Chapter 6 #2
“Eden,” he said, giving my name the weight he used when he wanted me to hear him from the other side of a crowded room. He looked at the women around me and worked out that not one of them would let him turn a name into a private appeal.
“Go back to her.” I opened the silverware packet. “Your responsibility is waiting.”
He didn’t move until Bear came in and ordered every civilian seated. He went back to the door rather than to Jess, and the difference gave me nothing.
Bear stood by the bar with a radio in one hand and his reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
“Outer gate stays shut. Nobody crosses the inner road without clearance. We’re checking water, power, ventilation, and every vehicle that came through here before yesterday.
Civilians rotate by group. You need medicine, food, anything out of another building, you tell whoever’s assigned to your group. You don’t go get it.”
“Who controls the list?” June asked, already writing.
“I do,” Bear said, and looked at the legal pad like a man who had just made work for himself.
A shot came from beyond the west tree line before he finished the next instruction.
It was far enough off that nobody went down, but chairs scraped and Jess spilled coffee across her hand.
Ryder reached her before the cup hit the floor.
He crouched beside her chair, took his cut off one shoulder and then the other, pulled the black jacket out from underneath it, and put the jacket around her shoulders.
“Put it on,” he said, at a volume meant for her and for the four nearest tables. “You’re shaking.”
I have worn that jacket on the back of his bike when cold air started to close my chest. He used to pull over before I would admit I needed the layer, wrap it around me on the shoulder of some county road, and then stand there and wait while I decided whether we were going on.
There is a split seam under the left sleeve from the night we went off the road in the rain.
I sewed it at our kitchen table while he held the lamp and complained that my stitches made the damage obvious, and then he paid me for the repair on the kitchen floor with flour in my hair.
Tessa put both hands on the table and started to rise. I caught her wrist. “Sit down.”
“I only need him in the hall for a minute.” The calm way she said it promised worse than shouting.
When I looked back, the jacket had come off Jess’s shoulders as far as her elbows and she was holding it there in both fists. “I’m okay,” she was telling him, with no color left in her face.
“You don’t have to prove anything right now.” He picked the cup up off the floor and set it away from her shoes, and stayed crouched until her hands went still. “Stay near the infirmary hall. If the west line changes, I’ll come get you.”
I sat with my fork in my hand and let the words arrive. Stay where I put you. I’ll come get you. He said it on the shoulder of a highway with a blown tire, at his mother’s funeral, in a corridor outside an emergency room at four in the morning. It was the closest thing we had to a vow.
June closed the legal pad. “We’re moving Eden’s group to the secured yard after breakfast. Jess should stay near the infirmary if that’s her shelter.”
Bear heard the argument underneath the details and nodded. “Eden, Leah, June and Tessa take the north yard with Gage’s group. Jess stays in the center hall until we clear her room. Ryder, west rotation.”
Ryder stood and put his cut back on over the shirt. The old instinct to turn to his right side came up in me before I killed it. If he wanted to hear me, he could do the work. “Eden needs to stay off the west wall. Wind’s carrying smoke from the road.”
“Eden can hear Bear’s assignments without a translator. Go guard the woman you picked.”
The secured yard held the east-house families between the clubhouse and the equipment building, where the outer wall blocks any sightline from the county road.
The air smelled of diesel, burned grass, and Saturday’s pastries going stale on paper plates.
Maya had built a house out of two folding chairs and a tarp and was charging admission in bottle caps.
Leo sat on the equipment-building step with his back to all of us, eight years old and furious about being counted twice an hour.
After twenty minutes my chest began to close in the slow way that leaves you time to be embarrassed about it.
I went to the far side of the water table before I took the inhaler out, which was pointless in a yard holding forty people, and did it anyway.
Leah didn’t follow. June turned a quarter of the way around to put her shoulder between me and the men at the barrier and kept writing.
I fitted the spacer, breathed in, held what I could, and hated the noise my own lungs made in a place where everybody was already listening for sounds that meant something was wrong.
Maya watched from inside her tarp house with her chin on her fists.
“Does that make it not hurt?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, because the truth needed more air than I had.
Tessa paced the wall until Gage caught the back of her belt and told her she was making the younger men nervous.
“Good,” she said, pulling free and not leaving the wall. “Their Road Captain is too busy building a second family to remember the first one has lungs.”
Gage looked over at me, braced on the cane he uses when long hours make the leg worse. “You want me to shut her up?”
“You’ve been married to Leah long enough to know that isn’t a service men provide.” It came out with enough of my old shape that all three women heard it, and the grief came in right behind.
“He’ll answer to Bear when we’re out of this,” Gage said. “Baby or not, nothing explains how he ran yesterday.”
“I don’t want him handled for me.” The common-room door opened. Ryder came out first, checked both directions, then waited while Jess crossed into the yard with the jacket over one arm. “I want him to live with what he chose.”
The group made room for her without welcoming or punishing her.
Leah moved a chair to clear the path. June asked the prospect whether Jess ought to be outdoors before the ventilation check was finished.
I was grateful they didn’t make me defend a pregnant woman from my friends, and angry that he had known I would.
Another burst came from beyond the north road.
Ryder put himself in front of Jess with his hand under his cut while prospects moved us toward the concrete building.
It stopped before the first door closed.
Jess had hold of his sleeve and bent toward him when he spoke.
I know the way he lowers his head when he wants a frightened person to see nothing but him.
I have had that face over me during attacks and funerals, beside hospital beds, on the side of a highway at midnight.
Bear came through after the all-clear with his temper showing. “Until we know whether yesterday’s missing prospect gave up the gate rotation, nobody drifts. Ryder, keep her near the center. If she’s carrying your kid, she doesn’t need another scare.”
Ryder answered with his body still between Jess and the outer wall. “Jess and the baby come first. I’ll keep her where I can reach her.”
He kept his voice low, but the yard had gone quiet listening for a second shot, so all of us heard it.
He used to talk that way about watching my breathing without taking the choices off me.
I had thought the restraint was what made him different from everyone else who ever used my lungs as a leash.
I walked past him toward the clubhouse with Leah and June beside me and Tessa behind. He turned to follow, and then didn’t, and he would call that restraint too.
Jess stayed where he had put her, at the center of the yard where the wall is thickest. She had the jacket folded over both forearms now, holding it the way you hold a coat somebody has draped on you in front of people.
Gunfire had come over a wall and Ryder had moved before anybody else did, and she had taken what was offered because she is twenty-two and frightened and nothing else was on offer.
If she had been cruel I could have hated her cleanly.
She looked at me for as long as it took Leo to run past her with a bottle cap in his fist. Then she looked at the ground, and set the jacket down on the bench beside her, and Ryder didn’t ask for it back.