“Are you okay?” she asks.
I rub my palms together, trying to focus on Faye, hoping I might be able to see some outline of her standing before me. But everything is dark. “I need to speak to Colette.”
She is quiet a moment, then I sense the subtle shift of her chin as she nods. She pushes the door wide behind her, and I step through, walking to Colette’s bedside. The baby is in her arms, making the soft gurgling noises that babies do at this young age.
“Bee,” Colette says when I touch her arm, her voice thin and wiry, like she hasn’t been sleeping. Like her husband’s death has left her raw, and now she has to force her lungs to take every inhale, to keep her heart beating and not seize up beneath her ribs. I suspect the baby is the only thing keeping her alive.
“We need to leave,” I say quietly, only a whisper in the air. “The baby won’t survive here.”
But before Colette can speak, I hear Faye behind me, shifting closer from where she had been standing in the doorway. “What are you talking about?” she asks, her breathing slow, measured—the inhales of a woman who has learned to calm her own heartbeat, to remain always in control. “You know we can’t leave,” Faye adds. “It’s too dangerous.” They are words we all know by heart, a mantra we live by, but we die by it too—painfully, wretchedly, necks suspended in nooses.
“I can get us safely down the road,” I say.
“How?” Colette asks, her voice so brittle it shreds the air.
“I’ve been in the woods. I know how to pass through without catching the pox.”
I hear Faye take a step back away from me.
“I’ve been beyond the border many times,” I say, lifting my hands toward her so she can see that I’m not sick. “And I’ve never caught it.”
“How?” Faye asks.
I will need to lie to convince them, because if I tell them the truth: the notion that is clattering around inside my head—that perhaps the pox is not what we think it is, that if we flee through the trees we won’t get sick—they will think I’ve gone mad. So instead I say, “I carry a bundle of sage. And I can hear the trees splitting open. I know when they are sick; I know how to stay clear of them.”
Faye’s feet shuffle on the wood floor, uneasy. “The child would never survive the journey, it’s too far for her to be outside. It’s not possible.”
I swivel my eyes, hoping I’m looking directly at her, hoping she can see that we don’t have another choice. “We won’t be walking,” I explain. “We’re going to drive.”
“How?”
“Theo found a truck down the road, just past the border. It hasn’t been there long; it should still run.” I leave out the part about who the truck belonged to, how it got here, or that Calla isn’t really my sister.
“Bee—” Faye says in a low muttering hush, as if just my words were a betrayal to the community.
“What if we can save the child—” I interrupt before she can tell me all the reasons why this is a bad idea. “What if we can bring back medicine. What if there are things out there that can help us.”
“Whatever is out there might also kill you.” Her voice is directed away from me, her face straining toward the door, as if she’s afraid someone might be outside listening. “You don’t even know what’s beyond our woods, in the outside. You’ve never seen it.”
I shake my head. “Faye, some part of you must know that something isn’t right here. There are lies built into the walls of this place; we just can’t see them.” My chest grows tight and heavy, and I suddenly want to be free of the birthing hut. “Some part of you must know that we have to try and save the child.”
Because what if it were my baby who was sick, but no one was willing to risk leaving the valley to help her? We need to do this—we need to try.
“Okay,” a voice says. But it isn’t Faye’s, it’s Colette’s, her small hand clamping around my wrist. “When do we leave?”
“Now.” I swallow, realizing the seriousness of what we’re about to do. “We’ll meet Theo and Calla on the road. But I just need to do something first—gather your things and I’ll come right back for you.”
This isn’t part of the plan. Calla and Theo and I never discussed this, but it’s something I must do before we leave, one last moment of defiance to prove to him that I don’t love him anymore. I want him to know that I’m leaving, and I’m not coming back.
I slip out of the birthing hut, and into the trees.
We are betraying the foundation of everything we’ve built here by leaving. We are breaking with the principles of everything Levi has taught us. He would have us believe that we will be infected with the pox if we go over the boundary, but if I’m the one who’s been carving the wounds into the trees, then maybe they’re not sick at all: no illness weeping from their fleshy white centers, no elm pox congealing in the air between the trees, waiting to infect those passing through.
I’m no longer sure if there is danger in the woods at all.
Or only the danger that lives in corrupt men’s hearts.
I hurry through the dark. No turning back. This is the only way to save Colette, to save the baby.
And myself.
* * *
The sky is a muted shade of twilight as the sun dips beyond the pines. I can’t see it, not exactly, but I can feel its delicate azure quality against my skin.
I stay back in the trees, where I won’t be seen. Still, my stomach tightens into itself the closer I get to Levi’s house, until I am made of knots and twisted fibers, just like the sage bundles that hang from the trees.
It’s early evening. Levi and Alice are surely still somewhere within the community, but I am quiet as I sneak up to the back door and turn the knob, slipping inside.