Requiem

My eyes land on the single painting in the room: the man, the hunter, and the butchered carcasses.

Only this time, I don’t look away.

There’s something wrong with the hunter—he’s dressed too well, in an old-fashioned suit and polished boots. Unconsciously, I take two steps closer, horrified and unable to look away. The animals strung from meat hooks aren’t animals at all.

They’re women.

Corpses, human corpses, strung from the ceiling and piled on the marble floor.

Next to the artist’s signature is a small, painted note: The Myth of Bluebeard, or, The Dangers of Disobedience.

I feel a need I can’t exactly name—to speak, or scream, or run. Instead I sit down on the stiff-backed leather chair behind the desk, lean forward, and rest my head on my arms, and try to remember how to cry. But nothing comes except for a faint itch in my throat and a headache.

I don’t know how long I have been sitting like that when I become aware of a siren drawing closer. Then the room is thrown, suddenly, into color: flashes of red and white burst intermittently through the windowpane. The sirens are still going, though—and then I realize that they are everywhere, both near and close, some wailing shrilly just down the street and some no louder than an echo.

Something is wrong.

I move out into the hall, just as several doors slam at once. The murmur of conversation and the music have stopped. Instead I hear people shouting over one another. Fred bursts into the hall and comes striding toward me, just after I’ve closed the door to his study.

He stops when he sees me. “Where were you?” he asks.

“The porch,” I say quickly. My heart is beating hard. “I needed some air.”

He opens his mouth; just then my mother comes into the hall, her face pale.

“Hana,” she says. “There you are.”

“What happened?” I ask. More and more people are flowing out of the living room: regulators in their pressed uniforms, Fred’s bodyguards, two solemn-faced police officers, and Patrick Riley, wrestling on his blazer. Cell phones are ringing, and bursts of walkie-talkie static fill the hall.

“There’s been a disturbance at the border wall,” my mother says, her eyes flitting nervously to Fred.

“Resisters.” I can tell from my mother’s expression that my guess is right.

“They’ve been killed, of course,” Fred says loudly, so everyone can hear.

“How many were there?” I ask.

Fred turns to me as he’s shoving his arms into his suit coat, which a gray-faced regulator has just passed him. “Does it matter? We’ve taken care of it.”

My mother shoots me a look and gives me a minute shake of the head.

Behind him, a policeman murmurs into his walkie-talkie. “Ten-four, ten-four, we’re on our way.”

“You ready?” Patrick Riley asks Fred.

Fred nods. Instantly, his cell phone starts blaring. He removes it from his pocket and silences it quickly. “Shit. We better hurry. The office phones are probably going crazy.”

My mom places an arm around my shoulders. I’m momentarily startled. It’s very rare that we touch like this. She must be more worried than she seems.

“Come on,” she says. “Your father’s waiting for us.”

“Where are we going?” I ask. She’s already moving me toward the front of the house.

“Home,” she says.

Outside, the guests are already amassing. We join the line of people waiting for their cars. We see seven and eight people piling into sedans, women in long gowns squeezing on top of one another in backseats. It’s obvious that no one wants to walk the streets, which are filled with the distant sounds of wailing.

My father ends up riding in the front with Tony. My mom and I squeeze into the backseat with Mr. and Mrs. Brande, who both work in the Department of Sanitization. Normally, Mrs. Brande can’t stop ru

It begins to rain. The streetlamps pattern the windows with broken halos of light. Now, alert with fear and anxiety, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. I make a sudden decision: no more going to Deering Highlands. It’s too dangerous. Lena’s family is not my problem. I have done all I can do.

The guilt is still there, pressing at my throat, but I swallow it down.

We pass under another streetlamp, and the rain on the windows becomes long fingers; then once again the car is swallowed in darkness. I imagine I see different figures moving through the dark, skating next to the car, faces merging in and out of the shadow. For a second, as we move beneath another streetlamp, I see a hooded figure emerging from the woods at the side of the road. Our eyes meet, and I let out a small cry.

Alex. It’s Alex.

“What’s the matter?” my mother asks tensely.

“Nothing, I—” By the time I turn around, he is gone, and then I’m sure I only imagined him. I must have imagined him. Alex is dead; he was taken down at the border and never made it into the Wilds. I swallow hard. “I thought I saw something.”

“Don’t worry, Hana,” my mother says. “We’re perfectly safe in the car.” But she leans forward and says, sharply, to Tony, “Can’t you drive any faster?”

I think of the new wall, lit up by a spi

What if there are more of them? What if they’re coming for us?

I have a vision of Lena moving out there, sneaking through the streets, ducking between shadows, holding a knife. For a moment my lungs stop moving.

But no. She doesn’t know I was the one who gave her and Alex away. No one knows.

Besides, she is probably dead.

And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.

Would she?

Lena

The pla

At one point Max and Raven emerge from the trailer to pee in the woods—their faces drawn and serious—but when I beg Raven to let me join the meeting, she cuts me down immediately.

“Go to bed, Lena,” she says. “Everything’s under control.”

It must be almost midnight; Julian has been asleep for hours. I can’t imagine lying down right now. I feel like my blood is full of thousands of ants—my arms and legs are crawling, itching to move, to dosomething. I walk in circles, trying to shake the feeling, and fuming—a

I was the one who got Julian out of the underground. I was the one who risked my life to sneak into New York City and save him. I was the one who got into Waterbury; I was the one who found out Lu was a fraud. And now Raven tells me to go to bed, like I’m an unruly five-year-old.

I take aim at a tin cup that has been lying, half-buried in ash, at the edge of a burned-out campfire, and watch as it rockets twenty feet and pings off the side of a trailer. A man calls out, “Take it easy!” But I don’t care if I’ve woken him up. I don’t care if I wake the whole damn camp up.