Late night. I couldn’t sleep. No one else could either.
With all the tension in the gym after Ben and Patrick’s fight, it felt like if you struck a match, the place would combust.
I leaned back in my cot, pen in hand, notebook open across my knees. I was way behind on entries and scribbling as fast as I could. There was a ton to catch up on, and as the Unofficial Historian of the Human Record, I had a responsibility to keep going. I stretched my neck, shook out the cramp in my hand.
The half-moon was caught perfectly in one of the casement windows above the bleachers, as if snared in a spiderweb. It was a rich shade of yellow, almost gold.
I thought about how peaceful it must be up there on the moon right about now. All that rock and hardened lava orbiting around us like always. In the stars it didn’t matter that every adult in the world was dead. Didn’t matter that Hatchlings were coming to devour us alive. Or that I’d had to hold Leonora Rose’s hand while Patrick fired a steel rod through her skull.
Alex was sitting up across from me on her cot with a needle and thread, stitching Bunny’s neck closed. She was biting her lip, furrowing her brow with concentration the way she did. Her shirt was torn and ragged, her hair tangled, her face streaked with dirt, but I have to say in that spill of golden moonlight she didn’t look bad at all.
She glanced up, caught me watching. I didn’t avert my eyes. She smiled at me.
It was a different kind of smile. Not flirtatious. But like she was happy to see me looking at her and didn’t care if I knew it. I felt it spread all through me, that smile, like a sip of something warm on a freezing night.
Her smile faded. We held our eye contact. I was vaguely aware of Patrick on the cot behind hers, lying back, pressing an ice pack to his swollen eye.
Finally Alex returned her attention to Bunny’s severed head. Someone had to.
I’d just started writing again when I became aware of whimpering a few rows over. I was used to this—ever since the Dusting, kids had all kinds of night terrors. At any given moment, you’d hear two or three kids in the darkness, chattering in terror, pleading in sleepy murmurs, or lurching awake, gasping for air.
This time, though, it was JoJo.
I got up and hurried over to her. She was thrashing around her cot in slow motion, almost gently, fending something off. One cot over, Rocky was out cold, his mouth popped slightly open, his curls falling across his milk-pale cheek. He was her big brother, sure, but he was only ten years old himself. Right now he looked even younger. I wanted him to sleep.
I rested a hand on JoJo’s stomach and jiggled her a little. Her eyes opened.
She started crying silently right when she saw me, her arms shooting out around my neck. I picked her up and shushed her.
“Nightmare about the Hosts?” I whispered.
She buried her face in the side of my neck like she did, and I felt her head shake. “No,” she said. “Ben.”
That’s all she said.
“Why don’t you come hang out with me for a while,” I said quietly.
“Yes, please.”
We walked back over to my cot, and she sat down in my lap. “Tell me the story about the cemetery again,” she said.
“It’s scary,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, “but it’s got a happy ending.”
Her hair was still a mess. It smelled like lollipops—I swear there was part of one stuck in there somewhere. I brushed a snarled tuft aside and let her lean back against me.
Keeping my voice low, I told her the story about how I’d found myself alone in the fog-drenched cemetery at night. How I’d made my way to my parents’ grave. How, when the fog cleared, I’d seen that I was surrounded by Hosts. A big group of them had all but filled the cemetery, and every direction I looked there’d been an eyeless form rising from the mist. The only way I’d survived was by sneaking out behind a Mapper who hadn’t raised his head once.
“And you stepped where he stepped,” JoJo said. “Your feet in his footprints.”
She always relished that detail.
“Yes.”
JoJo said, “And you passed within inches of other Mappers, but they never looked up either.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“And even though it took hours, you made your way out.”
“You can tell this story better than I can by now.”
JoJo reached for my notebook and pulled it into her lap. “You’re writing about your last expedition?” she whispered.
“Yes. I’m catching up on everything Patrick, Alex, and I saw. What we learned.”
“Let’s catch up on what me and Rocky saw, too,” she said.
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“That way we’ll be part of each other’s story, like you said. Forever and always.” She looked over her shoulder at me, her dark eyes shining in the moonlight.
I felt something catch in my throat. I thought of the mechanism hidden in my DNA, waiting to destroy me. “Forever and always, Junebug.”
“How do we do it?”
“You know how to tell a story,” I said. “You just did. Tell me what happened to you when we were gone, and I’ll figure out how to write it.”
“I was sitting in shop class against the big saw-machine thingy, letting Bunny jump up and down my leg,” JoJo said.
So I wrote:
JoJo sat with her back to the base of the slumbering band saw in shop class. She let Bunny hop down one of her legs and then up the other. A dirty stuffed animal with one half-chewed ear making her way along JoJo’s filthy jeans.
This is what passed for fun now.
I showed it to her. “How’s this?”
She read it solemnly and then looked up at me again.
“My jeans aren’t that filthy,” she said.
I gave her the same look that Patrick used on me, the one our father had used on both of us. “Those jeans,” I said, “are the filthiest jeans in the history of filth.”
She almost smiled.
Together we wrote out the rest, from Ben tearing Bunny’s head off and whipping Rocky to Chatterjee marching in and putting Ben in his place. I swear she seemed to calm as we got it down on paper. Maybe that’s one of the points of stories—purging stuff out of our heads onto the page.
She was nodding off just as we finished, and I carried her over to her cot and tucked her in. She stared up at me. Her eyes looked huge—Disney orphan eyes.
“What if you leave again and don’t come back?” she asked.
I answered instinctively. “I won’t.”
“You can’t promise that,” she said. “You can’t.”
I was about to offer her some fake assurance, but then I thought again about how I was nothing more than a dispersal bomb. I closed my mouth. The truth of it fully hit home in that moment: Fifteen years old and I was going to die. I was designed to die. I suppose in a way all of us are, but there seemed to be a special horror in knowing the how and when.
“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t.”
“I don’t need you,” she said. “I don’t.”
She rolled away angrily.
I stared at her back. “Okay.”
I moved to leave, but she reached behind her and grabbed my thumb with her little fist. At first I thought she was pouting, but after a few moments I realized that she’d fallen asleep still gripping my thumb.
I had to slide my hand free without waking her. I guess she felt about me how I felt about Patrick. As long as he was around, I knew I was safe. I wondered if I was up to my responsibility to her in the days I had left.
Who would take over for JoJo when I was gone?
On the way back to my cot, I spotted Eve sitting on the bleachers. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her alone in a while, so I detoured over to her. She grinned when she saw me coming. I sat next to her, and she took my hand, lacing her fingers through mine.
It felt awkward, since we weren’t really boyfriend and girlfriend. I guess we weren’t really not either. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I held her hand.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
She looked nervous. She let go of my hand. “What?”
“We saw your grandma,” I said.
Eve shook her head a little, as if that wasn’t what she was expecting. I wondered what she had been bracing herself for.
“Okay,” she said. “So you saw her. She’s like my mom and dad and everyone else, right?”
“We took care of her,” I said.
I realized that I meant it in both senses.
“She’s at peace now,” I added, though the words felt formal and clunky in my mouth.
Eve nodded a few times. “I feel like there’s less of me left every day,” she said.
Her eyes darted away, and her lips pursed, bringing out that dimple in her cheek. She looked so sad that I kissed her. I know that’s a dumb reason to kiss someone, but I wanted to do anything to make her feel better.
She was pretty, and her lips were soft, and her face was warm.
But I didn’t feel anything. Aside from guilt, I mean.
All I could think about was the way Alex’s hand had brushed against mine in the Widow Latrell’s basement. How that little gesture had brought something good to that awful moment—a tiny light in the darkness.
When I pulled back, Eve was still leaning toward me, her eyes closed. She opened them. “I wish I wasn’t older than you,” she said.
“Why?”
She blinked back tears. “Nothing. Forget it.”
I could tell from her expression that I’d done something wrong, but I wasn’t sure what.
She ducked her head a bit and hooked a strand of hair over her ear. “Good night, Chance.”
When I got back near my cot, Patrick was sleeping, his breaths long and even. I pulled the ice pack off his face. Even in the dark, his eye looked red and swollen.
I turned to say something to Alex, but her cot was empty.
I scanned the dark gym but didn’t see her, so I headed out toward the double doors. Of course Ben was sitting watch on his metal folding chair, his arms crossed, his stun gun tucked into his jeans.
“Sneaking out after your brother’s girlfriend?” he said, not bothering to lower his voice at all.
“Where is she?”
“Girls’ locker room. Maybe you two can swap lipstick.”
I walked past him.
Dezi and Mikey were working the front-door shift, and they turned and stared at me as I passed, their eyes glinting.
I reached the girls’ locker room and cracked the swinging door slightly. “Alex?”
Only the drip of water and a faint rumbling of pipes answered me.
I eased the door open and stepped inside. The lights were off, the generator shut down for the night.
It started up then, the grinding sensation in my stomach that signaled panic. I used to feel it maybe twice a year. Now it was more like twice a day.
As I passed the open stall of the showers, the dripping grew louder. The smell of mold and tile cleaner laced the air.
When I came up on the first bank of lockers, I heard a faint sound. The brush of metal against metal.
Snip-snip.
I crept forward, on high alert.
Snip-snip.
I rounded the lockers.
There Alex sat on the worn wooden bench that ran between the banks of lockers. She was covered by shadow. Her head was tilted forward, her hair dangling over her face.
She almost looked like a Host.
I heard a strange noise then. Not the snipping but a fainter breathy sound.
Alex was crying. I’d never seen her cry. Not like this at least.
I took a heavier step to announce my presence, not wanting to startle her. Her head turned slightly to take me in, though I couldn’t see her eyes through the drape of hair over her face. Her arms were limp, her hands resting loosely in her lap.
I remembered that snipping sound—scissors?—and wondered what the hell she was doing here alone in the darkness.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The water’s shut off for the night. I hate to sound like a princess, but I just want my friggin’ hair clean. Just once. I just want…”
She shook her bangs out of her face and wiped a tear off her cheek with her shoulder like a little kid. I still couldn’t make out her hands in her lap. I didn’t say anything, because I had no idea what to say.
After a time she said, “New Year’s baby. That’s me.”
I knew this, of course, but I kept my mouth shut because I figured she needed to tell me anyway.
“A month and a few days,” she said. “That’s all we have left.”
I eased closer to her. I straddled the bench facing her but left some distance between us, giving her space.
“You’re scared the plan won’t work?” I asked. “That you’ll transform?”
She made a sound like a laugh, but it was the most humorless laugh I’d ever heard. “If I transform, I won’t know anything. So no, I’m not scared of that. I’m sad I won’t be with you guys. And if the plan does work, you guys are gone. Then I don’t want to be here anyways. I don’t want to be left behind.” She gave another non-laugh. “God, this is so screwed up. Who would’ve ever thought we’d have to weigh all this?”
She shifted a little, and her hands came clear now. One of them clutched a pair of scissors. The other a hank of her long hair.
She raised the scissors, and—snip-snip—another lock fell away.
I stared at the blond curl resting across her palm, so long that the ends dangled a good six inches on either side. How many months—years—had it taken her to grow it that long?
She stared at it, then let it fall to the floor. “Maybe this is part of it. We give up what we like. What makes us us. Our parents. Our friends. Our clothes. Our hair. If we give up enough, then there’s nothing to lose. And if we’re gonna make it, we have to act like we’ve got nothing to lose.”
She swiped grime off her cheek. Then she peeled off her shirt. Beneath, a thin cotton tank top.
The collar dipped low across her chest. Her arms were lean and muscular. Her skin was streaked with dirt. Her chest rose and fell with her breaths. Her collarbone was shiny with sweat.
Emotions tumbled through me one after another. I couldn’t keep them straight.
She handed me the scissors. “Do it,” she said.
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Alex,” I said. “Alex, your hair is…”
But there was no way to tell her anything about her hair that made sense in words.
She took my hands, folded them around the metal handles. “Please, Chance.”
So I took the scissors.
I stood behind her.
And I cut off that beautiful long hair.
She stayed perfectly still, her head bowed as if in prayer. When I looked at the mound of wavy blond hair puddling around my boots, I felt a sense of loss that made it hard to breathe.
When I was done, she took the scissors from me and cut the few stray wisps that fell over her face.
Her hair sat choppy and uneven across her forehead, over her ears, along the back. Only on her could this have looked good.
Not good. Great.
She looked like some badass comic-book heroine. Postapocalyptic Girl.
She stood up, ran her fingers through her hair, shook free the loose strands. She looked at me. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her lips, so I glanced away at the empty shower stalls.
“Have you talked to Patrick about any of this?” I asked.
“Patrick doesn’t get this stuff,” she said. “Patrick is just Patrick. The same as he was before.”
“That’s because he’s strong,” I said.
She regarded me evenly. “Yes, strong. Strong and brave. The bravest guy I’ve ever known. But what does it say about him if none of this changes him?”
My mouth opened, but I had no answer.
Alex walked by me, and all at once we were close in the aisle between the lockers. She leaned over. Kissed me on the cheek.
I felt it everywhere in my body.
“Thank you,” she said.
I managed a nod.
She moved past me toward the door.
I stood there for a moment with my thoughts and the slow drip of the shower nozzles. Then I followed her out.
She was a few steps ahead of me in the dark hall. I hurried to catch her, my footsteps echoing hers.
She turned the corner into the next corridor and was suddenly jerked out of sight.
I sprinted after her. As I rounded the corner, I saw a shadow lurch at my face and I ducked. The fist skimmed across my cheek, mashing my upper lip into my teeth, hard enough to topple me. I cracked my head on the tile. Warmth spread through my mouth where my molars had cut into the inside of my cheek. Dark spots blotted my vision.
Dezi laughed down at me. “Man, you just don’t learn, do you?”
Mikey was holding Alex from behind, pressing his huge body into her. “Nice haircut, Alex. You look like a d—”
She stomped on his instep with her heel, and he yelped and shoved her away, hard enough to make her head snap back on her neck. She hit the floor, jolting on her knees, and spilled over next to me, her breath leaving her in a whoosh. She was gasping for air, the wind knocked out of her.
“You’re so pathetic,” Dezi said to me. “You think everyone doesn’t know that you’re crushing on Alex? You think everyone doesn’t laugh at you behind your back?”
He stepped forward and kicked me in the gut.
I curled up, coughing.
“We’re so sick of you three,” Mikey said. “Acting like you run the place. But times are changing.”
Behind them in the hall came a ticktock of approaching boots.
My brother’s broad form emerged from the shadows, his hat pulled low. Nothing but a band of shadow where his eyes should be.
Dezi and Mikey bladed their bodies, facing him and keeping an eye on me and Alex at the same time.
“I got it from here, little brother,” Patrick said.
He stepped toward them.
“No,” I said, getting my feet under me. “I got this.”
I punched Dezi in the knee and felt it buckle. As I rose, I elbowed him in the side of the head, and he fell away. Mikey was looking at me with shock. Before he could react, I hit him as hard as I could in the solar plexus. He grunted and doubled over, and I decked him, driving my fist into his chin with everything I had. It knocked a string of spit loose from his mouth as he went down, pile-driving into the tile.
Alex was up now, leaning against the wall, still catching her breath. “Nice … cross … Little Rain.”
Patrick looked above Dezi’s and Mikey’s squirming bodies at me. I could only see the bottom half of his face beneath the hat. His lips and chin seemed carved from stone. His mouth tensed with a touch of amusement. There was approval in there, too, maybe even pride.
I sensed a shift in the darkness beneath the brim of Patrick’s hat—his eyes moving past me to Alex. “I like the hair,” he said.
The heat of his invisible gaze found me again. He gave me a little nod.
I nodded back.
A trickle of red was streaming down my temple from where it had struck the tile. I wiped it off, spit blood, and headed back to my cot.