Fred nods. Instantly, his cell phone starts blaring. He removes it from his pocket and silences it quickly. “Shit. We better hurry. The office phones are probably going crazy.”
My mom places an arm around my shoulders. I’m momentarily startled. It’s very rare that we touch like this. She must be more worried than she seems.
“Come on,” she says. “Your father’s waiting for us.”
“Where are we going?” I ask. She’s already moving me toward the front of the house.
“Home,” she says.
Outside, the guests are already amassing. We join the line of people waiting for their cars. We see seven and eight people piling into sedans, women in long gowns squeezing on top of one another in backseats. It’s obvious that no one wants to walk the streets, which are filled with the distant sounds of wailing.
My father ends up riding in the front with Tony. My mom and I squeeze into the backseat with Mr. and Mrs. Brande, who both work in the Department of Sanitization. Normally, Mrs. Brande can’t stop running her mouth—my mom has always speculated that the cure left her with no verbal self-control—but tonight we drive in silence. Tony goes faster than usual.
It begins to rain. The streetlamps pattern the windows with broken halos of light. Now, alert with fear and anxiety, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. I make a sudden decision: no more going to Deering Highlands. It’s too dangerous. Lena’s family is not my problem. I have done all I can do.
The guilt is still there, pressing at my throat, but I swallow it down.
We pass under another streetlamp, and the rain on the windows becomes long fingers; then once again the car is swallowed in darkness. I imagine I see different figures moving through the dark, skating next to the car, faces merging in and out of the shadow. For a second, as we move beneath another streetlamp, I see a hooded figure emerging from the woods at the side of the road. Our eyes meet, and I let out a small cry.
Alex. It’s Alex.
“What’s the matter?” my mother asks tensely.
“Nothing, I—” By the time I turn around, he is gone, and then I’m sure I only imagined him. I must have imagined him. Alex is dead; he was taken down at the border and never made it into the Wilds. I swallow hard. “I thought I saw something.”
“Don’t worry, Hana,” my mother says. “We’re perfectly safe in the car.” But she leans forward and says, sharply, to Tony, “Can’t you drive any faster?”
I think of the new wall, lit up by a spinning light, stained red with blood.
What if there are more of them? What if they’re coming for us?
I have a vision of Lena moving out there, sneaking through the streets, ducking between shadows, holding a knife. For a moment my lungs stop moving.
But no. She doesn’t know I was the one who gave her and Alex away. No one knows.
Besides, she is probably dead.
And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.
Would she?
Lena
The planning goes late into the night. The sandy-haired man, whose name is Colin, remains sequestered in one of the trailers with Beast and Pippa, Raven and Tack, Max, Cap, my mother, and a few others he has handpicked from his group. He assigns a guard to watch the door; the meeting is invite-only. I know that something big is in the works—as big as, if not bigger than, the Incidents that blew part of a wall out of the Crypts and exploded a police station. From hints that Max has let slip, I’ve gathered that this new rebellion is not simply confined to Portland. As in the earlier Incidents, in cities all across the country, sympathizers and Invalids are gathering and channeling their anger and their energy into displays of resistance.
At one point Max and Raven emerge from the trailer to pee in the woods—their faces drawn and serious—but when I beg Raven to let me join the meeting, she cuts me down immediately.
“Go to bed, Lena,” she says. “Everything’s under control.”
It must be almost midnight; Julian has been asleep for hours. I can’t imagine lying down right now. I feel like my blood is full of thousands of ants—my arms and legs are crawling, itching to move, to do something. I walk in circles, trying to shake the feeling, and fuming—annoyed with Julian, furious with Raven, thinking of all the things I’d like to say to her.