5. Chapter 5
Kalli
This compartment has windows. Narrow, high, meshed on the outside. The light comes through the mesh in a grid and lies across my cuffed hands. When the road bends, the grid slides over my knuckles and back. It shows up a tiny seam in the cuff on my left wrist.
It also shows me what a year has done. My hands are thinner than they were.
There’s a red rope of hair down my front that hasn’t been cut or brushed in weeks, and when I push it back off my shoulder it’s heavier than it should be, and it smells of the van.
My mother used to have it pinned every morning by a woman whose whole job was to take care of my hair.
She’d have something to say about it now.
I keep looking at the cuff. Small thing. But it keeps me occupied.
Two men sit across from me. A cup of coffee gone cold in the corner. They haven’t said anything since we got on the road.
Last time they moved me in the dark, and I had to work everything out by ear or fingertips. This time I can see the whole compartment. It hasn’t helped.
I watch them anyway. There’s nothing else in here to watch.
The one on the left is older. Gray at the temples. A wedding ring. Boots that have been resoled, and the work was done well. The one on the right is younger. He sits without moving at all, and he’s pleased with himself about it.
They check the windows in turn, and they never do it in the same order twice. Somebody trained them.
None of it helps me. And a seam in a cuff is a long way from getting out.
Fine. Then I’ll talk to them.
“Long shift,” I say.
The older one looks straight at me and takes his time about it. He isn’t afraid of me. He isn’t interested in me either.
“It’s a long drive,” he says.
The younger one doesn’t look at all.
“How long?”
“Long.”
“You’re a wonderful conversationalist.”
“I’ve been told.”
I let ten minutes go by, quietly testing the pressure against my wrist. Then: “Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask.”
“That’s not the same as an answer.”
“No,” he agrees, “it isn’t.”
“So, is there a list that you work from? What you can tell me and what you can’t?”
“Why not ask, and find out?”
He isn’t playing with me. He’s telling me the rules once, so I don’t spend the whole day finding them out.
“Fine. Are we going north?”
“We’re going up.”
“Up isn’t a direction.”
“It’s all I’m giving you.”
I sink back against the wall and blow a loose hair off my face. I give my wrist a tiny twist and feel the cuff move a fraction.
More minutes drag by before I start again.
“What’s the weather like up there?”
“Cold.”
“Do I get a coat?”
“There’ll be a coat waiting for you.”
“Will it be a heavy coat?”
“It’ll be a coat.”
Sometime past midday, the younger one takes a bottle of water from the kit at his feet, cracks the seal in front of me so I can see it break, and sets it on the bench just close enough for me to reach. Then he sits back.
Neither of them comes any closer than that. Not once.
“You could hand it to me,” I say.
“He could,” the older one says.
“But he won’t.”
“No.”
I drink it. It isn’t kindness. It’s the same as the good food and the medic looking me over. Somebody’s paid for me to stay healthy.
“Do I get lunch, or is that also a question you can’t answer?”
“You get lunch.”
“What is it?”
“Chicken and rice.”
I let my head go back against the wall. “Look at that. Two facts in one day.”
“Three,” he says. “There’s pudding as well.”
“Now you’re showing off.”
More silence. I work the cuff. It burns my skin, but there’s give in it now.
“You’ve done this before,” I say, after a while. “Moving people.”
“Moving cargo.”
“That’s a nicer word for it.”
“It’s the word on the paperwork.”
“What am I on the paperwork?”
The vehicle takes a turn a little too fast, and I sway with it. The pair of them hold themselves rigid.
“A line and a number.”
“Which number?”
“Not going to answer that.”
“Have you ever moved anything like me?”
He takes a breath before he answers. He hasn’t done that once all day.
“No,” he says.
“Was that on the list?”
“That one wasn’t.”
The younger one turns his head half an inch. The older one doesn’t look at him, and the younger one turns it back.
Those two know something about me, and that question came close to it.
I push the worry down and go back to the cuff. It’s moving freely at the seam now.
The older guy looks up at me.
“So,” I say abruptly. “How many of you are there?”
“Enough.”
“Are you the one in charge?”
“No.”
“Is he in the front?”
“Not going to answer that.”
“You said ‘not going to.’ Not can’t.” I roll my shoulder against the wall. “So that question’s not on the list of things I’m not to be told?”
“Maybe.”
“How long is the list?”
“Long.”
“Everything’s long today.”
He shifts his boots. First time he’s moved his feet in hours.
“My instructions are to keep you comfortable, and conversation is part of that,” he says. “But it’s easier if you stop asking me things I’m not allowed to answer.”
Comfortable.
Nobody has cared whether I was comfortable in over a year. Wherever I’m going is going to be different from where I’ve been. That should be reassuring. It isn’t.
“You care that I’m comfortable?”
“I don’t care either way.”
“Geez. Charming. Does your wife know what you do?”
“She knows I drive.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s all she wants to know.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Long.”
“I’m putting that on your gravestone.”
“There are worse things to put there.”
“Do they let you go home between these?” I lean forward slightly and rest my elbows on my knees, my hands clasped together. I glance down. The crack I’ve been feeling is there. They won’t see it from where they’re sitting.
“Sometimes.”
“Is it far?”
“Far enough that I don’t go home for one night and come back.”
“So you sit somewhere in between and wait for the next one?”
“That’s the job.”
“Do you have kids?”
He doesn’t answer. That one isn’t from the list. He could tell me. He’d rather not. I leave it alone. He’ll stop answering anything if I push, and I want him talking again.
“Last one,” I say. “Then I’ll let you look out of your windows in peace.”
“Go on.”
“Do you know what I am?”
“I know what’s on the file.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
The van stops for fuel after dark. I can smell diesel through the mesh. Two men are talking at the front of the van, quietly, but I can hear them anyway.
“—found the guard on the floor of the east door. Out cold, not marked up. Whoever did it didn’t want a fight.”
“Anything missing?”
“Seems like they were after the medical bay. Drugs, from the looks of it.” A pause, longer than the last one. “My gut says otherwise.”
“Client know?”
“Client will know in ten minutes. Recheck the schedule.”
I don’t move. If I move, they’ll know I heard something worth moving for.
Neither of the men across from me moves either. No look between them, no hand going anywhere near a weapon. The older one takes the radio off his shoulder, says a route number and a time into it, and clips it back. Then he checks his watch against the clock up front.
“Somebody went into the building we left,” I say.
Nothing.
“What happened?”
Nothing.
“You’ve answered me all day.” I keep my voice easy. “What’s different about this one?”
He looks out of his window and says nothing. All day he’s given me something, even if it was only no. This is the first thing he won’t talk about at all.
Nobody’s coming for me. I settled that a year ago, and nothing has changed my mind about it since.
Hope takes too much out of you when it’s wrong.
My dragon doesn’t agree.
She doesn’t use words. She pushes, steady, behind my ribs, and she’s pushing toward the back of the van. Back down the road we’ve already driven.
You’re wrong, I tell her.
She keeps pushing. She won’t argue with me, and she won’t stop pushing. I can’t win against that.
The van pulls out of the lot, and the road starts climbing. The temperature drops.
“How much further?” I ask.
“Few hours.”
“Then what?”
“Then there’s a line,” he says. “My job ends at it. Somebody else’s starts.”
“A line on a map?”
“A ward line.”
I sit up a little. “How big?”
“It goes all the way round the territory we’re driving into,” he says. “You’ll feel it before we get there. Things like you generally do.”
Things like me?
“What does it stop?”
“Everything. There’s a list of people and vehicles that are allowed through. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get in.” He rolls his shoulders. It’s the first time he’s looked tired.
“You’ve been through it, though?”
“Twice, in eleven years of this work.”
I’ve lived inside ward-work for over a year. I know what it does when it’s built into a cuff or a set of bars. I’ve never heard of one that big.
He watches me for a moment. “You’ve asked me a great many questions today,” he says.
“You’ve answered about ten of them.”
“Not one of them was about what happens to you at the other end. You asked about my wife.”
“I was working you.”
“I know you were.” He goes back to his window. “You’re better at it than I expected.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“It wasn’t meant as one.” A moment. “It’s the reason I’ve been told to keep you talking to me and not to him.”
The younger one doesn’t move, except for his jaw.
The van stops again at a bigger lot. More engines. More doors. Headlights swing past the mesh, and there’s more than one set of them.
When we roll again, there’s a second vehicle behind us that wasn’t there before. It stays close enough that I can hear its engine under the sound of ours. Whatever they’ve loaded into it clinks, and it’s heavier than anything this crew has been carrying.
The older one watches the window for a long time.
“They weren’t with us this morning,” I say.
“No.”
“Are they yours?”
“They’re not mine.”
“Do you know them?”
“I know one of them.”
“You don’t sound pleased about it.”
“Six of us was the plan,” he mutters. “Six of us was a good plan.”
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t on the list. But right now he’s angry at whoever gave him the list. I’m not the only one in here who’s been told less than he wants to know.
He turns back to the window and doesn’t say more.
I work the cuff anyway. I roll my wrist slowly into the space I’ve made, in time with the van, so it looks like I’m shifting position. The only other thing I can do is stop, and stopping means giving up.
It’s full dark by the time the real climb starts. The engine drops through its gears. The noise of it bounces straight back at us off rock on both sides.
Narrow. Walls. One road.
Both vehicles start slowing at once, touching the brakes a little at a time. There’s a turn ahead tight enough to bring everything down to walking pace.
That’s when my dragon rises.
Not at either of the men. Not at anything inside this box. She comes up aimed at the dark outside the mesh, straight up the road ahead of us, and she’s harder to hold than she’s ever been.
I put everything I have into keeping her down.
That used to be enough. It isn’t now. She isn’t fighting me. She’s just coming, and I can’t stop her, and both vehicles keep slowing into the turn around us.
She isn’t afraid.
She’s the only thing in this compartment that isn’t.
Something’s about to happen.
She’s been waiting for it.