Raven: A Delirium Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

crazy, pulling off the thin blankets, thumping out the pillows. “One of my best knives.”
    For a second, the need to tell is overwhelming. It builds like a bubble in my chest. Let’s go, I almost say. Just you and me. Let’s leave the fight behind.
    Instead I say, “How about you check the van.”
    When Tack leaves the room, I’m left alone. Suddenly I need to see it again, need to know that it’s true. I squat down and stick my hand in the space between my mattress and the cheap metal frame. After a minute of fumbling, I find it: a small meter, barely bigger than a spoon, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. It cost me one of Tack’s knives and a silver-and-turquoise necklace Lena gave to me when she first crossed over; the trader who agreed to get it for me kept emphasizing the risks. Everyone knows it’s impossible to get a pregnancy test nowadays, she was saying. You have to have documentation. Letters of approval from the regulatory board. Blah, blah, blah.
    I paid. I had to. I needed to know.
    I sit back on my heels and smooth down the thin plastic, so I can read the results: two faint parallel lines, like a ladder leading somewhere.
    Pregnant.
    Footsteps sound in the hallway. I quickly stuff the test back under the mattress. My heart is beating heavy, quick. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I feel another heartbeat, a faint pulse somewhere beneath my rib cage, answering.
    The first one, we’ll name Blue.

Don’t miss the powerful, heartbreaking conclusion to
     
    Lauren Oliver’s eagerly awaited Delirium series . . .
     
    REQUIEM
     
    Available March 2013.
     
    Read on for a teaser preview.

Lena
     
     
     
     
    I’ve started dreaming of Portland again.
    Since Alex reappeared, resurrected but also changed, twisted, like a monster from one of the ghost stories we used to tell as kids, the past has been finding its way in. It bubbles up through the cracks when I’m not paying attention, and pulls at me with greedy fingers.
    This is what they warned me about for all those years: the heavy weight in my chest, the nightmare-fragments that follow me even in waking life.
    I warned you, Aunt Carol says in my head.
    We told you, Rachel says.
    You should have stayed. That’s Hana, reaching out across an expanse of time, through the murky-thick layers of memory, stretching a weightless hand to me as I am sinking.
     
    About two dozen of us came north from New York City: Raven, Tack, Julian, and me, and also Dani, Gordo, and Pike, plus fifteen or so others who are largely content to stay quiet and follow directions.
    And Alex. But not my Alex: a stranger who never smiles, doesn’t laugh, and barely speaks.
    The others, those who were using the warehouse outside White Plains as a homestead, scattered south or west. By now, the warehouse has no doubt been stripped and abandoned. It isn’t safe, not after Julian’s rescue. Julian Fineman is a symbol, and an important one. The zombies will hunt for him. They will want to string the symbol up, and make it bleed meaning, so that others will learn their lesson.
    We have to be extra careful.
    Hunter, Bram, Lu, and some of the other members of the old Rochester homestead are waiting for us just south of Poughkeepsie. It takes us nearly three days to cover the distance; we are forced to circumnavigate a half-dozen Valid cities.
    Then, abruptly, we arrive: The woods simply run out at the edge of an enormous expanse of concrete, webbed with thick fissures, and still marked very faintly with the ghostly white outlines of parking spaces. Cars, rusted, picked clean of various parts—rubber tires, bits of metal—still sit in the lot. They look smaa s Thainll and faintly ridiculous, like ancient toys left out by a child.
    The parking lot flows like gray water in all directions, running up at last against a vast structure of steel and glass: an old shopping mall. A sign in looping cursive script, streaked white with bird shit, reads empire state plaza mall .
    The reunion