I can’t see her smile, but I think I hear it: her lips cracking, a small exhalation that could be a laugh. “Good for you.” She holds up a dented bucket. “It’s water time.”
Raven withdraws, and I fumble for my clothes in the dark. When I first arrived at the homestead, the sleeping room looked like a mess, an explosion of fabric and clothing and miscellaneous belongings. Over time I’ve realized it isn’t actually so disorganized. Everyone has a little area, a space circumscribed for their things. We’ve drawn invisible circles around our little beds, or blankets, or mattresses, and people guard those spaces fiercely, like dogs marking out their territory. You must keep everything you own and need inside your little circle. Once it leaves, it is no longer yours. The clothes I’ve picked out from the store are folded at the very bottom of my blanket.
I fumble out of the room and feel my way down the hall. I find Raven by the kitchen, surrounded by empty buckets, coaxing last night’s fire up with the blunt, charred end of a large stick. She hasn’t turned on the lanterns here, either. It would be a waste of battery power. The smell of smoking wood, the low, flickering shadows, Raven’s shoulders touched by an orange glow: It makes me feel as though I haven’t yet woken from my dream.
“Ready?” She straightens up when she hears me, loops a bucket over each arm.
I nod, and she jerks her head toward the remaining buckets.
We wind our way upstairs and then get coughed out into the outside world: The release from inside, from the air and the closeness, is just as startling and abrupt as it was the time I explored the rest of the homestead with Sarah. The first thing that strikes me is the cold. The wind is icy and drives right through my T-shirt, and I let out a gasp without meaning to.
“What’s the matter?” Raven asks, speaking at a normal volume now that we’re outside.
“Cold,” I reply. The air smells like winter already, though I can see that the trees still have their leaves. At the very edge of the horizon, over the ragged and frayed skyline of the trees, there is a bare, golden glow where the sun is edging upward. The world is all grays and purples. The animals and birds are just beginning to stir.
“Less than a week until October,” Raven says, shrugging, and then, as I trip over a piece of twisted metal siding half-embedded in the ground, she says, “Watch your step.”
That’s when it really hits me: I’ve been following the rhythm of the days, keeping mental track of the date. But really I’ve been pretending that while I stayed buried underground, the rest of the world stayed motionless as well.
“Let me know if I’m walking too fast,” Raven says.
“Okay,” I say. My voice sounds strange in the empty, thin air of this autumn world.
We pick our way down the old main street. Raven walks easily, avoiding the torn-up bits of concrete and the twisted metal litter almost instinctively, the way that Sarah did. At the entrance to the old bank vault, where the boys sleep, Bram is waiting for us. Bram has dark hair and mocha-colored skin. He’s one of the quieter boys, one of the few who doesn’t scare me. He and Hunter are always together; in Zombieland, we would have called them Unnaturals, but here their relationship seems normal, effortless. Seeing them reminds me of pictures of Hana and me: one dark, one light. Raven passes him several buckets wordlessly, and he falls in next to us in silence. But he smiles at me, and I’m grateful for it.
Even though the air is cold, soon I’m sweating and my heart pushes painfully against my ribs. It has been more than a month since I’ve walked more than sixty feet at a time. My muscles are weak, and carrying even the empty buckets makes my shoulders ache after a few minutes. I keep shifting the handles in my palms; I refuse to complain or ask Raven to help, even though she must see that I’m having trouble keeping up. I don’t even want to think about how long and slow the way back will be, once the buckets are full.
We’ve left the homestead and the old main street behind, and veered off into the trees. All around us, the leaves are different shades of gold, orange, red, and brown. It is as though the whole forest is burning, a beautiful slow smolder. I can feel the space all around me, unbounded and unwalled, bright open air. Animals move, unseen, to our left and right, rustling through the dry leaves.
“Almost there,” Raven calls back. “You’re doing good, Lena.”