Authors: Kat Ross
Will doesn’t answer the second question directly. “We need to excise the skin and draw the venom out, like a snakebite,” he says. Fatima gags again and he turns her head so she doesn’t choke and his calm façade cracks a little bit. “Where the hell is Lisa?”
I shake my head mutely.
“Then you’re filling in,” Will says. “I need shepherd’s purse, sage and plantain. There’s a box in my tent. We’ll make a poultice. I’ll hit her with the last of the antibiotics. It’s the best we can do.” He lays a hand on her forehead and I feel a stab of jealousy. What’s wrong with me? Fatima’s throwing up on his shoes, for God’s sake, and possibly dying. I must be losing my mind.
Will starts prepping the needle and I get going before we make eye contact and he sees the shame and confusion there. Bob passes me on the way in with the water. He looks shell-shocked. Nileen is nowhere in sight; I guess she’s off looking for Lisa and my heart fills with pity at the thought of her finding out what happened to her only kid.
Will’s tent is just across the clearing. I’ve never been inside. I expect it to be neat and orderly, buttoned-down like him, and I’m surprised to find the sheet rumpled and a balled-up T-shirt hanging off the foot of his cot. There’s a body-shaped indentation in the middle and my attention lingers on it until I realize what I’m doing and get focused in a hurry. His possessions are pitifully few – a smooth black river stone, a feather, other boy stuff – so I spot the box right away. It’s finely made, bound in brass like a pirate’s chest. I open it and grimace. The box is overflowing with small plastic vials containing dried flowers, roots and leaves, and everything’s labeled according to some arcane numbering system known only to Will. I wish I could say I’ve become such an expert that I can instantly recognize what he’s asked me for, but that’s not the case. So I just grab the whole box and run back to the infirmary.
Bob boils water while Will and I get clean linens and make the poultices. Then Will heats a scalpel in the fire and cuts away the necrotic skin around the wound. I’ve never seen anything like it. The fang marks are oozing a clear liquid and it’s almost as if her flesh is decaying, dissolving, like a corpse. Fatima goes in and out of consciousness. It’s a mercy when she’s under, and nerve-racking every time she comes to. Her screams echo through the camp. Lisa comes and strokes her good hand and cries. We take turns holding Fatima down. It goes on for hours, and I wonder what kind of people meticulously engineered an insect to do such a thing.
We change the poultice every fifteen minutes. Will says it will draw the poison to the surface. But the necrosis keeps spreading. The antibiotics are gone. Everything’s gone except for Will’s herbs. Finally, Will says we can’t wait anymore. He’ll have to take the hand off. If he doesn’t, she’ll lose the whole arm, or just die. Lisa sobs and fights him. But in the end she knows he’s right. So he does it. We have no anesthesia, not even a bottle of whiskey, and I realize I was wrong when I thought she couldn’t scream any louder. His face is like a stone when he saws into her, and his hands are steady. I can’t even imagine the strength of character it takes to do that.
When he cauterizes the stump, Fatima finally passes out and mercifully stays that way. I have no idea how much time has elapsed. It’s been dark for hours. I stayed to help because Lisa was such a mess, and because Fatima was nice to me, and because I was there from the beginning, which is the way it happens sometimes. I haven’t had a second to stop, to do anything except boil more water or clean up puke or hold the stick between her teeth, but now I kind of topple into a plastic chair and just put my head in my hands.
“You did well,” Will says.
Not
did good
, like Fatima or Nileen would say.
Did well
.
His voice is heavy with exhaustion, but there’s a steadiness too. The resigned courage of the battlefield surgeon. You do what has to be done because there’s nobody else to do it. You partake in these horrors and then you lock them in a box, like the chest you keep in your tent. And you wear an actuary face for the world because it’s the only way to function with a semblance of normality.
“Why don’t you talk like the others?” I say, unable to bring myself to discuss what we just did. “You speak so precisely.”
“I learned English from books.” Will takes the chair next to me. We watch Fatima’s chest rise and fall. She looks about ten years older. “Danish is my first language.”
“Can you teach me to curse?”
Will smiles, but it’s half-hearted.
“She was cleaning my pot, you know,” I say. “If she hadn’t finished hers first and wanted to help, that would probably be me.”
“You didn’t tell me that.” Will’s eyes move over my face, and I remember almost touching his sheets. My cheeks warm and I look away.
“I didn’t really think of it until now. I was too scared.” I have literally never uttered those four words to another human being before. I put my chin up and wait for him to say something sarcastic but he doesn’t and I realize that Will wouldn’t. Jake would, but Will wouldn’t.
“You said it got away?” he asks.
I nod.
He runs his hands through his dirty-blonde hair. “We need to call a meeting first thing in the morning, tell everyone what happened and warn them to be on the lookout for a spider that appears to be a brown recluse but with a yellow band. I am not doing this again.”
“Have you before?” I ask.
“Yes. But only fingers and toes. Never a whole hand before.”
Only
.
“How old are you, Will?” I say. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
And he says, “Seventeen.”
A week after the spider incident, I wake up extra early after a bad dream whose details I can’t recall, only that it was red and loud. As is my habit, I go down and watch the sun come up alone on the beach. Everyone’s been subdued since what happened to Fatima. She’s going to make it, thanks to Will. He saved the rest of her arm. She’s young and strong. She’s got Bob and Lisa with her every minute of the day, and the rest of visiting in shifts too.
It could have been much worse.
Of course, the next time it might be. And there’s always a next time up here in the crazy ruins of Western civilization.
But despite that, despite the horror and the sadness, I watch the sun rise and I wonder how I could have gone without this my whole entire life. It’s not living down below. Just existing. I realize I haven’t thought about rescue at all lately. I realize I don’t want it anymore.
The truth is I’ve been on my own for years now. I went through the agony of losing my parents when I was eight and they packed me off to the Academy. Those wounds scarred over a long time ago. I had no close friends. I was good at what they taught me but I didn’t relish it, the way some did. The best thing I can say is I knew my place there, knew what was expected of me and what to expect in the future. In the military, there’s a plan for every contingency. Nothing is left to chance. That’s the hardest part about life on the surface, I think. The not knowing, from one day to the next, what will happen. I don’t just mean the storms, or genetically-engineered spiders, but lots of things can kill you up here. Anything from cancer, what they call bone-rot, to an infected hangnail. The food’s terrible, there’s no climate control, and the only creatures that seem to be thriving are the mosquitoes.
And yet.
I can deal with it. The fear and the strangeness.
The not knowing
. I don’t have my place yet, my niche, but I could someday.
If Raven Rock will let me.
Late afternoon, my favorite time of day. The captain says we’ll be leaving soon. So we build a huge bonfire on the beach, with dancing and singing in different languages. Fatima is out of bed, walking around again. She’s lost a lot of weight and says I should take some of her clothes until she gains it back. She gives me a dress, blue with thin straps that cross behind my back. It fits perfectly. I feel shy at first, but people keep coming up to me, students and their families, Charlie, Nileen, Lisa, offering a bite of fish or a sip of milk, still warm from the udder. Even Banerjee herself, who looks me up and down and nods approvingly.
“You don’t look like a pika anymore, Nordqvist,” she says.
I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but she’s right. My skin is brown and I’m leaner than I used to be, although the hikes with Will and daily fighting practice have kept me strong.
It’s not just that. I’ve changed inside too. I feel lighter, easier. Like I’ve shed a suit of clothing that didn’t quite fit.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I say.
Banerjee stares at me for a long moment and seems satisfied with what she sees there.
“Welcome,” she says, and embraces me in a formal way that has the weight of ritual. The captain holds me long enough for the others to see and take note, then steps back.
I don’t know what to say, and suddenly Will is beside me.
Banerjee smiles. “Go, little sister,” she says, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Enjoy the party.”
Will leads me through the crowd and it takes forever because people keep stopping me for a quick hug or kiss on the cheek. They call me daughter or sister. I hug them all back, but my head is spinning a little when we finally break free and reach the edge of the sea. The sun is setting and the waves are gilded a fiery orange at their crests.
“Walk with me,” Will says. The actuary must be on leave; there’s a light in his eyes tonight, like he’s thinking of a great joke and I’m the only other person in the world who gets it.
I kick off my flip-flops and we head down the beach until the buzz of voices fades away and the only sound is the liquid rush of the waves lapping at the shore.
“What just happened?” I ask as we stop to rest side by side on the sand.
“You’re one of us,” he says.
“So my probation is over?” I smile. “Does that mean I get on the list for eggs?”
Will gives me a quizzical look. “I don’t know that word.”
“Eggs?” I tease.
He grunts. “No, probation.”
“It means a test.”
He considers this. “Then yes, your probation is over. We’ll never leave you, Jansin.” Will stares out to sea. “We’d die for each other in this clan. Loyalty means everything,” he adds, and it’s a like a knife twisting in my heart. I resolve to tell Banerjee the truth tomorrow, whatever it costs. I know about loyalty. My whole life has been about loyalty. The catch is I was never given a choice about who and what I was loyal to. This is different. This is
my
decision. I can’t put the group at risk any longer. I can’t put Will at risk. They at least deserve to know what’s coming for them.
I want to say all this but the words stick in my throat.
We watch the daylight seep from the sky like honey through a sieve, red and purple giving way to the cooler tones of evening. I wish I could take his hand again but there’s still a distance inside him, a gulf I’m not sure another person can cross. So I content myself with lying there, feeling his fingers inches from mine.
“What do you know about the canes?” he asks after a while.
I glance over. His skin glows golden brown against his white shirt, a sight I find very distracting. “Um, there’s five. They’re big and I hope I don’t ever see one up close. Let’s see. . . Alecto is the youngest, Megaera the oldest. Kelaeno’s the speed demon. Aeolus seems to have the most erratic path, no one knows why. But it means she’s a favorite of long-odds gamblers.” The horizon stretches clear and flat as a pancake, but it still gives me the creeps talking about the canes. “That leaves Tisiphone. She’s the recluse of the hypercane family. Locked in place, out in the boonies, no satellites above, no ground views either. Look, Charlie’s really the person you should ask.”
Will gets up on one elbow and looks at me seriously with those mismatched eyes. “What if there was a place the canes didn’t reach? A land mass.”
“Go on,” I say.
“I know it sounds crazy, but my mother used to tell me stories when I was little. She was Inuit, though my dad was Danish and yellow-haired like me. Anyway, she got the stories from my grandmother, who lived through the Big Melt. About an island that’s hundreds of miles across and sheltered from the storms somehow.”
It’s the first time he’s ever mentioned his family, but I don’t think he even realizes that, he’s so lost in memory.
“My sister Greta would get angry and say it was all just a grown-up fairy tale, but I believed it. I mean, I
wanted
to believe it, but there was a ring of truth. The details were so vivid. The thing is, Jansin, I’ve heard the same story from other people we trade with. A few are crazy cultists. Wrath of God, reaping the whirlwind, that kind of stuff. But I’ve talked to people from all over the world. Most think it’s nonsense, but a few say they’ve heard it too, from relatives or elders.” He leans back and stares at the sky. “I’m just saying, there might be something to it.”
The first star comes out, bright and solitary.
“What if there is a Promised Land out there,” I say. “How do we find it?”
Will sighs. “I don’t know.”
“Sounds a little like wishful thinking,” I say. “I mean, wouldn’t you have met someone who’s actually been there? Wouldn’t
everyone
want to find it? It’s a nice idea though.”
I roll to the side and Will lightly touches the tattoo on my back, just under the nape of my neck. I’d almost forgotten about it. Goosebumps rise under his fingertips.
Ubi maior, minor cessat
.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you what that means,” he says.
“It means the weak capitulate before the strong. That’s my school motto.”
“Nice. Sounds vaguely fascist.”
“What do you know about fascism?” I ask, laughing in surprise.
“I know about all kinds of things.”
“Do you now? Such as?”
“Such as constellations.” He points up at the sky. “That’s the Big Bear. See the paws and the tail? And that one is the Archer. . .”
We lie quietly for a bit.
“There’s a picture of a wheat field in that book about North American horticulture,” he says. “The first time I saw it, I couldn’t believe it. I kept flipping back. That’s what a real farm should look like, Jansin. Just big open sky and miles of grain. If we could only plant crops up here, everything would change. But we can’t.”