Chapter 2
Liam did not run.
Every animal thing in him wanted to. The words had come from six inches behind his ear, so close he could feel the warmth of them, and the rifle was up and useless in his hands because the rifle was pointed at the trees in front of him and the danger was standing at his back.
But she had said four words that held him where he stood as surely as a chain.
She's still breathing.
"Isaiah," Liam said. "Don't move."
"I'm not moving." Isaiah's voice was a thread. "I am not moving, Liam, there's one behind me too."
"Two behind him," the woman said. "One in the tree over your left shoulder, and she's a better shot than either of us, so I'd stop thinking about that rifle if I were you."
Liam let out a slow breath.
He lowered the Winchester. Not all the way. Just enough to say he had heard her.
"Turn around," she said. "Slow. Nobody here wants to hurt you. But we've had a bad winter for strangers and I'd rather not have another one."
He turned around.
She was smaller than her voice. That was the first thing. Fifty, maybe fifty-five, thin as a rail through the shoulders, with gray hair cut short and ragged as if she had done it herself with a knife, which she probably had.
She wore an oilskin coat gone black with age. She carried a shotgun in the crook of her arm, broken open, which was not the posture of a woman about to shoot somebody, and Liam noted that and filed it away.
Down the whole left side of her face ran a scar. Old. White. From the corner of her eye to the hinge of her jaw.
"My name's Nell Rook," she said. "You're the two off the sailboat."
"You saw us."
"We've watched you since the fog lifted."
A ghost of something crossed her face, not quite a smile.
"You ran that shoreline all day looking for something. You went up your own mast twice. You went to your knees in the mud for a handful of kelp."
She looked at him with an expression he could not read.
"That's not what looters do. Looters look at what they can carry. You were looking for a person."
Liam's throat closed.
"Chloe," he said.
"Is that her name."
"She hasn't said her name?"
"She hasn't said much of anything." Nell Rook clicked the shotgun closed, and Liam's whole body went tight, but she only slung it and let it hang.
"She's got a hole through her side, front to back, which is the good kind if there's a good kind, and she spent some time in that water, which is the bad kind, and she has been in and out of her head for a day and a night. Mostly out."
"She's alive."
"She was an hour ago."
Isaiah made a sound behind him.
Liam did not turn to look at him. He could not. He was looking at Nell Rook's scarred face and he was trying to work the read, and the read would not come, because there was a roaring in his ears like a river.
"Take me to her," he said.
"That's where we're going." Nell studied him a moment. "You can keep the rifle."
Liam blinked.
"What?"
"I said keep it." She had already turned and started up the path, into the clicking trees, and she said the rest of it over her shoulder without slowing down. "You'll want it after dark."
They walked into the willows.
There were four of them escorting, and Liam only ever got a clear look at two, which told him something about the other two.
A boy of maybe seventeen with a spear made from a garden fork.
A heavy woman with an axe. The other two stayed off in the trees on either side and moved without sound, and every so often Liam caught the flick of them between the trunks, gone as soon as seen.
The path was old and worn and it wound.
That was the thing about the willows, and it took Liam a quarter mile to understand it.
The path did not go straight. It could not.
The trees grew too thick and too crooked, their trunks split into three and four and five, arching, doubling back, sending down new roots wherever a branch touched ground, so that a single willow could be a whole grove and you could not tell where one tree ended and the next began.
You could not see forty feet in any direction.
You could see forty feet in one direction, along the path, and the path curved, so what you actually saw was thirty feet of path and then a wall of gray.
"This is a bad place," Isaiah muttered.
"Keep your voice down," said the boy with the garden fork. He said it fast, and he said it scared.
The chimes went on clicking.
They were everywhere now, thickening as the path went deeper. Bones and tin and glass and spoons, strung on wire, hanging at eye level, hung so densely in places that the escort had to lift them aside with the backs of their hands to let people through.
They made a sound like rain on a tin roof, if the rain were slow, and dry, and thinking about it.
"What are they for," Liam said.
Nell Rook did not answer.
"I asked what they're for."
"You asked," she agreed. "I heard you."
Liam let it go. He had learned, in two thousand miles, that a person who would not answer a question the first time would sometimes answer it the third time, and the second time was always wasted.
The fog came back as they walked, or maybe it had never left and had only been waiting for them under the trees.
It filled in between the trunks, low, waist high, so that the four escorts seemed to be wading, and the roots and the wrack and the ground itself disappeared, and it became very easy to believe that there was nothing under that white at all.
They passed a thing hanging from a low branch that was not a chime.
It was a doll.
An old plastic doll, a child's doll, its hair gone, its face gone soft and pitted from years of weather, and it hung by its neck from a loop of fishing line and it turned slowly as they went by.
Isaiah made a small strangled noise and gave it a wide berth.
"Don't touch that," said the heavy woman with the axe, sharp.
"I wasn't going to touch it."
"Then don't look at it either."
And then, a hundred yards further on, in the deep gray under the trees to the left of the path, somebody laughed.
Liam stopped dead.
It was a child. That was what made his skin crawl up the back of his neck and his arms go to gooseflesh under three layers of wool.
It was a small high delighted laugh, the laugh of a little kid who has just seen something funny, and it came from off in the willows where there was nothing but fog and roots and gray.
Nobody in the escort turned their head.
Not one of them. The boy with the garden fork went a shade paler and walked a little faster, and the heavy woman shifted her grip on the axe, and Nell Rook kept walking as if she had heard nothing at all.
"There's a kid out there," Isaiah said.
"No," said Nell.
"I heard a kid. Right there. Right in the trees, I heard a—"
"There is no child out there." Nell Rook stopped and turned around, and her scarred face was flat and calm and absolutely serious.
"You will hear things in the willows. Everyone does. It is the second most important thing I am going to tell you, so I will tell you now, and I will only tell you once. You hear something in these trees, you do not go and look. You do not call back. You do not answer."
"What's the first most important thing," Liam said.
Nell Rook looked at him for a long moment.
"Be inside before dark," she said, and turned, and walked on.
The Landing came up out of the fog without warning.
One moment there was nothing but willows. The next, the trees opened, and Liam was standing at the edge of a wide flat clearing on the shore of the cove, and in it was a town.
Or the corpse of one.
It had been a trailer park. He could see that.
Fifty or sixty of the long boxes laid out in rows, once, on a low green shelf above the water, and then something had happened to the land, or to the sea, or to both.
The shore had dropped, or the water had risen, and half of the rows were in the cove now, sunk to their windows, tilted, their roofs green with moss.
The other half stood on the dry ground, and people had done things to them. Braced them with driftwood. Roofed them over with tarp and cedar shakes. Joined them together with covered walkways so that the whole thing had become one long sprawling low structure like a wooden animal lying down.
Smoke came from three chimneys.
And a sign stood at the head of the road, an old carved wooden sign, faded but still legible, and Liam read it and felt something cold turn over in him.
WILLOW LANDING. A FRIENDLY COMMUNITY.
"How many of you," Liam asked.
"Twenty-two," Nell said. "As of this morning."
There was something in the way she said as of this morning that Liam did not like at all.
She led them through the clearing, and the people of the Landing came out to look at them.
They were not hostile. That was what struck Liam. He had braced for Ashford, for hard eyes and hands on weapons, and it was not that.
It was worse, in a way that took him a moment to name.
They were tired. They were thin and gray and quiet, and they came out of the doorways and stood there and watched the strangers go by, and there was almost nothing in their faces. Not curiosity. Not fear. Something used up.
Every single one of them, Liam noticed, wore something around their neck. A bone. A shell. A bent spoon on a string.
"Here," Nell said.
She stopped at a doorway in the middle of the long structure. A hide hung across it, and firelight moved behind it.
"She's in there. Go easy. She's not right yet."
Liam pushed through the hide.
It was warm inside, and dim, and it smelled of woodsmoke and pine pitch and the sharp green smell of something boiling.
There was a cot against the far wall.
And Chloe Buck was on it.
Liam's legs took him across the room without asking him about it.
She was so pale. That was the first thing and it was almost unbearable.
Chloe, who had come to the Remnant alone with a canoe and a rifle and a face that said don't ask, Chloe, who had faced down Uebert Murray from a bench without standing up, was gray as ash and small under a pile of blankets and there was sweat standing on her forehead in the cold.