Pandemonium (Delirium, #2)

by Lauren Oliver

But the old Lena is dead too. I buried her. I left her beyond a fence, behind a wall of smoke and flame.

Sounds about Taylor Swift lyrics

Safe. Safe. Safe. You’re safe now.

Love, the deadliest of all deadly things. Love, it kills you. Alex. Both when you have it . . . Alex. And when you don’t. Alex.

freedom to choose, freedom to be around one another, freedom to look and touch and love one another—but the idea is very different from the reality, and I can’t help but start to panic a little.

illegal, wrong, sympathizer, disease.

Everything in the Wilds is process, slow steps, shuffling forward. Everything takes time.

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

It’s like a birthday party but better: ours to share, and just for that moment I feel a rush of happiness. Just for that moment, I feel as though I belong here.

Everyone has a little area, a space circumscribed for their things.

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control; we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Book of Shhh.

Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You’re only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.

NO ONE IS SAFE UNTIL EVERYONE IS CURED, reads the writing on the first envelope, printed neatly above our address. Then, beneath it: PLEASE SUPPORT THE DFA.

someone is always watching. There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire for control. So they watch, and poke, and pry.

Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees. Live free or die. Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.

Suddenly I have the wild urge to dig, to bury, to hack up the earth. I move blindly, numbly, back to the burrow. It takes me a little while to locate the cotton shorts and the old, tattered shirt I was wearing when I came to the Wilds. We’ve been using the shirt as a dishrag. These are the only items left from before: the remnants of my old life.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul: he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

For years, the Invalids have been able to count on one critical fact: They are not supposed to exist. The government has for decades denied that anyone inhabits the Wilds, and thus the Invalids have remained relatively safe. Any large-scale physical attack from the government would be tantamount to an admission of error.

Much later, we will find out why: The resistance has stepped up its game. They grew tired of waiting, of minor pranks and protests.

Tongue-kissing is even worse than illegal nowadays. It’s considered dirty, disgusting, a symptom of disease taken root.

Tongue kissing is filthy but passionate, tho

There’s a crazy pressure building in my chest, and now all of it is coming back, my real life, my old life—the rickety house in Portland and the sound of the water and the smell of the bay; the blackened walls of the Crypts and the emerald-green diamond patterns of the sun slanting through the trees in the Wilds; all these other selves, stacked one on top of another and buried, so that no one will ever find them.

If you want something, if you take it for your own, you’ll always be taking it from someone else. That’s a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.”

That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.

There was music, too, totally different from the approved stuff on LAMM. You wouldn’t believe it, Lena. Full of bad words, all about the deliria . . . but not all of them bad or hopeless at all.

“All you need is love . . .”

A classic man. I approve.

Raven taught me to look for patterns everywhere: the orientation of the moss on the trees; the level of undergrowth; the color of the soil. She taught me, too, to look for the inconsistencies—an area of sudden growth might mean water. A sudden stillness usually means a large predator is nearby. More animals than usual? More food.

It’s like returning somewhere you haven’t been since you were a child, and finding everything smaller and disappointing. It reminds me of the time Hana unearthed a dress she had worn every day in first grade. We were in her room, bored, messing around, and she and I laughed and laughed, and she kept repeating, I can’t believe I was ever that small.

I didn’t realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.

The girl is violent. Worried she might kill me. Ready to talk if you let me out NOW.

But I took my chance on the fence. It took me forever to figure out a way over with Blue. In the end I had to use the blanket as a sling. And the rain was a good thing.

Eventually she stops fidgeting and lies quiet and docile under our hands. We take turns with the towel until dawn breaks in the sky, a blush rose, liquid and pale, even though by that time, Blue has not taken a breath for hours.

“I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. That’s the thing about the cure, isn’t it? It isn’t just about deliria at all. It’s about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. That’s what the DFA is about. That’s what I believed in—what I’ve had to believe in.

The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.

At the last second, as we’re about to cover her with dirt, Raven pushes forward, suddenly hysterical. “She’ll be cold,” she says. “She’ll freeze like that.” Nobody wants to stop her. She strips off her sweater and slides into the makeshift grave, taking Blue in her arms and wrapping her in it. She’s crying. Most of us turn away, embarrassed. Only Lu steps forward.

But I imagine that for Blue it falls more gently, and covers her like a blanket, where it will keep her safely until spring.

I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other’s wounds; they repair the broken skin.

Then I see them: Tack and Hunter jogging toward us, rifles in hand, thin and pale and haggard and alive.

“There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”

It occurs to me, then, that people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

We can never

understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

Because I do want. I’m not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.

The DFA and the United States of America can no longer afford to be lenient. The resistance is too strong. It is growing—underground, in tunnels and burrows, in the dark, damp places they cannot reach.

Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

The hatred is a cord, tightening around my throat.

In it, God commands Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac, after Isaac becomes sick with the deliria. And so he does. He takes his son to a mountain and plunges a knife straight through his chest.

Its nor even because of deliria. Its to prove himself as a prophet of God, wha-

Why, why, why? Why did you let them take you? Why did you let me think you were dead? Why didn’t you come for me? Why didn’t you love me more?

Escaped the Crypts after the bombing. He hasn’t said much, hasn’t even given his name. I’m not sure what they did to him up there, but—”

Alex, I am sure of it.

“Don’t believe her.”

I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pressure and chaos. My head is about to explode.

Alex.

I find if baffling that he deliberately tells people not to believe Lena?