Delirium - Lauren Oliver [97]
Maybe Alex can tell how frightened I am. He leans forward and fumbles for a moment, trying to find my ear. His mouth bumps once on my neck and grazes my cheek lightly—which despite my panic makes me shiver with pleasure—and then skims my earlobe. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers, and I feel slightly better. Nothing bad will happen when I’m with Alex.
Then we’re up again. We dart forward at intervals, sprinting silently from one tree to the next and then pausing while Alex listens and makes sure there has been no change, no shouts or sounds of approaching footsteps. The moments of exposure—of dashing from cover to cover—grow longer as the trees begin to thin out, and the whole time we’re getting closer and closer to the line where the fringe of grass and growth disappears altogether and we will have to move out in the open, completely vulnerable. It is a distance of only about fifty feet from the last bush to the fence, but as far as I’m concerned it might as well be a lake of burning fire.
Beyond the torn-up remains of a road that existed before Portland was enclosed is the fence itself: looming, silver, in the moonlight, like some enormous spiderweb. A place where things stick, get caught, are eaten. Alex has told me to take my time, to focus; when I pick my way over the barbed wire at the top, but I can’t help but picture myself impaled on all of those sharp, spiny barbs.
And then, suddenly, we are out—past the limited protection offered by the trees, moving quickly over the loose gravel and shale of the old road. Alex moves ahead of me, bent nearly double, and I stoop as low as I can, but it doesn’t make me feel any less exposed. Fear screams, slams into me from all sides at once; I have never known anything like it. I’m not sure whether the wind picks up at that second or whether it’s just the terror cutting through me, but my whole body feels like ice.
The darkness seems to come alive on all sides of us, full of darting shadows and malicious, looming shapes, ready to turn into a guard any second, and I picture the silence suddenly punctuated by screams, sighs, horns, bullets. I picture blooming pain, and bright lights. The world seems to transform into a series of disconnected images: a bright white circle of light surrounding guard hut twenty-one, which expands ever outward, as though hungry and ready to swallow us; inside, a guard slumped backward in his chair, mouth open, sleeping; Alex turning to me, smiling—is it possible he’s smiling?—stones dancing underneath my feet. Everything feels far away, as unreal and insubstantial as a shadow cast by a flame. Even I don’t feel real, can’t feel myself breathing or moving, though I must be doing both.
And then just like that we’re at the fence. Alex springs into the air, and for a second he pauses there. I want to scream Stop! Stop! I picture the crack and sizzle as his body connects with fifty thousand volts of electricity, but then he lands on the fence and the fence sways silently: dead and cold, just like he said.
I should be climbing up after him, but I can’t. Not immediately. A feeling of wonder creeps over me, slowly pushing out the fear. I’ve been terrified of the border fence since I was a baby. I’ve never gotten within five feet of the fence. We’ve been warned not to, had it drilled into us. They told us we would fry; told us it would make our hearts go haywire, kill us instantly. Now I reach out and lace my hand through the chain-link, run my fingers over it. Dead and cold and harmless, the same kind of fence the city uses for playgrounds and schoolyards. In that second it really hits me how deep and complex the lies are, how they run through Portland like sewers, backing up into everything, filling the