“Alex—” I start to say. My voice comes out strange and strangled-sounding.
“Stop,” he says. “Wait.” He lets go of my hand, and I let out a little shriek without meaning to. Then his hands are fumbling on my arms, and his mouth bumps against my nose as he kisses me.
“It’s okay,” he says. He’s speaking almost at a normal volume now, so I guess we’re safe. “I’m not going anywhere. I just have to find this damn flashlight, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” I struggle to breathe normally, feeling stupid. I wonder if Alex regrets bringing me. I haven’t exactly been Miss Courageous.
As though he can read my mind, Alex gives me a second small peck, this time near the corner of my lips. I guess his eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark either. “You’re doing great,” he says.
Then I hear him rustling in the branches all around us, muttering little curses under his breath, a monologue I don’t quite follow. A minute later he lets out a quick, excited yelp, and a second after that a broad beam of light cuts upward, illuminating the densely packed trees and growth all around us.
“Found it,” Alex says, grinning, showing off the flashlight to me. He directs the light down to a rusty toolbox half-buried in the ground. “We leave it there, for the crossers,” he explains. “Ready?”
I nod. I feel much better now that we can see where we’re going. The branches above us form a canopy that reminds me of the vaulted ceiling of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where I used to sit in Sunday school to hear lectures about atoms and probabilities and God’s order. The leaves rustle and shake all around us, a constantly shifting pattern of greens and blacks, set dancing as countless unseen things hurry and skip from branch to branch. Every so often Alex’s flashlight is reflected for a brief second in a pair of bright wide blinking eyes, which watch us solemnly from within the mass of foliage before vanishing once again into the dark. It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it—all this life pushing everywhere, growing, as though at every second it’s expanding and thrusting upward, and I can’t really explain it but it makes me feel small and kind of silly, like I’m trespassing on property owned by someone way older and more important than myself.
Alex walks more surely now, occasionally sweeping a branch out of the way so I can pass underneath it, or swatting at the branches blocking our way, but we’re not following any path that I can see, and after fifteen minutes I begin to fear that we’re just turning in circles, or going deeper and deeper into the woods without any real destination. I’m about to ask him how he knows where we’re going when I notice that every so often he hesitates and sweeps his flashlight over the tree trunks that surround us like tall, ghostly silhouettes. Some of them, I see, are marked with a swath of blue paint.
“The paint . . . ,” I say.
Alex shoots me a look over his shoulder. “Our road map,” he says, pressing on, and then adds, “you don’t want to get lost in here, trust me.”
And then, abruptly, the trees just peter out. One second we’re in the middle of the forest, penned in on all sides, and the next we’re stepping out onto a paved road, a ribbon of concrete lit silver by the moonlight like a ribbed tongue.
The road is filled with holes, and cracked and buckled in places, so we have to step around enormous piles of concrete rubble. It winds up a long, low hill, and then disappears over the hill’s crest, where another black fringe of trees begins.
“Give me your hand,” Alex says. He’s whispering again and without knowing why, I’m glad of it. For some reason, I feel as though I’ve just entered a cemetery. On either side of the road are gigantic clearings, covered in waist-high grasses that sing and whisper against one another, and some thin, young trees, which look frail and exposed in the middle of all of that openness. There seem to be some beams, too—enormous beams of timber piled on top of one another, and twists of things that look metallic, gleaming and glinting in the grass.
“What is this?” I whisper to Alex, but just after I ask the question a little scream builds in my throat and I see, and I know.
In the middle of one of the fields of whispering grass is a large blue truck, perfectly intact, like someone might have driven up just to have a picnic.
“This was a street,” Alex says. His voice has turned tense. “Destroyed during the blitz. There are thousands and thousands of them, all across the country. Bombed out, totally destroyed.”
I shiver. No wonder I felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I am, in a way. The blitz was a yearlong campaign that happened long before my birth, when my mom was still a baby. It was supposed to have gotten rid of all the Invalids, and any resisters who didn’t want to leave their homes and move into an approved community. My mother once said that her earliest memories were all clouded by the sound of bombs and the smell of smoke. She said for years the smell of fire continued to drift over the city, and every time the wind blew it would bring with it a covering of ash.
We go on walking. I feel like I could cry. Being here, seeing this, it’s nothing like what I was taught in my history classes: smiling pilots giving the thumbs-up, people cheering at the borders because we were at last safe, houses incinerated neatly, with no mess, as though they were just blipped off a computer screen. In the history books there were no people, really, who lived in these houses; they were shadows, wraiths, unreal. But as Alex and I walk hand in hand down the bombed-out road, I understand that it wasn’t like that at all. There was mess and stink and blood and the smell of skin burning. There were people: people standing and eating, talking on the phone, frying eggs or singing in the shower. I’m overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people—or at least, my old people.
I don’t know who I am anymore, or where I belong.
That’s not totally true. Alex. I know I belong with Alex.