Lives We Lost,The

176 Pages·2013·3.07 MB·English

Title: The Lives We Lost Series: The Fallen World Author: Megan Crewe
Imprint: Hyperion
In-store date: 2/12/13 ISBN: 978-1-4231-4617-9 Price: $16.99 US / $18.50
CAN Trim size: 5½ × 8¼ Page count: 288
Ages: 12–18
Grades: 7–12
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THE FALLEN WORLD BOOK 2
THE
LIVES
WE
LOST
Megan Crewe
HYPERION
NEW YORK
Text copyright © 2013 by Megan Crewe
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
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ISBN 978-1-4231-4617-9
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To chances lost and risks worth taking
vi
Dec 23
This is how the world ends: With the boy who used to be my best friend
stepping off the ferry, hair shaggy and tangled, face too thin, looking at me like
he isn’t sure who I am. Like he isn’t sure of anything.
I was so excited when I spotted Leo crossing the strait, I didn’t wonder how
he’d gotten past the patrol boats that were supposed to be enforcing the
quarantine. Or why he was alone. I just grabbed Tessa and dashed for the harbor.
Then he was limping down the ramp with the man who’d driven the ferry,
and Tessa was throwing her arms around him, and he was staring at her with that
uncertain expression—and an inkling of what it all meant rose up inside me. For
a second I wanted to turn and run. As if I could outrun the truth.
But I stood my ground. A few people from town had gathered around us.
“You made it from the mainland!” someone said. “Is the government sending
help? The electricity’s out, and the phones . . .”
“Did they find a cure?” someone else broke in, with a sort of desperate
hopefulness.
Tessa stepped away from Leo, her gaze flickering to the opposite shore. “My
parents,” she said. “Did you see them?”
He looked at me again then, even though I hadn’t spoken, and this time a hint of
recognition came into his eyes. Too faint to tell whether he was happy to see me,
whether he was still stinging from our last argument, whether he cared at all.
Even before he spoke, my gut had knotted and my mouth had gone dry.
“There’s no help,” he said, with a rasp in his voice. “The virus, it ripped right
through the country—the States—maybe the whole world. Everything . . .
Everything’s fallen apart.”
The doctors didn’t control the epidemic on the mainland any better than they did
here. On the other side of the strait, everybody’s just as bad off as we are. No
one is coming to fix the electricity or the water, to bring the supplies we need, or
any of the other hopes I’d managed to hold on to.
I started writing here for Leo, to practice saying what I couldn’t to his face. I
kept going because I thought it was important to keep track of the awfulness
we’ve been through, to have some sort of record for the rest of the world. But the
world I was writing for— it’s lost. The boy I started for looks lost too. So what
is the point in writing? This journal isn’t going to help me find them.
I have to believe there’s something else that will.
one
I decided before I came downstairs that I wasn’t going to mention what day
it was. I got choked up every time I even thought about it. Tessa was in the
living room, pruning the bean plants on the window ledge. The smell of hot
oatmeal was wafting from the kitchen. Gav stood over the pot with a wooden
spoon, his tawny hair sleep-rumpled. I had to resist the urge to go over and run
my fingers through his tawny sleep-rumpled hair.
It was more than a week ago I suggested he crash on the air mattress here at
what used to be my Uncle Emmett’s house, considering he was over all the time
anyway and I couldn’t help worrying when he went home to his family’s empty
house at night. In spite of all my other worries, I still felt a little giddy finding
my boyfriend here each morning.
“Hey,” I said, and he glanced up and grinned.
“Good morning, Kaelyn!” Meredith crowed, bounding in from the dining room
with an incredible amount of energy for a kid who just recovered from a deadly
virus. I was starting to wonder if she was making up for all that time lying in a
hospital bed by moving in constant fast-forward. But seeing the healthy flush in
her dark cheeks made me smile.
She hopped up to peer into the pot of oatmeal. “Is there brown sugar?”
“Meredith,” I said, my giddiness dampening. Gav held up his hand.
“Not brown,” he said, “but I can sprinkle on a little of the white stuff.”
Meredith’s lower lip curled, but she pressed her mouth flat before it could turn
into a pout and lifted her chin. “Awesome!” she said. “Thank you, Gav!”
“I picked up an extra bag from the storage rooms,” Gav said to me as Meredith
scampered over to the table. “Figured if anyone deserved a treat, it was her.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And for breakfast, too.”
“Hey, I know you only keep me around for my cooking,” he said.
“And don’t you forget it,” I said. Slipping my arm around his waist, I leaned in
for a kiss. In the dining room, Meredith snorted in amusement.
As I released Gav, he started spooning the oatmeal out into the bowls on the
counter. The floor creaked behind him, and Leo emerged from the tiny
downstairs bathroom where he’d been washing up. He looked at us for a second
with the uncertain expression I’d first seen when he came off the ferry. Like he
wasn’t sure why he was even here. Then Gav turned, and the end of his serving
spoon tapped Leo’s arm. Leo flinched back, his hip smacking the counter’s edge.
“Crap,” Gav said. “I’m sorry.”
Leo ducked his head and steadied himself with a hand on the counter. “I’m fine,”
he said. “Crazy reflexes.” He laughed awkwardly, and my stomach twisted. The
Leo I grew up with used to joke effortlessly. This Leo made it look like work.
His gaze lingered on me as I picked up my bowl, and my stomach twisted
tighter. If anyone was going to notice the significance of the date, it’d be Leo.
“Hold on a sec, Kae,” he said, hurrying past us to the living room. Cloth rustled
—the backpack he’d brought back from his parents’ place, I guessed. His old
home, like mine, didn’t have a generator, so he’d been sleeping on the couch
here.
Gav raised an eyebrow at me, and I shrugged. He knew the short story of my and
Leo’s friendship, an abbreviated version I’d told him and Tessa after we’d
walked Leo back to the house two weeks ago. I’d said I hadn’t talked about it
before because I’d been so worried about what was happening on the island.
Which was mostly true.
I hadn’t mentioned how Leo and I had argued and then stopped talking after I’d
moved to Toronto for one of Dad’s jobs. Not even to Leo. He’d seemed so
messed up when he got back, I’d been trying to avoid all painful topics of
conversation. Our argument hardly seemed significant, considering the friends
and family we’d lost since. But then on the fourth day, he’d said to me, “We’re
all right now, aren’t we?” like he was afraid to ask.
All I’d managed to get out was, “I’m sorry, that whole fight was my fault.”
“I’ll take half the blame and we’ll call it even,” he’d replied, and hugged me so
tight I lost my breath, and just like that, it didn’t matter.
But even if we were all right now, I was pretty sure he wasn’t.
As Gav carried his and Meredith’s oatmeal to the table, Leo stepped back into
the kitchen with one hand behind his back.
“Close your eyes,” he said, with a smile that looked almost real. “Leo,” I said, “I
don’t—”
“Come on,” he said. “For old times.”
If I protested more, I had the feeling his expression was going to stiffen up
again. So I closed my eyes, holding my bowl. There was a grating sound, and a
clink, and the soft pat of something dropping onto the oatmeal.
“Okay,” Leo said.
I looked down, and my breath caught.
He’d placed a dollop of blueberry preserves in the middle of the bowl. I
recognized the angular handwriting on the label of the jar he held as his mom’s.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
I hadn’t even had store jam in at least a month. The juicy-sweet smell was
making my mouth water. At the same time, my eyes prickled.
When we were little, Leo’s family and mine used to go berrypicking together—
me watching for rabbits between the bushes, Leo practicing leaps and tumbles
on the rocks. His mom would give my parents a couple jars of preserves every
August, and Drew and I would polish them off by the end of September.
Back before the virus had taken all of them away. Gnawing through Mom’s
mind, making Drew feel he had to sneak to the mainland to try to find help. And
Dad, struck down by the gang of islanders who’d wanted to burn the hospital
and all the infected patients inside.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Leo was saying. “Our pantry was a mess, but this one jar
was lying behind a box in the corner, like it was waiting for me.”
“You should have it,” I said, offering the bowl to him. “It’s your mom’s.”
And she wasn’t going to be able to make more, ever again. The virus had taken
both of Leo’s parents too.
He shook his head, nudging the bowl back toward me, but his smile faltered.
“I think she’d have wanted me to share it,” he said.
He’d hardly spoken when he’d come back from their house, and I hadn’t pried.
He still hadn’t even offered us more than a vague summary of how he’d
hitchhiked and walked his way here from his dance school in New York. Most
of what I knew about the mainland I’d heard from Mark, the other islander
who’d been stuck across the strait and come back with Leo. But what could I do
except give him time?
As I hesitated, Gav poked his head into the room. “It’s your birthday?” he said.
“You should have told me.”
“I didn’t want to make a big deal about it,” I said, carrying my breakfast over to
the table. “Seventeen’s not an important one anyway, right?”
“I think seventeen’s pretty good,” Gav said. “But then I might be biased.”
“I forgot!” Meredith said. “I’ve got to make you a card!”
“You don’t have to,” I said, but she was already gulping down the last of her
oatmeal and dashing into the living room, where construction paper and colored
pencils littered the coffee table.
“Tess, breakfast is ready,” Leo said, coming in after me. I sat down next to Gav,
who hooked his ankle around mine.
“I’m going to think of something,” he said.
“Really,” I said, “you don’t—”
“I know, I know. Still going to.” He turned to Leo. “So, any other secrets of
Kae’s that I should know?”
Leo paused, as if taking the question seriously, and then put on a grin. “I think I
should stop now. She might sic those vicious ferrets on me.”
The teasing sounded weak to my ears, but Meredith spun around. “Mowat and
Fossey don’t hurt people!” she hollered, and the rest of us laughed, the tension
cracking. But as Tessa slipped into the room and everyone started eating, my
eyes prickling.
“No matter how busy we get,” Mom used to say, “we shouldn’t forget that
family matters more than anything else.” On my and Drew’s birthdays, she and
Dad had always arranged to go into work late and for us to skip the first period
of school if it was a week day. We’d come down after sleeping in to the presents
Dad had stacked on the table and Mom making whatever we’d requested for
breakfast the night before, and we’d all eat together.
I couldn’t remember what breakfast I’d asked for when I turned sixteen last year.
It hadn’t seemed important at the time.
I swallowed a mouthful of oatmeal, the blueberries sliding in a sticky clump