Free Raven: A Delirium Short Story by Lauren Oliver Page B

that’s all. It’s that goddamn jerky we’ve been eating.”
    Tack relaxes a little. He stops white-knuckling the wheel, and the muscle in his jaw goes still. I feel a wave of guilt, a surge even worse than the nausea. Lying is a defense, like a porcupine’s quills or a bear’s claws. And my time in the Wilds has made me very good at it. But I don’t like lying to Tack.
    He’s practically the only person I have left.
     
    “Is she yours?”
    Those were Tack’s first words to me. I can still see him the way he was then: skinnier, even, than he is now. Big hands. Two nose rings. Eyes half-closed but alert, like a lizard’s; hair falling practically to the bridge of his nose. Sitting in the corner of the sickroom, hands and ankles bound. Pockmarked with mosquito bites and bloody with scratches.
    I’d been in the Wilds for only a month. I was lucky, and found my way to a homestead within six hours of crossing from Yarmouth. Double lucky, actually. Only a week later, the homestead relocated, moved into New Hampshire, just south of Rochester. Rumors of a raid on the Wilds had everyone jumpy. I’d made it just in time.
    I had to. Blue was barely alive, and I had no way of feeding her. I’d run in a panic, blind to anything but the need to disappear; had no supplies, no knowledge, no hope of making it on my own. My shoes were too tight and left raw, bloody blisters the size of quarters after only a few hours of walking. I didn’t know how to navigate. Didn’t keep track of where I was going. Got thirsty but didn’t think of sipping from a stream because I was worried it would make me sick.
    Idiot. If I hadn’t wandered into the homestead, I would have died. And she would have too.
    Little baby Blue.
    I hadn’t believed in God since I was a little kid and saw my dad take my mom by the hair and slam her face-first into the kitchen counter, watched a spray of blood on the linoleum and saw one of her teeth skitter across the floor, white and shiny as a die. I knew then there was no one watching over us.
    But my first night in the Wilds, when the forest opened up like a jaw and I saw lights glowing fuzzily in the darkness, small halos beyond the rain, and heard voicekin heard s—when Grandma put a blanket around my shoulders, and Mari, twenty-two years old, who’d just given birth to her second stillborn, took Blue in her arms and to her breast and cried silently the whole time she was suckling, when I knew we’d both been saved—that night, I thought I knew God, just for a second.
    “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” I said to Tack. Only I didn’t know his name then. He didn’t have a name then. Didn’t have a group, or a homestead; didn’t belong anywhere. We called him the Thief.
    The Thief laughed. “You aren’t, huh? What about all the freedom on the other side of the walls?”
    “You’re a Scavenger,” I said, even though I hardly knew what the term meant. I hadn’t seen one yet, thank God, and wouldn’t for two years, during a relocation that wiped out half our number. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
    He flinched. “I’m not a Scavenger.” Then he lifted his chin and stared at me. That was the first time I realized he was probably my age. His clothes, the dirtiness of him, his attitude—I’d assumed he was older. “I’m not anything.”
    “You’re a thief,” I said, looking away. Only a month in the Wilds—I hadn’t even begun to shake my fear of them. Boys.
    He shrugged. “I’m a survivor.”
    “You were stealing our food,” I said. I didn’t add: Everyone thought I was to blame . “That makes you a Scavenger in my opinion.”
    For the past several weeks, the homesteaders had noticed supplies gone missing, some traps empty that should have been full, a jug or two of clean water mysteriously emptied overnight. The group had grown tense, suspicious, and I became the prime suspect. I was the newest, after all. No one knew who I was or where I’d come from or what I was