Requiem

“I’m okay,” I tell him. “I’ll explain later.” There’s a bubble of air caught in my chest, making it hard to breathe or speak.

He doesn’t know. Nobody knows, except for Raven and maybe Tack. They’ve worked with Bee before.

Now my mother won’t look at me at all. She accepts a cup of water from Raven and begins to drink. And just that—that small motion—makes anger uncoil inside me.

“I shot a deer today,” Julian is saying. “Tack spotted it halfway across the clearing. I didn’t think I had a chance—”

“Good for you,” I cut him off. “You pulled a trigger.”

Julian looks hurt. I’ve been horrible to him for days now. This is the problem: Take away the cure, and the primers, and the codes, and you are left with no rules to follow. Love comes only in flashes.

“It’s food, Lena,” he says quietly. “Didn’t you always tell me that this wasn’t a game? I’m playing for real—for keeps.” He pauses. “To stay.” He emphasizes the last part, and I know that he is thinking of Alex, and then I can’t help but think of him too.

I need to keep moving, find my balance, get away from the stifling room.

“Lena.” Raven is at my side. “Help me get some food on, will you?”

This is Raven’s rule: Stay busy. Go through the motions. Stand up.

Open a can. Pull water.

Do something.

I follow her automatically to the sink.

“Any news from Waterbury?” Tack asks.

For a moment there is silence. My mother is the one to speak.

“Gone,” she says simply.

Raven accidentally slices too hard through a strip of dried meat, and pulls her finger away, gasping, sucking it in her mouth.

“What do you mean, gone?” Tack’s voice is sharp.

“Wiped out.” This time Cap speaks up. “Mowed down.”

“Oh my God.” Hunter thuds heavily into a chair. Julian is standing perfectly rigid, taut, hands clenched; Tack’s face has turned stony. My mother—the woman who was my mother—sits with her hands folded on her lap, motionless, expressionless. Only Raven continues moving, wrapping a kitchen towel around her cut finger, sawing through the dried meat, back and forth, back and forth.

“So what now?” Julian asks, voice tight.

My mother looks up. Something old and deep flexes inside me. Her eyes are still the vivid blue I remember, still unchanged, like a sky to tumble into. Like Julian’s eyes.

“We have to move,” she says. “Give support where it can do good. The resistance is still gathering strength, gathering people—”

“What about Pippa?” Hunter bursts out. “Pippa said to wait for her. She said—”

“Hunter,”Tack says. “You heard what Cap said.” He lowers his voice. “Wiped out.”

There’s another moment of heavy silence. I see a muscle twitch in my mother’s jaw—a new tic—and she turns away, so I can see the faded green number tattooed along her neck, just beneath the vicious spate of angry scars, the products of all her failed procedures. I think about the years she spent in her tiny, windowless cell in the Crypts, chipping away at the walls with the metal pendant my father had given her, carving the word Loveendlessly over the stone. And somehow, now, after less than a year of freedom, she has entered the resistance. More than that. She is at its center.

I don’t know this woman at all; I don’t know how she became who she is, or when her jaw began to twitch and her hair began to gray, and she began to pull a veil over her eyes, and avoid the gaze of her daughter.

“So where do we go?” Raven asks.

Max and Cap exchange a look. “There’s something stirring up north,” Max says. “In Portland.”

“Portland?” I parrot the word without meaning to speak. My mother glances up at me, and I think she looks afraid. Then she drops her eyes.

“That’s where you come from, right?” Raven asks me.

I lean back against the sink, close my eyes for a second, and have a vision of my mother on the beach, ru

“I can’t go back there.”

The words come out with more force than I intended, and everyone turns to look at me.

“If we go anywhere, we all go together,” Raven says.

“There’s a big underground in Portland,” Max says. “The network is growing—has been since the Incidents. That was only the begi

“I can’t,” I repeat. “And I won’t.” Memories are coming fast: Hana ru

And with the memories comes the guilt, another feeling I have tried so hard to bury. I left them: Hana and Grace, and Alex, too. I left them and I ran, and I didn’t look back.

“It’s not your decision,” Tack says.

Raven says, “Don’t be a baby, Lena.”

Normally, I back down when Raven and Tack gang up on me. But not today. I push the guilt down under a heavy fist of anger. Everyone is staring at me, but I can feel my mother’s eyes like a burn—her blank curiosity, as though I’m a specimen in a museum, some ancient, foreign tool whose purpose she’s trying to decipher.

“I won’t.” I slam down the can opener, too hard, on the counter.

“What’s the matter with you?” Raven says in a low voice. But it has gone so quiet in the room, I’m sure that everyone hears.

My throat is so tight I can hardly swallow. I realize, all of a sudden, that I am on the verge of tears. “Ask her,” I manage to say, jerking my chin toward the woman who calls herself Bee.

There’s another moment of silence. All the eyes turn on my mother now. At least she looks guilty—she knows she’s a fraud, this woman who wants to lead a revolution for love and doesn’t even acknowledge her own daughter.

Just then Bram comes sailing down the stairs, whistling. He’s holding a large knife, which is wet with blood—he must have been cutting up the deer. His T-shirt is streaked with it too. He stops when he sees us standing there in silence.

“What’s up?” he says. “What’d I miss?” Then, as he takes in my mom, Cap, and Max: “Who are you?”

The sight of all that blood makes my stomach heave. We’re killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses. Before I can begin crying, I wrench away from the sink and push past Bram so roughly, he lets out a yelp of surprise. I pound up the stairs and throw myself outside, into the open air and the warm afternoon and the throaty sound of the woods opening up to spring.

But even outside I feel claustrophobic. There’s no place to go. There’s no way to escape the crushing sense of loss, the endless exhaustion of time sawing away at the people and things that I’ve loved.

Hana, Grace, Alex, my mother, the sea-spray salt-air Portland mornings and the distant cries of the wheeling seagulls—all of them broken, splintered, lodged somewhere deep, impossible to shake loose.

Maybe, after all, they were right about the cure. I am no happier than I was when I believed that love was a disease. In many ways, I am less happy.

I get only a few minutes away from the safe house before I stop fighting the pressure behind my eyes. My first cries are convulsions, and bring up the taste of bile. I let go completely. I sink onto the tangle of undergrowth and soft moss, put my head between my legs, and sob until I can’t breathe, until I’m spitting up on the leaves between my legs. I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind—by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.