Read Online The Revival by Chris Weitz - Free Book Online

looks up at me from the hole.
    Titch: “Miss.”
    Me: “Can you tell me something?” He just looks back at me. “The guy who got the biscuit, Chapel. He said the Reconstruction Committee doesn’t care about us. I mean us ‘kids,’ or whatever you want to call us. He said that you just wanted what was left after you let us all die.”
    Titch opens his mouth to say something, but then he thinks better of it. He leans the spade against the side of the grave.
    Titch: “I think I dug deep enough, miss,” he says finally. Then he levers himself out of the ground and shuffles off, leaving us “to say words.”
    Jefferson and I finish cleaning Brainbox off with surgical wipes. Jeff jumps into the hole, and I help lower in the body. It’s so easy that it’s hard—I mean, like, emotionally speaking. Brainbox is touchingly light. The guy forgot to eat at the best of times. When he was working on a problem, he might go days without a meal.
    I stretch my hand down to Jefferson to help him out of the ground. I have to lean back, practically fall, to keep from getting pulled in, and as he steps over the lip of the grave, we crumple into a ball together. It should be intimate; after everything I’ve gone through to get back to him, it should feel like home. But instead, it’s awkward. There’s a distance that we can’t seem to span—not yet at least. Maybe he smells another guy on me. I don’t know.
    We stand there looking at Brainbox below the ground as flies land and start to test the waters of his flesh. I want to figure out something to say, something that would make a difference if Brainbox were listening. He would’ve insisted it was pointless, though; he said that consciousness ended at death, so there’s nobody left to care about how you treat them or what you say.
    Jefferson doesn’t seem to be coming up with anything, either. We’ve said it all before, over other bodies of other friends. Jefferson’s brother, Wash. Half our tribe.
    So we just stand there for a while.

    I want to think about Brainbox, give him his due. But my mind keeps returning to Titch’s non-answer.
    It’d be nice if what Rab said was true. He says his job is to make contact with the Relevant Authorities—which is optimistic, both the idea that there
are
authorities and that, if there were, we could make contact with them—and begin the process of “reintegration.” The lost boys and girls of New York and the rest of the plague-ridden continent will be taken under the wing of the Reconstruction Committee.
    But I don’t buy it. Rab, I suspect, is here as my handler, The Powers That Be figuring that I still have feelings for him, which is
so
not true.
    And if this were a diplomatic mission, I’d say we’re a little heavy on firepower. It’s pretty obvious to me that the point of this little jaunt is to find the biscuit so that the fate of the world doesn’t end up in the hands of a bunch of juvenile delinquents. Maybe if it weren’t for that, they’d have preferred, as Chapel nicely put it, to wait until everybody was dead and then scrape up the goo.
    From the way Wakefield is giving clipped orders to the squaddies and the Gurkhas, I can tell he’s burning up because we were so close to getting ahold of the biscuit. And I can’t say that I’m 100 percent stoked that Chapel and Evan have it, either. A revolutionary and a sadist don’t add up to a great decision-making process, I figure.
    Wakefield looks over at us, calculating how long he can let this sad little excuse for a funeral go before he can get on the move. I figure this gesture at propriety may be the last chance Jefferson and I have to speak privately for a while.
    Me: “They came for the biscuit, Jefferson.”
    Jefferson: “I know.” He looks away from me, over the bone-white expanse of the meadow. He says, “What