Julian doesn’t finish his question. He doesn’t have to. All at once my whole body unfreezes; the whiteness, the heat, breaks in my chest and loosens my lips and all I have to do is turn my head, just a little, and his lips are there.
Then we are kissing: slowly, at first, because he doesn’t know how and it has been so long for me. I taste salt and sugar and soap; I run my tongue along his lower lip and he freezes for a second. His lips are warm and full and wonderful. His tongue traces my lips and then suddenly we both let go; and we are breathing into each other, and he is holding my face with his hands, and I am riding a wave of pure joy—I could almost cry, I’m so happy. His chest is solid, pressed against mine. I have drawn him up into the bed without meaning to, and I don’t ever want it to end. I could kiss him and feel his fingers in my hair, listen to him say my name, forever.
For the first time since Alex died, I have found my way to a truly free space: a space unbounded by walls and uninhibited by fear. This is flying.
And then, suddenly, Julian breaks off and pulls away. “Lena,” he gasps hoarsely, as if he has just been running a long distance.
“Don’t say it.” I still feel like I could cry. There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass. “Don’t ruin it.”
But he says it anyway. “What’s going to happen tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.” I draw his head down toward the pillow next to mine. For a second I think I sense a presence next to us in the dark, a moving figure, and I whip my head to the left. Nothing. I am imagining ghosts beside us. I am thinking of Alex. “Don’t worry about that now,” I say, as much to myself as to Julian.
The bed is very narrow. I turn onto my side, away from Julian, but when he puts his arm around me I relax backward into him, cupped in the long curve of his body as though I have been shaped for it. I want to run away and cry. I want to beg Alex—wherever he is, whatever otherworld now holds him—for forgiveness. I want to kiss Julian again.
But I do not do any of those things. I lie still, and feel Julian’s steady heartbeat through my back until my heart calms in response, and I let him hold me, and just before I fall asleep, I say a brief prayer that the morning never comes.
But the morning does come. It finds its way in through the cracks in the plywood, the fissures in the roof: a murky grayness, a slight ebbing of the dark. My first moments of awareness are confused: I believe I am with Alex. No. Julian. His arm is around me, his breath hot on my neck. I have kicked the sheets to the bottom of the bed in the night. I see a flicker of movement from the hall; the cat has gotten into the house somehow.
Then suddenly, a driving certainty—no, I closed the door last night, I locked it—and terror squeezing my chest.
I sit up, say, “Julian—”
And then everything explodes: They are streaming through the door, bursting through the walls, yelling, screaming—police and regulators in gas masks and matching gray uniforms. One of them grabs me and another one pulls Julian off the bed—he is awake now, calling to me, but I can’t hear over the tumult of sound, over the screaming that must be coming from me. I grab the backpack, still balled at the foot of my bed, and swing at the regulator but there are three more, flanking me in the narrow space between beds, and it’s hopeless. I remember the gun: still in the bathing room, and useless to me now. Someone pulls me by the collar and I choke. Another regulator wrenches my arms behind my back and cuffs me, then pushes me forward, so I am half dragged, half marched through Salvage and out into the bright, streaming sunshine, where more police are gathered, more members of the SWAT team carrying guns and gas masks—frozen, silent, waiting.
Setup. Those are the words drilling through me, through my panic. Setup. Has to be.
“Got ’em,” someone announces into a walkie-talkie, and all of a sudden the air comes to life, vibrates with sound: People are shouting to one another, gesturing. Two police officers gun the engines of their motorcycles, and the stink of exhaust is everywhere. Walkie-talkies cackle around us—buzzing, a cacophony.
“Ten-four, ten-four. We got ’em.”
“Twenty miles outside of regulated land … looked like some kind of hideout.”
“Unit 508 to HQ…”
Julian is behind me, surrounded by four regulators; he has been cuffed too.
“Lena! Lena!” I hear him calling my name. I try to turn around and am shoved forward by the regulator behind me.