Chubs nodded; we watched Liam go in silence, then Chubs turned to me. “Ruby,” he began, voice perfectly serious. “Can you tell me who the president is?”
I blinked. “Can you tell me why you’re asking this question?”
“Do you remember what happened?”
Did I? The memory was milky and distorted, like I was glimpsing someone else’s dream. “Angry man,” I said. “Rifle. Ruby’s head. Ouch.”
“Cut it out; I’m being serious!”
I winced, touching the stitching in my forehead again. “Can you keep your voice down? It feels like my head is about to cave in.”
“Yeah, well, serves you right for scaring the hell out of all of us. Here, keep drinking this,” he said, handing me what was left of our water bottle. It didn’t matter that the water was stale or warm; I finished it off in one gulp. “I mean, my dad used to say that head wounds look worse than they actually are, but I legitimately thought you were a corpse.”
“Thanks for stitching me up,” I said. “I’m looking a little Frankenstein, but I guess it’s appropriate, all things considered.”
Chubs gave me a weary sigh. “Frankenstein is the name of the doctor that created the monster, not the monster itself.”
“Couldn’t let that one go, could you?”
“Don’t get on my case about it. You’re the one that doesn’t know her classic literature.”
“Funny, I don’t think they had that one in Thurmond’s library.” I hadn’t meant for it to come out as sharply as it did, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience being reminded that your education level equaled that of a ten-year-old.
He had the decency to look apologetic as he let out a deep sigh. “It’s just…take it easy, will you? My heart can only take so much stress.”
All along, while listening to Chubs and Liam try to talk me down, some part of me had been trying to work through the argument I had overheard. I could understand, as horrifying as it was, the need to leave Betty behind. The PSFs and skip tracers all seemed to know to look for her now. But there had been something else underlying their words—something else that had them at odds. I had a feeling I knew exactly what it was, but I couldn’t ask Liam. I wanted the truth, not a sugarcoated version of it. The Team Reality take. Only Chubs could give that to me.
But I hesitated, because next to his feet, on the ground between us, was Chubs’s copy of Watership Down. And I kept thinking about this one line, the one that had made me so angry the first time I read it as a little kid.
Rabbits need dignity and, above all, the will to accept their fate.
In the book, the rabbits had come across this warren—this community—that accepted food handouts from humans in exchange for accepting that some of them would be killed by the same humans in return. Those rabbits stopped fighting the system, because it was easier to take the loss of freedom, to forget what it was like before the fence kept them in, than to be out there in the world struggling to find shelter and food. They had decided that the loss of some was worth the temporary comfort of many.
“Will it always be this way?” I asked, drawing my knees up to my chest and pressing my face against them. “Even if we find East River and we get help—there’s always going to be a Lady Jane around the corner, isn’t there? Will it even be worth it?”
The will to accept their fate. In our case, that fate was to never see our families again. To always be hunted and chased down to every dark pocket of earth we tried to hide inside. Something had to give—we couldn’t live that way. We weren’t made to.
I felt him drop a heavy palm on the back of my head, but it was a long time before he could piece together his thoughts.
“Maybe nothing will ever change for us,” he said. “But don’t you want to be around just in case it does?”
I don’t know if it was the smoke from the campfire that calmed me, or the sudden reappearance of Zu, who had come back from scouting a nearby campsite, making sure it was deserted. As she wrapped her arms around my waist, the boys began to pool together what was left of the food in Betty.
“So that’s how you figured out the clue,” Liam said. “You saw a memory of it?”
I nodded. “Not so impressive now, is it?”
“No—no, that’s not what I meant,” Liam said, adding quickly, “It’s just I’m trying to imagine what the inside of that kid’s head looked like, and the best I can come up with is a swamp filled with alligators. It must have been terrible.”
“Not as terrible as slipping into someone’s head I actually like,” I admitted.
“Did you?” Chubs said after nearly ten minutes of silence. Liam was busy testing out whether he could use Betty’s car key to pry open the lids of the fruit and soup cans.
“Did I what?”
“Did you ever get inside our heads?” he finished. The way he asked reminded me of the way a kid would ask for the end of a bedtime story. Eager. Surprising—in all of my nightmares about them finding out the truth, I had pictured Chubs taking it the worst.
“Of course she’s in our heads,” Liam said, his arms straining to open the can’s lid. “Ruby is one of us now.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Chubs huffed. “I just want to know how it works. I’ve never met an Orange before. We didn’t have any at Caledonia.”
“That’s probably because the government erased them all,” I said, dropping my hands in my lap. “That’s what happened to them at Thurmond.”
Liam looked up, alarmed. “What do you mean?”
“For the first two or three years I was there, we had every kind of color, even Red and Orange,” I said. “But…no one really knows why or how it happened. Some people thought they were taken away because of all the trouble they caused, but there were rumors they were being moved to a new camp where they could do more testing on them. We just woke up one morning and the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows were gone.” And it was just as terrifying for me to think about now as it was then.
“What about you, though?” Chubs asked. “How did you avoid getting bused?”
“I pretended to be Green from the start,” I said. “I saw how scared the PSFs were of the Oranges, and I messed with the scientist who was running the classifying test.” It was a struggle to push the rest of the words out. “Those kids were…they were so messed up, you know? Maybe they were like that before they got their abilities, or they hated themselves for having them, but they used to do terrible things.”