Julian shakes his head again. “Invalids.” Seeing me flinch, he adds, “I don’t know any other word for them. For you.”
“We’re not the same,” I say, watching the bent and crippled figures moving beyond the smoky fire. Something is cooking; I can smell it. I don’t want to think about what kind of food they eat down here—what kind of animals they manage to trap. I think of the rats, and my stomach lurches. “Don’t you get that yet? We’re all different. We want different things. We live different ways. That’s the whole point.”
Julian opens his mouth to respond, but at that moment the monster woman appears, the one I tried to fight off at the edge of the platform. She pushes aside the cardboard barricade, and it strikes me that they must have arranged it that way so Julian and I would have some privacy.
“You’re awake,” the woman says. Now that I’m not so terrified, I see that she’s not missing part of her face, as I imagined; the right side of her face is just much smaller than the left, collapsed inward, as though her face is composed of two different masks, imperfectly joined. Birth defect, I think, even though I’ve seen only a few defectives in my life, and all of them were in textbooks. In school we were always taught that kids born from the uncured would end up like this, crippled and mangled in some way. The priests told us this was the deliria manifesting in their bodies.
Children born of the healthy and the whole are healthy and whole; children born of the disease will have sickness in their bones and blood.
All these people, born crippled or bent or misshapen, have been driven underground. I wonder what would have happened to them as babies, as children, if they had stayed aboveground. I remember, then, what Raven told me about finding Blue. You know what they say about deliria babies. . . . She would probably be taken and killed. She wouldn’t even be buried. . . . She’ d be burned, and packed up with the waste.
The woman doesn’t wait for me to answer before kneeling in front of me. Julian and I are both silent. I want to say something to her, but I don’t have the words. I want to look away from her face, but I can’t.
“Thank you,” I finally manage. Her eyes flick to mine. They are brown and webbed with fine lines. She has a permanent squint, probably from existing in this strange, twilight world.
“How many were they?” she asks. I would have expected her voice to be mangled and broken, a reflection of her face, but it is high and clear. Pretty. When I don’t immediately respond, she says, “The Intruders. How many?”
I know immediately that she is referring to the Scavengers, though she uses a different word to describe them. I can tell from the way she says it: the mixture of anger, fear, and disgust.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Seven, at least. Maybe more.”
The woman says, “They came three seasons ago. Maybe four.” I must look surprised by her way of speaking, because she adds, “It isn’t easy to keep track of time in the tunnels. Days, weeks—unless we go above, it’s hard to know.”
“How long have you been down here?” I ask, almost afraid to know the answer.
She squints at me with those small, sludge-colored eyes. I do my best not to look at her mouth and chin: There, the deformity is at its worst, as though her face is curling up into itself, a wilting flower. “I’ve been here always,” she says. “Or almost always.”
“How—?” The question gets caught in my throat.
She smiles. I think it’s a smile, at least. One corner of her mouth corkscrews upward. “There is nothing for us on the surface,” she says. “Nothing but death, anyway.”
So it’s like I thought. I wonder if that’s what always happens to the babies who don’t find their way underground, or to a homestead in the Wilds. Maybe they get locked in prisons and mental institutions. Maybe they are simply killed.
“For all my life, the tunnels have belonged to us,” she says. I’m still having a hard time reconciling the melody of her voice with the look of her face. I focus on her eyes: Even in the dim, smoky light, I can see that they are full of warmth. “People find their way to us with babies. This is a safe place for them.” Her eyes flick to Julian, and I notice her scan his unblemished neck; then she’s back to me. “You’ve been cured,” she says. “That’s what they call it aboveground, right?”
I nod. I open my mouth to try and explain—I’m okay, I’m on your side—but to my surprise, Julian speaks up. “We’re not with the Intruders,” he says. “We’re not with anyone else. We’re—we’re on our own.”
We’re not with anyone else. I know he’s just saying it to appease her, but the words still buoy me up, help break apart the knot of fear that has been lodged in my chest since we’ve been underground.