The Woman They Kept (13 page)

Tears sprang to Gideon's eyes
and his voice broke. “Why are you telling me this? Are you
saying I should just give up?”

“
That's not what I'm
saying at all.” Leanin held him closer and spoke softly. “My
mother and father, they were like Arisa's parents. They thought
that she must have instigated everything, that she was asking for
it, enjoying it. Sure, they never dragged her out into the streets
like that, but they didn't shy away from telling her exactly how
they felt. Dishonor was a word they said a lot.”

“
What happened to her?”
Gideon asked.

The sun was just beginning to
turn the sky from black to dark blue. “She killed herself,"
Leanin said. Something scuttled outside of the cave, rustling up
the ground. Leanin stayed quiet for a moment, her head cocked to
the side, listening. After another minute it was quiet again.
"That's why you need to remember that no matter what happens,
deep down it's still Rolanda. You just have to work hard to bring
her back to the surface.”

Gideon nodded. Leanin's hands
were still on his chest, his heart beating under her palm. He
brushed a hair out of her face. “I'm sorry about your
sister,” Gideon said. Pulling her closer, her face in the
crook of his neck, he held her. She smelled of cinnamon and black
tea.

...

It was still a few hundred miles
to the ocean when they found the bodies. They were past the low
hills and the land was wide and flat plains. Cyclones of grey dust
kicked up in the distance and skeletal trees stuck out in the
landscape. Everything was shades of grey and brown.

The bodies were strung up in a
tree on the side of the road. They were hanging from nooses,
swinging in the breeze, their clothes long since mouldered away. A
hand painted sign stuck in the ground, saying, “A disobedient
whore needs to be punished.”

“
Who do you think they put
the sign up for?” Gideon asked.

“
I think it's here so
other transports can stop and show their cargo what happens when
they fall out of line,” Leanin said. Her face was very pale.
“Do you see the one on the end?”

Gideon walked closer and he
inspected the body she was referring to. The skeleton was polished
white from the wind and the dust, the macabre grin of death leering
back at him. Looking lower, his eyes widened and he took a step
back. Cradled in her pelvic bone was another, much smaller
skeleton, curled in upon itself. Gideon turned and vomited to the
side.

“
We have to do something
for them,” he said when his stomach settled.

“
Are you saying we should
bury them?” Leanin asked.

“
No!” Gideon
shouted. “No,” he repeated again, softer. “Nobody
should have to spend eternity smothered underground. Let's burn
them.”

Leanin put a hand on Gideon's
shoulder. “We're behind as it is, we'll only lose time. And
besides, they're already mostly bone. There's not much left to
burn. Let's just take them down and move on.”

They cut the bodies down and
stacked them away from the road, away from where they could be used
as a threat or warning. Gideon carefully removed the infant
skeleton and arranged it in the crook of the mother's arm.

Soon they were back on the
track, riding as quickly as they dared over the dusty plains. It
was a flat ride, though they still had to be vigilant about
scattered debris. They passed through the remnants of old towns,
built back before the necessity for the bubbles, where abandoned
buildings were left to slowly rot themselves into the ground. Some
of the brick and stone buildings still held the general form of a
house, the wooden ones had by and large fallen to the ground.

When the light was low enough
Leanin signaled and they set up camp in the remnants of an old
library. The shape was well made, four walls still stood, though
the roof had long since caved in. Scattered mouse-eaten books made
for a spongy, somewhat soft floor. They set the tent up and lit a
small fire with the remnants of the long forgotten literary
collection.

“
I don't care that she's
not a virgin anymore,” Gideon said suddenly. “I just
want her back.”

Leanin stirred the fire, kicking
up sparks. “People make a big deal out of a lot of things
that aren't. I'm not a virgin. I lost mine to an older man who I
thought loved me. Turned out he just loved fourteen year old girls.
I found a stash of girls' panties in his room. He had keepsakes
from every virginity he'd taken. The only thing that matters is
that you get her back safe,” she said, "and that you're
happy." Her eyes moved over the rough scar tissue on his
hands. The fight with Malakir had left a mark that would last a
long time.

Though she would never admit it,
Leanin sometimes felt that her own life had ended when Jenny was
taken. It wasn't fair, the hand that they had been dealt. She
watched Gideon clearing aside the molding debris while he set up the
tent. Most of the books on the ground had been so damaged by the
years of acid rain that they were little more than imprints on the
ground below them, but they cleared aside easy enough.

She threw what was salvageable
of an old bookcase on top of the fire. It wasn't right that if
everyone only got one life to live some people could get such a shit
end of it. People like Gideon and her, people who had experienced
trauma large enough to shape an entire life, they didn't get to
settle down and find someone nice to grow old with. She brushed
aside the thought and stretched out their sleeping mats next to the
fire, laying down on one.

Gideon lay next to her and
closed his eyes. His face was hard, tense, lined in a way that
wouldn't come naturally until he was much older. Leanin traced
those lines with her eyes and moved closer to him. Their shoulders
touched, and he turned and put his arm gently around her. When she
held a hand up to his face, the lines seemed to fade, if only a
little. “Who are you thinking I am?” She asked in a
whisper.

His eyes opened. They were
lying together, arm in arm, their bodies touching, warm, breathing
in time with each other. She smelled so clean, so fresh, even after
a long day of riding.

“
You can imagine I'm her,”
Leanin said. Her fingers traced around his ear and down the curve
of his jaw. The wind howled through the empty windows of the
library. “I'll hold you and you can pretend a while.”

Their foreheads touched as they
leaned against each other, the fire crackling warm. With eyes
closed their lips found each other. It was an explosion of
opposites; soft and gentle yet pressured firmly from both sides;
wanting and repelling and needing and regretting each other within
the same grasping moment. They pulled away only to spring back
together, their hands flustered about each other's bodies.

“
Stop,” Gideon
said. Swallowing hard, he held his hands up and shut his eyes.

Leanin stood quickly and walked
out of the shell of the library into the remnants of the town. The
sky above was turning dark, storm clouds rumbling toward them
quickly. For a moment, just a single moment and no longer, she saw
all the broken buildings around her as whole. People were walking
around, on their way to the market, sitting on steps and laughing at
nothing in particular, cautioning their children to behave, waving
to friends and neighbors. Then Gideon's footsteps thumped loudly
behind her and the image fell back to ruin.

“
Leanin, why are you
helping me?” Gideon said to her back.

She willed the vision of that
lively town back, but the buildings never changed from the broken
down heaps they were. “There's nothing else for me. Do you
know what I've been doing since Jenny killed herself? Going around
to everyone who had anything to do with her trafficking and killing
them. I've got nothing else to do but bloody my hands. There's no
substance to a life like that.”

The rain came then, little drops
at first sizzling on their necks, and they ran back to the library
and ducked into the tent. Little red blisters raised on their skin
where the rain had hit them.

“
Take off your shirt,”
Gideon said. After a moment's hesitation Leanin turned away and
pulled her shirt off, leaving her bra on. “I have some salve
that should help these.”

He was very gentle with her,
applying the salve with his fingertips in little circles around the
rising blisters. She gasped when he touched her, the salve bitterly
cold. Goosebumps raised and caused her to shiver as he finished
with the last of the sores.

“
Will you do me?” he
asked, holding out a small metal tin of salve. She nodded and
rubbed the ointment into his skin, her hands sliding along his back
and shoulders, feeling the hard muscles underneath. The rain
bounced harmlessly off of the treated tent fabric. “Do you
think we'll be able to ride tomorrow?” Gideon asked.

They lay down in the tent while
the light pitter patter of rain fell outside. “The storm will
probably clear up tonight, I would think,” Leanin said.
"Though if it pools were fucked."

There was not much else for the
two of them to do, so they fell asleep on opposite sides of the
tent. When they woke they discovered that in the night they had
cradled against each other, holding one another. They got dressed
without saying a word.

Algernia was a coastal city,
pushed as far to the edge of land as possible without falling into
the ocean. Its buildings were weather-stripped white before the
bubble was built over it, afterwords all the architects had simply
followed form, giving the whole bubble a milky, cloud-like
appearance. Beyond Algernia's bubble the ocean raged green and
black, foaming where it crashed against the coastline. They parked
their motorcycles and changed their money in silence before walking
into the city.

“
Doesn't it seem like
we've done this before?” Gideon said suddenly. They were in
a residential area, the houses small one and two bedroom buildings
with open windows. “We find the red light district, find our
guy, he's already sold her to someone else, so we move on to the
next stop on the track.”

Leanin put a hand on Gideon's
shoulder and he shrugged her off. “When I tracked Jenny it
was like that. It got to the point where I wondered if I should
just give up.”

“
I'm not there, Leanin.
Don't suggest it.” He walked away from her down the street.

She caught up with him and
grabbed his shoulder. “I didn't mean to offend, Gideon, I was
just trying to relate.”

Gideon wiped his face with the
palm of his hand and he clenched his jaw. “I don't need to
relate to you," he said, his voice low and menacing. "Rolanda
isn't Jenny, okay? They're not the same person, stop trying to make
them be.” Her eyes closed quickly and Gideon sighed, his
anger had been quick to rise and quick to fade. “I'm sorry.”
He rubbed his thumb and forefinger along the ridge of his nose. “I
shouldn't get mad at you.” Across the street a child ran
giggling away from them, kicking a ball far out in front of him and
chasing after it. “Sometimes I think that I really did die in
that grave and that all of this is some sort of punishment for me.”

“
What grave?”
Leanin asked.

Gideon sighed. His face was
drawn taught, the corners of his eyes and mouth pursed together.
“When they first grabbed Rolanda I was there. We were right
outside her parents house, sneaking off to be together.”
Gideon's eyes were far away. "I was helping her out of the
window and then they were right behind us, dressed in black. When
they said that they were taking her I thought they were kidding, but
one of them reached out and snatched her. I tried to fight them but
they overpowered me, taking her and beating me unconscious. I woke
up wrapped in a sheet and buried six feet underground. I had to
claw my way back to the surface. I still dream of it some nights.”

“
What about her parents?”

“
When I got out of the
grave I went back to the house. It was burned to the ground. The
peace officers said that they found two skeletons in the wreckage,
most likely it was her mother and father.” Tears sprang to
his eyes. He had tried not to think of that night in anything but a
clinical, this-is-what-happened way.

Leanin placed a hand on his
shoulder. He didn't shrug it off this time. "We'll get her
back, Gideon."

...

The red light district was on
the far edge of the city close to the seashore. It was right on the
inside of the edge of the glass, the bubble ended where the ocean
began. Greasy green waves lapped up against the glass, leaving a
scummy film. The ocean expanded out from there, a great blue-green
desert. Massive islands of discolored trash floated out on the
horizon. “I've never seen the ocean before,” Gideon
said. “It's beautiful.”

The red light district was an
outdoor market, the women leaning up against the sides of buildings
as a few men strutted with their hands in their pockets, feeling
here and there as though testing the ripeness of a fruit. People
haggled prices openly. Many of the women had deep wrinkles and
sores that they covered with heavy amounts of makeup. Some were
missing teeth. All had a faraway and disinterested look, bored
almost.