Requiem

climbing to her feet.

Just then a guard on the ground swings his rifle toward Pippa, locks her in his sights. I want to scream—I want to warn her—but I can’t make a sound.

“Down, Pippa!” Raven launches herself over the wall, knocking Pippa out of the way just as the guard squeezes the trigger.

Pop. The littlest noise. A toy-firecracker sound.

Raven jerks and stiffens. For a second, I think she is only surprised: Her mouth goes round, her eyes wide.

Then she begins teetering backward, and I know that she is dead. Falling, falling, falling . . .

“No!” Tack lunges forward and grabs hold of her shirt before she can tumble back over the wall, pulling her down and onto his lap. People are swarming all around him, seething like rats over the scaffolding, but he just sits there, rocking a bit, cupping her face in his hands. He wipes her forehead, brushes the hair away from her face. She stares up at him sightlessly, her mouth open and wet, eyes shock-wide, black braid coiled against his thigh. His lips are moving—he’s speaking to her.

And now there is a scream inside me, silent and huge, like a black hole tunneling deep through my center. I can’t move, can’t do anything but stare. This is not how Raven dies—not here, not in this way, not in one flimsy second, not without a fight.

Pop goes the weasel. The child’s game comes back to me then, the way we used to chase one another around the park. Pop. You’re it.

This is all a child’s game. We are playing with shiny tin toys and loud noises. We are playing two-sides, like we used to when we were children.

Pop. White-hot pain blazes through me, past me. I bring my hand to my face instinctively and feel for injury; my fingers graze my ear and come away wet with blood. A bullet must have just clipped me.

The shock, even more than the pain, wakes me up, kicks my body into motion. There weren’t enough guns to go around, but I have a knife—old and blunted, but still better than nothing. I wrestle it out of the leather pouch around my hips. Julian is making his way down the scaffolding, swinging along the crisscrossed iron bars like a monkey. A guard tries to grab hold of one of Julian’s legs—Julian twists and brings his foot, hard, into the guard’s face. The guard staggers back, releasing him, and Julian drops the remaining few feet to the ground, into the chaos of bodies: Invalids and officers, our side and their side, merging into one enormous, writhing, bloody animal.

I scoot to the edge of the catwalk and make the jump. The few seconds I am airborne—and a target—are the most terrifying. I am totally exposed, totally vulnerable. Two seconds—three seconds, tops, but it feels like an eternity.

I hit the ground, nearly on top of a regulator, and take him down with me as my ankle twists and I tumble onto the gravel. We are a wild tangle—momentarily entwined, struggling to gain the advantage. He tries to aim his gun at me, but I get his wrist in my hand and twist backward, hard. He yelps and drops the gun. Someone kicks it, and the gun spins away from my fingers, into the gray-dust chaos.

Then I see it barely a foot away. The regulator spots it at the same time, and we reach for it simultaneously. He’s bigger than I am, but slower, too. I have it in my hand, close my fingers around the trigger a full second before him, and his fist connects with nothing but dirt. He roars, enraged, and lunges for me. I swing the gun up, catch him in the side of the head, hear a crack as the gun connects with his temple. He goes slack, and I launch myself to my feet before I can be trampled.

My mouth tastes like metal and dust, and my head has started to throb. I don’t see Julian. I don’t see my mother or Colin or Hunter.

Then: a rocking mortar-blast, an explosion of stone and white caulk-dust. The blow nearly takes me off my feet. At first I think one of the bombs must have been triggered accidentally and I look around for Pippa, trying to clear my head of the ringing, of the stinging, choking dust, just in time to see her slip, undetected, between two guard huts, heading for downtown.

Behind me, one of the scaffolds groans and begins to topple. There is a sharp swell in the screaming. Hands dig at my back as everyone presses forward, trying to break free from its path. Slowly, slowly, groaning, it teeters —and then accelerating, crashes to the ground, splintering, trapping the unlucky ones beneath its weight.

The wall is now sporting a gaping hole at its base; I realize this must have been the work of a pipe bomb, an explosion jerry-rigged by the resistance. Pippa’s bomb would have ripped the wall in two.

Still, it’s enough; our remaining forces are spilling through the opening, a current of people who have been pushed or forced out, dispossessed and diseased, flooding into Portland. The guards, a ragged line of blue-and- white uniforms, are swallowed up in the tide, pushed back, and forced to run.

I’ve lost Julian. No point in trying to find him now; I can only pray that he is safe, and that he’ll make it out of this mess unharmed. I don’t know what happened to Tack, either. Part of me hopes that he has retreated over the wall with Raven, and for a second I imagine that once he has gotten her back to the Wilds, she’ll wake up. She’ll open her eyes and find that the world has been rebuilt the way she wanted it.

Or maybe she won’t wake up. Maybe she is already on a different pilgrimage, and has gone to find Blue again.

I push my way toward the place I saw Pippa vanish, struggling to breathe in the smoke-clotted air. One of the guard huts is burning. I flash back to the old license plate we found, half-buried in the mud, during our migration from Portland last winter.

Live free or die.

I stumble over a body. My stomach heaves into my mouth—for a split second, I’m overcome by blackness, coiled tight in my stomach like Raven’s hair on Tack’s leg, Raven’s dead, oh God—but I swallow and breathe and keep going, keep fighting and pushing. We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

At last I break free of the fighting. I duck past the guard huts, breaking into a run on the gravel path that divides them, heading for the sparse group of trees that encircles Back Cove. My ankle hurts every time I put my weight down on it, but I don’t stop. I swipe my ear quickly with my sleeve and judge that the bleeding has already slowed.

The resistance may have a mission in Portland, but I have a mission of my own.

Hana

The alarms go off just before the priest can pronounce us husband and wife. One moment, everything is quiet and ordered. The music has died down, the crowd is silent, the priest’s voice resonates through the room, rolls out over the audience. In the quiet, I can hear each individual camera shutter: opening and closing, opening and closing, like metal lungs.

The next moment everything is motion and sound, shrieking chaos, sirens. And I know, in that instant, that the Invalids are here. They’ve come for us.

Hands grab me roughly from all sides.

“Move, move, move.” Bodyguards are piloting me toward the exit. Someone steps on the end of my gown, and I hear it rip. My eyes are stinging; I’m choking on the smell of too much aftershave, too many bodies crowding and pulling.

“Come on, hurry it up. Hurry it up.”

Walkie-talkies explode with static. Urgent voices shout in a coded language I don’t understand. I try to turn around to look for my mother and am nearly carried off my feet by the pressure of the guards moving me forward. I catch a glimpse of Fred surrounded by his security team. He’s white-faced, yelling into a cell phone. I will him to look at me—in that moment I forget about Cassie, I forget about everything. I need him to tell me we’re okay; I need him to explain what’s happening.

But he doesn’t even glance in my direction.

Outside, the glare is blinding. I squeeze my eyes shut. Journalists jostle close to the doors, blocking the way to the car. The long metal barrels of their camera lenses look for a second like guns, all directed straight at