“Don’t worry about it.” Raven gives me a tight smile. “That’s my job, okay?”
That is another one of Raven’s catchphrases. Like her insistence that the past is dead, it has become a kind of mantra. I worry; you do what I say. We all need mantras, I guess—stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.
“Okay.” For a moment we stand there. It’s strange. In some ways Raven does feel like family—she’s the closest thing I have to it, anyway—but at other times it occurs to me I don’t really know her any better than I did in August, when she first found me. I still don’t know much about the person she was before coming to the Wilds. She has closed that part of herself down, folded it back to some deep, unreachable place.
“Go on,” she says, jerking her head toward the stairs. “It’s late. You should eat something.”
As I head up the stairs I brush my fingers, once, against the metal license plate we’ve tacked onto the wall. We found it in the Wilds, half buried in the mud and slush, during the relocation; we were all close to dead at that point, exhausted and starving, sick and freezing. Bram was the one who spotted it; and as he lifted it out of the ground, the sun had burst through the cloud cover, and the metal had flared a sudden white, almost blinding me so I could barely read the words printed underneath the number.
Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees.
Live free or die.
Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips.
Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.
then
It gets colder by the day. In the morning, the grass is coated in frost. The air stings my lungs when I run; the edges of the river are coated thinly with ice, which breaks apart around our ankles as we wade into the water with our buckets. The sun is sluggish, collapsing behind the horizon earlier and earlier, after a weak, watery swim across the sky.
I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire. My muscles are ropes, my legs are wooden. My palms are calloused—the bottoms of my feet, too, are as thick and blunt as stone. I never miss a run. I volunteer to cart the water every day, even though we’re supposed to rotate. Soon I can carry two buckets by myself the whole way back to camp without once pausing or stopping.
Alex passes next to me, weaving in and out of the shadows, threading between the crimson-and-yellow trees. In the summer he was fuller: I could see his eyes, his hair, a flash of his elbow. As the leaves begin to whirl to the ground and more and more trees are denuded, he is a stark black shadow, flickering in my peripheral vision.
I am learning, too. Hunter shows me how the messages are passed to us: how the sympathizers on the other side alert us to an arriving shipment.
“Come on,” he says to me one morning after breakfast. Blue and I are in the kitchen, scrubbing dishes. Blue has never quite opened up to me. She answers my questions with simple nods or shakes of her head. Her smallness, her shyness, the thinness of her bones: When I’m with Blue, I can’t help but think of Grace.
That’s why I avoid her as much as possible.
“Come on where?” I ask Hunter.
He grins. “You a good climber?”
The question takes me by surprise. “I’m okay,” I say, and have a sudden memory of scaling the border fence with Alex. I replace it quickly with another image: I am climbing into the leafy branches of one of the big maples in Deering Oaks Park. Hana’s blond hair flashes underneath the layers of green; she is circling the trunk, laughing, calling up for me to go higher.
But then I must take her out of the memory. I’ve learned to do that here, in the Wilds. In my head I trim her away—her voice, the flashing crown of her head—and leave only the sense of height, the swaying leaves, the green grass below me.
“It’s time to show you the nests, then,” Hunter says.
I’m not looking forward to being outside. It was bitterly cold last night. The wind shrieked through the trees, tore down the stairs, probed all the cracks and crevices of the burrow with long, icy fingers. I came in half-frozen from my run this morning, my fingers numb and blunt and useless. But I’m curious about the nests—I’ve heard the other homesteaders use the word—and I’m anxious to get away from Blue.
“Can you finish up here?” I ask Blue, and she nods, chewing on her lower lip. Grace used to do that too, when she was nervous. I feel a sharp pang of guilt. It’s not Blue’s fault that she reminds me of Grace.
It’s not Blue’s fault I left Grace behind.