“I hope the conversation didn’t upset you.”
I turn around. Fred has followed me into the kitchen. He leaves a respectful distance between us.
“It didn’t,” I say. I’m too tired to reassure him further. I just want to go home.
“You don’t have a fever, do you?” Fred looks at me steadily. “You look pale.”
“I’m just tired,” I say.
“Good.” Fred puts his hands in his pockets, dark, creased in front, like my father’s. “I was worried I’d gotten a defective one.”
I shake my head, sure that I’ve misheard him. “What?”
“I’m kidding.” Fred smiles. He has a dimple in his left cheek, and very nice teeth; I appreciate that about him. “I’ll see you soon.” He leans forward and kisses my cheek. I draw back involuntarily. I’m still not used to being touched by him. “Go get your beauty sleep.”
“I will,” I say, but he’s already pushing out of the kitchen and returning to the dining room, where soon, dessert and coffee will be served. In three weeks, he will be my husband, and this will be my kitchen, and the housekeeper will be mine too. Mrs. Hargrove will have to listen to me, and I will choose what we eat every day, and there will be nothing left to want.
Unless Fred is right. Unless I am a defective one.
Lena
The argument continues: where to go, whether to split up.
Some members of the group want to loop south again, and then east to Waterbury, where there are rumors of a successful resistance movement and a large camp of Invalids flourishing in safety. Some want to head all the way out to Cape Cod, which is practically unpopulated and will therefore be a safer place to camp out. A few of us—Gordo, in particular—want to continue north and try to make a break across the U.S. border and into Canada.
In school we were always taught that other countries—places without the cure—had been ravaged by the disease and turned into wastelands. But this, like most other things we were taught, was no doubt a lie. Gordo has heard stories from trappers and drifters about Canada, and he makes it sound like Eden in The Book of Shhh.
“I say Cape Cod,” Pike says. He has white-blond hair, ruthlessly trimmed down to the scalp. “If the bombing begins again—”
“If the bombing begins again, we won’t be safe anywhere,” Tack interrupts him. Pike and Tack are constantly butting heads.
“We’re safer the farther we are from a city,” Pike argues. If the resistance turns into a full-on rebellion, we can expect swift and immediate reprisals from the government. “We’ll have more time.”
“To what? Swim across the ocean?” Tack shakes his head. He is squatting next to Raven, who is repairing one of our traps. It’s amazing how happy she looks here, sitting in the dirt, after a long day of hiking and trapping—happier than she did when we lived together in Brooklyn, posing as cureds, in our nice apartment with shiny edges and polished hard surfaces. There, she was like one of the women we studied in history class, who laced themselves up in corsets until they could barely breathe or speak: white-faced, stifled. “Look, we can’t outrun this. We might as well join forces, build our numbers as best we can.”
Tack catches my eye across the campfire. I smile at him. I don’t know how much Tack and Raven have deciphered about what has happened between Alex and me, and what our history is—they’ve said nothing to me about it—but they have been nicer to me than usual.
“I’m with Tack,” Hunter says. He tosses a bullet into the air, catches it on the back of his hand, then flips it into his palm.
“We could split up,” Raven suggests for the hundredth time. It’s obvious she doesn’t like Pike, or Dani, either. In this new group, the lines of dominance haven’t been so clearly drawn, and what Tack and Raven say doesn’t automatically pass for gospel.
“We’re not splitting up,” Tack says firmly. But immediately he takes the trap from her and says, “Let me help you.”
This is how Tack and Raven work: It’s their private language of push and return, argument and concession. With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered.
Freedom is exhausting.
“What do you think, Lena?” Raven asks, and Pike, Dani, and the others swivel around to look at me. Now that I’ve proven myself to the resistance, my opinion carries weight. From the shadows, I can sense Alex looking at me too.
“Cape Cod,” I say, feeding more kindling into the fire. “The farther we are from the cities, the better, and any advantage is better than none. It’s not like we’ll be alone. There will be other homesteaders there, other groups to join with.” My voice rings out loudly in the clearing. I wonder if Alex has noticed this change: I have gotten louder and more confident.
There’s a moment of quiet. Raven looks at me thoughtfully. Then, abruptly, she turns and shoots a glance over her shoulder. “What about you, Alex?”
“Waterbury,” he answers immediately. My stomach knots up. I know it’s stupid—I know the stakes are higher than the two of us—but I can’t help but feel a flash of anger. Of course he disagrees with me. Of course.
“It’s no advantage to be cut off from communication and information,” he says. “There’s a war on. We can try to deny it, we can try to bury our heads in the sand, but that’s the truth. And the war will find us either way eventually. I say we meet it head-on.”
“He’s right,” Julian pipes up.
I turn to him, startled. He hardly ever speaks in the evenings around the campfire. I don’t think he feels comfortable yet. He is still the newbie, the outsider—and even worse, a convert from the other side. Julian Fineman, son of the late Thomas Fineman, founder and head of Deliria-Free America, and enemy to everything we stand for. It doesn’t matter that Julian turned his back on his family and cause—and nearly gave up his life—to be here with us. I can tell that some people don’t trust him.
Julian speaks with the measured cadence of a practiced public speaker. “There’s no point in using avoidance tactics. This won’t blow over. If the resistance grows, the government and the military will do anything they can to stop it. We’ll have a better chance of fighting back if we put ourselves in the middle of things. Otherwise we’ll just be rabbits in a hole, waiting to be flushed out.”
Even though Julian agrees with Alex, he is careful to keep his eyes trained on Raven. Julian and Alex never speak to or even look at each other, and the others are careful not to comment on it.
“I say Waterbury,” Lu puts in, which surprises me. Last year, she didn’t want anything to do with the resistance. She wanted to disappear into the Wilds, make a homestead as far as possible from the Valid cities.
“All right, then.” Raven stands up, brushing off the back of her jeans. “Waterbury it is. Any other objections?”
We’re all silent for a minute, looking at one another, our faces consumed by shadow. No one speaks. I’m not happy with the decision, and Julian must sense it. He puts a hand on my knee and squeezes.