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Of course it makes sense that girls and boys would be sharing a house in the Wilds—that’s the whole point, after all: 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.
Before I met Alex, I lived almost eighteen years believing fully in the system, believing 100 percent that love was a disease, that we must protect ourselves, that girls and boys must stay rigorously separate to prevent contagion.
“There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.”
thought the Invalids were beasts; I thought they would rip me apart. But these people saved me, and gave me the softest place to sleep, and nursed me back to health, and haven’t asked for anything in return. The animals are on the other side of the fence: monsters wearing uniforms. They speak softly, and tell lies, and smile as they’re slitting your throat.
It’s the passions that turn us stupid, animal-like. Free from love is close to God. That’s an old adage from The Book of Shhh. The cure was supposed to free us from extreme emotions, bring us clarity of thought and feeling.
“If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”
There is nothing to do but let go.
But you can build a future out of anything.
They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.
In the Wilds it is practically a sin to waste, and it is definitely bad luck. Waste today, want tomorrow—another of Raven’s favorite mantras.
I thInk that's true anywhere...
“We’re on the other side of the fence now, Lena,” she says, tiredly, as she passes. “Don’t you get it? You can’t tell me what to feel.”
I didn’t realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.
Wanting something you can't have...
The world is upside down and everything is shit and my life has been cleaved and there are two different Lenas running parallel to each other, the old and the new, and they will never, ever be whole again.
Maybe this is why the story is told in two different time periods in alternating chapters, rather than one cohesive time-line.
The flip side of freedom is this: When you’re completely free, you’re also completely on your own.
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.
Children born of the healthy and the whole are healthy and whole; children born of the disease will have sickness in their bones and blood.
“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.”
He is not Alex. You don’t want Julian. You want Alex. And Alex is dead. But that’s not quite true. I want Julian, too. My body is filled with aching. I want Julian’s lips on mine, full and soft; and his warm hands on my back and in my hair. I want to lose myself in him, dissipate into his body, feel our skin melting together.
I don't know if she's really falling in love or trying to not give up hope.
That is the DFA’s motto too: Some will die for the health of the whole. We have become like them.
Raven shakes her head. I see a flash of pity on her face. “You—you really liked him, then? Julian?” I can’t answer. I can only nod.
I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.
