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“Can you finish up here?” I ask Blue, and she nods, chewing on her lower lip. Grace used to do that too, when she was nervous. I feel a sharp pang of guilt. It’s not Blue’s fault that she reminds me of Grace.
It’s not Blue’s fault I left Grace behind.
“Thanks, Blue,” I say, and lay one hand on her shoulder. I can feel her trembling slightly beneath my fingers.
The cold is a wall, a physical force. I’ve managed to find an old wind breaker in the collection of clothes, but it’s far too big and doesn’t stop the wind from biting at my neck and fingers, slipping beneath the collar and freezing my heart in my chest. The ground is frozen and the frost-coated grass crunches under our feet. We walk quickly, to stay warm; our breath comes in clouds.
“How come you don’t like Blue?” Hunter asks abruptly.
“I do,” I say quickly. “I mean, she doesn’t really talk to me, but…” I trail off. “Is it that obvious?”
He laughs. “So you don’t like her. ”
“She just reminds me of someone, that’s all,” I say shortly, and Hunter turns serious.
“From before?” he asks.
I nod, and he reaches out and touches me once, lightly, on the elbow, to show me he understands. Hunter and I talk about everything except before. Of all the homesteaders, he is the one I feel closest to. We sit next to each other at dinner; and sometimes we stay up afterward, talking until the room is smudgy with smoke from the dying fire.
Hunter makes me laugh, even though for a long time I thought I would never laugh again.
It wasn’t easy to feel comfortable around him. It was hard to shake all the lessons I learned on the other side, in Portland, warnings drilled into me by everyone I admired and trusted. The disease, they taught me, grew in the space between men and women, boys and girls; it was passed between them in looks and smiles and touches, and would take root inside of them like mold that rots a tree from the inside out. Then I found out that Hunter was an Unnatural, a thing I’d always been taught to revile.
Now Hunter is Hunter, and a friend, and nothing more.
We head north, away from the homestead. It’s early, and the woods are quiet except for the crunch of our shoes on the thick layering of dead leaves. It hasn’t rained in several weeks. The woods are starved for water. It’s funny how I’ve learned to feel the woods, to understand them: their moods and tantrums, their explosions of joy and color. It’s so different from the parks and the carefully tended natural spaces in Portland. Those places were like animals at the zoo: caged in and also flattened, somehow. The Wilds are alive, and temperamental, and beautiful. Despite the hardships here, I am growing to love them.
“Almost there,” Hunter says. He nods to our left. Beyond the denuded branches I can see a crown of razor wire, looped at the top of a fence, and I feel a flash of fear, hot and sudden. I didn’t realize we’d come so close to the border. We must be skirting the edge of Rochester. “Don’t worry. ” Hunter reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “This side of the border isn’t patrolled. ”
I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.
We veer away from the fence again. Soon we come to an area of enormous trees, bare branches gray and gnarled like arthritic fingers. It may have been years since they’ve bloomed at all; the trees seem to have been dead a long time. But when I say so to Hunter, he just laughs and shakes his head.
“Not dead. ” He raps one with his knuckles as we pass. “Just biding their time. Storing up energy. They tuck all their life away deep inside, for winter. When it gets warm, they’ll bloom again. You’ll see. ”
I’m comforted by his words. You’ ll see means We’re coming back here. It means You’re one of us now. I run my fingers along a tree, feel the bark flake dryly under my fingertips. It’s impossible to imagine anything alive under all that hardness, anything flowing or moving.
Hunter stops so abruptly I almost run into him. “Here we are,” he says, grinning. “The nests. ”
He points upward. High in the branches of the trees are massive tangles of birds’ nests: curls and spray, bits of moss and hanging creepers, all woven together so that it looks as though the trees are crowned with hair.
But even stranger: The branches are painted.
Drips of green and yellow paint stain the bark; delicate forked footprints, also colored, dance along the nests.
“What…?” I see a large bird, about the size of a crow, wing toward a nest directly above our heads. It pauses, watching us. Everything about the bird is black, except for its feet, which are painted a vivid shade of bright green. It is carrying something in its mouth. After a moment it flaps into the nest, and a chorus of chirping begins.
“Green,” Hunter says, looking satisfied. “That’s a good sign. Supplies will be coming today. ”
“I don’t understand. ” I’m pacing underneath the network of nests. There must be hundreds of them. Some of the nests are actually strung up between the branches of different trees, forming a dense canopy. It is even colder here; the sun barely penetrates.
“Come on,” Hunter says. “I’ll show you. ”
He hoists himself up into the nearest tree, swinging easily up the trunk, using the many branches and protrusions as hand- and footholds.
I follow Hunter clumsily, imitating the placement of his hands and feet. It has been a long time since I’ve climbed a tree, and I remember it from childhood as effortless: swinging up into the branches without thought, unconsciously finding the nooks and cricks in the tree. Now it is painful and difficult.
I finally make it to one of the thicker, low-hanging branches. Hunter is straddling it, waiting for me. I crouch behind him. My legs are shaking a little, and he reaches back and loops his hands around my ankles, steadying me.
The nests are full of birds: piles of sleek black feathers, and winking black eyes. They are hopping and picking among heaps of tiny brown seeds, stockpiled for the winter. Several of them, disturbed by our arrival, go shrieking and cawing toward the sky.
The nests are coated with the same vivid green paint, a network of thatched claw prints as the birds flutter between nests.
“I still don’t understand,” I say. “Where does the color come from?”
“From the other side,” Hunter says, and I can hear the pride in his voice. “From Zombieland. In the summer, there are blueberry bushes that grow on the other side of the fence. The birds scavenge for food there. Over the years, the insiders started feeding them pellets and seeds, keeping them fat through winter. They line up different-colored troughs when they need to get us messages: half seeds, half paint. The birds eat and then they fly back here, to store up seeds for later. The nests get colored, and we get our messages. Green, yellow, or red. Green if everything’s fine, if we can expect a shipment. Yellow if there’s a problem or delay. ”
“Don’t the colors get all mixed up?” I say.
Hunter swivels around to look at me, eyes shining. “That’s the brilliant thing,” he says, and tips his head back toward the nests. “The birds don’t like the color. It attracts predators. So they’re constantly reforming the nests. It’s like a blank palette every day. ”
And even as I’m watching, the bird in the nest closest to us is selecting the green-tinged twigs, wrestling them away from the nests with her beak: pruning, snipping, cleaning, like a woman fussing over weeds in a garden. The nest is being transformed in front of my eyes, remade into something dull and brown and normal-colored.
“It’s amazing,” I say.
“It’s nature. ” Hunter’s voice turns serious. “Birds feed; then they nest. Paint them any color you want, send them halfway around the world, but they’ll always find a way back. And eventually they’ll show their true colors again. That’s what animals do. �
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As he speaks, I think of the raids last summer: when the regulators in their stiff uniforms stormed an illegal party, swinging baseball bats and police batons, letting loose the foaming, snapping bull mastiffs on the crowd. I think of the swinging arc of blood on a wall; the sounds of skulls cracking underneath heavy wood. Underneath their badges and their blank gazes, the cureds are full of a hatred that’s colder and also more frightening. They are detached from passion, but also from sympathy.
Underneath their colors, they are animals, too. I could not have stayed there; I will never go back. I will not become one of the walking dead.
It’s not until we’re on the ground again and headed back to the homestead that I’m struck by something else Hunter said.
“What does red mean?” I ask.
He looks at me, startled. We’ve been silent for a while, both lost in thought. “What?”
“Green is for supplies. Yellow when there’s been a delay. So what does red mean?”
For a moment I see fear flashing in Hunter’s eyes, and suddenly I am cold again.
“Red means run,” he says.
The relocation will soon begin in earnest. We will move everyone, the whole homestead, south. It is an enormous undertaking, and Raven and Tack spend hours planning, debating, arguing. It is not the first time they have orchestrated a relocation, but I gather that the moves have been hard and dangerous, and Raven considers them both failures.
But spending the winters up north has been even harder, and proved even more fatal, and so we will go. Raven insists that this time there will be no mortalities. Everyone who leaves the homestead will arrive safely at our destination.
“You can’t guarantee that,” I hear Tack say to her one night. It’s late, and I’ve been startled awake by the sounds of retching from the sickroom. It’s Lu’s turn.
I’ve slipped out of bed and started toward the kitchen for water when I realize Tack and Raven are still there, illuminated by the low, smoldering glow from the fire. The kitchen is murky, filled with wood smoke.
I pause in the hallway.
“Everyone stays alive,” Raven says stubbornly, and her voice trembles a little.
Tack sighs. He sounds tired—and something else, too. Gentle. Concerned. I’ve come to think of Tack as a dog: all bite and snarl. No softness to him at all.
“You can’t save everybody, Rae,” he says.
“I can try,” she says.
I go back to my room without the water, drawing my blankets all the way up to my chin. The air is full of shadows, shifting shapes I can’t identify.
There will be two main issues once we leave the homestead: food and shelter. There are other camps, other groups of Invalids, farther south, but settlements are few and separated by large expanses of open land. The northern Wilds are unforgiving in the fall and winter: hard and brittle and barren, full of hungry animals.
Over the years, traveling Invalids have mapped out a route: They have marked the trees with a system of gouges and slashes, to indicate the easiest path south.
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