Two more strong pulls get me to the top of the wall. I slide onto my stomach, pressing hard into the stone, trying to stay as small as possible. Compact. The inside of the wall is crisscrossed with scaffolding left over from construction. Only a few portions of the stone catwalk, meant for patrols, are complete: There are bodies tangled everywhere, people fighting, locked together, struggling for the advantage.
Pippa is working her way grimly up the ladder to my right. Tack has dropped into a crouch on the scaffolding; he is covering her, sweeping a gun from left to right, picking off the guards who are rushing us from the ground. Raven goes behind Pippa, the handle of a knife gripped in her mouth, a gun strapped to her hip. Her face is taut, and focused.
Everything registers in bursts, flashes:
Guards running at the wall, materializing from guard huts and warehouses.
Sirens wailing: police. They’ve been quick to respond to the alarms.
And beneath this, a squeeze in my gut—the landscape of roofs and roads; the grim-gray flow of pavement; Back Cove, shimmering in front of me; parks dotted in the distance; the sweep of the bay, beyond the distant white blot that is the laboratory complex: Portland. My home.
For a moment, I’m worried I’ll faint. There are too many people—bodies swarming and swinging, faces contorted and grotesque—and too much sound. My throat burns with smoke. A piece of the scaffolding has caught fire. And still we haven’t gotten more than a quarter of our number over the wall. I can’t see my mother; I don’t know what happened to her.
Then Julian has made it over, and he wraps an arm around my waist and forces me to my knees.
“Down! Down!” he’s shouting, and we thud hard onto our knees as a series of bullets lodge into the wall behind us, spraying us with fine dust and stone-spit. The scaffolding groans and sways beneath us. Guards have massed on the ground, heaving its supports, trying to topple it.
Julian shouts something. His words are lost, but I know he is telling me that we need to move—we need to get to the ground. Next to me, Tack has reached back to help Pippa over the wall. She moves clumsily, weighted down by the backpack she carries. For a second, I imagine that the bomb will go off right here, right now—the blood and fire, the sweet-smelling smoke and the ricocheting stone shrapnel—but then Pippa is safely over the wall and climbing to her feet.
Just then a guard on the ground swings his rifle toward Pippa, locks her in his sights. I want to scream—I want to warn her—but I can’t make a sound.
“Down, Pippa!” Raven launches herself over the wall, knocking Pippa out of the way just as the guard squeezes the trigger.
Pop. The littlest noise. A toy-firecracker sound.
Raven jerks and stiffens. For a second, I think she is only surprised: Her mouth goes round, her eyes wide.
Then she begins teetering backward, and I know that she is dead. Falling, falling, falling . . .
“No!” Tack lunges forward and grabs hold of her shirt before she can tumble back over the wall, pulling her down and onto his lap. People are swarming all around him, seething like rats over the scaffolding, but he just sits there, rocking a bit, cupping her face in his hands. He wipes her forehead, brushes the hair away from her face. She stares up at him sightlessly, her mouth open and wet, eyes shock-wide, black braid coiled against his thigh. His lips are moving—he’s speaking to her.
And now there is a scream inside me, silent and huge, like a black hole tunneling deep through my center. I can’t move, can’t do anything but stare. This is not how Raven dies—not here, not in this way, not in one flimsy second, not without a fight.
Pop goes the weasel. The child’s game comes back to me then, the way we used to chase one another around the park. Pop. You’re it.
This is all a child’s game. We are playing with shiny tin toys and loud noises. We are playing two-sides, like we used to when we were children.
Pop. White-hot pain blazes through me, past me. I bring my hand to my face instinctively and feel for injury; my fingers graze my ear and come away wet with blood. A bullet must have just clipped me.
The shock, even more than the pain, wakes me up, kicks my body into motion. There weren’t enough guns to go around, but I have a knife—old and blunted, but still better than nothing. I wrestle it out of the leather pouch around my hips. Julian is making his way down the scaffolding, swinging along the crisscrossed iron bars like a monkey. A guard tries to grab hold of one of Julian’s legs—Julian twists and brings his foot, hard, into the guard’s face. The guard staggers back, releasing him, and Julian drops the remaining few feet to the ground, into the chaos of bodies: Invalids and officers, our side and their side, merging into one enormous, writhing, bloody animal.