“Everyone stays alive,” Raven says stubbornly, and her voice trembles a little.
Tack sighs. He sounds tired—and something else, too. Gentle. Concerned. I’ve come to think of Tack as a dog: all bite and snarl. No softness to him at all.
“You can’t save everybody, Rae,” he says.
“I can try,” she says.
I go back to my room without the water, drawing my blankets all the way up to my chin. The air is full of shadows, shifting shapes I can’t identify.
There will be two main issues once we leave the homestead: food and shelter. There are other camps, other groups of Invalids, farther south, but settlements are few and separated by large expanses of open land. The northern Wilds are unforgiving in the fall and winter: hard and brittle and barren, full of hungry animals.
Over the years, traveling Invalids have mapped out a route: They have marked the trees with a system of gouges and slashes, to indicate the easiest path south.
Next week, groups of homesteaders—scouts—will leave on preliminary expeditions. Six will trek to our next big camp, which is eighty miles south, carting food and supplies in backpacks strapped to their bodies. When they reach camp, they will bury half the food in the ground, so it will not be consumed by animals, and mark the place of burial with a group of stones. Two will return to the homestead; the other four will go on another sixty miles, where they will bury half of what remains. Two of the four will then return to the homestead.
The fifth scout will wait there while the last scout pushes a final forty miles, equipped with the remaining portion of food. They will return to the homestead together, trapping and foraging what they can. By then we will have made all the arrangements and finished packing up.
When I ask Raven why the camps get closer and closer together as they wind southward, she barely glances up from what she’s doing.
“You’ll see,” she says shortly. Her hair is plaited into dozens of small braids—Blue’s work—and Raven has fixed golden leaves and dried red baneberries, which are poisonous, at their ends.
“Isn’t it better to go as far as we can every day?” I press. Even the third camp is a hundred miles from our final destination, although as we move south we’ll find other homesteads, better trapping, and people to share their food and shelter with us.
Raven sighs. “We’ll be weak by then,” she says, finally straightening up to look at me. “Cold. Hungry. It will probably be snowing. The Wilds suck the life out of you, I’m telling you. It’s not like going on one of your little morning runs. You can’t just keep pushing. I’ve seen—” She breaks off, shaking her head, as though to dislodge a memory. “We have to be very careful,” she finishes.
I’m so offended I can’t speak for a moment. Raven called my runs “little,” as though they’re some kind of game. But I’ve left bits of myself out there—skin, blood, sweat, and vomit—bits of Lena Haloway, flaking off in pieces, scattered in the dark.
Raven senses she’s upset me. “Help me with these, will you?” she asks. She’s making small emergency pouches, one for every homesteader, filled with Advil, Band-Aids, antibacterial wipes. She piles the supplies in the center of squares of fabric, cut from old sheets, then twists them into pouches and ties them off with wire. “My fingers are so fat I keep getting everything all tangled.”
It’s not true: Raven’s fingers are thin, just like the rest of her, and I know she’s trying to make me feel better. But I say, “Yeah, sure.” Raven hardly ever asks for help; when she does, you give it.
The scouts will be exhausted. Even though they will be weighed down by food, it is for storing, not for eating, and they have room to carry only a tiny bit for themselves. The last scout, the one who goes all one hundred and eighty miles, has to be the strongest. Without conferring or discussing it, everyone knows it will be Tack.
One night, I work up the courage to approach him. He is in a rare good mood. Bram brought four rabbits from the traps today, and for once we have all eaten until we were completely full.
After dinner, Tack sits next to the fire, rolling a cigarette. He doesn’t look up as I approach.
“What?” he asks, abrupt as ever, but his voice has none of its usual edge.
I suck in a deep breath and blurt out, “I want to be one of the scouts.” I’ve been agonizing all week about what to say to Tack—I’ve written whole speeches in my head—but at the last second these eight words are all that come.
“No,” Tack says shortly. And just like that, all my worrying and planning and strategizing have come to nothing.
I’m torn between disappointment and anger. “I’m fast,” I say. “I’m strong.”
“Not strong enough.”