Requiem

Lena

Night is coming quickly, and with it, the cold.

We’re lost.

We’re looking for an old highway that should lead us toward Waterbury. Pike is convinced we’re too far north; Raven thinks we’re too far south.

We’re striking out mostly blind, using a compass and a series of old sketches that have been passed back and forth among other traders and Invalids, filled in a little at a time, showing a random scattering of landmarks: rivers; dismantled roads and old towns, bombed by the blitz; the borders of the established cities, so we know to avoid them; ravines and impassable places. Direction, like time, is a general thing, deprived of boundaries and borders. It is an endless process of interpretation and reinterpretation, doubling back and adjusting.

We come to a stop while Pike and Raven argue it out. My shoulders are aching. I unload my pack and sit on top of it, take a swig of water from the jug I have looped to the belt around my waist. Julian is hovering behind Raven, red-faced, his hair dark with sweat and his jacket tied around his waist. He’s trying to see beyond her, to the map that Pike is holding. He is getting skinnier.

At the periphery of the group, Alex is sitting, like me, on his pack. Coral does the same, inching closer to him so their knees are touching. Over the course of a few short days, they have become practically inseparable.

Even though I want to, I can’t bring myself to look away from him. I don’t understand what he and Coral have to talk about. They talk while they hike, and while they set up camp. They talk at mealtimes, sequestered in the corner. Meanwhile, he hardly speaks with anyone else, and he has not exchanged a single word with me since our confrontation with the bear.

She must have asked him a question, because I see him shake his head.

And then, just for a second, both of them look up at me. I turn away quickly, heat rushing to my cheeks. They were talking about me. I know it. I wonder what she asked him.

Do you know that girl? She’s staring at you.

Do you think Lena’s pretty?

I squeeze my fists until my nails dig into the flesh of my palms, inhale deeply, and will away the thought. Alex and what he thinks of me are irrelevant.

Pike is saying, “I’m telling you, we should have gone east at the old church. It’s marked on the map.”

“That isn’t a church,” Raven argues, snatching the map back from him. “It’s the tree we passed earlier—the one split by lightning. And it means we should have continued north.”

“I’m telling you, that’s a cross—”

“Why don’t we send out scouts?” Julian interrupts them. Startled into silence, they turn to him. Raven frowns, and Pike stares at Julian with open hostility. My stomach starts squirming, and I silently pray in his direction: Don’t get involved. Don’t say anything stupid.

But Julian continues calmly, “We move more slowly as a group, and it’s a waste of our time and energy if we’re headed in the wrong direction.” For a second I see his old self float to the surface, the Julian of conferences and posters, the youth leader of the DFA, self-assured. “So I say two people head north—”

“Why north?” Pike breaks in angrily.

Julian barely misses a beat. “Or south, whichever. Hike for half a day, look for the highway. If it isn’t there, hike in the other direction. At least we’ll get more of a sense of the terrain. We can help orient the group.”

“We?” Raven parrots.

Julian looks at her. “I want to volunteer,” he says.

“It’s not safe,” I burst out, climbing to my feet. “There are Scavengers patrolling—maybe regulators, too. We need to stick together. Otherwise we’re easy prey.”

“She’s right,” Raven says, turning back to Julian. “It isn’t safe.”

“I’ve dealt with Scavengers before,” Julian argues.

“And almost died,” I fire back.

He smiles. “I didn’t, though.”

“I’ll go with him.” Tack spits a thick wad of tobacco onto the ground and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I glare at him. He ignores me. He has made no secret of the fact that he thinks it was a mistake to have rescued Julian and a liability to have him with us. “You know how to shoot a gun?”

“No,” I say. “He doesn’t.” Now everyone’s looking at me, but I don’t care. I don’t know what Julian’s trying to prove, but I don’t like it.

“I can handle a gun,” Julian lies quickly.

Tack nods. “All right, then.” He extracts another bit of tobacco from a pouch he wears around his neck and balls it into his mouth. “Let me unload some of my pack. We’ll leave in half an hour.”

“Okay, everyone.” Raven raises her arms in a gesture of resignation. “We might as well camp here.”

The group, as one, begins to shed packs and shake supplies out on the ground, like a single animal molting its skin. I grab Julian’s arm and draw him away from everybody else.

“What was that about?” I’m struggling to keep my voice down. I can see Alex watching us. He looks amused. I wish I had something to throw at him.

I take Julian and swivel him around, so he blocks Alex from my view.

“What do you mean?” He shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Don’t play dumb,” I say. “You shouldn’t have volunteered to scout. This isn’t a joke, Julian. We’re in the middle of a war.”

“I don’t think it’s a joke.” His calmness is infuriating. “I know better than anyone else what the other side is capable of, remember?”

I look away, biting my lip. He has a point. If anyone knows about the tactics of the zombies, it’s Julian Fineman.

“You still don’t know the Wilds,” I insist. “And Tack won’t protect you. If you get attacked—if anything happens, and it’s a question of you or the rest of us—he’ll leave you. He won’t endanger the group.”

“Lena.” Julian puts his hands on my shoulders and forces me to look at him. “Nothing’s going to happen, okay?”

“You don’t know that,” I say. I know I’m overreacting, but I can’t help it. For some reason, I feel like crying. I think of the quietness of Julian’s voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.

I love you, Julian. But the words don’t come.

“The others don’t trust me,” Julian says. I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off. “Don’t try and deny it. You know it’s true.”

I don’t contradict him. “So what? You need to prove yourself?”

He sighs and rubs his eyes. “I chose to make my place here, Lena. I chose to make my place with you. Now I have to earn it. It’s not about proving myself. But like you said, there’s a war on. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead once. He still hesitates for just a fraction of a second before he kisses me, as though he has to shake out that old fear, the terror of touch and contamination. “Why are you so upset about this? Nothing will happen.”

I’m scared, I want to say. I have a bad feeling. I love you and don’t want you to get hurt. But again, it’s as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears and past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” Julian says, and cups my chin briefly. “You’ll see.”

But they aren’t back by dinnertime, and they aren’t back by the time we rake dirt over the fire, extinguishing it for the night. It’s a liability now, and even though we’ll be colder, and Julian and Tack will have trouble finding their way to us without it, Raven is insistent.

I volunteer to stay up and stand watch. I’m too anxious to sleep. Raven gives me an extra coat from our store of clothing. The nights are still edged with a hard chill.

A few hundred feet from the camp is a slight incline, and an old cement wall, still imprinted with ghostly loops of graffiti, that will shield me from the wind. I huddle up with my back against the stone, cupping the mug of hot water Raven boiled for me earlier to help warm my fingers. My gloves were lost, or stolen, somewhere between the New York homestead and here, and now I have to do without.

The moon rises and touches the camp—the slumbering forms, the domed tents and makeshift shelters—with a fine white sheen. In the distance, a water tower, still intact, hovers over the trees like a steel insect, perched on long, spindly legs. The sky is clear and cloudless, and thousands of stars float out of the darkness. An owl hoots, a hollow, mournful sound that echoes through the woods. From even this short distance, the camp looks peaceful, wrapped up in its white haze, surrounded by the splintered wrecks of old houses: roofs collapsed into the ground, a swing set, overturned, its plastic slide still protruding from the dirt.

After two hours, I’m yawning so much my jaw aches, and my whole body feels as though it has been filled with wet sand. I lean my head back against the wall, struggling to keep my eyes open. The stars above me blur together . . . they became one beam of light—sunshine—Hana is stepping out of the sunshine, leaves in her hair, saying, “Wasn’t it a funny joke? I was never planning to get cured, you know. . . ” Her eyes are locked on mine, and as she steps forward, I see she’s about to put her foot in a trap. I try to warn her, but—

Snap. I jolt awake, heart throbbing in my throat, and quickly, as quietly as possible, move into a crouch. The air is still again, but I know I didn’t imagine or dream the sound: the sound of a twig snapping.

The sound of a footstep.

Let it be Julian, I think. Let it be Tack.

I scan the camp and see a shadow moving between the tents. I tense up and reach forward, ever so slowly, easing the rifle into my hands. My fingers are swollen with cold, and clumsy. The gun feels heavier than it did earlier.

The figure steps into a patch of moonlight, and I exhale. It’s just Coral. Her skin shines a vivid white in the moonlight, and she is wearing an oversized sweatshirt that I recognize as belonging to Alex. My stomach clenches. I bring the rifle up to my shoulder, swing the muzzle toward her, think: Bang.

I bring the gun down quickly, ashamed.

My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.

Coral disappears into the woods, probably to pee. My legs are cramping, so I straighten up. I’m too tired to stand guard any longer. I’ll go down and wake up Raven, who volunteered to replace me.

Snap. Another footstep, this one closer and on the east side of the camp. Coral went north. Instantly, I’m on alert again.

Then I see him: He inches slowly forward, gun raised, emerging from behind a thick copse of evergreens. I can tell right away he’s not a Scavenger. His posture is too perfect, his gun too pristine, his clothing well-fitted.

My heart stops. A regulator. Must be. And that means the Wilds really have been breached. Despite all the evidence, a part of me has been hoping it wasn’t true.

For a second everything gets silent, and then frighteningly loud, as the blood rushes to my head, pounding in my ears, and the night seems to light up with frightening hoots and screams, alien and wild, animals prowling the dark. My palms are sweating as I bring the gun once more to my shoulder. My throat is dry. I track the regulator as he moves closer to the camp. I put my finger on the trigger. Panic is building in my chest. I don’t know whether to shoot. I’ve never shot anything from this distance. I’ve never shot a person. I don’t even know that I could.

Shit, shit, shit, shit. I wish Tack were here.

Shit.

What would Raven do?

He reaches the edge of the camp. He lowers his gun, and I move my finger off the trigger. Maybe he’s just a scout. Maybe he’s supposed to report back. That will give us time to move, to clear out, to prepare. Maybe we’ll be okay.

Then Coral reemerges from the woods.

For a split second she stands there, frozen stiff and white as though framed in a photographer’s flash. For a split second, he doesn’t move either.

Then she gasps, and he swings his gun toward her, and without thinking or planning on it, my finger finds the trigger again and pulls. The regulator’s knee goes and he cries out, sinking to the ground.

Then everything is chaos.

The kick of the rifle knocks me backward, and I stumble, trying to keep my balance. A jagged tooth of rock bites sharply into my back, and pain shoots from my ribs to my shoulder. There are more gunshots—one, two—and then shouting. I sprint down toward the camp. In less than a minute, it has unfolded, opened, turned into a swarm of people and voices.

The regulator is lying facedown in the dirt, arms and legs splayed. A pool of blood extends like a dark shadow around him. Dani is standing near him with her handgun out. She must have been the one to kill him.

Coral has her arms wrapped around her waist, looking shocked and slightly guilty, as though she somehow summoned the regulator to her. She is uninjured, which is a relief. I’m glad that my instincts were to save her. I think about centering her in my crosshairs earlier, and feel another pulse of shame. This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

Hatred, too, the zombies warned me about.

Pike, Hunter, and Lu are all talking at the same time. The rest of our group huddles in a semicircle around them, pale and frightened-looking in the moonlight, their eyes hollows, like resurrected ghosts.

Only Alex isn’t standing. He’s squatting, quickly and methodically repacking his backpack.

“All right.” Raven speaks quietly, but the urgency there commands our attention. “Let’s look at the facts. We have a dead regulator on our hands.”

Someone whimpers.

“What are we doing?” Gordo breaks in. His face is wild with panic. “We have to go.”

“Go where?” Raven demands. “We don’t know where they are, what direction they’re coming from. We could be running straight into a trap.”

“Shhh.” Dani hushes us sharply. For a second there is total stillness, except for the low moan of wind through the trees and an owl calling. Then we hear it: from the south, the distant echo of voices.

“I say we stay and fight,” Pike says. “This is our territory.”

“We don’t fight unless we have to,” Raven says, turning on him. “We don’t know how many regulators there are, or what kind of weapons they have. They’re better fed and stronger than we are.”

“I’m sick of running,” Pike fires back.

“We’re not running,” she says calmly. She turns back to the rest of the group. “We’re going to divide. Spread out around the camp. Hide. Some of us can head down to the old riverbed. I’ll be watching from the hill. Rocks, bushes, whatever looks like it will conceal you—use it. Climb a tree, for shit’s sake. Just stay out of sight.” She looks to each of us in turn. Pike stubbornly refuses to meet her gaze.

“Take your guns, knives—anything you have. But remember, we don’t fight unless we have to. Don’t do anything until my signal, okay? Nobody moves. Nobody breathes, coughs, sneezes, or farts. Is that clear?”

Pike spits on the ground. No one speaks.

“All right,” Raven says. “Let’s go.”

The group breaks up, quickly and wordlessly. People blur past me and become shadows; the shadows fold themselves into the dark. I push my way to Raven, who has knelt down beside the dead regulator and is checking him for weapons, money, whatever might be of use.

“Raven.” Her name catches in my throat. “Do you think—?”

“They’ll be fine,” she says without looking up. She knows I was going to ask about Julian and Tack. “Now get out of here.”

I move through the camp at a jog, find my backpack heaped next to several others at the edge of the fire pit. I sling my pack over my right shoulder; next to the rifle, the strap digs painfully into my skin. I grab two of the other packs and swing them onto my left shoulder.

Raven jogs past me. “Time to go, Lena.” She, too, dissipates into the darkness.

I stand up, then notice that someone unpacked the medical supplies last night. If anything happens—if we have to run, and can’t come back—we’ll need those.

I remove one of the backpacks and kneel down.

The regulators are getting closer. I can pick out individual voices now, individual words. I am suddenly aware that the camp has been totally cleared out. I’m the only one left.

I unzip the backpack. My hands are shaking. I wrestle a sweatshirt out of the backpack, begin stuffing it instead with Band-Aids and bacitracin.

A hand clamps down on my shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing?” It’s Alex. He gets a hand under my arm and hauls me to my feet. I just manage to zip up the backpack. “Come on.”

I try to wrench my arm away, but he keeps a firm grip on me, practically dragging me into the woods, away from the camp. I flash back to the raid night in Portland when Alex led me like this through a black maze of rooms; when we huddled together on the piss-smelling floor of a storage shed and he gently wrapped my wounded leg, his hands soft and strong and strange on my skin.

He kissed me that night.

I push the memory away.

We plunge down a steep embankment, sinking through a rotten layer of loam and damp leaves, toward a jutting lip of land that forms a natural cave, a hollowed-out spot in the hillside. Alex pilots me into a crouch and practically pushes me into the small, dark space.

“Watch it.” Pike is there too: a few glistening teeth, a bit of solid darkness. He shifts slightly to accommodate us. Alex slides beside me, knees drawn to his chest.

The tents are no more than fifty feet away from us, up the hill. I say a silent prayer that the regulators will think we’ve run, and not waste their time searching.

The waiting is agony. The voices from the woods have dropped away. The regulators must be moving slowly now, stalking us, drawing closer. Maybe they’re even in the camp, threading their way past the tents: deadly, silent shadows.

The space is too narrow, the darkness intolerable. The idea comes to me, suddenly, that we are wedged in a coffin.

Alex shifts next to me. The back of his hand brushes up against my arm. My throat goes dry. His breathing is quicker than usual. I go stiff, perfectly rigid, until he withdraws his hand. It must have been an accident.

Another agonizing stretch of silence. Pike mutters, “This is stupid.”

“Shhh.” Alex hushes him sharply.

“Sitting here like rats in a trap . . .”

“I swear, Pike . . .”

“Both of you be quiet,” I whisper fiercely. We lapse into silence again. After a few more seconds, someone shouts. Alex tenses up. Pike eases his rifle off his shoulder, jabbing me in the side with his elbow. I bite back a cry.

“They’ve cleared out.” The voice floats down to us from the camp. So they’ve arrived. I guess now that they’ve found the tents empty, they don’t think they need to be quiet anymore. I wonder what their plan was: surround us, mow us down while we slept.

I wonder how many there are.

“Damn. You were right about the shots we heard. It’s Don.”

“Dead?”

“Yup.”

There’s a faint rustling sound, as though someone is kicking through the tents. “Look at how they live out here. Packed together. Mucking around in the dirt. Animals.”

“Careful. It’s all contaminated.”

So far, I’ve counted six voices.

“It smells, doesn’t it? I can smell them. Shit.”

“Breathe through your mouth.”

“Bastards,” Pike mutters.

“Shhh,” I say reflexively, even though anger has gripped me, too, alongside the fear. I hate them. I hate every single one of them, for thinking that they are better than us.

“Where do you think they’re headed?”

“Wherever it is, they can’t have gone far.”

Seven distinct voices in all. Maybe eight. It’s hard to tell. And we are about two dozen. Still, as Raven said, it’s impossible to know what kind of weapons they’re carrying, whether there are reinforcements waiting nearby.

“Let’s wrap it up here, then. Chris?”

“Got it.”

My thighs have started to cramp. I ease my weight backward to get some relief, pressing up against Alex. He doesn’t pull away. Once again, his hand brushes my arm, and I’m not sure if it’s accidental, or a gesture of reassurance. For a second—despite everything else—my insides go white and electric, and Pike and the regulators and the cold zoom away, and there is only Alex’s shoulder against my shoulder, and his ribs expanding and contracting against mine, and the rough warmth of his fingers.

The air smells like gasoline.

The air smells like fire.

I jolt into awareness. Gasoline. Fire. Burning. They’re burning our things. Now the air is popping and crackling. The regulators’ voices are muffled behind the noise. Ribbons of smoke stream down over the hillside, float into our view, writhing like airborne snakes.

“Bastards,” Pike says again, his voice strangled. He starts to rocket out of the hollow and I reach for him, try to pull him backward.

“Don’t. Raven said to wait for her signal.”

“Raven’s not in charge.” He breaks away from me and slides onto his stomach, holding his rifle in front of him like a sniper.

“Don’t, Pike.”

Either he doesn’t hear me or he ignores me. He begins inching up the hill on his stomach.

“Alex.” Panic is filling me like a tide. The smoke, the anger, the roar of the fire as it spreads—all of it is making it impossible to think.

“Shit.” Alex moves past me and starts to reach for Pike. By now, only his boots are still visible. “Pike, don’t be a goddamn idiot—”

Bang. Bang.

Two shots. The noise seems to echo and amplify in the hollow space. I cover my ears.

Then: bang, bang, bang, bang. Gunshots from everywhere, and people screaming. A shower of dirt rains on me from above. My ears are ringing, and my head is full of smoke.

Focus.

Alex has already pushed out of the hollow and I follow him, trying to wrestle the gun off my shoulder. At the last second I shrug off the backpacks. They’ll only slow me down.

Explosions from all sides, and the roar of an inferno.

The woods are full of smoke and fire. Orange and red flames shoot between the black trees—stark, stiff-necked, like witnesses frozen in horror. Pike is kneeling, half-concealed behind a tree, shooting. His face is lit orange from the fire, and his mouth is open in a roar. I see Raven moving through the smoke. The air is alive with gunshots: so many of them that it reminds me of sitting at the Eastern Prom with Hana on Independence Day and watching the fireworks display, the rapid staccato and the flashes of dazzling color. The smell of smoke.

“Lena!”

I don’t have time to see who calls my name. A bullet whizzes past me and lodges itself in the tree directly behind me, sending off a spray of bark. I unfreeze, dart forward, and position myself flat against the large trunk of a sugar maple. Several feet ahead of me, Alex has taken refuge behind a tree as well. Every few seconds he pokes his head around the trunk, fires off a few rounds, then ducks back into safety.

My eyes are watering. I crane my head cautiously around the trunk, trying to distinguish the figures grappling in the dark, backlit by the fire. From a distance, they look almost like dancers—pairs swaying, wrestling, dipping, and spinning.

I can’t tell who is who. I blink, cough, palm my eyes. Pike has disappeared.

There: I see Dani’s face briefly as she turns to the fire. A regulator has jumped her from behind, has an arm thrown around her neck. Dani’s eyes are bulging, her face purple. I bring my gun up, then lower it again. Impossible to aim from here, not as they stagger back and forth. Dani is twisting and bucking like a bull trying to shake its rider.

There’s another chorus of gunshots. The regulator withdraws his arm from Dani’s neck, clutching his elbow, shouting in pain. He turns toward the light, and I can see blood bubbling between his fingers. I have no idea who fired or whether the bullet was aimed at Dani or the regulator, but the momentary release gives Dani the advantage she needs. She fumbles at her belt for her knife, heaving and gagging. She is obviously tired, but she moves with the dumb persistence of an animal being worked to death.

She swings her arm up toward the regulator’s neck; metal flashes in her fist. After she stabs him, he jerks, a huge convulsion. His face registers surprise. He totters forward onto his knees, and then onto his face. Dani kneels next to him, wedges a boot under his body, and uses the purchase to bring her knife out of his neck.

Somewhere, beyond the wall of smoke, a woman screams. I track my rifle helplessly from one side of the burning camp to the other, but everything is confusion and blur. I have to get closer. I can help no one where I am.

I break into the open, staying as low as possible, and move toward the fire and the chaos of bodies, past Alex, who is tracking the action from behind a sycamore.

“Lena!” he shouts as I dart by him. I don’t respond. I need to focus. The air is hot and thick. The fire is leaping from tree branches now, a deadly canopy above us; flames braid themselves around the trunks, turning them a chalky white. The sky is obscured behind all the smoke. This is all that is left of our camp, of the supplies we gathered so carefully—the clothing we hunted for, scrubbed in the river, wore to tatters; and the tents we mended so painstakingly, until they were crisscrossed with stitches: this hungry, all-consuming heat.

Fifteen feet from me, a man the size of a boulder has brought Coral to the ground. I start toward her when someone tackles me from behind. As I’m falling, I jab hard behind me with the butt of my rifle. The man spits out a curse and pulls back several inches, giving me time and space to roll onto my back. I use my gun like a baseball bat, swinging it toward his jaw. It connects with a sickening crack, and he slumps sideways.

Tack was right about one thing: The regulators aren’t trained for combat like this. Almost all their fighting has been done from the air, from the cockpit of a bomber, from a distance.

I scramble to my feet and sprint toward Coral, who is still on the ground. I don’t know what happened to the regulator’s gun. But he has his hands coiled around her neck.

I raise the butt of my rifle high above my head. Coral’s eyes flick to mine. As I’m bringing the rifle down on the regulator’s head, he whips around toward me. I manage to graze the side of his shoulder, but I’m carried off balance by the force of my swing. I stumble, and he sweeps an arm at my shins and sends me sprawling flat. I bite down on my lip and taste blood. I want to turn onto my back, but suddenly there’s a weight on top of me, knocking me flat, crushing the air from my lungs. The gun is ripped from my hand.

I can’t breathe. My face is pressed to the dirt. Something—a knee? an elbow?—is digging into my neck. Bursts of light explode behind my eyelids.

Then there’s a thwack, and a grunt, and the weight is released. I twist around, sucking in air, kicking away from the regulator. He is still straddling me, but he is now slumped sideways, eyes closed, a small bit of blood trickling from his forehead, where he was hit. Alex is standing above me, gripping his rifle.

He leans down and grabs my elbow, hauls me to my feet. Then he picks up my rifle and passes it to me. Behind him, the fire is still spreading. The swaying dancers have dispersed. Now I can’t see anything but a huge wall of flame and several forms huddled on the ground. My stomach lurches. I can’t tell who has fallen, whether they are our people.

Next to us, Gordo lifts Coral and slings her over his back. She moans, eyelids fluttering, but doesn’t wake up.

“Come on,” Alex shouts. The noise of the fire is tremendous: a cacophony of cracking and popping, like a slurping, sucking monster.

Alex leads us away from the fire, using the butt of his rifle to swipe a clear path through the woods. I recognize that we’re heading in the direction of a small stream we located yesterday. Gordo pants loudly behind me, and I’m still dizzy, and not very steady on my feet. I keep my eyes locked on the back of Alex’s jacket, and I think of nothing but moving, one foot in front of the other, getting as far from the fire as possible.

“Coo-ee!”

As we draw close to the stream, Raven’s call echoes to us through the woods. To our right, a flashlight cuts through the darkness. We shoulder through a thick tangle of dead growth and emerge onto a gentle slope of stony land, through which a shallow stream is pushing resolutely. The break in the canopy above us allows moonlight to penetrate. It streaks the surface of the stream with silver, makes the pale pebbles lining the banks glow slightly.

Our group is crouching, huddled together, a hundred feet away on the other side of the stream. Relief breaks in my chest. We’re intact; we survived. And Raven will know what to do about Julian and Tack. She will know how to find them.

“Coo-ee!” Raven calls again, angling a flashlight in our direction.

“We see you,” Gordo grunts. He pushes ahead of me, his breathing now a hoarse rasp, and sloshes across the stream to the other side.

Before we can cross, Alex whirls around and takes two steps back to me. I’m startled to see that his face is twisted in anger.

“What the hell was that about?” he demands. When I can only stare at him, he goes on, “You could have died, Lena. If it wasn’t for me, you would be dead.”

“Is this your way of asking for a thank-you?” I’m shaky, and tired, and disoriented. “You could just learn to say please, you know.”

“I’m not kidding.” Alex shakes his head. “You should have stayed where you were. You didn’t need to go charging in there like some kind of hero.”

I feel a flicker of anger. I hold on to it and coax it into life. “Excuse me,” I say. “If I hadn’t charged in there, your new—your new girlfriend would be dead right now.” I’ve rarely had occasion to use the word in my life, and it takes me a second to remember it.

“She’s not your responsibility,” Alex says evenly.

Instead of making me feel better, his response makes me feel worse. Despite everything that has happened tonight, it’s this stupid, basic fact that makes me feel like I am going to cry: He didn’t deny that she was his girlfriend.

I swallow back the sick taste in my mouth. “Well, I’m not your responsibility either, remember? You can’t tell me what to do.” I’ve found the thread of anger again. Now I’m following it, pulling myself forward on it, hand over hand. “Why do you even care, anyway? You hate me.”

Alex stares at me. “You really don’t get it, do you?” His voice is hard.

I cross my arms and squeeze tight, trying to squeeze back the pain, to push it deep under the anger. “Don’t get what?”

“Forget it.” Alex shoves a hand through his hair. “Forget I said anything at all.”

“Lena!”

I turn. Tack and Julian have just emerged from the woods on the other side of the stream, and Julian runs toward me, splashing through the water without seeming to register it. He charges straight past Alex and sweeps me up in his arms, lifting me off the ground. I let out a single, muffled sob into his shirt.

“You’re okay,” he whispers. He’s squeezing me so tightly, I can hardly breathe. But I don’t mind. I don’t want him to let go, ever.

“I was so worried about you,” I say. Now that my anger at Alex has drained away, the need to cry is resurging, pushing at my throat.

I’m not sure Julian understands me. My voice is muffled by his shirt. But he gives me another hard squeeze before setting me down. He brushes the hair back from my face.

“When you and Tack didn’t come back . . . I thought maybe something had happened. . . .”

“We decided to camp for the night.” Julian looks guilty, as though his absence was somehow the cause of the attack. “Tack’s flashlight went bust and we couldn’t see a damn thing when the sun went down. We were worried about getting lost. We were probably only a mile from here.” He shakes his head. “When we heard the shots, we came as fast as we could.” He touches his forehead to mine and adds, a little softer, “I was so scared.”

“I’m fine,” I say. I keep my arms wrapped around his waist. He is so steady, so solid. “There were regulators—seven or eight of them, maybe more. But we chased them off.”

Julian finds my hand and laces his fingers in mine.

“I should have stayed with you,” he says, his voice breaking a little.

I bring his hand to my lips. This simple thing—the fact that I can kiss him like this, freely—suddenly seems like a miracle. They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past. But we are still here.

And there are more of us every day.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s make sure the others are okay.”

Alex must have crossed the stream and rejoined the group already. At the edge of the water, Julian doubles down and sweeps an arm behind my knees, so I stumble backward and into his arms. He picks me up, and I put my arms around his neck and rest my head against his chest: His heart is a steady rhythm, reassuring. He wades across the stream and deposits me on the other side.

“Nice of you to join us,” Raven is saying to Tack,as Julian and I push our way into the circle. But I can hear the relief in her voice. Despite the fact that Raven and Tack are often fighting, it’s impossible to imagine one without the other. They are like two plants that have grown around each other—they strangle and squeeze and support at the same time.

“What are we supposed to do?” Lu asks. She is an indistinct shape in the darkness. Most of the faces in the circle are ovals of dark, individual features fragmented by the small patches of moonlight. A nose is visible here; a mouth there; the barrel of a gun.

“We go to Waterbury, like we planned,” Raven says firmly.

“With what?” Dani says. “We have nothing. No food. No blankets. Nothing.”

“It could have been worse,” Raven says. “We got out, didn’t we? And we can’t be too far.”

“We aren’t.” Tack speaks up. “Julian and I found the highway. It’s a half day from here. We’re too far north, just like Pike said.”

“I guess we can forgive you, then,” Raven says, “for almost getting us killed.”

Pike, for the first time in his life, has nothing to say.

Raven sighs dramatically. “Okay. I admit it. I was wrong. Is that what you want to hear?”

Again: no response.

“Pike?” Dani ventures, into the silence.

“Shit,” Tack mutters. Then he says again, “Shit.”

Another pause. I shiver. Julian puts his arm around me, and I lean into him.

Raven says quietly, “We can light a small fire. If he’s lost, it will help him find his way to us.”

This is her gift to us. She knows—just like we all know in that instant, deep down—that Pike is dead.