10. Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten
Beckett
Maddox came down from the eastern line three weeks into her staying, and what he told me I filed under odd and not yet under wrong, though the line between those two was getting harder to find.
“Movement up past the tarn,” he said. We were in the map room—my map room, the one nobody else used, walls papered with the charts and hand-drawn survey I built up over five years of learning this mountain foot by foot.
He put a blunt finger on the high country, the bowl of rock and ice above the treeline where nothing lived in winter because nothing could.
“Tracks in the snow up there. Two, three of them, maybe more. Infected sign.”
“Scavengers. Something dragged a kill up high.”
“That’s what I said. Except there’s no drag.
No blood. No kill.” He frowned at the map like it had lied to him.
“Just tracks. Walking. Up where the wind will take the skin off your face in an hour. Beckett, there’s nothing up there for them.
Nothing to hunt, nothing to eat, no reason for a body to climb that high in this cold. But something did.”
I looked at the map a long moment.
Three weeks back I stood over a turned deer in a draw and told a starving woman they don’t come up this high in the cold, they never have.
And now Maddox was standing in my map room telling me the same rule had a second crack in it, higher up, colder still.
Two data points. My whole life since the collapse had been built on turning data points into decisions before the decisions turned into graves, and something in the back of my skull started keeping a tally I didn’t like the shape of.
But two wasn’t a pattern. Two was two. And I watched good men frighten their people to death over things that turned out to be nothing, panic spreading through a settlement like a fever until it did more killing than any threat ever would.
My job wasn’t to jump at shadows. My job was to watch the shadows long enough to know which ones had teeth.
“Keep the eastern patrols doubled,” I said.
“Quiet. Don’t spook anybody—you’re just being thorough.
Anybody asks, it’s the season, we always tighten up midwinter.
” I marked the tarn on the map with a bit of charcoal, a small notation only I read.
“And you see one of them, one, close enough to be sure—you don’t engage, you come tell me.
I want eyes on this before it’s anything. Not after.”
“You think it’s something.”
“I think it’s tracks in the snow.” I set the charcoal down. “I think we watch it, and we don’t build a coffin for a thing that hasn’t shown its face yet. Go get warm. You’ve been up for two days.”
He went. Good man, Maddox—steadier than Evan, older, less prone to run at his own alarm. If it rattled him even a little, it was worth watching. But watching was all it was worth, yet, and I meant to keep it that way as long as the mountain let me.
I stood in the map room a while longer with the single charcoal mark, and then I put it out of my head the way you learn to, the way you have to, and went to find my dinner.
That was the discipline of the thing. You carry eighty lives, you don’t get to spend them all on the fear that hasn’t earned its keep.
You feed the people. You fix the roof. You keep the lights on.
And you let the shadow with no face stay a shadow until it’s ready to be more, and not one hour before.
The trouble was what I found on the way to dinner.
Her. In the greenhouse passage, the grow lights spilled their strange violet-white glow out into the corridor.
It was the one place in The Hollow that never looked like anywhere on Earth—all that green light, all that green growing, where by every law of the season there should have been only dark and cold.
She was coming off a shift with Mara, sleeves shoved up, a smear of soil along one forearm, and she stopped in the mouth of the passage to look back at the racks of greens under the lights like she still couldn’t believe them.
Three weeks, and she still stopped to look.
That was the thing about her I kept catching on.
Everybody else down here had long since stopped seeing the marvel of it, the way you stop seeing your own hands.
She hadn’t. She came off every greenhouse shift and stood there a second looking at growing things under a mountain like a person looking at a fire they didn’t dare warm up to all the way.
And I stood in the corridor like a fool and looked at her looking.
I promised her I wouldn’t make things a thing, and I kept it, and keeping it was becoming the hardest steady work I did all day.
Because three weeks of warmth and food and sleep behind a locked door had done to her what it did to all of them, only more so—it had brought her back.
The hollows under her cheeks filled some.
She stood straight now, no longer folded down small around herself.
The hair Mara cut settled into something that suited her, dark and close, and it left her face open in a way the raggedy hacked-off version never had.
She looked like a woman, and I kept realizing it at inconvenient moments.
Not the flat wary nobody who pointed a rifle through a six-inch gap.
A woman, sharp-boned and quick-eyed and alive.
I was forty years old and had gone five years without letting myself so much as notice such a thing about anyone, and now I couldn’t walk down my own corridor without my chest doing something undignified.
She caught me. Of course she caught me; she caught everything.
“You’re staring,” she said. Not sharp. Testing, more like. The violet light did something to her face, softened the edges of it.
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that you’re the only person left down here who still looks at those lights like they’re a miracle.”
“They are a miracle.” She glanced back at them, and I watched her decide whether to let me have the next part, and then let me have it, which was new.
“I spent years learning exactly how much the world takes away. Every season, every mile, it takes something and it doesn’t give it back.
And then I come down here and there’s… that.
Green things growing in the dark in the dead of winter because somebody decided they would.
Because somebody looked at the way the world was and said no, not here, not us.
” She shook her head, slow. “I don’t know how not to look at that. ”
Because somebody decided they would. She had no idea she was describing me.
I built those racks with my own hands, ran the lines, done the sums on the solar and the batteries a hundred nights over.
She was standing in the middle of the thing I made, telling me what it meant to her without knowing she was telling me anything at all.
It went into me somewhere and lodged there and I couldn’t have dug it out with a knife.
“Somebody did,” was all I said.
“You know who?” She was watching me now, that quick attention. “Everybody down here talks about how things are. Nobody ever says who made them that way. Who built all this.”
Careful, now. “Lot of hands built this place.”
“That’s not an answer either.” Her mouth curved, not quite the smile she still wouldn’t fully give me but close, closer than the draw, closer than the woodpile. “You know, for a man who keeps the lights on, you’re awful cagey about who wired them.”
“You’re the one who told me she doesn’t hand things over.” I said it lightly and watched it land, watched her recognize her own words come back to her, the I’m not trading you anything from the snow. “Turns out I’ve got a thing or two I keep behind a lock too. You’ll live.”
She huffed, the kind of breath that in a warmer person would have been a laugh.
From her, it meant more than most people’s laughs ever did.
And for a second we just stood there in the violet light of the impossible garden, the two of us, not quite smiling at each other, and I felt the thing between us shift by some small increment, some click of a mechanism I couldn’t see, and I knew with a cold clear certainty that I was in trouble of a kind no scout report could ever cover.
Then Nessa came barreling down the corridor hollering that dinner was on, and the moment let go of us, and Eliza’s face did the thing it did whenever one of the children came near—softened, opened, went unconsciously gentle.
She turned to scoop the girl’s momentum before Nessa could brain herself on a cart, easy as anything, like she’s been doing it her whole life.
“Slow down, you,” she told the child, and Nessa grinned up at her with total adoration, and my traitor heart just about went over the edge entirely.
I didn’t sleep much that night, and it wasn’t the tracks past the tarn that kept me up.
I lay in the dark forty feet down and made myself be honest about it. A man who lies to himself about the state of his own defenses is a man who’s already lost them.
Three weeks ago I would have told you the shape of my life was set.
I built what I was going to build, and I’d keep it standing as long as my body held out.
As for the hole in the middle of me—the one I dug this whole place around, the one with names in it I never said aloud—that was just a permanent feature of the landscape.
You learned to walk around it. You kept it in the center where nobody had to see it, and you kept everyone fed and warm and safe, and that was enough.
It had to be enough. The alternative was letting yourself want something again, and wanting things was how you got them taken.
And then a starving woman pointed a rifle at my heart and called me a liar, and I’d been climbing down off that mountain ever since with my chest cracked open a little wider every day. I could feel exactly where it was heading, and I couldn’t for the life of me make myself want to stop it.
She looked at my grow lights and said somebody looked at the way the world was and said no, not us. She thought that was a thing about the lights.
It was a thing about her, too, that was the trouble.
Because that was what I started doing, lying awake in the dark thinking about her stubborn quick-eyed face.
Looking at the way my world was, the hole, the walls, the careful permanent solitude I built as my due—and thinking, for the first time in five years, no. Not this. Not anymore.
Somewhere up past the tarn, in the killing cold where nothing should have been, things I didn’t understand were walking uphill in the dark. I knew it, and I would deal with it, and I would keep it from touching my people as long as there was breath in me.
But that night I didn’t think about the dark things in the high country.
That night I lay awake and thought about violet light on a woman’s face, and a laugh that wasn’t quite a laugh, and how badly I wanted to earn the whole one.
And when I finally slept, I slept better than I had in years, which should have frightened me more than any tracks in the snow.
It didn’t. That was the trouble with her too.
She made even a careful man forget to be afraid.