Requiem

Brande, who both work in the Department of Sanitization. Normally, Mrs. Brande can’t stop running her mouth—my mom has always speculated that the cure left her with no verbal self-control—but tonight we drive in silence. Tony goes faster than usual.

It begins to rain. The streetlamps pattern the windows with broken halos of light. Now, alert with fear and anxiety, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. I make a sudden decision: no more going to Deering Highlands. It’s too dangerous. Lena’s family is not my problem. I have done all I can do.

The guilt is still there, pressing at my throat, but I swallow it down.

We pass under another streetlamp, and the rain on the windows becomes long fingers; then once again the car is swallowed in darkness. I imagine I see different figures moving through the dark, skating next to the car, faces merging in and out of the shadow. For a second, as we move beneath another streetlamp, I see a hooded figure emerging from the woods at the side of the road. Our eyes meet, and I let out a small cry.

Alex. It’s Alex.

“What’s the matter?” my mother asks tensely.

“Nothing, I—” By the time I turn around, he is gone, and then I’m sure I only imagined him. I must have imagined him. Alex is dead; he was taken down at the border and never made it into the Wilds. I swallow hard. “I thought I saw something.”

“Don’t worry, Hana,” my mother says. “We’re perfectly safe in the car.” But she leans forward and says, sharply, to Tony, “Can’t you drive any faster?”

I think of the new wall, lit up by a spinning light, stained red with blood.

What if there are more of them? What if they’re coming for us?

I have a vision of Lena moving out there, sneaking through the streets, ducking between shadows, holding a knife. For a moment my lungs stop moving.

But no. She doesn’t know I was the one who gave her and Alex away. No one knows.

Besides, she is probably dead.

And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.

Would she?

Lena

The planning goes late into the night. The sandy-haired man, whose name is Colin, remains sequestered in one of the trailers with Beast and Pippa, Raven and Tack, Max, Cap, my mother, and a few others he has handpicked from his group. He assigns a guard to watch the door; the meeting is invite-only. I know that something big is in the works—as big as, if not bigger than, the Incidents that blew part of a wall out of the Crypts and exploded a police station. From hints that Max has let slip, I’ve gathered that this new rebellion is not simply confined to Portland. As in the earlier Incidents, in cities all across the country, sympathizers and Invalids are gathering and channeling their anger and their energy into displays of resistance.

At one point Max and Raven emerge from the trailer to pee in the woods—their faces drawn and serious—but when I beg Raven to let me join the meeting, she cuts me down immediately.

“Go to bed, Lena,” she says. “Everything’s under control.”

It must be almost midnight; Julian has been asleep for hours. I can’t imagine lying down right now. I feel like my blood is full of thousands of ants—my arms and legs are crawling, itching to move, to do something. I walk in circles, trying to shake the feeling, and fuming—annoyed with Julian, furious with Raven, thinking of all the things I’d like to say to her.

I was the one who got Julian out of the underground. I was the one who risked my life to sneak into New York City and save him. I was the one who got into Waterbury; I was the one who found out Lu was a fraud. And now Raven tells me to go to bed, like I’m an unruly five-year-old.

I take aim at a tin cup that has been lying, half-buried in ash, at the edge of a burned-out campfire, and watch as it rockets twenty feet and pings off the side of a trailer. A man calls out, “Take it easy!” But I don’t care if I’ve woken him up. I don’t care if I wake the whole damn camp up.

“Can’t sleep?”

I spin around, startled. Coral is sitting a little ways behind me, knees hugged to her chest, next to the dying remains of another fire. Every so often she prods it halfheartedly with a stick.

“Hey,” I say cautiously. Since Alex left, she has gone almost completely mute. “I didn’t see you.”

Her eyes go to mine. She smiles weakly. “I can’t sleep either.”

Even though I’m still antsy, it feels weird to be hovering above her, so I lower myself onto one of the smoke-blackened logs that ring the campfire. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”

“Not really.” She gives the fire another prod, watches as it flares momentarily. “It doesn’t matter for me, does it?”

“What do you mean?” I look at her closely for the first time in a week; I’ve been unconsciously avoiding her. There is something tragic and hollow about her now: Her cream-pale skin looks like a husk—empty, sucked dry.

She shrugs and keeps her eyes on the embers. “I mean that I have no one left.”

I swallow. I’ve been meaning to speak to her about Alex, to apologize in some way, but the words never quite come. Even now they grow and stick in my throat. “Listen, Coral.” I take a deep breath. Say it. Just say it. “I’m really sorry that Alex left. I know—I know it must have been hard for you.”

There it is: the spoken admission that he was hers to lose. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I feel weirdly deflated, as though they’ve been swollen, balloonlike, in my chest this whole time.

For the first time since I sat down, she looks at me. I can’t read the expression on her face. “That’s okay,” she says at last, returning her gaze to the fire. “He was still in love with you, anyway.”

It’s as though she’s reached out and punched me in the stomach. All of a sudden, I can’t breathe. “What— what are you talking about?”

Her mouth crooks up into a smile. “He was. It was obvious. That’s okay. He liked me and I liked him.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t mean Alex, anyway, when I said I had no one left. I meant Nan, and the rest of the group. My people.” She throws down the stick and hugs her knees tighter to her chest. “Weird how it’s just hitting me now, huh?”

Even though I’m still stunned by what she has just said, I manage to keep control of myself. I reach out and touch her elbow. “Hey,” I say. “You have us. We’re your people now.”

“Thanks.” Her eyes flick to mine again. She forces a smile. She tilts her head and stares at me critically for a minute. “I can see why he loved you.”

“Coral, you’re wrong—” I start to say.

But just then there’s a footfall behind us, and my mother says, “I thought you went to sleep hours ago.”

Coral stands up, dusting off the back of her jeans—a nervous gesture, since we are all covered in dirt, caked grime that has found its way from our eyelashes to our fingernails. “I was just going,” she says. “Good night, Lena. And . . . thanks.”

Before I can respond, she spins around and heads off toward the southern end of the clearing, where most of our group is clustered.

“She seems like a sweet girl,” my mother says, easing herself down onto the log Coral has vacated. “Too sweet for the Wilds.”

“She’s been here almost her whole life.” I can’t keep the edge from my voice. “And she’s a great fighter.”

My mother stares at me. “Is something wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that I don’t like being kept in the dark. I want to know what the plan is tomorrow.” My heart is going hard. I know I’m not being fair to my mother—it isn’t her fault I wasn’t allowed in to plan—but I feel like I could scream. Coral’s words have shaken something loose inside me, and I can feel it