Pandemonium (21 page)

“Oh my God.”

Julian looks as though he has been mauled by a wild animal. His clothes are stained with blood, and for one terrifying second I am jettisoned back in time, back to the fence, watching red seep across Alex’s shirt, knowing he will die. Then the vision retreats and it’s Julian again, on his hands and knees, coughing and spitting blood onto the floor.

“What happened?” I slip the knife quickly under my mattress and kneel down next to him. “What did they do to you?”

A gurgling sound emerges from the back of his throat, followed by another round of coughing. Julian thuds onto his elbows, and my chest is full of a winging fear.
He’s going to die
, I think, and the certainty is carried on a wave of panic.

No. This is different. I can fix this.

“Forget it. Don’t try to talk,” I say. He has now slid onto the ground, almost in a fetal position. His left eyelid flutters, and I’m not sure how much he hears or understands. I slide his head onto my lap gently and help him roll over onto his back, biting back the cry that rises to my lips when I see his face: undifferentiated flesh, a beaten, bloody thing. His right eye is swollen completely shut, and blood is flowing rapidly from a deep cut above his right eyebrow.

“Shit,” I say. I’ve seen bad injuries before, but I’ve always been able to get some kind of medical supplies, however rudimentary. Here, I’ve got nothing. And Julian’s body is making strange, twitchy motions. I’m worried he might have an attack.

“Stick with me,” I say, trying to keep my voice low and calm, just in case he’s conscious and listening. “I need to get you out of your shirt, okay? Stay as still as you can. I’m going to make you a compress. It will help with the bleeding.”

I unbutton Julian’s filthy shirt. At least his chest is unmarked, apart from a few large and mean-looking bruises. All of the blood must be from his face. The Scavengers have worked him over, but they haven’t tried to do serious harm. When I ease his arms out of the sleeves he moans, but I manage to get the shirt off. I press it tightly to the wound on his forehead, wishing I had a clean cloth. He moans again.

“Shhh,” I say. My heart is pounding. Waves of heat are radiating from his skin. “You’re okay. Just breathe, all right? Everything’s going to be fine.”

There’s a little bit of water left in the bottom of the cup they brought for us yesterday. Julian and I were making it last. I dampen Julian’s shirt and blot his face with it; then I remember the antibacterial wipes the DFA was distributing at the rally. For the first time, I’m grateful to the DFA for their obsession with cleanliness. I still have the wipe folded into one of my back jeans pockets; as I unwrap it, the astringent smell of alcohol makes me wince, and I know it’s going to hurt. But if Julian gets an infection, there’s no way we’ll make it out of here.

“This is going to sting a little bit,” I say, and bring the wipe into contact with Julian’s skin.

Instantly he lets out a roar. His eyes fly open—as much as they can, anyway—and he jerks upright. I have to wrestle him by his shoulders to the ground again.

“Hurts,” he mutters, but at least he’s awake now, and alert. My heart leaps in my chest. I realize I’ve barely been breathing.

“Don’t be a baby,” I say, and continue cleaning his face while he tenses his whole body and grits his teeth. Once I’ve cleaned most of the blood away, I get a better sense of the damage they’ve done. The cut on his lip has opened up again, and he must have been hit repeatedly in the face, probably with a fist or a blunt object. The cut on his forehead is the most trouble some. It’s still bubbling blood. But all in all, it could be much worse. He’ll live.

“Here,” I say, and lift the tin cup to his lips, supporting his head on my knees. There’s a half inch of water left. “Drink this.”

When he’s finished with the water, he closes his eyes again. But his breathing is regular now, and his tremors have stopped. I take the shirt and rip off a long strip of fabric, trying to will away the memories that are pressing and resurging: I learned this from Alex. At one point, in another lifetime, he saved me when I was hurt. He wrapped and bandaged my leg. He helped me escape from the regulators.

I fold the memory carefully inside of me. I bury it down deep.

“Lift your head a little,” I say, and Julian does, this time soundlessly, so I can work the fabric around it. I tie the length of shirt low on his forehead, knotting it tightly close to the gash, so it forms a kind of tourniquet. Then I lower his head back onto my thighs. “Can you talk?” I ask, and Julian nods. “Can you tell me what happened?”

The right corner of his lip is so swollen that his voice sounds distorted, like he’s having to squeeze the words past a pillow. “Wanted to know things,” he says, then sucks in a deep breath and tries again. “Asked me questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“My family’s apartment. Charles Street. Security codes. Guards—how many and when.”

I don’t say anything. I’m not sure Julian realizes what this means, and how bad it is. The Scavengers have grown desperate. They’re trying to launch an attack on his house now, use him to find a way in. Maybe they’re planning to kill Thomas Fineman; maybe they’re just looking for the typical goods: jewelry, electronics that might be bartered on the black market, money, and, of course, weapons. They are always amassing weapons.

This can only mean one thing: Their plan to ransom Julian has failed. Mr. Fineman didn’t bite.

“Wouldn’t tell them anything,” Julian huffs out. “They said … a few more days … more sessions… I’d talk.”

There’s no longer any doubt. We have to get out as soon as possible. Whenever Julian decides to talk—which he will, eventually—neither he nor I will serve any purpose to the Scavengers. And they are not known for their policy of catch-and-release.

“All right, listen.” I try to keep my voice low, hoping he won’t read the urgency there. “We’re getting out of here, okay?”

He shakes his head, a tiny gesture of disbelief. “How?” he croaks out.

“I’ve got a plan,” I say. This isn’t true, but I figure I
will
have a plan. I’ve got to. Raven and Tack are counting on me. Thinking of the messages they left me, and the knife, fills me once again with warmth. I am not alone.

“Armed.” Julian swallows, then tries again. “They’re armed.”

“We’re armed too.” My brain is skipping ahead now, into the hallway: Footsteps come down, they go back up, one at a time. One guard only at mealtime. That’s a good thing. If we can somehow get him to unlock the door… I’m so consumed with the planning, I don’t even pay attention to the words coming out of my mouth.

“Look, I’ve been in bad situations before. You’ve got to trust me. This one time in Massachusetts—”

Julian interrupts me. “When … you… Massachusetts?”

That’s when I realize I’ve screwed up. Lena Morgan Jones has never been to Massachusetts, and Julian knows it. For a moment I debate telling another lie, and in that pause Julian struggles onto his elbows, swiveling around and scooting backward to face me, grimacing the whole time.

“Be careful,” I say. “Don’t push it.”

“When were you in Massachusetts?” he repeats painstakingly slowly, so that each word is clear.

Maybe it’s the way that Julian looks, with the blood-spotted strip of shirt knotted around his forehead and his eyes swollen practically shut: the look of a bruised animal. Or maybe it’s because I realize, now, that the Scavengers are going to kill us—if not tomorrow, then the next day or the day after that.

Or maybe I’m just hungry, and tired, and sick of pretending.

In a flash, I decide to tell him the truth. “Listen,” I say, “I’m not who you think I am.”

Julian gets very still. I’m reminded again of an animal—one time we found a baby raccoon, foundering in a mud pit that had opened up in the ground after a thaw. Bram went to help it, and as he approached, the raccoon went still just like that—an electric stillness, more alert and energetic than any kind of struggle.

“All that stuff I told you—about growing up in Queens and getting held back—none of that was true.”

Once I was on the other side, in Julian’s position. I stood, battered between currents, as Alex told me the same thing.
I’m not who you think I am.
I still remember the swim back to shore; the longest and most exhausting of my life.

“You don’t need to know who I am, okay? You don’t need to know where I really come from. But Lena Morgan Jones is a made-up story. Even this”—I touch my fingers to my neck, running them over the three-pronged scar—“this was made-up too.”

Julian still doesn’t say anything, although he has inched backward even farther and used the wall to pull himself into a seated position. He keeps his knees bent, hands and feet flat on the floor, as though if he could, he would spring forward and run.

“I know you don’t have a lot of reason to trust me right now,” I say. “But I’m asking you to trust me anyway. If we stay here, we’ll be killed. I can get us out. But I’m going to need your help.”

There is a question in my words, and I stop, waiting for Julian’s answer.

For a long time there is silence. At last he croaks out, “You.”

The venom in his voice surprises me. “What?”

“You,” he repeats. And then, “You did this. To me.”

My heart starts beating hard against my chest, painfully. For a second I think—I almost hope—that he’s having some kind of attack, a hallucination or fantasy. “What are you talking about?”

“Your people,” he says, and then I get a sick taste in my mouth and I know that he’s perfectly lucid. I know exactly what he means, and what he thinks. “Your people did this.”

“No,” I say, and then repeat it a little more emphatically. “No. We had nothing to do with—”

“You’re an Invalid. That’s what you’re telling me, right? You’re infected.” Julian’s fingers are trembling lightly against the ground, with a noise like the patter of rain. He’s furious, I realize, and probably scared, too. “You’re sick.” He nearly spits out the word.

“Those aren’t my people out there,” I say, and now I have to stop the anger from coming and dragging me under: It is a black force, a current tugging at the edges of my mind. “Those people aren’t…” I almost say,
They aren’t human
. “They’re not Invalids.”

“Liar,” Julian snarls. There it is. Just like the raccoon when Bram finally went to lift it from the mud and it leapt, snapping, and sank its teeth into the flesh of his right hand.

The sick taste in my throat comes all the way from my stomach. I stand up, hoping Julian won’t see that I, too, am shaking. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “You don’t know anything about us, and you don’t know anything about me.”

“Tell me,” Julian says, still with that undercurrent of rage and coldness. Each word sounds hard-edged and cutting. “When did you catch it?”

I laugh, even though none of it is funny. The world is upside down and everything is shit and my life has been cleaved and there are two different Lenas running parallel to each other, the old and the new, and they will never, ever be whole again. And I know Julian won’t help me now. I was an idiot to think that he would. He’s a zombie, just like Raven has always said. And zombies do what they were built to do: They trundle forward, blindly obedient, until they rot away for good.

Well, not me. I fish the knife out from under the mattress and sit on the cot, then begin running the blade quickly along the metal bedpost, sharpening it, taking pleasure in the way it catches the light.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say to Julian. “None of it matters.”

“How?” he persists. “Who was it?”

The black space inside me gives a tiny shudder, widens another inch. “Go to hell,” I say to Julian, but calmly now, and I keep my eyes on the knife, flashing, flashing, flashing, like a sign pointing the way out of the dark.

W
e stay four days at the first encampment. On the night before we are supposed to set out again, Raven takes me aside.

“It’s time,” she says.

I’m still angry at her for what she said to me at the traps, although the rage has been replaced by a dull, thudding resentment. All this time, she has known everything about me. I feel as though she has reached into me, to a deep place, and broken something.

“Time for what?” I say.

Behind me, the campfire is burning low. Blue and Sarah and some of the others have fallen asleep outside, a tangle of blankets and hair and legs. They have begun to sleep this way a lot, like a human patchwork: It keeps them warm. Lu and Grandpa are conversing in low voices. Grandpa is chewing some of his last tobacco, working it in and out of his mouth, spitting occasionally into the fire and causing a burst of green flame. The others must have gone into the tents.