My mouth tastes like metal and dust, and my head has started to throb. I don’t see Julian. I don’t see my mother or Colin or Hunter.
Then: a rocking mortar-blast, an explosion of stone and white caulk-dust. The blow nearly takes me off my feet. At first I think one of the bombs must have been triggered accidentally and I look around for Pippa, trying to clear my head of the ringing, of the stinging, choking dust, just in time to see her slip, undetected, between two guard huts, heading for downtown.
Behind me, one of the scaffolds groans and begins to topple. There is a sharp swell in the screaming. Hands dig at my back as everyone presses forward, trying to break free from its path. Slowly, slowly, groaning, it teeters—and then accelerating, crashes to the ground, splintering, trapping the unlucky ones beneath its weight.
The wall is now sporting a gaping hole at its base; I realize this must have been the work of a pipe bomb, an explosion jerry-rigged by the resistance. Pippa’s bomb would have ripped the wall in two.
Still, it’s enough; our remaining forces are spilling through the opening, a current of people who have been pushed or forced out, dispossessed and diseased, flooding into Portland. The guards, a ragged line of blue-and-white uniforms, are swallowed up in the tide, pushed back, and forced to run.
I’ve lost Julian. No point in trying to find him now; I can only pray that he is safe, and that he’ll make it out of this mess unharmed. I don’t know what happened to Tack, either. Part of me hopes that he has retreated over the wall with Raven, and for a second I imagine that once he has gotten her back to the Wilds, she’ll wake up. She’ll open her eyes and find that the world has been rebuilt the way she wanted it.
Or maybe she won’t wake up. Maybe she is already on a different pilgrimage, and has gone to find Blue again.
I push my way toward the place I saw Pippa vanish, struggling to breathe in the smoke-clotted air. One of the guard huts is burning. I flash back to the old license plate we found, half-buried in the mud, during our migration from Portland last winter.
Live free or die.
I stumble over a body. My stomach heaves into my mouth—for a split second, I’m overcome by blackness, coiled tight in my stomach like Raven’s hair on Tack’s leg, Raven’s dead, oh God—but I swallow and breathe and keep going, keep fighting and pushing. We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
At last I break free of the fighting. I duck past the guard huts, breaking into a run on the gravel path that divides them, heading for the sparse group of trees that encircles Back Cove. My ankle hurts every time I put my weight down on it, but I don’t stop. I swipe my ear quickly with my sleeve and judge that the bleeding has already slowed.
The resistance may have a mission in Portland, but I have a mission of my own.
Hana
The alarms go off just before the priest can pronounce us husband and wife. One moment, everything is quiet and ordered. The music has died down, the crowd is silent, the priest’s voice resonates through the room, rolls out over the audience. In the quiet, I can hear each individual camera shutter: opening and closing, opening and closing, like metal lungs.
The next moment everything is motion and sound, shrieking chaos, sirens. And I know, in that instant, that the Invalids are here. They’ve come for us.
Hands grab me roughly from all sides.
“Move, move, move.” Bodyguards are piloting me toward the exit. Someone steps on the end of my gown, and I hear it rip. My eyes are stinging; I’m choking on the smell of too much aftershave, too many bodies crowding and pulling.
“Come on, hurry it up. Hurry it up.”
Walkie-talkies explode with static. Urgent voices shout in a coded language I don’t understand. I try to turn around to look for my mother and am nearly carried off my feet by the pressure of the guards moving me forward. I catch a glimpse of Fred surrounded by his security team. He’s white-faced, yelling into a cell phone. I will him to look at me—in that moment I forget about Cassie, I forget about everything. I need him to tell me we’re okay; I need him to explain what’s happening.
But he doesn’t even glance in my direction.
Outside, the glare is blinding. I squeeze my eyes shut. Journalists jostle close to the doors, blocking the way to the car. The long metal barrels of their camera lenses look for a second like guns, all directed straight at me.
They’re going to kill us all.
The bodyguards fight to clear space for me, shouldering apart the rushing stream of people. At last we reach the car. Once again, I look for Fred. Our eyes meet briefly across the crowd. He’s heading for a squad car.