She stares at me for a moment without smiling, and I wonder if, somehow, I’ve offended her. “Like I said, you don’t belong down here,” she says. And then, her voice swelling, rising to a high pitch: “There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”
A small tremor passes through her body; her right hand tugs convulsively at the folds of her dirty dress.
“I’ll find someone to guide you,” she says abruptly, as though ashamed of her outburst, and turns away from us.
Rat-man is the one who comes for us, and seeing him brings back a sense of vertigo and nausea, even though this time he is alone. The rats have gone back to their holes and hiding places.
“Coin said you want to go up,” he says, the longest sentence I have heard from him yet. Julian and I are already standing. Julian has taken the backpack, and though I’ve told him I’m okay to stand, he insists on keeping a hand on my arm. Just in case, he said, and I think of how different he is from the boy I saw onstage in the Javits Center, the cool floating screen image—unimaginable that they should be the same person. I wonder whether that boy is the real Julian, or this boy is the real one, or whether it’s even possible to know.
Then it hits me: I’m not even sure who the real Lena is anymore.
“We’re ready,” Julian says.
We pick our way around the piles of junk and the makeshift shelters that clutter the platform. Everywhere we go, we are watched. Figures crouch in the shadows. They’ve been forced down here, the way we have been forced into the Wilds: all for a society of order and regularity.
For a society to be healthy, not a single one of its members can be sick. The DFA’s philosophy runs deeper—much deeper—than I’d believed. The dangerous are not just the uncured: They are also the different, the deformed, the abnormal. They must also be eradicated. I wonder if Julian realizes this, or whether he’s known it all along.
Irregularity must be regulated; dirt must be cleansed; the laws of physics teach us that systems tend increasingly toward chaos, and so the chaos must be constantly pushed back. The rules of expurgation are even written into The Book of Shhh.
At the end of the platform, the rat-man swings down into the tracks. He is walking well now. If he was injured during the scuffle with the Scavengers, he, too, has been mended and bandaged. Julian follows, and then helps me down, reaching up and putting his hands around my waist as I maneuver clumsily off the platform. Even though I feel better than I did earlier, I’m still not moving very well. I’ve been too long without enough food and water, and my head still throbs. My left ankle wobbles as I hit the ground, and for a minute I stumble against Julian, bumping my chin on his chest, and his arms tighten around me.
“You okay?” he says. I’m ultra-conscious of the closeness of our bodies, and the encircling warmth of his arms.
I step away from him, my heart climbing into my mouth. “I’m fine,” I say.
Then it’s time to go into the darkness again. I hang back, and Rat-man must think I’m scared. He turns and says, “The Intruders don’t come this far. Don’t worry.” He’s without a flashlight or a torch. I wonder if the fire was just meant to intimidate the Scavengers. The mouth of the tunnel is pitch-black, but he seems perfectly able to see.
“Let’s go,” Julian says, and I turn with him and follow the rat-man, and the dim beam of the flashlight, into the dark.
We walk in silence, although the rat-man occasionally stops, making clicking motions with his tongue, like a man calling a dog. Once he crouches, and pulls bits of crushed crackers from the pockets of his coat, scattering them on the ground between the wooden slats of the tracks. From the corners of the tunnel the rats emerge, sniffing his fingers, fighting over the crumbs, hopping up into his cupped palms and running up over his arms and shoulders. It is terrible to watch, but I can’t look away.
“How long have you been here?” Julian asks, after the ratman has straightened up again. Now all around us we hear the chittering of tiny teeth and nails, and the flashlight lights up quick-moving, writhing shadows. I have a sudden terror that the rats are all around me, even on the ceilings.
“Don’t know,” the rat-man says. “Lost count.”
Unlike the other people who have made their home on the platform, he has no noticeable physical deformities except for his single milk-white eye. I can’t help but blurt out, “Why?”
He turns abruptly back to me. For a minute Rat-man doesn’t say anything, and the three of us stand there in the stifling dark. My breath is coming quickly, rasping in my throat.
“I didn’t want to be cured,” he says at last, and the words are so normal—a vocabulary from my world, a debate from above—that relief breaks in my chest. He’s not crazy after all.
“Why not?” That’s Julian.