Requiem

off too.

At one corner of the park is a small stone rotunda, surrounded by a fringe of dark trees. If it weren’t for the single, old-fashioned lantern burning on the corner, I would have missed the girl sitting on one of its stone benches. Her head is dropped between her knees, but I recognize her long, streaked hair and her mud-caked purple sneakers. Lu.

Coral sees her at the same time I do. “Isn’t that . . . ?” she starts to ask, but I’m already breaking into a run.

“Lu!” I cry out.

She looks up, startled. She must not recognize me immediately; for a second her face is vivid white, frightened. I drop into a squat in front of her, put my hands on her shoulders.

“Are you all right?” I say breathlessly. “Where are the others? Did something happen?”

“I . . .” She trails off and shakes her head.

“Are you hurt?” I straighten up, keeping my hands on her shoulders. I don’t see any blood, but she’s trembling slightly under my hands. She opens her mouth and then closes it again. Her eyes are wide and vacant. “Lu. Talk to me.” I lift my hands from her shoulders to her face, giving her a gentle shake, trying to snap her out of it. As I do, my fingertips skim the skin behind her left ear.

My heart stops. Lu lets out a small cry and tries to jerk away from me. But I keep my hands wrapped tightly around the back of her neck. Now she is bucking and twisting, trying to fight her way from my grasp.

“Get away from me,” she practically spits.

I don’t say anything. I can’t speak. All my energy is in my hands now, and my fingers. She is strong, but she has been taken by surprise, and I manage to haul her to her feet and pin her back against a stone column. I drive my elbow into her neck, forcing her to turn, coughing, to the left.

Dimly I’m aware of Coral’s voice. “What the hell are you doing, Lena?”

I wrench Lu’s hair away from her face, so that her neck is exposed, white and pretty.

I can see the frantic flutter of her pulse—just beneath the neat, three-pronged scar on her neck.

The mark of the procedure. A real one.

Lu is cured.

The past few weeks cycle back to me: Lu’s quietness, and her changes in temperament. The fact that she grew her hair long and brushed it carefully forward every day.

“When?” I croak out. I still have my forearm pressed against her throat. Something black and old is rising up inside of me. Traitor.

“Let me go,” she gasps. Her left eye rolls back to look at me.

“When?” I repeat, and give her throat a nudge. She cries out.

“Okay, okay,” she says, and I ease the pressure, just a little. But I keep her pinned against the stone. “December,” she croaks. “Baltimore.”

My head is spinning. Of course. It was Lu I heard earlier. The regulator’s words come back to me with new, terrible meaning: I don’t know how you lived with that filth for so long. And hers: It wasn’t easy.

“Why?” I choke out the words. When she doesn’t answer me immediately, I lean into her again. “Why?”

She starts speaking in a hoarse rush. “They were right, Lena. I know that now. Think of all those people out there in the camps, in the Wilds . . . like animals. That’s not happiness.”

“It’s freedom,” I say.

“Is it?” Her eye is huge; her iris has been swallowed by black. “Are you free, Lena? Is this the life you wanted?”

I can’t respond. The anger is a thick, dark mud, a rising tide in my chest and throat.

Lu’s voice drops to a silken whisper, like the noise of a snake through the grass. “It’s not too late for you, Lena. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done on the other side. We’ll wipe that out; we’ll start clean. That’s the whole point. We can take all that away . . . the past, the pain, all your struggling. You can start again.”

For a second, we both stand there staring at each other. Lu is breathing hard.

“All of it?” I say.

Lu tries to nod, and grimaces as she once again encounters my elbow. “The anxiety, the unhappiness. We can make it go away.”

I ease the pressure off her neck. She sucks in a deep, grateful breath. I lean in very close to her and repeat something that Hana once said to me a lifetime ago.

“You know you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes, right?”

Lu’s face hardens. I’ve given her just enough space to maneuver, and when she goes to swing at me, I catch her left wrist and twist it behind her back, forcing her to double over. I wrestle her to the ground, press her flat, force a knee between her shoulder blades.

“Lena!” Coral shouts. I ignore her. A single word drums through me: Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.

“What happened to the others?” I say. My words are high and strangled, clutched in the web of anger.

“It’s too late, Lena.” Lu’s face is half-mashed against the ground, but still she manages to twist her mouth into a horrible smile, a leering half grin.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a knife on me. I would drive it straight into her neck. I think of Raven smiling, laughing. Lu can come with us. She’s a walking good-luck charm. I think of Tack dividing his bread, giving her the largest share when she complained about being hungry. My heart feels like it’s crumbling to chalk, and I want to scream and cry at the same time. We trusted you.

“Lena,” Coral repeats. “I think—”

“Be quiet,” I say hoarsely, keeping my focus locked on Lu. “Tell me what happened to them or I’ll kill you.”

She struggles under my weight, and continues beaming that horrible twisted grin at me. “Too late,” she repeats. “They’ll be here before nightfall tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her laughter is a rattle in her throat. “You didn’t think it would last, did you? You didn’t think we’d let you keep playing in your little camp, in your filth—” I twist her arms another inch toward her shoulder blades. She cries out, and then continues speaking in a rush. “Ten thousand soldiers, Lena. Ten thousand soldiers against a thousand hungry, thirsty, diseased, disorganized uncureds. You’ll be mowed down. Obliterated. Poof.”

I think I’m going to be sick. My head is thick, fluid-feeling. Distantly, I’m aware that Coral is speaking to me again. It takes a moment for the words to work their way through the murk, through the watery echoes in my head.

“Lena. I think someone’s coming.”

She has barely spoken the words when a regulator—probably the one we saw with Lu earlier—rounds the corner, saying, “Sorry that took so long. Shed was locked—”

He breaks off when he sees Coral and me, and Lu on the ground. Coral shouts and lunges for him but clumsily, off balance. He pushes her backward, and I hear a small crack as her head collides with one of the stone columns of the portico. The regulator lunges forward, swinging his flashlight at her face. She manages to duck, barely, and the flashlight crashes hard against the stone pillar and sputters into darkness.

The regulator has thrown too much weight into the swing, and his balance is upset. This gives Coral just enough time to break past him, away from the pillar. She’s swaying on her feet, and obviously unsteady. She staggers around to face him, but clutching one hand to the back of her head. The regulator regains his footing and his hand goes to his belt. Gun.

I rocket to my feet. I have no choice but to release Lu from underneath me. I dive at the regulator and grab him around the waist. My weight and momentum carry us both off our feet, and we hit the ground together, rolling once, arms and legs tangled together. The taste of his uniform and sweat is in my mouth, and I can feel the weight of his gun digging against my thigh.

Behind me, I hear a shout, and a body thudding to the ground. I pray that it’s Lu and not Coral.

Then the regulator breaks free of my grip and scrambles to his feet, pushing me off him roughly. He is panting, red-faced. Bigger than I am, and stronger—but slower, too, in bad shape. He fumbles with his belt, but I’m