“What’s your plan?” Tack says, and just like that, I know it’s real: This is happening. This will happen.
I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us.
Instead life has only grown harder.
I wonder whether it will ever end.
I feel Julian’s hand on my shoulder: a squeeze, a reassurance. I open my eyes.
Pippa squats and draws a large teardrop shape in the ground with a thumb. “Let’s say this is Waterbury. We’re here.” She marks an X at the southeast side of the larger end. “And we know that when the fighting started, the cureds retreated to the west side of the city. My guess is that the block is somewhere here.” She hazards an X on the east side, where the teardrop begins to narrow.
“Why?” Raven says. Her face is alive again, alert. For a moment, when I look at her, I get a small chill. She lives for this—the fight, the battle for survival. She actually enjoys it.
Pippa shrugs. “It’s my best guess. That part of the city was mostly park anyway—they’ve probably just flooded it completely, rerouted the water flow. They’ll have shored up defenses there, of course, but if they had enough firepower to rout us, they’d have attacked already. We’re talking whatever forces they’ve gathered in a week or two.”
She looks up at us, to make sure we’re following. Then she draws a sweeping arrow around the base of the teardrop, pointing upward. “They’ll probably expect us to go north, toward the water flow. Or they think we’ll scatter.” She draws lines radiating in various directions from the base of the teardrop; now it looks like a deranged, bearded smiley face. “I think instead we should make a direct attack, send a small force into the city, bust open the dam.” She draws a line, sweepingly, through the teardrop, cutting it in half.
“I’m in,” Raven says. Tack spits. He doesn’t have to say he’s in too.
Summer folds her arms, looking down at Pippa’s diagram. “We’ll need three separate groups,” she says slowly. “Two diversionary, to create problems here and here”—she bends down and marks X’s at two distinct places along the periphery—“and one smaller force to get in, do the job, and get out.”
“I’m in,” Lu pipes up. “As long as I can be part of the main force. I don’t want any of this side-business shit.”
This surprises me. At the old homestead, Lu never expressed interest in joining the resistance. She never even got a fake procedural mark. She just wanted to stay as far as possible from the fighting; she wanted to pretend that the other side, the cured side, didn’t exist. Something must have changed in the months we’ve been apart.
“Lu can come with us.” Raven grins. “She’s a walking good-luck charm. That’s how she got her name. Isn’t it, Lucky?”
Lu doesn’t say anything.
“I want to be part of the main force too,” Julian speaks up suddenly.
“Julian,” I whisper. He ignores me.
“I’ll go wherever you need me,” Alex says. Julian glances at him, and for a second I feel the resentment between them, a blunt, hard-edged force.
“So will I,” Coral says.
“Count us in.” Hunter speaks for him and Bram.
“I want to be the one who lights the match,” Dani says.
Other people are chiming in now, volunteering for different tasks. Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”
I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.
But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.
Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.
“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.
Hana
Before going home, I spend some time zigzagging through the streets near the Old Port, trying to clear my head of Lena, and the guilt; trying to clear it of Fred’s voice: Cassie asked too many questions.
I bump onto the curb and pedal as fast as I can, as though I can push out my thoughts through my feet. In just two short weeks, I won’t have even this freedom; I’ll be too known, too visible, too followed. Sweat trickles down my scalp. An old woman emerges from a store and I barely have time to swerve, jump the curb, and skate back into the street, before I hit her.
“Idiot!” she shouts.