by Jeff Sweat
How did Trina not see this happening, not see what Heather is trying to do? She was so focused on getting her way on the council that she didn’t notice that Heather was building her power outside the Olders. She doesn’t need the votes. She has the Hermanas.
She has the other girls, too. Most of the oldest Mamas have slipped quietly away, but the Middles and Tweens are chanting along with the Hermanas. A hundred, maybe more.
“Down with Muscle!”
“Girl home, girl rule!”
“Chicas por las chicas!”
Even the Middles have to realize that they need the boys for more than just the babies. They need their strength, need what smarts they have, even need whatever it is that makes them annoying. But by the time the Hermanas’ spell is broken, the Muscle could be gone.
“Get em out of here,” Trina says to Hyun.
“You ain’t my boss,” Hyun says.
“I am your boss. That’s why they call me the Oldest.”
Hyun acts as if he can’t hear. He’s riding with Heather as far as he can go. “What happens if Heather decides to get rid of the Muscle? Who’s got your back then?”
“Heather does,” he says, muttering.
“You fool,” she says. “If Heather’s got your back, she’s gonna stick something in it.”
He turns his back. Then she realizes: Hyun sent the Muscle away from the gate. None of them are here to help Apple. Stay away, Apple, she thinks. Just stay away, if you don’t want to get hurt by this crowd.
“Everyone!” she says, and she’s still the Oldest, so they have to listen. “Everyone go back to your casas! This is Older biz.”
“The Muscle do what they want, when they want. They ain’t safe,” Heather says. “This is everyone’s biz.”
The Hermanas start to chant again. “Chicas por las chicas!” Their voices are so loud, so rhythmic, that it hurts Trina’s chest. Everyone’s lit by the flame of the Circle, sweating, jumping, pinging off one another like rocks in a landslide. This is what crazy looks like, she thinks. Not the Last Lifers. This.
A Middle boy is stupid enough to walk through the crowd, and a girl bumps him. He cocks his arm as if to punch her, and the Hermanas are there, two of them beating him with their sticks. She sees him under the staffs, screaming, and then the other girls are pulling at the kid. Trina pushes through the crowd to stop them, with no real hope. All she hears are the shouts.
It’s to this that Apple comes home.
Half of the crowd goes quiet, and Trina sees Apple, still, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing when he looks at the Holy Wood. Behind him are four of the missing Muscle—just four—and the Exile. They look tired, determined, smeared with tar. Changed. Then they see the Hermanas beating the boy, and they spring to life.
“Get away from him!” Apple bellows, and Trina realizes what else has changed with them. They have guns. Jesucristo, Apple, she thinks. Guns. Apple shoulders his, and so do the two Muscle who carry weapons. Two of the guns aim into the crowd, and still the shrieks continue, and then Apple fires into the air. The sound is so unfamiliar that a few of the wildest rioters continue, but the rest of the crowd falls still and then even the wild ones do. When Apple speaks, he has almost total silence.
“Get away from the boy,” Apple says, quieter. People don’t really hear his words. They only see the gun. A boy, holding a gun. Only girls are allowed to touch the guns. All their fears of a Muscle rebellion are going to be fanned by that sight.
The crowd parts, the Hermanas part, and the Middle boy is exposed on the pavement. Even from here, Trina can see he’s breathing. Behind him, Jemma and Lady push through the girls. Trina sees Jemma’s panicked face but warns Jemma with her eyes not to rush in. It’s only gonna get worse for you from here, mija.
Trina steps toward Apple and holds out her hands, palms up. “Give me the guns, Apple,” she says. He doesn’t resist. He holds out his gun and nods at the others to give her theirs. Trina reaches out, then stops.
There’s another body on the ground, sprawled on a makeshift stretcher. Blue. Somehow Apple has killed the only girl Muscle.
“Oh, Apple,” she says, taking his gun from his hand and speaking so softly no one else can hear, “there ain’t much I can do for you. Ya lo cagaste, mijo.”
“That’s what people keep telling me,” he says. Grim.
He’s done so many things wrong: Picked up a gun. Killed that girl Blue, maybe. All unforgivable. He’s gonna be Exiled the second Heather gets a chance.
If Trina can pull Apple back to the Olders’ house and let the crowd die down, she has a chance of quietly saving him. But Heather knows that. She won’t let it happen. She wants a Questioning now, in public. Trina settles for moving them to the Casa de las Casas, because it’s smaller. Fewer people to tear Apple apart.
Heather’s case is what she’s been telling everyone all day. Apple left to find weapons to overthrow the Olders, to take over the Muscle, to rebel against the girls. He disobeyed his own Head’s orders.
Actually returning with guns and a dead Blue—those are gifts that even Heather couldn’t have hoped for. By the time she finishes talking, the crowd is just as ugly as it was outside.
This time, though, the crowd includes boys: Muscle without weapons, burly Farmers, Gatherers and Carpenters and Smiths. Apple is respected by almost all the boys—and girls once, too, she has to remind herself—and they’re here to make sure things are fair. Well, even with the Hermanas breathing down her neck, she better make it fair.
“Tell us what happened, Apple,” she says, and he launches into his best weapon: his side of the story. He’s the kind of kid everyone trusted. He needs to remind them of that.
The story unreels without drama, just a quiet retelling. Apple’s suspicions about the Last Lifers, his orders from Hyun to do nothing, his visit with the Half Holy and the attack on the museem, the tar arrows and the vodka bombs and the questioning of the Last Lifer. He seems to claim all the actions for himself, as if he did it all, ordered it all. That way no one else gets blamed. This Questioning is about Apple, now. They might escape, even if he won’t.
When Trina hears about the Last Lifers, about their guns, their numbers, their alliance with the Palos, she can’t hide her expression. The Last Lifers and the Palos could have come to destroy us, and we never would have seen it coming. You should be Head of the Muscle, she thinks, not for the first time. No. You should be an Older.
The crowd feels it, too. If Apple’s telling the truth, then he saved them from terrible deaths, something worse than Pablo’s rebellion. People start to murmur in approval. Some of them slip away. Heather can feel it slipping away, too. Trina can tell by the pukey look on her face, then permits herself a moment of snark: Heather always looks pukey.
“We owe you, Apple,” Trina says. She sees Hyun melting back into the crowd. “Hyun, we should talk.”
“Nah. That ain’t right.” It’s the voice of the Muscle they call Ko. Ko the Asshole. Trina doesn’t like him much, but with that name she didn’t expect to. Ko’s the one who kept trying to roll with Blue. Blue wanted nothing to do with him.
“What he sayin ain’t right,” Ko says. “He told us it was Hyun’s orders. Older orders. That we was just gonna scout for Last Lifers and report back. But he wanted to meet up with the Lifers and trade em vodka for guns.”
“That don’t sound like Apple,” Trina says.
Ko’s face is set hard. He’s not looking anyone in the eye. “He said he was gonna make the Muscle great. The Last Lifers was gonna help him get rid of the Olders.”
The room is still again. “Blue, she didn’t want us to be out there. She said he was wrong—said that wasn’t our orders. And so he shot her.” The room erupts. Jemma looks as if she’s the one who’s been shot.
“Bullshit!” Jamie shouts. “That’s bullshit, Ko! You just mad because they killed Blue! You blaming it on Apple. Apple didn’t kill her!” But the little Muscle is lost in the madness of the room.
; It takes almost a minute for Trina to calm the room down. She takes stock of it, even while she’s shouting for quiet. She sees Jemma’s face stretched tight over her jaw, which is grinding back and forth. She’s being careful not to show any expression, but all Trina reads is anger. Lady is just as still, and so is that Exile who tags behind Apple.
They’re smart not to say anything—it will only make things worse for Apple. Those three are dangerous, she thinks. She wouldn’t mind siccing them on Heather.
“The other Muscle got stories to tell?” she says when the room dies down, hoping that Hector or Shiloh will contradict Ko. But Heather cuts her off.
“We got enough! It’s time for the Harsh,” Heather says—time for the sentencing. Of course she has the room on her side, but now Trina can see she has the Olders, too. Mira, who’ll do whatever Heather says. In-sook looks smug and satisfied, a glittering chain of diamonds around her neck. Heather got to her in the terms she understands. Only Lupe, the former Carpenter, looks unsure.
“Exile me,” Apple says. “This ain’t my Holy Wood no more.”
You trying to piss off everyone? she wonders.
“Exile me,” he says. He is trying to piss them off. So they punish only him. But he’s wrong about this.
“We Exile him,” Heather says, pointedly refusing to talk to Apple directly, “he’ll come back here like Pablo did. He’ll attack the gates with his Last Lifer army and more guns, he’ll get the Muscle to rebel.”
“Last Lifer army.” Jesucristo, Heather. It’s true that the Olders had talked about harsher punishment for rebellion. Trina agreed to it. It just seemed safe. She never thought it would be applied to someone like Apple.
“Exile is too dangerous. It’s too good for him,” Heather says. “We want another Muscle rebellion?”
Shouts puncture the crowd. She’s speaking in the language they fear. Even someone as kind and brave as Apple can be swept up by that unthinking fear, as he’s about to be now.
“The Harsh for rebellion is death,” Heather says. Trina hoped that would sober everyone. If anything, the crowd grows more raucous, more bloodthirsty. Apple and his friends are resolute, deathly still.
Trina catches the eyes of the other Olders. They’re supposed to agree; the Oldest is supposed to say the sentence. Every face says to kill him: In-sook, Mira, Heather. Even Lupe’s face says it now, swayed by the lies and the shouting of the mob.
She feels so alone. She grew up with Apple in the Daycare. They were the same batch, Trina and Apple and Zee. Always she relied on Apple for kindness, common sense, strength—and she can’t give him any of that now.
If the crowd doesn’t hear the Harsh it wants to hear, she loses the room. And if she’s not the one to give the Harsh, she loses the Holy Wood.
“The Olders agree,” she says, and she sees hope draining out of Jemma’s face. Apple’s face stopped hoping the moment he walked through the gates. “For rebelling against the Olders, for threatening the Holy Wood, for working with the Last Lifers … for all these things, Apple is sentenced to be Ended at the barrel of the One Gun.”
No one has ever died like this in the Holy Wood, and Trina can’t stop it, not with the crowd watching, with the Hermanas ready to strike, the Muscle missing, and no fighters of her own. But maybe she can delay it, and give Apple a chance. Maybe give people a chance to come to their senses, or—or maybe give them time to come help Apple. “The Waking is tomorrow, and we can’t start a Waking with death. He will End at dawn after the Waking.”
Jemma’s eyes were focused on the floor, and she lifts them now to Trina, who nods. Jemma gives the faintest of smiles, just a shadow across the cheeks. Trina finds herself liking Jemma just a little bit despite—well, not liking her. That’s right, chica, she thinks. I just opened you a window.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE WINDOW
Jemma had one moment with Apple after he entered the gates. When the crowd saw Blue dead, they pushed Apple toward the Casa de las Casas, only his long legs keeping him from getting trampled. Jemma stood in front of him like any other kid too stupid to get out of the way, and the mob didn’t know the difference. She planted her feet. He hit her, chest to chest, so hard that it almost threw her back. She didn’t wrap her arms around him the way she wanted to, just pushed back against him as the mob streamed around him and tried to wash them both away. She dug her feet in more and held him there. The look on her face wasn’t fear, it was fire and steel.
“Hope,” he said, and the mob closed in. She pivoted sideways and the mob carried him away.
Apple managed to turn his head once as she followed him to the Questioning. “Pico!” he said.
“What?” Not the name she expected him to call out.
“The Exile,” he said, adding something else that disappeared into the crowd.
Then the crowd cleared and the Exile was there, standing quietly at her side. He was bloodied and smudged and he placed his hand on her arm. She jerked away from him and took three hard steps out of the Circle.
“Where you going?” Pico said.
“To get my hatchet,” she said.
“Wait,” he said. “I can help, but we ain’t gonna out-talk or out-fight that crowd. Wait and see what happens in there.”
“But Apple—”
“Wait,” Pico said.
They did. Because Apple trusted this kid somehow, Jemma and Lady waited. Through the Questioning, when all she wanted to do was split Heather’s head, they waited.
Now she won’t wait anymore. The three of them walk quietly away from the Casa de las Casas. Half the village is celebrating Apple’s death. The rest are in shock, almost like they are.
“Heather was right,” Lady says. “You gonna have to go through the Waking without Apple.” She sounds as if she doesn’t believe it could happen. She sounds sympathetic. At first all Jemma can think is: That’s what you take from this? And, then, absurdly, meaning all of it: I wished I’d rolled with him when I had the chance.
“Got to go through everything without Apple,” she says sullenly.
“I know. I didn’t mean it like—” Lady says, but Jemma’s already made up her mind.
“I … gotta talk to Pico. Alone,” she says.
“I wanna stay with you,” Lady says.
“Apple asked me to talk to him. About the Last Lifer raid,” Jemma says.
“I wanna—”
“It’s okay,” Jemma says. “I’ll see you in a little.” Lady looks hurt. But she can’t hear what comes next.
When Lady walks away, though, and it’s just her and Pico, Jemma doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know where to begin. The two of them walk. Everyone they pass acts as if they don’t see them. Because they’re friends with Apple. It’s as if they’ve got a flu that no one else wants to catch.
Finally she speaks. “Apple … thought I should talk to you.”
“He say why?”
“He was getting dragged off at the time.”
“Ah.”
“You know why?”
They head away from the gates, to the part of the Holy Wood closest to Ell Aye. There’s a dirt trail that leads through the brush. If they take it far enough, it will dead-end at the fence that holds in the Holy Wood. No one will be there to overhear.
“You want me to break him out,” he says.
“No,” she says. “I want you to tell me there’s a better world than this.”
“I only been to the Malibus,” he says.
“I know you know,” she says. “I don’t know how, but you know about the world. You know about the Parents. And I … and I—” And I need to believe what’s out there is better than what we got. That peoples don’t kill their bravest and truest for being brave and true. That not everything is driven by the wants and fears of a sixteen-year-old girl. That if she rescues Apple, they have the slightest chance at a life together.
Pico doesn’t answer, not right away.
“You told me there could be a place that got
the End beat,” she says.
“There could be,” he says. “I don’t know it. There just could be a chance.”
“There’s no chance at all here.”
Pico, silent again, places his pack on the ground and opens it. He hasn’t had a chance to take it off since they got back. He pulls out a heavy book with a once-glossy hard cover and opens it. The pages creak with age.
“Old,” she says.
“Not as old as it should be,” he says. “This was made after the Parents died.”
“How do you know?”
“I spend a lot of time looking at books,” he says.
He turns the pages. The moon is so bright that she can see almost every detail. At first she sees old pictures, of the priests and priestesses. It’s the way they’re supposed to look for the Waking, but these pictures are in black and white. Then she sees pictures of bodies stacked up carelessly, and she’s back in the Bowl. It’s the look of death that happened too quick to bury.
“Why would it be in there? With the others?”
“Someone wanted someone to find it. They wanted someone to do something about it.”
The next page is more pictures, of ambylances and bodies shrouded in white. Below them are huge blocks of black letters. Jemma can’t read, but the pictures tell the story.
“I don’t know if there’s a way to fix the End,” Pico says. “But I think some of the Parents knew what caused it. If they did, maybe they put the answers somewhere we could find em.”
How would they recognize the answers even if they found them? But then she understands.
“What does that say?” she says, pointing at the page.
“Children Immune from Mystery Plague—” Pico looks up as he realizes what he’s said. If they were in the daylight, she bets she could have seen his skin turn pale. His eyes are panicked. She thought she would never see that in him.
“You can—you can read it?” Jemma’s not sure what else to say. She’s never known anyone who could read.
“You can’t tell anyone, Jemma,” Pico says.