“I—I can’t describe it.” I force the words out. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe. His skin smells like smoke from a wood fire, like soap, like heaven. I imagine tasting his skin; I imagine biting his lips.
“I want to know.” His words are a whisper, barely audible. “I want to know with you.”
Then his fingers are tracing my forehead, ever so gently—his touch, too, is a whisper, the lightest breath, and I am still paralyzed, frozen. Over the bridge of my nose, and over my lips—the slightest bit of pressure here, so I taste the saltiness of his skin, feel the ridges and swirls of his thumb on my lower lip—and then over my chin, and around my jaw, and up to my hair, and I am full of a roaring hot whiteness that roots me to the bed, holds me in place.
“I told you”—Julian swallows; his voice is full, throaty now—“I told you I once saw two people kissing. Will you…?”
Julian doesn’t finish his question. He doesn’t have to. All at once my whole body unfreezes; the whiteness, the heat, breaks in my chest and loosens my lips and all I have to do is turn my head, just a little, and his lips are there.
Then we are kissing: slowly, at first, because he doesn’t know how and it has been so long for me. I taste salt and sugar and soap; I run my tongue along his lower lip and he freezes for a second. His lips are warm and full and wonderful. His tongue traces my lips and then suddenly we both let go; and we are breathing into each other, and he is holding my face with his hands, and I am riding a wave of pure joy—I could almost cry, I’m so happy. His chest is solid, pressed against mine. I have drawn him up into the bed without meaning to, and I don’t ever want it to end. I could kiss him and feel his fingers in my hair, listen to him say my name, forever.
For the first time since Alex died, I have found my way to a truly free space: a space unbounded by walls and uninhibited by fear. This is flying.
And then, suddenly, Julian breaks off and pulls away. “Lena,” he gasps hoarsely, as if he has just been running a long distance.
“Don’t say it.” I still feel like I could cry. There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass. “Don’t ruin it.”
But he says it anyway. “What’s going to happen tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.” I draw his head down toward the pillow next to mine. For a second I think I sense a presence next to us in the dark, a moving figure, and I whip my head to the left. Nothing. I am imagining ghosts beside us. I am thinking of Alex. “Don’t worry about that now,” I say, as much to myself as to Julian.
The bed is very narrow. I turn onto my side, away from Julian, but when he puts his arm around me I relax backward into him, cupped in the long curve of his body as though I have been shaped for it. I want to run away and cry. I want to beg Alex—wherever he is, whatever otherworld now holds him—for forgiveness. I want to kiss Julian again.
But I do not do any of those things. I lie still, and feel Julian’s steady heartbeat through my back until my heart calms in response, and I let him hold me, and just before I fall asleep, I say a brief prayer that the morning never comes.
But the morning does come. It finds its way in through the cracks in the plywood, the fissures in the roof: a murky grayness, a slight ebbing of the dark. My first moments of awareness are confused: I believe I am with Alex. No. Julian. His arm is around me, his breath hot on my neck. I have kicked the sheets to the bottom of the bed in the night. I see a flicker of movement from the hall; the cat has gotten into the house somehow.
Then suddenly, a driving certainty—no, I closed the door last night, I locked it—and terror squeezing my chest.
I sit up, say, “Julian—”
And then everything explodes: They are streaming through the door, bursting through the walls, yelling, screaming—police and regulators in gas masks and matching gray uniforms. One of them grabs me and another one pulls Julian off the bed—he is awake now, calling to me, but I can’t hear over the tumult of sound, over the screaming that must be coming from me. I grab the backpack, still balled at the foot of my bed, and swing at the regulator but there are three more, flanking me in the narrow space between beds, and it’s hopeless. I remember the gun: still in the bathing room, and useless to me now. Someone pulls me by the collar and I choke. Another regulator wrenches my arms behind my back and cuffs me, then pushes me forward, so I am half dragged, half marched through Salvage and out into the bright, streaming sunshine, where more police are gathered, more members of the SWAT team carrying guns and gas masks—frozen, silent, waiting.
Setup. Those are the words drilling through me, through my panic. Setup. Has to be.
“Got ’em,” someone announces into a walkie-talkie, and all of a sudden the air comes to life, vibrates with sound: People are shouting to one another, gesturing. Two police officers gun the engines of their motorcycles, and the stink of exhaust is everywhere. Walkie-talkies cackle around us—buzzing, a cacophony.
“Ten-four, ten-four. We got ’em.”
“Twenty miles outside of regulated land … looked like some kind of hideout.”
“Unit 508 to HQ…”
Julian is behind me, surrounded by four regulators; he has been cuffed too.
“Lena! Lena!” I hear him calling my name. I try to turn around and am shoved forward by the regulator behind me.
“Keep moving,” the regulator says, and I’m surprised to hear a woman’s voice, distorted through the gas mask.
A caravan of vehicles is parked on the road Julian and I walked, and there are more police officers here, and more members of the SWAT team. Some of them are in full gear, but others are leaning casually against their cars, dressed in civilian clothing, chatting and blowing on Styrofoam mugs of coffee. They barely glance at me as I am hauled, struggling, down the line of cars. I’m full of blind rage, a fury that makes me want to spit. This is routine for them. They will go home at the end of the day, to their orderly houses and their orderly families, and they will give no thought to the girl they saw screaming and kicking and dragged away, probably to her death.
I see a black town car; Thomas Fineman’s white, narrow face watches me impassively as I go by. If I could shake a fist loose I would plunge it through the window. I’d watch all the glass explode into his face, see how calm he would stay then.
“Hey, hey, hey!” A policeman is waving to us from up ahead, gesturing with his walkie-talkie toward a police van. Black words stand out vividly against its sparkling white paint: CITY OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION, REFORM, AND PURIFICATION. In Portland, we had a single prison, the Crypts. It housed all the criminals and resisters, plus the resident loonies, many of them driven crazy by botched or early cures. In New York and its sister cities there is a web of interrelated jails, a network stretching all across the sister cities, with a name almost as bad as the one Portland gave its prison: the Craps.
“Over here, this way!” Now another policeman is waving us over to a different van, and there is a momentary pause. The whole scene is a mass of confusion, more chaotic than the raids I’ve seen. There are too many people. There are too many cars choking the air with exhaust, too many radios buzzing at once, people talking and shouting over one another. A regulator and a member of the SWAT team are arguing about jurisdiction.
My head hurts; the sun is burning my eyes. All I see is glittering, glaring sunshine; a metal river of cars and motorcycles, exhaust turning the air to mirage, to thickness and smoke.
Suddenly panic crests inside of me. I don’t know what happened to Julian. He isn’t behind me anymore, and I can’t see him in the crowd. “Julian!” I scream out, and get no answer, although one policeman turns at the sound of my voice and then, shaking his head, hocks a brown glob of saliva onto the ground by my feet. I’m fighting against the woman behind me again, trying to tear myself out of her grasp, but her hands are a vise around my wrists and the more I struggle, the tighter she holds.
“Julian! Julian!”
No response. The panic has turned to a solid lump, and it is clotting my throat. No, no, no, no. Not again.
“All right, keep going.” The woman’s distorted gas-mask voice urges me forward. She pushes me past the line of waiting cars. The regulator who has been leading the procession is speaking rapidly into his walkie-talkie, some argument with Command about who is to take me in, and he barely glances at us as we thread through the crowd. I’m still fighting the woman behind me with every bit of strength I have, even though the way she is holding my arms sends a fiery pain from my wrists to my shoulders, and even if I did break free, I’m still handcuffed and wouldn’t get more than a few feet without getting tackled.
But the rock in my throat is there, and the panic, and the certainty. I need to find Julian. I need to save him.
Beneath that, older words, more urgent words, continue to surge through me: Not again, not again, not again.
“Julian!” I strike backward with my foot and connect with the woman’s shins. I hear her curse, and for just a second her grip loosens. But then she is once again restraining me, jerking my wrists so sharply that I gasp.
And then, as I tipped backward to give relief to my arms, trying to catch my breath, trying not to cry, she bends forward a little so the mouth of her mask bumps once against my ears.
“Lena,” she says, low. “Please. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m a freedom fighter.”
That word freezes me: That’s a secret code sympathizers and Invalids use to indicate their allegiances. I stop trying to fight her off, and her grip relaxes. But she continues to propel me forward, past the caravan of cars. She walks quickly, and with such purpose that nobody stops her or interferes.
Up ahead I see a white van straddling the gutter that runs next to the dirt road. It is also stenciled with the CRAP sign, but the markings seem slightly off—they are a tiny bit too small, I realize, although you’d have to be staring to notice it. We’ve rounded a bend in the road and are concealed from the rest of the security detail by an enormous pile of twisted metal and shattered concrete.
Suddenly the woman releases my arms. She springs forward to the van and produces a set of keys from one of her pockets. She swings open the back doors; the interior of the van is dark, empty, and smells faintly sour.
“In,” she says.
“Where are you taking me?” I’m sick of this helplessness; for days I’ve been left with a swirling confusion, a sense of secret allegiances and complex plots.
“Somewhere safe,” she says, and even through the mask I can hear the urgency in her voice. I have no choice but to believe her. She helps me into the van and instructs me to turn around while she unlocks my handcuffs. Then she tosses in my backpack and slams the doors shut. My heart flips a little as I hear her slide a lock into place. I’m trapped now. But it can’t be worse than what I would have faced outside the van, and my stomach bottoms as I think of Julian. I wonder what will happen to him. Maybe—I feel a brief flicker of hope—they’ll go easy on him, because of his dad. Maybe they’ll decide it was all just a mistake.