Requiem

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