So my second year we decided to move. It was Gray’s decision, actually, but we were all on board. Bram, who’d arrived earlier in the summer, told us about some homesteads farther south, friendly places where we would find shelter. In August, Gray sent out scouts to chart routes and look for campsites. In September, we started relocation.
The Scavengers hit in Connecticut. I’d heard stories about them, but never concrete stuff: more whispers and myths, like the monster stories my mom had told me as a kid to make me behave. Shhh. Be quiet or you’ll wake the dragon.
It was late and I was sleeping when Squirrel, who was scouting, gave the alarm: two shots fired into the darkness. But it was too late. Suddenly everyone was screaming. Blue—already big, beautiful, with the eyes of a grown-up and a pointed chin like mine—woke up bawling, terrified. She wouldn’t leave the tent. She was clinging to the sleeping bag, kicking me off, saying, No, no, no over and over again.
By the time I managed to get her up, get her into my arms and out of the tents, I thought the world was ending. I’d grabbed a knife, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d once skinned an animal and it had nearly made me puke.
I found out later that there were only four of them, but at the time it seemed like they were everywhere. That’s one of their tricks. Chaos. Confusion. There was fire—two tents went up just like that, like two match heads exploding—and there were shots and people screaming.
All I could think was run. I had to run. I had to get Blue away from there. But I couldn’t move. I felt terror like a cold weight inside me, rooting me in place, the same way it always had when I was a little girl—when my dad would come down the stairs, stomp, stomp, stomp, his anger like a blanket meant to suffocate us all. Watching from the corner while he kicked my mom in the ribs, in the face, unable to cry, unable to scream, even. For years I’d fantasized that the next time he touched me, or her, I’d stick a knife straight in through the ribs, all the way up to the handle. I’d thought about the blood bubbling from the wound and how good it would feel to know that he, like me, was made out of real stuff, bones and tissue, skin that could bruise.
But every time I was frozen, empty as a shell. Every time I did nothing but take it: red starburst explosions to the face, behind the eyes; pinches and slaps; hard shoves to the chest.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Tack was shouting from the other side of the camp. I started running to him without thinking, without watching where I was going, still clotted up with panic, with Blue soaking my neck with snot and tears and my heart drilling out of my chest, and when the Scavenger came from the left I didn’t even see him until he was swinging a club at my head.
un>I dropped Blue. Just let her fall to the ground. And I went down behind her, knees hard in the dirt, trying to shield her. I got a hand around her pajama bottoms and managed to pick her up and get her on her feet.
“Run,” I said. “Go on.” I pushed her. She was crying, and I pushed her. But she ran, as well as she could, on legs that were still too short for her body.
The Scavenger drove a foot between my ribs, exactly the spot where my dad had fractured them when I was twelve. The pain made everything go black for a second, and when I rolled over on my back, everything was different. The stars weren’t stars but a ceiling spotted with water stains. The dirt wasn’t dirt but a nubby carpet.
And the Scavenger wasn’t a Scavenger but Him. My dad.
Eyes small as cuts, fists as fat as leather belts,breath hot and wet in my face. His jaw, his smell, his sweat. He’d found me. He raised a fist and I knew it was starting all over again, that it would never stop, that he would never leave me alone and I would never escape.
That Blue would never be safe.
Everything went dark and silent.
I didn’t know I’d reached for the knife until it was deep between his ribs.
That’s all I’ve ever heard: silence. The times I’ve killed. The times I’ve had to kill. If there is a God, I guess he has nothing to say about it.
If there is a God, he must have gotten tired of watching a long time ago.
There is silence in Julian Fineman’s execution room, except for the occasional click-click of a camera, except for the drone of the priest’s voice. But when Abraham saw that Isaac had become unclean, he asked in his heart for guidance . . .
Silence like whiteness: like things painted over and concealed, or left unsaid.
Silence except for the squeak, squeak of my sneakers on the linoleum floor. The doctor turns to look at me, annoyed. Confused. My voice, in that big, vast white room, sounds unfamiliar.
The first gunshot is very loud.
I’m remembering: all those years ago, sitting with Tack when he was newly named. The red-ember glow of the fire in the old woodstove, and Blue, breathing easier already, heavy in my arms. Sleep sounds from the other rooms, and somewhere above us, the hiss of the wind through the trees.
“You came back,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he admitted. He looked different, wearing clothes Grandpa had found for him in the storeroom—much younger, much skinnier. His eyes were huge dark hollows in his face. I thought he was beautiful.
I hugged Blue a little closer. She was still hot, still fussing in her sleep. But her breaths came even and slow, and there was no trapped rattle in her chest. For the first time, it struck me that I’d been lonely. Not just at the homestead, where everyone was too busy surviving to worry about making friends, where most of the Invalids were older or half-soft in the head or just liked to keep to themselves. Even before that. At home I’d never had friends either. I couldn’t afford to, couldn’t let them see what my house was like, didn’t want anyone paying attention or asking questions.
Alone. I’d been alone my whole life. “Why did you change your mind?” I said.
He smiled a little. “Because I knew you thought I’d bail.”
I stared at him. “You crossed over to the other side—you risked your life—just to prove a point?”
“Not to prove a point,” he said. “To prove you wrong.” He smiled, bigger this time. His hair smelled like smoke from the fire. “You seem like you might be worth it.”
Then he kissed me. He leaned over and just touched his lips to mine with Blue held between us like a secret, and I knew then that I would not be so alone anymore.
“How did you—?” Lena is breathless, white in the face. Shock, maybe. Her palms are cut up, and there’s blood on her jacket. “Where did you—?”
“Later,” I say. My cheek is stinging. Got a face full of glass when Lena decided to break through the observation deck, but it’s nothing a pair of tweezers can’t fix. I’m lucky the glass missed my eyes.
Julian, up close, looks different than he does in all the DFA literature. Younger, and kind of sad and overeager, like a puppy begging for attention—even a swift kick.
Luckily, he asks no questions, just falls in behind me, walking quickly, saying nothing. He must be use to obeying. If it wasn’t for Lena, if she hadn’t switched up the rules, the needle would be in his arm by now, and he’d be dead. It would have been better for us, and for the movement.
No point in thinking about that now. Lena took a stand, and so I took a stand with her.
That’s what you do for family. Anything.
We go out the emergency exit to the fire escape, which leads down into the little courtyard I scouted earlier. So far, so good. Lena’s breathing fast and hard behind me, but m clnd me, y breath is easy, even, and slow.
This is my favorite part of the story: the escape.
Tack is waiting with the van on Twenty-Fourth Street, just like he said he would be. I open the cargo door and shut Lena and Julian inside.
“You got ’em?” Tack asks when I climb into the passenger seat.
“Would I be here if I didn’t?” I answer.
He frowns. “You’re cut.”
I flip down the mirror and take a look: a few uneven cuts on my cheek and neck, beaded with blood. “Just a scratch,” I say, blotting the blood with the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“Let’s roll, then,” Tack says, and sighs.
He guns the engine and pulls out into the street, gray and blurry with old rain. I keep my sleeve pressed to the side of my face to stanch the bleeding. We make it all the way to the West Side Highway before Tack speaks again.
“It’s a risk, taking him back with us,” he says in a low voice. “Julian Fineman. Shit. A big risk.”
“I’ll take responsibility.” I turn my face to the window. I can see the ghost-outlines of my reflection, feel the hum of cold air through the glass.
“She’s important to you, isn’t she? Lena, I mean.” Tack’s voice stays quiet.
“She’s important to the movement,” I answer, and see the ghost-girl speak too, her teeth flashing, superimposed over passing images of the city.
Tack doesn’t say anything for a second. Then I feel his hand on my knee. “I would have done it for you, too,” he says, even quieter. “If you’d been taken. I would have gone back. I would have risked it.”
I turn to look at him. “You already did come back for me,” I say. I remember that first kiss, and Blue’s warmth between us, and Tack’s lips, dry as bone, soft as shadow. I still can’t say her name, but I think he knows what I’m thinking. “You came back for us.”
Recently I’ve been having the fantasy more and more: the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars—sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.
And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to liveg we neo live—like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.
We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.
We have four kids. Maybe five. The first one is a girl, stupid beautiful, and we call her Blue.
“Where the hell were you?” Pike’s in my face as soon as we make it back to the warehouse.
I don’t like Pike. He’s moody and mean and he thinks he can boss me—and everyone else—around.
I put a hand on his chest, easing him backward. “Get out of my airspace.”
“I asked you a question.”
“Don’t talk to her that way,” Tack jumps in, already wound up, ready to go.
“It’s all right.” I’m suddenly too tired to argue. I keep thinking of Lena’s last words to me. The woman who came for me at Salvage . . . That’s my mother. Did you know? Like I should have known. Like it’s my fault Lena’s mom moved on without a So long, see you later.