Please. Please get me out of here. My heart will explode; I can’t take a breath.
Two black shapes unfold all at once from either side of me, and in my terror they look like enormous dark birds, reaching out their wings to enfold me.
“Not so fast,” one of them says. He grabs my wrist. The keys are knocked from my hand. Then searing pain, a flash of white.
I sink into the dark.
then
Miyako, who should have been one of the scouts, is instead the last one to enter the sickroom.
“She’ll be back on her feet tomorrow,” Raven says. “You’ll see. She’s as solid as a rock.”
But the next day, her cough is so bad we can hear it reverberating through the walls. Her breathing sounds thick and watery. She sweats through her blankets even as she cries that she is cold, cold, freezing cold.
She begins coughing up blood. When it’s my turn to look after her, I can see it caked in the corners of her mouth. I dab at it with a washcloth, but she is still strong enough to fight me off. The fever makes her see shapes and shadows in the air; she swats at them, muttering.
She can no longer stand, even when Raven and I try to lift her together. She cries out in pain, and eventually we give up. Instead we change the sheets when Miyako pisses them. I think we should burn them, but Raven insists we can’t; I see her that night, furiously scrubbing them in the basin, while steam rises from the scalding water. Her forearms are the shiny red of raw meat.
And then one night I wake up and the silence is perfect, a cool, dark pool. For one second, still emerging from the fog of my dreams, I think that Miyako must have gotten better. Tomorrow she will be squatting in the kitchen, tending the fire. Tomorrow we will make rounds together, and I will watch her braiding traps with her long, slender fingers. When she catches me staring, she will smile.
But it is too quiet. I get up, a knot of dread tightening inside my chest. The floor is freezing.
Raven is sitting at the foot of Miyako’s bed, staring at nothing. Her hair is loose, and the flickering shadows from the candle next to her make her eyes look like two hollow pits.
Miyako’s eyes are closed, and I can tell right away she is dead.
The desire to laugh—hysterical and inappropriate—wells in my throat. To quash it, I say, “Is she—?”
“Yes,” Raven says shortly.
“When?”
“I’m not sure. I fell asleep for a while.” She passes a hand over her eyes. “When I woke up, she wasn’t breathing.”
My body flashes completely hot and then completely cold. I don’t know what to say, so I just stand there for a while, trying not to look at Miyako’s body: a statue, a shadow, her face thinned by sickness, whittled down to bone. All I can think about are her hands, which only a few days ago moved so expertly against the kitchen table as she beat out a soft rhythm so that Sarah could sing. They were a blur, like hummingbird wings—full of life.
I feel like something has caught in the back of my throat. “I—I’m sorry.”
Raven doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “I shouldn’t have made her carry water. She said she wasn’t feeling well. I should have let her rest.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I say quickly.
“Why not?” Raven looks up at me then. In that moment she looks very young—defiant, stubborn, the way that my cousin Jenny used to look when Aunt Carol told her it was time for homework. I have to remind myself that Raven is young: twenty-one, only a few years older than me. The Wilds will age you.
I wonder how long I’ll last out here.
“Because it’s not your fault.” The fact that I can’t see her eyes makes me nervous. “You can’t—you can’t feel bad.”
Raven stands up then, cupping the candle in one hand.
“We’re on the other side of the fence now, Lena,” she says, tiredly, as she passes. “Don’t you get it? You can’t tell me what to feel.”
The next day it snows. At breakfast, Sarah cries silently while spooning up oatmeal. She was close to Miyako.
The scouts left the homestead five days ago—Tack, Hunter, Roach, Buck, Lu, and Squirrel—and have taken the shovel with them, for burying supplies. We collect pieces of metal and wood, whatever will serve us for digging instead.
The snow is light, thankfully; by midmorning, a bare half inch is on the ground. But it’s very cold, and the ground is frozen solid. After digging and hacking for a half hour, we’ve only made the barest indentation in the earth, and Raven, Bram, and I are sweating. Sarah, Blue, and a few others are huddled a few feet away from us, shivering.
“This isn’t working,” Raven pants out. She throws down a twisted piece of metal she has been using as a shovel, sends it skittering across the ground with a kick. Then she turns and starts stalking back toward the burrow. “We’ll have to burn her.”