Raven

  So my second year we decided to move. It was Gray’s decision, actually, but we were all on board. Bram, who’d arrived earlier in the summer, told us about some homesteads farther south, friendly places where we would find shelter. In August, Gray sent out scouts to chart routes and look for campsites. In September, we started relocation.

  The Scavengers hit in Connecticut. I’d heard stories about them, but never concrete stuff: more whispers and myths, like the monster stories my mom had told me as a kid to make me behave. Shhh. Be quiet or you’ll wake the dragon.

  It was late and I was sleeping when Squirrel, who was scouting, gave the alarm: two shots fired into the darkness. But it was too late. Suddenly everyone was screaming. Blue—already big, beautiful, with the eyes of a grown-up and a pointed chin like mine—woke up bawling, terrified. She wouldn’t leave the tent. She was clinging to the sleeping bag, kicking me off, saying, No, no, no over and over again.

  By the time I managed to get her up, get her into my arms and out of the tents, I thought the world was ending. I’d grabbed a knife, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d once skinned an animal and it had nearly made me puke.

  I found out later that there were only four of them, but at the time it seemed like they were everywhere. That’s one of their tricks. Chaos. Confusion. There was fire—two tents went up just like that, like two match heads exploding—and there were shots and people screaming.

  All I could think was run. I had to run. I had to get Blue away from there. But I couldn’t move. I felt terror like a cold weight inside me, rooting me in place, the same way it always had when I was a little girl—when my dad would come down the stairs, stomp, stomp, stomp, his anger like a blanket meant to suffocate us all. Watching from the corner while he kicked my mom in the ribs, in the face, unable to cry, unable to scream, even. For years I’d fantasized that the next time he touched me, or her, I’d stick a knife straight in through the ribs, all the way up to the handle. I’d thought about the blood bubbling from the wound and how good it would feel to know that he, like me, was made out of real stuff, bones and tissue, skin that could bruise.

  But every time I was frozen, empty as a shell. Every time I did nothing but take it: red starburst explosions to the face, behind the eyes; pinches and slaps; hard shoves to the chest.

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” Tack was shouting from the other side of the camp. I started running to him without thinking, without watching where I was going, still clotted up with panic, with Blue soaking my neck with snot and tears and my heart drilling out of my chest, and when the Scavenger came from the left I didn’t even see him until he was swinging a club at my head.

  un>I dropped Blue. Just let her fall to the ground. And I went down behind her, knees hard in the dirt, trying to shield her. I got a hand around her pajama bottoms and managed to pick her up and get her on her feet. “Run,” I said. “Go on.” I pushed her. She was crying, and I pushed her. But she ran, as well as she could, on legs that were still too short for her body.

  The Scavenger drove a foot between my ribs, exactly the spot where my dad had fractured them when I was twelve. The pain made everything go black for a second, and when I rolled over on my back, everything was different. The stars weren’t stars but a ceiling spotted with water stains. The dirt wasn’t dirt but a nubby carpet.

  And the Scavenger wasn’t a Scavenger but Him. My dad.

  Eyes small as cuts, fists as fat as leather belts,breath hot and wet in my face. His jaw, his smell, his sweat. He’d found me. He raised a fist and I knew it was starting all over again, that it would never stop, that he would never leave me alone and I would never escape.

  That Blue would never be safe.

  Everything went dark and silent.

  I didn’t know I’d reached for the knife until it was deep between his ribs.

  That’s all I’ve ever heard: silence. The times I’ve killed. The times I’ve had to kill. If there is a God, I guess he has nothing to say about it.

  If there is a God, he must have gotten tired of watching a long time ago.

  There is silence in Julian Fineman’s execution room, except for the occasional click-click of a camera, except for the drone of the priest’s voice. But when Abraham saw that Isaac had become unclean, he asked in his heart for guidance . . .

  Silence like whiteness: like things painted over and concealed, or left unsaid.

  Silence except for the squeak, squeak of my sneakers on the linoleum floor. The doctor turns to look at me, annoyed. Confused. My voice, in that big, vast white room, sounds unfamiliar.

  The first gunshot is very loud.

  I’m remembering: all those years ago, sitting with Tack when he was newly named. The red-ember glow of the fire in the old woodstove, and Blue, breathing easier already, heavy in my arms. Sleep sounds from the other rooms, and somewhere above us, the hiss of the wind through the trees.

  “You came back,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” he admitted. He looked different, wearing clothes Grandpa had found for him in the storeroom—much younger, much skinnier. His eyes were huge dark hollows in his face. I thought he was beautiful.

  I hugged Blue a little closer. She was still hot, still fussing in her sleep. But her breaths came even and slow, and there was no trapped rattle in her chest. For the first time, it struck me that I’d been lonely. Not just at the homestead, where everyone was too busy surviving to worry about making friends, where most of the Invalids were older or half-soft in the head or just liked to keep to themselves. Even before that. At home I’d never had friends either. I couldn’t afford to, couldn’t let them see what my house was like, didn’t want anyone paying attention or asking questions.

  Alone. I’d been alone my whole life. “Why did you change your mind?” I said.

  He smiled a little. “Because I knew you thought I’d bail.”

  I stared at him. “You crossed over to the other side—you risked your life—just to prove a point?”

  “Not to prove a point,” he said. “To prove you wrong.” He smiled, bigger this time. His hair smelled like smoke from the fire. “You seem like you might be worth it.”

  Then he kissed me. He leaned over and just touched his lips to mine with Blue held between us like a secret, and I knew then that I would not be so alone anymore.

  “How did you—?” Lena is breathless, white in the face. Shock, maybe. Her palms are cut up, and there’s blood on her jacket. “Where did you—?”

  “Later,” I say. My cheek is stinging. Got a face full of glass when Lena decided to break through the observation deck, but it’s nothing a pair of tweezers can’t fix. I’m lucky the glass missed my eyes.

  Julian, up close, looks different than he does in all the DFA literature. Younger, and kind of sad and overeager, like a puppy begging for attention—even a swift kick.

  Luckily, he asks no questions, just falls in behind me, walking quickly, saying nothing. He must be use to obeying. If it wasn’t for Lena, if she hadn’t switched up the rules, the needle would be in his arm by now, and he’d be dead. It would have been better for us, and for the movement.

  No point in thinking about that now. Lena took a stand, and so I took a stand with her.

  That’s what you do for family. Anything.

  We go out the emergency exit to the fire escape, which leads down into the little courtyard I scouted earlier. So far, so good. Lena’s breathing fast and hard behind me, but m clnd me, y breath is easy, even, and slow.

  This is my favorite part of the story: the escape.

  Tack is waiting with the van on Twenty-Fourth Street, just like he said he would be. I open the cargo door and shut Lena and Julian inside.

  “You got ’em?” Tack asks when I climb into the passenger seat.

  “Would I be here if I didn’t?” I answer.

  He frowns. “You’re cut.”

  I flip down the mirror and take a look: a few uneven cuts on my cheek and neck, bea
ded with blood. “Just a scratch,” I say, blotting the blood with the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

  “Let’s roll, then,” Tack says, and sighs.

  He guns the engine and pulls out into the street, gray and blurry with old rain. I keep my sleeve pressed to the side of my face to stanch the bleeding. We make it all the way to the West Side Highway before Tack speaks again.

  “It’s a risk, taking him back with us,” he says in a low voice. “Julian Fineman. Shit. A big risk.”

  “I’ll take responsibility.” I turn my face to the window. I can see the ghost-outlines of my reflection, feel the hum of cold air through the glass.

  “She’s important to you, isn’t she? Lena, I mean.” Tack’s voice stays quiet.

  “She’s important to the movement,” I answer, and see the ghost-girl speak too, her teeth flashing, superimposed over passing images of the city.

  Tack doesn’t say anything for a second. Then I feel his hand on my knee. “I would have done it for you, too,” he says, even quieter. “If you’d been taken. I would have gone back. I would have risked it.”

  I turn to look at him. “You already did come back for me,” I say. I remember that first kiss, and Blue’s warmth between us, and Tack’s lips, dry as bone, soft as shadow. I still can’t say her name, but I think he knows what I’m thinking. “You came back for us.”

  Recently I’ve been having the fantasy more and more: the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars—sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.

  And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to liveg we neo live—like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.

  We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.

  We have four kids. Maybe five. The first one is a girl, stupid beautiful, and we call her Blue.

  “Where the hell were you?” Pike’s in my face as soon as we make it back to the warehouse.

  I don’t like Pike. He’s moody and mean and he thinks he can boss me—and everyone else—around.

  I put a hand on his chest, easing him backward. “Get out of my airspace.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Don’t talk to her that way,” Tack jumps in, already wound up, ready to go.

  “It’s all right.” I’m suddenly too tired to argue. I keep thinking of Lena’s last words to me. The woman who came for me at Salvage . . . That’s my mother. Did you know? Like I should have known. Like it’s my fault Lena’s mom moved on without a So long, see you later.

  But I know it’s deeper than that. I’ve always thought of Lena as alone, like me. I always saw myself in her a little bit. But she isn’t alone. She has a mother, a free mother, a fighter. Someone to be proud of. She has family.

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath, think of a stone cottage all wrapped in a haze of snow. I open my eyes again.

  “We had to take care of something,” Tack is saying.

  “But we’re all set now,” I say quickly. I glance over at Tack, trying to communicate with my eyes—let it go, drop it, let’s get out of here.

  “We almost left without you,” Pike says, still not ready to forgive us.

  “Give us twenty minutes,” I say, and at last Pike shifts aside and lets us pass.

  The room where we’ve been sleeping has been stripped down: cots dismantled, gear packed up. Everyone’s getting ready to move on. Once the regulators fig . Igulatorure out it was Invalids who sprang Julian—maybe they’ve already figured it out—they’ll do a sweep. They’ll come looking up here eventually.

  There’s no sign of the boy who arrived late last night, the escapee from the Crypts. Young. Quiet type. Barely said a word before falling into bed. He looked like he’d been worked over pretty bad.

  He’s from Lena’s part of the world. I can’t help but wonder.

  “One of my knives is missing,” Tack says. He peels the mattress of the cot away from the frame. That’s where we stash the stuff that matters, the stuff we don’t want other people poking at and looking through. It’s not exactly a hiding place, since everyone does it—more like a boundary. Tack starts going crazy, pulling off the thin blankets, thumping out the pillows. “One of my best knives.”

  For a second, the need to tell is overwhelming. It builds like a bubble in my chest. Let’s go, I almost say. Just you and me. Let’s leave the fight behind.

  Instead I say, “How about you check the van.”

  When Tack leaves the room, I’m left alone. Suddenly I need to see it again, need to know that it’s true. I squat down and stick my hand in the space between my mattress and the cheap metal frame. After a minute of fumbling, I find it: a small meter, barely bigger than a spoon, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. It cost me one of Tack’s knives and a silver-and-turquoise necklace Lena gave to me when she first crossed over; the trader who agreed to get it for me kept emphasizing the risks. Everyone knows it’s impossible to get a pregnancy test nowadays, she was saying. You have to have documentation. Letters of approval from the regulatory board. Blah, blah, blah.

  I paid. I had to. I needed to know.

  I sit back on my heels and smooth down the thin plastic, so I can read the results: two faint parallel lines, like a ladder leading somewhere.

  Pregnant.

  Footsteps sound in the hallway. I quickly stuff the test back under the mattress. My heart is beating heavy, quick. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I feel another heartbeat, a faint pulse somewhe

  re beneath my rib cage, answering.

  The first one, we’ll name Blue.

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  Lena

  I’ve started dreaming of Portland again.

  Since Alex reappeared, resurrected but also changed, twisted, like a monster from one of the ghost stories we used to tell as kids, the past has been finding its way in. It bubbles up through the cracks when I’m not paying attention, and pulls at me with greedy fingers.

  This is what they warned me about for all those years: the heavy weight in my chest, the nightmare-fragments that follow me even in waking life.

  I warned you, Aunt Carol says in my head.

  We told you, Rachel says.

  You should have stayed. That’s Hana, reaching out across an expanse of time, through the murky-thick layers of memory, stretching a weightless hand to me as I am sinking.

  About two dozen of us came north from New York City: Raven, Tack, Julian, and me, and also Dani, Gordo, and Pike, plus fifteen or so others who are largely content to stay quiet and follow directions.

  And Alex. But not my Alex: a stranger who never smiles, doesn’t laugh, and barely speaks.

  The others, those who were using the warehouse outside White Plains as a homestead, scattered south or west. By now, the warehouse has no doubt been stripped and abandoned. It isn’t safe, not after Julian’s rescue. Julian Fineman is a symbol, and an important one. The zombies will hunt for him. They will want to string the symbol up, and make it bleed meaning, so that others will learn their lesson.

  We have to be extra careful.

  Hunter, Bram, Lu, and some of the other members of the old Rochester homestead are waiting for us just south of Poughkeepsie. It takes us nearly three days t
o cover the distance; we are forced to circumnavigate a half-dozen Valid cities.

  Then, abruptly, we arrive: The woods simply run out at the edge of an enormous expanse of concrete, webbed with thick fissures, and still marked very faintly with the ghostly white outlines of parking spaces. Cars, rusted, picked clean of various parts—rubber tires, bits of metal—still sit in the lot. They look smaa s Thainll and faintly ridiculous, like ancient toys left out by a child.

  The parking lot flows like gray water in all directions, running up at last against a vast structure of steel and glass: an old shopping mall. A sign in looping cursive script, streaked white with bird shit, reads empire state plaza mall.

  The reunion is joyful. Tack, Raven, and I break into a run. Bram and Hunter are running too, and we intercept them in the middle of the parking lot. I jump on Hunter, laughing, and he throws his arms around me and lifts me off my feet. Everyone is shouting and talking at once.

  Hunter sets me down, finally, but I keep one arm locked around him, as though he might disappear. I reach out and wrap my other arm around Bram, who is shaking hands with Tack, and somehow we all end up piled together, jumping and shouting, our bodies interlaced, in the middle of the brilliant sunshine.

  “Well, well, well.” We break apart, turn around, and see Lu sauntering toward us. Her eyebrows are raised. She has let her hair grow long, and brushed it forward, so it pools over her shoulders. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  It’s the first time I’ve felt truly happy in days.

  The short months we have spent apart have changed both Hunter and Bram. Bram is, against all odds, heavier. Hunter has new wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, although his smile is as boyish as ever.