After (47 page)

“You sound so weary. But I've seen what a fighter you are. If you fight so hard to live, isn't it worth fighting to live happily?”

“It's worth fighting for what one believes in. I believe in myself. My body. My life. I don't believe in happiness, or anything else I've never seen any evidence of.”

* * * *

Artel didn't seem to notice her come into the room. He had something in his hands. Down by his lap. A book. When she came closer, he looked up.

“They let you read?” she asked, and he nodded.

“I'll teach you, if you want.”

She came closer, nudged the spine of the ragged paperback.

“Jane Eyre,” she said aloud.

“You know it?”

“No.”

“I think you'd like it.”

* * * *

“Artel?”

He looked up from his book.

“I'm going to the south-east field. I'll come back in two hours.”

He'd asked her to tell him these things, so he wouldn't be left wondering, worrying, when she was gone for a while. Artel checked his watch.

“Alright.”

She pulled on a sweater and opened the back door.

“Nix.”

She stopped. Looked.

“Artel, my surname, that's me, the fighter. Here I don't want to be that. Would you...I'd like it if you'd call me Gareth. My given name.“

* * * *

Blue framed all around in glowing, waving, tufted spikes of gold, the hardness under her warm and steady. She liked to feel herself part of the earth, like a mound of dirt, or a great, flat stone, or a low shrub. Or a fallen tree. But the stones poking into her back, the prickle of the plants, the scurrying legs of insects tickling her skin reminded her she didn't belong. Couldn't stay. For now, though, there was pleasure. Her lax body pressed between the warmth of sun and earth, a whole field of vision filled up with sky and wheat, no sound but the rustle of green and gold things brushing against each other in the fresh breeze. If this small piece of time could be stretched to cover a whole life, maybe that would be happiness.

* * * *

“Unbutton your shirt.”

Nix opened the makeshift first aid kit and started prepping a fresh dressing while Artel bared his lacerated side.

“Looks like it's healing alright,” she told him as she peeled away the old bandage.

Talking helped. Distracted her from whatever it was she felt when she was so close to him. Fear. Anxiety. Some unpleasant emotion to do with wanting to get away from him at the same time she felt something else. A pull. Like gravity.

She could smell him. It was always bad, someone being close enough you could smell him. His sweat. His breath. The soap he used. As she worked, in her peripheral vision she saw him gazing up at her and the feeling got worse. Heavier.

“You've done this before,” he said. “Tended the wounded.”

She met his look, then turned back to taping the sterilized scrap of cloth to his skin and pushed images of old battles out of her mind.

When she'd gotten him taped up she retreated into the still, quiet womb of the basement, taking a thick stump of candle, finding her way with its weak, stuttering light.

There, in that cool silence, the anxiety that had coiled round and round her while tending Artel slipped loose and fell away. Now she could breathe. Think.

Instinct assured her, no one could surprise her down there. Artel or anyone else.

Every step above, she'd hear long before they reached the stairs. And already, she'd memorized every inch of the space down there in the soft, safe dark. Every shadowy nook where she could hide and wait, her candle snuffed out, and cut down the hunter before he could even scream.

She went to work. Laid out the seven sidearms she'd gotten off the guards she'd killed. All semiautomatic pistols. One by one she disassembled, inspected, and cleaned them before getting each one fully loaded, checking their action. Two, she holstered on, their weight and bulk comforting. The rest she wrapped up in a satchel with the extra ammo and hid in a cubby by the door at the top landing where she could grab it quick if they were ambushed. If it came to that, maybe she'd give one to Artel.

* * * *

“Gareth.”

This other name still felt strange to her mouth. He looked up from his book.

Strange, how his eyes had seemed so blank to her, before. Now they seemed faceted and changeable. Like two glimpses of a dark sea, reflecting the clouds rolling above and hinting at life teeming below the surface.

“In a few days, when you're stronger, I'll be leaving.”

The crystal gray of his eyes seemed to fog.

“Alright.”

After a moment he turned away from her, back to his book. But as she ate, after a while she felt his look was on her again.

“Going back to—I don't know what you call it—the resistance.”

She weighed his look. Their history.

“Yes.”

He left it at that until later that night.

“Your resistance. There are men.”

“No.”

“I've heard stories. Men caught with resisting women.”

So had she. And the rumors of men posing as collaborators so they could learn where the women were hiding, their tactics, identify the leaders so the underlings could be rehabbed.

“Not in the cells I've worked with.”

“Led, you mean.”

Her blood pumped for a fight.

“Your brand,” he said in his softest voice.

Her scarlet letter.

“I work alone, these days.”

He looked like he didn't believe her, but he just nodded and dropped it. But his look, his questions left their mark on her. Like an imprint in the shape of a hand after someone lets you out of his grip.

His look, something in his voice gave her that feeling, like he was after her for something. The cold knotting her veins snapped, and her whole body went hot. But she kept still. Hid it all. The scream, then the laugh clawing its way up her throat died there, silent.

So, that was it. Why he hadn't fucked her, back in his quarters, when she'd been next to helpless. Why he'd helped her escape. Why he'd made his weird little confessions. To win her trust. So she'd bring him inside. That was worth a couple lives—

the pugilist, and that first one. Two men counted for nothing against the damage her group had done. All those women. Maybe the others had been some kind of mistake.

Maybe they hadn't known who he was. His mission.

Once she'd reigned in the urge to spring, to accuse, to annihilate, those strangling coils of anxiety finally, really slipped away. She could breathe. Her heart felt strong, steady in her chest. It was not knowing that had been so unsettling. Now that she knew, he didn't scare her anymore. His strangeness made sense, now. He was just another enemy. So it would be easy.

It even soothed her when, the next day, he was on it again.

“I've been thinking.” Then, when he knew he had her attention, “A pair, like us.

We could work a town.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could go in, like we're relocating. From wherever. Make a study. Do some damage. Liberate a few women.”

“You and me?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You don't trust me”

“I told you. I work alone, now.”

“You don't trust me.”

Sometimes honesty was a good weapon. “No. I don't trust you. Not enough for that.”

“I'll earn your trust, if you let me.”

“I thought you didn't want to be a fighter anymore. Gareth.”

“I don't want to be just a fighter. Here, in this place, with you, I'd like to just be a man. At home.” He went quiet, then after a while: “It's alien to you. Wanting that.” He waited for a while, but she had nothing to say to that. “But,” he said, “even though I like it here, like this, I couldn't stay. Doing nothing.”

“About what?” she had to ask.

“What goes on. What they do to the women.”

“They?”

“We.”

“What do you care about that?”

“It's wrong.”

She laughed.

“I must sound naïve.” Fuck, he was good at this. So earnest, never mind the stoic face, the cynical gaze. “But I know I'm right. You're right.” As if his games gave him the right to put himself on her team. “The way I feel in the world, every town I've ever lived in, passed through, like I'm an alien in the wrong environment, breathing, drinking, eating poison. Reading books from before, that's the only time things seem kind of right.

And being here. With you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Even though she was sure she'd figured him out, that he was her enemy, she couldn't leave him, too hurt to look after himself, after what he'd done for her. She cursed whatever weakness made her feel some pang of loyalty, but she stayed.

But when it had been four nights and three days and no blood in piss or shit, and nothing coughed up, she let Artel up from his sick bed to have his meal at the table.

Seeing him sit up, eating with a hearty appetite drained off some of the anxiety that had been swelling inside her, making her sore and tight. He was well enough to look after himself. She could go.

When Artel had been asleep for more than an hour, she slipped out into the black night, thankful for the violent wind lashing the maple branches against the house, camouflaging the scrape of her boots on the roof, the thump of her drop to the ground below. Thankful, but anxious, too; the thrashing leaves, the bang of the old aluminum screen flapping in its casing would trick her, too. Hide the approach of danger.

She crept around the side of the house and slid her pack from beneath the porch step where she'd hidden it after dinner, and ran into the inky dark, blind to everything more than two or three feet ahead, but used to this, sensing what was ahead and behind by the feel of the terrain under her boots, the rough caress of branches and leaves on her face and arms. Moving quickly but conserving energy, settling into a pace she could keep for an hour or more before slowing to a brisk march.

Now and then she stopped. She'd go still and listen for footsteps under the howl of the wind and the groan of the bending, swaying trees, look behind her for the glow of a lantern, the flicker of a candle, or the slanting sword of cold white light the old mechanical torches threw, when someone could scavenge up the batteries. Each time, the embrace of perfect darkness assured her she could keep going.

After an hour, she cut over toward the road, keeping to the ditch that ran alongside. Her thoughts abandoned Artel, and shifted to the patrols that crisscrossed between towns, hunting runaways. Now, instead of a warning snap of a branch, or the stomp of a man's boots closing in, she turned her ear for the clatter of hooves on the pavement.

When the black sky diluted to a thick, heavy blue, she crept away from the road and nestled into a cradle of tall grass among some young birches to sleep where she would be hidden, but still able to hear and see anything passing along the road.

As the sun's reds and oranges swam over the edge of the world and licked her closed lids, burning through those thin veils of skin, into her memory, her sleep was stained red. The thick, warm red of spilled and emptied life. Her soul went to sleep in the quiet, watchful corpse of a young blond girl, bleeder, breeder, and through dead, blue eyes she floated out, into her rapist, felt his loss, his rage, his sickened terror. But before and after that, always, she was the one with the knife. The clean knife, cold and hard and heavy. The hot, heavy knife, hidden in its sheath of viscous red, thick as gravy.

* * * *

Under a high, white sun she crept alongside the road, a lingering scar on the belly of that healed, wild country, and before the night swallowed her, she'd reached the enclave. First, though, she went in the false door, the one that took her into the wrong building. If she'd been tracked, they'd ambush her there, alone, and the others would be safe. But no one came. So, in the dark night, hardly able to see her own hand against the sky, except that stars blinked on and off behind it, she entered the base. Gave her signal. A white beam lanced the pitch dark and held her, blind, in its circle while the guard approached. A woman she didn't recognize led her on.

“Nix!” Char breathed as if she were invoking the name of a ghost, and crept up slowly, trying to read in her eyes what they'd done to her. Then she put her arms around her. Nix found the strength to embrace her briefly before backing out of her arms. Nix hugged herself, rubbing at the nauseating tingle lingering where Char had touched her.

“Sorry,” Char said.

“No. It's alright. I'm alright.”

“You got out,” Char said, her voice exuberant, now.

People were gathering around. Familiar faces. A few new ones. Nix made herself smile. Her coming back, it was good for morale. Important. The ones she knew smiled back, even if their eyes were full of fear and hurt. Her being there, her smile only showed they hadn't killed her. They all had a fair idea what she'd been through. So no one would ask.

The only question, asked by a dark-haired girl Nix didn't know, when they'd all sat down to eat, was, “How'd you get away?”

“One of the Guard. He snuck me out.”

It wasn't unheard of. Now and then, one of them did the unfathomable. Betrayed his kind to help a woman. Usually for sex. They seemed to think it would be different, sex given in gratitude. Maybe it was, sometimes.

“Where's he then?” Char asked.

“Ditched him about forty miles back.”

No one asked if she was sure. Not even the new ones. Her rep was solid.

“So,” Nix steered things away from her and the last few days, “what's on the menu?”

Jan leaned forward. “Day after tomorrow. The orphanage. They've got transactions scheduled.”

“How many?”

“Five. And one of them bleeds.”

* * * *

Five were dressed in the simple, draping gowns of white traditionally worn by women in that town, on the day their virginity would be taken. Only one of the five knew this. She had lived ”off the books,” as they said in that region of the country, among resistance women until she was eleven. Then her cell had been infiltrated, and she'd been wrenched from her mother's arms and taken to the orphanage. All the years since, Andrea kept the truth of the world outside the walls of the institution a secret from the other girls. Let them have their peace. When they came of age, they'd lose it forever.