Requiem

Page 46

“Grace.” My voice is hoarse. I ease down onto the top step. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, Grace floats into focus—taller than she was eight months ago, thinner and dirtier, too—crouched in the corner, staring at me with wild, terrified eyes. “Grace, it’s me.”
I reach out to her, but she doesn’t move. I ease myself down a step farther, reluctant to go into the cellar and try to grab her. She was always fast; I’m afraid she’ll duck and run. My heart is throbbing painfully in my throat, and my mouth tastes like smoke. There’s a sharp, pungent smell in the cellar I can’t identify. I focus on Grace, on getting her to move.
“It’s me, Grace,” I try again. I can only imagine what I must look like to her, how changed I must appear. “It’s Lena. Your cousin Lena.”
She stiffens, as though I’ve reached out and shocked her. “Lena?” she whispers, her voice awed. But still she doesn’t move. Above us, there is a thunderous crash. A tree branch, or a piece of the roof. I have a sudden terror that we will be buried in here if we don’t move now. The house will collapse, we’ll be trapped.
“Come on, Gracie,” I say, invoking an old nickname. The back of my neck is sweaty. “We’ve got to go, okay?”
At last Grace moves. She strikes out clumsily with a foot, and I hear the tinkle of glass breaking. The smell intensifies, burning the inside of my nostrils, and suddenly I place it.
Gas.
“I didn’t mean to,” Grace says, her voice high-pitched, shrill with panic. She is crouching now, and I watch a dark stain of liquid spread on the packed dirt floor around her.
The terror is huge now: It presses me from all sides. “Grace, come on, sweetie.” I try to keep the panic from my voice. “Come take my hand.”
“I didn’t mean to!” She starts to cry.
I scuttle down the last few steps and grab her, heaving her up onto my waist. She is awkward, too big for me to carry comfortably, but surprisingly light. She wraps her legs around my waist. I can feel her ribs and the sharp points of her hip bones. Her hair smells like grease and oil and—faintly, just faintly—like dish soap.
Up the stairs and into the world of flame and fire, air turned watery, shimmering with heat, as though the world is breaking apart into a mirage. It would be faster to set Grace down and let her run next to me, but now that I have her—now that she is here, clinging to me, her heart beating frantically in her chest, pounding its rhythm into mine—I won’t let her go.
The bike is where I left it, thank God. Grace maneuvers clumsily onto the seat, and I squeeze on behind her. I shove off down the street, my legs heavy as stone, until momentum begins to carry us; and then I ride, as fast as I can, away from the fingers of smoke and flame, leaving the Highlands to burn.
Hana
I walk without paying attention to where I am or where I am going. One foot in front of the other, my white shoes slapping quietly against the pavement. In the distance, I can hear the roar of shouting voices. The sun is bright, and feels nice on my shoulders. A breeze lifts the trees silently, and they bow and wave, bow and wave, as I pass.
One foot, and then another foot. It’s so simple. The sun is so bright.
What will happen to me?
I don’t know. Maybe I will come across someone who recognizes me. Maybe I will be brought back to my parents. Maybe, if the world doesn’t end, if Fred is now dead, I will be paired with someone else.
Or maybe I will keep walking until I reach the end of the world.
Maybe. But for now there is only the high white sun, and the sky, and tendrils of gray smoke, and voices that sound like ocean waves in the distance.
There is the slapping of my shoes, and the trees that seem to nod and tell me, You’re okay. Everything will be okay.
Maybe, after all, they are right.
Lena
As we get close to Back Cove, the trickle of people swells to a roaring, rushing stream, and I can barely maneuver my bike between them. They are running, shouting, waving hammers and knives and pieces of metal piping, surging toward some unknown location, and I’m surprised to see that it isn’t just Invalids rioting anymore: It is kids, too, some as young as twelve and thirteen, uncured and angry. I even spot a few cureds watching from their windows above the street, occasionally waving, a show of solidarity.
I break loose of the crowd and bump the bike onto the churned-mud shores of the cove, where Alex and I made our stand a lifetime ago—where for the first time, he traded his happiness for mine. Grass grows high between the rubble of the old road, and people—injured or dead—are lying in the grass, letting out moans or staring sightlessly at the cloudless sky. I see several bodies facedown in the shallows of the cove, and tendrils of red sweeping across the surface of the water.
Past the cove, at the wall, the crowd is still thick, but it looks like mostly our people. The regulators and police must have been driven back, farther toward Old Port. Now thousands of rioters are flowing in that direction, their voices unified, a single note of fury.
I ditch the bike in the shade of a large juniper and, at last, take Grace by the shoulders, examine her all over for cuts or bruises. She is shaking, wide-eyed, staring at me as though she believes I’ll disappear any second.
“What happened to the others?” I ask. Her fingernails are coated with dirt, and she is skinny. But otherwise, she looks okay. More than okay—she looks beautiful. I feel a sob building in my throat, and I swallow it back. We aren’t safe, not yet.
Grace shakes her head. “I don’t know. There was a fire and . . . and I hid.”
So they did leave her. Or they didn’t care enough to look when she disappeared. I feel a wave of nausea.
“You look different,” Grace says quietly.
“You got taller,” I say. Suddenly I could shout for joy. I could scream with happiness while the whole world burns.
“Where did you go?” Grace asks me. “What happened to you?”
“I’ll tell you all about it later.” I take her chin with one hand. “Listen, Grace. I want to tell you how sorry I am. I’m sorry for leaving you behind. I’ll never leave you again, okay?”
Her eyes travel my face. She nods.
“I’m going to keep you safe now.” I push the words out past the thickness in my throat. “Do you believe me?”
She nods again. I pull her to me, squeezing. She feels so thin, so fragile. But I know that she is strong. She always has been. She will be ready for whatever comes next.
“Take my hand,” I tell her. I’m not certain where to go, and my mind flashes to Raven. Then I remember that she is gone—murdered at the wall—and the sickness threatens to overwhelm me again. But I have to stay calm for Grace’s sake.
I need to find a safe place to go with Grace until the fighting is done. My mother will help me; she’ll know what to do.
Grace’s grip is surprisingly strong. We pick our way along the shoreline, threading between the people—Invalids and regulators alike—injured, dying, and dead. At the top of the slope, Colin, limping, leans heavily on another boy and makes his way to an empty spot on the grass. The other boy looks up and my heart stops.
Alex.
He sees me almost immediately after I’ve spotted him. I want to call out to him, but my voice is caught in my throat. For a second, he hesitates. Then he eases Colin down into the grass and bends to say something to him. Colin nods, gripping his knee, wincing.
Then Alex is jogging toward me.
“Alex.” It’s as though saying his name makes him real. He stops a few inches away from me, and his eyes go to Grace, and then back to me. “This is Grace,” I say, tugging her hand. She hangs back, angling her body behind mine.
“I remember,” he says. There is no more hardness in his eyes, no more hatred. He clears his throat. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Here I am.” The sun feels overly bright, and all of a sudden I can think of nothing to say, no words to describe everything I’ve thought and wished and wondered. “I—I got your note.”
He nods. His mouth tightens just a little. “Is Julian . . . ?”
“I don’t know where Julian is,” I say, and then instantly feel guilty. I think of his blue eyes, and his warmth curling around me when I slept. I hope he has not been hurt. I bend down so I can look Grace in the eyes. “Sit here for a minute, okay, Gracie?”
She folds herself to the ground obediently. I can’t bring myself to step more than two paces away from her. Alex follows.
I lower my voice so Grace won’t hear us. “Is it true?” I ask him.
“Is what true?” His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.
“That you still love me,” I say, breathless. “I need to know.”
Alex nods. He reaches out and touches my face—barely skimming my cheekbone and brushing away a bit of my hair. “It’s true.”
“But . . . I’ve changed,” I say. “And you’ve changed.”
“That’s true too,” he says quietly. I look at the scar on his face, stretching from his left eye to his jawline, and something hitches in my chest.
“So what now?” I ask him. The light is too bright; the day feels as though it’s merging into dream.
“Do you love me?” Alex asks. And I could cry; I could press my face into his chest and breathe in, and pretend that nothing has changed, that everything will be perfect and whole and healed again.
But I can’t. I know I can’t.
“I never stopped.” I look away from him. I look at Grace, and the high grass littered with the wounded and the dead. I think of Julian, and his clear blue eyes, his patience and goodness. I think of all the fighting we’ve done, and all the fighting we have yet to do. I take a deep breath. “But it’s more complicated than that.”
Alex reaches out and places his hands on my shoulders. “I’m not going to run away again,” he says.
“I don’t want you to,” I tell him.
His fingers find my cheek, and I rest for a second against his palm, letting the pain of the past few months flow out of me, letting him turn my head toward his. Then he bends down and kisses me: light and perfect, his lips just barely meeting mine, a kiss that promises renewal.
“Lena!”
I step away from Alex when Grace shouts. She has climbed to her feet and is pointing toward the border wall, bouncing excitedly on her toes, full of energy. I turn to look. For a second, tears break apart my vision, turn the world to a kaleidoscope of colors—color crawling up the wall, making a mosaic of the concrete.
No. Not color: people. People are surging toward the wall.
More than that: They are tearing it down.
Yelling, wild and triumphant, brandishing hammers and bits of the ruined scaffolding, or picking with their bare hands, they are dismantling the wall piece by piece, breaking the boundaries of the world as we know it. Joy surges inside me. Grace begins to run; she, too, is pulled toward the wall.
“Grace, wait!” I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand.