Delirium: The Complete Collection (98 page)

I
wake up to motion and noise. Julian is gone.

The sun is high, the sky cloudless, and the day still. I kick off the blankets and sit up, blinking hard. My mouth tastes like dust.

Raven is kneeling nearby, feeding twigs, one at a time, to one of the campfires. She glances up at me. “Welcome to the land of the living. Sleep well?”

“What time is it?” I ask.

“After noon.” She straightens up. “We’re about to head down to the river.”

“I’ll come with you.” Water: That’s what I need. I need to wash and drink. My whole body feels like it’s coated in grime.

“Come on, then,” she says.

Pippa is sitting at the edge of her camp, talking with an unfamiliar woman.

“From the resistance,” Raven explains when she sees me looking, and my heart does a funny stutter in my chest. My mother is with the resistance. It’s possible the stranger knows her. “She’s a week late. She was coming from New Haven with supplies but got waylaid by patrols.”

I swallow. I’m afraid to ask the stranger for news. I’m terrified I’ll once again be disappointed.

“Do you think Pippa’s going to leave Waterbury?” I ask.

Raven shrugs. “We’ll see.”

“Where will we go?” I ask her.

She shoots me a small smile, reaches out and touches my elbow. “Hey. Don’t worry so much, okay? That’s my job.”

I feel a rush of affection for her. Things between us have not been the same since I found out that she and Tack used me—and Julian—for the movement. But I would be lost without her. We all would be.

Tack, Hunter, Bram, and Julian are standing together, holding makeshift buckets and containers of various sizes. They have obviously been waiting for Raven. I don’t know where Coral and Alex are. I don’t see Lu, either.

“Hey, sleeping beauty,” Hunter says. He has obviously slept well. He looks a hundred times better than he did yesterday, and he isn’t coughing anymore.

“Let’s get this party started,” Raven says.

We leave the relative safety of Pippa’s camp and push into the jostle of people, through the maze of patched-together shelters and makeshift tents. I try not to breathe too deeply. It stinks of unwashed bodies and—even worse—of bathroom smells. The air is thick with flies and gnats. I can’t wait to wade into the water, to wash away the smells and the dirt. In the distance, I can just make out the dark thread of the river, winding along the south side of the camp. Not too much farther now.

The press of tents and shelters eventually peters out. Ribbons of old pavement, now cracked and fragmented, crisscross the landscape. Vast squares of concrete mark the foundation of old houses.

As we approach the river, we see a crowd has gathered along its banks. People are shouting, pushing and shoving their way to the water.

“
Now
what’s the problem?” Tack mutters.

Julian hitches the buckets higher on his shoulder and frowns, although he stays silent.

“There’s no problem,” Raven says. “Everyone’s just excited about a shower.” But her voice is strained.

We force our way into the thick tangle of bodies. The smell is overwhelming. I gag, but there’s no space to move, no way to bring a hand over my mouth. Not for the first time, I’m grateful to be only five foot two; at least it allows me to squeeze through the smallest openings between people, and I fight to the front of the crowd first, breaking out onto the
steep, stony banks of the river, while the mass of people continues to swell behind me, fighting toward the river.

Something is wrong. The water is extremely low—no more than a trickle, a foot or so wide and hardly that deep, and churned mostly to mud. As the river winds back toward the city, it is filled with a moving jigsaw puzzle of people, swelling into the riverbank, desperate to fill their containers. From a distance, they look like insects.

“What the hell?” Raven finally pushes her way onto the bank and stands next to me, stunned.

“The water’s running out,” I say. Facing this sluggish stream of mud, I begin to panic. Suddenly I am thirstier than I have ever been in my life.

“Impossible,” Raven says. “Pippa said the river was flowing fine just yesterday.”

“Better take what we can,” Tack says. He, Hunter, and Bram have finally fought their way through the crowd. Julian follows a moment afterward. His face is red with sweat. His hair is plastered to his forehead. For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

More and more people are flowing down toward the river and fighting for what little water remains. There is no choice; we must fight alongside them. As I’m moving into the water, someone pushes me out of the way, and I end up falling backward, landing hard on the rocks. Pain shoots up my spine, and it takes me three tries to stand up. Too many people are
streaming by me, shoving me. Eventually, Julian has to fight his way back through the crowd and help me to my feet.

In the end, we manage to get only a fraction of the water we wanted, and we lose some of it on the way back to Pippa’s camp, when a man stumbles into Hunter, upsetting one of his buckets. The water we have collected is filled with fine silt and will be reduced even further once we manage to boil away the mud. I would cry if I thought I could waste the water.

Pippa and the woman from Resistance are standing in the middle of a small circle of people. Alex and Coral have returned. I can’t help but imagine where they have been together. Stupid, when there are so many other things to worry about; but still the mind will circle back to this one thing.

Amor deliria nervosa:
It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve
.

“The river—” Raven starts to say as we get closer, but Pippa cuts her off.

“We heard,” she says. Her face is grim. In the daylight, I see Pippa is older than I originally thought. I assumed she was in her early thirties, but her face is deeply lined, and her hair is gray at the temples. Or maybe that is only the effect of being here, in the Wilds, and waging this war. “It isn’t flowing.”

“What do you mean?” Hunter says. “A river doesn’t stop flowing overnight.”

“It does if it’s dammed,” Alex says.

For a second there’s silence.

“What do you mean,
dammed
?” Julian speaks first. He, too, is trying not to panic. I can hear it in his voice.

Alex stares at him. “Dammed,” he repeats. “As in, stopped. Blocked up. Obstructed or confined by a—”

“But who dammed it?” Julian cuts in. He refuses to look at Alex, but it’s Alex who responds.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” He shifts slightly, angling his body toward Julian. There’s a hot, electric tension in the air. “The people on the other side.” He pauses. “Your people.”

Julian still isn’t used to losing his temper. He opens his mouth and then shuts it. He says, very calmly, “What did you say?”

“Julian.” I place a hand on his arm.

Pippa jumps in. “Waterbury was mostly evacuated before I arrived,” she says. “We thought it was because of the resistance. We took it as a sign of progress.” She lets out a harsh bark of laughter. “Obviously, they had other plans. They’ve cut off the water source in the city.”

“So we’ll leave,” Dani says. “There are other rivers. The Wilds is full of them. We’ll go somewhere else.” Her suggestion meets with silence. She stares from Pippa to Raven.

Pippa runs a hand over the short fuzz of her hair.

“Yeah, sure.” The woman from the resistance speaks up. She has a funny accent, all lilts and melody, like drawn butter. “The people we can gather, the ones who can be mobilized—we can leave. We can scatter, break up, go back into the Wilds. But there are probably patrols waiting for us. No doubt they’re gathering even now. Easier for them
if we’re in smaller groups—less of a chance we’ll be able to fight. Plus, it looks better for the press. Large-scale slaughter is harder to cover up.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

I turn around. Lu has just joined the group. She is slightly breathless, and her face is shiny, as though she has been running. I wonder where she has been all this time. As usual, her hair is loose, plastered to her neck and forehead.

“This is Summer,” Pippa says evenly. “She’s with Resistance. She’s the reason you’ll be eating tonight.” The subtext is clear:
Watch what you say
.

“But we
have
to leave.” Hunter’s voice is practically a bark. I get the urge to reach out and squeeze his hand. Hunter never loses his temper. “What other choice do we have?”

Summer doesn’t flinch. “We could fight back,” she says. “We’ve all been looking for a chance to rally together, make something of this mess.” She gestures to the array of shelters, like pieces of enormous metal shrapnel, glittering vastly toward the horizon. “That was the point of coming to the Wilds, wasn’t it? For all of us? We were tired of being told what to choose.”

“But how will we fight?” I feel shyer in front of this woman, with her soft, musical voice and her fierce eyes, than I have in front of anyone for a while. But I press on. “We’re weak as it is. Pippa said we’re disorganized. Without water—”

“I’m not suggesting we go head-to-head,” she interrupts me. “We don’t even know what we’re dealing with—how
many people are left in the city, whether there are patrols gathering in the Wilds. What I’m suggesting is that we take the river back.”

“But if the river’s dammed—”

Again, she cuts me off. “Dams can be exploded,” she says simply.

We are silent for another second. Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Largely from habit, we wait for one of them to speak.

“What’s your plan?” Tack says, and just like that, I know it’s real: This is happening. This will happen.

I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us.

Instead life has only grown harder.

I wonder whether it will ever end.

I feel Julian’s hand on my shoulder: a squeeze, a reassurance. I open my eyes.

Pippa squats and draws a large teardrop shape in the ground with a thumb. “Let’s say this is Waterbury. We’re here.” She marks an
X
at the southeast side of the larger end. “And we know that when the fighting started, the cureds retreated to the west side of the city. My guess is that the block is somewhere here.” She hazards an
X
on the east side, where the teardrop begins to narrow.

“Why?” Raven says. Her face is alive again, alert. For a moment, when I look at her, I get a small chill. She lives for
this—the fight, the battle for survival. She actually
enjoys
it.

Pippa shrugs. “It’s my best guess. That part of the city was mostly park anyway—they’ve probably just flooded it completely, rerouted the water flow. They’ll have shored up defenses there, of course, but if they had enough firepower to rout us, they’d have attacked already. We’re talking whatever forces they’ve gathered in a week or two.”

She looks up at us, to make sure we’re following. Then she draws a sweeping arrow around the base of the teardrop, pointing upward. “They’ll probably expect us to go north, toward the water flow. Or they think we’ll scatter.” She draws lines radiating in various directions from the base of the teardrop; now it looks like a deranged, bearded smiley face. “I think instead we should make a direct attack, send a small force into the city, bust open the dam.” She draws a line, sweepingly, through the teardrop, cutting it in half.

“I’m in,” Raven says. Tack spits. He doesn’t have to say he’s in too.

Summer folds her arms, looking down at Pippa’s diagram. “We’ll need three separate groups,” she says slowly. “Two diversionary, to create problems here and here”—she bends down and marks
X
’s at two distinct places along the periphery—“and one smaller force to get in, do the job, and get out.”

“I’m in,” Lu pipes up. “As long as I can be part of the main force. I don’t want any of this side-business shit.”

This surprises me. At the old homestead, Lu never expressed
interest in joining the resistance. She never even got a fake procedural mark. She just wanted to stay as far as possible from the fighting; she wanted to pretend that the other side, the cured side, didn’t exist. Something must have changed in the months we’ve been apart.

“Lu can come with us.” Raven grins. “She’s a walking good-luck charm. That’s how she got her name. Isn’t it, Lucky?”

Lu doesn’t say anything.

“I want to be part of the main force too,” Julian speaks up suddenly.

“Julian,” I whisper. He ignores me.

“I’ll go wherever you need me,” Alex says. Julian glances at him, and for a second I feel the resentment between them, a blunt, hard-edged force.

“So will I,” Coral says.

“Count us in.” Hunter speaks for him and Bram.

“I want to be the one who lights the match,” Dani says.

Other people are chiming in now, volunteering for different tasks. Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”

I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice
but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.

But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.

“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.

B
efore going home, I spend some time zigzagging through the streets near the Old Port, trying to clear my head of Lena, and the guilt; trying to clear it of Fred’s voice:
Cassie asked too many questions
.

I bump onto the curb and pedal as fast as I can, as though I can push out my thoughts through my feet. In just two short weeks, I won’t have even this freedom; I’ll be too known, too visible, too followed. Sweat trickles down my scalp. An old woman emerges from a store and I barely have time to swerve, jump the curb, and skate back into the street, before I hit her.

“Idiot!” she shouts.

“Sorry!” I call over my shoulder, but the word gets lost in the wind.

Then, out of nowhere—a barking dog, a huge blur of black fur, leaps for me. I jerk my handlebars to the right and lose my balance. I tumble off the bike, hitting the ground hard on my elbow, and skid several feet as pain rips up my right side. My bike thuds next to me, screeching across the concrete, and someone is yelling, and the dog is still barking. One of my feet is entangled in the spokes of my front wheel. The dog circles me, panting.

“Are you okay?” A man speed-walks across the street. “Bad dog,” he says, smacking the dog’s head roughly. The dog slinks several feet away, whimpering.

I sit up, extracting my foot carefully from my bike. My right arm and shin are cut up, but miraculously, I don’t think I’ve broken anything. “I’m all right.” I pull myself carefully to my feet, rolling my ankles and wrists slowly, checking for pain. Nothing.

“You should watch where you’re going,” the man says. He looks annoyed. “You could have been killed.” Then he stalks off down the street, whistling for his dog to follow. The dog trots after him, head down.

I pick up my bike and wheel it onto the sidewalk. The chain has come off the stay, and one handlebar is slightly crooked, but other than that, it looks okay. As I bend down to adjust the chain, I notice that I’ve landed directly in front of the Center for Organization, Research, and Education. I must have been circling it for the past hour.

The CORE keeps Portland’s public records: the incorporation documents for its businesses, but also the names, birth dates, and addresses of its citizens; copies of their birth, marriage, medical, and dental records; violations against them and report cards and annual review scores, as well as evaluation results and suggested matches.

An open society is a healthy society; transparency is necessary to trust
. That’s what
The Book of Shhh
teaches. My mom used to phrase it differently: Only people who have something to hide make a fuss about privacy.

Without consciously making the decision, I lock my bike to a streetlamp and jog up the stairs. I push through the revolving doors and step into a large, plain lobby, decorated with gray linoleum floor tiles and buzzing overhead lights.

A woman sits behind a fake-wood desk, in front of an ancient-looking computer. Behind her a heavy chain is hung across an open doorway; from it, a large sign is dangling:
PERSONNEL AND AUTHORIZED CORE EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

The woman barely glances at me as I approach the desk. A small plastic name tag identifies her as
TANYA BOURNE, SECURITY ASSISTANT
.

“Can I help you?” she asks in a monotone. I can tell that she doesn’t recognize me.

“I hope so,” I say cheerfully, placing my hands on the desk and forcing her to meet my gaze. Lena used to call it my
Buy a bridge
look. “See, my wedding’s coming up, and I completely flaked on Cassie, and now I have barely any
time to track her down….”

The woman sighs and resettles in her chair.

“And of course Cassie
has
to be there. I mean, even if we haven’t spoken…well, she invited me to
her
wedding, and it just wouldn’t be nice, would it?” I let out a giggle.

“Miss?” she prompts tiredly.

I giggle again. “Oh, sorry. Babbling—it’s a bad habit. I guess I’m just nervous, you know, because of the wedding and everything.” I pause and suck in a deep breath. “So can you help me?”

She blinks. Her eyes are a dirty-bathwater color. “What?”

“Can you help me find Cassie?” I ask, squeezing my hands into fists, hoping she won’t notice.
Please say yes
. “Cassandra O’Donnell.”

I watch Tanya carefully, but she doesn’t appear to recognize the name. She heaves an exaggerated sigh, pushes up from her chair, and moves over to a tiered stack of papers. She moves back to me and practically slaps it on the desk. It’s as thick as a medical intake form—at least twenty pages long. “Personal Information Requests may be sent to CORE, attention Census Department, and will be processed within ninety days—”

“Ninety days!” I cut her off. “My wedding’s in
two
weeks.”

She draws her mouth into a line. Her whole face is the color of bad water. Maybe being here day after day, under the dull, buzzing lights, has begun to pickle her. She says determinedly, “Expedited Personal Information Request Forms must be accompanied by a personal statement—”

“Look.” I spread my fingers flat on the counter and press my frustration down through my palms. “The truth is, Cassandra is a little witch, okay? I don’t even
like
her.”

Tanya perks up a little.

The lies come fluidly. “She always said I’d flunk my evaluations, you know? And when she got an eight, she went on about it for days. Well, you know what? I scored higher than she did, and my pair is better, and my wedding will be better too.” I lean a little closer, drop my voice to a whisper. “I want her to be there. I want her to see it.”

Tanya studies me closely for a minute. Then, slowly, her mouth hitches into a smile. “I knew a woman like that,” she says. “You’d think God’s garden grew under her feet.” She turns her attention to her computer screen. “What’d you say her name was again?”

“Cassandra. Cassandra O’Donnell.”

Tanya’s nails click exaggeratedly against the keyboard. Then she shakes her head and frowns. “Sorry. No one listed by that name.”

My stomach does a weird turn. “Are you sure? I mean, you’ve spelled it correctly and everything?”

She swivels the computer screen around to face me. “Got over four hundred O’Donnells. Not one Cassandra.”

“What about Cassie?” I’m fighting a bad feeling—a feeling I have no name for. Impossible. Even if she were dead, she would show up in the system. The CORE keeps records of everyone, living or dead, for the past sixty years.

She readjusts the screen and
click-click-clicks
again, then shakes her head. “Uh-uh. Sorry. Maybe you got the wrong spelling?”

“Maybe.” I try to smile, but my mouth won’t obey. It doesn’t make any sense. How does a person disappear? A thought occurs to me: Maybe she was invalidated. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. Maybe her cure didn’t work, maybe she caught the
deliria
, maybe she escaped to the Wilds.

That would fit. That would be a reason for Fred to divorce her.

“…work out in the end.”

I blink. Tanya has been speaking. She stares at me patiently, obviously expecting a reply. “I’m sorry—what did you say?”

“I said that I wouldn’t worry too much about it. These things have a way of working out. Everyone gets what’s right for them in the end.” She laughs loudly. “The gears of God don’t turn unless all the pieces fit right. Know what I mean? And you got your right fit, and she’ll get hers.”

“Thanks,” I say. I can hear her laughing again as I cross back toward the revolving doors; the sound follows me out onto the street, rings faintly in my head even when I am several blocks away.