The dirt cavern was off one of the main tunnels, a cramped room with only a mattress and a desk covered with yellowed children’s books. I had searched its drawers wishing, against all logic, to find medicine. I had never quite realized its value before. At School they seemed to have a limitless supply.
We took it for granted, the ease with which anything—a cough, an infection, skin sliced on a broken lantern—was treated. A pill here, a shot to numb the flesh before stitches, sweet bubble-gum-pink syrup dripping down your throat. When Ruby seized up in the yard, overcome by a knifing pain in her side, she was whisked away and emerged days later, black twine marking her abdomen where her appendix had been cut out. What would have happened, in the wild? we’d wondered aloud as we inspected that scar. Maxine guessed she would’ve had to take it out herself, probably with rusty scissors. No, Headmistress corrected. She’d been walking behind our table in the dining hall, making sure we’d swallowed down the last of our vitamins. She simply would have died.
I brushed back Arden’s thick black hair, feeling the heat of her skin. I remembered the first time I saw her. In those years following the plague new students arrived regularly, some found in the woods, some dropped off by adults who could no longer provide for them. She was the tall girl in the faded blue dress who had appeared at School three years after I had, an eight-year-old rushed in through the side gate. She stayed in a quarantine room for a month, alone, as we all did when we first arrived. Pip and I had huddled by the tiny glass window in the door, watching while she brushed her teeth. She spit the white foam into the trash can and we wondered aloud if she seemed any different. It was a game among the students. We all paused there whenever we walked down the hallway, looking for the telltale blue bruises to appear beneath the skin’s surface. We waited for the whites of her eyes to turn a phlegm-colored yellow. They never did.
Arden rolled over and moaned, a deep guttural noise that terrified me. She sounded so much like my mother had in those final days. Now, in that dank room, I ran down a mental list of my mother’s symptoms. Arden had lost some weight, but it wasn’t severe. She didn’t have nosebleeds and her legs did not swell and weep, swell and weep, leaving puddles around her feet. Yet the way Arden hacked, the way she shook with chills, the way her eyes rolled back so I could see only the whites . . .
I squeezed her cold hand, willing her to shoot up in bed, awake and more alive than ever. To tell me to quit hovering and dismiss me with a roll of her eyes. But nothing. Only another kick of the leg, another moan. I said the words I couldn’t have said to my mother, the words that curdled in my throat that day in July when the trucks came through the barricade, the words that had since lodged there, near my heart, turning to something solid.
I was five again, my steps light on the stairs. She’d stopped waiting for the doctors, had heard the reports that they would only help the rich. She’d opened the door to her room. I went to hug her but she’d put the plastic over my mouth and dragged me to the street, calling with her broken voice, calling out for them to stop. I tried to hold onto the mailbox as she ran back, afraid to even kiss me. I tried to keep my arms around its wooden post but I was loaded up and onto the bed of the truck, my body limp in the old woman’s grasp.
“Please,” I begged Arden now, closing my eyes, rocking with the sound of my own voice. I squeezed her hand again, turning it over. “Don’t leave me. I need you.”
When Arden didn’t stir I returned my head to my pillow and welcomed the tears. She might never get better. We might never be back on the road, together, heading to Califia.
HOURS LATER, I AWOKE TO A BLINDING LIGHT.
Someone hovered in the doorway of the room, pointing a flashlight at my face. The silhouette shifted and the beam dropped to the ground. I rubbed at my eyes, trying to make sense of the tiny figure before me; the person could not have been any taller than my hip. Shaggy hair came down to her shoulders, and the wide, fluffy expanse of a tutu spread out around her waist.
I blinked in the darkness, but the figure was still there—real—not the shadowy remnant of a dream.
“What’s your name?” I whispered to the little girl, waiting for my vision to adjust to the dark. She took a step backward. “Come here, come to me.” I lifted my arm to signal her over. But before I could say anything more she darted away, down the dimly lit corridor.
I sat up in bed, fully awake now. I didn’t know how a little girl had found her way to this all-male camp, but I knew I had to follow her. I raced toward the threshold, watching as she padded down the tunnel, barely visible in the flashlight beams.
“Wait!” I called. “Come back!”
She disappeared around a sudden bend.