Sarah must sense my anxiety. “Come on,” she says. “You can sit next to me.” She reaches out and takes my elbow, steering me toward the table. This, too, is surprising. In Portland, in bordered communities, everyone is very careful about touching. Even Hana and I hardly ever hugged or put our arms around each other, and she was my best friend.
A cramp runs through me, and I double over, almost dropping my plate.
“Easy.” Across the table is the blond-haired boy, the one who looked as though he could hardly contain his laughter earlier. He raises his eyebrows; they’re the same pale blond as his hair, practically invisible. I notice that he, like Raven, has a procedural mark behind his left ear, and like hers, it must be fake. Only uncureds live in the Wilds; only people who have chosen, or been forced, to flee the bordered cities. “You okay?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. A whole lifetime of fears and warnings beat through me, and words flash rapidly in my mind: illegal, wrong, sympathizer, disease. I take a deep breath, try to ignore the bad feeling. Those are Portland words, old words; they, like the old me, have been left behind the fence.
“She’s fine,” Sarah jumps in. “She’s just hungry.”
“I’m fine,” I echo about fifteen seconds too late. The boy smirks again.
Sarah slides onto the bench and pats the empty space next to her, which Squirrel has just vacated. At least we’re at the very end of the table, and I don’t have to worry about being sandwiched next to someone else. I sit down, keeping my eyes on my plate. I can feel everyone watching me again. At least the conversation continues, a comforting blanket of noise.
“Go ahead.” Sarah looks at me encouragingly.
“I don’t have a fork,” I say quietly. The blond guy does laugh then, loud and long. So does Sarah.
“No forks,” she says. “No spoons. No nothing. Just eat.”
I risk glancing up and see that the people around me are watching, smiling, apparently amused. One of them, a grizzled, gray-haired man who must be at least seventy, nods at me, and I drop my eyes quickly. My whole body is hot with embarrassment. Of course they wouldn’t care about silverware and things like that in the Wilds.
I take the piece of rabbit with my hands, tear a tiny bit of flesh from the bone. And then I think I really might cry: Never in my whole life has anything tasted this good.
“Good, huh?” Sarah says, but I can’t do anything but nod. Suddenly I forget about the roomful of strangers and all the people watching me. I tear at the rabbit like an animal. I shovel up a bit of slop with my fingers, suck them into my mouth. Even that tastes good to me. Aunt Carol would absolutely flip if she could see me. When I was little, I wouldn’t even eat my peas if they were touching my chicken; I used to make neat compartments on my plate.
All too soon the plate is clean, except for a few bones. I drag the back of my hand across my mouth. I feel a surge of nausea and I close my eyes, willing it away.
“All right,” Raven says, standing abruptly. “Time for rounds.”
There’s a flurry of activity: people scraping away from their benches, bursts of conversations I can’t follow (“Laid traps yesterday,” “Your turn to check Grandma”), and people are passing behind me, releasing their plates noisily into the basin, then stomping up the stairs to my left, just past the stove. I can feel their bodies, and smell them, too: a flow, a warm, human river. I keep my eyes closed, and as the room empties, the nausea subsides somewhat.
“How are you feeling?”
I open my eyes and Raven is standing across from me, leaning both hands on the table. Sarah is still sitting next to me. She has brought one leg to her chest, on the bench, and is hugging her knee. In this pose, she actually looks her age.
“Better,” I say, which is true.
“You can help Sarah with the dishes,” she says, “if you’re feeling up to it.”
“Okay,” I say, and she nods.
“Good. And afterward, Sarah, you can take her up. You might as well get a feel for the homestead, Lena. But don’t push it, either. I don’t want to have to drag your ass out of the woods again.”
“Okay,” I repeat, and she smiles, satisfied. She’s obviously used to giving orders. I wonder how old she is. She speaks with such easy command, even though she must be younger than half the Invalids here. I think, Hana would like her, and the pain returns, knifing just below my ribs.
“And Sarah”—Raven is heading for the stairs—“get Lena some pants from the store, okay? So she doesn’t have to prance around half-naked.”
I feel myself going red again, and reflexively start fiddling with the hem of my shirt, tugging it lower down my thighs. Raven catches me and laughs.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.” Then she takes the stairs two at a time, and is gone.
I used to be on dish duty every night at Aunt Carol’s house, and I got used to it. But washing dishes in the Wilds is another story. First there’s the water. Sarah leads me back through the hall, to one of the rooms I passed on my way to the kitchen.
“This is the supply room,” she says, and for a moment frowns at all the empty shelves and the mostly used bag of flour. “We’re running a little low,” she explains, as though I can’t see that for myself. I feel a twist of anxiety—for her, for Blue, for everyone here, all that bone and thinness.
“Over here is where we keep the water. We pull it in the mornings—not me, I’m too small still.” She’s over in the corner by the buckets, which now I see are full. She hefts one up by its handle with both hands, grunting. It’s oversized, nearly as big as her torso. “One more should do it,” she says. “A small one should be okay.” She toddles out of the room, straining, with the bucket in front of her.
I find, to my embarrassment, that I can barely lift one of the smallest buckets. Its metal handle digs painfully into the palms of my hands—which are still covered in scabs and blisters from my time alone in the Wilds—and before I’ve even reached the hallway I have to set the bucket down and lean against the wall.
“You okay?” Sarah calls back.
“Fine!” I say, a little too sharply. There’s no way I’m going to let her come to my rescue. I heave the bucket in the air again, advance forward a few halting steps, place it on the ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. By the time I reach the kitchen, I’m out of breath and sweating; salt stings my eyes. Fortunately, Sarah doesn’t notice. She’s squatting at the stove, poking around at the fire with the charred end of a wooden stick, coaxing it higher.
“We boil the water in the mornings,” she says, “to sanitize it. We have to, or we’ll be shitting a river from breakfast to dinner.” In her last words, I recognize Raven’s voice; this must be one of her mantras.
“Where does the water come from?” I ask, grateful that she has her back to me so that I can rest, momentarily, on one of the nearest benches.
“Cocheco River,” she says. “It’s not too far. A mile, a mile and a half, tops.”
Impossible: I can’t imagine carrying those buckets, full, for a mile.