Requiem (29 page)

Lena

T
he Highlands are burning.

I smell the fire well before I get there, and when I'm still a quarter-mile away, I can see the smudge of smoke above the trees, and flames licking up from the old, weather-beaten roofs.

On Harmon Road, I spotted an open garage and a rusted bike mounted on the wall like a hunter's trophy. Even though the bike is a piece of crap, and the gears groan and protest whenever I try to adjust them, it's better than nothing. I actually don't mind the noise—the rattling of the chains or the hard ringing of the wind in my ears. It keeps me from thinking of Hana, and from trying to understand what happened. It drowns out her voice in my head, saying,
Go
.

It doesn't drown out the blast, though, or the sirens that follow afterward. I can hear them even when I have made it almost all the way to the Highlands, cresting like screams.

I hope she got out. I say a prayer that she did, although I no longer know who I'm praying to.

And then I'm in the Highlands, and I can think only of Grace.

The first thing I see is the fire, which is leaping from house to house, from tree to roof to wall. Whoever set the fire did it deliberately, systematically. The first group of Invalids breached the fence not far from here; this must be the work of regulators.

The second thing I notice is the people: people running through the trees, bodies indistinct in the smoke. This startles me. When I lived in Portland, Deering Highlands was deserted, cleared out after accusations of the disease made it a wasteland. I haven't had time to think about what it means that Grace and my aunt are living here now, or consider that others might have made their home here as well.

I try to pick out familiar faces as they blur past me, darting through the trees, shouting. I can't see anything but form and color, people holding bundles of their belongings in their arms. Children are wailing, and my heart stops: Any one of them could be Grace. Little Grace, who barely made a sound—she could be shrieking in the half dark somewhere.

A hot, electric feeling is pulsing through me, as though the flames have made their way into my blood. I'm trying to remember the layout of the Highlands, but my mind is full of static: An image of 37 Brooks, of the blanket in the garden and the trees lit gold by the dipping sun, keeps playing there. I hit Edgewood and know I've gone too far.

I turn around, coughing, and retrace my path. The air is full of cracking, thunderbolt crashes: Whole houses are engulfed, standing like shivering ghosts, burning white-hot, doors gaping, skin melting from flesh.
Please, please, please.
The word drills through my head.
Please.

Then I spot the sign for Wynnewood Road: a short three-block street, fortunately. Here the fire has not spread so far and remains caught up in the tangled canopy of trees, and skating over the roofs, an ever-growing crown of white and orange. By now, the people in the trees have thinned, but I keep thinking I hear children crying—ghostly, wailing echoes.

I'm sweating, and my eyes are burning. When I ditch the bike, I struggle to catch my breath. I bring my shirt to my face and try to breathe through it as I jog down the street. Half the houses don't have any visible numbers. I know that in all probability, Grace has fled. I hope she was one of the people I saw moving through the trees, but I can't shake the fear that she might be trapped somewhere, that Aunt Carol and Uncle William and Jenny might have left her behind. She was always curling up in corners and hiding in hidden, recessed spaces, trying to make herself as invisible as possible.

A faded mailbox indicates number 31, a sad, sagging house, smoke churning out of its upper windows, flames licking across its weather-beaten roof. Then I see her—or at least I think I do. Just for a second, I swear I see her face, pale as a flame, in one of the windows. But before I can call out, she vanishes.

I take a deep breath and dart across the lawn and up the half-rotted steps. I stop just inside the front door, momentarily dizzy. I recognize the furniture—the faded striped couch, the rug with its singed tassels, and the stain on the old red throw pillows where Jenny spilled her grape juice, still barely visible—from my old house, Aunt Carol's place on Cumberland. I feel as though I've stumbled directly into the past, but a warped past: a past that smells like smoke and wet wallpaper, with rooms that have been distorted.

I go from room to room, calling out to Grace, checking behind furniture and in the closets of several rooms that are totally vacant. This house is much larger than our old one, and there is not nearly enough stuff to fill it. She is gone. Maybe she was never here—maybe I only imagined her face.

Upstairs is black with smoke. I can only make it halfway to the landing when I am forced back downstairs, heaving and coughing. Now the front rooms, too, are on fire. Cheap shower curtains are tacked to the windows. They go up in one lick, letting off the stink of plastic.

I back into the kitchen, feeling like a giant has its fist around my chest, needing to get out, needing to breathe. I heave my shoulder into the back door—swollen with heat, it resists—and finally go stumbling into the backyard, coughing, eyes watering. I'm not thinking anymore; my feet are moving me automatically away from the fire, toward clean air,
away
, when I feel a shooting pain in my foot and I am falling. I hit the ground and look back to see what has tripped me: a door handle, a cellar, half-obscured by the long grass on either side of it.

I don't know what makes me reach back and wrench open the door—instinct, maybe, or superstition. A set of steep wood stairs runs down to a small underground cellar, roughly hacked out of the earth. The tiny room is fitted with shelves, and stocked with cans of food. Several glass bottles—soda, maybe—are lined up on the ground.

She's squeezed so far into a corner, I almost miss her. Luckily, before I can close the door again, she shifts, and one of her sneakers comes into view, illuminated in the smoky red light pouring in from above. The shoes are new, but I recognize the purple laces, which she colored in herself.

“Grace.” My voice is hoarse. I ease down onto the top step. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, Grace floats into focus—taller than she was eight months ago, thinner and dirtier, too—crouched in the corner, staring at me with wild, terrified eyes. “Grace, it's me.”

I reach out to her, but she doesn't move. I ease myself down a step farther, reluctant to go into the cellar and try to grab her. She was always fast; I'm afraid she'll duck and run. My heart is throbbing painfully in my throat, and my mouth tastes like smoke. There's a sharp, pungent smell in the cellar I can't identify. I focus on Grace, on getting her to move.

“It's me, Grace,” I try again. I can only imagine what I must look like to her, how changed I must appear. “It's Lena. Your cousin Lena.”

She stiffens, as though I've reached out and shocked her. “Lena?” she whispers, her voice awed. But still she doesn't move. Above us, there is a thunderous crash. A tree branch, or a piece of the roof. I have a sudden terror that we will be buried in here if we don't move now. The house will collapse, we'll be trapped.

“Come on, Gracie,” I say, invoking an old nickname. The back of my neck is sweaty. “We've got to go, okay?”

At last Grace moves. She strikes out clumsily with a foot, and I hear the tinkle of glass breaking. The smell intensifies, burning the inside of my nostrils, and suddenly I place it.

Gas.

“I didn't mean to,” Grace says, her voice high-pitched, shrill with panic. She is crouching now, and I watch a dark stain of liquid spread on the packed dirt floor around her.

The terror is huge now: It presses me from all sides. “Grace, come on, sweetie.” I try to keep the panic from my voice. “Come take my hand.”

“I didn't mean to!” She starts to cry.

I scuttle down the last few steps and grab her, heaving her up onto my waist. She is awkward, too big for me to carry comfortably, but surprisingly light. She wraps her legs around my waist. I can feel her ribs and the sharp points of her hip bones. Her hair smells like grease and oil and—faintly, just faintly—like dish soap.

Up the stairs and into the world of flame and fire, air turned watery, shimmering with heat, as though the world is breaking apart into a mirage. It would be faster to set Grace down and let her run next to me, but now that I have her—now that she is here, clinging to me, her heart beating frantically in her chest, pounding its rhythm into mine—I won't let her go.

The bike is where I left it, thank God. Grace maneuvers clumsily onto the seat, and I squeeze on behind her. I shove off down the street, my legs heavy as stone, until momentum begins to carry us; and then I ride, as fast as I can, away from the fingers of smoke and flame, leaving the Highlands to burn.

Hana

I
walk without paying attention to where I am or where I am going. One foot in front of the other, my white shoes slapping quietly against the pavement. In the distance, I can hear the roar of shouting voices. The sun is bright, and feels nice on my shoulders. A breeze lifts the trees silently, and they bow and wave, bow and wave, as I pass.

One foot, and then another foot. It's so simple. The sun is so bright.

What will happen to me?

I don't know. Maybe I will come across someone who recognizes me. Maybe I will be brought back to my parents. Maybe, if the world doesn't end, if Fred is now dead, I will be paired with someone else.

Or maybe I will keep walking until I reach the end of the world.

Maybe. But for now there is only the high white sun, and the sky, and tendrils of gray smoke, and voices that sound like ocean waves in the distance.

There is the slapping of my shoes, and the trees that seem to nod and tell me,
You're okay. Everything will be okay.

Maybe, after all, they are right.

Lena

A
s we get close to Back Cove, the trickle of people swells to a roaring, rushing stream, and I can barely maneuver my bike between them. They are running, shouting, waving hammers and knives and pieces of metal piping, surging toward some unknown location, and I'm surprised to see that it isn't just Invalids rioting anymore: It is kids, too, some as young as twelve and thirteen, uncured and angry. I even spot a few cureds watching from their windows above the street, occasionally waving, a show of solidarity.

I break loose of the crowd and bump the bike onto the churned-mud shores of the cove, where Alex and I made our stand a lifetime ago—where for the first time, he traded his happiness for mine. Grass grows high between the rubble of the old road, and people—injured or dead—are lying in the grass, letting out moans or staring sightlessly at the cloudless sky. I see several bodies facedown in the shallows of the cove, and tendrils of red sweeping across the surface of the water.

Past the cove, at the wall, the crowd is still thick, but it looks like mostly our people. The regulators and police must have been driven back, farther toward Old Port. Now thousands of rioters are flowing in that direction, their voices unified, a single note of fury.

I ditch the bike in the shade of a large juniper and, at last, take Grace by the shoulders, examine her all over for cuts or bruises. She is shaking, wide-eyed, staring at me as though she believes I'll disappear any second.

“What happened to the others?” I ask. Her fingernails are coated with dirt, and she is skinny. But otherwise, she looks okay. More than okay—she looks beautiful. I feel a sob building in my throat, and I swallow it back. We aren't safe, not yet.

Grace shakes her head. “I don't know. There was a fire and . . . and I hid.”

So they did leave her. Or they didn't care enough to look when she disappeared. I feel a wave of nausea.

“You look different,” Grace says quietly.

“You got taller,” I say. Suddenly I could shout for joy. I could scream with happiness while the whole world burns.

“Where did you go?” Grace asks me. “What happened to you?”

“I'll tell you all about it later.” I take her chin with one hand. “Listen, Grace. I want to tell you how sorry I am. I'm sorry for leaving you behind. I'll never leave you again, okay?”

Her eyes travel my face. She nods.

“I'm going to keep you safe now.” I push the words out past the thickness in my throat. “Do you believe me?”

She nods again. I pull her to me, squeezing. She feels so thin, so fragile. But I know that she is strong. She always has been. She will be ready for whatever comes next.

“Take my hand,” I tell her. I'm not certain where to go, and my mind flashes to Raven. Then I remember that she is gone—murdered at the wall—and the sickness threatens to overwhelm me again. But I have to stay calm for Grace's sake.

I need to find a safe place to go with Grace until the fighting is done. My mother will help me; she'll know what to do.

Grace's grip is surprisingly strong. We pick our way along the shoreline, threading between the people—Invalids and regulators alike—injured, dying, and dead. At the top of the slope, Colin, limping, leans heavily on another boy and makes his way to an empty spot on the grass. The other boy looks up and my heart stops.

Alex.

He sees me almost immediately after I've spotted him. I want to call out to him, but my voice is caught in my throat. For a second, he hesitates. Then he eases Colin down into the grass and bends to say something to him. Colin nods, gripping his knee, wincing.

Then Alex is jogging toward me.

“Alex.” It's as though saying his name makes him real. He stops a few inches away from me, and his eyes go to Grace, and then back to me. “This is Grace,” I say, tugging her hand. She hangs back, angling her body behind mine.

“I remember,” he says. There is no more hardness in his eyes, no more hatred. He clears his throat. “I thought I'd never see you again.”

“Here I am.” The sun feels overly bright, and all of a sudden I can think of nothing to say, no words to describe everything I've thought and wished and wondered. “I—I got your note.”

He nods. His mouth tightens just a little. “Is Julian . . . ?”

“I don't know where Julian is,” I say, and then instantly feel guilty. I think of his blue eyes, and his warmth curling around me when I slept. I hope he has not been hurt. I bend down so I can look Grace in the eyes. “Sit here for a minute, okay, Gracie?”

She folds herself to the ground obediently. I can't bring myself to step more than two paces away from her. Alex follows.

I lower my voice so Grace won't hear us. “Is it true?” I ask him.

“Is what true?” His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.

“That you still love me,” I say, breathless. “I need to know.”

Alex nods. He reaches out and touches my face—barely skimming my cheekbone and brushing away a bit of my hair. “It's true.”

“But . . . I've changed,” I say. “And you've changed.”

“That's true too,” he says quietly. I look at the scar on his face, stretching from his left eye to his jawline, and something hitches in my chest.

“So what now?” I ask him. The light is too bright; the day feels as though it's merging into dream.

“Do you love me?” Alex asks. And I could cry; I could press my face into his chest and breathe in, and pretend that nothing has changed, that everything will be perfect and whole and healed again.

But I can't. I know I can't.

“I never stopped.” I look away from him. I look at Grace, and the high grass littered with the wounded and the dead. I think of Julian, and his clear blue eyes, his patience and goodness. I think of all the fighting we've done, and all the fighting we have yet to do. I take a deep breath. “But it's more complicated than that.”

Alex reaches out and places his hands on my shoulders. “I'm not going to run away again,” he says.

“I don't want you to,” I tell him.

His fingers find my cheek, and I rest for a second against his palm, letting the pain of the past few months flow out of me, letting him turn my head toward his. Then he bends down and kisses me: light and perfect, his lips just barely meeting mine, a kiss that promises renewal.

“Lena!”

I step away from Alex when Grace shouts. She has climbed to her feet and is pointing toward the border wall, bouncing excitedly on her toes, full of energy. I turn to look. For a second, tears break apart my vision, turn the world to a kaleidoscope of colors—color crawling up the wall, making a mosaic of the concrete.

No. Not color: people. People are surging toward the wall.

More than that: They are tearing it down.

Yelling, wild and triumphant, brandishing hammers and bits of the ruined scaffolding, or picking with their bare hands, they are dismantling the wall piece by piece, breaking the boundaries of the world as we know it. Joy surges inside me. Grace begins to run; she, too, is pulled toward the wall.

“Grace, wait!” I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand.

“I'll find you,” he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. “I won't let you go again.”

I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand.

“Go,” he says.

So I do. Grace has paused to wait for me, and I take her thin little hand in mine, and soon I find that we are running: through the sun and the lingering smoke, through the grass on the shores that have become a graveyard, while the sun continues its indifferent rotation and the water reflects nothing but sky.

As we approach the wall, I spot Hunter and Bram, standing side by side, sweating and brown, swinging at the concrete with large pieces of metal piping. I see Pippa, standing on a portion of the wall that remains, waving a vivid green shirt like a flag. I see Coral; fierce and beautiful, she passes in and out of view as the crowd surges and shifts around her. Several feet away, my mother works with a hammer, swinging easily and gracefully, making it look like a dance: this hard and muscled woman I hardly know, a woman I have loved my whole life. She is alive. We are alive. She will get to meet Grace.

I see Julian, too. He is shirtless, sweating, balancing on a heap of rubble, working the butt of a rifle against the wall, so that it splinters and sends a fine spray of white dust onto the people beneath him. The sun makes his hair blaze like a ring of pale fire, touches his shoulders with white wings.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen—to me, to Alex and to Julian, to any of us.

“Come on, Lena.” Grace is tugging at my hand.

But it's not about knowing. It is simply about going forward. The cureds want to know; we have chosen faith instead. I asked Grace to trust me. We will have to trust too—that the world won't end, that tomorrow will come, and that truth will come too.

An old line, a forbidden line from a text Raven once showed me, comes back to me now.
He who jumps may fall, but he may also fly.

It's time to jump.

“Let's go,” I say to Grace, and let her lead me into the surge of people, keeping a tight hold on her hand the whole time. We push into the shouting, joyful throng, and fight our way up toward the wall. Grace scrabbles up a pile of broken-down wood and shards of shattered concrete, and I follow clumsily, until I am balancing next to her. She is shouting—louder than I have ever heard her, a babble-language of joy and freedom—and I find that I join in with her as together we begin to tear at chunks of concrete with our fingernails, watching the border dissolve, watching a new world emerge beyond it.

Take down the walls.

That is, after all, the whole point. You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don't know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise or destruction.

Take down the walls.

Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.

Otherwise you may never know hell; but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying.

All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull.

I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever.

Take down the walls.