A tendril of pale smoke trickled from under one pant leg of Emily Waterman’s baggy overalls.
“Allie!” Harper said. “Stop it. You’re giving Emily the smokes!”
“Please, Allie,” Renée said, putting a hand on Allie’s shoulder. “We’ve all been under so much pressure, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t sometimes want to scream. But if you’ll sit down with me—”
“Will you stop touching me?” Allie cried. She shrugged off Renée’s hand. “You don’t know anything about me. You aren’t my mother. My mother burned to death. You are no one to me. You are not my mother and you are not my friend. You’re a pain vulture who circles around and around, looking for someone to feed off. That’s why you spend all your free time reading to the kids. You love their wounded little hearts. You feed off their loneliness just like a vampire. You love kids with no parents, because they need someone. It’s easy to read them a story to make yourself feel special. But you aren’t special. Stop feeding off us all.”
A stunned silence fell upon the basement.
Harper wanted to say something but had lost the trick of speech. She was not sure if she had been silenced by her horror—she had never imagined Allie, who was so daring, so clever, so beautiful, and so funny, could be so cruel—or by a crippling wave of déjà vu. For when Allie insisted altruism was really selfishness, and kindness a form of manipulation, she sounded just like Jakob. She had all his savage powers of logic. It made a person feel naive and childish for imagining there could be any good in the world at all.
For herself, Renée had lifted an arm to protect her face, as if she expected to be struck. She studied Allie with a mute, wounded fascination.
The room was still waiting for her to reply—to defend herself—when Nick charged across the basement, inserting himself between Allie and Renée. He held up his Yahtzee scorecard, turned over to the back, where he had written:
TWO YAHTZEES IN A ROW!!
Allie stared at this message with blank incomprehension. Then she took the sheet of paper from his hands, balled it up, and threw it in his face. It bounced off his forehead and onto the floor.
Nick staggered backward, as if he had been shoved. His shoulder thumped into Renée’s breast. Harper did not think she had ever seen so much naked hurt in a face before.
He ran. Before anyone could catch him, he flew to the stairs. He hesitated at the bottom of the steps for one last look at his older sister, and for a moment he fixed her with a glare of contempt as fierce as anything Allie herself could produce. Like their elfin good looks, a gift for hate was, perhaps, something that ran in the family.
Harper called his name, called for him to wait. But of course Nick didn’t—couldn’t—hear her. Harper rose to go after him, but he had already dashed up the stairs, banged through the door at the top, and launched himself into the falling snow.
She turned a frustrated look upon Allie.
“What? What? You got something to say, Nurse Nobody?” Allie asked her.
“Yes,” Harper said, summoning up all the Julie Andrews she had in her heart. “A bad show, Allie. A very bad show. He also lost his mother, you know, and you are all he has left. For shame. After he threw two Yahtzees!”
Allie’s response to this shocked Harper more than anything else. Her face crumpled and she began to sob. She sat down hard, with her back against the springs of her overturned bed.
At this sudden display of defeat, the Neighbors twins, Jamie Close, and all the other members of Allie’s unofficial, unnamed sorority—that society of orphan girls with shaved heads—flocked to her side. Even Emily Waterman scuttled out from under her cot and ran over to throw her arms around Allie’s neck. Girls took her hands and sat beside her, whispering soothingly and fussing over her. Gail Neighbors began to quietly pick up her things. One entering the room would’ve imagined Allie was the person who had just been bullied and humiliated, not Renée or Nick.
Harper returned to her cot, which was at a right angle to Renée’s. Renée was already sitting on the edge of her mattress by then, looking as worn and disheartened as Harper felt.
“Should one of us go after Nick?” Renée asked.
“I don’t think so. He won’t go far in this snow. The Lookouts will yell if he so much as steps off the planks. One of them will bring him back eventually.”
The Marlboro Man was still chattering, saying something about a woman who had smelled like a wet cat when she burned. He seemed offended that she had the bad grace to stink when she died. Talk radio was enough to make Harper think the end of the world wasn’t so bad after all.
“I can’t take anymore,” Renée said, and Harper thought she was speaking of life in the camp, but she only meant the DJ. Renée reached out and, with an irritated flick, switched the radio to AM and began to skip through bands of static.
Harper said, “What are you doing? Why are people in this camp always listening to static? What are all of you listening for?”
“Martha Quinn,” Renée said.
“Martha Quinn? Martha Quinn, who used to be on MTV a thousand years ago?”
“She’s out there . . . somewhere.”
“Lies,” Norma Heald murmured. “All lies. That’s a pipe dream.”
Renée ignored her. “You know what the kids say.”
“I have no idea what the kids say. What do they say?”
“She came back from the eighties to save mankind. Martha Quinn is our only hope.”
3
“I’ve never heard the broadcast myself, but supposedly she’s transmitting from off the coast of Maine.” Renée struggled into a bulky orange parka.
It was later. Women milled around the bottom of the basement steps, picking coats and hats out of cardboard boxes, readying themselves for the three-hundred-foot march through the snow to the cafeteria and supper. Outside, the wind screamed.
“From a boat?”
“From an island. They’ve got a little town and their own research lab, backed by the federal government. What’s left of the federal government, anyway. They’re testing experimental treatments.”
Jamie Close grinned, showing snaggled teeth, two incisors missing from the lower part of her mouth. “They’ve got a serum they give to you in eighteen shots. Like for rabies. It suppresses the Dragonscale, but they need to give it to you every day. Bend over, drop your pants, and bite on this stick, because you’re getting it right in the ass. I say no thank you to that. If I wanted someone poking painful things in my ass every day, I’ve got an uncle I could look up.”
Harper had a scarf over her mouth, wound around and around the lower part of her face, and she felt this gave her permission not to reply. She squeezed into the crowd of women making their way up the steps, out into the darkness and the shrieking gale.
“It’s not as bad as that,” murmured Gail Neighbors. At least Harper thought it was Gail Neighbors. It would’ve been difficult to tell the twins apart under any circumstances, but with a hat pulled to the girl’s eyebrows and the puffy collar of her parka up around her ears, Harper could hardly see any of her face. “Apparently they’re doing great things with medical marijuana. Everyone gets an allowance, seven joints a week. Government-bred weed, so it’s really clean, really mellow.”
“Also, the legal drinking age there is sixteen,” said the one Harper thought was Gillian. They had both turned sixteen, Harper recalled, just after Thanksgiving.
The pressure of the crowd behind Harper ejected her out of the stairwell and into the night. A pair of planks ran alongside each other, across the snow, dwindling off into the darkness. The salty gale battered at Harper, caused her to stagger. She wasn’t as steady on her pins as she had been a couple months ago. Her center of gravity was shifting. She steadied herself against a boulder wearing a white cap of snow.