Pandemonium (33 page)

The bed is very narrow. I turn onto my side, away from Julian, but when he puts his arm around me I relax backward into him, cupped in the long curve of his body as though I have been shaped for it. I want to run away and cry. I want to beg Alex—wherever he is, whatever otherworld now holds him—for forgiveness. I want to kiss Julian again.

But I do not do any of those things. I lie still, and feel Julian’s steady heartbeat through my back until my heart calms in response, and I let him hold me, and just before I fall asleep, I say a brief prayer that the morning never comes.

But the morning does come. It finds its way in through the cracks in the plywood, the fissures in the roof: a murky grayness, a slight ebbing of the dark. My first moments of awareness are confused: I believe I am with Alex. No. Julian. His arm is around me, his breath hot on my neck. I have kicked the sheets to the bottom of the bed in the night. I see a flicker of movement from the hall; the cat has gotten into the house somehow.

Then suddenly, a driving certainty—no, I closed the door last night, I locked it—and terror squeezing my chest.

I sit up, say, “Julian—”

And then everything explodes: They are streaming through the door, bursting through the walls, yelling, screaming—police and regulators in gas masks and matching gray uniforms. One of them grabs me and another one pulls Julian off the bed—he is awake now, calling to me, but I can’t hear over the tumult of sound, over the screaming that must be coming from me. I grab the backpack, still balled at the foot of my bed, and swing at the regulator but there are three more, flanking me in the narrow space between beds, and it’s hopeless. I remember the gun: still in the bathing room, and useless to me now. Someone pulls me by the collar and I choke. Another regulator wrenches my arms behind my back and cuffs me, then pushes me forward, so I am half dragged, half marched through Salvage and out into the bright, streaming sunshine, where more police are gathered, more members of the SWAT team carrying guns and gas masks—frozen, silent, waiting.

Setup. Those are the words drilling through me, through my panic. Setup. Has to be.

“Got ’em,” someone announces into a walkie-talkie, and all of a sudden the air comes to life, vibrates with sound: People are shouting to one another, gesturing. Two police officers gun the engines of their motorcycles, and the stink of exhaust is everywhere. Walkie-talkies cackle around us—buzzing, a cacophony.

“Ten-four, ten-four. We got ’em.”

“Twenty miles outside of regulated land … looked like some kind of hideout.”

“Unit 508 to HQ…”

Julian is behind me, surrounded by four regulators; he has been cuffed too.

“Lena! Lena!” I hear him calling my name. I try to turn around and am shoved forward by the regulator behind me.

“Keep moving,” the regulator says, and I’m surprised to hear a woman’s voice, distorted through the gas mask.

A caravan of vehicles is parked on the road Julian and I walked, and there are more police officers here, and more members of the SWAT team. Some of them are in full gear, but others are leaning casually against their cars, dressed in civilian clothing, chatting and blowing on Styrofoam mugs of coffee. They barely glance at me as I am hauled, struggling, down the line of cars. I’m full of blind rage, a fury that makes me want to spit. This is routine for them. They will go home at the end of the day, to their orderly houses and their orderly families, and they will give no thought to the girl they saw screaming and kicking and dragged away, probably to her death.

I see a black town car; Thomas Fineman’s white, narrow face watches me impassively as I go by. If I could shake a fist loose I would plunge it through the window. I’d watch all the glass explode into his face, see how calm he would stay then.

“Hey, hey, hey!” A policeman is waving to us from up ahead, gesturing with his walkie-talkie toward a police van. Black words stand out vividly against its sparkling white paint:
CITY OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION, REFORM, AND PURIFICATION
. In Portland, we had a single prison, the Crypts. It housed all the criminals and resisters, plus the resident loonies, many of them driven crazy by botched or early cures. In New York and its sister cities there is a web of interrelated jails, a network stretching all across the sister cities, with a name almost as bad as the one Portland gave its prison: the Craps.

“Over here, this way!” Now another policeman is waving us over to a different van, and there is a momentary pause. The whole scene is a mass of confusion, more chaotic than the raids I’ve seen. There are too many people. There are too many cars choking the air with exhaust, too many radios buzzing at once, people talking and shouting over one another. A regulator and a member of the SWAT team are arguing about jurisdiction.

My head hurts; the sun is burning my eyes. All I see is glittering, glaring sunshine; a metal river of cars and motorcycles, exhaust turning the air to mirage, to thickness and smoke.

Suddenly panic crests inside of me. I don’t know what happened to Julian. He isn’t behind me anymore, and I can’t see him in the crowd. “Julian!” I scream out, and get no answer, although one policeman turns at the sound of my voice and then, shaking his head, hocks a brown glob of saliva onto the ground by my feet. I’m fighting against the woman behind me again, trying to tear myself out of her grasp, but her hands are a vise around my wrists and the more I struggle, the tighter she holds.

“Julian! Julian!”

No response. The panic has turned to a solid lump, and it is clotting my throat.
No, no, no, no. Not again.

“All right, keep going.” The woman’s distorted gas-mask voice urges me forward. She pushes me past the line of waiting cars. The regulator who has been leading the procession is speaking rapidly into his walkie-talkie, some argument with Command about who is to take me in, and he barely glances at us as we thread through the crowd. I’m still fighting the woman behind me with every bit of strength I have, even though the way she is holding my arms sends a fiery pain from my wrists to my shoulders, and even if I did break free, I’m still handcuffed and wouldn’t get more than a few feet without getting tackled.

But the rock in my throat is there, and the panic, and the certainty. I need to find Julian. I need to save him.

Beneath that, older words, more urgent words, continue to surge through me:
Not again, not again, not again
.

“Julian!” I strike backward with my foot and connect with the woman’s shins. I hear her curse, and for just a second her grip loosens. But then she is once again restraining me, jerking my wrists so sharply that I gasp.

And then, as I tipped backward to give relief to my arms, trying to catch my breath, trying not to cry, she bends forward a little so the mouth of her mask bumps once against my ears.

“Lena,” she says, low. “Please. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m a freedom fighter.”

That word freezes me: That’s a secret code sympathizers and Invalids use to indicate their allegiances. I stop trying to fight her off, and her grip relaxes. But she continues to propel me forward, past the caravan of cars. She walks quickly, and with such purpose that nobody stops her or interferes.

Up ahead I see a white van straddling the gutter that runs next to the dirt road. It is also stenciled with the CRAP sign, but the markings seem slightly off—they are a tiny bit too small, I realize, although you’d have to be staring to notice it. We’ve rounded a bend in the road and are concealed from the rest of the security detail by an enormous pile of twisted metal and shattered concrete.

Suddenly the woman releases my arms. She springs forward to the van and produces a set of keys from one of her pockets. She swings open the back doors; the interior of the van is dark, empty, and smells faintly sour.

“In,” she says.

“Where are you taking me?” I’m sick of this helplessness; for days I’ve been left with a swirling confusion, a sense of secret allegiances and complex plots.

“Somewhere safe,” she says, and even through the mask I can hear the urgency in her voice. I have no choice but to believe her. She helps me into the van and instructs me to turn around while she unlocks my handcuffs. Then she tosses in my backpack and slams the doors shut. My heart flips a little as I hear her slide a lock into place. I’m trapped now. But it can’t be worse than what I would have faced outside the van, and my stomach bottoms as I think of Julian. I wonder what will happen to him. Maybe—I feel a brief flicker of hope—they’ll go easy on him, because of his dad. Maybe they’ll decide it was all just a mistake.

And it was a mistake: the kissing, the way we touched.

Wasn’t it?

The van lurches forward, sending me tumbling onto an elbow. The van floor rattles and shakes as we bump along the pitted road. I try to mentally chart our progress: We must be near the dump now, headed past the old train station and toward the tunnel that goes into New York. After ten minutes we roll to a stop. I crawl to the front of the truck bed and press my ear against the pane of glass—painted black, completely opaque—that separates me from the driver’s seat. The woman’s voice filters back to me. I can make out a second voice, too: a man’s voice. She must be talking to Border Control.

The waiting is an agony. They’ll be running her SVS card, I think. But the seconds tick away, and stretch into minutes. The woman is silent. Maybe SVS is backed up. Even though it’s cold in the cab, my underarms are damp with sweat.

Then the second voice is back, barking a command. The engine cuts off, and the silence is sudden and extreme. The driver’s door opens and slams shut. The van sways a little.

Why is she getting out? My mind is racing: If she is a part of the resistance, she may have been caught, recognized. They’re sure to find me next. Or—and I’m not sure which is worse—they won’t find me. I’ll be trapped here; I’ll starve to death, or suffocate. Suddenly I’m having trouble breathing. The air is thick and full of pressure. More sweat trickles down my neck and beads on my scalp.

Then the driver’s door opens, the engine guns to life, and the van sails forward. I exhale, almost a sob. I can somehow feel it as we enter the Holland Tunnel: the long, dark throat around the van, a watery, echoey place. I imagine the river above us, flecked with gray. I think of Julian’s eyes, the way they change like water reflecting different kinds of light.

The van hits a pothole, and my stomach lurches as I rocket into the air and down onto the floor again. Then a climb, and through the metal walls I can hear sporadic sounds of traffic: the distant whirring of a siren, a horn bleating nearby. We must be in New York. I’m expecting the van to stop at any minute—every time we do stop, I half expect the doors to slide open and for the woman in the mask to haul me into the Craps, even though she told me she was on my side—but another twenty minutes passes. I have stopped trying to keep track of where we are. Instead I curl up in a ball on the dirty floor, which vibrates under my cheek. I am still nauseous. The air smells like body odor and old food.

Finally the van slows, and then stops altogether. I sit up, heart pounding in my chest. I hear a brief exchange—the woman says something I can’t make out, and somebody else says, “All clear.” Then there is a tremendous creaking, as of old doors scraping back on their hinges. The van advances forward another ten or twenty feet, then stops again. The engine goes silent. I hear the driver climb out of the van and I tense, gripping my backpack in one hand, preparing to fight or run.

The doors swing open, and as I slide cautiously out of the back, disappointment is a fist in my throat. I was hoping for some clues, some answer to why I’ve been taken and by whom. Instead I am in a featureless room, all concrete and exposed steel beams. There is an enormous double door, wide enough to accommodate the van, in one wall; in another wall is a second single door, this one made of metal and painted the same dull gray as everything else. At least there are electric lights. That means we are in an approved city, or close to one.

The driver has removed her gas mask but is still wearing a tight-fitting nylon cloth over her head, with cut-away holes for her mouth, nose, and eyes.

“What is this place?” I ask as I straighten up and swing the backpack onto one shoulder. “Who are you?”

She doesn’t answer me. She is watching me intently. Her eyes are gray, a stormy color. Suddenly she reaches out, as though to touch my face. I jerk backward, bumping against the van. She, too, takes a step backward, balling up her fist.

“Wait here,” she says. She turns to leave through the double doors, the ones that admitted us, but I grab her wrist.

“I want to know what this is about,” I say. I am tired of plain walls and closed rooms and masks and games. I want answers. “I want to know how you found me, and who sent you to get me.”

“I’m not the one who can give you the answers you need,” she says, and tries to shake me off.