“Thank you,” I finally manage. Her eyes flick to mine. They are brown and webbed with fine lines. She has a permanent squint, probably from existing in this strange, twilight world.
“How many were they?” she asks. I would have expected her voice to be mangled and broken, a reflection of her face, but it is high and clear. Pretty. When I don’t immediately respond, she says, “The Intruders. How many?”
I know immediately that she is referring to the Scavengers, though she uses a different word to describe them. I can tell from the way she says it: the mixture of anger, fear, and disgust.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Seven, at least. Maybe more.”
The woman says, “They came three seasons ago. Maybe four.” I must look surprised by her way of speaking, because she adds, “It isn’t easy to keep track of time in the tunnels. Days, weeks—unless we go above, it’s hard to know.”
“How long have you been down here?” I ask, almost afraid to know the answer.
She squints at me with those small, sludge-colored eyes. I do my best not to look at her mouth and chin: There, the deformity is at its worst, as though her face is curling up into itself, a wilting flower. “I’ve been here always,” she says. “Or almost always.”
“How—?” The question gets caught in my throat.
She smiles. I think it’s a smile, at least. One corner of her mouth corkscrews upward. “There is nothing for us on the surface,” she says. “Nothing but death, anyway.”
So it’s like I thought. I wonder if that’s what always happens to the babies who don’t find their way underground, or to a homestead in the Wilds. Maybe they get locked in prisons and mental institutions. Maybe they are simply killed.
“For all my life, the tunnels have belonged to us,” she says. I’m still having a hard time reconciling the melody of her voice with the look of her face. I focus on her eyes: Even in the dim, smoky light, I can see that they are full of warmth. “People find their way to us with babies. This is a safe place for them.” Her eyes flick to Julian, and I notice her scan his unblemished neck; then she’s back to me. “You’ve been cured,” she says. “That’s what they call it aboveground, right?”
I nod. I open my mouth to try and explain—I’m okay, I’m on your side—but to my surprise, Julian speaks up. “We’re not with the Intruders,” he says. “We’re not with anyone else. We’re—we’re on our own.”
We’re not with anyone else. I know he’s just saying it to appease her, but the words still buoy me up, help break apart the knot of fear that has been lodged in my chest since we’ve been underground.
Then I think of Alex, and I feel nauseous all over again. I wish that we had never left the Wilds. I wish that I had never agreed to join the resistance.
“How did you come here?” the woman says. She pours from a jug next to me, and offers me a plastic cup: a child’s cup, with faded patterns of deer prancing around its rim. This, like everything else down here, must have floated in from above—discarded, unwanted, drifting through the cracks of the earth like a melting snow.
“We were taken.” Julian’s voice gets stronger now. “Kidnapped by the Intruders.” He hesitates, and I know that he’s thinking about the DFA badges we found, the tattoo I saw. He doesn’t understand yet, and I don’t either; but I know this was not merely the effort of Scavengers. They were paid or were supposed to be paid for their trouble. “We don’t know why,” he says.
“We’re trying to find our way out,” I say, and then something that the woman said earlier strikes me, and I feel a sudden surge of hope. “Wait—you said you have trouble keeping track of time unless you go aboveground, right? So … there’s a way out? A way up?”
“I don’t go aboveground,” she says. The way she says above makes it sound like a dirty word.
“But somebody does,” I persist. “Somebody must.” They must have ways of getting supplies: sheets and cups and fuel and all the piles of half-used, broken-down furniture heaped around us on the platform.
“Yes,” she says evenly. “Of course.”
“Will you take us?” I ask. My throat is dry. Just thinking about the sun, and the space, and the surface, makes me want to cry. I don’t know what will happen once we’re above again, but I push away the thought.
“You’re still very weak,” she says. “You need to eat and rest.”
“I’m okay,” I insist. “I can walk.” I try to stand up, and find my vision clouding with black. I thud back down.
“Lena.” Julian puts a hand on my arm. Something flickers in his eyes—Trust me, it’s okay, a little longer won’t kill us. I don’t know what’s happening, or how we’ve begun to communicate in silence, or why I like it so much.
He turns to the woman. “We’ll rest for a bit. Then will someone show us the way to the surface?”
The woman once again looks from Julian to me and back again. Then she nods. “You don’t belong down here,” she says. She climbs to her feet.
I feel suddenly humbled. All these people make a life from trash and broken things, living in darkness, breathing in smoke. And yet, they helped us. They helped us without knowing us, and for no reason at all other than the fact that they knew how. I wonder whether I would do the same, if I were in their position. I’m not sure.
Alex would have, I think. And then: Julian would too.
“Wait!” Julian calls her back. “We—we didn’t get your name.”
A look of surprise crosses her face: Then she smiles again, the little corkscrew lips. “I was named down here,” she says. “They call me Coin.”
Julian wrinkles his forehead, but I get it right away. It’s an Invalid name: descriptive, easy to remember, funny, kind of sick. Coin, as in two-sided.
Coin was right: Time is hard to measure in the tunnels, even harder than it was to measure in the cell. At least there we had the electric light to guide us—on during day, off at night. Every minute down here becomes an hour.
Julian and I eat three granola bars each, and some more of the jerky we stole from the Scavengers’ stash. It feels like a feast, and before I’m even finished, my stomach is cramping badly. Still, after eating, and drinking the whole jug of water, I feel better than I have in days. We doze for a bit—lying so close I can feel Julian’s breath stirring my hair, our legs almost touching—and we both wake at the same time.
Coin is standing above us again. She has refilled the jug of water. Julian utters a little cry as he is shaking himself into awareness. Then he sits up quickly, embarrassed. He runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up at crazy angles, every which way; I have an overwhelming urge to reach out and smooth it down.
“Can you walk?” Coin asks me. I nod. “I’ll have someone take you to the surface, then.” Again, she says surface as though it’s a dirty word, or a curse.
“Thank you.” The words seem thin and insufficient. “You didn’t need to—I mean, we really appreciate it. We’d probably be dead if it weren’t for you and … your friends.” I almost say your people, but I catch myself at the last minute. I remember how angry I’ve been with Julian for saying the same thing.
She stares at me for a moment without smiling, and I wonder if, somehow, I’ve offended her. “Like I said, you don’t belong down here,” she says. And then, her voice swelling, rising to a high pitch: “There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”
A small tremor passes through her body; her right hand tugs convulsively at the folds of her dirty dress.
“I’ll find someone to guide you,” she says abruptly, as though ashamed of her outburst, and turns away from us.
Rat-man is the one who comes for us, and seeing him brings back a sense of vertigo and nausea, even though this time he is alone. The rats have gone back to their holes and hiding places.
“Coin said you want to go up,” he says, the longest sentence I have heard from him yet. Julian and I are already standing. Julian has taken the backpack, and though I’ve told him I’m okay to stand, he insists on keeping a hand on my arm. Just in case, he said, and I think of how different he is from the boy I saw onstage in the Javits Center, the cool floating screen image—unimaginable that they should be the same person. I wonder whether that boy is the real Julian, or this boy is the real one, or whether it’s even possible to know.
Then it hits me: I’m not even sure who the real Lena is anymore.
“We’re ready,” Julian says.
We pick our way around the piles of junk and the makeshift shelters that clutter the platform. Everywhere we go, we are watched. Figures crouch in the shadows. They’ve been forced down here, the way we have been forced into the Wilds: all for a society of order and regularity.
For a society to be healthy, not a single one of its members can be sick. The DFA’s philosophy runs deeper—much deeper—than I’d believed. The dangerous are not just the uncured: They are also the different, the deformed, the abnormal. They must also be eradicated. I wonder if Julian realizes this, or whether he’s known it all along.
Irregularity must be regulated; dirt must be cleansed; the laws of physics teach us that systems tend increasingly toward chaos, and so the chaos must be constantly pushed back. The rules of expurgation are even written into The Book of Shhh.
At the end of the platform, the rat-man swings down into the tracks. He is walking well now. If he was injured during the scuffle with the Scavengers, he, too, has been mended and bandaged. Julian follows, and then helps me down, reaching up and putting his hands around my waist as I maneuver clumsily off the platform. Even though I feel better than I did earlier, I’m still not moving very well. I’ve been too long without enough food and water, and my head still throbs. My left ankle wobbles as I hit the ground, and for a minute I stumble against Julian, bumping my chin on his chest, and his arms tighten around me.
“You okay?” he says. I’m ultra-conscious of the closeness of our bodies, and the encircling warmth of his arms.
I step away from him, my heart climbing into my mouth. “I’m fine,” I say.
Then it’s time to go into the darkness again. I hang back, and Rat-man must think I’m scared. He turns and says, “The Intruders don’t come this far. Don’t worry.” He’s without a flashlight or a torch. I wonder if the fire was just meant to intimidate the Scavengers. The mouth of the tunnel is pitch-black, but he seems perfectly able to see.
“Let’s go,” Julian says, and I turn with him and follow the rat-man, and the dim beam of the flashlight, into the dark.