Chapter 1 Cora
Seven empty bottles. Never six.
I set them in a stack on the supply tent's lone shelf, gently, because rough handling sounded like negligence and one of the kids in the schoolhouse two tents over would hear it and come asking.
I reached for the next crate. The radio crackled behind me.
Crystal's voice, the way it had crackled every morning for eight months now.
"Urbana, this is Mojave, do you copy."
No answer. There was never an answer. Crystal would keep calling. I would keep counting. Two things human beings did when the alternative was unbearable.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
The grain bags came out in twos. I touched the rough burlap, registered the weight, set them in pairs along the shelf because grain stacked best in pairs and I did not have to do anything with the number two.
Two was safe. I reached for the eleventh bag.
Then the twelfth. Then I stopped, because there were thirteen bags in the crate and I would have to leave one on the floor or stack three of them, and counting three was not the same as counting fourteen.
Fourteen was made of two-times-seven. Three was just three.
I stacked three on the floor. Kept the twelve on the shelf. Six. Six. I let my breath out through my teeth.
"Urbana, this is Mojave, day two-fifty-three. We are still on the air. Nina, if you can hear me, we have not given up. Mark says hi. Auriel is six months. Deedee's blanket is dry."
A pause. The hum of the open band. Then Crystal again, lower, the way she dropped into when she was talking to me through a frequency that was supposed to be reaching her daughter. She did this sometimes. She did it when she knew I was in the supply tent and could hear.
"And Cora. You can't keep counting people who aren't here. You count them, you don't bring them home. You bring them home, then you stop counting. Day two-fifty-three. Mojave out."
The static came back. The kettle on the kitchen fire two tents over made a sound like exhaled air.
Crystal's voice didn't shake. It had stopped shaking eight months ago, the morning after the radio first failed and Mark carried her to bed and Brecca gave her a sedative she had not asked for.
Now she just talked. To the static. Every dawn.
Every dusk. Two hundred and fifty-three mornings of saying we have not given up into a frequency that did not answer.
I rolled the bottles into a separate box.
Seven again. I would burn them tonight for the perimeter fire and the bottle-count would be zero by morning, and the morning after that there would be seven new ones, because three groups came in this week from the south coast and each group drank water through the night because that was what bodies did, and bodies were the only count that meant anything in the end.
I straightened up. Looked through the open tent flap.
The Mojave camp at dawn hurt to look at.
Solar panels on the ridgeline catching the first light, casting long thin shadows across the dirt.
The garden was green in stripes where the rows were.
Crystal's logistics had pulled three salvage runs to LA last month for fertilizer alone, and the rows had come back from the brink with a stubbornness only soil could manage.
Smoke from the kitchen fire. The smell of beans cooking, hot and starchy, which meant Tess was on breakfast rotation, which meant Auriel was in the kitchen on a sling because Tess refused to set her down for any longer than it took to wash her hands.
Auriel was the camp's mascot. Six months old. Half-Vampyren, fully alive, fully ours.
Two hundred and fourteen humans. Eleven Vampyren. One half-Vampyren adult. Six Lucian who'd stuck. One baby.
I had the camp's headcount memorized to the body. I had updated it last night at the perimeter check.
A small shape moved across the camp toward the south fence. I registered it before I saw it clearly. Child-sized, lagging-step, the wobble of a kid who'd just woken up and was looking for something she shouldn't be looking for alone. Mira.
Five years old. Blood-farm survivor from the convention center liberation last spring.
Crystal had been the one who'd pulled her out of the converted exhibition hall, blood-bag still taped to her arm.
Mira lived with her mother Inez in the eastern row of family tents.
Inez worked the kitchen overnight, slept until eight.
Mira woke at six and wandered if no one stopped her.
I had stopped her three times this week.
I set down the clipboard mid-line. Fourteen, fifteen, six.
No. Mid-count. I had been mid-count. My hand was not on the clipboard anymore, my feet were already moving, and I walked fast across the camp toward the south fence.
Not running. Running meant the perimeter watchers turned to see what was happening, and the watchers were Tomas this morning and Renn the night before.
Tomas would put his weapon down if he saw me running, but Renn was a Vampyren and Renn did not assume the alarm was an alarm just because a human ran. I walked fast.
Mira was at the chain-link, fingers hooked through the diamond pattern, looking out at the strip of brown dirt between the inside fence and the outer fence, and beyond that the rocky descent toward what used to be Highway 14. She was on her tiptoes. She was barefoot.
I picked her up. She made a small noise of surprise, not fear, surprise, and her arms wrapped around my neck because that was what bodies did when they were lifted unexpectedly.
Her hair smelled like the cheap shampoo Crystal's salvage team had brought back last month, the green one that came in two-liter jugs.
"What are you looking at, baby."
"There's a man," she said into my shoulder.
I turned. Looked.
There was a man.
Drew, of course. Drew was on the outside of the camp perimeter at dawn because Drew was always on the outside of the camp perimeter at dawn.
Drew did the dawn walk solo, without the watchers requesting it, without anyone authorizing it, because his half-Vampyren body did not need the same things human bodies needed and he could walk the perimeter in the dark hour before sun-up and clear it of whatever the night watchers might have missed without taxing the camp for anything.
It was not officially his job. It was something he did because not doing it would have cost the camp something, in his accounting, and Drew did not allow himself to be a cost.
He was about thirty feet down the slope, moving the wrong direction for someone returning to camp at dawn, which meant he had found something. He stopped when Mira called him.
"Mister."
He looked up. Saw Mira. Saw me. His face did nothing.
That was a thing Drew did. His face did nothing when he was deciding what to say.
His face did nothing when he was deciding whether to say anything.
Most of the time his face did nothing because there was nothing he wanted his face to say.
Saying nothing was not the same as having nothing to say. It was easier, was all.
"Cora," he said. He did not say it as a greeting. He said it as a name. Drew said names the way other people said please.
"What did you find?"
He held up his hand. He was holding a long curved piece of rebar, half-rust, half-stripped, twisted into a loop that meant a kid had once made a hoop out of it. Nothing dangerous. Nothing important.
"Stuck under the perimeter wire. Pulled it out. Bringing it up."
"Why."
He looked at the rebar. Looked at me. The not-saying again.
"In case anyone wants to know what was there."
Mira reached toward the rebar. Drew did not move.
Mira's hand stayed there in the air, palm-open, the way kids did when they wanted to be passed something.
Drew watched the hand. He did not pass her the rebar.
He did not put the rebar down. He stood with the rebar held away from her at hip height, and his face did nothing, and the hand stayed in the air, and after a moment Mira lowered it and turned her face back into my shoulder.
"He's not going to let me hold it, Cor."
"No, baby. He's not."
"Why."
"Because it has rust on it and rust makes you sick. He doesn't want you to be sick."
That was a true sentence. It was also not the actual reason.
The actual reason was that Drew did not hand things to people.
Drew did not give. Drew did not loan. Drew did not let his hand touch another person's hand unless the touch was necessary in a way that did not become an exchange.
He had been at the Mojave camp for nine months and he had passed something to a human one time, when Brecca had been bleeding on her own table and the gauze had been on the wrong side of the room and there had been no one else, and Drew had handed her the bandage without making eye contact and walked out before she had said thank you.
"Cora." Drew's voice from the slope. He had not moved.
"Yeah."
"Tomas is heading this way."
I turned. Tomas was indeed walking from the east tower with that particular brisk frown that meant a perimeter watcher had noticed something out of pattern and was about to ask politely whether it was a problem.
He did not particularly enjoy asking politely.
Tomas was a forty-six-year-old electrical contractor from Reseda who'd lost both his teenage daughters in year one of the invasion and had emerged from the loss as a man who did not believe in either God or unnecessary words.
He was good on the perimeter because he counted as efficiently as I did.
He had counted my walk-not-run from the supply tent and concluded that something was wrong and was now walking the diagonal to verify what.
"Cora."
"Tomas. Mira got out before her mother was up. I have her. We're heading back."