“Might have just clipped it,” Dani says. “Hard to tell. Not enough to stop it, though.”
Alex says nothing, doesn’t register my presence, even. He keeps walking, threading his way through the tents, past Julian and me, close enough that I imagine I can smell him—the old smell of grass and sun-dried wood, a Portland smell that makes me want to cry out, and bury my face in his chest, and inhale.
Then he is heading down the embankment as Raven’s voice floats up to us: “Dinner’s on. Eat up or miss out.”
“Come on.” Julian grazes my elbow with his fingertips. Gentle, patient.
My feet turn me, and move me down the embankment, toward the fire, which is now burning hot and strong; toward the boy who becomes shadow standing next to it, blotted out by the smoke. That is what Alex is now: a shadow-boy, an illusion.
For three days he has not spoken to me or looked at me at all.
Hana
Want to know my deep, dark secret? In Sunday school, I used to cheat on the quizzes.
I could never get into The Book of Shhh, not even as a kid. The only section of the book that interested me at all was Legends and Grievances, which is full of folktales about the world before the cure. My favorite story, the Story of Solomon, goes like this:
Once upon a time, during the days of sickness, two women and an infant went before the king. Each woman claimed that the infant was hers. Both refused to give the child to the other woman and pleaded their cases passionately, each claiming that she would die of grief if the baby were not returned solely to her possession.
The king, whose name was Solomon, listened to both their speeches, and at last announced that he had a fair solution.
“We will cut the baby in two,” he said, “and that way each of you will have a portion.”
The women agreed that this was just, and so the executioner was brought forward, and with his ax, he sliced the baby cleanly in two.
And the baby never cried, or so much as made a sound, and the mothers looked on, and afterward, for a thousand years, there was a spot of blood on the palace floor that could never be cleaned or diluted by any substance on earth. . . .
I must have been only eight or nine when I read that passage for the first time, but it really struck me. For days I couldn’t get the image of that poor baby out of my head. I kept picturing it split open on the tile floor, like a butterfly pinned behind glass.
That’s what’s so great about the story. It’s real. What I mean is, even if it didn’t actually happen—and there’s debate about the Legends and Grievances section, and whether it’s historically accurate—it shows the world truthfully. I remember feeling just like that baby: torn apart by feeling, split in two, caught between loyalties and desires.
That’s how the diseased world is.
That’s how it was for me, before I was cured.
In exactly twenty-one days, I’ll be married.
My mother looks as though she might cry, and I almost hope that she will. I’ve seen her cry twice in my life: once when she broke her ankle and once last year, when she came outside and found that protesters had climbed the gate, and torn up our lawn, and pried her beautiful car into pieces.
In the end she says only, “You look lovely, Hana.” And then: “It’s a little too big in the waist, though.”
Mrs. Killegan—Call me Anne, she simpered, the first time we came for a fitting—circles me quietly, pinning and adjusting. She is tall, with faded blond hair and a pinched look, as though over the years she has accidentally ingested various pins and sewing needles. “You’re sure you want to go with the cap sleeves?”
“I’m sure,” I say, just as my mom says, “You think they look too young?”
Mrs. Killegan—Anne—gestures expressively with one long, bony hand. “The whole city will be watching,” she says.
“The whole country,” my mother corrects her.
“I like the sleeves,” I say, and I almost add, It’s my wedding. But that isn’t true anymore—not since the Incidents in January, and Mayor Hargrove’s death. My wedding belongs to the people now. That’s what everybody has been telling me for weeks. Yesterday we got a phone call from the National News Service, asking whether they could syndicate footage, or send in their own television crew to film the ceremony.
Now, more than ever, the country needs its symbols.
We are standing in front of a three-sided mirror; my mother’s frown is reflected from three different angles. “Mrs. Killegan’s right,” she says, touching my elbow. “Let’s see how it looks at three-quarters, okay?”