“What”—I manage, between deep breaths—“was that?”
He paces, runs both hands through his hair and then through his stubble. I can’t tell how many facets there are to his fury, or how much I’ve contributed to it. His fists are balled at his side—it’s obvious he wants to hit something, or throw something—but he controls himself. Barely.
“Seriously, Lonan,” I press, “what just happened? Clearly, you know more than you’re saying, because you knew how to sedate them. She could have killed me—I could have died.”
“You wouldn’t have died,” he says, but he is shaking. Shaken.
“Maybe not from the syringe—”
“Fine.” He holds his hands up in surrender. “You’re right—you’re right.” He paces, paces. Runs a hand through his hair. “The sedative is good for two hours. It doesn’t kill—it merely neutralizes. But no, you’re right, the needle wasn’t our only threat. You’re right.”
My breaths are difficult, like I’m breathing a year’s worth of air with each one, simply because I can. Breathing is so easy until it’s not.
“Well,” I say, when things even out again, when I can form words. “Looks like you have just under two hours to tell me everything you know.”
I’ve won, and he knows it.
“Bring the cheese,” he mutters. “The bread, too.” He heads for the mouth of the cave, a black silhouette against the tunnel’s bright green leaves. “Let’s get some air.”
THIRTY-NINE
“I WOULDN’T TOUCH the moss, if I were you,” I say. Lonan is most of the way up the tunnel wall, climbing toward the flat rocks that form the roof of our cave.
“I’ll take my chances,” he says, though the way he subtly adjusts his grip so he’s completely clear of the moss isn’t lost on me. “Coming?”
“Why can’t we just talk down here?”
“Cave seems to be a trigger spot,” he says. Whatever that means. “Can’t afford for them to overhear us.”
Again with the them. “Them, as in Finnley and Cass?”
“No.” He pushes himself solidly up onto the cave roof and holds out his hand. “Come on. I’ll take the food while you climb, and then we’ll talk.”
I toss the bread and cheese up to him and trace his path. Fortunately, it’s not too steep a climb, or impossibly high. At the top, the difference in scenery is incredible: blue skies in every direction, with such a thick spread of green it’s almost as if we’re having a picnic in a sunny field. Beyond that, sunlight glitters on the endless, empty ocean.
I have the sudden, uncontrollable urge to laugh, even though nothing about this is particularly funny.
“What?”
“I mean, look at us,” I say. Him, in his modern-day pirate attire, when in another life maybe he would have been, I don’t know, a soccer star? Prom king, most definitely, especially if the people voting had a thing for mysterious bad-boy types. And me, a girl who’s had to learn the hard way what she’s capable of. All those years of prosperity, burned away by the fire of this harsh new world and the pressure of simply having to be strong in order to survive. I never considered myself particularly strong, Before, but, well—I’m still here, aren’t I?
“Look at us,” I say again. “When you were a little kid, did you ever imagine you’d end up hiking on an island like this and stabbing your friends in self-defense?”
It’s the closest he’s come to a smile since I’ve known him. “No,” he said. “I never did imagine this.”
He’s quiet for a long time, staring out over the ocean. And while I hate to interrupt the sentimental moment that seems to be playing out in his memory, time doesn’t just stop for sentimental moments.
“So.”
I don’t have to elaborate. He knows what I want to know.
“It’s complicated.” He runs a hand through his hair, something he’s done enough times now that I’ve picked up on its meaning: he’s uncomfortable and doesn’t know how, exactly, to untangle himself. “Tell me about the war from your perspective, and I’ll fill in the cracks.” He points to my finger, where my name has been forever branded as property of the Wolves. “I’m guessing there’s a lot you don’t know, given your history.”
All the time in the world—all the words in the world—wouldn’t be enough to express the hundreds of days that have passed since Zero. I keep it to the basics: the Kiribati disasters, the devolution of our own shores, Envirotech stepping in as saviors, how it would have been easier to move into a colony on the moon than land a spot on the ocean-based habitats they were developing.
How the Wolfpack movement started with the underpaid and overworked, the thirsty and the sick.
How their sudden surge of power was unusually stealthy and organized and effective, an unprecedented feat among underground movements.
How the wealthy were moved to gulags along the coasts, because we are most vulnerable there, because the reefs and seawalls weren’t going to build themselves.
How there was a distinct turning point—when the kingpins emerged from their anonymity and revealed themselves as the Wolves’ alphas—where things got dramatically worse. How the Global Alliance tried to intervene. How the war spread to the world stage.
I leave Birch out. Dad, too.
I simply say, People have lost so many loved ones, a sentence with roots so deep they’d poke out the far side of the planet.
I talk about heavy, life-altering things as if I’m reading from a history book—as if I live in the far-distant future where schoolkids know nothing of the fear we’ve faced, nothing of our oppressors.
If only.
“Here.” He shakes the crumbs from the dish towel that protected Phoenix’s loaf of bread before we devoured it, hands it to me.
For the tears I must be crying.
“Your account is more accurate than I expected,” he says, and I wonder why his account would be any different from mine. How he managed to escape the things that have, quite literally, scarred an entire population. An entire world. “From your perspective, it’s all shadows—but things aren’t quite as black and white as you think.”
I tear off a hunk of blue, veiny cheese and put it in my mouth before I say something I regret.
“There’s a resistance at work,” he continues. “You may not remember much from that morning, just before Zero went down, but if you try, I bet you can think of how odd it was that a good portion of the school didn’t show up for class that day.” Quickly, he adds, “Not just your school—all schools. Businesses.”
I’ve always assumed the people who were missing were the Wolves: that the only people who weren’t caught off guard by Zero were the people enforcing it.