“Lena,” Raven barks at me sharply. “Take her feet.”
I do. Her body is heavier than seems possible. In death, she has become a weight of iron. I’m furious with Raven, so furious I could spit. This is what we are reduced to here. This is what we have become in the Wilds: We starve, we die, we wrap our friends in old and tattered sheets, we burn them in the open. I know it’s not Raven’s fault—it’s the people on the other side of the fence, it’s Them, the zombies, my former people—but the anger refuses to dissolve. It burns a hole in my throat.
A quarter mile from the homestead there is a gully where at one point a stream must have flowed. We place her there, and Raven splashes her with gasoline: just a little, as there isn’t much to spare. The snow is falling harder now. At first she won’t light. Blue begins to cry, loudly, and Grandma pulls her sharply away from the fire, saying, “Quiet, Blue. You’re not helping.” Blue turns her face into Grandma’s overlarge corduroy jacket so the sound of her sobbing is muffled. Sarah is silent, white-faced, trembling.
Raven douses the body with more gasoline and finally gets it lit. The air is filled right away with a choking smoke, the smell of burning hair; the noise is terrible too, a crackling that makes you think of meat falling away from bones. Raven can’t even speak the whole eulogy before she starts to gag. I turn away, tears stinging my eyes—from the smoke or from anger, I can’t tell.
Suddenly I have the wild urge to dig, to bury, to hack up the earth. I move blindly, numbly, back to the burrow. It takes me a little while to locate the cotton shorts and the old, tattered shirt I was wearing when I came to the Wilds. We’ve been using the shirt as a dishrag. These are the only items left from before: the remnants of my old life.
The others have now gathered in the kitchen. Bram is stoking the fire, coaxing it to life. Raven is boiling water in a pot: for coffee, no doubt. Sarah is shuffling a pack of water-warped and dog-eared cards. Everyone else is sitting in silence.
“Hey, Lena,” Sarah says as I stalk past her. I’ve stuffed the shorts and the T-shirt under my jacket and am keeping my arms tightly crossed over my stomach; for some reason, I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing, especially Raven. “You want to play Spit?”
“Not now,” I growl at her. The Wilds turn us mean, too. Mean and hard, all edges.
“We could play something else,” she says. “We could play—”
“I said no.” Then I’m running up the stairs before I can see I’ve hurt her feelings.
The air is thick: a white blur. For a moment the cold stuns me and I stand, blinking, confused. Everything is sprouting a layer of snow, a fuzzy growth. I can still smell Miyako’s body burning. And I imagine that with the snow there is ash blowing over us. I fantasize that it will cover us in our sleep, seal us into the burrow, and suffocate us there, underground.
There is a juniper bush at the edge of the homestead, where I start and end my runs. Underneath it the snow has not accumulated. There is a bare dusting on the ground, which I sweep away with the cuff of my jacket.
Then I dig.
I claw at the earth with my fingers. The anger and the grief is still throbbing behind my eyes, narrowing my vision to a tunnel. I can’t even feel the cold or the pain in my hands. Dirt and blood are caking my fingernails, but I don’t care. I bury those last, tattered parts of me there, under the juniper, in the snow.
Two days after we burn Miyako, the snow has still not stopped. Every day Raven scans the skies anxiously, cursing under her breath. It is time to move. Lu and Squirrel, the first of the scouts, have returned. The homestead is mostly packed up, although we are still gathering food and supplies from the river, and trying to trap and hunt what we can. But the snow makes it hard. The animals stay underground.
As soon as the rest of the scouts return, we will leave. They’ll be here any day now—that’s what we all tell Raven, to ease her anxiety. The snow falls slowly, steadily, turning the world to white drift.
I’ve started checking the nests for messages twice a day. The trees, encased in ice, are harder to climb. Afterward, when I come back to the burrow, my fingers throb painfully as the feeling returns to them. For weeks the supplies have been floating to us regularly, although sometimes we’ve found them caught upriver, in the shallows, which freeze more easily. We have to break them out with broom handles. Roach and Buck make it back to the homestead, exhausted but triumphant. The snow finally stops. Now we are just waiting on Hunter and Tack.
Then one day, the nests are yellow. And again the next day: yellow.
On the third day of yellow, Raven pulls me aside.
“I’m worried,” she says. “Something must be wrong on the inside.”
“Maybe they’re patrolling again,” I say. “Maybe they’ve turned on the fence.”
She bites her lip, shakes her head. “Whatever it is, it must be major. Everyone knows it’s time for us to move. We need all the supplies we can get.”
“I’m sure it’s temporary,” I say. “I’m sure tomorrow we’ll get a shipment.”
Raven shakes her head again. “We can’t afford to wait much longer,” she says, and her voice is strangled. I know she isn’t thinking only of the supplies. She’s thinking of Hunter and Tack, too.
The next day, the sky is a pale blue, the sun high and amazingly warm, breaking through the trees and turning the ice to rivulets of flowing water. The snow brought silence with it, but now the woods are alive again, full of dripping and twittering and cracking. It is as though the Wilds have been released from a muzzle.
We are all in a good mood—everyone but Raven, who does her daily scan of the sky and only mutters, “It won’t last.”
On my way to the nests, stamping through the snow, I’m so warm I have to take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. The nests will be green today, I can sense it. They’ll be green, and the supplies will come, and the scouts will return, and we’ll all flow south together. The light is dazzling, bouncing off the glittering branches, filling my vision with spots of color, flashes of red and green.
When I get to the nests, I untie my jacket and loop it over one of the lower branches. I’ve gotten good at the climb—my body finds its way up easily, and I feel a kind of joy in my chest I haven’t felt for a long time. From far away I hear a vague humming, a low vibration that reminds me of crickets singing in the summertime.