“Then it’s decided. Tomorrow we can—”
Raven is cut off by the sound of shouting, a sudden flurry of voices. We all rise—an instinctive response.
“What the hell?” Tack has shouldered his rifle and is scanning the mass of trees that surround us, a tangled wall of branches and vines. The woods have fallen silent again.
“Shh.” Raven holds up a hand.
Then: “I need help out here, guys!” And then, “Shit.” There is a collective release, a relaxation of tension. We recognize Sparrow’s voice. He wandered away earlier to do his business in the woods.
“We got you, Sparrow!” Pike calls out. Figures race into the trees, turning to shadow as soon as they leave the small circumference of brightness cast by the fire. Julian and I stay where we are, and I notice that Alex does too. There is a confusion of voices and instructions—“Her legs, her legs, grab her legs”—and then Sparrow, Tack, Pike, and Dani are emerging once again into the clearing, each pair saddled with a body. At first I think they are each hauling an animal, bundled in tarps, but then I see a pale white arm, dangling toward the ground, starkly illuminated by the fire, and my stomach turns.
People.
“Water, get water!”
“Grab the kit, Raven, she’s bleeding.”
For a moment, I’m paralyzed. As Tack and Pike place the bodies down on the ground, near the fire, two faces are revealed: one old, dark, weather-beaten; a woman who has been in the Wilds for most of her life, if not all of it. Saliva is bubbling at the corners of her mouth, and her breathing is hoarse and full of fluid.
The other face is unexpectedly lovely. She must be my age or even a little younger. Her skin is the color of the inside of an almond, and her long, dark-brown hair is fanned out behind her in the dirt. For a moment I am jettisoned back to my own escape to the Wilds. Raven and Tack must have found me exactly this way—more dead than not, beaten and bruised.
Tack swivels around and catches me staring.
“A little help, Lena,” he says sharply. His voice snaps me out of my trance. I go and kneel beside him, next to the older woman. Raven, Pike, and Dani are taking care of the girl. Julian hovers behind me.
“What can I do?” he asks.
“We need clean water,” Tack says without looking up. He has his knife out and is cutting away her shirt. In places it seems almost melded with her skin—and then I see, horrified, that her lower half is badly burned, her legs covered with open sores and infection. I have to close my eyes for a second and will myself not to be sick. Julian brushes my shoulder once with his hand, then goes off in search of the water.
“Shit,” Tack mutters, as he uncovers yet another wound; this one a long, ragged cut along her shin, deep and welling with infection. “Shit.” The woman lets out a gurgled moan and then falls silent. “Don’t tap out on me now,” he says. He whips off his wind breaker. Sweat glistens on his forehead. We are close to the fire, which the others are stoking higher.
“I need a kit.” Tack grabs a hand towel and begins ripping it into strips, expertly and quickly. These will be tourniquets. “Someone get me a damn kit.”
The heat is a wall next to us. The dark smoke blots out the sky. It weaves its way into my thoughts, too, distorting my impressions, which begin to take on the quality of dream: the voices, the movement, the heat and the smell of bodies, all fractured and senseless. I can’t tell whether I am kneeling there for minutes or hours. At some point Julian returns, carrying a bucket of steaming water. Then he leaves and returns again. I am helping to clean the woman’s wounds, and after a time I stop seeing her body as skin and flesh, but as something twisted and warped and weird, like the dark pieces of petrified wood we turn up in the forest.
Tack tells me what to do and I do it. More water, cold this time. Clean cloth. I stand, move, take the objects that are given to me and return with them. More minutes pass; more hours.
At some point I look up and it is not Tack next to me, but Alex. He is sewing up a cut on the woman’s shoulder, using a regular sewing needle and long, dark thread. He is pale with concentration, but he moves fluidly and quickly. He has obviously had practice. It occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him—his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.
Our elbows touch. He draws away.
The smoke is coating my throat now, making it difficult to swallow. The air smells like ash. I continue cleaning the woman’s wooden legs and body, the way I used to help my aunt polish the mahogany table once a month, carefully and slowly.
Then Alex is gone, and Tack is next to me again. He puts his hands on my shoulders and draws me gently backward.
“It’s okay,” he’s saying. “Leave it. It’s all right. She doesn’t need you anymore.”
For a second I think, We did it, she’s safe now. But then, as Tack pilots me toward the tents, I see her face lit up in the glow of the fire—white, waxen, eyes open and staring blindly at the sky—and I know that she’s dead, and everything we did was for nothing.
Raven is still kneeling by the younger girl’s side, but her ministrations are less frantic now, and I can hear that the girl is breathing regularly.
Julian is already in the tent. I’m so tired, I feel as though I’m sleepwalking. He moves over and makes a space for me, and I practically collapse into him, into that little question mark formed by his body. My hair reeks of smoke.
“Are you okay?” Julian whispers, finding my hand in the dark.
“Fine,” I whisper back.
“Is she okay?”
“Dead,” I say shortly.
Julian sucks in a breath, and I feel his body stiffen behind me. “I’m sorry, Lena.”
“You can’t save them all,” I say. “That’s not how it works.” That is what Tack would say, and I know it’s true, even if, deep down, I still don’t quite believe it.
Julian squeezes me, and kisses the back of my head, and then I let myself tunnel down into sleep, and away from the smell of burning.
Hana
For a second night, the fog of my sleep is disturbed by an image: two eyes, floating up through darkened murk. Then the eyes are disks of light, headlights bearing down on me—I’m frozen in the middle of the road, surrounded by the heavy smells of garbage and car exhaust…gripped, motionless, in the roaring heat from an engine….
I wake up just before midnight, sweating.
This can’t be happening. Not to me.
I stand up and fumble toward the bathroom, bumping my shin against one of the unpacked boxes in my room. Even though we moved in late January, more than two months ago, I haven’t bothered to unpack anything other than the basics. In less than three weeks I’ll be married, and I’ll have to move again. Besides, my old belongings—the stuffed animals and books and funny porcelain figurines I used to collect as a kid—don’t mean very much to me anymore.
In the bathroom, I splash cold water on my face, trying to shock out the memory of those headlight-eyes, the tightness in my chest, the terror of being flattened. I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, that the cure works a little bit differently for everyone.