A shiver snakes through me, and I suddenly feel very alert. Raven has never spoken of her life before the Wilds. She has always repeated that there is no such thing. No before.
“I was like everybody else, really. Just accepted what people told me and didn’t think too much about it. Only cureds go to heaven. Patrols are for my own protection. The uncured are dirty; they turn into animals. The disease rots you from inside. Stability is godliness and happiness.” She shrugs, as though shaking off the memory of who she was. “Except that I wasn’t happy. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like everybody else.”
I think of Hana, spinning around once in her room, arms wide, saying, You think this is it? This is all there is?
“The summer I turned fourteen, they started new construction by the fence. They were projects, really, for the poorest families in Yarmouth: the badly matched ones, or families whose reputations had been ruined because of dissent, or even rumors of it—you know what it’s like. During the day, I used to play around the construction site. A bunch of us did. Of course, we had to be careful to stay separate, the boys and the girls. There was a line that divided us: Everything east of the waterline was ours, everything west of it was theirs.” She laughs softly. “It seems like a dream now. But at the time it seemed like the most normal thing in the world.”
“There was nothing to compare it to,” I say, and Raven shoots me a quick glance, nodding sharply.
“Then there was a week of rain. Construction came to a standstill, and nobody wanted to explore the site. I didn’t mind the rain. I didn’t like to be at home very much. My dad was—” There’s a hitch in her voice, and she breaks off. “He wasn’t totally right after the procedure. It didn’t work correctly. There was disruption of the mood-regulating temporal lobes. That’s what they called it. He was mostly okay, like everybody else. But every so often he flew into rages…” For a while she stares at the fire, silent. “My mom helped us cover the bruises, put on makeup and stuff. We couldn’t tell anyone. We didn’t want too many people knowing that my dad’s cure hadn’t worked properly. People get hysterical; he could have been fired. My mom said people would make things difficult. So instead we hid it. Long sleeves in summertime. Lots of sick days. Lots of lies, too—falling down, bumping my head, hitting the door frame.”
I have never imagined Raven as any younger than she is now. But I can see the wiry girl with the same fierce mouth, rubbing concealer over the bruises on her arms, shoulders, and face. “I’m sorry,” I say. The words seem flimsy, ridiculous.
Raven clears her throat and squares her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter,” she says quickly. She breaks a long, skinny twig into quarters and feeds it, one piece at a time, into the fire. I wonder whether she has forgotten about the original course of conversation—about Blue’s name—but then she starts speaking again.
“That week—the week of the rain—was one of my dad’s bad times. So I went out to the site a lot. One day, I was just picking around one of the foundations. It was all cinder block and pits; hardly any of the building had actually gotten done. And then I saw this little box. A shoe box.” She sucks in a breath, and even in the dark I see her tense.
The rest of her story comes out in a rush: “Someone must have left it there, wedged in the space underneath a part of the foundation. Except the rain was so bad it had caused a miniature mudslide. The box had rolled out into the open. I don’t know why I decided to look inside. It was filthy. I thought I might find a pair of shoes, maybe some jewelry.”
I know, now, where the story is going. I am walking toward the muddy box alongside her; I am lifting the water-warped cover. The horror and disgust is a mud too: It is rising, black and choking, inside of me.
Raven’s voice drops to a whisper. “She was wrapped in a blanket. A blue blanket with yellow lambs on it. She wasn’t breathing. I—I thought she was dead. She was … she was blue. Her skin, her nails, her lips, her fingers. Her fingers were so small.”
The mud is in my throat. I can’t breathe.
“I don’t know what made me try to revive her. I think I must have gone a little crazy. I was working as a junior lifeguard that summer, so I’d been certified in CPR. I’d never had to do it, though. And she was so tiny—probably a week, maybe two weeks old. But it worked. I’ll never forget how I felt when she took a breath, and all that color came rushing into her skin. It was like the whole world had split open. And everything I’d felt was missing—all that feeling and color—all of it came to me with her first breath. I called her Blue so I would always remember that moment, and so I would never regret.”