“I, um—” Heat rises in my cheeks. The field guide is so closely tied to my father that I struggle to think of something, anything, to say about it. Any answer I give will only lead to more questions.
“Seriously, though, where?” she presses, folding a fresh crease into one of the field guide’s pages. I wince, even though I’ve creased so many corners the book could be deconstructed origami.
“Come on, Finn, that’s personal.” Hope takes the book from her, closes it. “Eden obviously doesn’t want to talk about it. Sorry,” she says, handing the book over to me. “People take so much. We should all be allowed to hold on to at least one private thing.”
Finnley doesn’t say another word about it, though I’m certain she wants to. Perhaps there are some things of her own she’d like to keep only for herself—we all have our secrets, I guess. I send a thousand silent thank-yous to Hope.
“So, you guys”—I gesture to the tattoo on Finnley’s pinky, desperate for a subject change—“you’re both red. Where did they bring you in from?” Ink color varies based on where each of us were first processed, whatever the Wolves had on hand. Most of Texas ended up with green.
“Santa Monica,” Hope says.
Matamoros suddenly makes a lot more sense. She and Finnley had hoped to cut through Mexico, I’d bet, climb up into California—they were trying to run back.
If only. If only there were home or family to run back to. If only the Wolves hadn’t shaken the world so thoroughly, if only things weren’t so splintered or broken. There is no going back.
“Where did they put you for work?” I ask.
“Metalworks,” Hope and Finnley say, blandly, in unison.
None of us were originally stationed at chorehouses, not in the beginning—they preferred to pretend we didn’t exist at all. Cockroaches. Only when the Allied Forces intervened, and the Wolves stepped up their war efforts, were we driven into chorehouses. They turned us into ants, made us carry five thousand times our body weight.
Finnley starts in about how blisteringly hot the crucibles were in their foundries. She holds up her hands. “See all the scars where I’ve been burned?” Raised, wrinkled lines crisscross her palms and forearms. A thick, gnarled scar mars the pad of her left pointer finger.
“Those weren’t even bad burns, compared to some we’ve seen,” Hope chimes in. “Like the guy who dumped his crucible out just to make a point.”
She doesn’t elaborate. It’s probably for the best.
“We’ve learned to be careful,” Finnley says. “Also, the Wolves threatened to dump melted lead on our feet when too many people were out with injuries. It was motivating,” she deadpans.
My station at the silkworm house sounds like an absolute oasis in comparison. I tended larvae, fed them mulberry leaves three times daily as if they were my own pets, and then I harvested their cocoons to be shipped off to the silk labs. It was a stifling, sweat-soaked job, but it was no metal factory. Still, I’ve suffered my share of burns. It was my job to boil the cocoons at the end of every cycle, live moths still inside them. I hated it. It was like killing myself every time I dipped them into the vat, these flightless creatures kept alive only to serve and then die. Silk technology is amazing, has done incredible things for the world, but it is born directly out of so much death.
“You think the scars are bad,” Finnley says, and only now do I realize I’m staring. “The reason we have them is even worse.”
I look up. “Yeah?”
“We worked in a bullet factory.”
I don’t know what’s more atrocious: the fact that these girls were scarred while making weapons for the very people who enslaved them, or the fact that the Wolfpack needs a bullet factory at all. They seized every shelf in every store—and every factory—and every abandoned basement—and every military base, even, thanks to thousands of well-placed Wolves and an abundance of strategy and luck. To think, they’ve exhausted their supply of all those bullets. Or, if they haven’t yet exhausted their supply, they plan to.
I believe it. I wish I didn’t.
“So,” I say, mainly to direct the conversation toward something less horrific, “you guys obviously knew each other before today.”
Hope and Finnley are quiet for a long moment.
“We’ve known each other since Zero,” Finnley finally says.
So much for less horrific.
Zero: the day the Wolves took over—the day they took everything. I’d been in the cafeteria line during my first week of sophomore year at Veritas. I’d chosen the salad bar over pizza and fries, mainly so my already-tight purple skirt wouldn’t turn unflattering-tight during biology lab, and I’d just popped a cherry tomato between my teeth when the doors burst open. They spilled in: ten, twenty, fifty officers. For a high school cafeteria.
“Like, since lineup?” I ask. “Or barracks?”
“A little bit before,” Hope chimes in. “I’d seen her around school, but we’d never met. We ended up in the same group as they herded us away.”
“One of the officers hit her,” Finnley says. “He hit her so hard she fell down in the parking lot and tore her knees up on the gravel. I stayed behind to help her up.”
“He hit you?” Looking at Hope, I just can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine why anyone, not even an officer, would raise a voice at her, let alone strike her hard enough to knock her down. “Why?”
Tears sparkle in her eyes. “I said no. No, you can’t take me.”
With that one little word, everything makes sense. No one says no. I watched Birch take his last two steps over saying no.
“How did you . . .”
“Make it out alive?”
She leans her back against the mast and stares out at the endless horizon. “The officer was my older brother.”
FOUR
THE ENEMY WORE sheep’s clothes for many years before it bared its fangs and went for blood.
Fathers. Brothers. The barista who made your daily latte, the guy behind the fish counter at the grocery store, the girl in Sephora who taught you how to line your eyes. All seemingly unconnected, until one day they were a force.
After Zero, it all made sense: the neon fliers stapled to telephone poles, the #wolfpack hashtag everyone assumed was a fandom of some sort, the pendants people wrote off as a passing trend. The signs were all around us, but we were too wrapped up in our own lives to really question them.
Which, I guess, was their point. It was a good point, at its heart, albeit a bitter one—that too many people were out of touch with reality, floating on the hard work of others who were killing themselves just to survive. That too many of us were too entitled, too ungrateful. Too used to all we touched turning to gold.
They weren’t altogether wrong.
These issues are as old as humanity itself, people who have and people who want—but then came the floods. We want a better life became We want life, period.