And still we haven’t gotten more than a quarter of our number over the wall. I can’t see my mother; I don’t know what happened to her.
Then Julian has made it over, and he wraps an arm around my waist and forces me to my knees.
“Down! Down!” he’s shouting, and we thud hard onto our knees as a series of bullets lodge into the wall behind us, spraying us with fine dust and stone-spit. The scaffolding groans and sways beneath us. Guards have massed on the ground, heaving its supports, trying to topple it.
Julian shouts something. His words are lost, but I know he is telling me that we need to move—we need to get to the ground. Next to me, Tack has reached back to help Pippa over the wall. She moves clumsily, weighted down by the backpack she carries. For a second, I imagine that the bomb will go off right here, right now—the blood and fire, the sweet-smelling smoke and the ricocheting stone shrapnel—but then Pippa is safely over the wall and climbing to her feet.
Just then a guard on the ground swings his rifle toward Pippa, locks her in his sights. I want to scream—I want to warn her—but I can’t make a sound.
“Down, Pippa!” Raven launches herself over the wall, knocking Pippa out of the way just as the guard squeezes the trigger.
Pop. The littlest noise. A toy-firecracker sound.
Raven jerks and stiffens. For a second, I think she is only surprised: Her mouth goes round, her eyes wide.
Then she begins teetering backward, and I know that she is dead. Falling, falling, falling . . .
“No!” Tack lunges forward and grabs hold of her shirt before she can tumble back over the wall, pulling her down and onto his lap. People are swarming all around him, seething like rats over the scaffolding, but he just sits there, rocking a bit, cupping her face in his hands. He wipes her forehead, brushes the hair away from her face. She stares up at him sightlessly, her mouth open and wet, eyes shock-wide, black braid coiled against his thigh. His lips are moving—he’s speaking to her.
And now there is a scream inside me, silent and huge, like a black hole tunneling deep through my center. I can’t move, can’t do anything but stare. This is not how Raven dies—not here, not in this way, not in one flimsy second, not without a fight.
Pop goes the weasel. The child’s game comes back to me then, the way we used to chase one another around the park. Pop. You’re it.
This is all a child’s game. We are playing with shiny tin toys and loud noises. We are playing two-sides, like we used to when we were children.
Pop. White-hot pain blazes through me, past me. I bring my hand to my face instinctively and feel for injury; my fingers graze my ear and come away wet with blood. A bullet must have just clipped me.
The shock, even more than the pain, wakes me up, kicks my body into motion. There weren’t enough guns to go around, but I have a knife—old and blunted, but still better than nothing. I wrestle it out of the leather pouch around my hips. Julian is making his way down the scaffolding, swinging along the crisscrossed iron bars like a monkey. A guard tries to grab hold of one of Julian’s legs—Julian twists and brings his foot, hard, into the guard’s face. The guard staggers back, releasing him, and Julian drops the remaining few feet to the ground, into the chaos of bodies: Invalids and officers, our side and their side, merging into one enormous, writhing, bloody animal.
I scoot to the edge of the catwalk and make the jump. The few seconds I am airborne—and a target—are the most terrifying. I am totally exposed, totally vulnerable. Two seconds—three seconds, tops, but it feels like an eternity.
I hit the ground, nearly on top of a regulator, and take him down with me as my ankle twists and I tumble onto the gravel. We are a wild tangle—momentarily entwined, struggling to gain the advantage. He tries to aim his gun at me, but I get his wrist in my hand and twist backward, hard. He yelps and drops the gun. Someone kicks it, and the gun spins away from my fingers, into the gray-dust chaos.
Then I see it barely a foot away. The regulator spots it at the same time, and we reach for it simultaneously. He’s bigger than I am, but slower, too. I have it in my hand, close my fingers around the trigger a full second before him, and his fist connects with nothing but dirt. He roars, enraged, and lunges for me. I swing the gun up, catch him in the side of the head, hear a crack as the gun connects with his temple. He goes slack, and I launch myself to my feet before I can be trampled.
My mouth tastes like metal and dust, and my head has started to throb. I don’t see Julian. I don’t see my mother or Colin or Hunter.
Then: a rocking mortar-blast, an explosion of stone and white caulk-dust. The blow nearly takes me off my feet. At first I think one of the bombs must have been triggered accidentally and I look around for Pippa, trying to clear my head of the ringing, of the stinging, choking dust, just in time to see her slip, undetected, between two guard huts, heading for downtown.
Behind me, one of the scaffolds groans and begins to topple. There is a sharp swell in the screaming. Hands dig at my back as everyone presses forward, trying to break free from its path. Slowly, slowly, groaning, it teeters—and then accelerating, crashes to the ground, splintering, trapping the unlucky ones beneath its weight.
The wall is now sporting a gaping hole at its base; I realize this must have been the work of a pipe bomb, an explosion jerry-rigged by the resistance. Pippa’s bomb would have ripped the wall in two.
Still, it’s enough; our remaining forces are spilling through the opening, a current of people who have been pushed or forced out, dispossessed and diseased, flooding into Portland. The guards, a ragged line of blue-and-white uniforms, are swallowed up in the tide, pushed back, and forced to run.
