To Whom It May Concern:
This letter is in regard to the physical and mental state of Cassandra Melanea Hargrove, b. O’Donnell, who was admitted to my care and supervision for a period of nine days.
In my professional opinion, Mrs. Hargrove suffers acute delusions provoked by an entrenched mental instability; she is fixated on the Bluebeard myth and relates the story to her fears of persecution; she is profoundly neurotic and unlikely, in my opinion, to improve.
Her condition seems of the degenerative kind and may have been provoked by certain chemical imbalances resultant from the procedure, although this is impossible to say definitively.
I read the letter several times. So I was right—there was something wrong with her. She went screwy. Maybe the procedure unhinged her, like it did for Willow Marks. Strange that no one noticed before she married Fred, but I guess sometimes these things are gradual.
Still, the knot in my stomach refuses to unravel. Beneath the doctor’s polished prose is a separate message: a message of fear.
I remember the story of Bluebeard: the story of a man, a handsome prince, who keeps a locked door in his beautiful castle. He tells his new bride that she may enter any room but that one. But one day her curiosity overwhelms her, and she discovers a room of murdered women, strung from their heels. When he finds out she disobeyed his order, he adds her to that horrible, bloody collection.
The fairy tale terrified me when I was a kid, especially the image of the women heaped together, arms pale and eyes sightless, gutted.
I fold the letter carefully and return it to my back pocket. I’m being stupid. Cassie was defective, like I thought she was, and Fred had every reason to divorce her. Just because she no longer shows up in the system doesn’t mean anything terrible happened to her. Maybe it was just an administrative error.
But the whole ride home, I can’t help but picture Fred’s strange smile, and the way he said, Cassie asked too many questions.
And I can’t help the thought that rises, unbidden, unwanted: What if Cassie was right to be afraid?
Lena
For the first half of the day we see no evidence of troops, and it occurs to me that Lu might have been lying. I feel a welling of hope: Maybe the camp won’t be attacked after all, and Pippa will be fine. Of course there’s still the problem of the dammed river, but Pippa will figure it out. She’s like Raven: born to survive.
But in the afternoon, we hear shouting in the distance. Tack holds up a hand and gestures for silence. We all freeze, and then, when Tack motions, disperse into the woods. Julian has adjusted to the Wilds well, and to our need for camouflage. One second he is standing next to me; the next he has melted behind a small group of trees. The others vanish just as quickly.
I duck behind an old concrete wall, which appears to have been dropped randomly from above. I wonder what kind of structure it used to belong to; and suddenly, I have a memory of the story Julian told me when we were imprisoned together, of a girl named Dorothy whose house spirals up into the air on the powerful surges of a tornado, and who ends up in a magical land.
As the sound of shouting gets louder and the noise of clanking weaponry and heavy boot steps swells to a pounding rhythm, I find myself fantasizing that we, too, will be whisked away—all of us, all the Invalids, the people pushed and elbowed out of normal society—will vanish on a puff of air, and wake up and find ourselves somewhere different.
But this is not a fairy tale. This is April in the Wilds, and black mud seeping up around my damp sneakers; and clouds of hovering gnats; and held breath and waiting.
The troops are several hundred feet away from us, down a gently sloping embankment and across a trickling stream. From our elevated position, we can easily see the long line of soldiers as it comes into view, a blur of uniforms weaving in and out of trees. The shifting diamond pattern of leaves merges perfectly with the shifting, blurry mass of men and women, suited up in camouflage, hauling machine guns and tear gas. It seems there is no end to them.