Requiem

nothing more than charred bits of blackened wood and a few smoking embers. The air still smells, faintly, like scorched metal and beans.

I’m not sure where I’m going, and it’s stupid to wander from camp—Raven has warned me a million times against it. At night, the Wilds belong to the animals, and it’s easy to get turned around, lost among the growth, the slalom of trees. But I have an itch in my blood, and the night is so clear, I have no trouble navigating.

I hop down into the dried-out riverbed, which is covered in a layer of rocks and leaves and, occasionally, a relic from the old life: a dented metal soda can, a plastic bag, a child’s shoe. I walk south for a few hundred feet, where I’m prevented from going farther by an enormous, felled oak. Its trunk is so wide that, horizontal, it nearly reaches my chest; a vast network of roots arch up toward the sky like a dark pinwheel spray of water from a fountain.

There’s a rustling behind me. I whip around. A shadow shifts, turns solid, and for a second my heart stops— I’m not protected; I have no weapons, nothing to fend off a hungry animal. Then the shadow emerges into the open and takes the shape of a boy.

In the moonlight, it’s impossible to tell that his hair is the exact color of leaves in the autumn: golden brown, and shot through with red.

“Oh,” Alex says. “It’s you.” These are the first words he has spoken to me in four days.

There are a thousand things I want to say to him.

Please understand. Please forgive me.

I prayed every day for you to be alive, until the hope became painful.

Don’t hate me.

I still love you.

But all that comes out is: “I couldn’t sleep.”

Alex must remember that I was always troubled by nightmares. We talked about it a lot during our summer together in Portland. Last summer—less than a year ago. It’s impossible to imagine the vast distance I’ve covered since that time, the landscape that has formed between us.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” Alex says simply.

Just this, the simple statement, and the fact that he is speaking to me at all, loosens something inside me. I want to hold him, to kiss him the way I used to.

“I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.”

“Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.”

“No. You don’t understand.” My throat is tight; I feel as though I’m being strangled. “I couldn’t keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn’t true, and you were still gone. I—I wasn’t strong enough.”

He is quiet for a second. It’s too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me.

Finally he says, “When they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn’t even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.”

“Alex.” The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach.

“I didn’t die. I don’t know how. I should have. I’d lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game—to see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I’d—”

He breaks off abruptly. I can’t hear any more; don’t want to know, don’t want it to be true, can’t stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue.

“Alex.” I repeat his name like a prayer, like a magic spell that will make everything okay again. I run my hands up his chest and to his chin. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Suddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. “There were days I would rather they have killed me.” He doesn’t drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. “There were days I asked for it—prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you—the hope for it—was the only thing that kept me going.” He releases me and takes another step backward. “So no. I don’t understand.”

“Alex, please.”

He balls his fists. “Stop saying my name. You don’t know me anymore.”

“I do know you.” I’m still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. “It’s me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard—”

“Don’t,” he says. His voice breaks on the word.

“And I always beat you in Scrabble,” I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. “Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them—”

“Don’t.”

“And we did, and it wasn’t bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.” I’m gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I’m reaching for him blindly, grabbing at his collar.

“Stop.” He grabs my shoulders. His face is an inch from mine but unrecognizable: a gross, contorted mask. “Just stop. No more. It’s done, okay? That’s all done now.”

“Alex, please—”

“Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.”

“Alex!”

He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you.”

The air goes. Everything goes. “I don’t believe you.” I’m crying so hard, I can hardly speak.

He takes one step toward me. And now I don’t recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”

“Please.” I don’t know how I stay on my feet, why I don’t shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when I want it so badly to stop. “Please don’t do this, Alex.”

“Stop saying my name.”

Then we both hear it: the crack and rustle of leaves behind us, the sound of something large moving through the woods. Alex’s expression changes. The anger drops away and is replaced by something else: a frozen tenseness, like a deer just before it startles.

“Don’t move, Lena,” he says quietly, but his words are laced with urgency.

Even before I turn around, I can feel the looming shape behind me, the snuffle of animal breath, the hunger—craving, impersonal.

A bear.

It has picked its way into the gully and is now no more than four feet away from us. It is a black bear, its matted fur streaked silver in the moonlight, and big: five or six feet long, and, even on all four legs, almost as high as my shoulder. It looks from Alex to me, and back to Alex. Its eyes are just like pieces of carved onyx, dull, lifeless.

Two things strike me at once: The bear is skinny, starving. The winter has been hard.

Also: It is not afraid of us.