“How?” Julian asks. “Because of the deliria?” I know if I say yes he’ll feel good. See, he’ll think. We’re right. We’ve been right all this time. Let people die so that we can be right.
“You,” I say. “Your people.”
Julian sucks in a quick breath. When he speaks again, his voice is softer. “You said you never had nightmares.”
I wall myself up inside. From the tower, the people on the ground are no more than ants, specks, punctuation marks: easily smudged out.
“I’m an Invalid,” I say. “We lie.”
In the morning my plan has hardened, clarified. Julian is sitting in the corner, watching me the way he did when we were first taken. He is still wearing the rag around his head, but he looks alert now, and the swelling in his face has gone down.
I wrestle the umbrella apart, pulling the nylon shell away from its hinged metal arms. Then I lay the nylon flat and cut it into four long strips. I tie the strips together into a makeshift cord and test its strength. Decent. It won’t hold forever, but I don’t need longer than a few minutes.
“What are you doing?” Julian asks me, and I can tell he’s trying hard not to seem too curious. I don’t answer him. I no longer care what he does, or whether he comes with me or remains here to rot forever, as long as he stays out of the way.
It doesn’t take me long to remove the hinges from the flap door, just some wiggling and working with the point of the knife: the hinges are rusted and loose anyway.
Once the hinges are off, I manage to push the door outward, so it falls, clattering into the hall. That will bring someone, and soon. My heart speeds up. It’s showtime, as Tack used to say, right before heading out on a hunt. I pull The Book of Shhh onto my lap and tear out a page.
“You’ll never fit through that space,” Julian says. “It’s too small.”
“Just stay quiet,” I say. “Can you do that for me? Just don’t speak.”
I unscrew the mascara that made its way into my backpack, silently send a message of thanks to Raven—now that she is on the other side, in Zombieland, she can’t get enough of its little trinkets and comforts, its well-lit stores stocked with rows and rows of things to buy.
I can feel Julian watching me. I scrawl out a note on the blank side of the page.
The girl is violent. Worried she might kill me. Ready to talk if you let me out NOW.
I slip the note through the cat-flap door and into the hallway. Then I repack my backpack with The Book of Shhh, the empty water bottle, and pieces of the dismantled umbrella. I grip the knife in my hand, stand by the door, and wait, trying to slow my breathing, every so often flipping the knife into my other hand and wiping sweat from my palms onto my pants. Hunter and Bram once took me deer hunting with them, just to watch, and this was the part I couldn’t stand: the stillness, the waiting.
Fortunately, I don’t wait long. Someone must have heard the flap door fall. Pretty soon I hear another door close—more information; information is good; that means there’s another door somewhere, another room underground—and footsteps coming toward me. I hope it’s the girl who comes, the one with the wedding ring threaded through her nose.
I hope, above all, it’s not the albino.
But the boot steps are heavy, and when they stop just outside the door, it’s a man who mutters, “What the hell?”
My whole body feels wound up, coiled like an electrical wire. I’ll have only one shot to get this right.
Now that I’ve disabled the flap door, I have a solid view of mud-splattered combat boots and baggy green trousers, like the kind lab techs and street sweepers wear. The man grunts, and moves the flap door a few inches with a boot, as though toeing a mouse to see whether it is alive. Then he kneels down and snatches up the note.
I tighten my grip on the knife. Now my heart feels as though it is barely going at all. I am not breathing, and the space between heartbeats is an eternity.
Open the door. Don’t call for backup. Open the door now. Come on, come on, come on.
Finally there’s a heavy sigh, and the sound of keys jingling; a clicking, too, as I imagine him sliding the safety off his gun.
Everything is sharp and very slow, as though funneled through a microscope. He’s going to open the door.
The keys turn in the lock and Julian scrabbles, alarmed, to his feet, letting out a short cry. For a second the guard hesitates. Then the door begins to push inward, inward, toward me—toward where I am standing, pressed up against the wall, invisible.
Just like that the seesaw has swung: The seconds are banging together so fast I can hardly keep track of them. Everything is instinct and blur. Things happen in one collapsed moment: The door swings fully open, just a few inches from my face, as he takes a step into the cell, saying, “All right, I’m all ears,” and as he does I push against the door with both hands, slamming it toward him, hear a small crack and his short exclamation, a curse and a groan. Julian is saying, “Holy shit, holy shit.”
I leap out from behind the door—all instinct now, no more thinking—and land on the Scavenger’s back. He is staggering on his feet, clutching his head, where the door must have hit him, and my momentum carries him off his feet and onto the ground. I drive a knee into his back and press the knife into his throat.
“Don’t move.” I’m shaking. I hope he can’t feel it. “Don’t scream. Don’t even think about screaming. Just stay where you are, nice and easy, and you won’t get hurt.”
Julian watches me, wide-eyed, silent. The Scavenger is good. He stays still. I keep my knee in his back and the tip of my knife at his throat, take one end of the nylon rope in my teeth, and twist his left hand behind his back, and then his right, keeping them both stabilized with my knee.
Julian wrenches away from the wall suddenly and comes over to me.
“What are you doing?” My voice is a snarl, through the nylon and my gritted teeth. I can’t take Julian and the Scavenger at once. If he interferes, it’s all over.
“Give me the rope,” he says calmly. For a second I don’t move, and he says, “I’m helping you.”
I pass the cord to him wordlessly, and he kneels down behind me. I keep the Scavenger pressed to the ground as Julian binds his hands and feet.
I press my knee harder into the Scavenger’s back, holding him still. I picture the spaces between the ribs, the soft skin and layers of fat and flesh—and beneath it all, the heart, squeezing and pumping out life. It would only take one quick jab. . . .
“Give me the knife,” Julian says.
I tighten my grip on the handle. “For what?”
“Just give it to me,” he says.
I hesitate, then pass it back to him. He cuts off the excess nylon cord—he is clumsy with the knife, and it takes him a minute—and then passes both the knife and the strip of nylon back to me.
“You should gag him,” Julian says matter-of-factly. “So he won’t be able to call for help.”
He is amazingly calm. I tip the Scavenger’s head up and wrestle the makeshift gag into his mouth. He kicks out with his legs, thrashing like a fish pulled onto land, but I manage to get the fabric knotted behind his head. The bonds are flimsy—he’ll get his hands free in ten, fifteen minutes—but that should be enough time.
I climb quickly to my feet and sling my backpack over my shoulders. The door to the cell is still gaping open. Just that—the open door—fills me with a sense of joy so complete I could shout. I imagine Raven and Tack, watching me approvingly.
I won’t let you down.
I look back. Julian has gotten to his feet.
“You coming, or what?” I say.
He nods. He still looks like shit, his eyes bare cracks, but his mouth is set tight in a line.
“Let’s go, then.” I tuck the knife, sheathed, into the waistband of my pants. I can’t worry about whether Julian will slow me down. And he may even be helpful. At least he’s another target; if I get pursued or jumped, he’ll be a distraction.
We close the cell door carefully behind us, which quiets the sounds of the Scavenger’s muffled cries, the scuffing of his shoes against the floor. The hall outside the cell is long, narrow, and well lit: four doors, all of them closed and all of them metal, run along the wall to our left, and at the end of the hall is another steel door. This throws me a bit. I’ve been assuming our cell was simply annexed off one of the old subway tunnels, and we would emerge into darkness and dankness. But we’re obviously in a space that is far more elaborate, an underground complex.
The voices I heard earlier are coming from behind one of the closed doors on our left. I think I recognize the low, flat growl of Albino. I pick up only a few words of conversation: “… waiting … bad idea from the start.” A staccato response follows: another man’s voice. At least I know where the albino is now, although that makes the girl with the piercings unaccounted for. That means at least four Scavengers were involved in our kidnapping. They’re obviously getting organized: a very, very bad thing.
As we progress, the voices get louder and clearer. The Scavengers are arguing.
“Stick with the original agreement…”
“Don’t owe … to anyone…”
My heart has lodged in my throat, making it difficult to breathe. Just as I’m about to scoot past the door I hear a loud bang from inside the room. I freeze, thinking immediately of gunfire. The door handle rattles. My insides go loose and I think, This is it, right here.
Then the voice I don’t recognize says loudly, “Come on, don’t be upset. Let’s talk about this.”
“I’m tired of talking.” That’s Albino: So whatever happened inside, it wasn’t a gunshot I heard.
Julian has frozen beside me. We’ve both instinctively flattened ourselves against the wall—not that it will help us, if the men come bursting out into the hall. Our arms are just touching, and I can feel the light fuzz of blond hair on his forearms. It seems to be conducting a current, small electrical pulses. I inch away from him.
The door handle gives a final rattle and then Albino says, “All right, I’m listening.” His footsteps retreat back into the room, and the spasm in my chest relaxes. I make a motion to Julian. Let’s go. He nods. He has been clenching his fists. His knuckles are tiny white half-moons.
All the remaining doors in the hallway are closed, and we hear no more voices, and see no evidence of other Scavengers. I wonder what the rooms contain: Maybe, I think, there are prisoners in all of them, lying in twin cots, waiting to be ransomed or killed. The idea makes me sick, but I can’t think about it too long. That’s another rule of the Wilds: You have to take care of yourself first.
The flip side of freedom is this: When you’re completely free, you’re also completely on your own.
We reach the door at the end of the hallway. I grab the door handle and pull. Nothing. That’s when I see the small keypad fitted just above the door handle, like the kind Hana used to have on her front gate.
The door requires a code.