Pandemonium (35 page)

“Julian has everything to do with it, Lena,” Raven says. She sits down at the table, next to Tack. They are the patient parents; I am the troublemaking teen. We could be discussing a flunked test. “If Julian’s out of the DFA, if he’s cast out—”

“Even better, if he chooses out,” Tack interjects, and Raven spreads her hands as if to say,
Obviously
.

She continues, “If he’s cast out or he wants out, either way, it sends a powerful message to all the uncureds who have followed him and seen him as a leader. They might rethink their loyalties—some of them will, at least. We have a chance to bring them over to our side. Think about that, Lena. That’s enough to make a real difference. That’s enough to turn the tide in our favor.”

My mind is moving slowly, as though it has been encased in ice. This morning’s raids—planned. I thought it was a setup, and I was right. The resistance was behind it: They must have tipped off the police and the regulators. They gave up the location of one of their own homesteads just to ensnare Julian.

And I helped ensnare him. I think of his father’s face, floating in the window of the black town car: tight, grim, determined. I think of the story Julian told me about his older brother—how his father locked him in a basement, injured, to die alone and in the dark. And that was just for participating in a demonstration.

Julian was in bed with me. Who knows what they’ll do to him as punishment.

Blackness surges inside of me. I close my eyes and see Alex and Julian’s faces, merging together and then separating, like they did in my dream. It’s happening again. It’s happening again, and again it’s my fault.

“Lena?” I hear a chair scrape away from the table and suddenly Raven is next to me, slipping an arm around my shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“Can we get you something?” Tack asks.

I shake out of Raven’s grasp. “Get off of me.”

“Lena,” Raven croons. “Come on. Have a seat.” She is reaching for me again.

“I said, get off of me.” I pull away from her, stumble backward, bump against a chair.

“I’m going to get some water,” Tack says. He pushes away from the table and heads into a hall that must lead to the rest of the warehouse. For a moment I hear a surge in conversation, raucous, welcoming; then silence.

My hands are shaking so badly I can’t even squeeze them into fists. Otherwise I might hit Raven in the face.

She sighs. “I understand why you’re mad. Maybe Tack was right. Maybe we should have told you the plan from the beginning.” She sounds tired.

“You—you used me,” I spit out.

“You said you wanted to help,” Raven says simply.

“No. Not like that.”

“You don’t get to choose.” Raven takes a seat again and lays her hands flat on the table. “That isn’t how it works.”

I can feel her willing me to yield, to sit, to understand. But I can’t, and I won’t.

“What about Julian?” I force myself to meet her eyes, and I think I see her flinch just slightly.

“He’s not your problem.” Raven’s voice turns slightly harder.

“Yeah?” I think of Julian’s fingers running through my hair, the encircling warmth of his arms, how he whispered,
I want to know. I want to know with you
. “What if I want to make him my problem?”

Raven and I stare at each other. Her patience is running out. Her mouth is set in a line, angry and tight. “There’s nothing you can do,” she says shortly. “Don’t you get it? Lena Morgan Jones doesn’t exist anymore. Poof—she’s gone. There’s no way back in for her. There’s no way in for you. Your job is done.”

“So we leave Julian to be killed? Or thrown in prison?”

Once again Raven sighs, as though I’m a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. “Julian Fineman is the head of the youth division of the DFA—,” she begins again.

“I know all that,” I snap. “You made me memorize it, remember? So, what? He gets sacrificed for the cause?”

Raven looks at me in silence: an assent.

“You’re just as bad as they are,” I squeeze out, through the tightness of the fury in my throat, the heavy stone of disgust. That is the DFA’s motto too: Some will die for the health of the whole. We have become like them.

Raven stands again and moves toward the hallway. “You can’t feel guilty, Lena,” she says. “This is war, you know.”

“Don’t you get it?” I fire back at her the very words she used on me a long time ago, back at the burrow, after Miyako died. “You can’t tell me what to feel.”

Raven shakes her head. I see a flash of pity on her face. “You—you really liked him, then? Julian?”

I can’t answer. I can only nod.

Raven rubs her forehead tiredly and sighs again. For a moment I think she is going to relent. She’ll agree to help me. I feel a surge of hope.

But when she looks at me again, her face is composed, emotionless. “We leave tomorrow to go north,” she says simply, and just like that the conversation is ended. Julian will go to the gallows for us, and we will smile, and dream of victory—hazy-red, soon to come, a blood-colored dawn.

The rest of the day is a fog. I drift from room to room. Faces turn to me, expectant, smiling, and turn away again when I do not acknowledge them. These must be other members of the resistance. I recognize only one of them, a guy Tack’s age who came once to Salvage to bring us our new identity cards. I look for the woman who brought me here but see no one who resembles her, hear no one who speaks the way she did.

I drift and I listen. I gather we are twenty miles north of New York, and just south of a city named White Plains. We must be skimming our electricity from them: We have lights, a radio, even an electric coffeemaker. One of the rooms is piled with tents and rolled-up sleeping bags. Tack and Raven have prepared us for the move. I have no idea how many of the other resisters will be joining us; presumably, at least some of them will stay. Other than the folding table and chairs, and a room full of sleeping cots, there is no furniture. The radio and the coffeemaker sit directly on the cement floor, nested in a tangle of wires. The radio stays on for most of the day, piping thinly through the walls, and no matter where I go, I can’t escape it.

“Julian Fineman … head of the youth division of
Deliria-
Free America and son of the group’s president…”

“… himself a victim of the disease…”

Every radio station is the same. They all tell an identical story.

“… discovered today…”

“… currently under house arrest…”

“Julian … resigned his position and has refused the cure…”

A year ago, the story would not have been reported at all. It would have been suppressed, the way the very existence of Julian’s brother was no doubt slowly and systematically expunged from public records after his death. But things have changed since the Incidents. Raven is right about one thing: It is war now, and armies need symbols.

“… emergency convention of the Regulatory Committee of New York … swift judgment … scheduled for execution by lethal injection at ten a.m. tomorrow…”

“… some are calling the measures unnecessarily harsh … public outcry against the DFA and the RCNY…”

I sink into a dullness, a place of suspension: I can no longer feel anything. The anger has ebbed away, and so has the guilt. I am completely numb. Julian will die tomorrow. I helped him die.

This was the plan all along. It is no comfort to think that had he been cured, he would have in all probability died as well. My body is chilled, frozen to ice. At some point someone must have handed me a sweatshirt, because I am wearing one. But still I can’t get warm.

“… Thomas Fineman’s official statement…

“The DFA stands behind the Regulatory Committee’s decision… They say: ‘The United States is at a critical juncture, and we can no longer tolerate those who want to do us harm … we must set a precedent…’”

The DFA and the United States of America can no longer afford to be lenient. The resistance is too strong. It is growing—underground, in tunnels and burrows, in the dark, damp places they cannot reach.

So they will make a bloody example for us in public, in the light.

At dinner, I manage to eat something, and even though I still can’t bring myself to look at Raven and Tack, I can tell they take this as a sign that I have relented. They are forced-cheerful, too loud, telling jokes and stories to the four or five other resisters who have assembled around the table. Still, the radio-voice infiltrates, seeps through the walls, like the sibilant hiss of a snake.

“… No other statement from either Julian or Thomas Fineman…”

After dinner, I go to the outhouse: a tiny shed fifty feet from the main building, across a short expanse of cracked pavement. It is the first time I’ve been outside all day, and the first chance I’ve had to look around. We are in some kind of old warehouse. It sits at the end of a long, winding concrete drive surrounded by woods on both sides. To the north I can make out the twinkling glow of city lights: This must be White Plains. And to the south, against the blush-pink evening sky, I can just detect a hazy, halo glow, the artificial crown of lights that indicates New York City. It must be around seven o’clock, still too early for curfew or mandatory blackout. Julian is somewhere among those lights, in that blur of people and buildings. I wonder whether he’s scared. I wonder whether he’s thinking of me.

The wind is cold but carries with it the smell of thawing earth and new growth: a spring smell. I think of our apartment in Brooklyn—packed up now, or perhaps ransacked by regulators and police. Lena Morgan Jones is dead, like Raven said, and now there will be a new Lena, just like every spring the trees bring forth new growth on top of the old, on top of the dead and the rot. I wonder who she will be.

I feel a sharp stab of sadness. I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of the things and people I have cared for: My mom. Grace. Hana. Alex.

And now Julian.

This is not who I wanted to be.

An owl hoots somewhere, sharply, in the gathering darkness, like a faint alarm. That’s when it really hits me, the certainty like a concrete wall going up inside of me. This is not what I wanted. This is not why I came to the Wilds, why Alex wanted me to come: not to turn my back and bury the people I care about, and build myself hard and careless on top of their bodies, as Raven does. That is what the Zombies do.

But not me. I have let too many things decay. I have given up on enough.

The owl hoots again, and now its cry sounds sharper, clearer. Everything seems clearer: the creaking of the dry trees; the smells in the air, layered and deep; a distant rumbling, which swells on the air, then fades again.

Truck. I’ve been listening without thinking, but now the word, the idea, clarifies: We can’t be far from a highway. We must have driven from New York City, which means there must be a way back in.

I don’t need Raven, and I don’t need Tack. And even if Raven was right about Lena Morgan Jones—she doesn’t exist anymore, after all—fortunately, I don’t need her, either.

I go back into the warehouse. Raven is sitting at the folding table, packing food into cloth bundles. We will strap them to our packs, and hang them from tree branches when we camp at night, so the animals won’t get at them.

At least, that is what she will do.

“Hey.” She smiles at me, over-friendly, as she has been all evening. “Did you get enough to eat?”

I nod. “More than I’ve had in a while,” I say, and she winces slightly. It’s a dig, but I can’t help it. I lean up against the table, where small, sharp knives have been laid out to dry on a kitchen towel.

Raven draws one knee to her chest. “Listen, Lena. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you earlier. I thought it would be—well, I just thought it would be better this way.”

“It was a purer test, too,” I say, and Raven looks up quickly. I lean forward, place my palm over the handle of a knife, feel its contours pressing into my flesh.

Raven sighs, and looks away again. “I know you must hate us right now,” she starts to say, but I cut her off.

“I don’t hate you.” I straighten up again, bringing the knife with me, slipping it into my back pocket.

“Really?” For a moment Raven looks much younger than her age.