I force myself to think other thoughts, better thoughts. My panicked mind lands on, of all things, how my mother used to smell like spring-rain fabric softener. I imagine her being there to greet me, on the other side of darkness, ready to stuff my sweaty clothes into our front-loader washing machine. I imagine the bubbles piling up against its window, watching them like I did when I was maybe four or five years old. I imagine taking a shower, the smooth lather of soap and the fresh scent of clean, fluffy towels. I imagine falling asleep in soft sheets, then waking to a day of sunshine and buttered toast and Good morning, Eden!
But once we reach the end of the tunnel, I have to face reality in the broad light of day. I never had some of those things, and I never will.
Hope scrambles off me when we’re close to the edge of the courtyard, even though many of the beetles still hunt us. The bandage Alexa tied around Hope’s leg seems to be doing its job well enough—it’s like they can still smell her blood, so they follow, but the makeshift bandage masks the exact source of it. We climb up over the rubble, not at all tentative like we were when we first arrived.
It’s odd, the way the beetles struggle in an attempt to follow us beyond the temple’s ruined wall: they climb over one another, burrow under one another, until they are a mass of flailing appendages piled up against some invisible barrier.
Not one is able to break through.
I bend, hands on knees, catch my breath. That was intense, and baffling, and a thousand other words that wouldn’t be strong enough.
Hope shifts, examining the innumerable pinprick red dots covering her leg. They cover mine, too, in all the places where the beetles stepped.
“So,” she says, breathless, “was that ‘classic Wolfpack,’ too?”
Alexa gathers our pile of supplies, the sharp-tipped spears and cardigan-wrapped bundle of supplies we had to leave outside in order to climb the rubble in the first place. She throws a sharp glance toward the beetles, who are still scrambling over one another, trying to get at us and failing. “I don’t know what the hell that was.”
TWENTY-SIX
MY FIRST AND only bee sting happened on my eleventh birthday, right after I’d blown out the candles. It was the most perfect day in May—pre-sting—not only because of the deep blue sky and the scratch-made chocolate cake my father had toiled over past midnight the night before, but also because of Birch.
Emma’s parents had just been through the most harrowing divorce over the holidays, introducing our entire class to terms like prenuptial agreement and homewrecker and life in prison. Emma herself had been hopelessly scarred over what her father had done to her mother’s lover—the thing that earned him life in prison, and eventually death there, too. But it wasn’t like she had to tell anyone what had happened for them to find out. Everyone just seemed to know, thanks to the segments they ran on the nightly news for more than a month. And for some reason, everyone avoided Emma as if her parents’ sins were something she had inherited from them. As if they were contagious, able to be caught by simply making eye contact.
So when Emma arrived at the park for my party, in the spotless white sundress her mother had pinched pennies to buy, there was an eternal second where this was a mistake hung in the air. Not because I didn’t want her there—I very much did—but because I didn’t want her there if it was going to be the same as school, where kids were cruel and the days ended with Emma shrinking into herself, hiding behind her stick-straight brown hair.
But Birch.
Birch—who was just another kid in my class at the time, who I mainly knew because he was exceptional at spelling and always won our Friday-afternoon bees—gave her the biggest grin.
“Got a seat over here, E,” he said. No one called her E, but apparently Birch could, and from then on, Birch did. And because he was popular with the guys, and crushed-upon among the girls, they all parted like the Red Sea there at the picnic table, making an E-sized space just for her.
The bee sting came just after I’d wished for Birch. Suddenly, he wasn’t merely the cute, popular boy who could perfectly spell things like phlegmatic and onomatopoeia on the first try—he was the boy who’d single-handedly stopped my best friend’s trajectory toward social implosion.
There’ve been a lot of things like that over the years, bee-sting-on-a-perfect-birthday things that aren’t as they should be.
Like how Emma, a girl with a heart-shaped face and sugar-spice soul, could turn into a social disease just because of her parents’ drama that she had nothing to do with.
Like how Birch was able to reverse months of wrongness with one simple phrase. Even though it was a good thing, it was odd, how easily and permanently things changed.
Like how I wished for Birch, and then got him, only to lose him in the end. Like how I somehow, foolishly, thought that a wish came with forever attached to it.
And now, after everything, if there’s one thing that should just be right, it should be Sanctuary. We made it out of the gulag alive, managed not to get blown to pieces on the beach. We sailed, survived the open ocean, made it to the island. We found the temple, even. The fact that there’s a temple here at all validates so much of what we set out to find.
But it isn’t peace we’ve found, after all.
It was our last hope in this broken, chaotic world. Where is there to go from here?
TWENTY-SEVEN
OUR TREK BACK to the clearing is a strained, uneasy endeavor.
At least it won’t take as long as the first: rather than following the ravine back to the earlier paths we took, we marked out a more direct route to the beach using the map and notes I made. We should be back to our clearing within a couple of hours, according to our estimations.
Those hours cannot pass quickly enough.
Alexa was right; this mission really has been one giant fail. At least we found water—at least we’ll be able to keep ourselves alive out here for a few more days. But for what? There is no Sanctuary, only strange upon strange. Did my father really give up everything for this?
Not that he had much left—but we did have each other.
In the first days after Zero, in barracks, you couldn’t walk two feet without seeing someone who’d been destroyed by what had gone down. Half the girls in my division quarters had been torn from their home regions; most had seen loved ones killed or abused. We were the orphaned and heartbroken, the stray and confused.
All things considered, I was one of the lucky ones.