Wilder Girls(4)

My first flare-up blinded my right eye and fused it shut, and I thought that was all, until something started to grow underneath. A third eyelid, that’s what Byatt thought it was. It didn’t hurt, just itched like hell, but I could feel something moving. That’s why I tried to tear it open.

It was stupid. The scar is proof enough of that. I barely remember any of it, but Byatt says I dropped my rifle in the middle of Gun Shift and started clawing at my face like something had taken hold of me, working my fingernails between my crusted eyelashes and ripping at my skin.

The scar’s mostly healed, but every now and then it splits open and blood weeps down over my cheek, pink and watery with pus. During Gun Shift I’ve got plenty else to think about, and it’s not so bad, but now I can feel my heartbeat in my skin. Infected, maybe. Though that’s the least of our worries.

   “Can you stitch it for me?” I’m trying not to sound anxious, but she hears it anyway.

“That bad?”

“No, just—”

“Did you even clean it?”

Reese makes a satisfied sound. “I told you not to leave it open.”

“Come here,” Byatt says. “Let me see.”

I shift around on the rocks until she’s kneeling and my chin’s lifted to her. She runs her fingers along the wound, brushing my eyelid. Something underneath it flinches.

“Looks like it hurts,” she says, pulling a needle and thread from her pocket. They’re always with her, ever since my eye first scarred over. Of the three of us she’s closest to turning seventeen, and at times like this you can tell. “Okay. Don’t move.”

She slips the needle in and there’s pain, but it’s small enough, the cold air wicking it away. I try to wink at her, make her smile, but she shakes her head, a frown hanging on her brows.

“I said don’t move, Hetty.”

And it’s fine, Byatt and me, and she’s staring at me like I’m staring at her, and I’m safe, safe because she’s here, until she digs the needle in too deep and I buckle, my whole body folding in. Pain blinding and everywhere. Around me the world’s gone water. I can feel blood leaking into my ear.

   “Oh my God,” she says. “Hetty, are you okay?”

“It’s only stitches,” says Reese. She’s lying back on the rocks, her eyes closed. Shirt riding up so I can see a pale strip of stomach, stark through the dizzy blur. She’s never cold, not even on days like this when our breaths hang in the air.

“Yeah,” I say. Reese’s hand never gives her trouble, not like my eye does me, and I smooth a snarl off my lips. There’s enough to fight about without picking at this. “Keep going.”

Byatt starts to say something, when there’s a yell from near the garden. We turn around to see if somebody’s had their first. Raxter runs sixth grade through high school, or it did, so our youngest girls are thirteen now. Eleven when this whole mess began, and now it’s started to take them apart.

But there’s nothing wrong, just Dara from our year, the girl with the webbed fingers, waiting where the rocks start. “Shooting,” she calls to us. “Miss Welch says it’s shooting time.”

“Come on.” Byatt ties off my stitches and gets up, holds out her hand to me. “I’ll do the rest of your eye after dinner.”



* * *



—

   We had shooting before the Tox, too, a tradition left over from the start of the school, but it wasn’t like it is now. Only the seniors—and Reese, best shot on the island, born to it like she was born to everything on Raxter—got to go into the woods with Mr. Harker and fire at the soda cans he’d line up along the ground. The rest of us got a class on gun safety, which usually turned into a free period when Mr. Harker inevitably ran late.

But then the Tox took Mr. Harker. Took Reese’s firing hand and changed it so she couldn’t grip the trigger anymore. And shooting stopped being shooting and turned into target practice, because now there are things we have to kill. Every few afternoons, as the sun comes back to earth, one by one, firing away until we hit a target dead center.

We have to be ready, Welch says. To protect ourselves, each other. During the first winter, a fox got through the fence, just slipped between the bars. Afterward, the Gun Shift girl said it reminded her of her dog back home, and that’s why she couldn’t take the shot. That’s why the fox made it through the grounds to the patio. That’s why it cornered the youngest girl left living and tore out her throat.

We practice out in the barn, near the island’s point, with its big sliding doors open on each end so the stray shots fly into the ocean. There used to be horses, four of them, but early in the first season, we noticed how the Tox was starting to get inside them like it got inside us, how it was pushing their bones through their skin, how it was stretching their bodies until they screamed. So we led them out to the water and shot them. The stalls are empty now, and we pile into them to wait our turn. You have to fire at the target, and you’re not allowed to stop until you’ve hit the bull’s-eye.

   Ms. Welch keeps most of the guns locked in a storage closet in the house, along with the bullets the Navy started sending once they heard about the animals, so there’s only a shotgun and a carton of shells out here for all of us, laid out on a table made from sawhorses and a thin plywood plank. Not like the rifles we shoot with during Gun Shift, but Welch always says a gun’s a gun, and every time, it makes a muscle in Reese’s jaw twitch.