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by Carrie Vaughn

  A small desk in the corner served the investigators as an office, where they could review evidence and keep accounts of previous cases. Their collective knowledge. Committee records were kept here as well, pages bound into simple books with leather covers recording harvests, births, deaths, storms, local happenings, events of note. Local histories, local portraits.

  There wasn’t much. Various committees and investigators had only been keeping records for about twenty years or so; the notes didn’t go all the way back to the Fall. Folk then had more important things to worry about; paper had been scarce, and they weren’t convinced there’d be anyone around in the future to look at records. At some point, though, someone decided that writing things down might be useful. Planning resources and crops and babies and everything was easier if you could see the patterns. So, now they had records.

  Enid and Tomas found the relevant volumes; each took half to read, and the tedious work began. They’d only been at it twenty minutes or so when Tomas asked, “Do you remember Auntie Kath?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “She talked about how they didn’t know what they needed to save. They couldn’t save it all, so they had to choose. How later she wished there were things people in the early days of Haven had saved.”

  “Like cameras. Or latex gloves.” Enid not only remembered—she could almost hear the old woman’s low, rough voice going on about it.

  “Plastic wrap,” Tomas added, and they both chuckled. Plastic wrap had been an obsession with Auntie Kath, who insisted the item had a million uses, and she brought it up every time one of those uses occurred to her. No one had ever really understood what she was talking about.

  “Someday we’ll dig into an undisturbed cellar or an old archive and find some plastic wrap,” Enid said.

  He shrugged. “We’ve gone this long without it. No one’s missed it since Kath died. But I wonder if this is how they felt. Trying to learn it all because we don’t know what we need to know. But it isn’t possible. We’ll miss something but have to hope we won’t.”

  They studied the records, hoping to get a picture of the town of Pasadan, to guess what they might find when they got there. But they couldn’t predict, not really. Columns were labeled, lists of numbers written carefully in different hands, in fading ink. Names of Pasadan’s committee members, short descriptions of them that in the end didn’t say anything at all. This might have been any of a dozen small settlements on the Coast Road. But this was the one requesting investigation of a death.

  They wouldn’t really know a thing about the town until they got there.

  CHAPTER TWO • HAVEN

  ///////////////////////////////////////

  Fifteen Years Earlier

  The Worst Storm

  The storm started with gusts that threatened to throw Enid across the yard at Plenty household. She had the job of putting away tools and tying down tomato plants and squash vines, hoping they wouldn’t get too torn up. The sudden blasting wind turned what should have been an ordinary chore into an emergency. Some of the plants in the garden were already flattened. Enid’s fingers shook, trying to get a last piece of twine knotted. She’d seen storms before; this felt like something else, electric and ominous, black clouds on the horizon expanding to fill the sky.

  Peri, her mother and one of the town’s medics, shouted at her from the door of Plenty’s cellar. “Enid! Leave it! Come in now!”

  Rain started, huge drops driving into the ground and into Enid. They actually hurt, icy slaps on her skin. Sheets of it would soon follow, soaking everything. She ran to the cellar along with the last few straggling household folk. The wind howled.

  One of these last was Tomas, who still held the hammer he’d been using to help to secure doors and windows. He was a lithe man with brown hair in a tail, his tunic stained with sweat and dirt.

  “This is some fun, yeah?” he said, grinning. He had to put down the hammer and use both hands to haul the cellar door shut.

  “What?” Wide-eyed, she gaped at him. It hadn’t occurred to her that on some level this might be fun.

  “Get in, you, come on.” Peri patted his shoulder, urging him down the thin wooden stairs, and put her arm around Enid. Her hair was coming loose from her headband; sweat matted strands of it to her face. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Enid said, but she wasn’t sure. The adults had this pensive air, brows furrowed, biting their lips and looking up at the ceiling as if they might see through wood and dirt to what was happening in the sky overhead. Hanging on to their children just like Peri was doing.

  Plenty was a prosperous household, with a half-dozen kids under eighteen. The baby was crying, and no one seemed to mind. Having to huddle in a cellar during a storm seemed like a good reason to cry. On the other hand, Tomas sat on the steps by the door, hand resting on the handle, like he wanted to reach through the wood and touch the storm. Thriving on the sense of urgency.

  “You look like you want to go out and watch,” one of the household women said to him.

  “I kind of do,” he answered. There was nervous laughter. A crack of thunder startled them into silence. Rain rattled on the doors like a million hands clapping.

  Windows had been boarded up, doors bolted, rain barrels drained and secured, windmills lashed down. Livestock penned into barns and chickens into coops. Everything that could be harvested had been. Nothing more to do but wait it out.

  Even in the cellar, the wind pounded, slamming against adobe walls, whistling through cracks in the door. Enid had never heard anything like it. She didn’t want to admit how the fierceness of it scared her. This wind could pick them up and carry them away. The rain was loud as thunder, the thunder like earthquakes.

  It seemed to go on for hours. Enid found her own place sitting with her back to one of the dirt walls. Wrapped in a blanket, she hugged her knees to her chest and failed to sleep.

  Most of Plenty’s thirty members had crammed into the cellar; a few had stayed at Haven’s clinic to help anyone who needed it. They had lanterns, plenty of water, blankets, food, and a bucket in a corner roped off for a latrine. But the time dragged. Most tried to sleep, but the next crack of thunder would wake everyone, and they’d go back to studying the ceiling, gripping one another’s hands.

  “How bad is it, you think?” someone asked.

  “Worst I’ve seen,” another answered.

  “No, remember that one that flooded the river? Washed out Angel household? They never did rebuild, did they?”

  A discussion ensued, all the old people talking about what storms they remembered, what the previous worst storm really was, and whether it was twenty or twenty-five years ago. People only fell quiet when the rain picked up and got so loud nobody could hear anymore.

  The oldest among them was Auntie Kath, and she was old enough to remember before the Fall; she’d been a teenager in Haven’s earliest years. So, of course, folk turned to her for the definitive answer.

  “Oh, no, not even close to the worst,” she said, shaking her head. A chair had been brought to the cellar for her, and she sat there, blankets piled on her. One of the little kids curled up asleep at her feet. Her frame was shrunken, bent, her hair thinned to wisps. Her vision was long gone. She didn’t work anymore, but the folk of Plenty cared for her, a precious grandmother to them all. The last who remembered. “The one that shut down L.A. was the worst. This isn’t anything as bad as that. But really, the storms don’t seem as bad when you don’t have as much to be broken by them.” She chuckled in her rattling voice.

  This was definitely the worst storm Enid had ever been through, but she was only twelve. Listening to the others, she was pretty sure there’d be worse someday. She tried to think of what that might look like and decided Tomas had a point: she was curious to see what a worse storm could possibly look like. How bad was really bad, if this was only sort of bad?

  More hours passed. The air in the cellar grew close and humid. The little kids were crying along with the baby now.
Enid was trying hard to be grown-up about the situation, but she thought about crying too. Or convincing Tomas to maybe open the door, just a crack, and let them have a look outside. People kept trying to talk to her, and she was tired of answering the same questions: yes, she was fine; no, she didn’t need anything to eat; and even if she was scared, she wasn’t going to admit it.

  Several times, Peri went around to check on everyone and came to Enid last. “How’re you holding up?”

  “Fine,” she said, her face wrinkling. What if the storm never let up? There’d been talk of flooding, of lightning strikes and fires. What would they do if anything like that happened here?

  Peri smiled wryly and ran a hand over Enid’s hair. “It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because there’s never been a storm in all of human history that lasted forever.”

  “Can’t I go out? Just for a minute, just to look around.” Just to get away from the crying, the people fussing, the heat . . .

  “Look at Tomas. He’s being patient.” In fact, Tomas was still on the stairs, hunched over. He seemed to be asleep even, despite the noise, the stuffiness, the still-pounding rain. “Just a little longer. Try to sleep, all right?”

  Enid huddled back in on herself and glared.

  More hours passed. The world quieted, wind letting up, rain slackening. The building above them stopped rattling. Restless murmuring started, folk asking one another when they might open the door and go out to see what damage had been done.

  A hard pounding—a human pounding—knocked at the cellar door, and Tomas was right there to crack it open. The lingering rain was enough to soak the edge of the steps and Tomas’s tunic, but he didn’t seem to mind. He called a greeting to the visitors.

  Two soaking-wet men in brown investigator tunics leaned in. The beard on one of them dripped water. This one spoke loudly, as if he had been shouting over the storm for hours and hadn’t noticed the quiet. “Tornado touched down. Ant Farm and Potter north of town got hit. Some of their folk are missing; they need help.”

  “Right.” He pushed open the door, turning to Enid. “Latch it closed behind me, yeah?”

  “I want to go,” Enid said, not thinking before starting up the stairs, as if she were a cat hoping to slip out the door before he could shut it again. “I can help.” She was done with sitting, done with listening to the breathing and the chatter and the crying. She didn’t know if she could help, really. But she wanted to get out and do something.

  “Enid,” her mother commanded. It was uncanny, how her mother could make the name sound like “stop.”

  She looked pleadingly at Tomas, who considered a moment.

  “You’re a spark, kid,” he said, then to Peri, “I’ll look after her.”

  Peri shook her head. “I don’t think—” But Enid had already scrambled up after him. “Fine, then. But don’t get in the way,” she ordered, grabbing a cloak to shove at her. Enid took it, nodding. “Is it okay for the rest of us to come out?” Peri called to the investigators.

  One of them looked into the sky and said, “Give it another hour.”

  “Right. Enid, be careful.”

  “I will.”

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  Tomas had been training to be an investigator for the last couple of years. Enid still wasn’t used to seeing him in the brown uniform. He looked almost sinister wearing it; he didn’t smile as much. He wore it now because the other investigators seemed to think they needed the authority. In a disaster, they needed people to follow orders, and the uniform increased the chances of that.

  This wouldn’t be the last time Enid followed Tomas on an investigation, but she didn’t know that then.

  The rain had turned everything to mud: the garden, the pasture, and the paths between houses—all of it had become a soupy mess, melted brown earth slipping under their feet, a stink of rain and rot rising up. Some of the fencing around the household grounds had blown over. Branches on the big cottonwood in back had broken off, and now hung on by naked strips of torn wood. Cleaning this up was going to take weeks. The plants and vines she’d worked so hard to shore up were all ripped and drowned. Rain still fell, but it seemed tired now. It would have been a pleasant drizzle, if it hadn’t just followed a typhoon. Enid took a big breath of wet air, which smelled strongly of dirt and ozone, but was still fresher than the close stink of heat and bodies in the cellar.

  They had a solar car still charged up; Enid perched in the back among the tools they’d brought: ropes, hooks, crowbars, shovels, a first aid kit. Things for digging, breaking, rescuing, and she wondered what they expected to find. She also kept very quiet, surprised that they were letting her come on the trip and determined not to get in the way. To actually be useful. Small price to pay for getting to see what all this was about.

  One of the affected households had gotten a runner out to Haven to get help. The investigators had been sheltered at the clinic; one of them was a medic as well. They set out as soon as the rain let up. Still, several hours had passed. Things could have gotten much worse in that time.

  After bouncing and jolting over rutted, washed-out roads, slipping in mud, nearly stalling out in places where the road had washed out entirely, the solar car ran out of battery halfway to the plain where the households of Ant Farm and Potter were located. The adults seemed to expect that, merely collecting the gear and setting out on foot. Enid carried coils of rope over her shoulder and hugged the first aid bag to her chest. A lane branched off, emerged from a copse of trees, and from there they looked out onto a wide field.

  Plenty and the rest of Haven had been waterlogged and roughed up. But Potter, the first of the households they came to, was shattered. A windmill lay on its side; trees had fallen, tangled roots reaching to the sky and dripping mud. The first plank-board cottage they came upon had completely fallen over. Clothes and pots and glass and furniture lay scattered among broken wood, as if some giant had come and smashed the thing with a hand.

  “They didn’t have a cellar,” the bearded investigator said despairingly.

  “What did this?” she asked, awestruck.

  “Tornado,” Tomas answered simply. While Enid might have known the definition of a tornado, understood the concept of one—a great funnel of wind bridging earth and sky, generated by colliding storm fronts—she had no idea what that meant in reality. What had all this looked like while it was happening? What had the howl of wind sounded like?

  The household had two other buildings: a workhouse and a small barn for goats and chickens. The workhouse, little more than a shed, was smashed and blown across half a pasture. The barn was still mostly standing, and they found four survivors there, three adults and a kid of about ten, soaked and huddled together under the wall that had only fallen halfway in.

  “Bret and Smoke, did you find them? Did you find them?” one of the survivors demanded as Tomas and the others coaxed them out of their hiding place. They stood blinking into the pale sky, like new chicks.

  Since they didn’t have a cellar, they had fled to a nearby ravine for shelter—as low and as close to underground as they could get when the worst of the storm cell had passed overhead. But Smoke had stayed behind to save a few things from the house, fetch water and supplies they would need while they hid, as well as knives and tools that would be difficult to replace. After the howling winds had passed by, the others returned to find the cottage smashed. Bret had urged them to stay sheltered in the remains of the barn while he went to check on their neighbors and then go to Haven for help. He was still at the clinic, his household-mates were relieved to hear. But they hadn’t found Smoke.

  While the medic sat with the survivors, tending small wounds and shock, the investigators started a search. Enid helped pick through the cottage’s wreckage. Systematically, starting at one end and working through it together, they turned over boards, broke through walls with the crowbars. The thing hardly seemed like a h
ouse anymore, even when she came across an intact clay vase, still with a soggy flower nestled inside. A rag doll. A woven blanket, matted with mud. A sodden mop of feathers that turned out to be a dead chicken.

  “Here!” Tomas called finally, and Enid and the other investigator ran over.

  Tomas had broken through a wall to find a body. He knelt to touch it, but with a lack of urgency. Part of Enid told her to hold back, that she didn’t need to see this. She didn’t want to—she should never have come. But she’d wanted to come, she was here—she should see it all.

  Caught up in broken boards, the body was of a youngish man, tan skin gone ashen. Half his shirt was torn off, along with the skin underneath it, a great gash across his chest, but rain had washed the blood away. He had shoulder-length black hair and the start of a beard. His eyes were closed, one hand clenched around a hammer.

  “Well,” the other investigator muttered. “That’s that, then.”

  “Was it blood loss that got him?” Tomas asked.

  The older man shook his head. “There’s a wound on the skull, here. Probably a combination of things, when the house came down on him. He shouldn’t have gone back.” He shook his head. “You want to tell them, or should I?”

  Tomas answered, “Which would you prefer?”

  “I think I’d rather untangle this guy here, if that’s all right.”

  Tomas nodded. “We ought to get to Ant Farm as soon as we can. If it’s anything like this, there’s a lot more work ahead.”

  “Yeah. Enid, could you help me lift this?”

  She stood frozen a moment. She had wanted to help. She had wanted to work, but she hadn’t imagined this. Tomas lingered a moment, as if waiting to see what she would do. That more than anything prompted her. “Yes. Yes, I can.”

  Tomas turned to the barn to deliver the bad news, and Enid helped prop up the broken boards while the investigator extricated the body and carried it to the soaked grass, to lay it there neatly for his people.