I manage to nod.
“This was a school.” She gestures to another enormous area of low growth, roughly the shape of a rectangle. The trees around its perimeter are marked from the fire: seared white, and practically leafless, they remind me of tall, spindly ghosts. “Some of the lockers were just sitting there, hanging open. Some of them had clothes in them and stuff.” She looks momentarily guilty, and then it hits me—the clothing in the storage room, the pants and shirt I am wearing—all of those clothes must have come from somewhere, must have been scavenged.
“Stop for a second.” I’m feeling out of breath, and so we stand for a moment in front of the old school while I rest. We’re in a patch of sunshine, and I’m grateful for the warmth. Birds twitter and zip overhead, small, quick shadows against the sky. Distantly I can make out sounds of good-natured shouting and laughter, Invalids tromping through the woods. The air is full of whirling, floating golden-green leaves.
A squirrel sits back on its haunches, working a nut quickly between its paws, on the top step of what must have been an entrance to the school. Now the stairs run aground, into soft earth and a covering of wildflowers. I think of all the feet that must have stepped right there, where the squirrel is. I think of all the small, warm hands spinning out locker combinations, all the voices, the rush and patter of movement. I think of what it must have been like during the blitz—the panic, the screaming, the running, the fire.
In school we always learned that the blitz, the cleansing, was quick. We saw footage of pilots waving from their cockpits as bombs dropped on a distant carpet of green, trees so small they looked like toys, narrow plumes of smoke rising, featherlike, from the growth. No mess, no pain, no sounds of screaming. Just a whole population—the people who had resisted and stayed, who refused to move into the approved and bordered places, the nonbelievers and the contaminated—deleted all at once, quick as the stroke of a keyboard, turned into a dream.
But of course it wouldn’t really have been like that. It couldn’t have been. The lockers were still full: of course. The children wouldn’t have had time to do anything but fight and claw for the exits.
Some of them—very few—may have escaped and made their home in the Wilds, but most of them died. Our teachers told us the truth, at least, about that. I close my eyes, feel myself swaying on my feet.
“Are you okay?” Sarah asks. She puts her hand on my back. “We can turn around.”
“I’m okay.” I open my eyes. We’ve only gone a few hundred feet. Most of the old main street still stretches in front of us, and I’m determined to see all of it.
We walk even slower now, as Sarah points out the empty spaces and broken foundations where buildings must once have existed: a restaurant (“a pizza restaurant—that’s where we got the stove”); a deli (“you can still see the sign—see? Kind of buried over there? ‘Sandwiches made to order’”); a grocery store.
The grocery store seems to depress Sarah. Here the ground is churned up, the grass even newer than everywhere else; the site of years and years of digging. “For a long time we kept finding things to eat, buried all around here. Cans of food, you know, and even some packaged stuff that made it through the fires.” She sighs, looks wistful. “It’s all gone now, though.”
We walk on. Another restaurant, marked by an enormous metal counter, and two metal-backed chairs sitting side by side in a solid square of sunlight; a hardware store (“saved our lives plenty of times”). Next to the hardware store is an old bank: here, too, there are stairs that disappear into the earth, a yawning mouth cut into the ground. The dark-haired boy—the glarer—is just emerging into the sunshine. He has a rifle slung casually over one shoulder.
“Hey, Tack,” Sarah says shyly.
He ruffles her hair as he passes. “Boys only,” he says. “You know that.”
“I know, I know.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m just showing Lena around. That’s where the boys sleep,” Sarah explains to me.
So even the Invalids have not entirely done away with segregation. This small piece of normalcy—of familiarity—is a relief.
Tack’s eyes click to me, and he frowns.
“Hi.” My voice comes out as a squeak. I try, unsuccessfully, to smile. He’s very tall and, like everyone else in the Wilds, thin; but his forearms are roped with muscle, and his jaw is square and strong. He, too, has a procedural mark, a three-pronged scar behind his left ear. I wonder if it is a fake, like Alex’s was; or whether, perhaps, the cure didn’t work on him.
“Just stay out of the vaults.” The words are directed at Sarah, but he keeps his eyes locked on me. They are cold, appraising.
“We will,” Sarah says. As he stalks away, she whispers to me, “He’s like that with everyone.”
“I can see what Raven means about the attitude problem.”
“Don’t feel bad, though. I mean, you can’t take it personally.”
“I won’t,” I say, but the truth is that the brief encounter has shaken me. Everything is wrong here, upside down and inverted: the door frames that open into air, invisible structures—buildings, signposts, streets, still casting the shadow of the past over everything. I can feel them, can hear the rush of hundreds of feet, can hear old laughter running underneath the birdsong: a place built of memory and echo.
I am suddenly exhausted. We have made it only halfway down the old street, but my earlier resolution to walk the whole area now seems absurd. The brightness of the sun, the air and space around me—all of it feels disorienting. I turn around—too quickly, clumsily—and trip over a slab of limestone spattered in bird shit; for one second I am in free fall and then I’m landing, hard, facedown in the dirt.
“Lena!” Sarah is next to me in a second, helping to pull me to my feet. I’ve bitten down on my tongue and my mouth tastes like metal. “Are you okay?”
“Just give me a second,” I say, gasping a little. I sit back on the limestone. Something occurs to me: I don’t even know what day it is, what month. “What’s today’s date?” I ask Sarah.