As soon as the rest of the scouts return, we will leave. They’ll be here any day now—that’s what we all tell Raven, to ease her anxiety. The snow falls slowly, steadily, turning the world to white drift.
I’ve started checking the nests for messages twice a day. The trees, encased in ice, are harder to climb. Afterward, when I come back to the burrow, my fingers throb painfully as the feeling returns to them. For weeks the supplies have been floating to us regularly, although sometimes we’ve found them caught upriver, in the shallows, which freeze more easily. We have to break them out with broom handles. Roach and Buck make it back to the homestead, exhausted but triumphant. The snow finally stops. Now we are just waiting on Hunter and Tack.
Then one day, the nests are yellow. And again the next day: yellow.
On the third day of yellow, Raven pulls me aside.
“I’m worried,” she says. “Something must be wrong on the inside.”
“Maybe they’re patrolling again,” I say. “Maybe they’ve turned on the fence.”
She bites her lip, shakes her head. “Whatever it is, it must be major. Everyone knows it’s time for us to move. We need all the supplies we can get.”
“I’m sure it’s temporary,” I say. “I’m sure tomorrow we’ll get a shipment.”
Raven shakes her head again. “We can’t afford to wait much longer,” she says, and her voice is strangled. I know she isn’t thinking only of the supplies. She’s thinking of Hunter and Tack, too.
The next day, the sky is a pale blue, the sun high and amazingly warm, breaking through the trees and turning the ice to rivulets of flowing water. The snow brought silence with it, but now the woods are alive again, full of dripping and twittering and cracking. It is as though the Wilds have been released from a muzzle.
We are all in a good mood—everyone but Raven, who does her daily scan of the sky and only mutters, “It won’t last.”
On my way to the nests, stamping through the snow, I’m so warm I have to take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. The nests will be green today, I can sense it. They’ll be green, and the supplies will come, and the scouts will return, and we’ll all flow south together. The light is dazzling, bouncing off the glittering branches, filling my vision with spots of color, flashes of red and green.
When I get to the nests, I untie my jacket and loop it over one of the lower branches. I’ve gotten good at the climb—my body finds its way up easily, and I feel a kind of joy in my chest I haven’t felt for a long time. From far away I hear a vague humming, a low vibration that reminds me of crickets singing in the summertime.
There is a vast world for us, a boundless space beyond and between the fences and the rules. We will travel it freely. We will be okay.
I have almost reached the nests. I adjust my weight, seek better purchase for my feet, and pull myself upward, toward the final branch.
Just then a shadow zooms past me—so sudden and startling I nearly slip backward. For a moment I feel the terror of free fall—the tipping, the cold air behind me—but at the last second I manage to right myself. My heart is pounding, though, and I can’t shake that momentary impression of falling.
And then I see that it wasn’t a shadow that startled me.
It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere.
Red. Red. Red.
Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches.
Red means run.
I don’t know how I get down from the tree. I am slipping and sliding, all the grace and ease driven out of my limbs by the panic. Red means run. I drop the last four feet and land tumbling in the snow. Cold seeps through my jeans and sweater. I snatch my jacket and run, just like Hunter told me to do, through the dazzling, melting world of ice, while blackness eats at the edges of my vision. Every step is an agony, and I feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you’re trying to escape but you can’t move at all.
Now the humming I heard earlier is louder—not like crickets at all. Like hornets.
Like motors.
My lungs are burning and my chest is aching and tears are stinging my eyes as I flounder toward the homestead. I want to scream. I want to sprout wings and fly. And for a second I think, Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe nothing bad will happen.
That is when the humming turns into a roar, and above the trees I see the first plane tearing across the sky, screaming.
But no. I’m the one screaming.
I am screaming as I run. I am screaming when the first bomb falls, and the Wilds turn to fire around me.
now