Chapter 4 Drew
She drove the way she counted.
Cora's hands were on the wheel at ten and two.
The wheel was old. Pre-invasion plastic, cracked at the rim, the texture worn to a slick polish on the inside of the curve where she gripped it.
She gripped at ten and two. Her hands did not move.
Every forty minutes she would shift one hand to the wheel's six o'clock for thirty seconds, roll her shoulders, return the hand to two.
The shift was a rotation. The rotation was scheduled.
I had watched her do it eleven times since dawn.
I watched her drive.
I had not slept. I had stayed at the perimeter the entire night, which Sylvia had told me explicitly not to do.
Sylvia had used the word ordered, which was a word that Sylvia did not use casually, and which was a word a Marine like Cruz used routinely but a vet-tech-medic like Sylvia used only when she meant it.
Sylvia was going to find out at the next fuel stop that I had not slept.
She would be unhappy. She had said five stitches in my wrist with a small, precise needle, and she had told me she was Brecca's redundancy and the redundancy did not let people down.
Not sleeping when she had ordered me to sleep would be the letting-down she had been talking about.
I was going to deal with that at the next fuel stop.
For now I was watching Cora drive.
She had said the count was six.
She had said the count was six twice in two days.
Once at the council, when Loren had asked her how many people they were going to Urbana for and she had said it without flinching, the way a person said a number they had practiced not saying for three years and had only said because Loren was Loren.
The second time she had said the count was six had been at the Albuquerque cache, last night, when she had told me the bathroom number had been six and the child's name had been Talia and she had not said the name out loud in three years.
She had said Talia.
She had said the name to me.
I had not asked. I had told her I would not ask.
Tess had given me the carving with a 7 burned into the bottom and Tess had told me, in the schoolhouse two days before we left, that the six was the number Cora did not count and the seven was the safe one.
Tess had said it the way Tess said things: fast, blunt, complete.
Then Tess had reached up and put her hand on my shoulder and looked at me the way she had looked at me three months ago when I had first held Auriel in the medical tent and Auriel had not cried.
That was the moment I had decided I was going to follow Cora on this trip whether or not Loren signed the paper.
I had not told Cora that.
I had not told anyone that.
I watched Cora drive.
The sun was at four o'clock to her face.
East, behind us, climbing. And the light came through her side window in a band that crossed her cheek and her jaw and lit the small scar at the corner of her mouth that I had never asked her about.
The scar was old. Two years, maybe. A clean line.
I had no theory on the scar. The not-having-a-theory had been bothering me for nine months.
She caught me looking.
"What."
"Nothing."
"Drew."
"The scar."
She did not move her hands from ten and two.
"Year four. Bottle, broken. I was breaking up a fight in the supply line at Mojave. The wrong end caught me. Brecca stitched it. Three stitches. I told her she was bad with cosmetic work and she told me to walk it off."
"It looks clean."
"Brecca is good. Brecca's just bad with comfort."
"Brecca is good with comfort. She just thinks comfort makes the wound take longer to heal."
Cora looked at me. The corner of her mouth, the scar corner, moved.
"That's Brecca."
"It is."
She returned to the road.
The miles rolled. The carving stayed on the dashboard. The 7 stayed up.
I thought about Mira at the schoolhouse.
I thought about her without meaning to. The thought arrived.
I had not summoned it. It arrived because Cora was the woman who counted and Mira was the child who had been counted and Cora had taught the schoolhouse for two weeks last spring when Mira's mother had been sick and Mira had sat in the front row and had been the only kid in the schoolhouse who could already count to fifty.
The other kids had been the blood-farm cohort and the blood-farm cohort had not been taught to count because the convention center had not bothered to teach the things it drained for blood.
Cora had taught them in two weeks. She had taught them by sevens.
Mira had asked Cora once, in the schoolhouse, why they were counting in sevens.
Cora had said it was because seven was a good number and the kids had nodded the way kids nodded when adults told them a thing was true.
Then Mira had turned to me. I had been in the doorway, listening, because Tess had asked me to walk Auriel through the schoolhouse for the older kids to meet and I had been waiting for Cora to finish the lesson. And Mira had said:
Why don't you count, mister.
I had said: I count.
You don't count out loud.
No.
Why.
I had looked at Cora. Cora had been at the front of the schoolhouse with the chalkboard. Cora had been watching me. She had not been mouthing the numbers under her breath, the way she always did. She had stopped, just for that moment, to listen to the answer.
I had said: Some people count for themselves. Some people count for everyone.
Mira had said: Which are you.
I had said: I don't know yet.
Cora had not said anything. She had turned back to the chalkboard.
She had resumed the lesson. Seven, fourteen, twenty-one.
And the kids had repeated. I had stood in the doorway with Auriel in my arm.
Auriel had been asleep. Her hand had been on my collarbone.
Auriel's hand on my collarbone was the warmest thing my body had registered in eleven years.
I had walked Auriel back to Tess.
I had not gone back to the schoolhouse.
That was the day I had decided I needed to be on Cora's team.
I had not been able to articulate why. The reason had taken three more months to come together.
The reason was that Cora counted for everyone and I counted for no one, and I did not know what either of us was supposed to do with the other one, but Cora was the first person I had met in eleven years whose counting was a way of loving and not a way of refusing.
I had not told Cora any of that.
I was not going to.
* * *
Sylvia found out about the no-sleep at the Holbrook fuel stop.
We pulled in at noon. The fuel stop was a former Love's, picked clean of everything that could be picked clean, with two functioning gas pumps that Cruz had jury-rigged on a previous run and which we kept restocked from the convoy's reserve cans.
The lot was empty. The roof had partially collapsed but the canopy over the pumps still held.
We refueled the trucks in the canopy shade.
Sylvia came to me at the rear of the lead truck.
"Drew."
"Sylvia."
"How many hours."
"Of what."
"Of sleep. Since I told you six hours."
"Zero."
She did not say anything for a moment. She had a way of doing that. The medic-pause, the one Brecca had taught her, where she let the patient register the failure of the patient's own honesty before she said the next thing.
"Drew. You took five stitches in your wrist eight hours ago.
You stood watch the entire night after I told you not to.
You drove for six hours this morning. You have not eaten and you have not drunk.
You are running half-Vampyren biology, which I have read about exactly twice in my life because you are the only adult half-Vampyren the medical literature has any data on, and the data is mostly Brecca's notes on you.
The notes say you need less food and less water and less sleep than a human but you do need them, and the less is not the same as none. "
"Sylvia."
"I am going to ask you for one thing, Drew. One. You are not going to give me five things in return because I asked for one. You are going to give me one. Are you ready."
"Yes."
"Eat this." She held out a strip of jerky.
Tess's jerky. The kind Tess had been making in the kitchen tent for two months in preparation for this trip, with the dried-meat-and-pepper recipe Crystal had brought back from the Vegas barter market last year.
The jerky was Tess's. I had watched her make it.
I had watched her wrap it in waxed paper and write for the team on the paper with a marker.
I took the jerky.
I ate it.
"Now this." She held out a canteen. Water.
I drank.
She watched. The medic-pause again. She did not look away.
"Now. Listen to me. I am going to ride in the lead truck for the next leg.
Cruz will take the third with the medical pack.
You are going to sleep in the cab of the second truck with Renn driving.
Renn is fine driving the second slot. You are going to sleep for two hours minimum.
If you wake up before two hours I will give you a tranquilizer and you will sleep for the rest of the leg. Are you arguing with me."
"No."
"Are you sure."
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because Cora signed me on the team and Cora signed your authorization too. You outrank me on medical questions. I am not arguing with you."
"Good." She did not soften. "Drew. The thing you do not understand yet about being on a team is that the team needs you alive at the end of the trip, not the beginning.
You are running on the half-Vampyren version of fumes.
If you do not sleep now, you will be useless in three days, and useless in three days means useless when Hess arrives. Sleep."
"Yes."
I climbed into the cab of the second truck. Renn was at the wheel. He looked at me. He did the Vampyren-formal nod again. He had been giving me that nod since the strip yesterday morning and I had not yet figured out what to do with it.
"Sleep, half-blood. I have the road."
"Renn."