“What do you mean?” I look at her closely for the first time in a week; I’ve been unconsciously avoiding her. There is something tragic and hollow about her now: Her cream-pale skin looks like a husk—empty, sucked dry.
She shrugs and keeps her eyes on the embers. “I mean that I have no one left.”
I swallow. I’ve been meaning to speak to her about Alex, to apologize in some way, but the words never quite come. Even now they grow and stick in my throat. “Listen, Coral.” I take a deep breath. Say it. Just say it. “I’m really sorry that Alex left. I know—I know it must have been hard for you.”
There it is: the spoken admission that he was hers to lose. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I feel weirdly deflated, as though they’ve been swollen, balloonlike, in my chest this whole time.
For the first time since I sat down, she looks at me. I can’t read the expression on her face. “That’s okay,” she says at last, returning her gaze to the fire. “He was still in love with you, anyway.”
It’s as though she’s reached out and punched me in the stomach. All of a sudden, I can’t breathe. “What—what are you talking about?”
Her mouth crooks up into a smile. “He was. It was obvious. That’s okay. He liked me and I liked him.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t mean Alex, anyway, when I said I had no one left. I meant Nan, and the rest of the group. My people.” She throws down the stick and hugs her knees tighter to her chest. “Weird how it’s just hitting me now, huh?”
Even though I’m still stunned by what she has just said, I manage to keep control of myself. I reach out and touch her elbow. “Hey,” I say. “You have us. We’re your people now.”
“Thanks.” Her eyes flick to mine again. She forces a smile. She tilts her head and stares at me critically for a minute. “I can see why he loved you.”
“Coral, you’re wrong—” I start to say.
But just then there’s a footfall behind us, and my mother says, “I thought you went to sleep hours ago.”
Coral stands up, dusting off the back of her jeans—a nervous gesture, since we are all covered in dirt, caked grime that has found its way from our eyelashes to our fingernails. “I was just going,” she says. “Good night, Lena. And…thanks.”
Before I can respond, she spins around and heads off toward the southern end of the clearing, where most of our group is clustered.
“She seems like a sweet girl,” my mother says, easing herself down onto the log Coral has vacated. “Too sweet for the Wilds.”
“She’s been here almost her whole life.” I can’t keep the edge from my voice. “And she’s a great fighter.”
My mother stares at me. “Is something wrong?”
“What’s wrong is that I don’t like being kept in the dark. I want to know what the plan is tomorrow.” My heart is going hard. I know I’m not being fair to my mother—it isn’t her fault I wasn’t allowed in to plan—but I feel like I could scream. Coral’s words have shaken something loose inside me, and I can feel it rattling around in my chest, knifing against my lungs. He was still in love with you.
No. It’s impossible; she got it all wrong. He never loved me. He told me so.
My mother’s face turns serious. “Lena, you have to promise me that you’ll stay here, at the camp, tomorrow. You have to promise me you won’t fight.”
Now it’s my turn to stare. “What?”
She rakes a hand through her hair, making it look as though it has been styled with an electric current. “Nobody knows exactly what we can expect inside that wall. The security forces are estimates, and we’re not sure how much support our friends in Portland have drummed up. I was urging a delay, but I was overruled.” She shakes her head. “It’s dangerous, Lena. I don’t want you to be a part of it.”
The rattling piece in my chest—the anger and sadness over losing Alex, and more than that, even, over this life that we string together from scraps and tatters and half-spoken words and promises that are not fulfilled—explodes suddenly.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” I am practically shaking. “I’m not a child anymore. I grew up. I grew up without you. And you can’t tell me what to do.”
I half expect her to snap back at me, but she just sighs and stares at the smoldering orange glow still embedded in the ash, like a buried sunset. Then she says abruptly, “Do you remember the Story of Solomon?”
Her words are so unexpected that for a moment, I can’t speak. I can only nod.
“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me what you remember.”
Alex’s note, still tucked into the pouch around my neck, seems to be smoldering too, burning against my chest. “Two mothers are fighting over a child,” I say cautiously. “They decide to cut the baby in half. The king decrees it.”
My mother shakes her head. “No. That’s the revised version; that’s the story in The Book of Shhh. In the real story, the mothers don’t cut the baby in half.”