This is my chance to climb, just like Alex said.
Somehow I find the strength to drag myself to the fence on my hands and knees, dry-heaving, vomiting dust. I hear shouting behind me, but it all sounds distant, like under-water noise. I limp to the fence and haul myself upward, inch by inch. I’m going as fast as I can but it feels like I’m crawling, barely making progress. Alex must be behind me because I hear him shouting, “Go, Lena! Go!” I focus on his voice: It’s the only thing that keeps me going up. Somehow—miraculously—I reach the top of the fence, and then I step over the loops of barbed wire like Alex taught me, and then I tip over the other side and let myself drop twenty feet to the ground, hitting the grass hard, half-unconscious now and incapable of feeling any more pain. Just a few more feet and I’ll be sucked into the Wilds; I’ll be beyond its impenetrable shield of interlocking trees and growth and shade. I wait for Alex to hit next.
But he doesn’t.
That’s when I do the thing I swore I wouldn’t do. Suddenly all my strength is back, fueled by panic. I scramble to my feet as the fence begins to hum again.
And I look back.
Alex is still standing on the other side of the fence, beyond a flickering wall of smoke and fire. He hasn’t moved a single inch since we both jumped off the bike, hasn’t tried to.
Strangely, in that moment I think back to what I answered all those months ago, at my first evaluation, when I was asked about Romeo and Juliet and could only think to say beautiful. I’d wanted to explain; I’d wanted to say something about sacrifice.
Alex’s T-shirt is red, and for a second I think it’s a trick of the light, but then I realize he’s drenched, soaked in blood: blood seeping across his chest, like the stain seeping up the sky, bringing another day to the world. Behind him is that insect army of men, all of them running toward him at once, guns drawn. The guards are coming too, reaching for him from both sides as though they are going to tear him apart, straight down the middle. The helicopter has him fixed in its spotlight. He is standing white and still and frozen in its beam, and I don’t think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him.
He is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.
And then he opens his mouth and his mouth forms one last word.
The word is: Run.
After that the insect men fall on him. He is taken up by all their snapping, ravaging arms and mouths like an animal being set upon by vultures, enfolded in all their darkness.
I run for I don’t know how long. Hours, maybe, or days.
Alex told me to run. And so I run.
You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way.
But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.
I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.
An Exclusive Q & A with Lauren Oliver
Q: What inspired you to write Delirium? Did you always conceive of it as the first book in a trilogy?
A: The idea for Delirium came from an essay I read by Gabriel García Márquez, in which he wrote that all great books were about love or death. The next day I was thinking about that quote—particularly about how and in what form a modern love story could be told—while I was on the treadmill at the gym. I was simultaneously watching a news story about a flu outbreak that had everyone freaking out about the possibility of a pandemic, and I was marveling that people so easily go into panics about reports of these diseases. At some point the two trains of thought—love and disease—just combined in my head.
In terms of conceiving it as a trilogy, I had always hoped I would be able to extend the story—from the beginning, I kept the working manuscript in a folder on my computer called “The Love Trilogy.” So I had a sense of where the story would go and how it would evolve—and luckily HarperCollins let me run with it!