The press of tents and shelters eventually peters out. Ribbons of old pavement, now cracked and fragmented, crisscross the landscape. Vast squares of concrete mark the foundation of old houses.
As we approach the river, we see a crowd has gathered along its banks. People are shouting, pushing and shoving their way to the water.
“Now what’s the problem?” Tack mutters.
Julian hitches the buckets higher on his shoulder and frowns, although he stays silent.
“There’s no problem,” Raven says. “Everyone’s just excited about a shower.” But her voice is strained.
We force our way into the thick tangle of bodies. The smell is overwhelming. I gag, but there’s no space to move, no way to bring a hand over my mouth. Not for the first time, I’m grateful to be only five foot two; at least it allows me to squeeze through the smallest openings between people, and I fight my way to the front of the crowd first, breaking out onto the steep, stony banks of the river, while the mass of people continues to swell behind me, fighting toward the river.
Something is wrong. The water is extremely low—no more than a trickle, a foot or so wide and hardly that deep, and churned mostly to mud. As the river winds back toward the city, it is filled with a moving jigsaw puzzle of people, swelling into the riverbank, desperate to fill their containers. From a distance, they look like insects.
“What the hell?” Raven finally pushes her way onto the bank and stands next to me, stunned.
“The water’s running out,” I say. Facing this sluggish stream of mud, I begin to panic. Suddenly I am thirstier than I have ever been in my life.
“Impossible,” Raven says. “Pippa said the river was flowing fine just yesterday.”
“Better take what we can,” Tack says. He, Hunter, and Bram have finally fought their way through the crowd. Julian follows a moment afterward. His face is red with sweat. His hair is plastered to his forehead. For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.
More and more people are flowing down toward the river and fighting for what little water remains. There is no choice; we must fight alongside them. As I’m moving into the water, someone pushes me out of the way, and I end up falling backward, landing hard on the rocks. Pain shoots up my spine, and it takes me three tries to stand up. Too many people are streaming by me, shoving me. Eventually, Julian has to fight his way back through the crowd and help me to my feet.
In the end, we manage to get only a fraction of the water we wanted, and we lose some of it on the way back to Pippa’s camp, when a man stumbles into Hunter, upsetting one of his buckets. The water we have collected is filled with fine silt and will be reduced even further once we manage to boil away the mud. I would cry if I thought I could waste the water.
Pippa and the woman from resistance are standing in the middle of a small circle of people. Alex and Coral have returned. I can’t help but imagine where they have been together. Stupid, when there are so many other things to worry about; but still the mind will circle back to this one thing.
Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.
“The river—” Raven starts to say as we get closer, but Pippa cuts her off.
“We heard,” she says. Her face is grim. In the daylight, I see Pippa is older than I originally thought. I assumed she was in her early thirties, but her face is deeply lined, and her hair is gray at the temples. Or maybe that is only the effect of being here, in the Wilds, and waging this war. “It isn’t flowing.”
“What do you mean?” Hunter says. “A river doesn’t stop flowing overnight.”
“It does if it’s dammed,” Alex says.
For a second there’s silence.
“What do you mean, dammed?” Julian speaks first. He, too, is trying not to panic. I can hear it in his voice.
Alex stares at him. “Dammed,” he repeats. “As in, stopped. Blocked up. Obstructed or confined by a—”
“But who dammed it?” Julian cuts in. He refuses to look at Alex, but it’s Alex who responds.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” He shifts slightly, angling his body toward Julian. There’s a hot, electric tension in the air. “The people on the other side.” He pauses. “Your people.”
Julian still isn’t used to losing his temper. He opens his mouth and then shuts it. He says, very calmly, “What did you say?”
“Julian.” I place a hand on his arm.
Pippa jumps in. “Waterbury was mostly evacuated before I arrived,” she says. “We thought it was because of the resistance. We took it as a sign of progress.” She lets out a harsh bark of laughter. “Obviously, they had other plans. They’ve cut off the water source in the city.”
“So we’ll leave,” Dani says. “There are other rivers. The Wilds is full of them. We’ll go somewhere else.” Her suggestion meets with silence. She stares from Pippa to Raven.
Pippa runs a hand over the short fuzz of her hair.
“Yeah, sure.” The woman from the resistance speaks up. She has a funny accent, all lilts and melody, like drawn butter. “The people we can gather, the ones who can be mobilized—we can leave. We can scatter, break up, go back into the Wilds. But there are probably patrols waiting for us. No doubt they’re gathering even now. Easier for them if we’re in smaller groups—less of a chance we’ll be able to fight. Plus, it looks better for the press. Large-scale slaughter is harder to cover up.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
I turn around. Lu has just joined the group. She is slightly breathless, and her face is shiny, as though she has been running. I wonder where she has been all this time. As usual, her hair is loose, plastered to her neck and forehead.
“This is Summer,” Pippa says evenly. “She’s with resistance. She’s the reason you’ll be eating tonight.” The subtext is clear: Watch what you say.
“But we have to leave.” Hunter’s voice is practically a bark. I get the urge to reach out and squeeze his hand. Hunter never loses his temper. “What other choice do we have?”
Summer doesn’t flinch. “We could fight back,” she says. “We’ve all been looking for a chance to rally together, make something of this mess.” She gestures to the array of shelters, like pieces of enormous metal shrapnel, glittering vastly toward the horizon. “That was the point of coming to the Wilds, wasn’t it? For all of us? We were tired of being told what to choose.”
“But how will we fight?” I feel shyer in front of this woman, with her soft, musical voice and her fierce eyes, than I have in front of anyone for a while. But I press on. “We’re weak as it is. Pippa said we’re disorganized. Without water—”
“I’m not suggesting we go head-to-head,” she interrupts me. “We don’t even know what we’re dealing with—how many people are left in the city, whether there are patrols gathering in the Wilds. What I’m suggesting is that we take the river back.”
“But if the river’s dammed—”
Again, she cuts me off. “Dams can be exploded,” she says simply.
We are silent for another second. Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Largely from habit, we wait for one of them to speak.
“What’s your plan?” Tack says, and just like that, I know it’s real: This is happening. This will happen.
I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us.
Instead life has only grown harder.
I wonder whether it will ever end.
I feel Julian’s hand on my shoulder: a squeeze, a reassurance. I open my eyes.
Pippa squats and draws a large teardrop shape in the ground with a thumb. “Let’s say this is Waterbury. We’re here.” She marks an X at the southeast side of the larger end. “And we know that when the fighting started, the cureds retreated to the west side of the city. My guess is that the block is somewhere here.” She hazards an X on the east side, where the teardrop begins to narrow.
“Why?” Raven says. Her face is alive again, alert. For a moment, when I look at her, I get a small chill. She lives for this—the fight, the battle for survival. She actually enjoys it.
Pippa shrugs. “It’s my best guess. That part of the city was mostly park anyway—they’ve probably just flooded it completely, rerouted the water flow. They’ll have shored up defenses there, of course, but if they had enough firepower to rout us, they’d have attacked already. We’re talking whatever forces they’ve gathered in a week or two.”
She looks up at us, to make sure we’re following. Then she draws a sweeping arrow around the base of the teardrop, pointing upward. “They’ll probably expect us to go north, toward the water flow. Or they think we’ll scatter.” She draws lines radiating in various directions from the base of the teardrop; now it looks like a deranged, bearded smiley face. “I think instead we should make a direct attack, send a small force into the city, bust open the dam.” She draws a line, sweepingly, through the teardrop, cutting it in half.
“I’m in,” Raven says. Tack spits. He doesn’t have to say he’s in too.
Summer folds her arms, looking down at Pippa’s diagram. “We’ll need three separate groups,” she says slowly. “Two diversionary, to create problems here and here”—she bends down and marks X’s at two distinct places along the periphery—“and one smaller force to get in, do the job, and get out.”
“I’m in,” Lu pipes up. “As long as I can be part of the main force. I don’t want any of this side-business shit.”
This surprises me. At the old homestead, Lu never expressed interest in joining the resistance. She never even got a fake procedural mark. She just wanted to stay as far as possible from the fighting; she wanted to pretend that the other side, the cured side, didn’t exist. Something must have changed in the months we’ve been apart.
“Lu can come with us.” Raven grins. “She’s a walking good-luck charm. That’s how she got her name. Isn’t it, Lucky?”
Lu doesn’t say anything.
“I want to be part of the main force too,” Julian speaks up suddenly.
“Julian,” I whisper. He ignores me.
“I’ll go wherever you need me,” Alex says. Julian glances at him, and for a second I feel the resentment between them, a blunt, hard-edged force.
“So will I,” Coral says.
“Count us in.” Hunter speaks for him and Bram.
“I want to be the one who lights the match,” Dani says.
Other people are chiming in now, volunteering for different tasks. Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”
I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.