Requiem

Grace doesn’t say anything. She’s trying to stuff her arms with all the food I’ve brought. When I crouch down and try and help her, she grabs the pack of cookies and presses it protectively to her chest.

“Easy,” I say. “I’m just trying to help.”

She sniffs, but allows me to help her stack and gather up the cans of vegetables and soup. We’re just a few inches apart, so close I can smell her breath, sour and hungry. There is dirt under her fingernails, streaks of grass on her knees. I’ve never been this close to Grace before, and I find myself searching her face for a resemblance to Lena. Grace’s nose is sharper, like Jenny’s, but she has Lena’s big brown eyes and dark hair.

I feel a quick pulse of something: a squeeze deep in my stomach, an echo from another time, feelings that should have been quieted forever by now.

No one can know, or even suspect.

“I have more to give you,” I tell Grace quickly as she stands up, holding a teetering pile of packages and bags in her arms, along with the plastic bottle. “I’ll come back. I can only bring a little bit at a time.”

She just stands there, staring at me with Lena’s eyes.

“If you’re not here, I’ll leave the food for you somewhere safe. Somewhere it won’t get—damaged.” I stop myself at the last second from saying stolen. “Do you know a good hiding place?”

She turns abruptly and darts around the side of the gray house, through a patch of overgrown grass and high weeds. I’m not sure whether she intends for me to follow her, but I do. The paint is peeling; one of the shutters hangs crookedly from a window on the second floor, tapping lightly in the wind.

At the back of the house, Grace waits for me by a large wooden door set in the ground, which must lead to a cellar. She sets down the pile of food carefully in the grass, then grabs the rusted metal handle of the trapdoor and heaves. Underneath the door is a gaping mouth of darkness, and a set of wooden stairs descending into a small, packed-dirt space. The room is empty except for several crooked wooden shelves, which contain a flashlight, two bottles of water, and some batteries.

“This is perfect,” I say. For just a second, a smile flits across Grace’s face.

I help her carry the food down into the cellar and stock it on the shelves. I place the bottle of gasoline against one wall. She keeps the package of cookies hugged to her chest, though, and refuses to let it go. The room smells bad, like Grace’s breath: sour and earthy. I’m glad when we emerge back into the sunshine. The morning has left a heavy feeling in my chest that refuses to dissolve.

“I’ll be back,” I say to Grace.

I’ve nearly rounded the corner when she speaks.

“I remember you,” she says, her voice hardly louder than a whisper. I spin around, surprised. But she is already darting away into the trees, and disappears before I have a chance to reply.

Lena

The dawn is double: a twin smoky glow at the horizon and behind us, above the trees, where the fire continues to smolder. The clouds and the drifts of black smoke are almost indistinguishable.

In the dark, and the confusion, we didn’t realize we were missing two members of our group: Pike and Henley. Dani wants to go back and look for their bodies, but the fire makes it impossible. We can’t even go back to forage for cans that will not have burned, and supplies that have made it through the flames.

Instead, as soon as the sky is light, we push forward.

We walk in silence, in a straight line, our eyes trained on the ground. We must get to the camp at Waterbury as soon as possible—no detours, no resting, no explorations of the ruins of old towns, picked clean of useful supplies long ago. The air is charged with anxiety.

We can count ourselves lucky for one thing: that Raven’s map was with Julian and Tack and have not been destroyed with the rest of our supplies.

Tack and Julian walk together at the front of the line, occasionally stopping to consult notations they’ve made on the map. Despite everything that has happened, it gives me a rush of pride to watch Tack consulting Julian, and a different kind of pleasure too—vindication, because I know Alex will also have noticed.

Alex, of course, takes up the rear with Coral.

It’s a warm day—so warm I have removed my jacket and rolled my long-sleeved shirt to the elbows—and the sun is splashed liberally over the ground. It’s almost impossible to believe that only hours ago we were attacked, except that Pike’s and Henley’s voices are missing from the murmured conversation.

Julian is ahead of me. Alex is behind me. So I push forward—exhausted, my mouth still full of the taste of smoke, my lungs burning.

Waterbury, Lu has told us, is the beginning of a new order. An enormous camp has amassed outside the city’s wall, and many of the city’s Valid residents have fled. Portions of Waterbury have been totally evacuated; other parts of the city are barricaded against the Invalids on the other side.

Lu has heard that the Invalid camp is almost like a city itself: Everyone pitches in, everyone helps repair shelters and hunt for food and gather water. It has so far been safe from retaliation, partly because no one has remained who can retaliate. The municipal offices were destroyed, and the mayor and his deputies were chased out.

There, we’ll build shelters out of branches and salvaged brick, and finally find a place for ourselves.

In Waterbury, everything will be okay.

The trees begin to thin, and we pass old, graffiti-covered benches and half-shell underpasses, speckled with mold; a roof, intact, sitting on a field of grass, as though the rest of the house has been simply suctioned underground; stretches of road that, leading nowhere, are now part of a nonsense-grammar. This is the language of the world before—a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair—before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.

We know we’re getting close.

In the evening, when the sun begins to set, the anxiety comes sweeping back. None of us wants to spend another night alone, exposed, in the Wilds, even if we have managed to put the regulators off our trail for now.

From ahead, there is a shout. Julian has circled away from Tack and fallen into step beside me, although we have been mostly walking in silence.

“What is it?” I ask him. I’m so tired I am numb. I can’t see past the people ahead of me. The group is fanning out over what looks as though it was once an old parking lot. Most of the pavement is gone. Two streetlamps, empty of lightbulbs, are staked into the ground. Next to one of them, Tack and Raven have both stopped.

Julian cranes onto his tiptoes. “I think . . . I think we’re there.” Even before he finishes speaking, I am pushing through the group, angling for a look.

At the edge of the old parking lot, the ground drops away suddenly and cuts sharply downward. A series of switchback trails leads down the hillside to a barren, treeless portion of land.

The camp is not like I’ve envisioned it at all. I’ve been imagining real houses, or at least solid structures, nestled between trees. This is simply a vast, teeming field, a patchwork of blankets and trash, and hundreds and hundreds of people, pushing almost directly up against the city’s wall, stained red in the dying light. Fires burn sporadically across the great, dark expense, winking like lights from a distant city. The sky, electric at the horizon, is otherwise stretched dark and tight, like a metal lid that has been screwed shut over waste.

For a moment I flash back to the twisted underground people Julian and I met when we were trying to escape the Scavengers, and their grimy, smoky, underground world.

I’ve never seen so many Invalids. I have never seen so many people, period.

Even from here, we can smell them.

My chest feels like it has caved in.

“What is this place?” Julian mutters. I want to say something to comfort him—I want to tell him it will be okay—but I feel weighted down, dull with disappointment.

“This is it?” Dani is the one to voice what we must all be feeling. “This is the big dream? The new order?”

“We have friends here, at least,” Hunter says quietly. But even he can’t keep up the act. He shoves a hand through his hair so it sticks up in all directions. His face is white; all day, he has been hacking as he walked, his