Wilder Girls(44)

“It’s time,” she whispers. Around us the house is quiet, no sliver of sound from the other dorms to puncture it, and the moon is so high I can’t see it out the window. We must be past midnight. Sun won’t hit the sky for a few more hours this time of year, but the lawn is glassy and bright with frost. We should be able to see well enough in the woods without a flashlight.

We get up, moving slowly to keep our footsteps soft. I hesitate at the door to our room. Right now, Byatt’s alive. That’s what I know. If I go out there, I’ll be taking that thought in my hands, bending it to see if it breaks.

“Ready?” Reese says behind me.

   Byatt’s alive. She’s alive and she needs me now, like I’ve always needed her. “Yeah.”

Out the door and down the hall, Reese with her hood drawn up over her hair to keep the light in, and walking so close I can feel the backs of her fingers brushing against mine. Nobody else is awake, or if they are, they’re being quiet, so we make it past the other dorms and out onto the mezzanine free and easy.

We crouch at the top of the stairs, my eye straining to find the girl usually stationed guarding the front entrance. I wonder if she’ll help Welch take Byatt out to the Harker house or if Welch will do it alone.

I can’t see anybody, even with the silver light streaming through the stacks of windows, but maybe it’s just my blind eye, so I nudge Reese. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Reese says. I look back, and she’s frowning. “Someone should be on duty.”

“She must have changed the schedule.” We both know why, even if we’re not saying it—Welch doesn’t want anybody seeing what she’s about to do. An advantage for her, but for me, too, and I’m not about to pass it up. “Let’s get outside.”

I stand and take the first few stairs slowly, my eye struggling to make edges out of the dark. Step by step, Reese at my elbow, until we hit the ground floor. And still nobody—no guard girls to catch us, no sign of Welch. Are we too early? Or too late?

Reese opens one of the double doors, and I slip outside after her, hesitating under the porch as the chilled winter air burrows into my jacket. I have a feeling the Gun Shift girls have been pulled off duty just like whoever was supposed to be guarding the door, but I can’t be too careful.

   Gun Shift always keeps a lantern lit after sundown. I wait as Reese tugs her hood tightly over her hair and ducks out into the night, peering up to the roof deck.

“Nothing,” she says, clouds of her breath drifting in the dark. “We’re good.”

All of this happening in secret. I can’t think about what that might mean for Byatt.

Out, then, along the flagstone path and to the spruce copse by the fence. Reese waits for me as I dig for the shotgun with numb fingers, frozen dirt clumping under my nails. Right where we left it, and I should be glad, but I never wanted any of this. Not a gun in my hands, not the life of my best friend on my shoulders.

For a moment I wait, think of the note pinned to the bulletin board in the main hall. Keep the quarantine, they said. Follow the rules and we’ll help you.

A knife in my belt, and the shotgun in my hands. A year and a half of empty sky, of not enough medicine, of bodies burning behind the school. We have to help ourselves.



* * *



—

At the gate I go first, open it as gingerly as I can to keep from cutting my fingers open on the shards of glass we’ve bound to the bars. Anybody can open it from the school side of the fence, but it will lock behind us when we leave, with the key hanging from Welch’s belt the only way back in.

   “You sure about the north edge?” Reese says. She means my plan for getting back home. Not really a plan so much as our only option, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to boost ourselves up over the fence where it hits the cliff on the north side of the island.

“As sure as I’m getting,” I say, and it has to be good enough. There’s no other choice.

Reese leads the way as we head out into the pines. Trees clustered close, needles a carpet of green rot, wet and sweet. Even though the island’s changed, even though I’m the one who’s been out in the wildwood since it turned strange and cruel, I think she still knows it best. We’re all Raxter girls, but not like Reese.

Sometimes she’d tell us about the island. About the secret places she’d found—the beaches you could only get to at low tide, the trails through the spindlegrass. She’d tell us about her father waking her up in the middle of the night and taking her down to the rocky shore, to see the waves glaze the stone with a bioluminescent glow, a cool white like the light of her hair. Those first few days back at school after summer break she’d stare out the window, still freckled and tanned, a look in her eyes like she was trapped.

If only it were like that for me out here. Instead, everywhere I look, there’s something to be scared of. Every noise an animal coming up behind us. I shoulder the shotgun and remind myself I only have two shots to take.

   We’re in deep enough that I can’t see the fence if I look back. Above us, the canopy letting only the barest stripes of moon through. I want to ask Reese to take off her hood, to let the light off her hair show me the path, but we can’t risk being seen by Welch, or by whoever she’s heading to meet. So I stick close to her, trust that her eyes are making more sense of the dark than mine.