“Where did you hide?” Max presses.
Pippa and Beast exchange an indecipherable look. For a moment, I think Pippa will refuse to answer. Something happened at the camp, something she won’t tell us.
Then she coughs and turns her eyes back to Max. “In the riverbed, at first, before the shooting started,” she says. “It didn’t take long for the bodies to start falling. We were protected under them, once they did.”
“Oh my God.” Hunter balls his fist into his right eye. He looks like he’s about to be sick. Julian turns away from Pippa.
“We had no choice,” Pippa says sharply. “Besides, they were already dead. At least their bodies didn’t go to waste.”
“We’re glad you made it, Pippa,” Raven says gently, and places a hand on Pippa’s shoulder. Pippa turns to her gratefully, her face suddenly eager, open, like a puppy’s.
“I was planning to get word to you at the safe house, but I figured you had already left,” she says. “I didn’t want to risk it when there were troops in the area. Too conspicuous. So I went north. We stumbled on the hive by accident.” She jerks her chin to the vast parking structure. It really does look like a gigantic hive, now that there are figures, half-shadowed, peering down at us from its different levels, flitting through patches of light and then retreating once again into the darkness. “Figured it was a good place to hide out for a bit and wait for things to settle down.”
“How many you got?” Tack asks. Dozens and dozens of people have descended and are standing, herded together, a little ways behind Pippa, like a pack of dogs that has been beaten and starved into submission. Their silence is disconcerting.
“More than three hundred,” Pippa says. “Closer to four.”
A huge number: still, only a fraction of the number of people who were camped outside Waterbury. For a moment I am filled with a blind, white-hot rage. We wanted the freedom to love, and instead we have been turned into fighters, savages. Julian moves close to me and puts his arm around my shoulder, allowing me to lean into him, as though he can sense what I am thinking.
“We’ve seen no sign of the troops,” Raven says. “My guess is they came up from New York. If they had tanks, they must have used one of the service roads along the Hudson. Hopefully they’ve gone south again.”
“Mission accomplished,” Pippa says bitterly.
“They haven’t accomplished anything.” My mother speaks up again, but her voice is softer now. “The fight isn’t over—it’s only beginning.”
“We’re headed to Portland,” Max says. “We have friends there—lots of them. There’ll be payback,” he adds with sudden fierceness. “An eye for an eye.”
“And the whole world goes blind,” Coral puts in quietly.
Everyone turns to look at her. She has barely spoken since Alex left, and I have been careful to avoid her. I feel her pain like a physical presence, a dark, sucking energy that consumes and surrounds her, and it makes me both pity and resent her. It’s a reminder that he was no longer mine to lose.
“What did you say?” Max says with barely concealed aggression.
Coral looks away. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just something I once heard.”
“We have no choice,” my mother insists. “If we don’t fight, we’ll be destroyed. It’s not about payback.” She shoots a look at Max, and he grunts and crosses his arms. “It’s about survival.”
Pippa runs a hand over her head. “My people are weak,” she says finally. “We’ve been living on scraps—rats, mostly, and what we could forage in the woods.”
“There will be food up north,” Max says. “Supplies. Like I said, the resistance has friends in Portland.”
“I’m not sure they’ll make it,” Pippa says, lowering her voice.
“Well, you can’t stay here, either,” Tack points out.
Pippa bites her lip and exchanges a look with Beast. He nods.
“He’s right, Pip,” Beast says.
Behind Pippa, a woman speaks up suddenly. She is so thin, she looks as though she has been whittled from ancient wood.
“We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.”
Pippa exhales slowly. Then she nods.
“All right, then,” she says. “Portland it is.”
As we draw closer to Portland, as the light and land grow more familiar—lush with growth and smells I know from childhood, from my longest, oldest memories—I begin to make my plans.
Nine days after we left the safe house, our numbers now hugely swollen, we catch a glimpse of one of the Portland border fences. Only now it is no longer a fence. It’s a huge cement wall, a faceless slab of stone, stained an unearthly pink in the dawn light.