Then I think of Alex, and I feel nauseous all over again. I wish that we had never left the Wilds. I wish that I had never agreed to join the resistance.
“How did you come here?” the woman says. She pours from a jug next to me, and offers me a plastic cup: a child’s cup, with faded patterns of deer prancing around its rim. This, like everything else down here, must have floated in from above—discarded, unwanted, drifting through the cracks of the earth like a melting snow.
“We were taken.” Julian’s voice gets stronger now. “Kidnapped by the Intruders.” He hesitates, and I know that he’s thinking about the DFA badges we found, the tattoo I saw. He doesn’t understand yet, and I don’t either; but I know this was not merely the effort of Scavengers. They were paid or were supposed to be paid for their trouble. “We don’t know why,” he says.
“We’re trying to find our way out,” I say, and then something that the woman said earlier strikes me, and I feel a sudden surge of hope. “Wait—you said you have trouble keeping track of time unless you go aboveground, right? So … there’s a way out? A way up?”
“I don’t go aboveground,” she says. The way she says above makes it sound like a dirty word.
“But somebody does,” I persist. “Somebody must.” They must have ways of getting supplies: sheets and cups and fuel and all the piles of half-used, broken-down furniture heaped around us on the platform.
“Yes,” she says evenly. “Of course.”
“Will you take us?” I ask. My throat is dry. Just thinking about the sun, and the space, and the surface, makes me want to cry. I don’t know what will happen once we’re above again, but I push away the thought.
“You’re still very weak,” she says. “You need to eat and rest.”
“I’m okay,” I insist. “I can walk.” I try to stand up, and find my vision clouding with black. I thud back down.
“Lena.” Julian puts a hand on my arm. Something flickers in his eyes—Trust me, it’s okay, a little longer won’t kill us. I don’t know what’s happening, or how we’ve begun to communicate in silence, or why I like it so much.
He turns to the woman. “We’ll rest for a bit. Then will someone show us the way to the surface?”
The woman once again looks from Julian to me and back again. Then she nods. “You don’t belong down here,” she says. She climbs to her feet.
I feel suddenly humbled. All these people make a life from trash and broken things, living in darkness, breathing in smoke. And yet, they helped us. They helped us without knowing us, and for no reason at all other than the fact that they knew how. I wonder whether I would do the same, if I were in their position. I’m not sure.
Alex would have, I think. And then: Julian would too.
“Wait!” Julian calls her back. “We—we didn’t get your name.”
A look of surprise crosses her face: Then she smiles again, the little corkscrew lips. “I was named down here,” she says. “They call me Coin.”
Julian wrinkles his forehead, but I get it right away. It’s an Invalid name: descriptive, easy to remember, funny, kind of sick. Coin, as in two-sided.
Coin was right: Time is hard to measure in the tunnels, even harder than it was to measure in the cell. At least there we had the electric light to guide us—on during day, off at night. Every minute down here becomes an hour.
Julian and I eat three granola bars each, and some more of the jerky we stole from the Scavengers’ stash. It feels like a feast, and before I’m even finished, my stomach is cramping badly. Still, after eating, and drinking the whole jug of water, I feel better than I have in days. We doze for a bit—lying so close I can feel Julian’s breath stirring my hair, our legs almost touching—and we both wake at the same time.
Coin is standing above us again. She has refilled the jug of water. Julian utters a little cry as he is shaking himself into awareness. Then he sits up quickly, embarrassed. He runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up at crazy angles, every which way; I have an overwhelming urge to reach out and smooth it down.
“Can you walk?” Coin asks me. I nod. “I’ll have someone take you to the surface, then.” Again, she says surface as though it’s a dirty word, or a curse.
“Thank you.” The words seem thin and insufficient. “You didn’t need to—I mean, we really appreciate it. We’d probably be dead if it weren’t for you and … your friends.” I almost say your people, but I catch myself at the last minute. I remember how angry I’ve been with Julian for saying the same thing.