Pandemonium (20 page)

“How long have you been awake?” I ask. In the light everything feels tense and awkward again. I can almost believe last night was a dream. Julian put his fingers in my hair. Julian touched me. I let him touch me.

I liked it.

“A while,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Nightmares?” I ask. The air in the room is stifling. Each word is an effort.

“No,” he says. I expect him to say something else, but the silence stretches long between us.

I sit up. The room is hot, and it smells. I feel nauseous. I’m reaching for something to say, something to bleed out the tension in the room.

And then Julian says, “Do you think they’re going to kill us?” and the swollenness deflates at once. We’re on the same side today.

“No,” I say, with more confidence than I feel. As each day has passed I’ve grown more and more uncertain. If they—the Scavengers—were planning to ransom Julian, surely they would have done it by now. I think about Thomas Fineman, and the polished metal of his cuff links, and his hard, shiny smile. I think of him beating his nine-year-old son into unconsciousness.

He might have decided not to pay. The thought is there, a needling doubt, and I try to ignore it.

Thinking of Thomas Fineman reminds me: “How old is your brother now?” I ask.

“What?” Julian sits up so his back is toward me. He must have heard me, but I repeat the question anyway. I watch his spine stiffen: a tiny contraction, barely noticeable.

“He’s dead,” he says abruptly.

“How—how did he die?” I ask gently.

Again, Julian nearly spits the word out. “Accident.”

Even though I can tell Julian’s uncomfortable talking about it, I just don’t want to let it drop. “What kind of accident?”

“It was a long time ago,” he says shortly, and then, suddenly whirling on me, “Why do you care, anyway? Why are you so curious? I don’t know shit about you. And I don’t pry. I don’t bother you about it.”

I’m so startled by his outburst, I nearly snap back. But I’ve been slipping too much; and so instead I take refuge in the smoothness, the roundness, of Lena Morgan Jones’s calm: the calm of the walking dead; the calm of the cured.

I say smoothly, “I was just curious. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

For a second I think I see panic on Julian’s face; it flashes there like a warning. Then it’s gone, replaced by a sternness I have seen in his father. He nods once, curtly, and stands, begins pacing the room. I take a perverse pleasure in his agitation. He was so calm at first. It’s gratifying to see him lose it just a little: Down here the protection and certainty offered by the DFA mean nothing.

Just like that we are on opposite sides again. There’s comfort in the morning’s stony silence. It is how things should be. It is right.

I should never have let him touch me. I shouldn’t have even let him get close. In my head, I repeat an apology
: I’m sorry. I’ll be careful. No more slipping.
I’m not sure whether I’m speaking to Raven or Alex or both.

The water never comes; neither does the food. And then, midmorning, a subtle change in the air: echoes different from the sounds of dripping water and the hollow flow of underground air. For the first time in hours, Julian looks at me.

“Do you hear—,” he starts to say, and I shush him.

Voices in the hall, and heavy boot steps—more than one person is approaching. My heart speeds up, and I look around instinctively for a weapon. Other than the bucket, there isn’t much. I’ve already tried to unscrew the metal bedposts from the cots, with no success. My backpack is on the other side of the room, and just as I’m thinking of making a dive for it—any weapon is better than no weapon at all—locks scrape open and the door swings inward and two Scavengers step into the room. Both of them are carrying guns.

“You.” The Scavenger in front, middle-aged, with the whitest skin I’ve ever seen, points to Julian with the butt of his rifle. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” Julian asks, although he must know they won’t answer. He is standing, keeping his arms pressed to his sides. His voice is steady.

“We’ll be asking the questions,” the pale man says, and smiles. He has dark-spotted gums, and yellow teeth. He is wearing heavy military-style pants and an old military jacket, but he is a Scavenger beyond a shadow of a doubt. On his left hand I see a faint pattern of a blue tattoo, and as he steps farther into the room, circling Julian like a jackal looping around its prey, my blood goes cold. He has a procedural scar, too, but his is terribly botched: three slashes on his neck, red like gaping wounds. He has tattooed a black triangle between them. Decades ago the procedure was much riskier than it is now, and growing up we heard stories about the people who weren’t cured at all, but turned crazy, or brain-dead, or totally and utterly ruthless—incapable of feeling anything for anyone else, ever.

I try to fight the panic that’s building in my chest, sending my heart into a skittering, erratic rhythm. The second Scavenger, a girl who might be Raven’s age, is leaning in the door frame, blocking my exit. She’s taller than I am but thinner, too. Her face is heavily pierced—I count five rings in each eyebrow, and gems studded into her chin and forehead—as well as what looks like a wedding ring looped through her septum. I don’t want to think about where she got it. She has a handgun strapped to a belt hanging low on her hips. I try to estimate how quickly she could have it out and pointed at my head.

Her eyes flick to mine. She must interpret the expression on my face because she says, “Don’t even think about it.”

Her voice is strange and slurry, and when she opens her mouth to yawn I see it is because her tongue is glinting with metal. Metal studs, metal rings, metal wires: all of it looping on and around her tongue, making her look like she has swallowed barbed wire.

Julian hesitates for only a moment more. He jerks forward—a sudden, wrenching movement—and then recovers. As he passes through the door, flanked on one side by the pierced girl and on the other by the albino, he goes gracefully, as though he’s strolling to a picnic.

He does not look at me, not even once. Then the door grates shut again, and the locks click into place, and I am left alone.

The waiting is an agony. My body feels like it’s on fire. And although I’m hungry, and thirsty, and weak, I can’t stop pacing. I try not to think about what they’ve done with Julian. Maybe he has been ransomed and released after all. But I didn’t like the way the albino smiled and said,
We’ ll be asking the questions
.

In the Wilds, Raven taught me to look for patterns everywhere: the orientation of the moss on the trees; the level of undergrowth; the color of the soil. She taught me, too, to look for the inconsistencies—an area of sudden growth might mean water. A sudden stillness usually means a large predator is nearby. More animals than usual? More food.

The appearance of the Scavengers is inconsistent, and I don’t like it.

To keep myself busy I unpack and repack my backpack. Then I unpack it again and lay its contents on the ground, as though the sad collection of items is a hieroglyph that might suddenly yield new meaning. Two granola bar wrappers. A tube of mascara. One empty water bottle.
The Book of Shhh
. One umbrella. I get up, turn a circle, and sit down again.

Through the walls, I think I hear a muffled shout. I tell myself it’s just my imagination.

I pull
The Book of Shhh
onto my lap and flip through the pages. Even though the psalms and prayers are still familiar, the words look strange and their meanings are indecipherable: It’s like returning somewhere you haven’t been since you were a child, and finding everything smaller and disappointing. It reminds me of the time Hana unearthed a dress she had worn every day in first grade. We were in her room, bored, messing around, and she and I laughed and laughed, and she kept repeating,
I can’t believe I was ever that small
.

My chest begins to ache. It seems impossibly, unbelievably long ago—when I could sit in a room with carpet, when we could spend days messing around, doing nothing in each other’s company. I didn’t realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.

Halfway through
The Book of Shhh
a page has been dog-eared. I stop, and see several words in one paragraph have been emphatically underlined. The excerpt comes from Chapter 22: Social History.

When you consider how society may persist in ignorance, you must also consider how long it will persist in delusion; all stupidity is changed to inevitability, and all ills are made into values (choice turned to freedom, and love to happiness), so there is no possibility of escape.

Three words have been forcefully underscored:
You. Must. Escape.

I flip forward another few chapters and find another dog-eared page where words have been circled, seemingly sloppily and at random. The full passage reads:

The tools of a healthy society are obedience, commitment, and agreement. Responsibility lies both with the government and with its citizens. Responsibility lies with you.

Someone—Tack? Raven?—has circled various words in the paragraph:
The tools are with you.

Now I’m checking every page. Somehow, they knew this would happen; they knew I might be—or would be—taken. No wonder Tack insisted I bring
The Book of Shhh
; he left clues for me in it. A feeling of pure joy wells up inside of me. They didn’t forget about me, and they haven’t abandoned me. Until now, I haven’t realized how terrified I’ve been—without Tack and Raven, I have no one. Over the past year, they have become everything to me: friends, parents, siblings, mentors.

There is only one other page that has been marked up. A large star has been drawn next to Psalm 37.

Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain;

The calm shall be buried inside of me;

A warm stone, heavy and dry;

The root, the source, a weapon against pain.

I read through the psalm several times as disappointment comes thudding back. I was hoping for some kind of encoded message, but no deeper meaning is immediately apparent. Maybe Tack only meant for me to stay calm. Or maybe the star was penned in earlier, and is unrelated; or maybe I’ve misunderstood and the markings are random, a fluke.

But no. Tack gave me the book because he knew I might need it. Tack and Raven are meticulous. They don’t do things randomly or without purpose. When you are living on a razor’s edge, there is no room at all for fumbling.

Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain…

Rain.

Tack’s umbrella—the one he pushed into my hands, and insisted I bring, on a cloudless day.

My hands are shaking as I pull the umbrella onto my lap and begin to examine it more closely. Almost immediately, I spot a tiny fissure—imperceptible, had I not been looking for it—that runs the length of the handle. I slide my fingernail into the miniscule crack and try to pry the handle apart, but it won’t budge.

“Shit,” I say out loud, which makes me feel a little better. “Shit, shit, shit.” Each time I say it, I try to pull and twist the umbrella apart, but the wood handle stays cleanly intact, polished and pretty.

“Shit!” Something inside me snaps—it’s the frustration, the waiting, the heavy silence. I throw the umbrella, hard, against the wall. It hits with a crack. As it lands, the halves of the handle come neatly apart, and from between them a knife clatters to the ground. When I pull it from its leather sheath, I recognize it as one of Tack’s. It has a carved bone handle and a viciously sharp blade. I once saw Tack gut an entire deer with it, cleanly, from throat to tail. Now the blade is polished so brightly that I can see my reflection in it.

Suddenly there is noise from the hallway: clomping footsteps, and a heavy grating sound, too, as though something is being dragged toward the cell. I tense up, gripping the knife, still in a crouch—I could make a run for it when the door opens; I could lunge at the Scavengers, swipe, swipe, take out an eye or get in at least one cut, make a run for it—but before I have time to plan or choose, the door is swinging open and it’s Julian who comes toppling through, half-conscious, so bruised and bleeding I recognize him only by his shirt, and then the door slams shut again.