He flinched. “I’m not a Scavenger.” Then he lifted his chin and stared at me. That was the first time I realized he was probably my age. His clothes, the dirtiness of him, his attitude—I’d assumed he was older. “I’m not anything.”
“You’re a thief,” I said, looking away. Only a month in the Wilds—I hadn’t even begun to shake my fear of them. Boys.
He shrugged. “I’m a survivor.”
“You were stealing our food,” I said. I didn’t add: Everyone thought I was to blame. “That makes you a Scavenger in my opinion.”
For the past several weeks, the homesteaders had noticed supplies gone missing, some traps empty that should have been full, a jug or two of clean water mysteriously emptied overnight. The group had grown tense, suspicious, and I became the prime suspect. I was the newest, after all. No one knew who I was or where I’d come from or what I was about, and the thefts had started soon after I’d arrived with Blue.
So this guy named Gray, who was kind of the group leader at the time, had started surveillance without telling anyone. In the middle of the night he got out of bed and circulated to all the snares and traps, checked the storerooms, made sure everyone from the homestead was exactly where they should be. On the second day of his rounds, he caught Tack wrestling a rabbit out of one of our traps. Stealing. Tack nearly put a knife through Gray, trying to escape. But he missed and just sliced off a chunk of Gray’s shoulder blade, and Gray managed to shout and pin Tack to the ground, and since then he’d been our prisoner and everyone had been debating what to do about him.
“Welcome to freedom,” he said. And he spit. Right next to his feet, on the ground. “Everyone has an opinion.”
I turned my attention back to Blue. Grandma had told me not to get too attached. So many of them don’t make it out here, she’d said. But I was already attached. From the second I found her; from the second I felt the skating pressure of her heartbeat beneath her tiny ribs. I knew she was mine—my job, my duty to protect.
At first she’d barely taken any food from Mari, but after two weeks she was eating better and beginning to gain weight. When Mari nursed, I sat next to her, sometimes with an arm around Blue, like I could absorb them both. Like I was the one sending life out through my fingertips and into Blue’s veins and heart and mouth. I kept Blue with me all the time. Grandma gave me an old baby carrier, faded to a dull and genderless gray from so many washings, so I could strap her to my chest when I was helping the others with the rounds.
But then she’d gotten sick again. She fussed and wouldn’t stay asleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Her nose was always running, and on the second day, her fever was so bad, I could feel the heat of her body when I held my hand six inches from her chest. She stopped feeding, and she cried for hours at a time. Everyone told me it was just a cold, and she’d get over it.
For three days, I’d been moving through a thick fog of exhaustion, a relentless tiredness like nothing I’d ever known. At night, I stayed awake and whispered to her, rocking her even as she tried to push me off, keeping her cool with wet cloths. We had moved, both of us, into the sickroom. Tack had been placed there too, temporarily, while the other homesteaders convened in the main room and talked about whether to let him go and trust that he wouldn’t steal from us again, or whether he should be punished, even killed.
The law of the Wilds was just as harsh, in its way, as the law on the other side of the fence.
Tack watched me as I bent over Blue, murmuring to her, wiping the sweat from her forehead. She wasn’t crying anymore. Her eyes were half-closed, and she barely stirred when I touched her. Her breathing was short and shallow.
“It’s RSV,” Tack spoke up suddenly. “She needs medicine.”
“You some kind of doctor?” I fired back. But I was scared. I wished she would cry, open her mouth, respond to me in any way. But she was just lying there, fighting for breath. And I knew then that it wasn’t just a cold. Whatever she had was getting worse.
“My mother was a nurse,” Tack said calmly. This startled me. It was weird to think of the Thief, the wild and lawless boy, as having a mother—as having a past at all. I looked at him.
“Untie me,” he said, his voice low, convincing, “and I’ll help you.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
There’s a part of me—a big part—that’s hoping Lena won’t show up. She might have gotten stuck at the border, or caught by a patrol without an ID. She might have gotten lost. She might just be too late. Then Tack and I won’t have to get involved, won’t risk a big fat stinking mess.