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We’d gone seven miles, maybe less. The girls had tired quickly, and the rain was coming down sideways, the wind pushing against us. I knew we wouldn’t get far, but these first few miles outside the City were the most dangerous. As soon as the flooding subsided, the soldiers would be back on the roads, canvassing, looking for us. We’d have to rest now and take one of the back routes out of the development the following morning, before the sun came up.
The second story of the house was mostly dark, with dim light coming in from the broken windows. One corner of the floor was warped, the wooden boards rotted. A few of the girls sat on a bare mattress, covered by the one sheet we’d found. “I don’t understand,” Helene, the girl with tiny black braids, said to no one in particular. She’d found a pack of T-shirts in a basement closet, and some of the girls had put them on, looking strangely uniform now, with the exception of three girls who’d discovered sweaters in a bottom drawer. Nearly every surface was covered with wet clothes—jumpers and socks laid over the back of the armchair, mud-caked shoes strewn by the bedroom door.
“It’s impossible to understand,” Beatrice said. She squeezed the ends of her hair, trying to get out the last bit of water. “Lord knows, I have tried. ”
I picked one of the blankets off the floor, opening it up toward the window. Then I passed it to Bette and Lena, the two girls sitting closest to me. “I’ve seen what happens in that compound—I was at my School for twelve years,” I said. “And after I left, whenever I felt scared, or confused, or worried, I just came back to one fact—the Teachers there lied. It was never our life; we were always under their control. ”
Lena took off her black plastic glasses, wiping the scratched lenses on her shirt. “But Teacher Henrietta said—”
“I know what they said. ” I ran my hands over my hair, pushing a few wet strands away from my face. The girls were no older than fourteen, but they’d already undergone some of the initial processes for graduation. “Do you remember the vitamins they gave you? The way they charted your height and weight every month? How the older girls went to the doctors more frequently? Did you know any girls who’d started the injections?”
Helene’s face changed, revealing some sort of recognition. I remembered what I felt that day when Arden had told me the truth. Every part of me had wanted not to believe, that resistance lingering even after I’d seen the Graduates myself. If everything that happened inside the School was a lie, then who was I now, after having based my identity around it? How could I possibly go on?
“I did,” Helene said, not looking at the others as she said it.
“You’re probably convinced you’re going to die out here, that you couldn’t possibly survive in the wild,” I continued. “But that’s not true either. ”
I looked to a few of the girls who were huddled together on the bed. Some had softened toward me, now that we’d made it out of the rain. I knew my position as Princess meant something to them—they had heard my voice before on the broadcasts from the City. They’d sat in a dining hall similar to the one at my School, listening to the parade when I first arrived, listening to the stories about the girl who’d come from the Schools to the Palace, as if that were a possibility for them, too. How many of them must’ve imagined who their parents were, if they had somehow survived and were living somewhere inside the City?
“We shouldn’t have come here,” Bette said. “We should’ve stayed with the rest of the girls. Now we’ll never see them again. ”
Sarah turned from the window, where she was bringing in another plastic bottle of rainwater. “But we can’t go back now,” she said. Beatrice stepped forward to help her, but she turned away, setting the bottle down against the wall.
Bette pulled her sweater tighter around her sides. “Why would they do that, though? Maybe it wasn’t at all the Schools—maybe it was just at yours. How do you know?”
Clara settled into the armchair in the corner. “She knows better than anyone. We were living in the Palace. The King said it himself. ”
Bette shook her head. She whispered something to the girl next to her that I couldn’t quite hear. “I hope you’ll learn to trust me,” I said. “If you went back to those Schools you’d be trapped there indefinitely. ”
“Then what are we going to do?” Bette asked. “We can’t just stay here forever. ”
“We’re going to Califia,” I said as I sat on the edge of the mattress, looking at the girls. I rubbed my hands together, trying to warm them. “It’s a settlement up north. And there’s food, water, supplies. You can stay there as long as you need—other escapees from the Schools have. ”
Lena hugged her knees to her chest. “Are there men there?” she asked.
“It’s all women,” I said.
Bette kept shaking her head. “So what if it’s all women?” She looked at the other girls. “How are we even going to get there?”
“We’re going to walk,” I said. “And if we can find some other, faster way to get there we will. But it may take us as long as a month. And we’ll hunt, and rest, and get supplies however we can, but we’ll get there. I’ve done it before. ”
I could feel Clara’s eyes on me. I didn’t turn to face her. I knew what she was thinking—that I’d driven part of the way to Califia, up the Sierra Nevada and then through to the ocean in the soldiers’ Jeep. Maybe it was stupid, foolish even, to think we could get that far on foot, but now that we were beyond the walls we couldn’t hide out indefinitely. The girls, Clara and Beatrice at least, needed somewhere they could settle. My father might remain in power for years still, his reach extending to parts of the wild.
“How are we supposed to survive for a month?” Helene asked. “There are gangs out here who’ve murdered girls much younger than us. There was a twelve-year-old orphan kidnapped just a mile outside School, almost as soon as she tried to go beyond the wall. ”
Sarah set another bottle down, trying to seal it as best she could with one of the warped plastic caps. “But maybe that was a lie, too. Teacher Rose said that, and she said lots of other things. ”
“It’s not too late,” Bette said. “We can still go back. We’ll just find one of the soldiers and tell—”
“You will not,” I interrupted. “You’ll come with us, and we’ll get to Califia. And maybe you don’t understand it now, but you will eventually. There is no going back at this point. ”
Bette kept shaking her head. “We don’t even know you. ” She looked at a few of the other girls. “What do you think is going to happen to us out there? We’re not going to make it. I don’t care what they say—we were safe at School. ”
“You were never safe there,” Clara said. She picked up a few of the blankets and passed them to the girls, hoping to end the conversation, but I could see Bette wasn’t ready to let it go. She whispered something else to the petite girl curled up beside her, and I had a sudden glimpse of the weeks spread out before me, how difficult it would be to keep them safe.
Beyond the front window, the sky was a mottled gray mass, the moon covered by clouds. The rain kept on, coming sideways at the front of the house. Water pooled on the floor below the window ledge. As Beatrice settled on the floor beside Sarah, my eyes focused on a single point on the horizon, the lights so small at first they were hardly noticeable. A Jeep was coming toward us, on the broken highway above—the first one we’d seen in the hours since we’d left.