Sever by Lauren DeStefano Page A

letting her out tonight, aren’t they? Linden’s youngest wife.”
    “Cecily,” I remind him. Names aren’t his strong suit. “And she’s his only wife now.”
    “Well, then, that’s a bit of good news, isn’t it? It means she’ll be okay.”
    When I last saw her, she was in a hospital bed, rocking her son and whispering into his hair. Linden was trying to say something to her, but she kept moving her head away.
    I was astounded by how young and how very old she looked at the same time. And then I thought of Jenna—strong, steely, beautiful Jenna, who turned sallow and died in our hands while we just watched. Vaughn can do what he wants with us. He can make us sick, and make us well again, and keep us alive for months after our expiration date if he has a mind to. He can deliver our babies, or kill them in the womb, or smother them if they’re malformed.
    And I can’t stop him. All I can do is clean up.
    “I have to get fresh water,” I say.
    “You should stop now,” Reed says. “You’re about to drop.”
    My legs are shaking from the inactivity. Tears are heavy in my eyes. “Until that happens, I have work to do.”
    “You’re of no use to any of us unconscious,” he says. “Sit for a while.”
    “If you make me stay, I’m going to ask all the questions I like, until you’re sick of me,” I warn.
    “Deal.”
    “And you have to answer them,” I say.
    “Shoot.”
    I don’t have to think about it; there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask him. “Have you ever been married?”
    “No,” he says. “I rather like being by myself. Had a dog for a while; it followed me around and never talked. I imagine a wife wouldn’t grant me that level of peace.”
    “You never wanted children?” I ask. “Not even before they knew about the virus?”
    “Having children seemed like a reckless thing for someone like me to do,” Reed says. “Now that we know about the virus, it’s worse than reckless. It’s cruel. No offense, doll; you had as much a right to be born as any first generation, but if I wanted to watch something live its course and die, I’d get another dog.”
    I don’t know why, but that makes me laugh. Dogs. I’llonly live a few years longer than a dog. All that effort to save my sister wife, and the bloodstain she left in the backseat will be around longer than she will anyway. Reed has had his solitude disrupted by a house full of kids, and in a few years we’ll all be dead, though he’s the one with tired eyes and wrinkled hands and gray hair. We are young and energetic, but in six years there won’t be a trace of us. The absurdity of it all.
    Reed frowns at me.
    “Your brother has been filling everyone’s head with promises of a cure,” I say, recovering from my laughter with intermittent hiccups of it. “He builds all of these hospitals and secret lairs. But not you.”
    “My brother is mad,” Reed says. “Completely off his rocker. Don’t get me wrong, but if you strip all of that away, he just doesn’t want to bury another son. I have to hold on to that thought, or else I wouldn’t believe he was human at all.”
    “And when he can’t save Linden, he’ll move on to Bowen,” I say.
    “Bowen and Linden,” Reed says, clapping his hands against the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. “Those are two names I thought I’d never hear in the same sentence.”
    “What do you mean?” I ask.
    “Vaughn doesn’t like to talk about the past, you understand,” Reed says. “Poor Linden has no idea that his son is named after his dead brother.”

    That night Cecily is discharged from the hospital. It rains. Reed goes speeding down twisty back roads, the tires of his old car squealing at sharp turns. Through the windshield I can’t see a thing, and I wonder how, or even if, he can.
    Linden sits in the front seat holding Bowen, and patiently says things like “Uncle Reed, please” and “That was a stop sign.”
    Cecily’s eyes are closed, and she’s