Requiem

A jolt of fear shocks through me, shorting out the pain, shorting out all other thoughts besides one: I should have brought a gun.

The bear takes another step forward, swinging its massive head back and forth, evaluating us. I can see its breath steaming in the cold air, its peaked shoulder blades high and sharp.

“All right,” Alex says, in that same low voice. He’s standing behind me, and I can feel the tension in his body—ramrod straight, petrified. “Let’s take it easy. Real slow. We’re going to back away, all right? Nice and slowly.”

He takes a single step backward and just that, that little movement, makes the bear tense up in a crouch, baring its teeth, which glisten bone white in the moonlight. Alex freezes again. The bear begins to growl. It is so close that I can feel the heat from its massive body, smell the sourness of its starving breath.

I should have brought a gun. No way to turn and run; that makes us prey, and the bear is looking for prey. Stupid. That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

The bear swings forward another step, still growling. Every muscle in my body is an alarm, screaming at me to run, but I stay rooted in place, forcing myself not to move, not to twitch.

The bear hesitates. I won’t run. So maybe not prey, then.

It pulls back an inch—an advantage, a tiny concession.

I take it.

“Hey!” I bark, as loud as I can, and bring my arms above my head, trying to make myself look as large as possible. “Hey! Get out of here! Go on. Go.”

The bear withdraws another inch, confused, startled.

“I said go.” I reach out and strike against the nearest tree with my foot, sending a spray of bark in the bear’s direction. As the bear still hesitates, uncertain—but not growling now, on the defensive, confused—I drop down into a crouch and scoop up the first rock I can get my fist around, and then I’m up and chucking it, hard. It connects just below the bear’s left shoulder with a heavy thud. The bear shuffles backward, whimpering. Then it turns and bounds off into the woods, a fast black blur.

“Holy shit,” Alex bursts out behind me. He exhales, long and loud, bends over, straightens up again. “Holy shit.”

The adrenaline, the release of tension, has made him forget; for a second, the new mask is dropped, and a glimpse of the old Alex is revealed.

I feel a brief surge of nausea. I keep thinking of the bear’s wounded, desperate eyes, and the heavy thud of the rock against its shoulder. But I had no choice.

It is the rule of the Wilds.

“That was crazy. You’re crazy.” Alex shakes his head. “The old Lena would have bolted.”

You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher.

A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn’t love me.

He never loved me.

It was all a lie.

“The old Lena is dead,” I say, and then push past him, back down through the gully toward the camp. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.

You must hurt, or be hurt.

Alex doesn’t follow me, and I don’t expect him to. I don’t care where he goes, whether he stays in the woods all night, whether he never returns to camp.

As he said, all of that—the caring—is done now.

It’s not until I’ve almost reached the tents that I begin crying again. The tears come all at once, and I have to stop walking and double up into a crouch. I want to bleed all the feelings out of me. For a second I think about how easy it would be to pass back to the other side, to walk straight into the laboratories and offer myself up to the surgeons.

You were right; I was wrong. Get it out.

“Lena?”

I look up. Julian has emerged from his tent. I must have woken him. His hair is sticking up at crazy angles, like the broken spokes of a wheel, and his feet are bare.

I straighten up, swiping my nose on the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “I’m okay,” I say, still hiccuping back tears. “I’m fine.”

For a minute he stands there, looking at me, and I can tell that he knows why I’m crying, and he understands, and it’s going to be all right. He opens his arms to me.

“Come here,” he says quietly.

I can’t move to him fast enough. I practically fall into him. He catches me and pulls me in tightly to his chest, and I let myself go again, let sobs run through me. He stands there with me and murmurs into my hair and kisses the top of my head and lets me cry over losing another boy, a boy I loved better.

“I’m sorry,” I say over and over into his chest. “I’m sorry.” His shirt smells like smoke from the fire, like mulch and spring growth.

“It’s okay,” he whispers back.

When I’ve calmed down a little, Julian takes my hand. I follow him into the dark cave of his tent, which smells like his shirt but even more so. I lie down on top of his sleeping bag and he lies down beside me, making a perfect seashell arc for my body. I curl up in this space—safe, warm—and let the last tears I will ever cry for Alex flow hot over my cheeks, and down into the ground, and away.

Hana

Hana.” My mother is looking at me expectantly. “Fred asked you to pass the green beans.”

“Sorry,” I say, forcing a smile. Last night, I hardly slept. I even had little snatches of dream—bare wisps of image that skittered away before I could focus on them.

I reach for the glazed ceramic dish—like everything in the Hargrove house, it is beautiful—even though Fred is more than capable of reaching it himself. This is part of the ritual. Soon I will be his wife, and we will sit like this every night, performing a well-choreographed dance.

Fred smiles at me. “Tired?” he says. In the past few months, we have spent many hours together; our Sunday dinner is just one of the many ways we have begun practicing merging our lives.

I’ve spent a long time scrutinizing his features, trying to figure out whether he is attractive, and in the end I have come up with this: He is very pleasant to look at. He is not as attractive as I am, but he is smarter, and I like his dark hair, and the way it falls over his right eyebrow when he has not had time to smooth it back.

“She looks tired,” Mrs. Hargrove says. Fred’s mother often talks about me as though I’m not in the room. I don’t take it personally; she does it with everybody. Fred’s father was mayor for more than three terms. Now that Mr. Hargrove is dead, Fred has been groomed to take his place. Since the Incidents in January, Fred campaigned tirelessly for nomination and appointment, and it paid off. Only a week ago, a special interim committee appointed him the new mayor. He will be inaugurated publicly early next week.

Mrs. Hargrove is used to being the most important woman in the room.

“I’m fine,” I say. Lena always said that I could lie my way out of hell.

The truth is, I’m not fine. I’m worried that I can’t stop worrying about Jenny and how thin she looked.

I’m worried that I’ve been thinking of Lena again.

“Of course, the wedding preparations are very stressful,” my mother says.

My father grunts. “You’re not the one writing the checks.”

This makes everybody laugh. The room is suddenly illuminated by a brief flash of light from outside: A