“Please.” The hunger is a snake; it is lashing at the pit of my stomach, eating me from the inside out.
She sighs, stands, and disappears through the darkened doorway. I think I hear a crescendo in the hallway voices, a swelling of sound. Then, abruptly, silence. The black-haired girl returns with a second bowl of broth. I take it from her and she sits again, drawing her knees up to her chest, like a kid would. Her knees are bony and brown.
“So,” she says, “where did you cross from?” When I hesitate, she says, “That’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, no. It’s fine.” I sip from this bowl of broth more slowly, savoring its strange, earthy quality: as though it has been stewed with stones. For all I know, it has been. Alex told me once that Invalids—the people who live in the Wilds—have learned to make do with only the barest provisions. “I came over from Portland.” Too soon the bowl is empty again, even though the snake in my stomach is still lashing. “Where are we now?”
“A few miles east of Rochester,” she says.
“Rochester, New Hampshire?” I ask.
She smirks. “Yup. You must have been hoofing it. How long were you out on your own?”
“I don’t know.” I rest my head against the wall. Rochester, New Hampshire. I must have looped around the northern border when I was lost in the Wilds: I’ve ended up sixty miles southwest of Portland. I’m exhausted again, even though I’ve been sleeping for days. “I lost track of time.”
“Pretty ballsy of you,” she says. I’m not really sure what “ballsy” means, but I can guess. “How did you cross?”
“It wasn’t—it wasn’t just me,” I say, and the snake lashes, seizes up. “I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be just me.”
“You were with somebody else?” She’s staring at me penetratingly again, her eyes almost as dark as her hair. “A friend?”
I don’t know how to correct her. My best friend. My boy-friend. My love. I’m still not totally comfortable with that word, and it seems almost sacrilegious, so instead I just nod.
“What happened?” she asks, a little more softly.
“He—he didn’t make it.” Her eyes flash with understanding when I say “he”: If we were coming from Portland together, from a place of segregation, we must have been more than just friends. Thankfully she doesn’t push it. “We made it all the way to the border fence. But then the regulators and the guards…” The pain in my stomach intensifies. “There were too many of them.”
She stands abruptly and retrieves one of the water-spotted tin buckets from the corner, places it next to the bed, and sits again.
“We heard rumors,” she says shortly. “Stories of a big escape in Portland, lots of police involvement, a big cover-up.”
“So you know about it?” I try once again to sit up all the way, but the cramping doubles me back against the wall. “Are they saying what happened to … to my friend?”
I ask the question even though I know. Of course I know.
I saw him standing there, covered in blood, as they descended on him, swarmed him, like the black ants in my dream.
The girl doesn’t answer, just folds her mouth into a tight line and shakes her head. She doesn’t have to say anything else—her meaning is clear. It’s written in the pity on her face.
The snake uncoils fully and begins thrashing. I close my eyes. Alex, Alex, Alex: my reason for everything, my new life, the promise of something better—gone, blown away into ash. Nothing will ever be okay again. “I was hoping…” I let out a little gasp as that terrible, lashing thing in my stomach comes riding toward my throat on a surge of sickness.
She sighs again and I hear her stand up, scrape the chair away from the bed.
“I think—” I can barely force the words out; I’m trying to swallow back the nausea. “I think I’m going to—”
And then I’m tipping over the bed, throwing up into the bucket she has placed beside me, my body gripped by waves of sickness.
“I knew you would make yourself sick,” the girl says, shaking her head. Then she disappears into the dark hallway. A second later, she pops her head back into the room. “I’m Raven, by the way.”
“Lena,” I say, and the word brings with it a new round of vomiting.
“Lena,” she repeats. She raps on the wall once with her knuckles. “Welcome to the Wilds.”
Then she disappears, and I am left with the bucket.
Later in the afternoon, Raven reappears, and I again try the broth. This time I sip slowly and manage to keep it down. I’m still so weak I can barely lift the bowl to my lips, and Raven has to help me. I should be embarrassed, but I can’t feel anything: Once the nausea subsides it is replaced by a numbness so complete it is like sinking under ice water.