“You’re the one who isn’t trusting—”
His voice cuts off sharply as I shut the door behind me, a little louder than I normally would, so they’ll know I’m there. I hate listening to Tack and Raven fight—I’d never heard any adults fight until I escaped to the Wilds—though over time I’ve grown more used to it. I’ve had to. It seems like they’re always bickering about something.
I go down the stairs. As I do, Tack turns away, passing a hand over his eyes. Raven says shortly, “You’re late. The meeting ended hours ago. What happened?”
“I missed the first round of buses.” Before Raven can start lecturing, I quickly add, “I left a glove and had to go back for it. I spoke to Julian Fineman.”
“You what?” Raven bursts out, and Tack sighs and rubs his forehead.
“Only for, like, a minute.” I almost tell them about the pictures and decide, at the last minute, that I won’t. “It’s cool. Nothing happened.”
“It’s not cool, Lena,” Tack says. “What did we tell you? It’s all about staying under the radar.”
Sometimes it feels as though Tack and Raven take their roles as Thomas and Rachel—strict guardians—a little bit too seriously, and I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes.
“It was no big deal,” I insist.
“Everything’s a big deal. Don’t you get it? We—”
Raven cuts him off. “She gets it. She’s heard it a thousand times. Give her a break, okay?”
Tack stares at her mutely for a second, his mouth a thin white line. Raven meets his gaze steadily. I know they’re angry about other things—that it’s not just me—but I feel a hot rush of guilt anyway. I’m making things worse.
“You’re unbelievable,” Tack says. I don’t think he means for me to hear.
Then he brushes past me and pounds up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Raven demands, and for a moment something flares in her eyes—some need, or fear. But it’s gone before I can identify it.
“Out,” Tack says without stopping. “There’s no air down here. I can hardly breathe.” Then he’s pushing into the pantry and the door closes at the top of the stairwell, and Raven and I are left alone.
For a second we stand in silence. Then Raven barks a laugh. “Don’t mind him,” she says. “You know Tack.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling awkward. The fight has soured the air; Tack was right. The basement feels heavy, clotted. Normally it’s my favorite place in the house, this secret space—Tack and Raven’s, too. It’s the only place where we can shed the false skins, fake names, fake pasts.
At least this room feels inhabited. The upstairs looks like a normal house, and smells like a normal house, and is full of normal-house things; but it’s off somehow, as though it were tipped just a few inches on its foundations.
In contrast to the rest of the apartment, the basement is a wreck. Raven can’t clean and straighten as fast as Tack can accumulate and unravel. Books—real books, banned books, old books—are piled everywhere. Tack collects them. No, more than that. He hoards them, the way the rest of us hoard food. I tried to read a few of them, just to find out what it was like before the cure, and before all the fences, but it made my chest ache to imagine it: all that freedom, all that feeling and life. It’s better, much better, not to think about it too much.
Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That’s another reason I can’t read anymore.
Raven sighs and starts shuffling some papers piled haphazardly on a rickety wooden table in the center of the room. “It’s this goddamn rally,” she says. “It’s got everybody all twitchy.”
“What’s the problem?” I ask.
She waves away the question. “Same as always. Rumors about a riot. The underground is saying the Scavengers will show, try to pull something major. But nothing’s confirmed.”
Raven’s voice takes on a hard edge. I don’t even like to say the word Scavengers. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, of things rotting, of ash. All of us—the Invalids, the resistance—hate the Scavengers. They give us a bad name. Everyone agrees that they’ll ruin, have already ruined, so much of what we are working to achieve. The Scavengers are Invalids, like us, but they don’t stand for anything. We want to take down the walls and get rid of the cure. The Scavengers want to take down everything—burn everything to dust, steal and slaughter and set the world to flame.
I’ve only run into a group of Scavengers once, but I still have nightmares about them.
“They won’t be able to pull it off,” I say, trying to sound confident. “They’re not organized.”
Raven shrugs. “I hope not.” She stacks books on top of one another, making sure their corners are aligned. For a second I feel a rush of sadness for her: standing in the middle of so much mess, stacking books as though it means something, as though it will help.
“Is there anything I can do?”