“Come on!” Tack is walking backward, half skipping, toward the warehouse. “We’re packing up and moving out. We’ve lost a day already. Hunter will be waiting with the others in Connecticut.”
Raven hitches her backpack a little higher and winks. “You know how Hunter gets when he’s cranky,” she says. “We better get moving.”
I can sense Julian’s confusion. The patter of dialogue and strange names, the closeness of the trees, untrimmed and untended, must be overwhelming. But I will teach him, and he will love it. He will learn and love, and love to learn. The words stream through me—calming, beautiful. There is time for absolutely everything now.
“Wait!” I jog after Raven as she starts to follow Tack into the warehouse. Julian hangs back. I keep my voice low so Julian can’t hear.
“Did—did you know?” I say, swallowing hard. I feel out of breath, though I’ve run less than twenty feet. “About my mom, I mean.”
Raven looks at me, confused. “Your mom?”
“Shhh.” For some reason I don’t want Julian to overhear—it is too much, too deep, too soon.
Raven shakes her head.
“The woman who came for me at Salvage,” I say, persisting despite Raven’s look of total confusion. “She has a tattoo on her neck—5996. That’s my mother’s intake number, from the Crypts.” I swallow. “That’s my mother.”
Raven reaches out two fingers as though to touch my shoulder, then thinks better of it and drops her hand. “I’m sorry, Lena. I had no idea.” Her voice is uncharacteristically gentle.
“I have to talk to her before we go,” I say. “There are—there are things I need to say.” Really, there is only one thing I want to say, and just thinking of it makes my heart speed up: Why, why, why? Why did you let them take you? Why did you let me think you were dead? Why didn’t you come for me?
Why didn’t you love me more?
Once you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces—and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to keep you permanently awake. The DFA is right about that, at least.
Raven draws her eyebrows together. “She’s gone, Lena.”
My mouth goes dry. “What do you mean?”
Raven shrugs. “She left this morning with some of the others. They’re higher-level than I am. I don’t know where they were headed. I’m not supposed to ask.”
“She’s … she’s part of the resistance, then?” I ask, even though it’s obvious.
Raven nods. “Top-top,” she says gently, as though that makes up for anything. She spreads her hands. “That’s all I know.”
I look away, biting my lip. To the south, the clouds are breaking up, like wool slowly unraveling, revealing patches of bare blue sky. “For most of my life, I thought she was dead,” I say. I don’t know why I tell her, or what difference it will make.
She does touch me then, skimming my elbow. “Someone arrived from Portland last night—a fugitive. Escaped the Crypts after the bombing. He hasn’t said much, hasn’t even given his name. I’m not sure what they did to him up there, but—” Raven breaks off. “Anyway, he might know something about your mom. About her time there, at least.”
“Okay,” I say. Disappointment makes me feel heavy, dull. I don’t bother telling Raven that my mom was kept in solitary the whole time she was in prison—and besides, I don’t need to know what she was like then. I want to know her now.
“I’m sorry,” Raven repeats, and I can tell she means it. “But at least you know she’s free, right? She’s free and she’s safe.” Raven smiles briefly. “Like you.”
“Yeah.” She’s right, of course. The disappointment breaks apart a little. Free and safe—me, Julian, Raven, Tack, my mom. We’re all going to be okay.
“I’m going to see if Tack needs help,” Raven says, turning businesslike again. “We leave tonight.”
I nod. Despite everything that has happened, it feels good to talk to Raven, and to see her like this—in go mode. That’s how it should be. She pushes into the warehouse, and I stand for a moment, closing my eyes, inhaling the cold air: smells of damp earth and wet bark; a moist, wet smell of renewal. We’ll be okay. And someday, I’ll find my mom again.
“Lena?” Julian’s voice pipes up quietly, behind me. I turn. He’s standing near the van, arms hanging heavily at his sides, as though he’s afraid to move in this new world. “Are you okay?”
Seeing him there—with the trees spread out darkly on all sides of us, and the clouds retreating—joy wells up in me again. Suddenly I am closing the space between us, not thinking, and barreling into his arms with so much force he almost topples backward. “Yes,” I say. “I’m okay. We’re okay.” I laugh. “Everything’s going to be fine now.”
“You saved me,” he whispers. I can feel his mouth moving against my forehead. The touch of his lips makes heat dance through me. “I couldn’t believe—I never thought you would come.”
“I had to.” I pull away so that I can look up at him, keeping my arms looped around his waist. He rests his hands on my back. Even though I have spent a long time in the Wilds, it strikes me again that it is a miracle to stand this way with someone. No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other, and the rest of the world can go to hell.
Julian reaches up and brushes a piece of hair out of my eyes. “What happens now?” he asks.
“Anything we want,” I say. The joy is a surge: I could soar away on it, ride it all the way to the sky.
“Anything?” Julian’s smile spreads slowly from his lips to his eyes.
“Anything and everything,” I say, and Julian and I move at the same time, and find each other’s lips. At first, it’s clumsy: His nose bumps my lips, and then my chin bumps his chin. But he’s smiling, and we take our time, and find each other’s rhythm. I run my lips lightly over his, explore his tongue, softly, with mine. He puts his fingers in my hair. I inhale the smell of his skin, fresh and also woodsy, like soap and evergreen trees, mixed. We kiss slowly, gently, because now we have all the time in the world—nothing but time, and the space to get to know each other freely, and to kiss as much as we want. My life is beginning again.
Julian pulls away to look at me. He traces my jaw with one finger. “I think—I think you’ve given it to me,” he says, slightly out of breath. “The deliria.”
“Love,” I say, and squeeze his waist. “Say it.”
He hesitates for just a second. “Love,” he says, testing the word. Then he smiles. “I think I like it.”
“You’ll grow to love it. Trust me.” I raise myself on my tip-toes and Julian kisses my nose, then skims his lips over my cheekbones, brushing against my ear, planting tiny kisses across the crown of my head.
“Promise me we’ll stay together, okay?” His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. “You and me.”
“I promise,” I say.
Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: “Don’t believe her.”
The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.
I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pressure and chaos. My head is about to explode.
He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a small tattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes—once a sweet, melted brown, like syrup—have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.
Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.
Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.
Alex.