Wilder Girls Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Nike Power

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Aykut Aydoğdu

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Power, Rory, author.

  Title: Wilder girls / Rory Power.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: Friends Hetty, Byatt, and Reece go to extremes trying to uncover the dark truth about the mysterious disease that has had them quarantined at their boarding school on a Maine island.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018039286 | ISBN 978-0-525-64558-0 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-525-64559-7 (glb) | ISBN 978-0-525-64560-3 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-593-11848-1 (intl. tr. pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Quarantine—Fiction. | Diseases—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Boarding schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P6947 Wil 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525645603

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Hetty

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Byatt

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Hetty

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Byatt

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Hetty

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Byatt

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Hetty

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To my mother,

  and to me,

  and to the versions of us

  who never thought

  we would arrive here

  together

  All things counter,

  original,

  spare,

  strange

  —GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS,

  “PIED BEAUTY”

  HETTY

  CHAPTER 1

  Something. Way out in the white-dark. Between the trees, moving where the thickets swarm. You can see it from the roof, the way the brush bends around it as it rustles to the ocean.

  That size, it must be a coyote, one of the big ones hitting shoulder high. Teeth that fit like knives in the palm of my hand. I know because I found one once, the end of it just poking through the fence. Took it back and hid it under my bed.

  One more crash through the brush and then the stillness again. Across the roof deck Byatt lowers her gun, rests it on the railing. Road clear.

  I keep mine up, just in case, keep the sight raised to my left eye. My other eye’s dead, gone dark in a flare-up. Lid fused shut, something growing underneath.

  It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over.

  Through the sight, noon sun bleaching the world, I can see the woods stretching out to the island’s edge, the ocean beyond. Pines bristling thick like always, rising high above the house. Here and there, gaps where the oak and birch have shed their leaves, but most of the canopy is woven tight, needles stiff with frost. Only the radio antenna breaking through, useless now the signal’s out.

  Up the road someone yells, and out of the trees, there’s Boat Shift coming home. It’s only a few who can make the trip, all the way across the island to where the Navy delivers rations and clothes at the pier the ferries used to come and go from. The rest of us stay behind the fence, pray they make it home safe.

  The tallest, Ms. Welch, stops at the gate and fumbles with the lock until at last, the gate swings open, and Boat Shift come stumbling in, cheeks red from the cold. All three of them back and all three of them bent under the weight of the cans and the meats and the sugar cubes. Welch turns to shut the gate behind her. Barely five years past the oldest of us, she’s the youngest of the teachers. Before this she lived on our hall and looked the other way when somebody missed curfew. Now she counts us every morning to make sure nobody’s died in the night.

  She waves to give the all clear, and Byatt waves back. I’m gate. Byatt’s road. Sometimes we switch, but my eye doesn’t do well looking far, so it never lasts. Either way I’m still a better shot than half the girls who could take my place.

  The last Boat girl steps under the porch and out of sight, and that’s the end of our shift. Unload the rifles. Stick the casings in the box for the next girl. Slip one in your pocket, just in case.

  The roof slopes gently away from the flattop deck, third floor to second. From there we swing over the edge and through the open window into the house. It was harder in the skirts and socks we used to wear, something in us still telling us to keep our knees closed. That was a long time ago. Now, in our ragged jeans, there’s nothing to mind.

  Byatt climbs in behind me, leaving another set of scuff marks on the window ledge. She pushes her hair over one shoulder. Straight, like mine, and a bright living brown. And clean. Even when there’s no bread, there’s always shampoo.

  “What’d you see?” she asks me.

  I shrug. “Nothing.”

  Breakfast wasn’t much, and I’m feeling the shake of hunger in my limbs. I know Byatt is too, so we’re quick as we head downstairs for lunch, to the main floor, to the hall, with its big high ceilings. Scarred, tilting tables; a fireplace; and tall-backed couches, stuffing ripped out to burn for warmth. And us, full of us, humming and alive.

  * * *

  —

  There were about a hundred girls when it started, and twenty teachers. All together we filled both wings off the old house. These days we only need one.

  The Boat girls come banging through the front doors, letting their bags drop, and there’s a scramble for the food. They send us cans, mostly, and sometimes packs of dried jerky. Barely ever anything fresh, never enough for everyone, and on an average day, meals are just Welch in the kitchen, unlocking the storage closet and parceling out the smallest rations you ever saw. But today’s a delivery day, new supplies come home on the backs of the Boat Shift girls, and that means Welch
and Headmistress keep their hands clean and let us fight for one thing each.

  Byatt and me, though, we don’t have to fight. Reese is right by the door, and she drags a bag off to the side for us. If it were somebody else, people would mind, but it’s Reese—left hand with its sharp, scaled fingers—so everyone keeps quiet.

  She was one of the last to get sick. I thought maybe it had missed her, maybe she was safe, and then they started. The scales, each a shifting sort of silver, unfolding out of her skin like they were coming from inside. The same thing happened to one of the other girls in our year. They spread across her whole body and turned her blood cold until she wouldn’t wake up, so we thought it was the end for Reese, and they took her upstairs, waited for it to kill her. But it didn’t. One day she’s holed up in the infirmary, and the next she’s back again, her left hand a wild thing but still hers.

  Reese rips open the bag, and she lets me and Byatt root through it. My stomach clenching, spit thick around my tongue. Anything, I’d take anything. But we’ve got a bad one. Soap. Matches. A box of pens. A carton of bullets. And then, at the bottom, an orange—a real live orange, rot only starting to nip at the peel.

  We snatch. Reese’s silver hand on my collar, heat roiling under the scales, but I throw her to the floor, shove my knee against the side of her face. Bear down, trap Byatt’s neck between my shoulder and my forearm. One of them kicks; I don’t know who. Clocks me in the back of the head and I’m careening onto the stairs, nose against the edge with a crack. Pain fizzing white. Around us, the other girls yelling, hemming in.

  Someone has my hair in her fist, tugging up, out. I twist, I bite where the tendons push against her skin, and she whines. My grip loosens. So does hers, and we scrabble away from each other.

  I shake the blood out of my eye. Reese is sprawled halfway up the staircase, the orange in her hand. She wins.

  CHAPTER 2

  We call it the Tox, and for the first few months, they tried to make it a lesson. Viral Outbreaks in Western Civilizations: a History. “Tox” as a Root in Latinate Languages. Pharmaceutical Regulations in the State of Maine. School like always, teachers standing at the board with blood on their clothes, scheduling quizzes as if we’d all still be there a week later. The world’s not ending, they said, and neither should your education.

  Breakfast in the dining room. Math, English, French. Lunch, target practice. Physicals and first aid, Ms. Welch bandaging wounds and Headmistress pricking with needles. Together for dinner and then locked inside to last the night. No, I don’t know what’s making you sick, Welch would tell us. Yes, you’ll be fine. Yes, you’ll go home again soon.

  That ended quickly. Classes falling off the schedule as the Tox took teacher after teacher. Rules crumbling to dust and fading away, until only the barest bones were left. But still, we count the days, wake every morning to scan the sky for cameras and lights. People care on the mainland, that’s what Welch always says. They’ve cared from the second Headmistress called Camp Nash on the coast for help, and they’re looking for a cure. In the first shipment of supplies Boat Shift ever brought back, there was a note. Typed and signed, printed on the Navy’s letterhead.

  FROM: Secretary of the Navy, Department of Defense

  Commanding Officer, Chemical/Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF), Camp Nash Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

  TO: Raxter School for Girls, Raxter Island

  SUBJECT: Quarantine procedures as recommended by the CDC

  Implementation of a full isolation and quarantine effective immediately. Subjects to remain on school grounds at all times, for safety and to preserve conditions of initial contagion. Breach of school fence, save by authorized crew for supply retrieval (see below), violates terms of quarantine.

  Termination of phone and internet access pending; communication to route only through official radio channels. Full classification of information in effect.

  Supplies to arrive via drop-off at western pier. Date and time to be set via Camp Nash lighthouse.

  Diagnostics and treatment in development. CDC cooperating with local facilities re: cure. Expect delivery.

  Wait, and stay alive, and we thought it would be easy—together behind the fence, safe from the wildwood, safe from the animals grown savage and strange—but girls kept dropping. Flare-ups, which left their bodies too wrecked to keep breathing, left wounds that wouldn’t heal, or sometimes, a violence like a fever, turning girls against themselves. It still happens like that. Only difference is now we’ve learned that all we can do is look after our own.

  Reese and Byatt, they’re mine and I’m theirs. It’s them I pray for when I pass the bulletin board and brush two fingers against the note from the Navy still pinned there, yellowed and curling. A talisman, a reminder of the promise they made. The cure is coming, as long as we stay alive.

  Reese digs a silver fingernail into the orange and starts peeling, and I force myself to look away. When food’s fresh like that, we fight for it. She says it’s the only fair way to settle things. No handouts, no pity. She’d never take it if it didn’t feel earned.

  Around us the other girls are gathering in swirls of high laughter, digging through the clothing that spills out of every bag. The Navy still sends us enough for the full number. Shirts and tiny boots we don’t have anybody small enough to wear them.

  And jackets. They never stop sending jackets. Not since the frost began to coat the grass. It was only just spring when the Tox hit, and for that summer we were fine in our uniform skirts and button-downs, but winter came like it always does in Maine, bitter and long. Fires burning in daylight and the Navy-issue generators running after dark, until a storm broke them to bits.

  “You’ve got blood on you,” Byatt says. Reese slices off the tail of her shirt and tosses it onto my face. I press. My nose squelches.

  A scrape above us, on the mezzanine over the main hall. We all look up. It’s Mona from the year ahead of me, red hair and a heart-shaped face, back from being taken to the infirmary on the third floor. She’s been up there for ages, since last season’s flare-up, and I don’t think anybody expected her to ever come back down. I remember how her face steamed and cracked that day, how they carried her to the infirmary with a sheet over her like she was already dead.

  Now she has a lattice of scars across her cheeks and the beginning of an aura to her hair. Reese is like that, with her blond braid and the glow the Tox gave it, and it’s so much hers that it’s startling to see it on Mona.

  “Hey,” she says, unsteady on her feet, and her friends run over, all fluttering hands and smiles, plenty of space between them. It’s not contagion we’re afraid of—we all have it already, whatever it is. It’s seeing her break apart again. Knowing someday soon it’ll happen to us. Knowing all we can do is hope we make it through.

  “Mona,” her friends say, “thank God you’re okay.” But I watch them let the conversation drop, watch them drift out into the last daylight hours and leave Mona stranded on the couch, staring at her knees. There’s no room for her with them anymore. They got used to her being gone.

  I look over at Reese and Byatt, kicking at the same splinter in the stairs. I don’t think I could ever get used to being without them.

  Byatt gets up, an odd little frown creasing her brow. “Wait here,” she says, and goes over to Mona.

  They talk for a minute, the two of them, Byatt bending so her voice can slide right into Mona’s ear, the shine of Mona’s hair washing Byatt’s skin red. And then Byatt straightens, and Mona presses her thumb against the inside of Byatt’s forearm. They both look rattled. Just a little, but I see it.

  “Afternoon, Hetty.”

  I turn around. It’s Headmistress, the angles in her face even sharper now than they used to be. Gray hair twined tight in a bun, her shirt buttoned up to her chin. And a stain around her mouth, faint pink from
the blood that’s always oozing out of her lips. Her and Welch—the Tox is different with them. It doesn’t cut them down the way it did the other teachers; it doesn’t change their bodies the way it does ours. Instead, it wakes weeping sores on their tongues, sets a tremor in their limbs that won’t go away.

  “Good afternoon,” I say to Headmistress. She’s let a lot of things slide, but manners aren’t one of them.

  She nods across the hall, to where Byatt is still bent over Mona. “How’s she doing?”

  “Mona?” I say.

  “No, Byatt.”

  Byatt hasn’t had a flare-up since late summer, and she’s due for one soon. They cycle in seasons, each one worse than before until we can’t bear it anymore. After her last one, though, I can’t imagine something worse. She doesn’t look any different—just a sore throat she can’t shake and that serrated ridge of bone down her back, bits of it peeking through her skin—but I remember every second of it. How she bled through our old mattress until it dripped onto the floorboards underneath our bunk. How she looked more confused than anything as the skin over her spine split open.

  “She’s fine,” I say. “It’s getting about time, though.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Headmistress says. She watches Mona and Byatt a little longer, frowning. “I didn’t know you girls and Mona were friends.”

  Since when has she cared about that? “Friendly, I guess.”

  Headmistress looks at me like she’s surprised I’m still standing there. “Lovely,” she says, and then she starts across the main hall, down the corridor to where her office is hidden away.