Thankfully, we make it to the border wall without encountering any patrols, and locate a rusty metal stairwell that leads up to the guards’ walkway, which is also empty; we must be at the southernmost end of the city right now, very close to the camp, and security is concentrated in more populated portions of Waterbury.
Coral mounts the stairs shakily and I go behind her, to make sure she won’t fall, but she refuses my help and jerks away from me when I place a hand on her back. In just a few hours, my respect for her has increased tenfold. As we reach the walkway, the alarm in the distance finally stops, and the sudden quiet is somehow scarier: a silent scream.
Getting down the other side of the wall is trickier. The drop from the top is a good fifteen feet, onto a steep, loose slope of gravel and rock. I go first, swinging out, hand over hand, on one of the disabled floodlights; when I let go and drop to the ground, I slide forward several feet, thudding onto my knees, and feel the gravel bite through my denim. Coral follows after me, her face pale with concentration, landing with a small cry of pain.
I don’t know what I was expecting—I had feared, I think, that the tanks would have already arrived, that we would find the camp already consumed by fire and chaos—but it stretches before us as it ever did, a vast and pitted field of peaked tents and shelters. Beyond it, across the valley, are the high cliffs, capped with a shaggy black mass of trees.
“How long do you think we have?” Coral says. I know without asking that she means before the troops come.
“Not long enough,” I say.
We move in silence toward the outskirts of the camp—walking the periphery will still be quicker than trying to navigate the maze of people and tents. The river is still dry. The plan obviously failed. Raven and the others did not manage to disable the dam—not that it matters much, at this point.
All these people . . . thirsty, exhausted, weak. They’ll be easier to corral.
And, of course, far easier to kill.
By the time we make it back to Pippa’s camp, my throat is so dry I can hardly swallow. For a second, when Julian rushes toward me, I don’t recognize his face: It is a collection of random shapes and shadows.
Behind him, Alex turns away from the fire. He meets my eyes and starts toward me, mouth open, hands extended. Everything freezes, and I know I’ve been forgiven and I reach out my hands—reach out my arms to him . . .
“Lena!” Then Julian is sweeping me into his arms, and I snap back into myself, press my cheek against his chest. Alex must have been reaching for Coral; I hear him murmuring to her, and as I pull away from Julian, I see that Alex is leading Coral back toward one of the campfires. I was so sure, for just that one second, that he was reaching for me.
“What happened?” Julian asks, cupping my face and bending down a little bit so that we’re nearly eye to eye. “Bram told us—”
“Where’s Raven?” I say, cutting him off.
“I’m right here.” She flows out of the dark, and suddenly I am surrounded: Bram, Hunter, Tack, and Pippa, all speaking at once, firing questions at me.
Julian keeps one hand on my back. Hunter offers me a drink from a plastic jug, which is mostly empty. I take it gratefully.
“Is Coral okay?”
“You’re bleeding, Lena.”
“God. What happened?”
“There’s no time.” The water has helped, but still the words shred my throat. “We have to leave. We have to get everyone we can, and we have to—”
“Slow down, slow down.” Pippa holds up both hands. Half her face is lit by the fire; the other is plunged in darkness. I think of Lu and feel nauseous: a half person, a two-faced traitor.
“Start from the beginning,” Raven says.
“We had to fight,” I say. “We had to go inside.”
“We thought you might have been taken,” Tack says. I can tell he’s hopped up, anxious; everybody is. The whole group is charged with bad electricity. “After the ambush—”
“Ambush?” I repeat sharply. “What do you mean, ambush?”
“We never made it to the dam,” Raven says. “Alex and Beast managed to get their blast off okay. We were a half-dozen feet from the wall when a group of regulators started swarming us. It was like they were waiting. We would have been screwed if Julian hadn’t spotted the movement and given the alarm early.”
Alex has joined the group. Coral gets clumsily to her feet, her mouth a fine, dark line. I think she looks more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. My heart squeezes once, tight, in my chest. I can see why Alex likes her.
Maybe even why he loves her.
“We beat it back here,” Pippa pipes up. “Then Bram showed up. We’ve been debating whether to go looking—”
“Where’s Dani?” I notice, for the first time, that she isn’t with the group.
“Dead,” Raven says shortly, avoiding my eyes. “And Lu was taken. We couldn’t get to them in time. I’m sorry, Lena,” she finishes in a softer voice, and looks at me again.
I feel another surge of nausea. I wrap my arms around my stomach, as though I can press it deep and down. “Lu wasn’t taken,” I say. My voice comes out as a bark. “And they were waiting for you. The regulators. It was a trap.”
There’s a second of silence. Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Alex is the one who speaks.
“What are you talking about?”
It’s the first time he has spoken to me directly since that night on the banks, after the regulators burned our camp.
“Lu isn’t what we thought she was,” I say. “She isn’t who we thought she was. She’s been cured.”
More silence: a sharp, shocked minute of it.
Finally Raven bursts out, “How do you know?”
“I saw the mark,” I say. Suddenly I’m exhausted. “And she told me.”
“Impossible,” Hunter says. “I was with her. . . . We went to Maryland together. . . .”
“It’s not impossible,” Raven says slowly. “She told me she’d broken off from the group for a while, spent some time floating between homesteads.”
“She was only gone for a few weeks.” Hunter looks at Bram for confirmation. Bram nods.
“That’s time enough.” Julian speaks softly. Alex glares at him. But Julian’s right: It is time enough.
Raven’s voice is strained. “Go on, Lena.”
“They’re bringing in troops,” I say. Once the words leave my mouth I feel like I’ve been socked in the stomach.
There’s another moment of silence. “How many?” Pippa demands.
“Ten thousand.” I can barely speak the words.
There is a sharp intake of breath, gasps from all around the circle. Pippa stays laser-focused on me. “When?”
“Less than twenty-four hours,” I say.
“If she was telling the truth,” Bram says.
Pippa runs a hand through her hair, making it stick up in spikes. “I don’t believe it,” she says, but adds almost immediately, “I was worried something like this might happen.”
“I’ll fucking kill her,” Hunter says softly.
“What do we do now?” Raven addresses the comment to Pippa.
Pippa is silent for a second, staring at the fire. Then she rouses herself. “We do nothing,” she says firmly, sweeping her eyes deliberately around the group: from Tack and Raven to Hunter and Bram; to Beast and Alex and Coral, and to Julian. Finally her eyes click to mine, and I involuntarily draw back. It’s as though a door has closed inside her. For once, she isn’t pacing. “Raven, you and Tack will lead the group to a safe house just outside of Hartford. Summer told me how to get there. Some contacts from the resistance will be there in the next few days. You’ll have to wait it out.”
“What about you?” Beast asks.
Pippa pushes her way out of the circle, stepping into the three-sided structure at the center of camp and moving toward the old refrigerator. “I’ll do what I can here,” she says.
Everyone speaks at once. Beast says, “I’m staying with you.”
Tack bursts out, “That’s suicide, Pippa.”
And Raven says, “You’re no match for ten thousand troops. You’ll be mowed down—”
Pippa raises a hand. “I’m not planning to fight,” she says. “I’ll do what I can to spread the word about what’s coming. I’ll try to clear the camp.”
“There’s no time.” Coral speaks up. Her voice is shrill. “The troops are already on their way. . . . There’s no time to move everyone, no time to get the word out—”
“I said I would do what I can.” Now Pippa’s voice turns sharp. She removes the key from around her neck and opens the lock around the fridge, removing food and medical equipment from the darkened shelves.
“We won’t leave without you,” Beast says stubbornly. “We’ll stay. We’ll help you clear the camp.”
“You’ll do what I say,” Pippa says, without turning around to face him. She squats and begins pulling blankets from under the bench. “You’ll go to the safe house and you’ll wait for the resistance.”
“No,” he says. “I won’t.” Their eyes meet: Some wordless dialogue flows between them, and at last, Pippa nods.
“All right,” she says. “But the rest of you need to clear out.”
“Pippa—” Raven starts to protest.
Pippa straightens up. “No arguing,” she says. Now I know where Raven learned her hardness, her way of leading people. “Coral is right about one thing,” Pippa continues quietly. “There’s hardly any time. I expect you out of here in twenty minutes.” She sweeps her eyes around the circle again. “Raven, take the supplies you think you’ll need. It’s a day’s walk to the safe house, more if you have to circumvent the troops. Tack, come with me. I’ll make you a map.”
The group breaks up. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or the fear, but everything seems to happen as it does in a dream: Tack and Pippa are crouching over something, gesticulating; Raven is rolling up food in blankets, tying up the bundles with old cord; Hunter is urging me to have more water and then, suddenly, Pippa is pressing us to go, go.
The moon beats down on the switchback paths cut in the hill, tawny-colored and dry, as though steeped in old blood. I shoot a last glance back down at the camp, at the sea of writhing shadows—people, all those people, who don’t know that even now the guns and the bombs and the troops are drawing closer.
Raven must sense it too: the new terror in the air, the proximity of death, the way an animal must feel when it is caught in a trap. She turns and shouts down to Pippa.
“Please, Pippa.” Her voice rolls off the bare slope. Pippa is standing at the bottom of the dirt path, watching us. Beast is standing behind her. She’s holding a lantern, which illuminates her face from below, carves it into stone, into planes of shadow and light.