Текст книги "Requiem"

Автор книги: Лорен Оливер

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“What about fears of attack?” Tack says. “You don’t think that the city will retaliate?”

Pippa shakes her head. “The city was mostly evacuated after the riots.” Her mouth quirks into a small smile. “Fear of contagion—the deliriaspreading through the streets, turning us all into animals.” Then the smile fades. “I’m telling you something. The things I’ve seen here . . . They might be right.”

She takes the stack of blankets and passes them to Raven. “Here. Make yourself useful. You’ll have to share. The blankets are even harder to keep around than the pots. Bed down wherever you can find the space. Don’t wander too far, though. There are some crazies around here. I’ve seen it all—botched procedures, loons, criminals, the lot. Sweet dreams, kiddies.”

It’s only when Pippa mentions sleep that I realize how exhausted I am. It has been more than thirty-six hours since I’ve slept, and until now I have been fueled primarily by fear of what will happen to us. Now my body is leaden. Julian has to help me to my feet. I follow him like a sleepwalker, blindly, hardly conscious of my surroundings. We move away from the three-sided hut.

Julian stops by a campfire that has been allowed to burn out. We are at the very base of the hill, and here the slope is even steeper than the one we came down, and no path has been beaten in its side.

I don’t care about the hardness of the ground, the bite of the frost, the continued shouts and hoots from all around us, a darkness alive and menacing. As Julian settles behind me and wraps the blankets around us both, I’m already somewhere else: I am at the old homestead, in the sickroom, and Grace is there, speaking to me, saying my name over and over. But her voice is drowned out by the fluttering of black wings, and when I look up I see that the roof has been blown apart by the regulators’ bombs, and instead of a ceiling there is only the dark night sky, and thousands and thousands of bats, blotting out the moon.

Hana

I wake up as the dawn is barely washing over the horizon. An owl hoots somewhere outside my window, and my room is full of drifting dark shapes.

In fifteen days, I will be married.

I join Fred to cut the ribbon at the new border wall, a fifteen-foot-tall, concrete and steel-reinforced structure. The new border wall will replace all the electrified fences that have always encircled Portland.

The first phase of construction, completed just two days after Fred officially became mayor, extends from Old Port past Tukey’s Bridge and all the way to the Crypts. The second phase will not be completed for another year, and will place a wall all the way down to the Fore River; two years after that, the final wall will go up, connecting the two, and the modernization and strengthening of the border will be complete, just in time for Fred’s reelection.

At the ceremony, Fred steps forward with a pair of oversized scissors, smiling at the journalists and photographers clustered in front of the wall. It’s a brilliantly sunny morning—a day of promise and possibility. He raises the scissors dramatically toward the thick red ribbon strung across the concrete. At the last second he stops, turns, and gestures me forward.

“I want my future wife to usher in this landmark day!” he calls out, and there is a roar of approval as I come forward, blushing, feigning surprise.

This has all been rehearsed, of course. He plays his role. And I am very careful to play mine, too.

The scissors, manufactured for show, are dull, and I have trouble getting the blades through the ribbon. After a few seconds, my palms begin to sweat. I can feel Fred’s impatience behind his smile, can feel the weighted stare of his associates and committee members, all of them watching me from a small, cordoned-off area next to the pack of journalists.

Snip.At last I work the scissors through the ribbon, and the ribbon flutters to the ground, and everyone cheers in front of the high, smooth concrete wall. The barbed wire at its top glistens in the sun, like metal teeth.

Afterward, we adjourn to the basement of a local church for a small reception. People snack on brownies and cheese squares off paper napkins, and sit in folding chairs, balancing plastic cups of soda on their laps.

This, too—the informality, the neighborhood feel, the church basement with its clean white walls and the faint smell of turpentine—was carefully planned.

Fred receives congratulations and answers questions about policy and planned changes. My mother is glowing, happier than I have ever seen her, and when she catches my eye across the room, she winks. It occurs to me that this is what she has wanted for me—for us—all my life.

I drift through the crowd, smiling, making polite conversation when I am needed. Underneath the laughter and chatter, I am pursued by a snake-hiss of sound, a name that follows me everywhere.

Prettier than Cassie . . .

Not as slender as Cassie . . .

Cassie, Cassie, Cassie . . .

Fred is in a great mood as we drive home. He loosens his tie and unbuttons his collar, rolls up his sleeves to the elbow, and opens the windows so the breeze sweeps into the car, blowing his hair across his face.

Already he looks more like his father. His face is red—it was hot in the church—and for a second I can’t help but imagine what it will be like after we are married, and how soon he will want to get started on having babies. I close my eyes and visualize the bay, let the image of Fred on top of me break apart on its waves.

“They were eating it up,” Fred says excitedly. “I threw out a couple hints—here and there—about Finch and the Department of Energy, and you could just tell everyone was going ape shit.”

All of a sudden, I can no longer keep the question down: “What happened to Cassandra?”

His smile falters. “Were you even listening?”

“I was. They were eating it up. Going ape shit.” He winces a little when I say the word shit, even though I’m only parroting his words back to him. “But you reminded me—I’ve been meaning to ask. You never told me what happened to her.”

Now the smile is completely gone. He turns toward the window. The afternoon sunshine stripes his face in alternating patterns of light and shadow. “What makes you think something happened?”

I keep my voice light. “I just meant—I wanted to know why you got divorced.”

He swivels quickly to look at me, eyes narrow, as though hoping to catch the lie on my face. I keep my face neutral. He relaxes a little.

“Irreconcilable differences.” The smile returns. “They must have made a mistake when they evaluated her. She wasn’t right for me at all.”

We stare at each other, both of us smiling, doing our duty, keeping our respective secrets.

“You know one of the things I like best about you?” he asks, reaching for my arm.

“What?”

He jerks me suddenly close to him. Surprised, I cry out. He pinches the soft skin on the inside of my elbow, sending a sharp zip of pain down my arm. Tears prick my eyes, and I inhale deeply, willing them back.

“That you don’t ask too many questions,” he says, and then pushes me away from him roughly. “Cassie asked too many questions.”

Then he leans back, and we drive the rest of the way in silence.

Late afternoon used to be my favorite time of day—mine, and Lena’s. Is it still?

I don’t know. My feelings, my old preferences, are just out of reach—not eradicated completely, as they should have been, but like shadows, burning away whenever I try to focus on them.

I don’t ask questions.

I just go.

The ride to Deering Highlands already feels easier. Thankfully, I don’t encounter anyone. I deposit the supplies of food and gasoline in the underground cellar that Grace showed me.

Afterward, I make for Preble Street, where Lena’s uncle used to have his little corner grocery store. As I suspected, it is now closed and shuttered. Metal grates have been drawn over its windows; beyond the latticed steel, I see graffiti scrawls across the glass, now indecipherable, faded by rain and weather. The awning, a royal blue, is torn up and half-dismantled. One thin, spindly metal support, like the jointed leg of a spider, has come free of the fabric and swings pendulum-like in the wind. A small placard fixed to one of the metal grates says COMING SOON! BEE’S SALON AND BARBER.

The city no doubt forced him to close his doors, or the customers stopped coming, worried that they would be guilty by association. Lena’s mother, Lena’s uncle William, and now Lena . . .

Too much bad blood. Too much disease.

No wonder they’re hiding in the Deering Highlands. No wonder Willow is hiding there as well. I wonder whether it was by choice—or whether they were coerced, threatened, or even bribed to leave a better neighborhood.

I don’t know what possesses me to go around back, to the narrow alley and the small blue door that used to lead to the storeroom. Lena and I used to hang out here together when she was stocking shelves after school.

The sun slants hard over the sloped roofs of the buildings around me, skipping right over the alley, which is dark and cool. Flies buzz around a Dumpster, droning and then colliding with the metal. I climb off my bike and lean it against one of the beige concrete walls. The sounds from the street—people shouting to one another, the occasional rumble of a bus—already seem distant.

I step toward the blue door, which is streaked with pigeon shit. Just for a moment, time seems to fold in two, and I imagine that Lena will fling open the door for me, as she always did. I’ll grab a seat on one of the crates of baby formula or canned green beans, and we’ll split a bag of chips and a soda stolen from stock, and we’ll talk about . . .

What?

What did we talk about then?

School, I guess. The other girls in our class, and track meets, and the concert series in the park and who was invited to whose birthday party, and things we wanted to do together.

Never boys. Lena wouldn’t. She was far too careful.

Until, one day, she wasn’t.

That day I remember perfectly. I was still in shock because of the raids the night before: the blood and the violence, the chorus of shouting and screaming. Earlier that morning, I had thrown up my breakfast.

I remember Lena’s expression when he knocked on the door: eyes wild, terrified, body stiff; and how Alex had looked at her when she finally let him into the storeroom. I remember exactly what he was wearing, too, and the mess of his hair, the sneakers with their blue-tinged laces. His right shoe was untied. He didn’t notice.

He didn’t notice anything but Lena.

I remember the hot flash that stabbed through me. Jealousy.

I reach out for the door handle, suck in a deep breath, and pull. It’s locked, of course. I don’t know what I was expecting, and why I feel so disappointed. It wouldbe locked. Beyond it, the dust will be settling on the shelves.

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.

But the cure works differently for everybody; and it does not work perfectly for all.

I’m resolved to help Lena’s family. Their store was taken away and their apartment reclaimed, and for that I am partly responsible. I was the one who encouraged her to go to her first illegal party; I was the one who always egged her on, asking her about the Wilds, talking about leaving Portland.

And I was also the one who helped Lena escape. I got the note to Alex informing him she had been caught and that her procedural date had been changed. If it weren’t for me, Lena would have been cured. She might be sitting in one of her courses at the University of Portland, or walking the streets of the Old Port with her pair. The Stop-N-Save would still be open, and the house on Cumberland would be occupied.

But the guilt goes even deeper than that. It, too, is dust: Layers and layers of it have accumulated.

Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all.

I told on them.

I was jealous.

God forgive me, for I have sinned.

Lena

I wake up to motion and noise. Julian is gone.

The sun is high, the sky cloudless, and the day still. I kick off the blankets and sit up, blinking hard. My mouth tastes like dust.

Raven is kneeling nearby, feeding twigs, one at a time, to one of the campfires. She glances up at me. “Welcome to the land of the living. Sleep well?”

“What time is it?” I ask.

“After noon.” She straightens up. “We’re about to head down to the river.”

“I’ll come with you.” Water: That’s what I need. I need to wash and drink. My whole body feels like it’s coated in grime.

“Come on, then,” she says.

Pippa is sitting at the edge of her camp, talking with an unfamiliar woman.

“From the resistance,” Raven explains when she sees me looking, and my heart does a funny stutter in my chest. My mother is with the resistance. It’s possible the stranger knows her. “She’s a week late. She was coming from New Haven with supplies but got waylaid by patrols.”

I swallow. I’m afraid to ask the stranger for news. I’m terrified I’ll once again be disappointed.

“Do you think Pippa’s going to leave Waterbury?” I ask.

Raven shrugs. “We’ll see.”

“Where will we go?” I ask her.

She shoots me a small smile, reaches out and touches my elbow. “Hey. Don’t worry so much, okay? That’s my job.”

I feel a rush of affection for her. Things between us have not been the same since I found out that she and Tack used me—and Julian—for the movement. But I would be lost without her. We all would be.

Tack, Hunter, Bram, and Julian are standing together, holding makeshift buckets and containers of various sizes. They have obviously been waiting for Raven. I don’t know where Coral and Alex are. I don’t see Lu, either.

“Hey, sleeping beauty,” Hunter says. He has obviously slept well. He looks a hundred times better than he did yesterday, and he isn’t coughing anymore.

“Let’s get this party started,” Raven says.

We leave the relative safety of Pippa’s camp and push into the jostle of people, through the maze of patched-together shelters and makeshift tents. I try not to breathe too deeply. It stinks of unwashed bodies and—even worse—of bathroom smells. The air is thick with flies and gnats. I can’t wait to wade into the water, to wash away the smells and the dirt. In the distance, I can just make out the dark thread of the river, winding along the south side of the camp. Not too much farther now.

The press of tents and shelters eventually peters out. Ribbons of old pavement, now cracked and fragmented, crisscross the landscape. Vast squares of concrete mark the foundation of old houses.

As we approach the river, we see a crowd has gathered along its banks. People are shouting, pushing and shoving their way to the water.

“ Nowwhat’s the problem?” Tack mutters.

Julian hitches the buckets higher on his shoulder and frowns, although he stays silent.

“There’s no problem,” Raven says. “Everyone’s just excited about a shower.” But her voice is strained.

We force our way into the thick tangle of bodies. The smell is overwhelming. I gag, but there’s no space to move, no way to bring a hand over my mouth. Not for the first time, I’m grateful to be only five foot two; at least it allows me to squeeze through the smallest openings between people, and I fight my way to the front of the crowd first, breaking out onto the steep, stony banks of the river, while the mass of people continues to swell behind me, fighting toward the river.

Something is wrong. The water is extremely low—no more than a trickle, a foot or so wide and hardly that deep, and churned mostly to mud. As the river winds back toward the city, it is filled with a moving jigsaw puzzle of people, swelling into the riverbank, desperate to fill their containers. From a distance, they look like insects.

“What the hell?” Raven finally pushes her way onto the bank and stands next to me, stunned.

“The water’s running out,” I say. Facing this sluggish stream of mud, I begin to panic. Suddenly I am thirstier than I have ever been in my life.

“Impossible,” Raven says. “Pippa said the river was flowing fine just yesterday.”

“Better take what we can,” Tack says. He, Hunter, and Bram have finally fought their way through the crowd. Julian follows a moment afterward. His face is red with sweat. His hair is plastered to his forehead. For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

More and more people are flowing down toward the river and fighting for what little water remains. There is no choice; we must fight alongside them. As I’m moving into the water, someone pushes me out of the way, and I end up falling backward, landing hard on the rocks. Pain shoots up my spine, and it takes me three tries to stand up. Too many people are streaming by me, shoving me. Eventually, Julian has to fight his way back through the crowd and help me to my feet.

In the end, we manage to get only a fraction of the water we wanted, and we lose some of it on the way back to Pippa’s camp, when a man stumbles into Hunter, upsetting one of his buckets. The water we have collected is filled with fine silt and will be reduced even further once we manage to boil away the mud. I would cry if I thought I could waste the water.

Pippa and the woman from resistance are standing in the middle of a small circle of people. Alex and Coral have returned. I can’t help but imagine where they have been together. Stupid, when there are so many other things to worry about; but still the mind will circle back to this one thing.

Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.

“The river—” Raven starts to say as we get closer, but Pippa cuts her off.

“We heard,” she says. Her face is grim. In the daylight, I see Pippa is older than I originally thought. I assumed she was in her early thirties, but her face is deeply lined, and her hair is gray at the temples. Or maybe that is only the effect of being here, in the Wilds, and waging this war. “It isn’t flowing.”

“What do you mean?” Hunter says. “A river doesn’t stop flowing overnight.”

“It does if it’s dammed,” Alex says.

For a second there’s silence.

“What do you mean, dammed?” Julian speaks first. He, too, is trying not to panic. I can hear it in his voice.

Alex stares at him. “Dammed,” he repeats. “As in, stopped. Blocked up. Obstructed or confined by a—”

“But who dammed it?” Julian cuts in. He refuses to look at Alex, but it’s Alex who responds.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” He shifts slightly, angling his body toward Julian. There’s a hot, electric tension in the air. “The people on the other side.” He pauses. “Your people.”

Julian still isn’t used to losing his temper. He opens his mouth and then shuts it. He says, very calmly, “What did you say?”

“Julian.” I place a hand on his arm.

Pippa jumps in. “Waterbury was mostly evacuated before I arrived,” she says. “We thought it was because of the resistance. We took it as a sign of progress.” She lets out a harsh bark of laughter. “Obviously, they had other plans. They’ve cut off the water source in the city.”

“So we’ll leave,” Dani says. “There are other rivers. The Wilds is full of them. We’ll go somewhere else.” Her suggestion meets with silence. She stares from Pippa to Raven.

Pippa runs a hand over the short fuzz of her hair.

“Yeah, sure.” The woman from the resistance speaks up. She has a funny accent, all lilts and melody, like drawn butter. “The people we can gather, the ones who can be mobilized—we can leave. We can scatter, break up, go back into the Wilds. But there are probably patrols waiting for us. No doubt they’re gathering even now. Easier for them if we’re in smaller groups—less of a chance we’ll be able to fight. Plus, it looks better for the press. Large-scale slaughter is harder to cover up.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

I turn around. Lu has just joined the group. She is slightly breathless, and her face is shiny, as though she has been running. I wonder where she has been all this time. As usual, her hair is loose, plastered to her neck and forehead.

“This is Summer,” Pippa says evenly. “She’s with resistance. She’s the reason you’ll be eating tonight.” The subtext is clear: Watch what you say.

“But we haveto leave.” Hunter’s voice is practically a bark. I get the urge to reach out and squeeze his hand. Hunter never loses his temper. “What other choice do we have?”

Summer doesn’t flinch. “We could fight back,” she says. “We’ve all been looking for a chance to rally together, make something of this mess.” She gestures to the array of shelters, like pieces of enormous metal shrapnel, glittering vastly toward the horizon. “That was the point of coming to the Wilds, wasn’t it? For all of us? We were tired of being told what to choose.”

“But how will we fight?” I feel shyer in front of this woman, with her soft, musical voice and her fierce eyes, than I have in front of anyone for a while. But I press on. “We’re weak as it is. Pippa said we’re disorganized. Without water—”

“I’m not suggesting we go head-to-head,” she interrupts me. “We don’t even know what we’re dealing with—how many people are left in the city, whether there are patrols gathering in the Wilds. What I’m suggesting is that we take the river back.”

“But if the river’s dammed—”

Again, she cuts me off. “Dams can be exploded,” she says simply.

We are silent for another second. Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Largely from habit, we wait for one of them to speak.

“What’s your plan?” Tack says, and just like that, I know it’s real: This is happening. This will happen.

I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us.

Instead life has only grown harder.

I wonder whether it will ever end.

I feel Julian’s hand on my shoulder: a squeeze, a reassurance. I open my eyes.

Pippa squats and draws a large teardrop shape in the ground with a thumb. “Let’s say this is Waterbury. We’re here.” She marks an Xat the southeast side of the larger end. “And we know that when the fighting started, the cureds retreated to the west side of the city. My guess is that the block is somewhere here.” She hazards an Xon the east side, where the teardrop begins to narrow.

“Why?” Raven says. Her face is alive again, alert. For a moment, when I look at her, I get a small chill. She lives for this—the fight, the battle for survival. She actually enjoysit.

Pippa shrugs. “It’s my best guess. That part of the city was mostly park anyway—they’ve probably just flooded it completely, rerouted the water flow. They’ll have shored up defenses there, of course, but if they had enough firepower to rout us, they’d have attacked already. We’re talking whatever forces they’ve gathered in a week or two.”

She looks up at us, to make sure we’re following. Then she draws a sweeping arrow around the base of the teardrop, pointing upward. “They’ll probably expect us to go north, toward the water flow. Or they think we’ll scatter.” She draws lines radiating in various directions from the base of the teardrop; now it looks like a deranged, bearded smiley face. “I think instead we should make a direct attack, send a small force into the city, bust open the dam.” She draws a line, sweepingly, through the teardrop, cutting it in half.

“I’m in,” Raven says. Tack spits. He doesn’t have to say he’s in too.

Summer folds her arms, looking down at Pippa’s diagram. “We’ll need three separate groups,” she says slowly. “Two diversionary, to create problems here and here”—she bends down and marks X’s at two distinct places along the periphery—“and one smaller force to get in, do the job, and get out.”

“I’m in,” Lu pipes up. “As long as I can be part of the main force. I don’t want any of this side-business shit.”

This surprises me. At the old homestead, Lu never expressed interest in joining the resistance. She never even got a fake procedural mark. She just wanted to stay as far as possible from the fighting; she wanted to pretend that the other side, the cured side, didn’t exist. Something must have changed in the months we’ve been apart.

“Lu can come with us.” Raven grins. “She’s a walking good-luck charm. That’s how she got her name. Isn’t it, Lucky?”

Lu doesn’t say anything.

“I want to be part of the main force too,” Julian speaks up suddenly.

“Julian,” I whisper. He ignores me.

“I’ll go wherever you need me,” Alex says. Julian glances at him, and for a second I feel the resentment between them, a blunt, hard-edged force.

“So will I,” Coral says.

“Count us in.” Hunter speaks for him and Bram.

“I want to be the one who lights the match,” Dani says.

Other people are chiming in now, volunteering for different tasks. Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”

I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.

But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.

“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.