Pandemonium (29 page)

I close my eyes.

A rifle shot explodes in the silence, then two more. I open my eyes and see the Scavenger above me collapse to one side, like a puppet whose strings have been suddenly cut. His ax falls blade-first in the snow. Two other Scavengers have fallen too, pierced cleanly with bullets: Their blood is spreading against the whiteness.

Then I see them: Tack and Hunter jogging toward us, rifles in hand, thin and pale and haggard and alive.

W
hen I come to, I’m lying on my back on a dingy sheet. Julian is kneeling next to me, his hands unbound.

“How are you feeling?”

All of a sudden I remember—the rats, the monsters, the woman with the half face. I struggle to sit up. Little fireworks of pain go off in my head.

“Easy, easy.” Julian puts his arm under my shoulders and helps move me into a seated position. “You cracked your head pretty badly.”

“What happened?” We are sitting in an area that has been partially blocked off by dismantled cardboard boxes. All along the platform, flowered sheets are strung up between broken slats of plywood, offering some privacy to the squatters inside; mattresses have been placed inside enormous, sagging cardboard structures; walls and blockades have been made by interlocking broken chairs and three-legged tables. The air is still hot, stinking of ash and oil. I watch the smoke trace a line along the ceiling, before getting sucked up and out through a tiny vent.

“They cleaned you up,” Julian says quietly, in a tone of disbelief. “At first I thought they were going to—” He breaks off, shaking his head. “But then a woman came, with bandages and everything. She wrapped up your neck. It was bleeding again.”

I touch my neck: It has been taped up with thick gauze. They’ve taken care of Julian, too; the cut on his lip has been cleaned, and the bruises on his eyes are less swollen.

“Who are these people?” I say. “What is this place?”

Julian shakes his head again. “Invalids.” Seeing me flinch, he adds, “I don’t know any other word for them. For you.”

“We’re not the same,” I say, watching the bent and crippled figures moving beyond the smoky fire. Something is cooking; I can smell it. I don’t want to think about what kind of food they eat down here—what kind of animals they manage to trap. I think of the rats, and my stomach lurches. “Don’t you get that yet? We’re all different. We want different things. We live different ways. That’s the whole point.”

Julian opens his mouth to respond, but at that moment the monster woman appears, the one I tried to fight off at the edge of the platform. She pushes aside the cardboard barricade, and it strikes me that they must have arranged it that way so Julian and I would have some privacy.

“You’re awake,” the woman says. Now that I’m not so terrified, I see that she’s not missing part of her face, as I imagined; the right side of her face is just much smaller than the left, collapsed inward, as though her face is composed of two different masks, imperfectly joined.
Birth defect,
I think, even though I’ve seen only a few defectives in my life, and all of them were in textbooks. In school we were always taught that kids born from the uncured would end up like this, crippled and mangled in some way. The priests told us this was the
deliria
manifesting in their bodies.

Children born of the healthy and the whole are healthy and whole; children born of the disease will have sickness in their bones and blood.

All these people, born crippled or bent or misshapen, have been driven underground. I wonder what would have happened to them as babies, as children, if they had stayed aboveground. I remember, then, what Raven told me about finding Blue.
You know what they say about
deliria
babies. . . . She would probably be taken and killed. She wouldn’t even be buried. . . . She’ d be burned, and packed up with the waste.

The woman doesn’t wait for me to answer before kneeling in front of me. Julian and I are both silent. I want to say something to her, but I don’t have the words. I want to look away from her face, but I can’t.

“Thank you,” I finally manage. Her eyes flick to mine. They are brown and webbed with fine lines. She has a permanent squint, probably from existing in this strange, twilight world.

“How many were they?” she asks. I would have expected her voice to be mangled and broken, a reflection of her face, but it is high and clear. Pretty. When I don’t immediately respond, she says, “The Intruders. How many?”

I know immediately that she is referring to the Scavengers, though she uses a different word to describe them. I can tell from the way she says it: the mixture of anger, fear, and disgust.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Seven, at least. Maybe more.”

The woman says, “They came three seasons ago. Maybe four.” I must look surprised by her way of speaking, because she adds, “It isn’t easy to keep track of time in the tunnels. Days, weeks—unless we go above, it’s hard to know.”

“How long have you been down here?” I ask, almost afraid to know the answer.

She squints at me with those small, sludge-colored eyes. I do my best not to look at her mouth and chin: There, the deformity is at its worst, as though her face is curling up into itself, a wilting flower. “I’ve been here always,” she says. “Or almost always.”

“How—?” The question gets caught in my throat.

She smiles. I think it’s a smile, at least. One corner of her mouth corkscrews upward. “There is nothing for us on the surface,” she says. “Nothing but death, anyway.”

So it’s like I thought. I wonder if that’s what always happens to the babies who don’t find their way underground, or to a homestead in the Wilds. Maybe they get locked in prisons and mental institutions. Maybe they are simply killed.

“For all my life, the tunnels have belonged to us,” she says. I’m still having a hard time reconciling the melody of her voice with the look of her face. I focus on her eyes: Even in the dim, smoky light, I can see that they are full of warmth. “People find their way to us with babies. This is a safe place for them.” Her eyes flick to Julian, and I notice her scan his unblemished neck; then she’s back to me. “You’ve been cured,” she says. “That’s what they call it aboveground, right?”

I nod. I open my mouth to try and explain—
I’m okay, I’m on your side
—but to my surprise, Julian speaks up. “We’re not with the Intruders,” he says. “We’re not with anyone else. We’re—we’re on our own.”

We’re not with anyone else. I know he’s just saying it to appease her, but the words still buoy me up, help break apart the knot of fear that has been lodged in my chest since we’ve been underground.

Then I think of Alex, and I feel nauseous all over again. I wish that we had never left the Wilds. I wish that I had never agreed to join the resistance.

“How did you come here?” the woman says. She pours from a jug next to me, and offers me a plastic cup: a child’s cup, with faded patterns of deer prancing around its rim. This, like everything else down here, must have floated in from above—discarded, unwanted, drifting through the cracks of the earth like a melting snow.

“We were taken.” Julian’s voice gets stronger now. “Kidnapped by the Intruders.” He hesitates, and I know that he’s thinking about the DFA badges we found, the tattoo I saw. He doesn’t understand yet, and I don’t either; but I know this was not merely the effort of Scavengers. They were paid or were supposed to be paid for their trouble. “We don’t know why,” he says.

“We’re trying to find our way out,” I say, and then something that the woman said earlier strikes me, and I feel a sudden surge of hope. “Wait—you said you have trouble keeping track of time unless you go aboveground, right? So … there’s a way out? A way up?”

“I don’t go aboveground,” she says. The way she says
above
makes it sound like a dirty word.

“But somebody does,” I persist. “Somebody must.” They must have ways of getting supplies: sheets and cups and fuel and all the piles of half-used, broken-down furniture heaped around us on the platform.

“Yes,” she says evenly. “Of course.”

“Will you take us?” I ask. My throat is dry. Just thinking about the sun, and the space, and the surface, makes me want to cry. I don’t know what will happen once we’re above again, but I push away the thought.

“You’re still very weak,” she says. “You need to eat and rest.”

“I’m okay,” I insist. “I can walk.” I try to stand up, and find my vision clouding with black. I thud back down.

“Lena.” Julian puts a hand on my arm. Something flickers in his eyes—
Trust me, it’s okay, a little longer won’t kill us
. I don’t know what’s happening, or how we’ve begun to communicate in silence, or why I like it so much.

He turns to the woman. “We’ll rest for a bit. Then will someone show us the way to the surface?”

The woman once again looks from Julian to me and back again. Then she nods. “You don’t belong down here,” she says. She climbs to her feet.

I feel suddenly humbled. All these people make a life from trash and broken things, living in darkness, breathing in smoke. And yet, they helped us. They helped us without knowing us, and for no reason at all other than the fact that they knew how. I wonder whether I would do the same, if I were in their position. I’m not sure.

Alex would have, I think. And then: Julian would too.

“Wait!” Julian calls her back. “We—we didn’t get your name.”

A look of surprise crosses her face: Then she smiles again, the little corkscrew lips. “I was named down here,” she says. “They call me Coin.”

Julian wrinkles his forehead, but I get it right away. It’s an Invalid name: descriptive, easy to remember, funny, kind of sick. Coin, as in two-sided.

Coin was right: Time is hard to measure in the tunnels, even harder than it was to measure in the cell. At least there we had the electric light to guide us—on during day, off at night. Every minute down here becomes an hour.

Julian and I eat three granola bars each, and some more of the jerky we stole from the Scavengers’ stash. It feels like a feast, and before I’m even finished, my stomach is cramping badly. Still, after eating, and drinking the whole jug of water, I feel better than I have in days. We doze for a bit—lying so close I can feel Julian’s breath stirring my hair, our legs almost touching—and we both wake at the same time.

Coin is standing above us again. She has refilled the jug of water. Julian utters a little cry as he is shaking himself into awareness. Then he sits up quickly, embarrassed. He runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up at crazy angles, every which way; I have an overwhelming urge to reach out and smooth it down.

“Can you walk?” Coin asks me. I nod. “I’ll have someone take you to the surface, then.” Again, she says
surface
as though it’s a dirty word, or a curse.

“Thank you.” The words seem thin and insufficient. “You didn’t need to—I mean, we really appreciate it. We’d probably be dead if it weren’t for you and … your friends.” I almost say your people, but I catch myself at the last minute. I remember how angry I’ve been with Julian for saying the same thing.

She stares at me for a moment without smiling, and I wonder if, somehow, I’ve offended her. “Like I said, you don’t belong down here,” she says. And then, her voice swelling, rising to a high pitch: “There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”

A small tremor passes through her body; her right hand tugs convulsively at the folds of her dirty dress.

“I’ll find someone to guide you,” she says abruptly, as though ashamed of her outburst, and turns away from us.

Rat-man is the one who comes for us, and seeing him brings back a sense of vertigo and nausea, even though this time he is alone. The rats have gone back to their holes and hiding places.

“Coin said you want to go up,” he says, the longest sentence I have heard from him yet. Julian and I are already standing. Julian has taken the backpack, and though I’ve told him I’m okay to stand, he insists on keeping a hand on my arm.
Just in case
, he said, and I think of how different he is from the boy I saw onstage in the Javits Center, the cool floating screen image—unimaginable that they should be the same person. I wonder whether that boy is the real Julian, or this boy is the real one, or whether it’s even possible to know.

Then it hits me: I’m not even sure who the real Lena is anymore.