Chapter 8
EDEN
Itook my controller medication at the kitchen counter with a flashlight standing on end so the beam went off the ceiling, because the east row had no power and would not have any until the county put a crew on the line.
Shake, breathe out, seal, hold. Rinse the mouth into a sink that ran cold and stayed cold.
Both rescue inhalers into the purse, then the spacer, then the written plan, in that order, the way I do it when nobody is watching, which was the whole point, because that was the third morning of the lockdown and none of it had happened with Ryder’s face in the room.
That was supposed to feel like taking something back.
The clubhouse smelled like burned coffee, sleeping bodies, gun oil, and the smoke nobody could keep all the way outside.
Bear had ordered the damaged intake closed after Ryder found the cut alarm wire, so the common room ran on two window units wired to the clubhouse generator, and the generator was on ration because eleven hundred gallons of diesel had gone up behind the maintenance shed.
The units moved July from one side of the room to the other and rattled while they did it.
Every breath tasted faintly of yesterday even after Aris said the air was inside limits.
June had turned the corner of the shelter corridor into a civilian supply station, names on masking tape under medicine bags, chargers, water, and the paperwork people had grabbed when the first shots came.
She checked every item against her list and argued with any man who used the phrase dependent civilian.
Leah sat on the floor beside her sorting prescriptions out of toiletries.
Tessa carried boxes in and threatened the shelving whenever it shifted.
“If Bear makes us live in this hall another day I’m invoicing the club for administrative labor,” June said, writing the time beside an older woman’s blood-pressure bottle. “Extra fee every time a man asks whether I’m sure the list is current.”
“Charge for dumb questions and we can fund Eden’s bakery by Friday.” Tessa set a box down near my feet and frowned when I bent toward it. “Cleaning supplies. Don’t open that one if the fumes bother you.”
“I know what bothers me.” It came out faster than she deserved.
I had spent the morning hearing Ryder in every ordinary warning, and I was tired of punishing the people who hadn’t used my lungs to throw me away.
I took my hands off the box. “You’re right.
Put it by the loading door, not the shelter rooms.”
She took the correction and the apology inside it and went. Leah held a roll of labels out toward me. “You can take the food and equipment list if you want something to do. If you don’t, you can sit by the fan and nobody in this hall gets to call that weakness.”
“Give me the list.” I sat down beside June with my purse between my knees where the medication stayed mine, and started writing names.
That was the part that got me. Forty-one paper bags with forty-one names on them, and every one of those people would come down this corridor and be handed their own medicine by a woman holding a legal pad, and not one of them would have to explain why they needed it.
My father used to stand at the foot of emergency-room beds and tell doctors which parts of my life he intended to remove before anybody asked me what I wanted.
School trips first. Then camp. Then anything that meant sleeping further away than his car could reach in an hour.
He was not cruel. He was frightened, and he had decided that frightened outranked everything, and by the time I was fourteen I had learned to hide the first two days of an attack so that one bad night couldn’t cost me a summer.
I labeled a bag for a man whose hands shake and thought about how long it took me to stop doing that.
Five years, roughly. About as long as I had been married.
June glanced toward the common room. Ryder stood by the west door with Jax, both of them bent over a map taped to the wall.
Jess sat in the center hall in her own blue blouse with a cup between her hands.
His jacket hung over the back of her chair, where he had put it during the blast and she had moved it, and she sat forward on the edge of the seat so that no part of her touched the leather.
“He asked Bear to move the civilian medicine into the infirmary,” June said. “Bear said no until you and the other owners agree.”
“Good.” I pressed a label onto a bag and wrote the name large enough to read without opening it. “If Ryder moves my inhaler I’m moving his gun somewhere he won’t enjoy retrieving it.”
Leah’s mouth tightened, and not with amusement. “Bear heard your threat yesterday. He told every prospect that your medication, your car, your bedroom, your purse and your documents are not to be touched on Ryder’s authority.”
The rule should have been obvious. Needing Bear to say it out loud meant my husband’s rank had always been able to reach every private part of my life, and I had never once tested it. I labeled another bag while the anger kept my handwriting legible.
“Did Bear make the same rule for Jess?”
“June asked. She controls her things too.” Leah looked down the hall. “She asked Mia to call her when the phones open.”
Jess must have felt us looking, because she lifted her head. I expected guilt, or fear. What came across her face was closer to warning, and she was on her feet before I understood it.
“Do you smell that?”
It came in under the old smoke, bitter and wrong, plastic and the cleaner Tessa had just carried out. June stopped writing. Leah stood up and followed it to the grille at the end of the corridor, where a gray thread was coming through, thinning in the moving air, then thickening.
Nobody had mapped the second ventilation line.
The damaged intake had been closed and tagged on Monday and every man in the building had been thinking about that one.
The shelter corridor drew from an older housing on the north side of the roof that had not been on anybody’s drawing since the equipment building went up, and when the chemical store beside the maintenance shed caught, that was the line it found.
The alarm above us started. The blast reached the building a second later.
Glass went somewhere past the common room, the floor moved, and the smoke came through the grille in a dark rolling wave while people started shouting.
Bear’s voice came over the speakers ordering the center hall cleared toward the basement.
Jax ran for the west door. Ryder turned from the map, found me through the crowd, and started across the common room.
“Move.” Tessa threw the cleaning box out through the loading doorway before the prospect hauled the door shut. “June, take the list. Leah, get Eden.”
“I can walk.” I stood with my purse against my side and picked the medication pouch up off the floor before anybody else could decide to carry it.
The common room had filled at the ceiling, but the shelter corridor was still visible.
I put my shirt over my mouth, went with Leah and June, and helped two women toward the basement door while Tessa cleared behind us.
People pressed in, then broke apart when June started calling names and destinations off her list. She can turn a panic into an argument with columns.
It steadied me until a cough took the bottom out of my next breath.
Leah heard it. She came around in front of me at the basement landing and didn’t touch me. “Inhaler now?”
I nodded, already opening the purse. The spacer went on because my hands knew the order even with my eyes watering.
I took it the way Aris and I wrote it down, held what I could, waited for the room to open.
Leah stayed in front of me. June kept people moving around us.
Tessa put herself between my back and anyone who might come through it.
Ryder came down the corridor through the smoke with his cut pulled over his mouth and one hand out. “Eden!”
I stepped away before he reached me. It cost more air than I had planned for, and the cough that came doubled me over the spacer. Leah blocked him with both arms while Aris pushed through behind him with the emergency bag.
“She said no.” Leah braced a hand on Ryder’s chest when he tried to see around her. “Back up.”
“The chemical store went up by the north housing.” He looked at the inhaler, then at what my shoulders were doing. “She needs to be outside.”
“She needs clean air and treatment, and I’ll pick the location after I assess her.” Aris came down to my level and left the inhaler in my hand. “Eden. Do you want Leah with you?”
I nodded. Talking had gotten expensive, and fear was making the ends of the hall look further off than they were.
Ryder heard the answer and moved back, not far enough that I stopped seeing his face.
Three years ago he sat on our bathroom floor and put the phone on the tile between us and told me what he could hear in my breathing, and then waited for me to choose, and I went because he had respected the no the first time.
That was the man in the corridor. That was the same man.
I had wanted him hurt. I had wanted him to stand near somebody he loved and be told he no longer belonged to her emergency. The satisfaction never came, because all of me was busy dragging air past the place where it had stopped fitting.