Requiem

Page 42

I’ve lost Julian. No point in trying to find him now; I can only pray that he is safe, and that he’ll make it out of this mess unharmed. I don’t know what happened to Tack, either. Part of me hopes that he has retreated over the wall with Raven, and for a second I imagine that once he has gotten her back to the Wilds, she’ll wake up. She’ll open her eyes and find that the world has been rebuilt the way she wanted it.
Or maybe she won’t wake up. Maybe she is already on a different pilgrimage, and has gone to find Blue again.
I push my way toward the place I saw Pippa vanish, struggling to breathe in the smoke-clotted air. One of the guard huts is burning. I flash back to the old license plate we found, half-buried in the mud, during our migration from Portland last winter.
Live free or die.
I stumble over a body. My stomach heaves into my mouth—for a split second, I’m overcome by blackness, coiled tight in my stomach like Raven’s hair on Tack’s leg, Raven’s dead, oh God—but I swallow and breathe and keep going, keep fighting and pushing. We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
At last I break free of the fighting. I duck past the guard huts, breaking into a run on the gravel path that divides them, heading for the sparse group of trees that encircles Back Cove. My ankle hurts every time I put my weight down on it, but I don’t stop. I swipe my ear quickly with my sleeve and judge that the bleeding has already slowed.
The resistance may have a mission in Portland, but I have a mission of my own.
Hana
The alarms go off just before the priest can pronounce us husband and wife. One moment, everything is quiet and ordered. The music has died down, the crowd is silent, the priest’s voice resonates through the room, rolls out over the audience. In the quiet, I can hear each individual camera shutter: opening and closing, opening and closing, like metal lungs.
The next moment everything is motion and sound, shrieking chaos, sirens. And I know, in that instant, that the Invalids are here. They’ve come for us.
Hands grab me roughly from all sides.
“Move, move, move.” Bodyguards are piloting me toward the exit. Someone steps on the end of my gown, and I hear it rip. My eyes are stinging; I’m choking on the smell of too much aftershave, too many bodies crowding and pulling.
“Come on, hurry it up. Hurry it up.”
Walkie-talkies explode with static. Urgent voices shout in a coded language I don’t understand. I try to turn around to look for my mother and am nearly carried off my feet by the pressure of the guards moving me forward. I catch a glimpse of Fred surrounded by his security team. He’s white-faced, yelling into a cell phone. I will him to look at me—in that moment I forget about Cassie, I forget about everything. I need him to tell me we’re okay; I need him to explain what’s happening.
But he doesn’t even glance in my direction.
Outside, the glare is blinding. I squeeze my eyes shut. Journalists jostle close to the doors, blocking the way to the car. The long metal barrels of their camera lenses look for a second like guns, all directed straight at me.
They’re going to kill us all.
The bodyguards fight to clear space for me, shouldering apart the rushing stream of people. At last we reach the car. Once again, I look for Fred. Our eyes meet briefly across the crowd. He’s heading for a squad car.
“Take her to my house.” He yells this to Tony, then turns around and ducks into the back of a police car. That’s it. No words at all for me.
Tony puts a hand on top of my head and directs me roughly into the backseat. Two of Fred’s bodyguards slide in next to me, guns out. I want to ask them to put their weapons away, but my brain doesn’t seem to be working correctly. I can’t remember either of their names.
Tony jerks the car into gear, but the knots of people gathered in the parking lot mean that we’re trapped. Tony leans on the horn. I cover my ears and remind myself to breathe; we’re safe, we’re in the car, it will be okay. The police will take care of everything.
Finally, we begin to move forward, plowing steadily through the dispersing crowd. It takes us nearly twenty minutes to make it out of the long drive leading down to the labs. We turn right onto Commercial Street, which us clotted with more foot traffic. then zip against traffic into a narrow one-way street. In the car, everyone is silent, watching the blur of people in the streets—people running, panicked, undirected. Even though I can see people openmouthed, shouting, only the sound of the alarms penetrates the thick windows. Strangely, this is more frightening than anything—all these people voiceless, screaming silently.
We barrel down an alley so narrow, I’m positive we’ll get stuck between the brick walls on either side of us. Then we turn down another one-way street, this one relatively free of people. We blow straight past the stop signs, and jerk left into another alley. Finally, we’re really moving.
It occurs to me to try and reach my mother on her cell phone, but when I dial her number, the phone system keeps returning an error. The systems must be overloaded. I suddenly feel very small. The system is security; it is everything. In Portland, there is always someone watching.
But now it seems the system has been blinded.
“Turn on the radio,” I tell Tony. He does. The National News Service patches in. The announcer’s voice is reassuring, almost lazy—speaking terrifying words in a tone of total calm.
“ . . . breach at the wall . . . everyone urged not to panic . . . until the police can restore control . . . lock doors and windows, stay inside . . . regulators and every government official working hard in tandem—”
The announcer’s voice cuts off abruptly. For a moment there is nothing but static. Tony spins the dial, but the speakers continue buzzing and popping, letting out nothing but white noise. Then, suddenly, an unfamiliar voice comes in, overloud and urgent:
“We are taking back the city. We are taking back our rights and our freedom. Join us. Take down the walls. Take down the—”
Tony punches the radio off. The silence in the car rings out, deafening. I flash back to the morning of the first terrorist attacks, when at ten a.m., in the middle of a peaceful, everyday Tuesday, three blasts went off simultaneously in Portland. I was in a car then, I remember; when my mother and I heard the announcement on the radio, we didn’t believe it at first. We didn’t believe it until we saw the smoke clotting the sky, and saw the people begin to stream past us, running, pale, and the ash began to drift like snow.
Cassandra said that Fred let those attacks happen, to prove that the Invalids were out there, to show that they were monstrous. But now the monsters are here, inside the walls, in our streets again. I can’t believe that he would let this happen.
I have to believe that he will fix it, even if it means killing them all.
We’ve finally shaken off the chaos and the crowds. We’re near Cumberland now, where Lena used to live, in the quietly run-down residential portion of the city. In the distance, the foghorn in the old watchtower on Munjoy Hill begins blowing, sending mournful notes beneath and beyond the alarms. I wish we were heading home instead of to Fred’s house. I want to curl up in my bed and sleep; I want to wake up and find that today was all just a nightmare that has pushed through the cracks, past the cure.
But my home is no longer my home. Even if the priest did not get to finish his pronouncement, I am now officially married to Fred Hargrove. Nothing will ever be the same.
Left onto Sherman; then right into yet another alley, which will dump us onto Park. Just as we reach the end of the alley, someone runs out in front of the car, a gray blur.
Tony shouts and slams on the brakes, but it’s too late. I have time to register the tattered clothing, the long, matted hair—Invalid—before the impact carries her off her feet. She spins across the hood—fans for a second against the windshield—and drops out of sight again.
Anger crests inside me, sudden and startling, a stabbing peak of it that breaks through the fear. I lean forward, shouting, “It’s one of them, it’s one of them! Don’t let her get away!”
Tony and the other guards don’t need to be asked twice. In an instant, they’re rocketing into the street, guns drawn, leaving the doors of the car hanging open. My hands are shaking. I squeeze them into fists and lean back, taking deep breaths, trying to calm down. With the doors open, I can hear the alarms more clearly, and distant sounds of shouting, too, like the echo-roar of the ocean.
This is Portland, my Portland. In that moment, nothing else matters—not the lies or the mistakes, and the promises we’ve failed to keep. This is my city, and my city is under attack. The anger tightens.
Tony is hauling the girl to her feet. She is fighting, although she is outnumbered and completely outmatched. Her hair is hanging in her face, and she’s kicking and scratching like an animal.
Maybe I’ll kill this one myself.
Lena
By the time I make it onto Forest Avenue, the sound of the fighting has faded, swallowed by the shrill cries of the alarms. Every so often I see a hand twitching at a curtain, a fishbowl-eye peering down at me and then vanishing just as quickly. Everyone is staying locked up and locked in.
I keep my head down, moving as quickly as I can despite the throbbing in my ankle where I landed on it wrong, listening for sounds of squads and patrols. There’s no way I’ll be mistaken for anything but an Invalid: I’m filthy, wearing old, mud-splattered clothes, and my ear is still streaked with blood. Amazingly, there’s no one on the streets. Security forces must have been diverted elsewhere. This is, after all, the poorer part of town; no doubt the city doesn’t feel these people need protection.
A path and a road for everyone . . . and for some, a path straight into the ground.
I make it to Cumberland without problems. As soon as I step onto my old block, I feel for a moment as though I’m caught in a still life from the past. It seems forever ago that I used to turn down this block on my way home from school; that I used to stretch here after my runs, placing one leg on top of the bus-stop bench; that I would watch Jenny and the other kids playing kick the can, and open up the fire hydrants for them when it got hot in the summer.
It was a lifetime ago. I’m a different Lena now.
The street, too, looks different—saggier, as though an invisible black hole is spiraling the whole block slowly down into itself. Even before I reach the gate in front of number 237, I know that the house will be empty. The certainty is lodged like a hard weight between my lungs. But I still stand stupidly in the middle of the sidewalk, staring up at the now-abandoned building—my home, my old house, the little bedroom on the top floor, the smells of soap and laundry and cooked tomato—taking in the peeling paint and the rotting porch steps, the boarded-up windows, the faded red X spray-painted on the door, marking the house as condemned.
I feel as if I’ve been punched in the stomach. Aunt Carol was always so proud of the house. She wouldn’t let a single season go by without repainting, cleaning out the gutters, scrubbing the porch.
Then the grief is replaced by panic. Where did they go?