“Fine,” I say. “I’m fine.”
I don’t sound fine. I sound like my imaginary conversation with Yong will soon be real, because I’ll be as dead as he is.
My eyes flutter partway open. Off to the right, I see a little tree with orange fruits. I can’t turn away from it, not even to see O’Malley’s face. He’s very pretty to look at, but those orange fruits are pretty, too.
“Farrar said we should set up a perimeter,” O’Malley says. “For the pigs. Just in case. I did that while Bishop buried Latu. I have Farrar, Bawden and Coyotl watching. They’ll do that while the others rest, then I’ll have them switch off. We’re safe, Em.”
“All right,” I say.
I feel a warm hand on my forehead, stroking my hair. It’s very nice.
“You can sleep now,” O’Malley says. “You need it. We’ll figure everything out later.”
His voice sounds rough, weary, like he’s not doing that much better than I am.
O’Malley walks off. If I sleep, is he in charge? I think so. I hope he doesn’t mess things up. But hey, if no one dies? Then he’s better at the job than I am.
My eyes close. I force them open one more time. I can’t really see that much, though. Everything is a blur.
I hear a sound that I thought I might never hear again: people laughing.
No one is being disrespectful to Latu, it’s just that we have food, we have water. We are safe.
Laughter. It’s a good sound.
My eyes close.
TWENTY-FOUR
A piercing scream snaps me awake.
So bright, hard to see. My hands search the ground around me, seeking out the spear, but all I feel is cool dirt and soft plants. The spear isn’t here, where is it where is it? The pigs, coming for me, coming to tear out my insides and eat my bones, coming for all of us, and— The scream again…followed by a laugh.
My vision adjusts. I look around. My friends are sitting under trees or lying near the reeds. They are eating, talking, sleeping. Everyone is calm.
There is no danger.
The scream, it came from Spingate. She’s in the tall grass, wrestling with Gaston. They are laughing.
Under a tree to my right, Aramovsky is standing, talking to a group of people who sit around him in a semicircle. Opkick, Johnson and Cabral, if I remember their names right. By the bubbling spring, Bello and Ingolfsson are making neat piles of fruit. I see O’Malley talking to Borjigin, a half-circle who carries himself more like a girl than the boy he is.
And farthest off, past the long rectangle of reeds that stretches away from me, I see three muscular backs. None of them are wearing shirts. I don’t even need to see their faces to know who they are: the dark skin and thick neck of Farrar, the white hair and pink skin of Visca, the wide shoulders and crisscross scratches that can only belong to Bishop. They stand there, in the tall grass, staring out into woods that stretch far away down this long room.
They are guarding against pigs, against the next danger we might find.
I notice that a few others have also abandoned their shirts. Coyotl, Bawden, El-Saffani…all the circle-stars. Girl El-Saffani and Bawden don’t seem to care that their breasts are exposed, but it makes me very uncomfortable. They should be covered up, like all the other girls are. Do they think being circle-stars makes them different? I guess the answer is that they are different. Without their shirts, the circle-stars look like a group—a group separate from the rest of us.
That worries me.
Bello sees me. Her face lights up. She hops to her feet and rushes over. The way the arched ceiling’s light catches her blond hair makes her look like she glows from within.
“Em! You’re awake. I was worried about you, you slept a long time.”
“I did? How long?”
She frowns, shrugs. “Who knows?” She points to my shirt. “You were so out of it you didn’t even wake up when we took that off you.”
My shirt…most of the blood is gone. The dirt, too. Faded stains remain, though, pink where the blood was, light brown from the dirt, faded green from grass stains. The shirt feels a little stiff, as does my skirt.
My clothes feel clean…and so does my skin.
I look at Bello, confused.
“We washed you,” she says. “Me and D’souza. She’s a circle, like us.”
My hands automatically cover my breasts, even though my shirt is buttoned all the way up.
“You took my clothes off?”
Bello pats my shoulder. “It’s okay, the other girls sat in front of you so the boys couldn’t see. We washed your clothes and wiped all that gunk from your body. You had lots of scratches. Smith cleaned those. She wouldn’t let anyone else touch your wounds. She cleaned up Bishop’s, too.”
Smith. The tall, skinny girl. The circle-cross.
My hair feels different. I pull the braid around in front of me: it’s been redone. Someone tied off the end with a strip of white fabric, torn from a boy’s shirt, no doubt.