And I helped ensnare him. I think of his father’s face, floating in the window of the black town car: tight, grim, determined. I think of the story Julian told me about his older brother—how his father locked him in a basement, injured, to die alone and in the dark. And that was just for participating in a demonstration.
Julian was in bed with me. Who knows what they’ll do to him as punishment.
Blackness surges inside of me. I close my eyes and see Alex and Julian’s faces, merging together and then separating, like they did in my dream. It’s happening again. It’s happening again, and again it’s my fault.
“Lena?” I hear a chair scrape away from the table and suddenly Raven is next to me, slipping an arm around my shoulders. “Are you okay?”
“Can we get you something?” Tack asks.
I shake out of Raven’s grasp. “Get off of me.”
“Lena,” Raven croons. “Come on. Have a seat.” She is reaching for me again.
“I said, get off of me.” I pull away from her, stumble backward, bump against a chair.
“I’m going to get some water,” Tack says. He pushes away from the table and heads into a hall that must lead to the rest of the warehouse. For a moment I hear a surge in conversation, raucous, welcoming; then silence.
My hands are shaking so badly I can’t even squeeze them into fists. Otherwise I might hit Raven in the face.
She sighs. “I understand why you’re mad. Maybe Tack was right. Maybe we should have told you the plan from the beginning.” She sounds tired.
“You—you used me,” I spit out.
“You said you wanted to help,” Raven says simply.
“No. Not like that.”
“You don’t get to choose.” Raven takes a seat again and lays her hands flat on the table. “That isn’t how it works.”
I can feel her willing me to yield, to sit, to understand. But I can’t, and I won’t.
“What about Julian?” I force myself to meet her eyes, and I think I see her flinch just slightly.
“He’s not your problem.” Raven’s voice turns slightly harder.
“Yeah?” I think of Julian’s fingers running through my hair, the encircling warmth of his arms, how he whispered, I want to know. I want to know with you. “What if I want to make him my problem?”
Raven and I stare at each other. Her patience is running out. Her mouth is set in a line, angry and tight. “There’s nothing you can do,” she says shortly. “Don’t you get it? Lena Morgan Jones doesn’t exist anymore. Poof—she’s gone. There’s no way back in for her. There’s no way in for you. Your job is done.”
“So we leave Julian to be killed? Or thrown in prison?”
Once again Raven sighs, as though I’m a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. “Julian Fineman is the head of the youth division of the DFA—,” she begins again.
“I know all that,” I snap. “You made me memorize it, remember? So, what? He gets sacrificed for the cause?”
Raven looks at me in silence: an assent.
“You’re just as bad as they are,” I squeeze out, through the tightness of the fury in my throat, the heavy stone of disgust. That is the DFA’s motto too: Some will die for the health of the whole. We have become like them.
Raven stands again and moves toward the hallway. “You can’t feel guilty, Lena,” she says. “This is war, you know.”
“Don’t you get it?” I fire back at her the very words she used on me a long time ago, back at the burrow, after Miyako died. “You can’t tell me what to feel.”
Raven shakes her head. I see a flash of pity on her face. “You—you really liked him, then? Julian?”
I can’t answer. I can only nod.
Raven rubs her forehead tiredly and sighs again. For a moment I think she is going to relent. She’ll agree to help me. I feel a surge of hope.
But when she looks at me again, her face is composed, emotionless. “We leave tomorrow to go north,” she says simply, and just like that the conversation is ended. Julian will go to the gallows for us, and we will smile, and dream of victory—hazy-red, soon to come, a blood-colored dawn.
The rest of the day is a fog. I drift from room to room. Faces turn to me, expectant, smiling, and turn away again when I do not acknowledge them. These must be other members of the resistance. I recognize only one of them, a guy Tack’s age who came once to Salvage to bring us our new identity cards. I look for the woman who brought me here but see no one who resembles her, hear no one who speaks the way she did.
I drift and I listen. I gather we are twenty miles north of New York, and just south of a city named White Plains. We must be skimming our electricity from them: We have lights, a radio, even an electric coffeemaker. One of the rooms is piled with tents and rolled-up sleeping bags. Tack and Raven have prepared us for the move. I have no idea how many of the other resisters will be joining us; presumably, at least some of them will stay. Other than the folding table and chairs, and a room full of sleeping cots, there is no furniture. The radio and the coffeemaker sit directly on the cement floor, nested in a tangle of wires. The radio stays on for most of the day, piping thinly through the walls, and no matter where I go, I can’t escape it.