Julian is ahead of me. Alex is behind me. So I push forward—exhausted, my mouth still full of the taste of smoke, my lungs burning.
Waterbury, Lu has told us, is the beginning of a new order. An enormous camp has amassed outside the city’s wall, and many of the city’s Valid residents have fled. Portions of Waterbury have been totally evacuated; other parts of the city are barricaded against the Invalids on the other side.
Lu has heard that the Invalid camp is almost like a city itself: Everyone pitches in, everyone helps repair shelters and hunt for food and gather water. It has so far been safe from retaliation, partly because no one has remained who can retaliate. The municipal offices were destroyed, and the mayor and his deputies were chased out.
There, we’ll build shelters out of branches and salvaged brick, and finally find a place for ourselves.
In Waterbury, everything will be okay.
The trees begin to thin, and we pass old, graffiti-covered benches and half-shell underpasses, speckled with mold; a roof, intact, sitting on a field of grass, as though the rest of the house has been simply suctioned underground; stretches of road that, leading nowhere, are now part of a nonsense-grammar. This is the language of the world before—a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair—before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.
We know we’re getting close.
In the evening, when the sun begins to set, the anxiety comes sweeping back. None of us wants to spend another night alone, exposed, in the Wilds, even if we have managed to put the regulators off our trail for now.
From ahead, there is a shout. Julian has circled away from Tack and fallen into step beside me, although we have been mostly walking in silence.
“What is it?” I ask him. I’m so tired I am numb. I can’t see past the people ahead of me. The group is fanning out over what looks as though it was once an old parking lot. Most of the pavement is gone. Two streetlamps, empty of lightbulbs, are staked into the ground. Next to one of them, Tack and Raven have both stopped.
Julian cranes onto his tiptoes. “I think…I think we’re there.” Even before he finishes speaking, I am pushing through the group, angling for a look.
At the edge of the old parking lot, the ground drops away suddenly and cuts sharply downward. A series of switchback trails leads down the hillside to a barren, treeless portion of land.
The camp is not like I’ve envisioned it at all. I’ve been imagining real houses, or at least solid structures, nestled between trees. This is simply a vast, teeming field, a patchwork of blankets and trash, and hundreds and hundreds of people, pushing almost directly up against the city’s wall, stained red in the dying light. Fires burn sporadically across the great, dark expense, winking like lights from a distant city. The sky, electric at the horizon, is otherwise stretched dark and tight, like a metal lid that has been screwed shut over waste.
For a moment I flash back to the twisted underground people Julian and I met when we were trying to escape the Scavengers, and their grimy, smoky, underground world.
I’ve never seen so many Invalids. I have never seen so many people, period.
Even from here, we can smell them.
My chest feels like it has caved in.
“What is this place?” Julian mutters. I want to say something to comfort him—I want to tell him it will be okay—but I feel weighted down, dull with disappointment.
“This is it?” Dani is the one to voice what we must all be feeling. “This is the big dream? The new order?”
“We have friends here, at least,” Hunter says quietly. But even he can’t keep up the act. He shoves a hand through his hair so it sticks up in all directions. His face is white; all day, he has been hacking as he walked, his breath coming wet and ragged. “And we had no choice, anyway.”
“We could have gone to Canada, like Gordo said.”
“We wouldn’t have made it there without our supplies,” Hunter says.
“We would still have our supplies if we had headed north in the first place,” Dani fires back.
“Well, we didn’t. We’re here. And I don’t know about you guys, but I’m thirsty as hell.” Alex pushes his way through the line. He has to sidestep down the hill to the first switchback trail, sliding a little on the steep slope, sending a spray of gravel skidding down toward the camp.
He pauses when he reaches the path and looks back up at us. “Well? Are you coming?” His eyes slide over the whole group. When he looks at me, a small shock pulses through me, and I quickly drop my eyes. For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.