Pandemonium (34 page)

“Take off your mask,” I say. For a second, I think I see a flash of fear in her eyes. Then it passes.

“Let go of me.” Her voice is quiet, but firm.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll take it off myself.”

I reach for her mask. She swats me away but not quickly enough. I manage to lift a corner of the fabric back, peeling it away from her neck, where a small tattooed number runs vertically from her ear toward her shoulder: 5996. But before I can wrangle the mask any higher, she gets hold of my wrist and pushes me away.

“Please, Lena,” she says, and again I hear the urgency in her voice.

“Stop saying my name.”
You don’t have a right to say my name.
Anger surges in my chest, and I swing at her with my backpack, but she ducks. Before I can go at her again, the door opens behind me and I spin around as Raven strides into the room.

“Raven!” I cry out, running to her. I throw my arms around her impulsively. We’ve never hugged before, but she allows me to squeeze her tightly for several seconds before she pulls away. She’s grinning.

“Hey, kid.” She runs a finger lightly along the cut on my neck, and scans my face for other injuries. “You look like shit.”

Tack is behind her, leaning in the doorway. He’s also smiling, and I can barely keep myself from flying at him, too. I settle for reaching forward and squeezing the hand he offers me.

“Welcome back, Lena,” he says. His eyes are warm.

“I don’t understand.” I’m overwhelmingly happy; relief makes waves in my chest. “How did you find me? How did you know where I would be? She wouldn’t tell me anything, I—” I turn around, gesturing to the masked woman, but she is gone. She must have ducked out the double doors.

“Easy, easy.” Raven laughs, and slings an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get you something to eat, okay? You’re probably tired, too. Are you tired?” She’s piloting me past Tack, through the open door. We must be in some kind of a converted warehouse. I hear other voices, talking and laughing, through the flimsy dividing walls.

“I was kidnapped,” I say, and now the words bubble out of me. I need to tell Tack and Raven; they’ll understand, they’ll be able to explain and make sense of everything. “After the demonstration I followed Julian into the old tunnels. And there were Scavengers, and they attacked me—only I think the Scavengers must have been working with the DFA, and—”

Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Tack speaks up soothingly. “Listen, Lena. We know you’ve been through a lot. Just relax, okay? You’re safe now. Eat up, and rest up.” They’ve led me into a room dominated by a large metal folding table. On it are foods I haven’t had in forever: fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, cheese. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The air smells like coffee, good and strong.

But I can’t sit and eat yet. First, I need to know. And I need them to know—about the Scavengers, and the people who live underground, and the raid this morning, and about Julian.

They can help me rescue Julian: The thought comes to me suddenly, a deliverance. “But—,” I start to protest. Raven cuts me off, laying a hand on my shoulder.

“Tack’s right, Lena. You need to get your strength up. And we’ll have plenty of time to talk on the road.”

“On the road?” I repeat, looking from Raven to Tack. They are both smiling at me, still, and it makes a nervous prickling feeling in my chest. It is a form of indulgence, the smile doctors give children when they administer painful shots.
Now I promise, this will only pinch for a second. . . .

“We’re heading north,” Raven says in a too-cheerful voice. “Back to the homestead. Well, not the original homestead—we’ll spend the summer outside of Waterbury. Hunter has been in touch. He heard about a big homestead by the perimeter of the city, lots of sympathizers on the other side, and—”

My mind has gone blank. “We’re leaving?” I say dumbly, and Raven and Tack exchange another look. “We can’t leave now.”

“We have no other choice,” Raven says, and I start to feel anger rising in my chest. She’s using her singsong voice, like she’s speaking to a baby.

“No.” I shake my head, ball my fists against my thighs. “No. Don’t you get it? I think the Scavengers are working with the DFA. I was kidnapped with Julian Fineman. They locked us underground for days.”

“We know,” Tack says, but I barrel on, coasting on the fury now, letting it build.

“We had to fight our way out. They almost—they almost killed me. Julian saved me.” The rock in my stomach is migrating up into my throat. “And now they’ve taken Julian, and who knows what they’ll do. Probably drag him straight to the labs, or maybe throw him in prison, and—”

“Lena.” Raven puts her hands on my shoulders. “Calm down.”

But I can’t. I’m shaking from panic and rage. Tack and Raven must understand; they need to. “We have to do something. We have to help him. We have to—”

“Lena.” Raven’s voice turns sharper, and she gives me a shake. “We know about the Scavengers, okay? We know they’ve been working with the DFA. We know all about Julian, and everything that happened underground. We’ve been scouting for you around all the tunnel exits. We were hoping you would make it out days ago.”

This, at last, makes me shut up. Raven and Tack have finally stopped smiling. Instead they are looking at me with twin expressions of pity.

“What do you mean?” I pull away from Raven’s touch and stumble a bit; when Tack draws a chair out from the table, I thud into it. Neither of them answers right away, so I say, “I don’t understand.”

Tack takes a chair across from me. He examines his hands, then says slowly, “The resistance has known for a while that the Scavengers were being paid off by the DFA. They were hired to pull off that stunt you saw at the demonstration.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I feel like my brain is covered in thick paste; my thoughts flounder, come to nothing. I remember the screaming, the shooting, the Scavengers’ glittering blades.

“It makes perfect sense.” Raven speaks up. She is still standing, keeping her arms wrapped around her chest. “Nobody in Zombieland knows the difference between the Scavengers and the rest of us—the other Invalids. We’re all the same to them. So the Scavengers come and act like animals, and the DFA shows the whole country how terrible we are without the cure, how important it is to get everyone treated for
deliria
immediately. Otherwise the world goes to hell. The Scavengers are the proof.”

“But—” I think of the Scavengers swarming into the crowd; faces monstrous with screaming. “But people died.”

“Two hundred,” Tack says quietly. He still won’t look at me. “Two dozen officers. The rest citizens. They didn’t bother to tally the Scavengers who were killed.” He shrugs his shoulders, a quick convulsion. “Sometimes it is necessary that individuals are sacrificed for the health of the whole.” That’s straight out of a DFA pamphlet.

“Okay,” I say. My hands are shaking, and I grip the sides of my chair. I’m still having trouble thinking straight. “Okay. So what are we going to do about it?”

Raven’s eyes flick to Tack, but he keeps his head bowed. “We’ve already done something about it, Lena,” she says, still in that baby-voice, and once again I get a weird prickling in my chest. There is something they aren’t telling me—something bad.

“I don’t understand.” My voice sounds hollow.

There are a few seconds of heavy silence. Then Tack sighs, and says over his shoulder to Raven, “I told you, we should have clued her in from the start. I told you we should have trusted her.”

Raven says nothing. A muscle twitches in her jaw. And suddenly I remember coming downstairs a few weeks before the rally and hearing Tack and Raven fighting.

I just don’t understand why we can’t be honest with each other. We’re supposed to be on the same side.

You know that’s unrealistic, Tack. It’s for the best. You have to trust me.

You’re the one who isn’t trusting. . . .

They were fighting about me.

“Clued me in to what?” The prickling is becoming a heavy thud, painful and sharp.

“Go ahead,” Raven says to Tack. “If you want to tell her so badly, be my guest.” Her voice is biting, but I can tell, underneath that, she’s afraid. She’s afraid of me and how I will react.

“Tell me what?” I can’t stand this anymore—the cryptic glances, the impenetrable web of half phrases.

Tack passes a hand over his forehead. “Okay, look,” he says, speaking quickly now, as though eager to end the conversation. “It wasn’t a mistake that you and Julian were taken by the Scavengers, okay? It wasn’t an error. It was planned.”

Heat creeps up my neck. I lick my lips. “Who planned it?” I say, though I know: It must have been the DFA. I answer my own question, saying, “The DFA,” just as Tack grimaces and says, “We did.”

Ticking silence. One, two, three, four. I count off the seconds, take a deep breath, close my eyes, and reopen them. “What?”

Tack actually flushes. “We did. The resistance planned it.”

More silence. My throat and mouth have gone to dust. “I—I don’t understand.”

Tack is avoiding my eyes again. He walks his fingers across the edge of the table, back and forth, back and forth. “We paid the Scavengers to take Julian. Well, the resistance did. One of the higher-ups in the movement has been posing as a DFA agent—not that it matters. The Scavengers will do anything for a price, and just because they’ve been in the DFA’s pocket for a while now doesn’t mean their loyalties aren’t for sale.”

“Julian,” I repeat. Numbness is creeping through my body. “And what about me?”

Tack hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “They were paid to hold you, too. They were told that Julian was being tailed by a girl. They were told to hold both of you together.”

“And they thought they’d get a ransom for us,” I say. Tack nods. My voice sounds foreign, as though it’s coming from far away. I can hardly breathe. I manage to gasp out, “Why?”

Raven has been standing still, staring at the ground. Suddenly she bursts out, “You were never in any danger. Not really. The Scavengers knew they wouldn’t get paid if they touched you.”

I think back to the argument I overheard in the tunnels, the wheedling voice urging Albino to stick with the original plan, the way they tried to pump Julian for information about his security codes. The Scavengers were obviously getting impatient. They wanted their payday sooner.

“Never in any danger?” I repeat. Raven won’t look at me either. “I—I almost died.” Anger is spreading hot tentacles through my chest. “We were starved. We were jumped. Julian was beaten half to death. We had to fight—”

“And you did.” Finally Raven looks at me, and to my horror her eyes are shining; she looks happy. “You escaped, and you got Julian out safely too.”

For several seconds I can’t speak. I am burning, burning, burning, as the true meaning of everything that happened slams into me. “This … this was all a test?”

“No,” Tack says firmly. “No, Lena. You have to understand. That was part of it, but—”

I push back from the table, turn away from the sound of his voice. I want to curl into a ball. I want to scream, or hit something.

“It was bigger than that, what you did. What you helped us do. And we would have made sure you were safe. We have our own people underground. They’d been told to look out for you.”

The rat-man and Coin. No wonder they helped us. They were paid to.

I can’t speak anymore. I am having trouble swallowing. It takes all my energy just to stay on my feet. The containment, the fear, the bodyguards who were killed in the subway—the resistance’s fault. Our fault. A test.

Raven speaks up again, her voice filled with quiet urgency: a salesman trying to convince you to buy, buy, buy. “You did a great thing for us, Lena. You’ve helped the resistance in more ways than you know.”

“I did nothing,” I spit out.

“You did everything. Julian was tremendously important to the DFA. A symbol of everything the DFA stands for. Head of the youth group. That’s six hundred thousand people alone, young people, uncured. Unconvinced.”

My blood goes all at once to ice. I turn around slowly. Tack and Raven are both looking at me hopefully, as though they expect me to be pleased. “What does Julian have to do with this?” I say.

Once again Raven and Tack exchange a glance. This time I can read what they are thinking: I am being difficult, obtuse. I should understand this by now.