Chapter 1 Cora #2
He looked at Mira. Looked at me. Looked at Drew on the slope with the rebar.
His mouth did the small set-shift that meant I will not ask whether the half-Vampyren was on the perimeter unauthorized at dawn again, because I have asked four times and the camp council has heard four times and the camp council says he's allowed, and I do not have to like it, and I am going back to the tower now.
"Bring her to Inez."
"Yes."
He turned. Walked. Did not say anything to Drew. Did not look at him.
Drew waited until Tomas was twenty feet away, then turned and resumed his slope-walk down toward Highway 14.
He had not put the rebar down. He had not passed it to anyone.
He was going to walk it back to the southern edge of the perimeter and add it to the small pile of foreign-objects-removed-from-the-wire he kept at the back of his tent because he was a man who tracked the objects pulled from the wire by month and would, six months from now, be able to tell you which weeks had been windier than others.
I walked Mira back across the camp.
She was quiet against my shoulder. I could feel her thinking.
Mira thought hard. Mira thought the careful way of a kid who had been kept in a converted exhibition hall, drained on a schedule, then carried into sunlight by a woman she had never met.
She had been three when the convention center fell.
She did not remember much. She remembered enough.
"Cora."
"Yeah."
"Why does the man not want anyone to touch him."
I missed a step. My hand tightened on her back. She felt the tighten and her head came up and she looked at me with the expression of a five-year-old who had said something true and was checking whether it was the right kind of true.
"That's a question for him, baby."
"He doesn't answer questions."
"I know."
"Does he answer you."
I thought about the rebar held away from her hand.
I thought about Drew at the dawn perimeter, every morning, walking the line alone.
I thought about the time I had brought him a cup of coffee in his tent six weeks ago.
Fresh from a Vegas salvage haul, a real cup of real coffee in a chipped diner mug.
He had thanked me and not drunk it and let it go cold and then washed the cup at the basin and brought it back to me empty, and somewhere around the empty-cup return I had understood that Drew would not drink anything I made him because drinking it would mean owing me something, and the owing would be the cost, and the cost was the thing he would not pay.
"Not always."
"Sometimes?"
"Sometimes."
"That's better than nothing."
"Yeah. It is."
I delivered her to Inez. Inez was awake, barely; she had the kitchen-shift exhaustion in the way she rubbed her eyes.
She took Mira's hand and apologized and looked at the ground, and Mira did not let her apologize for long because Mira did not like to see her mother sad, and that was a thing about Mira that I had not yet figured out whether to admire or worry about.
I walked back to the supply tent.
The clipboard was on the floor of the shelf. The grain count was at twelve-and-three. The bottles were stacked at seven. The crate was where I had left it.
I picked up the clipboard.
Fourteen, fifteen, six.
I had stopped at six. Six was the unsaid number. Six was the count I would not write.
I had stopped because of Mira.
I scratched it out. Fifteen, sixteen, seven.
The math no longer made sense for the bag count.
There were thirteen bags, not seventeen.
But the math had not made sense the moment I had counted six under my breath without meaning to, and a clipboard could be re-counted, and a clipboard was forgiving in a way that bodies were not.
I counted again. One. Two. Three. The bags. Thirteen. Twelve on the shelf, three on the floor: fifteen. I had counted two of them twice. I had been so determined not to count to six that I had double-counted and made a fifteen out of a thirteen.
I wrote 13.
I set the clipboard down.
The radio crackled. Crystal again. The dusk call already, no, it was morning still, this was the day call. The day calls had started two weeks ago when Crystal had given up on having dusk be enough, and her voice was the way it had always been, steady and untouched.
"Urbana, this is Mojave, day two-fifty-three. The sun is up. The garden is in. Mark says it's going to rain on Tuesday. We're still here. Don't —"
There was a click. A click and a hum. The hum lasted maybe three seconds.
Then a voice.
"Cor —"
Female. Not Crystal. Not Crystal's frequency. Coming through the open band, the way Urbana's old call-back used to come through when the radio had worked.
"— Mojave — please — Cor —"
The voice broke up. The signal cut out. The static came back.
I was already running.
* * *
I came into Loren and Kiera's tent without knocking.
Crystal was there already, on the floor, on her knees, and Mark was behind her with his hand on her shoulder and Loren was at the radio table with the headset in his hand and his tawny hair coming loose from where he had tied it back.
Kiera was at the door. She let me in without speaking. She had that look.
"It was Nina," Crystal said. She didn't look up. "It was Nina's voice."
"I heard." I knelt next to her. Did not touch her. Crystal did not like to be touched when she was on her knees. "How long was the signal?"
"Three seconds. Maybe four." Loren, at the table. Calm. The way he was always calm when something was breaking, the way he had been calm in Chicago and on the beach in Newport. "She said your name, Cora. Your name twice."
"Why my name."
He looked at me. Tawny eyes. He did not blink.
"Because she's been listening to Crystal's morning call for two hundred and fifty-three days and she knows you would be the one to come."
Crystal made a sound. Not a sob. The sound of a person whose chest had been holding eight months of air and had just let some of it out.
"We can't wait anymore." Her voice was lower than usual. Quieter. The Book-Four snark gone. "I have been calling her for eight months. I have been calling because as long as I was calling she was alive, and now she has called back, and she is asking for you, and she is dying."
"She didn't say she was dying."
"She didn't have to. She said please. Nina doesn't say please."
I sat back on my heels. Looked at Loren.
He looked at me.