“Here,” she says. “Take this.” She passes me the plate she’s been holding: two small round patties, like pancakes but darker and grainier, are sitting at its center. She removes a dented tin soup can from a shelf in the corner, uses it as a ladle to scoop a bit of water from one of the buckets under the sink, and carries it back to me. I can only hope that bucket doesn’t do double duty as a vomit basin.
“Hard to find glass around here,” she says when I raise my eyebrows at the soup can, and then adds, “Bombs.” She says it as though she’s in a grocery store and saying Grapefruit, as though it’s the most everyday thing in the world. She sits again, braiding a bit of hair between her long brown fingers absentmindedly.
I lift the soup can to my lips. Its edges are jagged, and I have to sip carefully.
“You learn to make do out here,” Raven says with a kind of pride. “We can build out of nothing—out of scraps and trash and bones. You’ll see.”
I stare at the plate in my lap. I’m hungry, but the words trash and bones make me nervous about eating.
Raven must understand what I’m thinking, because she laughs. “Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s nothing gross. Some nuts, a bit of flour, some oil. It’s not the best thing you’ll ever eat in your life, but it will keep your strength up. We’re running low on supplies; we haven’t had a delivery in a week. The escape really screwed us, you know.”
“My escape?”
She nods. “They’ve had the borders running live in all the cities for a hundred miles for the past week, doubled security at the fences.” I open my mouth to apologize, but she cuts me off. “It’s all right. They do this every time there’s a breach. They always get worried there’ll be some mass uprising and people will rush the Wilds. In a few days they’ll get lazy again, and then we’ll get our supplies. And in the meantime…” She jerks her chin toward the plate. “Nuts.”
I take a nibble of the pancake. It’s not bad, actually: toasty and crunchy and just a little bit greasy, leaving a sheen of oil on my fingertips. It’s a lot better than the broth, and I say so to Raven.
She beams at me. “Yeah, Roach is the resident cook. He can make a good meal out of anything. Well, he can make an edible meal out of anything.”
“Roach? Is that his real name?”
Raven finishes a braid, flicks it over her shoulder, starts on another one. “As real as any name,” she says. “Roach has been in the Wilds his whole life. Originally comes from one of the homesteads farther south, close to Delaware. Someone down there must have named him. By the time he got up here, he was Roach.”
“What about Blue?” I ask. I make it through the whole first pancake without feeling queasy, then set the plate on the floor next to the bed. I don’t want to push my luck.
Raven hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “She was born right here, at the homestead.”
“So you named her for her eyes,” I say.
Raven stands abruptly, and turns away before saying, “Uh-huh.” She goes to the shelves by the sink and clicks off one of the battery-operated lanterns, so the room sinks even further into darkness.
“How about you?” I ask her.
She points to her hair. “Raven.” She smiles. “Not the most original.”
“No, I mean—were you born here? In the Wilds?”
The smile disappears just like that, like a candle being snuffed out. For a second she looks almost angry. “No,” she says shortly. “I came here when I was fifteen.”
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself from pressing. “By yourself?”
“Yes.” She picks up the second lantern, which is still emitting a pale bluish light, and moves toward the door.
“So what was your name before?” I say, and she freezes, her back to me. “Before you came to the Wilds, I mean.”
For a moment she stands there. Then she turns around. She is holding the lantern low so her face is in darkness. Her eyes are two bare reflections, glittering, like black stones in the moonlight.
“You might as well get used to it now,” she says with quiet intensity. “Everything you were, the life you had, the people you knew … dust.” She shakes her head and says, a little more firmly, “There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.”
Then she heads into the hallway with her lantern, leaving me in total darkness, my heart beating very fast.
The next morning, I wake up starving. The plate is still there with the second pancake, and I half tumble out of bed reaching for it, banging onto my knees on the cold stone floor. A beetle is exploring the surface of the pancake—normally, before, this would have grossed me out, but now I’m too hungry to care. I flick the insect away, watch it scurry into a corner, and eat the pancake greedily with both hands, sucking on my fingers. It saws off only the barest corner of my hunger.