“We never made it to the dam,” Raven says. “Alex and Beast managed to get their blast off okay. We were a half-dozen feet from the wall when a group of regulators started swarming us. It was like they were
Alex has joined the group. Coral gets clumsily to her feet, her mouth a fine, dark line. I think she looks more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. My heart squeezes once, tight, in my chest. I can see why Alex likes her.
Maybe even why he loves her.
“We beat it back here,” Pippa pipes up. “Then Bram showed up. We’ve been debating whether to go looking —”
“Where’s Dani?” I notice, for the first time, that she isn’t with the group.
“Dead,” Raven says shortly, avoiding my eyes. “And Lu was taken. We couldn’t get to them in time. I’m sorry, Lena,” she finishes in a softer voice, and looks at me again.
I feel another surge of nausea. I wrap my arms around my stomach, as though I can press it deep and down. “Lu wasn’t taken,” I say. My voice comes out as a bark. “And they
There’s a second of silence. Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Alex is the one who speaks.
“What are you talking about?”
It’s the first time he has spoken to me directly since that night on the banks, after the regulators burned our camp.
“Lu isn’t what we thought she was,” I say. “She isn’t
More silence: a sharp, shocked minute of it.
Finally Raven bursts out, “How do you know?”
“I saw the mark,” I say. Suddenly I’m exhausted. “And she told me.”
“Impossible,” Hunter says. “I was with her. . . . We went to Maryland together. . . .”
“It’s not impossible,” Raven says slowly. “She told me she’d broken off from the group for a while, spent some time floating between homesteads.”
“She was only gone for a few weeks.” Hunter looks at Bram for confirmation. Bram nods.
“That’s time enough.” Julian speaks softly. Alex glares at him. But Julian’s right: It is time enough.
Raven’s voice is strained. “Go on, Lena.”
“They’re bringing in troops,” I say. Once the words leave my mouth I feel like I’ve been socked in the stomach.
There’s another moment of silence. “How many?” Pippa demands.
“Ten thousand.” I can barely speak the words.
There is a sharp intake of breath, gasps from all around the circle. Pippa stays laser-focused on me. “When?”
“Less than twenty-four hours,” I say.
“
Pippa runs a hand through her hair, making it stick up in spikes. “I don’t believe it,” she says, but adds almost immediately, “I was worried something like this might happen.”
“I’ll fucking kill her,” Hunter says softly.
“What do we do now?” Raven addresses the comment to Pippa.
Pippa is silent for a second, staring at the fire. Then she rouses herself. “We do nothing,” she says firmly, sweeping her eyes deliberately around the group: from Tack and Raven to Hunter and Bram; to Beast and Alex and Coral, and to Julian. Finally her eyes click to mine, and I involuntarily draw back. It’s as though a door has closed inside her. For once, she isn’t pacing. “Raven, you and Tack will lead the group to a safe house just outside of Hartford. Summer told me how to get there. Some contacts from the resistance will be there in the next few days. You’ll have to wait it out.”
“What about you?” Beast asks.
Pippa pushes her way out of the circle, stepping into the three-sided structure at the center of camp and moving toward the old refrigerator. “I’ll do what I can here,” she says.
Everyone speaks at once. Beast says, “I’m staying with you.”
Tack bursts out, “That’s suicide, Pippa.”
And Raven says, “You’re no match for ten thousand troops. You’ll be mowed down—”
Pippa raises a hand. “I’m not planning to fight,” she says. “I’ll do what I can to spread the word about what’s coming. I’ll try to clear the camp.”
“There’s no
“I said I would do what I can.” Now Pippa’s voice turns sharp. She removes the key from around her neck and opens the lock around the fridge, removing food and medical equipment from the darkened shelves.
“We won’t leave without you,” Beast says stubbornly. “We’ll stay. We’ll help you clear the camp.”
“You’ll do what I say,” Pippa says, without turning around to face him. She squats and begins pulling blankets from under the bench. “You’ll go to the safe house and you’ll wait for the resistance.”
“No,” he says. “I won’t.” Their eyes meet: Some wordless dialogue flows between them, and at last, Pippa nods.
“All right,” she says. “But the rest of you need to clear out.”
“Pippa—” Raven starts to protest.
Pippa straightens up. “No arguing,” she says. Now I know where Raven learned her hardness, her way of leading people. “Coral is right about one thing,” Pippa continues quietly. “There’s hardly any time. I expect you out of here in twenty minutes.” She sweeps her eyes around the circle again. “Raven, take the supplies you think you’ll need. It’s a day’s walk to the safe house, more if you have to circumvent the troops. Tack, come with me. I’ll make you a map.”
The group breaks up. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or the fear, but everything seems to happen as it does in a dream: Tack and Pippa are crouching over something, gesticulating; Raven is rolling up food in blankets, tying up the bundles with old cord; Hunter is urging me to have more water and then, suddenly, Pippa is pressing us to
The moon beats down on the switchback paths cut in the hill, tawny-colored and dry, as though steeped in old blood. I shoot a last glance back down at the camp, at the sea of writhing shadows—people, all those people, who don’t know that even now the guns and the bombs and the troops are drawing closer.
Raven must sense it too: the new terror in the air, the proximity of death, the way an animal must feel when it is caught in a trap. She turns and shouts down to Pippa.
“Please, Pippa.” Her voice rolls off the bare slope. Pippa is standing at the bottom of the dirt path, watching us. Beast is standing behind her. She’s holding a lantern, which illuminates her face from below, carves it into stone, into planes of shadow and light.
“Go,” Pippa says. “Don’t worry. I’ll meet you at the safe house.”
Raven stares at her for a few more seconds, and then begins to turn around again.
Then Pippa calls, “But if I’m not there in three days, don’t wait.”
Her voice never loses its calm. And I know, now, what the look was that I saw earlier in her eyes. It was beyond calm. It was resignation.
It was the look of someone who knows she will die.
We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer.
Hana
On Saturday morning I make my visit to Deering Highlands. It is becoming almost routine. I’m happy that I manage to avoid seeing Grace—the streets are still, silent, wrapped in an early-morning mist—and happy, too, that