I open my eyes into pain. For a second everything is swirling color, and I have a moment of total panic—Where am I? What happened?—but then shapes and boundaries assert themselves. I am in a windowless stone room, lying on a cot. In my confusion I think that perhaps I’ve made it back to the burrow, and found myself in the sickroom.
But no. This room is smaller and dingier. There are no sinks, and only one bucket in the corner, and the mattress I’m lying on is stained and thin and without sheets.
Memories return: the rally in New York; the subway entrance, the horrible vision of the bodyguards. I remember the rasping voice in my ear: Not so fast.
I try to sit up and instantly have to lay back again, overwhelmed by the surge behind my eyes, like the pressure of a knife.
“Water helps.”
This time I do sit up, whipping around despite the pain. Julian Fineman is sitting on a narrow cot behind me, leaning his head against the wall, watching me through heavy-lidded eyes. He is holding a tin cup, which he extends toward me.
“They brought it earlier,” he says. There is a long, thin gash that runs from his eyebrow to his jaw, caked with dried blood, and a bruise on the left side of his forehead, just beneath his hairline. The room is outfitted with a small bulb, set high in the ceiling, and in its white glow, his hair is the color of new straw.
My eyes go immediately to the door behind him, and he shakes his head. “Locked from the outside.”
So. Prisoners.
“Who’s they?” I ask, even though I know. It must be Scavengers who brought us here. I think of that hellish vision in the tunnels, a guard strung up, another knifed in his back … no one but the Scavengers could have done that.
Julian shakes his head. I see, too, that he has bruises around his neck. They must have choked him. His jacket is gone and his shirt is ripped; there’s more blood ringing his nostrils, and some of it has dripped onto his shirt. But he seems surprisingly calm. The hand holding the cup is steady.
Only his eyes are electric, restless—that vivid, improbable blue, alert and watchful.
I reach out to take the cup from him, but at the last second he draws it away a fraction of an inch.
“I recognize you,” he says, “from the meeting.” Something flickers in his eyes. “You lost your glove.”
“Yeah.” I reach again for the cup.
The water tastes mossy, but it feels amazing on my throat. As soon as I have a sip, I realize I’ve never been so thirsty in my life. There isn’t enough to take more than a bare edge off the feeling; I gulp most of it down in one go before realizing, guiltily, that Julian might want some. There’s a half inch of water left, which I try to return to him.
“You can finish it,” he says, and I don’t argue. As I drink, I can feel his eyes on me again, and when I look at him, I see that he has been staring at the three-pronged scar on my neck. It seems to reassure him.
Amazingly, I still have my backpack. For some reason, the Scavengers have let me keep it. This gives me hope. They may be vicious, but they’re obviously not very practiced at kidnapping people. I remove a granola bar from my bag, then reconsider. I’m not starving yet, and I have no idea how long I’m going to be trapped in this rat hole. I learned in the Wilds: It’s better to wait when you still can. Eventually, you’ll be too desperate to have self-control.
The rest of the things I’ve brought—The Book of Shhh, Tack’s stupid umbrella, the water bottle, which I drank dry on the bus ride into Manhattan, and a tube of mascara, probably Raven’s, nestled at the very bottom of the bag—are useless. Now I know why they didn’t bother confiscating the backpack. Still, I take everything out, lay it carefully on my bed, and overturn the backpack—shaking it hard, as though a knife or a lock pick or some other kind of salvation might suddenly materialize.
Nothing. Still, there’s got to be a way out of here.
I stand up and go to the door, bending my left arm. The pain in my elbow has faded to a dull throb. It isn’t broken, then: another good sign.
I try the door: locked, like he said, and made of heavy iron. Impossible to break down. There’s a smaller door—about the size of a cat flap—fitted into the larger one. I squat down and examine it. The way its hinges are fitted allows it to be opened from their side, but not from ours.
“That’s where they put the water through,” Julian says. “Food, too.”
“Food?” This surprises me. “They gave you food?”
“A little bit of bread. Some nuts, too. I ate it all. I didn’t know how long you’d be out.” He looks away.
“That’s all right.” I straighten up, and scan the walls for cracks or fissures, a hidden door, or a weak place we might be able to push through. “I would have done the same thing.”
Food, water, an underground cell: Those are the facts. I can tell we’re underground because of the pattern of mold at the top of the walls—it’s a particular kind that we used to get all the time in the burrow. It comes from the dirt all around us.
It means, essentially, that we’re buried.