For a few minutes we breathe together, in tandem. I wonder if Julian notices.
“I never figured out why the book was banned,” Julian says after a bit. “That part must have come later, after the witch, and the shoes. I’ve been wondering about it ever since. Funny how certain things stay with you.”
“Do you remember any of the other stories you read?” I ask.
“No. None of the songs, either. Just that one line… ‘All you need is love.’” He sings the notes again.
We lie in silence for a bit, and I begin to float in and out of consciousness. I am walking the shimmering silver ribbon of a river winding through the forest, wearing shoes that sparkle in the sun as though they are made out of coins…
I am passing under a branch and there is a tangle of leaves in my hair. I reach up and feel a warm hand—fingers…
I startle into awareness again. Julian’s hand is hovering an inch above my head. He has rolled over to the very edge of his cot. I can feel the warmth from his body.
“What are you doing?” My heart is beating very fast. I can feel his hand trembling ever so slightly by my right ear.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, but doesn’t move his hand. “I …”
I can’t see his face. He is a long, curved shadow, frozen, like something made of polished wood. “You have nice hair,” he says finally.
My chest feels like it is being squeezed. The room seems hotter than ever.
“Can I?” he asks, so quietly I barely hear him, and I nod because I can’t speak. My throat, too, is being squeezed.
Softly, gently, he lowers his hand that final inch. For a moment he leaves it there and again I hear that quick exhale, a release of some kind, and everything in my whole body goes still and white and hot, a starburst, a silent explosion. Then he runs his fingers through my hair and I relax, and the squeezing goes away, and I’m breathing and alive and it’s all fine and everything will be okay. Julian keeps running his hand through my hair—twisting it around his fingers, curling it up and over his wrist and letting it drop onto the pillow again—and this time when I close my eyes and see the shining silver river I walk straight into it, and let it carry me down and away.
In the morning I wake up to blue: Julian’s eyes, staring at me. He turns away quickly but not quickly enough. He has been watching me sleep. I feel embarrassed and angry and flattered at the same time. I wonder if I’ve said anything. I used to call Alex’s name sometimes, and I’m pretty sure he was in my dreams last night. I don’t remember any of them, but I woke up with that Alex-feeling, like a hollow carved in the center of my chest.
“How long have you been awake?” I ask. In the light everything feels tense and awkward again. I can almost believe last night was a dream. Julian put his fingers in my hair. Julian touched me. I let him touch me.
I liked it.
“A while,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Nightmares?” I ask. The air in the room is stifling. Each word is an effort.
“No,” he says. I expect him to say something else, but the silence stretches long between us.
I sit up. The room is hot, and it smells. I feel nauseous. I’m reaching for something to say, something to bleed out the tension in the room.
And then Julian says, “Do you think they’re going to kill us?” and the swollenness deflates at once. We’re on the same side today.
“No,” I say, with more confidence than I feel. As each day has passed I’ve grown more and more uncertain. If they—the Scavengers—were planning to ransom Julian, surely they would have done it by now. I think about Thomas Fineman, and the polished metal of his cuff links, and his hard, shiny smile. I think of him beating his nine-year-old son into unconsciousness.
He might have decided not to pay. The thought is there, a needling doubt, and I try to ignore it.
Thinking of Thomas Fineman reminds me: “How old is your brother now?” I ask.
“What?” Julian sits up so his back is toward me. He must have heard me, but I repeat the question anyway. I watch his spine stiffen: a tiny contraction, barely noticeable.
“He’s dead,” he says abruptly.
“How—how did he die?” I ask gently.
Again, Julian nearly spits the word out. “Accident.”
Even though I can tell Julian’s uncomfortable talking about it, I just don’t want to let it drop. “What kind of accident?”
“It was a long time ago,” he says shortly, and then, suddenly whirling on me, “Why do you care, anyway? Why are you so curious? I don’t know shit about you. And I don’t pry. I don’t bother you about it.”
I’m so startled by his outburst, I nearly snap back. But I’ve been slipping too much; and so instead I take refuge in the smoothness, the roundness, of Lena Morgan Jones’s calm: the calm of the walking dead; the calm of the cured.
I say smoothly, “I was just curious. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
For a second I think I see panic on Julian’s face; it flashes there like a warning. Then it’s gone, replaced by a sternness I have seen in his father. He nods once, curtly, and stands, begins pacing the room. I take a perverse pleasure in his agitation. He was so calm at first. It’s gratifying to see him lose it just a little: Down here the protection and certainty offered by the DFA mean nothing.
Just like that we are on opposite sides again. There’s comfort in the morning’s stony silence. It is how things should be. It is right.
I should never have let him touch me. I shouldn’t have even let him get close. In my head, I repeat an apology: I’m sorry. I’ll be careful. No more slipping. I’m not sure whether I’m speaking to Raven or Alex or both.
The water never comes; neither does the food. And then, midmorning, a subtle change in the air: echoes different from the sounds of dripping water and the hollow flow of underground air. For the first time in hours, Julian looks at me.
“Do you hear—,” he starts to say, and I shush him.
Voices in the hall, and heavy boot steps—more than one person is approaching. My heart speeds up, and I look around instinctively for a weapon. Other than the bucket, there isn’t much. I’ve already tried to unscrew the metal bedposts from the cots, with no success. My backpack is on the other side of the room, and just as I’m thinking of making a dive for it—any weapon is better than no weapon at all—locks scrape open and the door swings inward and two Scavengers step into the room. Both of them are carrying guns.
“You.” The Scavenger in front, middle-aged, with the whitest skin I’ve ever seen, points to Julian with the butt of his rifle. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Julian asks, although he must know they won’t answer. He is standing, keeping his arms pressed to his sides. His voice is steady.
“We’ll be asking the questions,” the pale man says, and smiles. He has dark-spotted gums, and yellow teeth. He is wearing heavy military-style pants and an old military jacket, but he is a Scavenger beyond a shadow of a doubt. On his left hand I see a faint pattern of a blue tattoo, and as he steps farther into the room, circling Julian like a jackal looping around its prey, my blood goes cold. He has a procedural scar, too, but his is terribly botched: three slashes on his neck, red like gaping wounds. He has tattooed a black triangle between them. Decades ago the procedure was much riskier than it is now, and growing up we heard stories about the people who weren’t cured at all, but turned crazy, or brain-dead, or totally and utterly ruthless—incapable of feeling anything for anyone else, ever.
I try to fight the panic that’s building in my chest, sending my heart into a skittering, erratic rhythm. The second Scavenger, a girl who might be Raven’s age, is leaning in the door frame, blocking my exit. She’s taller than I am but thinner, too. Her face is heavily pierced—I count five rings in each eyebrow, and gems studded into her chin and forehead—as well as what looks like a wedding ring looped through her septum. I don’t want to think about where she got it. She has a handgun strapped to a belt hanging low on her hips. I try to estimate how quickly she could have it out and pointed at my head.
Her eyes flick to mine. She must interpret the expression on my face because she says, “Don’t even think about it.”
Her voice is strange and slurry, and when she opens her mouth to yawn I see it is because her tongue is glinting with metal. Metal studs, metal rings, metal wires: all of it looping on and around her tongue, making her look like she has swallowed barbed wire.
Julian hesitates for only a moment more. He jerks forward—a sudden, wrenching movement—and then recovers. As he passes through the door, flanked on one side by the pierced girl and on the other by the albino, he goes gracefully, as though he’s strolling to a picnic.
He does not look at me, not even once. Then the door grates shut again, and the locks click into place, and I am left alone.
The waiting is an agony. My body feels like it’s on fire. And although I’m hungry, and thirsty, and weak, I can’t stop pacing. I try not to think about what they’ve done with Julian. Maybe he has been ransomed and released after all. But I didn’t like the way the albino smiled and said, We’ ll be asking the questions.
In the Wilds, Raven taught me to look for patterns everywhere: the orientation of the moss on the trees; the level of undergrowth; the color of the soil. She taught me, too, to look for the inconsistencies—an area of sudden growth might mean water. A sudden stillness usually means a large predator is nearby. More animals than usual? More food.
The appearance of the Scavengers is inconsistent, and I don’t like it.
To keep myself busy I unpack and repack my backpack. Then I unpack it again and lay its contents on the ground, as though the sad collection of items is a hieroglyph that might suddenly yield new meaning. Two granola bar wrappers. A tube of mascara. One empty water bottle. The Book of Shhh. One umbrella. I get up, turn a circle, and sit down again.
Through the walls, I think I hear a muffled shout. I tell myself it’s just my imagination.
I pull The Book of Shhh onto my lap and flip through the pages. Even though the psalms and prayers are still familiar, the words look strange and their meanings are indecipherable: It’s like returning somewhere you haven’t been since you were a child, and finding everything smaller and disappointing. It reminds me of the time Hana unearthed a dress she had worn every day in first grade. We were in her room, bored, messing around, and she and I laughed and laughed, and she kept repeating, I can’t believe I was ever that small.
My chest begins to ache. It seems impossibly, unbelievably long ago—when I could sit in a room with carpet, when we could spend days messing around, doing nothing in each other’s company. I didn’t realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.
Halfway through The Book of Shhh a page has been dog-eared. I stop, and see several words in one paragraph have been emphatically underlined. The excerpt comes from Chapter 22: Social History.
