Thanks.
I can’t even be angry. I’m too shocked, too dazed by her sudden appearance: this mirage-woman with the face of my mother. My body feels hollow, my hands and feet huge, balloonlike, as though they belong to someone else. I watch the hands feel their way down the wall, watch the feet go clomp-clomp-clomp down the stairs.
For a second I stand at the base of the stairwell, disoriented. In my absence, everyone has returned. Tack and Hunter talk over each other, firing off questions; Julian rises from a chair as soon as he sees me; Raven bustles around the room, organizing, ordering people around.
And in the middle of it, my mother—removing her pack, taking a chair, moving with unconscious grace. Everyone else breaks apart into flutter and flurry, like moths circling a flame, undifferentiated blurs against the light. Even the room looks different now that she’s inside it.
This must be a dream. It has to be. A dream of my mother who is not really my mother, but someone else.
“Hey, Lena.” Julian cups my chin in his hands and leans down to give me a kiss. His eyes are still swollen and ringed with purple. I kiss him back automatically. “You okay?” He pulls away from me, and I purposely avoid his eyes.
“I’m okay,” I tell him. “I’ll explain later.” There’s a bubble of air caught in my chest, making it hard to breathe or speak.
He doesn’t know. Nobody knows, except for Raven and maybe Tack. They’ve worked with Bee before.
Now my mother won’t look at me at all. She accepts a cup of water from Raven and begins to drink. And just that—that small motion—makes anger uncoil inside me.
“I shot a deer today,” Julian is saying. “Tack spotted it halfway across the clearing. I didn’t think I had a chance—”
“Good for you,” I cut him off. “You pulled a trigger.”
Julian looks hurt. I’ve been horrible to him for days now. This is the problem: Take away the cure, and the primers, and the codes, and you are left with no rules to follow. Love comes only in flashes.
“It’s food, Lena,” he says quietly. “Didn’t you always tell me that this wasn’t a game? I’m playing for real—for keeps.” He pauses. “To stay.” He emphasizes the last part, and I know that he is thinking of Alex, and then I can’t help but think of him too.
I need to keep moving, find my balance, get away from the stifling room.
“Lena.” Raven is at my side. “Help me get some food on, will you?”
This is Raven’s rule: Stay busy. Go through the motions. Stand up.
Open a can. Pull water.
Do something.
I follow her automatically to the sink.
“Any news from Waterbury?” Tack asks.
For a moment there is silence. My mother is the one to speak.
“Gone,” she says simply.
Raven accidentally slices too hard through a strip of dried meat, and pulls her finger away, gasping, sucking it in her mouth.
“What do you mean, gone?” Tack’s voice is sharp.
“Wiped out.” This time Cap speaks up. “Mowed down.”
“Oh my God.” Hunter thuds heavily into a chair. Julian is standing perfectly rigid, taut, hands clenched; Tack’s face has turned stony. My mother—the woman who was my mother—sits with her hands folded on her lap, motionless, expressionless. Only Raven continues moving, wrapping a kitchen towel around her cut finger, sawing through the dried meat, back and forth, back and forth.
“So what now?” Julian asks, voice tight.
My mother looks up. Something old and deep flexes inside me. Her eyes are still the vivid blue I remember, still unchanged, like a sky to tumble into. Like Julian’s eyes.
“We have to move,” she says. “Give support where it can do good. The resistance is still gathering strength, gathering people—”
“What about Pippa?” Hunter bursts out. “Pippa said to wait for her. She said—”
“Hunter,” Tack says. “You heard what Cap said.” He lowers his voice. “Wiped out.”
There’s another moment of heavy silence. I see a muscle twitch in my mother’s jaw—a new tic—and she turns away, so I can see the faded green number tattooed along her neck, just beneath the vicious spate of angry scars, the products of all her failed procedures. I think about the years she spent in her tiny, windowless cell in the Crypts, chipping away at the walls with the metal pendant my father had given her, carving the word Love endlessly over the stone. And somehow, now, after less than a year of freedom, she has entered the resistance. More than that. She is at its center.
I don’t know this woman at all; I don’t know how she became who she is, or when her jaw began to twitch and her hair began to gray, and she began to pull a veil over her eyes, and avoid the gaze of her daughter.
“So where do we go?” Raven asks.
Max and Cap exchange a look. “There’s something stirring up north,” Max says. “In Portland.”