Requiem

Lena

As we get close to Back Cove, the trickle of people swells to a roaring, rushing stream, and I can barely maneuver my bike between them. They are running, shouting, waving hammers and knives and pieces of metal piping, surging toward some unknown location, and I’m surprised to see that it isn’t just Invalids rioting anymore: It is kids, too, some as young as twelve and thirteen, uncured and angry. I even spot a few cureds watching from their windows above the street, occasionally waving, a show of solidarity.

I break loose of the crowd and bump the bike onto the churned-mud shores of the cove, where Alex and I made our stand a lifetime ago—where for the first time, he traded his happiness for mine. Grass grows high between the rubble of the old road, and people—injured or dead—are lying in the grass, letting out moans or staring sightlessly at the cloudless sky. I see several bodies facedown in the shallows of the cove, and tendrils of red sweeping across the surface of the water.

Past the cove, at the wall, the crowd is still thick, but it looks like mostly our people. The regulators and police must have been driven back, farther toward Old Port. Now thousands of rioters are flowing in that direction, their voices unified, a single note of fury.

I ditch the bike in the shade of a large juniper and, at last, take Grace by the shoulders, examine her all over for cuts or bruises. She is shaking, wide-eyed, staring at me as though she believes I’ll disappear any second.

“What happened to the others?” I ask. Her fingernails are coated with dirt, and she is skinny. But otherwise, she looks okay. More than okay—she looks beautiful. I feel a sob building in my throat, and I swallow it back. We aren’t safe, not yet.

Grace shakes her head. “I don’t know. There was a fire and . . . and I hid.”

So they did leave her. Or they didn’t care enough to look when she disappeared. I feel a wave of nausea.

“You look different,” Grace says quietly.

“You got taller,” I say. Suddenly I could shout for joy. I could scream with happiness while the whole world burns.

“Where did you go?” Grace asks me. “What happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you all about it later.” I take her chin with one hand. “Listen, Grace. I want to tell you how sorry I am. I’m sorry for leaving you behind. I’ll never leave you again, okay?”

Her eyes travel my face. She nods.

“I’m going to keep you safe now.” I push the words out past the thickness in my throat. “Do you believe me?”

She nods again. I pull her to me, squeezing. She feels so thin, so fragile. But I know that she is strong. She always has been. She will be ready for whatever comes next.

“Take my hand,” I tell her. I’m not certain where to go, and my mind flashes to Raven. Then I remember that she is gone—murdered at the wall—and the sickness threatens to overwhelm me again. But I have to stay calm for Grace’s sake.

I need to find a safe place to go with Grace until the fighting is done. My mother will help me; she’ll know what to do.

Grace’s grip is surprisingly strong. We pick our way along the shoreline, threading between the people—Invalids and regulators alike—injured, dying, and dead. At the top of the slope, Colin, limping, leans heavily on another boy and makes his way to an empty spot on the grass. The other boy looks up and my heart stops.

Alex.

He sees me almost immediately after I’ve spotted him. I want to call out to him, but my voice is caught in my throat. For a second, he hesitates. Then he eases Colin down into the grass and bends to say something to him. Colin nods, gripping his knee, wincing.

Then Alex is jogging toward me.

“Alex.” It’s as though saying his name makes him real. He stops a few inches away from me, and his eyes go to Grace, and then back to me. “This is Grace,” I say, tugging her hand. She hangs back, angling her body behind mine.

“I remember,” he says. There is no more hardness in his eyes, no more hatred. He clears his throat. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Here I am.” The sun feels overly bright, and all of a sudden I can think of nothing to say, no words to describe everything I’ve thought and wished and wondered. “I—I got your note.”

He nods. His mouth tightens just a little. “Is Julian . . . ?”

“I don’t know where Julian is,” I say, and then instantly feel guilty. I think of his blue eyes, and his warmth curling around me when I slept. I hope he has not been hurt. I bend down so I can look Grace in the eyes. “Sit here for a minute, okay, Gracie?”

She folds herself to the ground obediently. I can’t bring myself to step more than two paces away from her. Alex follows.

I lower my voice so Grace won’t hear us. “Is it true?” I ask him.

“Is what true?” His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.

“That you still love me,” I say, breathless. “I need to know.”

Alex nods. He reaches out and touches my face—barely skimming my cheekbone and brushing away a bit of my hair. “It’s true.”

“But . . . I’ve changed,” I say. “And you’ve changed.”

“That’s true too,” he says quietly. I look at the scar on his face, stretching from his left eye to his jawline, and something hitches in my chest.

“So what now?” I ask him. The light is too bright; the day feels as though it’s merging into dream.

“Do you love me?” Alex asks. And I could cry; I could press my face into his chest and breathe in, and pretend that nothing has changed, that everything will be perfect and whole and healed again.

But I can’t. I know I can’t.

“I never stopped.” I look away from him. I look at Grace, and the high grass littered with the wounded and the dead. I think of Julian, and his clear blue eyes, his patience and goodness. I think of all the fighting we’ve done, and all the fighting we have yet to do. I take a deep breath. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

Alex reaches out and places his hands on my shoulders. “I’m not going to run away again,” he says.

“I don’t want you to,” I tell him.

His fingers find my cheek, and I rest for a second against his palm, letting the pain of the past few months flow out of me, letting him turn my head toward his. Then he bends down and kisses me: light and perfect, his lips just barely meeting mine, a kiss that promises renewal.

“Lena!”

I step away from Alex when Grace shouts. She has climbed to her feet and is pointing toward the border wall, bouncing excitedly on her toes, full of energy. I turn to look. For a second, tears break apart my vision, turn the world to a kaleidoscope of colors—color crawling up the wall, making a mosaic of the concrete.

No. Not color: people. People are surging toward the wall.

More than that: They are tearing it down.

Yelling, wild and triumphant, brandishing hammers and bits of the ruined scaffolding, or picking with their bare hands, they are dismantling the wall piece by piece, breaking the boundaries of the world as we know it. Joy surges inside me. Grace begins to run; she, too, is pulled toward the wall.

“Grace, wait!” I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand.

“I’ll find you,” he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. “I won’t let you go again.”

I don’t trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand.

“Go,” he says.

So I do. Grace has paused to wait for me, and I take her thin little hand in mine, and soon I find that we are running: through the sun and the lingering smoke, through the grass on the shores that have become a graveyard, while the sun continues its indifferent rotation and the water reflects nothing but sky.

As we approach the wall, I spot Hunter and Bram, standing side by side, sweating and brown, swinging at the concrete with large pieces of metal piping. I see Pippa, standing on a portion of the wall that remains, waving a vivid green shirt like a flag. I see Coral; fierce and beautiful, she passes in and out of view as the crowd surges and shifts around her. Several feet away, my mother works with a hammer, swinging easily and gracefully, making it look like a dance: this hard and muscled woman I hardly know, a woman I have loved my whole life. She is alive. We are alive. She will get to meet Grace.

I see Julian, too. He is shirtless, sweating, balancing on a heap of rubble, working the butt of a rifle against the wall, so that it splinters and sends a fine spray of white dust onto the people beneath him. The sun makes his hair blaze like a ring of pale fire, touches his shoulders with white wings.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I’m not certain of anything anymore. I don’t know what will happen—to me, to Alex and to Julian, to any of us.

“Come on, Lena.” Grace is tugging at my hand.

But it’s not about knowing. It is simply about going forward. The cureds want to know; we have chosen faith instead. I asked Grace to trust me. We will have to trust too—that the world won’t end, that tomorrow will come, and that truth will come too.

An old line, a forbidden line from a text Raven once showed me, comes back to me now. He who jumps may fall, but he may also fly.

It’s time to jump.

“Let’s go,” I say to Grace, and let her lead me into the surge of people, keeping a tight hold on her hand the whole time. We push into the shouting, joyful throng, and fight our way up toward the wall. Grace scrabbles up a pile of broken-down wood and shards of shattered concrete, and I follow clumsily, until I am balancing next to her. She is shouting—louder than I have ever heard her, a babble-language of joy and freedom—and I find that I join in with her as together we begin to tear at chunks of concrete with our fingernails, watching the border dissolve, watching a new world emerge beyond it.

Take down the walls.

That is, after all, the whole point. You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don’t know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise or destruction.

Take down the walls.

Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.

Otherwise you may never know hell; but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying.

All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull.

I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever.

Take down the walls.