Murder of Crows (34 page)

Fetching the copy of the
Lakeside News,
Meg opened it to the comics and pointed to one strip.

“That strip has been around for years,” Merri Lee said. “When I was young, I thought it was funny, but it doesn’t seem funny anymore.”

One group of characters in the strip always wore elaborate hats, symbols of authority. But the other group, dressed in business suits, were always pulling tricks on the primitives who “couldn’t understand civilization.”

“The Others never learned about taking notes to help them remember what they heard in classes?” Ruthie said. She pressed her lips in a thin line. “Then the instructors would think they’re taking up space in classrooms because they’re entitled to be there but they don’t really care about learning. So the instructors don’t make an effort to find out why the
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aren’t doing the things that would help them get the most out of the class. And the Others realize they aren’t getting what was promised even if they aren’t sure what’s missing, and they resent the humans they still see as intruders even though we’ve been living on this continent with them for centuries.”

“And they express their resentment by tightening the resources we need for the way we live and the things we make, because why should they give up bits of the world that belong to them in order to make things convenient for us?” Merri Lee added. “We
all
feel a lack, and resentment keeps building. And when the humans go that one step too far …”

“I picked up an old book at an estate sale,” Ruthie said. “Inside was a folded sheet of paper with a list of cities that don’t exist anymore. I didn’t realize at first that’s what it was. It was just a list of city names and dates. When I looked up the cities … or tried to … that’s when I realized they had been destroyed, reclaimed by the wild country.” She looked sad. “How many of those cities vanished because someone couldn’t be bothered to explain something as simple as taking notes?”

Meg watched Ruthie turn to a clean page in her notebook. “What are you doing?”

“Mr. Wolfgard hired me to teach the Others about human things, and that’s what I’m going to do. And not just how to order from a menu or what utensil to use when in a restaurant or how to make a purchase in a store. Karl thinks we have an opportunity to interact with the Others in ways that might make a difference for all of us, and I think so too. So I’m going to teach the
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in the Courtyard about social skills and what to do when they attend a school that employs human instructors. I’m just going to take a minute to make a note about this.”

Merri Lee nodded. “While you do that, Meg and I will start working with the Lakeside map to figure out how she got here.”

It sounded simple. It wasn’t. Meg hadn’t realized how little of the journey she had absorbed. Or, more to the point, she wasn’t sure what had been real and what had been training images. She had focused on following the images that had guided her escape and somehow managed not to see anything that might have created confusion or doubt—the very things that would have helped them now to follow her journey.

There had been a train. She remembered being too scared to sleep and too tired to stay awake. Caught in that mental vagueness, the images that guided her were sharp but had no context. She’d bought a ticket for the last train leaving that night, but she couldn’t remember how she’d reached the station. There must have been a vehicle that had left the compound, but … She remembered riding on the train a long time and seeing something that triggered the decision to get off before the stop listed on her ticket. Which city? She didn’t know. And there had been buses, the kind that provided transportation between cities. And another ticket for another train? But, again, she had followed the visions, and most of what she’d seen had faded too much to recall.

Before the three of them became too frustrated, the first set of pictures was delivered for a review of region.

The pictures of alligators, panthers, and snakes fascinated her. Her training images of these creatures had been line drawings that weren’t the least bit scary.
These
images were of predators. Maybe even
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The trees and flowers were like nothing she’d seen before, not even in training images.

“Okay,” Merri Lee said, making notes. “You didn’t recognize the critters or the plants, so I’d say you didn’t live in the Southeast or come through there when you ran away.”

“It was dark a lot of the time,” Meg said. Or had that been her mind’s way of protecting itself from absorbing too many images as the train sped on? There
had
been daylight at least part of the time, but not bright. Winter light and gray sky.

“You were wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a denim jacket, and sneakers,” Ruthie said, making her own notes. “You didn’t have a winter coat, so you came from someplace warmer than here.”

Meg frowned. “No. The denim jacket was part of the outfit. The Walking Name was wearing the winter coat.”

They looked at her.

“They wore white uniforms and changed out of their regular clothes. She took the coat out of her locker because she went outside for something. She didn’t close the locker properly. That’s why I could take the clothes and the money in her wallet.”

“It was cold when you went outside?” Merri Lee asked.

Meg nodded. “Very cold. But I was so afraid. Maybe it felt cold because I was so afraid of what the Controller would do to me if I got caught. Jean … Jean and I were going to run away together. It was before the visions that helped me escape, so it was just talk, just wishful thinking about having a real life. But a Walking Name overheard us, and the Controller didn’t think I would run away by myself, so he … broke one of Jean’s feet. I still wanted both of us to run away, but she said if she went with me, we’d get caught. By myself, I would escape. And I did.” Meg didn’t realize she was crying until Merri Lee handed her a tissue. “But Jean is still there.”

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I’ve never been in the Southeast. I’m sure of that much.”

They crossed off the High North next. Theral was using the library computer to check details for them, and she confirmed that the lake-effect storm that had touched Lakeside the evening Meg arrived had shut down rail and bus transportation in the High Northeast for the whole day.

Tess brought over coffee, sandwiches, and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, as well as another stack of pictures.

Meg, Merri Lee, and Ruthie drank the coffee, ate the sandwiches and cookies, and crossed the West Coast region off the list.

Midafternoon, Heather showed up with a handful of magazines and eyes that were puffy from crying.

“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she said, setting the magazines on the sorting table. “They used to make more effort to stay human, and they don’t anymore. Have you noticed that?” Heather looked at Merri Lee, who had been working at A Little Bite for over a year. “And most of the customers were human, so it wasn’t too bad. And with the Market Square credit, I was making as much working part-time hours as I would make working full-time in another bookstore in the city.”

“Then why can’t you do this anymore?” Merri Lee asked.

“Last night my father told me he doesn’t want me setting foot in his house again while I’m working in the Courtyard. He said it was hard enough to find work in Lakeside, and being tarred as a Wolf lover was the first step toward losing a job and then sleeping in a homeless shelter and begging on the streets, and how that brush spread the muck over everyone in a family. And while he was saying those things, my mom just sat there and wouldn’t look at me. She didn’t say anything to me until I got up to leave. Then she stopped me at the door and told me if anything happened to my younger brother or sister because I was being a whore for the Others, it would be on my head.”

“That’s awful,” Ruthie said. “They had no right to say those things!”

“Like your family hasn’t said it to you?”

Ruthie took a step back.

“You lost your job because of this place.” Heather looked at Merri Lee. “And you were beaten up and can’t go back to school.”

“The Others didn’t do those things,” Merri Lee replied. “Humans did.”

“Because of them! And now we’re being asked … Do you even know what they’re going to do with the information we’re providing? What if we’re helping them do something terrible? What happens to us if we’re branded traitors to humankind?”

“I don’t think anything about working with the
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is as black-and-white as that,” Ruthie said carefully. “Maybe it is that simple in places like Cel-Romano or Tokhar-Chin, where humans control a big chunk of land and only brush against the Others at the borders between human-controlled land and the wild country. But our ancestors settled on a continent that didn’t belong to humans, so it’s different for us. If we can’t work with them, they’ll turn against us.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that Heather has been given a choice: give up the job or lose her family,” Merri Lee said.

What will happen to Heather if she makes the wrong choice?
Meg thought, knocking her hand against the underside of the sorting table as she reached for the magazines. She almost cried out at the sudden stab of pain, but she swallowed pain that turned into mild agony, too surprised to speak when the cover of a magazine kept shifting into a different picture. Only pieces, so she never saw the whole image, as if she was seeing bits of several pictures. Then, struggling to focus on the vision, she saw a date—and blood soaking the paper.

When she came back to herself, she realized no one had noticed anything had happened. Ruthie and Merri Lee were still talking, still trying to offer Heather some sympathy and encouragement. But their friend didn’t need sympathy and encouragement. She needed …

“Heather, you have to go,” Meg said quietly.

They all stopped talking and looked at her.

“I’d rather stay here and work with you,” Heather said. “There’s too much strange fur and fang in the library.”

“No.” Meg walked over to the counter, picked up the phone, and dialed. “You have to hand in your notice today and go.”

“Meg?” Merri Lee said. “What’s going on?”

She shook her head as Vlad answered the phone at HGR. “Vlad? Can you come to the office? We need to talk to you. No, just you.” She hung up before turning to look at her friends and the maps and the notebooks, but she didn’t see anything else, didn’t feel any warning prickles.

“Meg!” Vlad rushed into the sorting room moments later and jerked to a stop.

“Heather needs to leave,” Meg said. “She can’t work in the Courtyard anymore.”

“I hadn’t decided that!” Heather protested. Clearly frightened, she turned to Ruthie and Merri Lee for support. “I didn’t say that.”

“She didn’t say that,” Merri Lee said.

Vlad gave Heather a considering look, but Meg didn’t think the decision surprised him. Then he sniffed the air and walked around the table until he stood next to her and said gently, “Let me see your hands.”

“What?” Meg said.

“Your hands,” Vlad repeated.

“What’s going on?” Ruthie asked.

“Meg?” Merri Lee said.

She held out her hands. The gouge on the top of her right index finger was tiny, barely the size of a pinhead, but it was just enough lost skin for blood to rise in the wound.

“How did you do that?” Vlad asked.

“I hit my hand on the table when I reached for the magazines. I must have scraped something?”

“And you saw …?”

She saw Merri Lee scramble for a notebook and pen. Distracting. Another image. Not the answer to Vlad’s question. “I saw the cover of the magazine.” She tried to point but Vlad still held her hands, so she tipped her head to indicate the stack of magazines on the table. “But the one in the vision wasn’t the current issue. I saw blood. All the pages were soaked in blood.”

“What does that have to do with Heather?”

“Her family wants her to stop working here. When I reached for the magazines, I was thinking about what would happen if she made the wrong choice, and then I felt pain … and I saw …” She looked at Vlad. “She has to go.”

“Yes,” Vlad said, giving her hands a gentle squeeze before releasing them. “I’ll take care of it.” To Heather he added, “Gather your personal belongings, then meet me in the store’s office. I’ll give you your pay.”

Heather stumbled to the back room and out the door.

“I’ll make sure she has enough money to take care of her bills for a couple of months,” Vlad said. “That will give her time to find another job. And I’ll have Blair come by to sniff out the spot where you damaged your finger and repair it so you won’t get hurt again.”

“But I don’t even know how I did it!” Meg protested. “How can he find the exact spot?”

Vlad smiled. “He’s a Wolf with an excellent sense of smell. He’ll find it.” The smile faded as he waved a hand to indicate Merri Lee and Ruth. “What about the rest of the human pack?”

No pins-and-needles feeling in response to the question. No other vision. “They can stay,” Meg replied. Then she added silently,
They’ll be safer here.

She couldn’t be certain of that, but the thought felt right.

“All right,” Vlad said. “I’ll have to tell Simon, so take care of that wound before he shows up howling about it.”

Once Vlad left the building, Ruthie turned to Meg, wide-eyed. “Okay, that was weird. What was that?”

“That,” Meg replied, “was prophecy.”

Simon wasn’t happy that Meg had called Vlad instead of him, but after he went off by himself for a few minutes to snarl about it, he thought he’d worked out the human logic. Since he’d summoned the
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leaders to Lakeside, he was in charge of the big meeting, which left Vlad in charge of the bookstore. And Heather leaving and being paid was bookstore business.

Realizing Vlad would also be stuck with the employee-quitting paperwork cheered Simon up considerably. He hated filling out that paperwork.

Of course, finding new humans to work for them wasn’t going to be a romp in the woods.