The Woodlands (18 page)

“
Are you all right?” Joseph asked. I was staring through the trees. Thinking about my father, how I had always wondered why he left, and why he had never contacted me. It was a small comfort to know that maybe he had wanted to, but he couldn’t because of my mother. A very small comfort.

Clara emerged from
the clustered trees, barely fitting between the trunks as she made her way towards us. She took my hand and pulled me up.

“
We need to move,” she said, puffing hard but with that beautiful smile on her face. Framed by the light shining through the trunks, she was an angel. “Alexei says we only have a day’s head start and we need to make the most of it.” She flashed a grin at Joseph, which he returned in full. I could tell they would get along very well. “You must be Joseph,” she said and curtsied. She nearly fell over but he caught her. “You’re strong,” she giggled as he helped her stand.

“
So are you,” he laughed. “You managed to move this lump over here,” he said as he pointed in my direction. I scowled at him. Laughing, smiling was hard. Deshi called Joseph and he left us behind as he bounded towards the campfire.

Clara linked arms with me and kissed me on the cheek.
“So that’s Joseph,” she said, playfully elbowing me in the side as we walked. “Finally I get to meet him.”

“
What do you mean, ‘finally’?” I couldn’t remember ever mentioning his name before.

Joseph slowed his pace at the mention of his name.

“After all those nights of you talking about him or to him in your sleep, it’s nice to finally see him in the flesh.”

I blushed. He was pretending not to listen
, but I could see him smirking as he walked towards the others.

We re
ached the fire and there was a clatter of activity. There was barely time to think. Alexei threw a pack at me, and a green-grey coat. I pulled them on.

“
I’m glad you decided to stay,” he said, out of breath.

“
I didn’t say I would stay,” I announced.

“
Well, you have two choices,” Joseph said, trying to force my hand, “follow us or go back to the facility.”

“
Those are not the only choices. I will come with you, but I’m not going to follow you. If you want me to stay, then you have to include me in your planning. I will have a say and so will Clara.”

Joseph sighed, he knew me. He knew I wasn
’t going to go along with everything they had already decided. If anything, I was always good at throwing a spanner in the works. We had all stopped moving. Alexei broke the silence.

“
Very well, good, we will fill you in as we walk.” His voice had an academic edge to it. It didn’t help that he had thinning hair and spectacles. He looked like he spent all his time indoors reading books. I had my doubts that he would be the right person to lead this ridiculous group of travelers.

“
Where are we going?” I asked him.

“
Into the Wilderness.”

We walked in a
southeasterly direction. Alexei had an old compass he had swiped from the archives. He held it flat in the palm of his hand and shuffled around in circles until he looked off into the distance, squinted, and said, “That way.” The GPS in the reader would have been so much easier but Alexei was right, if we turned it on, it would be like a homing beacon for the Woodland soldiers to follow.

I had agreed to
look for the railway line because I couldn’t come up with anything better and we couldn’t stay where we were. We hadn’t seen any evidence that people were looking for us, but I was sure they would be. Deshi explained that the antidote smoke he had engineered was designed to stick to the inside of the ventilation shafts and continue releasing small amounts of the purple cloud for another three days. He had set it up to explode with such force that every vent and shaft, every pipe, was covered. In some cases, it probably blew the pipe covers into the rooms. I told him about my sophisticated mashed potato plug. He laughed and said that it would have shot across the room like a bullet. It would take the White Coats quite a while to clean the airshafts and get the girls back inside. So we had to make the best of the head start.

I thought about the girls we had left behind. I hoped some had got away
, but we hadn’t come across one yet. I wished we could have helped them. Deshi felt the same way, but our group was conspicuous enough, without adding more hysterical, pregnant girls to the mix. I felt horribly guilty about being the one that got away. But having Clara with me helped ease that guilt.

We usually walked at the back, mostly because Clara was so
slow, but also because I liked to keep as much distance between Apella and myself as I could. The more I knew of her, the more I disliked her. She seemed weak and followed Alexei around, lovesick and useless. She had no skills out here in the real world, and relied entirely on him for everything. It was extremely hard to believe that she had headed up the massive, secret operation that Clara and I had been caught in. Alexei led the way, and Deshi and Joseph took turns walking behind us.

We trudged through the forest from dawn until it was nearly dark every day. There was
so much to look at but we never stopped to take in the scenery. The tall pines stretched to the sky, dropping needles in our hair one minute, then we were out in a field moving through low grass and wild flowers. I loved the green, the rocks, and the flowers.

I had been underground all winter and now it was spring. I found I could recall many of the names and uses of the flowers and plants we passed. My
favorite was the Campanulas, a small, delicate, purple bloom shaped like a bell. It grew in clumps in the grassier areas. I would pick them and put them in Clara’s hair, making her smile, which always made me smile.

Clara was about ready to have her baby. It seemed like it could happen at any moment and I was dreading that day. I think we all were. Every time she made an uncomfortable noise, everyone jumped. They let her rest as much as they could, but we had to keep moving. Sometimes Joseph would carry her for a spell, which she loved. She would talk with him or more, at him, about her life, her baby. She pressed him to talk about me, how we met, what happened, why was I so angry all the time?

“
She’s always been like that,” he answered as he strolled through the underbrush with Clara in his arms. She was tiny, but it must have been difficult to carry her. If it was, he hid it well. He took good care of her, which I was grateful for.

“
Yes, but why?” Clara pressed. I was behind them, watching her thin fingers tapping his shoulder. The sun bounced across his golden hair and absorbed into her black hair.

“
She’s protecting herself. She doesn’t trust people. She doesn’t trust me anymore. I probably deserve it, though,” he sadly admitted.

“
She trusts you. I don’t think she trusts herself, not yet anyway,” Clara said in her singsong voice. I rolled my eyes. I wish she wouldn’t say things like that.

I wanted to respond
, tell her to mind her own business or defend myself, but my mouth was sewn shut with imaginary thread. I couldn’t explain it well enough to even try. I didn’t mean to be this way but this experience had changed me. I hoped I could get myself back. I hoped the old Rosa wasn’t completely lost. When I was talking to Clara, sometimes I could forget about it, and I could laugh, smile. She was the silliest person I had ever met, bordering on insane, but despite my best efforts I adored her.

Joseph
would ask her about the baby, which she was always happy to talk about. He asked her a lot of detailed questions about how it felt to be pregnant—was she tired, was she hungry, was she in any pain? I suspected this had a lot to do with the fact that whenever he asked me anything about how I was feeling, I gave him snappy, one word answers. I didn’t like to think about the thing, let alone talk about it.

“
I have a name,” she said leadingly, “Hessa if it’s a boy and Rosa if it’s a girl.”

Joseph laughed heartily
. “You better hope it’s a boy then!”

I laughed without meaning to
and covered my mouth.

“
Have you got names, Rosa?” he asked hopefully, turning to me. Giving me that look again.

“
Yes, one, but you’re not going to like it,” I replied. He just looked at me imploringly, waiting. “Leech for a boy or a girl.”

He considered it for a moment and then grinned
. “Leech Sulle, has a nice ring to it.” It was disarming. If I tried to bait him, it never worked the way I expected it to.

I held my tongue. I
’d let him have that one.

After
three days of walking, we still hadn’t hit the railway line. According to Alexei, we were very close and needed to spread out and start searching the ground for any signs of it. It had been hundreds of years since it was last used and it was bound to be covered with dirt and plants. We were looking for anything metal sticking out of the ground. Alexei asked us to split up into teams of two; we would walk straight out from a central point for five-hundred paces and then return if we didn’t find anything. If we did find the tracks, one of us would stay where we were, while the other one went back to the meeting place to fetch the rest of the group. The central point was a neat circle of Radiata pines. We dumped our packs there and teamed up. Alexei with Apella, of course, then, before Joseph could speak, I said I would go with Deshi, making up the excuse that Clara should go with the strongest, in case she couldn’t walk back.

Deshi scowled at me
. “I’m not carrying you.”

“
Never expected you to,” I said as I charged off down our allocated search line.

The line we were given seemed to be uphill all the way. Deshi was puffing and panting as we pushed our way through a thicket of dead branches
, intertwined with vines. He wasn’t fit like Joseph, his body not built for hard, physical challenges.

“
How far have we gone?” I asked. “Is it time to turn around?”

Deshi sounded confused
. “I don’t know. I thought you were counting.”

“
Great,” I snorted and sat down on a log to rest for a minute.

Deshi laughed half-heartedly.
“Trust me to stuff this up.” I was surprised. His attitude didn’t match that of before, when he was cocky and slightly aggressive. I eased myself off the log and stood, reaching my hand out to pull him up.

“
C’mon, we’ll go another two-hundred paces and then we’ll turn around,” I said, trying to sound confident. Deshi took my hand. It was cold and sweaty.

“
Thanks,” he said as I pulled his slight frame to its feet.

Deshi
’s presence here with us didn’t make much sense to me. He wasn’t doing it out of guilt or some misplaced family duty. He didn’t have someone he had to save like Apella and Alexei. I wanted to trust him, but in order to do that, I had to know his motivation.

“
Can I ask you something?”

“
Sure, what?” he said suspiciously, as he tried to find a foothold on the crumbly ascent.

“
Why are you here?” I asked outright. I was never good at leading into things.

He was scrambling up the incline, bits of rock and rubble sliding down the hill.

“That’s a good question,” he said as he held out his hand and pulled me towards him. He pulled a little too hard and we fell sideways, landing in the dirt next to each other, nearly rolling down the hill. I lay there, waiting for an answer.

“
Let’s just say, if Joseph wasn’t madly in love with you, I would very happily take your place in his affections.” I think my eyes were nearly popping out of my head. I had never heard of such a thing. Shock didn’t even cover it.

“
Does…Joseph…know?” I managed to stammer. I was reeling at this information.

“
Yes, but don’t worry,” he said sadly. “He has always made it clear that he considers me a friend, nothing more. He never asked me to come; I made that decision for myself.”

I felt quite sad for him. Even if it
weren’t Joseph he loved, in the Woodlands his would always be a life of constant lying and unhappiness. In Pau, and I assume everywhere, one was expected to marry and produce a child. Life was hard enough without the added burden of living a lie. I understood why he left. Anything had to be better than that.

“
I’m not worried,” I said, “but I’m glad to understand you better.” I knew what it was like to love someone from a distance. I guess sometimes that’s all you get.

“
Maybe you’ll let me understand you better then?” he said as we pushed ourselves up to standing.

“
Maybe.”

We pushed on. It was getting steeper and the vegetation was clearing. Now it was mostly crumbling dirt and orange gravel. It was very slippery and hard to negotiate. As we neared the top
, we were both crawling on our hands and knees. I got to the top first and hauled Deshi’s slight body over the edge. We both stood up, dusting orange dirt off our knees and palms.

We both looked down at our
feet; we were standing on large slabs of wood evenly spaced apart with two metal rails lying across them. It snaked off into the distance as far as we could see. This had to be it.

It was joyful and frightening at the same time. The tracks followed a line of trees, pines and spruces, green and towering. They leaned into the
track, casting spiky shadows over it but never covering it. The track itself was in remarkable condition. It was rusty and the wood was grey and rotting, but it was not engulfed in vegetation as Alexei had expected. From our vantage point, we could see the whole world. It was foreign, ancient, and beautiful.

Deshi handed me his canteen and I took a large gulp of water. Almost immediately
, I needed to go to the toilet. As I went on, I was finding more and more that this child inside me was encroaching on my physical well-being, changing things I didn’t want changed and always making life harder.

“
I need to go to the toilet,” I said, embarrassed.

Deshi rolled his eyes but he was used to this after travelling with two pregnant girls for days.