Delirium - Lauren Oliver [94]
“I trust you,” I say, and mean it 150 percent.
He still won’t look at me. “Yeah, but . . . the penalty for crossing over . . .” He takes another deep breath. “The penalty for crossing over is . . .” At the last second he can’t say death.
“Hey.” I nudge him gently. It’s an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back. “I know the rules. I’ve been living here longer than you have.”
He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. “Hardly.”
“Born and raised. You’re a transplant.” I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. “Country bumpkin!” I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing.
“City slicker,” he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.
We agree to meet at Back Cove the next evening, a Wednesday; since I won’t be working again until Saturday, it should be relatively easy to get Carol to allow me to sleep over at Hana’s. Alex walks me through some of the major points of the plan. Crossing over isn’t impossible, but hardly anyone risks it. I guess the whole punishable-by-death thing isn’t really a big attraction.
I don’t see how we’ll ever make it past the electrified fence, but Alex explains that only certain portions of it are actually electrified. Pumping electricity through miles and miles of fence is too expensive, so relatively few stretches of the fence are actually “online”: the remainder of the fence is no more dangerous than the one that encircles the playground at Deering Oaks Park. But as long as everyone believes that the whole thing is juiced up with enough kilowattage to fry a person like an egg in a pan, the fence is serving its purpose just fine.
“Smoke and mirrors, all of it,” Alex says, waving his hand vaguely. I assume he means Portland, the laws, maybe all of the USA. When he gets serious a little crease forms between his eyebrows, a tiny comma, and it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. I try to stay focused.
“I still don’t see how you know all this,” I say. “I mean, how did you guys figure it out? Did you just keep running people at the fence, to see whether they got fried in certain places?”
Alex cracks a tiny smile. “Trade secrets. But I can tell you there were some observational experiments involving wild animals.” He raises his eyebrows. “Ever eaten fried beaver?”
“Ew.”
“Or fried skunk?”
“Now you’re just trying to gross me out.”
There are more of us than you think: That’s another one of Alex’s favorite expressions, his constant refrain. Sympathizers everywhere, uncured and cured, positioned as regulators, police officers, government officials, scientists. That’s how we’ll get past the guard huts, he tells me. One of the most active sympathizers in Portland is matched with the guard who works the night shift at the northern tip of Tukey’s Bridge, right where we’ll be crossing. She and Alex have developed a sign. On nights he wants to cross over, he leaves a certain flyer in her mailbox, the stupid photocopied kind that takeout delis and dry cleaners give out. This one advertises for a free eye exam with Dr. Swild (which seems pretty obvious to me, but Alex says that resisters and sympathizers live with so much stress they need to be allowed their little private jokes) and whenever she finds it she makes sure to put an extra-large dose of Valium in the coffee she makes for her husband to drink during his shift.
“Poor guy,” Alex says, grinning. “No matter how much coffee he drinks, he just can’t seem to stay awake.” I can tell how much the resistance means to him, and how proud he is of the fact that it is there, healthy, thriving, shooting its arms through Portland. I try to smile, but my cheeks feel stiff. It still blows my mind that everything I’ve been taught is so wrong, and it’s still hard for me to think of the sympathizers and resisters as allies