Chapter 12
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth like a fly on flypaper. I work it free and part my swollen lips. Pain pulses in my head in time with my heartbeat. I bring shaky fingers up to my temples and the pain intensifies, making me cringe.
I force my eyelids up over my parched eyeballs and see nothing but darkness. But to the left of me, the darkness is somehow darker, and shaped like shoulders and a head. I reach toward that darkness and feel fabric, and beneath the fabric, warm skin.
“Are you awake?” the shadow whispers.
I jerk my hand away, startled. “I hope not,” I croak. Every single bit of my body aches. I groan.
“Definitely awake,” he says, voice a deep, quiet rumble. Bowen.
“Crap. I was afraid of that. Why do I hurt so much?” Even talking hurts. I gingerly lick my swollen lip and taste blood.
“Let’s see. You were attacked by a beast filled with electricity. Before that, I hit you upside the head because I had to get your cuffs off. Oh. And the bathroom door split your lip.”
Bathroom door? And then I remember—he tore the shirt from my body. Revealed my secret. I gasp and run my hands over my chest and down to my hips. A shirt covers me, a shirt that smells like a high mountain lake. My eyes slip shut in relief. My secret is still safe.
“So, when were you going to tell me?” he asks.
My eyes pop open, and I gulp down a resurgence of fear. “Tell you what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He chuckles. “Whatever, Fotard.”
That name on his lips sends my heart racing. It is the name he made up to torment me when we were in third grade. I push up onto my elbows to get a better look at him and realize that for the first time since I’ve been in the camp, my cuffs aren’t fused together. Bowen scrambles backward and bumps up against the wall of a tent.
“Don’t move or I’ll activate your cuffs,” he says, voice hard.
I lower myself back onto the sleeping bag and lay my arms flat against my sides. “I’m not moving.” I look at his silhouette out of the corner of my eye. Slowly, he eases closer to me, juts a bit.
“Can I ask you something, Bowen?” He knows my secret. There’s no use in pretending anymore.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Are you Dreyden? Or Duncan?” I already know the answer—I just need to hear him say it.
There’s a long pause before he answers, “You spent enough time staring at my brother. Can’t you tell the difference?” There is resentment in his voice.
I see the two faces from my past, the two brothers, one with gray eyes, one with green, one my age, one several years older, and know without a doubt which one sits beside me. “But you’re too old to be Dreyden,” I whisper.
“Too old? We’re the same age,” he says.
I take a deep breath, grateful for the darkness that hides my face when I ask, or rather squeak, “How old am I?”
“What do you mean? You don’t know?” Skepticism taints his voice, as if he thinks I’m lying.
I’m thirteen. One-three. I can remember blowing out thirteen candles on my last birthday cake. Remember my twin brother blowing out the candles on his cake at the same time. I wore a yellow sundress. And mascara on my pale lashes—my first time wearing mascara. My mom gave me my first bottle of perfume, and my dad gave me a gold treble-clef charm on a gold chain. My hand gropes my empty collarbone, feeling for the necklace even though I already know it isn’t there.
“Seventeen.” Bowen’s voice interrupts my memories.
My breath comes too fast and my hands grip my too-big hip bones. There is no way I’m seventeen. He’s got to be wrong, got to be lying to me. I push up on my elbows again to tell him so, and hear the hum of electricity. My arms are yanked out from under me and meld together, pinned awkwardly over my stomach. I fall back and land with a thud, and all the air jolts from my lungs. Pain shoots through my throbbing head, and my stomach roils with nausea. I whimper and squeeze my eyes shut.
“I told you not to move,” Bowen says, his words laced with anger. He opens the tent flap and leaves.
After a moment of lying perfectly still and taking deep, even breaths, the nausea subsides and I can think despite the pounding of my head. Seventeen. That’s how old my body looks. But I don’t remember turning fourteen or fifteen. Or sixteen. And I definitely don’t remember seventeen. I remember …
Lavender and forget-me-nots blowing in the wind.
Being forbidden to go outside.
Jonah staring out the music-room window while I practiced piano.
Wearing clothes to school that covered me from my neck to my fingertips to my toes, with a hat that draped bee sting–resistant netting over my head like a veil.
I remember a yard with grass that hadn’t been mown in so long it died and was replaced by dandelions even though my dad was anal about paying someone to keep the lawn mowed and edged.
And Mom and Lis coming home from the grocery store wearing their netting veils, and all they’d purchased was bags and bags and bags full of canned fruit and dehydrated meat substitute.
I remember the sharp prick of a needle, hardly bigger than the tip of a pencil, and a deep voice that didn’t belong to my father: You have to relax your muscles, Fiona.
And every month when Jonah and I went to the health clinic to get another shot, I cried, so Jonah held my hand.
“Bowen,” someone outside my tent whispers, scattering my memories. “Can we talk?”
“Yeah. What?” Bowen says, his voice still tinged with anger.
“Mind sending the armed guard away first?”
“Take a break, men. I don’t think the kid’s going to try anything in the next ten minutes,” Bowen says.
“Yessir.” The hollow thump of boots echoes up through the ground.
“‘Sup, Len?” Bowen asks.
“I want to know your answer regarding what we talked about last night,” Len says, his voice hushed.
“Refresh my memory,” Bowen snaps.
“I want the Fec. I’ll buy him off you for eight ounces.” There’s something about Len’s voice that makes me squirm. It has the same emotion I saw in the beast’s eyes when it looked at me—hunger. But is hunger an emotion? I wonder, shivering.
A shoe scrapes in the dirt and there’s a long silence. Bowen finally says, “So, why d’you want him so bad? You’ve never shown interest in anyone with the mark before.”
“What’s your problem, Drey?” The other guy sounds offended. “I’m offering to take a Level Ten off your hands and pay you! You should be the one paying me!”
“Yeah. I don’t buy it. What’s your real motive? Why the sudden interest in someone with the mark?”
“I’ll give you sixteen ounces, man,” Len whispers. “That’s double what they’ll pay for him at the lab. Sixteen ounces!”
“Sixteen ounces?” Bowen’s voice is shocked. “Where’d you get sixteen ounces?”
“I’ve got my sources. So, what do you say?”
“Well, crap, Len. Sixteen ounces of honey? Let me think about it,” Bowen says. “Hmmm. Thinking hard. Thinking, thinking. And the answer is … no. Get out of here.”
“Twenty-four ounces of honey. That is my final offer. An offer you’d be a fool to refuse,” Len says, his gravelly voice mad. “Take it or leave it.”
“Twenty-four ounces? I could practically retire on that and live inside the wall. No more special forces,” Bowen says, and I can hear the yearning in his voice, as loud and clear as the hunger in Len’s.
“Please, no,” I whisper, straining to hear his answer.
Bowen sighs. And then groans, as if facing a painful internal struggle.
“Like I said. An offer you can’t refuse,” Len says eagerly. His tone makes me feel … dirty. I burrow deeper into my sleeping bag, shut my eyes, and pray Bowen says no.
After a drawn-out silence, my pounding heart the only noise, Bowen says, “You wanna know the funny thing about making me an offer I can’t refuse?”
“No. Tell me what’s funny about it.” Len is practically panting.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse it.”
My eyes pop open, and a small smile pulls painfully on my split lip. Tears fill my eyes, the first good tears that I’ve cried since waking up in my abandoned house. Thank you, Dreyden!
“Now get out of here before my men come back and I have them escort you away,” Bowen says, voice taut.
Len growls, an animal sound of frustration. “Let me know when you change your mind.”
“Won’t happen. Get. Out. Of. Here.”
Footsteps pound over the ground, fading to silence. Bowen exhales and swears under his breath. A light flickers. The tent flap opens, and I squeeze my eyes shut against the glare of a flashlight.
Bowen squats beside my head and shines the light on my chin. I squint up at him. His eyes move over my face, searching for something. “Is it possible Len knows?” he whispers.
I frown. “Knows what?” “That you’re …” His eyes travel over my sleeping bag and grow wide, as if he can see my female body through the bulky material.
“That I’m a gir—”
Bowen claps a hand over my mouth, gently, though, so his callused palm doesn’t hurt my split lip. He puts a finger to his lips and removes his hand.
“You dragged me around the camp half-naked last night,” I whisper.
Bowen shakes his head, brow furrowed. “No. He knew before that. He had to have known the first night you came into the camp.”
“Why does it matter? What’s the big deal about my gender?”
Bowen smirks. “Where have you been the past few years? Seriously?”
I open my mouth, but no answer comes out. I sigh and finally say, “I don’t remember.”
Bowen rubs his eyes and leans as far from me as the tent allows, setting the flashlight in his lap. “You really don’t remember? It’s not some sort of act?”
“I remember turning thirteen. But I don’t remember any birthdays after that,” I say. “What’s wrong with being a girl?”
He sighs and his breath stirs the air. “Well, for one thing, there are seven living men for every one living woman. Being a woman outside the wall is the worst thing you can be. Women are hunted even more than beasts.”
“Why?”
“Because they bring the highest … the gangs pay … some men are …” Bowen presses on his eyes with the balls of his hands. “So now …” His hands drop to his sides and he looks at me. “On top of me protecting the entire camp from you, it looks like I’ll be protecting you from them.”
Footsteps stir outside the tent and fabric rustles. Bowen sits tall.
“Bowen? You in there, man?” a voice rumbles.
Bowen’s eyes meet mine and he presses a finger to his lips. “Yeah, Tommy. Just keeping you guys safe from the Fec. You boys have a nice break?”
“Sure did. Thanks, man.”
Bowen turns off the flashlight, and the tent goes dark. There is warm pressure on my lips, and my heart flutters before I realize what he’s doing. I obediently open my mouth, and a wafer is placed on my tongue. It tastes like hamburgers and French fries, and as it settles in my stomach, it brings a food-heavy tiredness to my entire body that makes me think of Thanksgiving Day.
As I drift off to sleep, I believe being cuffed is worth tasting food again, even if it is in wafer form.