My dream was the one I usually have but this time reversed: I was floating in the ocean, treading water, watching my mother perched on a crumbling ledge hundreds and hundreds of feet above me—so far I couldn’t make out any of her features, just the blurry lines of her silhouette, framed against the sun. I was trying to call out a warning to her, trying to lift my arms and wave at her to go back, away from the edge, but the more I struggled the more the water seemed to drag at me and hold me back, the consistency of glue, suctioning my arms in place and oozing in my throat to freeze the words there. And all the time sand was drifting around me like snow, and I knew at any second she would fall and smash her head on the jagged rocks, which poked up through the water like sharpened fingernails.
Then she was falling, flailing, a black spot growing bigger and bigger against the blazing sun, and I was trying to scream but I couldn’t, and as the figure grew larger I realized it wasn’t my mother headed for the rocks.
It was Alex. That’s when I woke up.
I finally stand, slightly dizzy, trying to ignore a feeling of dread. I go slowly, gropingly, to the window, and am relieved once I’m outside, even though I’m in more danger on the streets. But at least there’s a bit of a breeze. The atmosphere in the house was stifling.
Alex is already waiting for me when I arrive at Back Cove, crouching in the shadows cast by a group of trees that stand near the old parking lot. He is so perfectly concealed that I almost trip over him. He reaches up and draws me down into a crouch. In the moonlight his eyes seem to glow, like a cat’s.
He gestures silently across Back Cove, to the line of twinkling lights just before the border: the guard huts.
From a distance they look like a line of bright white lanterns strung up for a nighttime picnic—cheerful, almost. Twenty feet beyond the security points is the actual fence, and beyond the fence, the Wilds. They’ve never looked quite so strange to me as they do now, dancing and swaying in the wind. I’m glad Alex and I agreed not to speak until we crossed over. The lump in my throat is making it difficult to breathe, much less say anything.
We’ll be crossing over at the tip of Tukey’s Bridge, on the northeast point of the cove: if we were swimming, a direct diagonal from our meet-up point. Alex pumps my hand three times. That’s our signal to move.
I follow him as we skirt the perimeter of the cove, being careful to avoid the marshland; it looks deceptively like grass, especially in the dark, but you can get sucked down almost knee deep before you realize the difference. Alex darts from shadow to shadow, moving noiselessly on the grass. In places he seems to vanish completely before my eyes, to melt into darkness.
As we loop around to the north side of the cove, the guard stations begin to outline themselves more clearly—becoming actual buildings, one-room huts made of concrete and bulletproof glass.
Sweat pricks up on my palms and the lump in my throat seems to quadruple in size, until I feel like I’m being strangled. I suddenly see how stupid our plan is. A hundred—a thousand!—things could go wrong. The guard in number twenty- one might not have had his coffee yet—or he might have had it, but not enough to knock him out—or the Valium might not have kicked in.
And even if he is asleep, Alex could have been wrong about the parts of the fence that aren’t electrified; or the city might have pumped on the power, just for the night.
I’m so scared I feel like I might faint. I want to get Alex’s attention and scream that we have to turn around, call the whole thing off, but he’s still moving swiftly up ahead of me, and screaming anything or making any noise at all will bring the guards down on us for sure.
And guards make the regulators look like little kids playing cops and robbers. Regulators and raiders have nightsticks and dogs; guards have rifles and tear gas.
We finally reach the northern arm of the cove. Alex drops down behind one of the larger trees and waits for me to catch up. I go into a crouch next to him. This is my last opportunity to tell him I want to go back. But I can’t speak, and when I try to shake my head no, nothing happens. I feel like I’m back in my dream, getting slurped into the dark, floundering like an insect stuck in a bowl of honey.
Maybe Alex can tell how frightened I am. He leans forward and fumbles for a moment, trying to find my ear. His mouth bumps once on my neck and grazes my cheek lightly—which despite my panic makes me shiver with pleasure—and then skims my earlobe. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers, and I feel slightly better. Nothing bad will happen when I’m with Alex.
Then we’re up again. We dart forward at intervals, sprinting silently from one tree to the next and then pausing while Alex listens and makes sure there has been no change, no shouts or sounds of approaching footsteps. The moments of exposure—of dashing from cover to cover—grow longer as the trees begin to thin out, and the whole time we’re getting closer and closer to the line where the fringe of grass and growth disappears altogether and we will have to move out in the open, completely vulnerable. It is a distance of only about fifty feet from the last bush to the fence, but as far as I’m concerned it might as well be a lake of burning fire.
Beyond the torn-up remains of a road that existed before Portland was enclosed is the fence itself: looming, silver, in the moonlight, like some enormous spiderweb.
A place where things stick, get caught, are eaten. Alex has told me to take my time, to focus; when I pick my way over the barbed wire at the top, but I can’t help but picture myself impaled on all of those sharp, spiny barbs.
And then, suddenly, we are out—past the limited protection offered by the trees, moving quickly over the loose gravel and shale of the old road. Alex moves ahead of me, bent nearly double, and I stoop as low as I can, but it doesn’t make me feel any less exposed. Fear screams, slams into me from all sides at once; I have never known anything like it. I’m not sure whether the wind picks up at that second or whether it’s just the terror cutting through me, but my whole body feels like ice.
The darkness seems to come alive on all sides of us, full of darting shadows and malicious, looming shapes, ready to turn into a guard any second, and I picture the silence suddenly punctuated by screams, sighs, horns, bullets. I picture blooming pain, and bright lights. The world seems to transform into a series of disconnected images: a bright white circle of light surrounding guard hut twenty- one, which expands ever outward, as though hungry and ready to swallow us; inside, a guard slumped backward in his chair, mouth open, sleeping; Alex turning to me, smiling—is it possible he’s smiling?— stones dancing underneath my feet. Everything feels far away, as unreal and insubstantial as a shadow cast by a flame. Even I don’t feel real, can’t feel myself breathing or moving, though I must be doing both.
And then just like that we’re at the fence. Alex springs into the air, and for a second he pauses there. I want to scream Stop! Stop! I picture the crack and sizzle as his body connects with fifty thousand volts of electricity, but then he lands on the fence and the fence sways silently: dead and cold, just like he said.
I should be climbing up after him, but I can’t. Not immediately. A feeling of wonder creeps over me, slowly pushing out the fear. I’ve been terrified of the border fence since I was a baby. I’ve never gotten within five feet of the fence. We’ve been warned not to, had it drilled into us. They told us we would fry; told us it would make our hearts go haywire, kill us instantly.
Now I reach out and lace my hand through the chain- link, run my fingers over it. Dead and cold and harmless, the same kind of fence the city uses for playgrounds and schoolyards. In that second it really hits me how deep and complex the lies are, how they run through Portland like sewers, backing up into everything, filling the city with stench: the whole city built and constructed within a perimeter of lies.
Alex is a fast climber; he’s made it halfway up the fence.
He looks over his shoulder and sees that I’m still standing there like an idiot, not moving. He jerks his head at me like, What are you doing?
I put my hand out to the fence again and then immediately jerk it back again: A shock runs through me all at once, but it has nothing to do with the voltage that should be pumping there. Something has just occurred to me.
They’ve lied about everything—about the fence, and the existence of the Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace.
They told us that love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.
For the very first time I realize that this, too, might be a lie.
Alex rocks carefully back and forth on the fence so that it sways a little. I glance up, and he gestures to me again. We’re not safe. It’s time to move. I reach up and hoist myself onto the fence and start climbing. Being on the fence is even worse, in some ways, than being out in the open on the gravel. At least there we had more control—we could have seen if a guard was patrolling, could have hurried back to the cove and hoped to lose him in the darkness and the trees. A small hope, but hope nonetheless. Here we have our backs turned to the guard huts, and I feel like I’m a gigantic moving target with a big sign on my back saying SHOOT ME.
Alex reaches the top before me, and I watch him pick his way slowly, painstakingly, around the loops of barbed wire. He makes it over and lowers himself carefully down the other side, climbing backward a few feet and pausing to wait for me. I follow his motions exactly. I’m shaking by this point, from fear and exertion, but I manage to pass over the top of the fence and then I’m climbing down the other side. My feet hit the ground. Alex takes my hand and pulls me quickly into the woods, away from the border.
Into the Wilds.
Chapter Eighteen
“Mary bring out your umbrella—
The sun shines down on this fine, fine day
But the ashes raining down forever
Are going to turn your hair to gray.
Mary keep your oars a-steady
Sail away on the rising flood
Keep your candle at the ready
Red tides can’t be told from blood.”
—“Miss Mary” (a common child’s clapping game, dating from the time of the blitz), from Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play
The lights from the guard hut get suctioned away all at once like they’ve been sealed back behind a vault. Trees close in around us, leaves and bushes press on me from all sides, brushing my face and shins and shoulders like thousands of dark hands, and from all around me a strange cacophony starts up, of fluttering things and owls hooting and animals scrabbling in the underbrush.
The air smells so thickly of flowers and life it feels textured, like a curtain you could pull apart. It’s pitch- black. I can’t even see Alex in front of me now, can just feel his hand in mine, pulling.
I think I might be even more frightened now than I was making the crossing, and I tug on Alex’s hand, willing him to understand me and stop.
“A little farther,” comes his voice, from the darkness ahead of me. He tugs me on. We go slowly, though, and I hear twigs snapping and the rustle of tree branches, and I know that Alex is feeling his way, trying to clear a path for us. It seems that we move forward by inches, but it’s amazing how quickly we’ve lost sight of the border and everything on the other side of it, as though they’ve never existed at all. Behind me is blackness. It’s like being underground.