“Julian,” I say. “Look at this.”
He stands next to me, staring wordlessly as I sift past all the laminated cards, a blur of faces, facts, identities.
“Come on,” he says, after a minute. “We have to hurry.”
I select a half-dozen ID cards quickly, trying to pick girls who look roughly my age, and rubber-band them together, slipping them into a pocket. I take a DFA badge too. It might be useful later.
Finally it’s time for the weapons. There are crates of them: old rifles heaped together like a tangle of thick thorns, gathering dust; well-palmed and well-oiled handguns; heavy clubs and boxes of ammunition. I pass Julian a handgun after checking to see that it’s loaded. I dump a box of bullets in my backpack.
“I’ve never shot one before,” Julian says, handling it gingerly, as though he’s worried it will explode on its own. “Have you?”
“A few times,” I say. He sucks his lower lip into his mouth. “You take it,” he says. I slip the handgun into my backpack, even though I don’t like the idea of being weighed down.
Knives, on the other hand, are useful, and not just for hurting people. I find a switchblade and stick it under the strap of the sports bra. Julian takes another switchblade, which he also pockets.
“Ready to go?” he asks me, after I’ve shouldered my backpack.
That’s when it hits me: The shimmering worry at the edge of my thoughts swells and breaks over me. This is wrong—all wrong. This is too organized. There are too many rooms, too many weapons, too much order.
“They must have had help,” I say, as the idea occurs to me for the first time. “The Scavengers could never have done this on their own.”
“The who?” Julian asks impatiently, casting an anxious look at the door.
I know we have to go, but I can’t move; a tingling feeling is working its way from my toes up into my legs. There’s another idea flickering in the back of my mind now—a brief impression, something seen or remembered. “Scavengers. They’re uncureds.”
“Invalids,” Julian says flatly. “Like you.”
“No. Not like me, and not Invalids. Different.” I squeeze my eyes shut and the memory crystallizes: pressing the point of my knife into the flesh below the Scavenger’s jaw, just above faint blue markings that looked somehow familiar…
“Oh my God.” I open my eyes. My chest feels as though someone is pounding on it.
“Lena, we have to go.” Julian reaches out to grab my arm, but I pull away from him.
“The DFA.” I can barely croak out the words. “The guy—the guard back there, the one we tied up—he had a tattoo of an eagle and a syringe. That’s the DFA crest.”
Julian stiffens. It’s as though a current has run through his whole body. “It must be a coincidence.”
I shake my head. Words, ideas, are tumbling through my head, a stream: Everything flows one way. Everything makes sense: talk of payday; all this equipment; the tattoo; the box of badges. The complex, the security—all of it costs money. “They must be working together. I don’t know why, or what for, or—”
“No.” Julian’s voice is low and steely. “You’re wrong.”
“Julian—”
He cuts me off. “You’re wrong, do you understand me? It’s impossible.”
I force myself not to look away from him, even though there’s something strange going on behind his eyes, a roiling and swirling that makes me feel dizzy, as though I’m standing on the edge of a cliff and in danger of falling.
That’s how we’re standing—frozen like that, a tableau—when the door bangs open and two Scavengers burst into the room.
For a second nobody moves, and I have just enough time to register the basics: one guy (middle-aged), one girl (blue-black hair, taller than I am), both of them unfamiliar. Maybe it’s the fear, but I fixate, too, on the strangest details: the way the man’s left eyelid droops, as though gravity is pulling on it, and the way the girl stands there, mouth open, so I can see her cherry-red tongue. She must have been sucking on something, I think. A lollipop or candy; my mind flies to Grace.
Then the room unfreezes, and the girl goes for her gun, and there’s no thinking anymore.