Some Fine Day (16 page)

Because the canes would sweep them away.

“So you think that if you could just find this place, this safe place, you could jumpstart surface civilization again?” I say.

“Yes,” he answers simply.

I think of the sheep and the sun breaking through the clouds. Wasn’t that my favorite daydream once? Before I saw the real thing.

“Well, sign me up then,” I say.

It’s too dark now to see his face, but I know Will is smiling.

Usually we take bucket showers in a makeshift enclosure, but since it’s still nice the next day, Will and I pack a picnic lunch and hike up into the hills. He says there’s a stream up there that runs into a deep pool perfect for swimming.

I went looking for Banerjee first thing after breakfast, but Fatima told me she’d gone off with Rupert in one of the smaller boats to check out a freshwater spring on the next island. Her absence was both a relief and a disappointment. I’m so tired of lying all the time, of constantly watching what I say. It’s like a heavy weight I just want to walk away from and never look back.

I decide I’ll spill my guts to the captain tonight even if I have to camp out in front of her tent.

After we climb for an hour, the ground starts to open up and the island spreads wide behind us. I can see the shore, and the line of breakers beyond it. The ocean is a dozen different shades of blue, turquoise in the shallows and fading to deeper cobalt in the depths. A thin veil of dirty white clouds has spread across the sky.

We move high up the mountain, farther than we’ve gone before. Will spots some guarana, whose large brown seeds are used to treat migraine headaches, urinary tract infections and a bunch of other things. I sit on a fallen tree while he gathers handfuls of the red outer pods and stows them in his pack.

A few minutes later we reach the pool. It’s surrounded by mossy rocks, with a pebbly bottom. We dive in with our clothes on and float on our backs for a while. Will’s more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him, like a different person. It turns out he has a gift for accents, and he absolutely ruins me with impressions of Banerjee and some of the tough-talking boys in my class. When I manage to stop laughing, I find the bar of soap I pilfered from the bucket showers and sit on a flat rock near a trickle of water coming down the slope above. I start to comb out my tangles and then I feel his fingers on mine, gently drawing my hands into my lap.

“I’ll do it,” he says, and I’m very aware of his closeness and his hands in my hair, his breath next to my ear. I sit very still. He smells like cool water and clean, sun-warmed skin.

I feel like such a fraud.

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Of course.” His voice is low, husky, as his fingers stroke my curls.

“Did Banerjee make you take me on? Do you tell her what we talk about?”

Will freezes and his hands drop to his sides.

“Why do you think that?” he says neutrally.

“I don’t know. I just. . . I thought you hated me. It didn’t make any sense.”

“Jan.”

I turn around to face him. He’s giving me his intense look, the one I could just drown in.

“First of all, I never hated you. I tried to save you, remember? You just have a talent for rubbing me the wrong way sometimes.”

I smile a little. “Sounds strangely familiar.”

“And second, it was my idea. You’re obviously smart. And fit.” He eyes wander over the wet clothes clinging to my body and he clears his throat. “Anyway, Lisa’s great but she’s a diabetic. She doesn’t like people to know, so keep it to yourself. But strenuous exercise is too dangerous for her without insulin.”

“And that’s all?” I say, feeling unaccountably bold with him today.

“And I like talking to you,” he admits. “You’re different from anyone I’ve ever known before.”

I swallow. “What if I’m not who you think I am?”

“What do you mean?”

I take a deep breath. There’s no going back now. “What if I’m a general’s daughter? What if my presence is endangering the entire group? They’ll never stop looking for me, Will, never.” I bury my face in my hands.

“Hey.” He scoots closer and puts an arm around my shoulders.

“Don’t you hate me now?” I mumble.

“No, Jansin, I still don’t hate you. I kind of figured that anyway, from the way you talked. I’m not a complete fool. Have you told Banerjee?”

“I was going to today.” I peek at him through my fingers. “What if they leave me behind? It’s the only smart thing to do.”

I realize I’ve just articulated my greatest fear, one I didn’t even want to admit to myself. Will takes my hand and pulls me to my feet.

“Then I’ll stay too,” he says, and I can tell he’s perfectly serious.

That does it. The emotional release of confessing everything I’ve pent up for weeks makes me cry a little, which Will can’t handle at all.

“Please don’t,” he says desperately. “Everything will be fine, you’ll see. She’ll never get a majority to vote against you now, even if she wanted to, which she won’t. And the ones that try. . . Well, we’ll get Bob to pay them a visit. He worships you almost as much as Fatima, you know.”

“OK,” I sniffle, wiping my face with the hem of my tank top.

“Plus I packed a really special lunch!” Will cries, bounding over to our packs. He rummages through his own and pulls out a cloth bag. “There’s fried fish and rice,” he says, setting out a plastic container, “but in light of your current state, I’d suggest we skip straight to dessert.”

Will whips out a small brown square and presents it to me with a theatrical flourish.

“Is that. . .?” I whisper.

“Chocolate. Sweet-talked it from the cook.”

“Oh. My. God.” I start laughing through my tears. “I think I love you.”

Will’s eyes lock on mine for an instant, then he tears his gaze away and grins. “Don’t get carried away,” he says.

There’s nothing better than a good cry, unless it’s a good cry followed by a piece of dark chocolate. I close my eyes and let the sweetness mingle with the salty tears in a glorious explosion of endorphins.

We eat the rest of our picnic lunch in peaceable silence, letting the sun dry our clothes. Then the sky darkens and the air takes on a heavy quality. It’s probably my imagination, but I can almost feel the pressure dropping. The high, wispy cirrus has given way to thick, low clouds crawling in from the sea.

“I hate to say it, but we should get going,” Will says, brushing the last grains of rice fish from his hands. “Charlie told me the rains are coming early this afternoon.”

We pack up and head back the way we came as thunder rolls through the valley. It starts to drizzle, so we put our ponchos on. Pretty soon, the drizzle turns to rain, which turns to a soaking deluge. I can hardly see through the horizontal curtains of water.

Lightning forks down and an ear-splitting boom follows almost instantly. Will looks back. “We need shelter,” he calls. “Come on, I know a place ahead.”

We slog along for another few minutes and then he turns toward an overhang in the side of the cliff, not exactly a cave but deep enough to be dry at the back. Will drops his pack and strips off his poncho, then helps me do the same. The rain encloses us in a cocoon of white noise. A cool breeze hits my skin and I shiver a little.

Will stands in front of me, watching the storm. “I’m really sorry for what happened to your people,” he says after a while.

His face is turned so I can’t see his expression. We haven’t talked about this since the first day we went up the mountain together. About the night at Archipelago Six.

“It’s just. . . you have to understand. There’re things we need, things we can only get from the camps. Medicine, but also food, clothing, weapons. The cities are all looted or flattened or under water. There’s nothing left from the old days. Some of the clans raid each other, but we don’t do that. Most of the time, we hit after the tourists are gone and pick through the scraps. It’s safer that way, but you never know what you’ll find.” He pauses. “You probably think we’re savages. But I’ve never killed anyone. And I hope I never have to.”

I wrap my arms around myself and watch the rain course down the hillside in a hundred brown rivulets. “I get it,” I say. “And I don’t think you’re savages. If you knew some of the things they taught me at the Academy. . . Trust me, us pikas are much worse than your people.”

Will leans against the rock wall. His voice is weary. “One of the kids got real sick with an infection. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t help her. We needed medicine. So we took a chance. We just wanted the drugs. We didn’t know about the trenches. Then it all got out of control.”

I think about the contractors, the whole setup. If Will’s people had appeared in daylight, unarmed, what would we have done? Would we have helped? Or would we have shot them on sight?

“At first, I thought you were toads,” I say. “I didn’t know what else it could be.”

Will doesn’t move, but something in his posture stiffens. “Up North we called them draugr. My grandmother used to scare us with tales of how they’d catch children who lied or stole or didn’t mind their elders. I never saw one up close until I was ten.” He pauses. “They didn’t look like she said. No green skin or sharp teeth. They were worse. Because they looked like us. Except they moved funny. Very fast, and jerky.” He shudders almost imperceptibly. “You were brave enough to tell me your story,” he says with a twisted smile. “Now I’ll tell you mine, if you’d like.”

“OK,” I say, laying a hand on his arm. The temperature has plummeted so far up the mountain, but his skin is hot, almost feverish.

Will watches the rain for a minute. His eyes take on a dreamy, unfocused quality. “My father was in the bow, untangling a fishing line with my sister Greta. It was a calm day for a change. Perfectly cloudless. I had a cat, a gift from another family. He was orange and had seven toes on one paw and eight on the other.” He rubs his forehead, arm muscles taut with tension.  “It’s not as weird as it sounds. The extra toes were tiny. You could only see them if you squeezed his paw a little and made them stick out.”

“What was his name?” I ask. I’ve always liked cats.

“You know, I don’t think I’d named him yet. He was so new.”

The rain hisses around us and I feel a knot of dread tighten in the pit of my stomach.

Alone
. . .
drifting for weeks
. . .

“So I’m playing with the cat,” Will continues, unconsciously switching to present tense, “and after a while I realize I can’t hear my father and sister talking anymore. I stand up and walk to the bow. The line they’re working on is there, so I figured they went below. I start toward the forward hatch, and that’s when I see the blood. Just a few drops, but it stops me cold. I wonder if my sister cut herself and my father took her to bandage the wound. But then I think, I know Greta, she would have yelled her head off. Why didn’t I hear anything?

“I start feeling a little scared, but it’s the kind of scared where you let yourself imagine that something terrible has happened because you know in your heart that it hasn’t really, it’s just a game, just your mind playing tricks. Then I hear a scream from the open hatch, and I know right away it’s my mother. I freeze, literally freeze. I could not move a muscle. And then I see a shadow on the other side of the sail. I knew it wasn’t my father or Greta from the way it stood, so perfectly still.

“I still don’t remember moving, but I must have, because the next thing I’m hiding under a rolled-up sail. There was a gap. I saw my mother one last time before they took her over the side. And she saw me.
Don’t move
, she whispered. I didn’t. I let them go.” He says this in a dead voice that matches his eyes.

“You couldn’t have done anything,” I say gently. “You were just a child.”

“I know,” he says. “It doesn’t really matter.”

I touch his braid, damp from the rain, and have a sudden urge to see what his hair would look like unbound, hanging down his back. I think about the gentleness underneath his guarded exterior, and his intelligence, and how he makes me feel when I’m with him.

Like I’m a human being instead of a carefully crafted weapon to be used as others see fit.

“I want to see your hair,” I say.

He doesn’t answer, but his breath quickens a little as I remove the scrap of string and slowly work out his braid. I use my fingers to unravel it until it hangs down his back in a shining wave. It smells like rain.

He finally turns toward me. “Listen, Jansin,” he says, but that’s all he has time for because I lean forward on my tiptoes and very softly press my forehead to his mouth. Will’s hands cup my face, his fingers tracing my cheeks and jaw. His hair is even longer than I expected, nearly to his hips. I press my palm flat against it, feel the curve of his spine, the lean muscles of his back. His heart beats hard against my throat. I close my eyes and start lifting my lips to meet his when the wail of a siren slices through the storm. It reaches a crescendo, fades, then begins howling again. Will’s hands tighten on my shoulders.

“What is it,” I whisper, searching his widening eyes.

“Evac,” he says, taking a deep, shaky breath. “Time to run.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the near total transformation of society’s physical environment, culture adhered closely to the old ways in dress, language and style. Idiomatic expressions like “hungry as a horse” persisted for decades after the last horse had perished.