Pandemonium (6 page)

I am suddenly exhausted. We have made it only halfway down the old street, but my earlier resolution to walk the whole area now seems absurd. The brightness of the sun, the air and space around me—all of it feels disorienting. I turn around—too quickly, clumsily—and trip over a slab of limestone spattered in bird shit; for one second I am in free fall and then I’m landing, hard, facedown in the dirt.

“Lena!” Sarah is next to me in a second, helping to pull me to my feet. I’ve bitten down on my tongue and my mouth tastes like metal. “Are you okay?”

“Just give me a second,” I say, gasping a little. I sit back on the limestone. Something occurs to me: I don’t even know what day it is, what month. “What’s today’s date?” I ask Sarah.

“August twenty-seventh,” she answers, still looking at me with her face all creased up, worried. But she’s keeping her distance.

August 27. I left Portland on August 21. I’ve lost almost a week in the Wilds, in this upside-down place.

This is not my world. My world is unfolding miles away: a world of doors that lead to rooms, and clean white walls, and the quiet hum of refrigerators; a world of carefully plotted streets, and pavement that is not full of fissures. Another pang shoots through me. In less than a month, Hana will have her procedure.

Alex was the one who understood things here. He could have built up this collapsed street for me, turned it into a place of sense and order. He was going to lead me through the wilderness. With him, I would have been okay.

“Can I get you anything?” Sarah’s voice is uncertain.

“I’ll be all right.” I can barely force the words out, past the pain. “It’s just the food. Not used to it.”

I’m going to be sick again. I duck my head between my knees, coughing to force down the sob that shudders through me.

Sarah must know, though, because she says, in the quietest voice, “You get used to it after a while.” I get the sense she’s talking about more than the breakfast.

After that there is nothing to do but make our way back: down the bombed-out road, through the shards, metal glittering in the high grass like snakes lying in wait.

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.

Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

T
hat is the girl I was then: stumbling, sinking, lost in brightness and space. My past had been wiped clean, bleached a stark and spotless white.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

This is the girl I am right now: knees pressed together, hands on my thighs. Silk blouse pulling tight against my neck, skirt with a woolen waistband, standard issue, bearing the Quincy Edwards High School crest. It’s itchy; I wish I could scratch, but I won’t. She would take that as a sign of nerves, and I am not nervous, will never be nervous again in my life.

She blinks. I don’t. She is Mrs. Tulle, the principal, with a face like a fish pressed to glass; eyes so large they appear distorted.

“Is everything okay at home, Magdalena?”

It’s strange to hear her use my full name. Everyone has always called me Lena.

“Fine,” I say.

She shuffles the papers on her desk. Everything in her office is ordered, all the edges lined up correctly. Even the water glass on her desk is centered perfectly on its coaster. The cureds have always liked order: straightening, aligning, making adjustments.
Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness, and Order Is Ascension.
It gives them something to do, I guess—tasks to fill those long, empty hours.

“You live with your sister and her husband, is that correct?”

I nod, repeat the story of my new life: “My mother and father were killed in one of the Incidents.”

This, at least, is not so much of a lie. The old Lena, too, was an orphan; as good as one, anyway.

I do not have to clarify the reference to the Incidents. Everyone has heard about them by now: last fall, the resistance coordinated its first major, violent, visible strikes. In a handful of cities, members of the resistance—helped by sympathizers, and in some cases, young uncureds—caused simultaneous explosions in important municipal buildings.

In Portland, the resistance chose to explode a portion of the Crypts. In the ensuing chaos, two dozen civilians were killed. The police and regulators were able to restore order, but not before several hundred prisoners had escaped.

It’s ironic. My mother spent ten years tunneling her way out of that place, when she might have just waited another few months and strolled free.

Mrs. Tulle winces.

“Yes, I saw that in your records.” Behind her, a humidifier whirs quietly. Still, the air is dry. Her office smells like paper and, faintly, of hairspray. A trickle of sweat rolls down my back. The skirt is hot.

“We’re concerned that you seem to be having trouble adjusting,” she says, watching me with those fish eyes. “You’ve been eating lunch by yourself.” It’s an accusation.

Even this new Lena feels slightly embarrassed; the only thing worse than having no friends is being pitied for having no friends. “To be honest, I’m having some trouble with the girls,” new Lena says. “I’m finding them a little bit … immature.” As I speak, I angle my head away slightly, so she can see the triangular scar just behind my left ear: the mark of the procedure, the mark of being cured.

Instantly, her expression softens. “Well, yes, of course. Many of them are younger than you, after all. Not yet eighteen, uncured.”

I spread my hands as if to say,
Of course
.

But Mrs. Tulle isn’t done with me, although her voice has lost its edge. “Mrs. Fierstein says you fell asleep in class again. We’re worried, Lena. Do you feel the workload is too much for you? Are you having trouble sleeping at night?”

“I have been a little stressed,” I admit. “It’s all this DFA stuff.”

Mrs. Tulle raises her eyebrows. “I didn’t realize you were in the DFA.”

“Division A,” I say. “We’re having a big rally next Friday. Actually, there’s a planning meeting this afternoon in Manhattan. I don’t want to be late.”

“Of course, of course. I know all about the rally.” Mrs. Tulle lifts her papers, jogs them against the desk to make sure their edges are aligned, and slides them into a drawer. I can tell I’m off the hook. The DFA is the magic word:
Deliria
-Free America. Open sesame. She is all kindness now. “It’s very impressive that you’re trying to balance your extracurricular involvements with your schoolwork, Lena. And we support the work the DFA is doing. Just be sure you can find a balance. I don’t want your board scores to suffer because of your social work, however important it is.”

“I understand.” I duck my head and look penitent. The new Lena is a good actress.

Mrs. Tulle smiles at me. “Now go on. We don’t want you to be late to your meeting.”

I stand up, shoulder my tote bag. “Thanks.”

She inclines her head toward the door, a signal that I can leave.

I walk through the scrubbed linoleum halls: more white walls, more quiet. All the other students have gone home by now.

Then it’s out through the double doors, into the dazzling white landscape: an unexpected March snow, hard, bright light, trees encased in thick black sheaths of ice. I pull my jacket tighter and stomp my way out of the iron gates, onto Eighth Avenue.

This is the girl I am now. My future is here, in this city, full of icicles dangling like daggers getting ready to drop.

There’s more traffic in the sister cities than I’ve ever seen in my life. Hardly anyone had working cars in Portland; in New York, people are richer and can afford the gas. When I first came to Brooklyn, I used to go to Times Square just to watch them, sometimes a dozen at a time, one right after the other.

My bus gets stuck on 31st Street behind a garbage truck that has backed into a soot-colored snowbank, and by the time I get to the Javits Center, the DFA meeting has already begun. The steps are empty, as is the enormous entrance hall, and I can hear the distant, booming feed from a microphone, applause that sounds like a roar. I hurry to the metal detector and unload my bag, then stand with arms and legs splayed while a man sweeps impassively with the wand over my breasts and between my legs. I have long since outgrown being embarrassed by these procedures. Then it’s over to the folding table set just in front of two enormous double doors; behind them, I can hear another smattering of applause, and more microphone-voice, amplified, thunderous, passionate. The words are inaudible.

“Identity card, please,” drones the woman behind the table, a volunteer. I wait while she scans my ID; then she waves me on with a jerk of her head.

The auditorium is enormous. It must fit at least two thousand people and is, as always, almost entirely full. There are a few empty seats off to the very left, close to the stage, and I skirt the periphery of the room, trying to slip into a chair as inconspicuously as possible. I don’t have to worry. Everyone in the room is transfixed by the man behind the podium. The air is charged; I have the sense of thousands and thousands of droplets, suspended, waiting to fall.

“… is not sufficient to ensure our safety,” the man is saying. His voice booms through the room. Under the high fluorescent lights, his hair shines a brilliant black, like a helmet. This is Thomas Fineman, the founder of the DFA. “They talk to us of risk and harm, damages and side effects. But what risk will there be to us as a people, as a society, if we do not act? If we do not insist on protecting the whole, what good is the health of a mere portion?”

A smattering of applause. Thomas adjusts his cuffs, leans closer to the microphone. “This must be our single, unified purpose. This is the point of our demonstration. We ask that our government, our scientists, our agencies, protect us. We ask that they keep faith with their people, keep faith with God and his Order. Did God himself not reject, over thousands of years, millions of species that were faulty or flawed in some way, on his way to a perfect creation? Do we not learn that it is sometimes necessary to purge the weak, and the diseased, in order to evolve to a better society?”

The applause swells, cresting. I clap as well. Lena Morgan Jones claps.

This is my mission, the job that I have been given by Raven: Watch the DFA. Observe. Blend.

They have told me nothing else.

“Finally, we ask the government to stand behind the promise of
The Book of Shhh
: to ensure the Safety, Health, and Happiness of our cities and our people.”

I observe:

Rows of high lights.

Rows of half-moon faces, pale, bloated, fearful, and grateful—the faces of the cured.

Gray carpet, rubbed bare by the pressure of so many feet.

A fat man to my right, wheezing, pants belted high over his paunch.

A small area cordoned off next to the stage, three chairs, only one of them occupied.

A boy.

Of all the things I see, the boy is the most interesting. The other things—the carpet, the faces—are the same at every meeting of the DFA. Even the fat man. Sometimes he is fat, sometimes he is thin, sometimes it is a woman instead. But it is all the same—they are always all the same.

The boy’s eyes are dark blue, a stormy color. His hair is caramel blond and wavy, and hangs to his mid-jawline. He is wearing a collared red polo shirt, short-sleeved despite the weather, and pressed dark jeans. His loafers are new, and he also wears a shiny silver watch around one wrist. Everything about him says rich. His hands are folded in his lap. Everything about him says right, too. Even his unblinking expression as he watches his father onstage is perfection and practice, the embodiment of a cured’s controlled detachment.

Of course he isn’t cured, not yet. This is Julian Fineman, Thomas Fineman’s son, and although he is eighteen, he has not yet had the procedure. The scientists have so far refused to treat him. Next Friday, the same day as the big planned DFA rally in Times Square, that will change. He will have his procedure, and he will be cured.