“Oh, I’m not nervous,” I tell her. “Trust me. I can’t wait.”
Only seven more days.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager schoolchildren, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be deceived?”
—“On Beauty and Falsehood,” The New Philosophy , by Ellen Dorpshire
Hana’s already there when I arrive, leaning up against the chain-link fence that encircles the track, head tilted back and eyes closed against the sun. Her hair is loose and spilling down her back, nearly white in the sun. I pause when I’m fifteen feet away from her, wishing I could memorize her exactly like that, hold that precise image in my mind forever.
Then she opens her eyes and sees me. “We haven’t even started to run yet,” she says, pushing off the fence and making a big show of checking her watch, “and you’re already coming in second.”
“Is that a challenge?” I say, closing the last ten feet between us.
“Just a fact,” she says, grinning. Her smile flickers a little as I get closer. “You look different.”
“I’m tired,” I say. It feels strange to greet each other with no hug or anything, even though this is how things have always been between us, how things have always had to be. It feels strange that I’ve never told her how much she means to me. “Long day.”
“You want to talk about it?” She squints at me. The summer has made her tan. The sun-freckles on her nose bunch up like a constellation of stars collapsing. I really think she might be the most beautiful girl in Portland, maybe in the whole world, and I feel a sharp pain behind my ribs, thinking of how she’ll grow older and forget me. Someday she’ll hardly think of all the time we spent together— when she does, it will seem distant and faintly ridiculous, like the memory of a dream whose details have already started to ebb away.
“After we run, maybe,” I say, the only thing I can think to say. You have to go forward: It’s the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.
“After you eat dirt, you mean,” she says, bending forward to stretch out her hamstrings.
“You talk a big game for someone who’s been lying on her ass all summer.”
“You’re one to talk.” She tilts her head up to wink at me.
“I don’t think what you and Alex have been doing really counts as exercise.”
“Shhh.”
“Relax, relax. No one’s around. I checked.”
It all seems so normal—so deliciously, wonderfully normal—that I’m filled from head to toe with a joy that makes me dizzy. The streets are striped with golden sun and shadow, and the air smells like salt and the odor of frying things and, faintly, seaweed washed up onto the beaches. I want to hold this moment inside of me forever, keep it safe, like a shadow-heart: my old life, my secret.
“Tag,” I say to Hana, giving her a tap on the shoulder.
“You’re it.”
And then I’m off and she’s yelping and leaping to catch up, and we’re rounding the track and heading down to the piers without hesitating or debating our route. My legs feel strong, steady; the bite I got on the night of the raids has healed well and completely, leaving just a thin red mark along the back of my calf, like a smile. The cool air pumps in and out of my lungs, aching, but it’s the good kind of pain: the pain that reminds you how amazing it is to breathe, to ache, to be able to feel at all.
Salt stings my eyes and I blink rapidly, not sure whether I’m sweating or crying.
It’s not the fastest run we’ve ever been on, but I think it might be one of our best. We keep up the same exact rhythm, running almost shoulder to shoulder, drawing a loop from the old harbor all the way out to Eastern Prom.
We’re slower than we were at the start of the summer, that’s for sure. At about the three-mile mark both of us are starting to lag, and by silent agreement we both cut down the sloping lawn onto the beach, flinging ourselves onto the sand, starting to laugh.
“Two minutes,” Hana says, gasping. “I just need two minutes.”
“Pathetic,” I say, even though I’m just as grateful for the pause.
“Right back at you,” she says, lobbing a handful of sand in my direction. Both of us flop onto our backs, arms and legs flung apart like we’re about to make snow angels.
The sand is surprisingly cool on my skin, and a little damp. It must have rained earlier after all, maybe when Alex and I were in the Crypts. Thinking again of that tiny cell and the words drilled straight through the wall, sun revolving through the O as though beamed through a telescope, makes that thing constrict in my chest again. Even now, this second, my mother is out there somewhere—moving, breathing, being.
Well, soon I’ll be out there too.
There are only a few people on the beach, mostly families walking, and one old man, plodding slowly by the water, staking his cane into the sand. The sun is sinking farther beyond the clouds, and the bay is a hard gray, just barely tinged with green.
“I can’t believe in only a few weeks we won’t have to worry about curfew anymore,” Hana says, then swivels her head to look at me. “Less than three weeks, for you.
Sixteen days, right?”
“Yeah.” I don’t like to lie to Hana so I sit up, wrapping my arms around my knees.
“I think on my first night cured I’m going to stay out all night. Just because I can.” Hana props herself up on her elbows. “We can make a plan to do it together—you and me.” There’s a pleading note in her voice. I know I should just say, Yeah, sure, or That sounds great. I know it would make her feel better—it would make me feel better—to pretend that life will go on as usual.
But I can’t force the words out. Instead I start blotting bits of sand from my thighs with a thumb. “Listen, Hana.
I have to tell you something. About the procedure . . .”
“What about it?” She squints at me. She’s heard some note of seriousness in my voice, and it has worried her.
“Promise you won’t be mad, okay? I won’t be able to—” I stop myself before I can say, I won’t be able to leave if you’re mad at me. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Hana sits up completely, holding up a hand, forcing a laugh. “Let me guess. You’re jumping ship with Alex, making a run for it, going all rogue and Invalid on me.”
She says it jokingly but there’s an edge to her voice, an undercurrent of neediness. She wants me to contradict her.
I don’t say anything, though. For a minute we just stare at each other, and all the light and energy drains from her face at once.
“You’re not serious,” she says finally. “You can’t be serious.” “I have to, Hana,” I tell her quietly. “When?”
She bites her lip and looks away. “We decided today.
This morning.”
“No. I mean— when . When are you going?”
I hesitate for only a second. After this morning, I feel like I don’t know very much about the world or anything in it. But I do know that Hana would never, ever betray me—not now, at least, not until they stick needles into her brain and pick her apart, tease her into pieces. I realize now that that’s what the cure does, after all: It fractures people, cuts them off from themselves.
But by then—by the time they get to her—it will be too late. “Friday,” I say. “A week from now.”
She breathes out sharply, the air whistling between her teeth. “You can’t be serious,” she repeats.
“There’s nothing for me here,” I say.
She looks back at me then. Her eyes are enormous, and I can tell I’ve hurt her. “I’m here.”
Suddenly the solution comes to me—simple, ridiculously simple. I almost laugh out loud. “Come with us,” I burst out. Hana scans the beach anxiously, but everyone has dispersed: The old man has plodded on, halfway down the beach by now and out of earshot. “I’m serious, Hana.
You could come with us. You’d love it in the Wilds. It’s incredible. There are whole settlements there—”
“You’ve been?” she cuts in sharply.
I blush, realizing I’d never told her about my night with Alex in the Wilds. I know she’ll see this, too, as a betrayal. I used to tell her everything. “Just once,” I say.
“And only for a couple of hours. It’s amazing, Hana. It’s not like we imagined it at all. And the crossing . . . The fact that you can cross at all . . . So much is different from what we’ve been told. They’ve been lying to us, Hana.”
I stop, temporarily overwhelmed. Hana looks down, picking at the seam of her running shorts.
“We could do it,” I say, more gently. “The three of us together.”
For a long time Hana doesn’t say anything. She looks out at the ocean, squinting. Finally she shakes her head, an almost imperceptible movement, shooting me a sad smile. “I’ll miss you, Lena,” she says, and my heart sinks.
“Hana—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“Or maybe I won’t miss you.” She heaves herself to her feet, slapping the sand off her shorts. “That’s one of the promises of the cure, right? No pain. Not that kind of pain, anyway.”
“You don’t have to go through with it.” I scramble to my feet. “Come to the Wilds.”
She lets out a hollow laugh. “And leave all this behind?”
She gestures around her. I can tell she’s half joking, but only half. In the end, despite all her talk, and the underground parties and forbidden music, Hana doesn’t want to give up this life, this place: the only home we’ve ever known. Of course, she has a life here: family, a future, a good match. I have nothing.
The corners of Hana’s mouth are trembling and she drops her head, kicking at the sand. I want to make her feel better but can’t think of anything to say. There’s a frantic aching in my chest. It seems like as we stand there I’m watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her father’s old glasses, and bang on her desk with a ruler whenever I got an answer wrong, and we always started choking with laughter halfway through; the time she put a fist, hard, in Jillian Dawson’s face because Jillian said my blood was diseased; eating ice cream on the pier and dreaming of being paired and living in identical houses, side by side. All of it is being sucked into nothing, like sand getting swept up by a current.
“You know it’s not about you,” I say. I have to force the words out, past a lump in my throat. “You and Grace are the only people who matter to me here. Nothing else—” I break off. “Everything else is nothing.”