Delirium: The Complete Collection (78 page)

Julian pulls away to look at me. He traces my jaw with one finger. “I think—I think you’ve given it to me,” he says, slightly out of breath. “The
deliria
.”

“Love,” I say, and squeeze his waist. “Say it.”

He hesitates for just a second. “Love,” he says, testing the word. Then he smiles. “I think I like it.”

“You’ll grow to love it. Trust me.” I raise myself on my tip-toes and Julian kisses my nose, then skims his lips over my cheekbones, brushing against my ear, planting tiny kisses across the crown of my head.

“Promise me we’ll stay together, okay?” His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. “You and me.”

“I promise,” I say.

Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: “Don’t believe her.”

The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.

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.

He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a small tattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes—once a sweet, melted brown, like syrup—have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.

Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.

Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.

Alex.

Cover photograph © 2012 by Michael Frost

Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PANDEMONIUM
. Copyright © 2012 by Laura Schechter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Oliver, Lauren.

Pandemonium / Lauren Oliver.—1st ed.

   p. cm.

Sequel to: Delirium.

Summary: After falling in love, Lena and Alex flee their oppressive society where love is outlawed and everyone must receive “the cure”—an operation that makes them immune to the delirium of love—but Lena alone manages to find her way to a community of resistance fighters. Although she is bereft without the boy she loves, her struggles seem to be leading her toward a new love.

EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062101990

Version 09132013

ISBN 978-0-06-197806-7 (trade bdg.)

ISBN 978-0-06-213008-2 (international edition)

[1. Government, Resistance to—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Science fiction.]

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FIRST EDITION

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Copyright

W
hen I was a girl, it snowed for a whole summer.

Every day, the sun rose smudgy behind a smoke-gray sky and hovered behind its haze; in the evenings, it sank, orange and defeated, like the glowing embers of a dying flame.

And the flakes came down and down—not cold to touch, but with their own peculiar sting—as the wind brought smells of burning.

Every night, my mother and father sat us down to watch the news. All the pictures were the same: towns neatly evacuated, cities enclosed, grateful citizens waving from the windows of big, shiny buses as they were carted off to a new future, a life of perfect happiness. A life of painlessness.

“See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?”

And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.

Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?

And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?

These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true. During the day the guards come, to deliver food and take the bucket; and at night the others moan and scream. They are the lucky ones. They are the ones who still believe that sound, that voice, will do any good. The rest of us know better, and have learned to live in silence.

I wonder what Lena is doing now. I always wonder what Lena is doing. Rachel, too: both my girls, my beautiful, big-eyed girls. But I worry about Rachel less. Rachel was always harder than Lena, somehow. More defiant, more stubborn, less
feeling
. Even as a girl, she frightened me—fierce and fiery-eyed, with a temper like my father’s once was.

But Lena … little darling Lena, with her tangle of dark hair and her flushed, chubby cheeks. She used to rescue spiders from the pavement to keep them from getting squashed; quiet, thoughtful Lena, with the sweetest lisp to break your heart. To break my heart: my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart. I wonder whether her front teeth still overlap; whether she still confuses the words
pretzel
and
pencil
occasionally; whether the wispy brown hair grew straight and long, or began to curl.

I wonder whether she believes the lies they told her.

I, too, am a liar now. I’ve become one, of necessity. I lie when I smile and return an empty tray. I lie when I ask for
The Book of Shhh
, pretending to have repented.

I lie just by being here, on my cot, in the dark.

Soon, it will be over. Soon, I will escape.

And then the lies will end.

T
he first time I saw Rachel and Lena’s father I knew: knew I would marry him, knew I would fall in love with him. Knew he would never love me back, and I wouldn’t care.

Picture me: seventeen, skinny, scared. Wearing a too-big, beat-up denim jacket I’d bought from a thrift store and a hand-knitted scarf, not even close to warm enough to immunize me from the frigid December wind, which came howling across the Charles River, blew the snow sideways, stripped people in the streets of all their color so they walked, white as ghosts, heads bowed against the fury.

That was the night Misha took me to see the cousin of a friend of a friend, Rawls, who ran a Brain Shop down on Ninth.

That’s what we called the dingy centers that sprang up in the decade after the cure became law: Brain Shops. Some of them pretended to be at least half-legit, with waiting rooms like at a regular doctor’s office and tables for lying down. In others, it was just some guy with a knife, ready to take your money and give you a scar, hopefully one that looked realistic enough.

Rawls’s shop was the second kind. A low basement room, painted black for God knows what reason; a sagging leather couch, a small TV, a stiff-backed wooden chair, and a space heater—and that was pretty much it, except for the smell of blood, a few buckets, and a little curtained-off area, too, where he actually did his work.

I remember I nearly threw up coming in, I was so nervous. A couple of kids were ahead of me. There was no space on the couch, and I had to stand. I kept thinking the walls were contracting; I was terrified they would collapse entirely, burying us there.

I’d run away from home almost a month earlier and in that time had been scraping and saving money for a fake.

In those days it was easier to travel; a decade after the cure was perfected, the walls were still going up, and regulations weren’t as stringent. Still, I’d never been more than twenty miles from home, and I spent practically the whole bus ride down to Boston either with my nose pressed up against the window, watching the bleak blur of starved winter trees and shivering landscapes and guard towers, new and in construction—or in the bathroom, sick with nerves, trying to hold my breath against the sharp stink of pee.

The last commercial flight: that’s what I watched on TV, at Rawls’s shop, while I waited my turn. The news crews packing the runway, the roar of the plane down the strip, and then the lift: an impossible lift, like a bird’s, so beautiful and easy it made you want to cry. I’d never been on an airplane, and now I never would. The airstrips would be dismantled and airports abandoned. Too little gas, too much risk of contagion.

I remember my heart was in my throat, and I couldn’t look away from the TV, from the image of the plane as it morphed, grew smaller, turned into a small black bird against the clouds.

That’s when they came: soldiers, young recruits, fresh out of boot camp. Uniforms crisp and new, boots shining like oil. People were trying to run out the exit in the back, and everyone was shouting. The curtains got torn down; I saw a flimsy folding table covered by a sheet, and a girl stretched out on it, bleeding from her neck. Rawls must have been halfway through her procedure.

I wanted to help her, but there wasn’t any time.

The back door was thrown open, and I made it out and into an alley slick with ice, heaped with dirty snow and trash. I fell, cut my hand on the ice, kept going. I knew if I was caught, that was the end—I’d be hauled back to my parents, chucked into the labs, probably ranked a zero.

That was the first year that a national system of ranking was established, made consistent across the country. Pairing was taking off. Regulatory councils were springing up everywhere, and little kids talked about becoming evaluators when they grew up.