After (57 page)

Just about every place has a hidden treasure or two. Like the linens and toilet paper, at the ghost town hotel. Here it was an old Coleman stove and a couple full bottles of propane. Never daring to light a real fire and risk luring curious guards and bounty hunters with the smoke, the find meant a rare, hot meal. When they'd eaten, they watched the sunset from the back porch.

“Do you ever wonder about your mother?” she asked him.

“Probably every day.”

“It must be strange, not knowing what happened to a parent.”

“I know what happened to her,” Gareth said. “She died giving birth to me.”

“How do you know?”

“My father told me.”

“And after everything, you believe him?”

Gareth turned away from the sunset. Gave her a smile.

“My dad wasn't a very honest person. I mean, it's not that I caught him in a lot of lies, but he was always very hidden. All my life, the whole time he was alive, I was the only person he ever allowed to know him. And even with me, he didn't talk much about the past. But I know, I mean, I truly believe he loved her.”

“Maybe. But even if he'd wanted to keep her, for the three of you to be a family, he wouldn't have had a choice.”

Gareth just nodded, and turned back to the purpling sky.

“Something I haven't asked you, yet,” he said, then.

“No. I don't bleed.”

“You're glad.”

“If I did, if I'd ever been pregnant, I'd have killed myself at the first chance.”

“Yeah.” His graveled voice was so soft she almost hadn't heard him. “I don't know how they survive it. Having their babies taken.”

“What do you know about it? Mothers and their babies?”

“Nothing, I guess. Just what I've read. Made up stories. Not about this life, but before the dying. They make you feel it, how deep that love is. How bad a mother or father hurts, when they lose a child.”

Nix told him, “It's terrible to see. A mother after her baby's been taken. We see them a lot. They're ready to risk just about anything, when that's happened to them, so that's when a lot of them run away. Come to the resistance. Especially when it's a girl that's been taken. Because all the mother can think about, the dream that haunts them every night and even all day, is their baby girl suffering everything they've suffered.

Being sold. Raped. Going through the agony of childbirth, then having that one time of real happiness, that year of holding her child, nursing it, singing to it. Then the shock, the terror of waking one morning to find it gone. Or having it wrenched from her arms and taken away.

“And I've seen...”

“What, Nix?”

“I've seen women kill their own babies.”

Gareth went pale, his gray eyes cold and hard, like two stones.

“They must...everything that's been done to them, it must make them crazy,” he breathed.

“No. They weren't crazy when they did it, the women I've known.”

“Nix, how—“

“They just knew. If that little baby lived to grow up, that her life would be just suffering. Or, with the baby boys, those mothers couldn't live with the idea of raising a son, knowing sooner or later they'd be found, caught, that he'd be taken away, raised by men. Raised to do the things men do to us. Those mothers couldn't stand looking at those little babies, loving them, knowing what they would become.”

“But the mothers, they'd run away,” Gareth said. “They were free. Their children were free.”

“Yes. But it's a lot easier to get free than to stay free. There are plenty of horror stories, women who've lived off the books with their children for a year, five years, ten, then been caught. Watched a pack of men drag their little girl away. If you ever find a success story, a girl who's grown up with her mother, off the books, and never been sold, never been raped, please tell me about her. I could use the inspiration.”

They spent the night together, her curled up behind him, breathing in the scent of his hair, his skin, feeling his warmth, how his body moved as he breathed while he slept.

At first light, they rose and ate and set out again, faces to the sun.

That night they holed up in yet another farmhouse, forty miles further east, forty miles nearer their destination. Gareth never asked where or what it was. Just like he never asked her to touch him or kiss him or sleep in his bed. He only smiled and accepted what she offered.

In the middle of the night, the screech of an owl woke her. The heavy shape of a pale man leaning over her tore a sound from her throat, or maybe it was the owl's screech again. Gareth. Just Gareth, paled by the moon, propped on his elbow, watching her. Watching her tears drip into the sweat trickling over her scalp.

“You're alright,” he whispered, finding her hand under the blanket, weaving their fingers together, squeezing.

Whose scream? Not her own. The girl with blue eyes.

Gareth said, “You were dreaming.”

The owl shrieked again. She let Gareth put his arms around her, hold her while she closed her eyes. It was easy to push away the pictures while she was awake. She lay there in that warm embrace, silently asking the girl with blue eyes to please stay out of her dreams.

* * * *

“Get undressed.”

Without asking if she would take her clothes off, too, he unlaced his boots and stripped out of his things. And then he stood still, his gray eyes steady, watching her look.

She'd never seen him naked before. She'd hardly seen any men naked. They seldom bothered to go to the trouble. Her husband had, but usually in the dark.

Not hard yet. Balls and cock hanging, red-brown and heavy, a ripe cluster. She almost wanted to touch. There, or along his hip, along that shadowed ridge between thigh and body, trace that river of blood, that heavy vein that surged up from smooth skin just above the thatch of dark curls and coursed up, gray-blue, toward his navel. Or all those shaded valleys merging at the corners of those plateaus of muscle all up his belly. His tawny nipples crinkled in the chill air. That moved her, for some reason.

“Sit down.”

She meant it as an invitation, but heard it come out sounding like one of her orders. But he smiled and lowered himself into the armchair she'd gestured to. His gray eyes turned up, following her while she stepped near, loomed above looking down at him, naked, his cock swelling a little, slinking up from his thigh, toward his belly. She planted her knees outside his thighs, lowered herself onto his lap. Watched his chest rise and fall and rise and fall.

“I like your smell,” she sighed. “I've never liked a man's smell, before.”

He smiled. “I'm glad. I like your smell, too.”

“Show me again,” she said, “how small, how weak you can be.”

She cradled his head on her shoulder, held him to her while he worked his hand over his stiff cock, panting, whimpering, flexing under her, holding onto her, almost clinging as he shuddered and groaned.

After, when his breathing calmed, when his trembling stilled, when he opened his eyes and lifted his head from her shoulder to look at her, and she saw how startled, how vulnerable he let himself be with her, she leaned forward and touched his lips with hers.

He stayed still. Soft. For a few brief seconds, she felt the wet warmth of his mouth.

Tasted him.

Then she slipped away.

Into the woods. The still, dark night. A half moon and a million, million stars showed her the trees and the grass and, when she looked back, the old farmhouse, weather-bleached and pale. Step by step, the anxious dread and the warm, heavy want drained away, and she felt light again. Able to breathe again.

When she went back inside, she stripped down to her tank and underwear and got under his blanket. Curved her arm over him. Found his hand and laced their fingers together.

* * * *

“There are rules. You need to learn them, before we meet up with the others.”

“Alright.”

The terrain here was tougher than it had been. Uphill, rocky in patches, dense with tangles of roots and shrubby undergrowth in other spots.

“First, about the girls,” Nix said. “We've got somewhere safe to take them. But it's a trek. We might not make it. If they're caught, they'll be treated as stolen. Rehabbed.

It's important they stay virgins. They have a better chance, that way, of getting an easier placement. If you fuck one of them, and we're caught, instead of being sold to a husband, she'll end up in a sex hotel. So the girls are off limits.”

“Alright.”

“Another thing, we talked about before. But if you're going to come with me, you have to take it seriously.”

“Okay.”

“If you're caught with me, or with us, you have to make them believe you're on their side. If it's just the two of us, it's easy. You were just having a little fun before you took me in.”

Stony silence.

“Aright?”

“No.” He didn't say it defiantly. Didn't sound smug. More like scared. Hurt.

“Gareth. If you come with me, you have to be ready to do hard things. We all make sacrifices. We make them because the end goal is worth it. Peace, safety from harm is easy to find.”

She took a breath. Pulled it together.

“Some women, they want that more than anything. Once they've had a taste of freedom, of belonging to themselves, the most important thing in the world, for them, is staying free. Never being owned. Never being forced. Those women, we know what they want from us, if the bounty hunters or the guards show up. If we can't win.

“If the thing I cared about most was dying free, never having to endure some man holding me down and all the rest, I could have found some isolated spot and spent my life at peace. Even if I'd stuck with the resistance, if my top priority was making sure they couldn't hurt me, I would have used my gun to end my life, the other day. And now, instead of what I'm asking you, I'd be giving you orders to kill me, if we're caught. But I won't end my life until I'm too old, or sick, or injured to fight any more.

“A long time ago, I knew that for me, there's no happiness to cling to. I don't fight for my safety, for my freedom. All I care about, all I fight for, is to break their system. Kill the men. Free the women. One by one, for now. Until we can do more.”

They went on for a while in silence. She let him process. He wasn't like her. Like them. How could he understand?

“If you're too weak to do it, too afraid, then they'll probably kill you. But first, they'll probably make you rape me, anyway. That's really a favorite, with them. Making men rape the women they care for. Be glad you're not off the books with a daughter. And they'll probably rape you. Probably cut pieces off of you. And, with you dead, I'll end up at the pillory, and then I'll be meat for the guards again. I'm branded. The luxury of the sex hotels isn't for me, anymore.

“So, if you're going to come with me, I need to know you can do that.”

He was silent for a long time before he breathed out a raspy, “I don't know.”

She said, “You said you've done it before. Done your part at brandings. A way to spot the worst of them. Punish them. It's no different.”

“You can't say that. Not after...”

“What?”

“How we've been. Close. Together.”

“What? You can't do to me what you've done to other women, now? Because you know me?”

“I don't just know you, Nix. I—.”

“Don't.” For a minute she was too angry to speak. Her rage used up all her air.

When she could breathe again she said, “You told me you know why they guards were so rough with me, that day we met.”

“Yes.”

“Those women. They were mother and daughter. I'd ended up with them by accident. Just like everything's by accident. Like the way I stumbled into the resistance.

Like the guards giving me to you that day. I was on the move, and wandered into their hideout.

“The girl was fourteen. A bleeder. She'd lived her whole life off the books. Her mother confessed to me, once, that she'd almost killed her when she was born, seeing it was girl, knowing what she'd go through. Jordan was Ella's second. So she'd been through it all. Given birth to that first child, a baby boy, loved and nursed it through its first year, then woken up one day and found him gone. She never even saw her husband again. Just a pair of guards who dragged her out of her room, away from the empty cradle, and dumped her in an isolation cell for a week before she was delivered to her next husband. When she realized she was pregnant again, she ran away. Almost starved to death. But found a spot, holed up, made it through the pregnancy, through delivery. She told me she was still sorry, sometimes, that she hadn't killed Jordan that night. That she was ashamed she hadn't, that it was selfishness, keeping her, knowing what she'd probably suffer.

“But they'd made it, all those years. I'd never met one, before. A woman who'd never been in the system.

“And Jordan was nothing like any woman, any girl, I've ever known. So light.

Nothing dark under her smile or in her eyes. She was quiet, shy from living in isolation all her life with no one but her mother around, but there was no fear in her. No hate.

“One time Ella asked me, if I had a daughter, would I rather see her die, or join the resistance. It surprised me, how hard it was for me to answer. For me, it's always been simple. Not even a choice. But looking at Jordan, so easy, so happy in her tiny world, the thought of her enduring things I'd been through made me feel sick. And thinking about what it had made me, all the things they'd done to me, all the things I'd done, what I've seen, what I know, when I thought about Jordan becoming like me, it was like imagining someone opening her up and cutting out her guts. Chopping off pieces of her. Compared with her, I felt so broken. Emptied out. Cut apart.

“I told Ella the truth. That I think all of us have a duty to fight. That when one of us hides to keep ourself safe, or commits suicide, it hurts the resistance. It means the men, their society, their system has one less enemy. One less person to slow them down. Kill them off. That every woman who hides or kills herself lets them get away with the raping, with the torture. With forced impregnation and baby stealing. But would I wish my life on my own child? Would I wish it on Jordan, who smiled every time one of us looked at her? No.