Wilders

by Brenda Cooper

  “It’s a long story and you don’t have any time.”

  Lou stiffened and shook her head. “I have a job to do. I can’t help that, and we just lost an afternoon and a night.”

  Stung, Coryn stood completely still and tried to keep her cool.

  Lou noticed. “I’m sorry. It’s not my fault so much is happening right now, but it’s not your fault, either.”

  Coryn walked over and touched Lou’s cheek. “Okay. Thanks. That was the hard way to find you, though. Not everyone gets captured by raving murderers in order to find their sister.”

  “They’re hackers, not murderers.”

  “They killed my friends. And they were planning to kill me.”

  Lou’s lips thinned. “Maybe. Life is harder out here. You should have stayed in the city. It’s safer there.”

  Coryn took a deep breath. Whether or not Bartholomew was a murderer could wait. “You’re the only family I have. I had to find you.”

  Lou closed her eyes and chewed on her lower lip. “I think about you every day. But I knew you were safe with Paula. I knew you were okay. Damn you, now I don’t know that anymore.”

  “Yes, you do. I’m right here.” Anger curled up her spine. She tried to control it, knowing that she was too tired to make any sense of things. Hackers. They’d been hacking the ecobots. That’s why they were so excited when the robots rolled up to them like pets. “Aren’t you about to attack the city?”

  Lou’s eyes widened, as if shocked that Coryn had deduced the obvious. “Portland,” she said. “Only Portland. I’d have warned you before we got to Seacouver.”

  “Damnit, Lou.” Her anger dug in deeper. “I didn’t come out here to fight; I miss home. I can’t tell you how much I miss it now that I’ve left it. I don’t know what you’re part of, and I didn’t think things would be so bad out here, but your notes didn’t exactly warn me. I want to help make it better.”

  Lou stayed still, just inches from Coryn, a slightly shocked look on her face.

  “I’m willing to help rewild. Isn’t that what you came for? To rewild?”

  Lou just laughed. “You don’t know anything.” She crossed the bed without touching Coryn and sat down on the edge. “Living out here, we forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “How little anybody in the cities know. They’re keeping you distracted.”

  Coryn bristled. “I read the papers. I know Portland just changed mayors and Rio just became the biggest city in Latin America with no one below the poverty level. No one!”

  Lou sighed. “Maybe you are my sister after all. I didn’t used to see this much fight in you.”

  “I’m not your little sister any more. I’m a full adult.”

  Lou braided and unbraided her own hair, brighter red and longer than Coryn had ever seen it, almost down to her waist. The old habit made her seem a little more like Coryn remembered her.

  “You have no idea how much you have to learn,” Lou said, her voice so soft that the words didn’t sting very much.

  “So stay and tell me a few things. I’ll shower and you can talk to me and then you can tuck me in and go talk to your friends without me.”

  “If it weren’t for Blessing, you’d be dead.”

  “Okay, our friends.” Coryn starting stripping off her filthy, bloody clothes. She looked for a hamper, but didn’t see one.

  “Drop them on the floor. They’re trash anyway.”

  Maybe it was a good thing she’d gotten old junk clothes in Cle Elum.

  Aspen crept across the bed to Lou’s side and nosed her until she started petting him. “I’ll wait. You can’t take long showers here.”

  “So tell me something I should know.” She stepped into the small bathroom and turned on the standup shower, holding her hand under the water to test temperature. Her fingers nearly froze, but the cold woke her up, got her thinking more clearly. “What’s wrong with the cities? I would have thought you’d defend them. Concentrated population so the wild can be wild and all that. The efficiencies of the many. You know the stories.”

  “There’s some truth.” Lou spoke louder now, to get over the sound of the shower. “But that doesn’t make me love the cities. No one should, not really.”

  “Really?” Coryn asked, grabbing a towel and positioning it near the shower. “Billions of people should hate their homes?”

  “The city killed our parents.”

  “You never did like home as much as me.” The water changed to tepid. “But then I left, so I guess I don’t know what I want. Not really.”

  “So why did you leave?” Lou asked.

  Coryn took a deep breath and ducked under the shower head. She held her bruised face up, let the water wash the blood and grime of the last few days away. She found soap and started slathering it everywhere, stinging her lip with it. “The city’s a lonely place.” She set the slippery soap back down. “And I missed you.”

  “That’s one problem.” Lou spoke slowly, as if afraid Coryn would miss a word and misunderstand her. “The city drains you of your soul. I felt it. You felt it about the same time. Our parents killed themselves because mom couldn’t bear the city anymore.”

  “I know our sordid family history. Is there shampoo?”

  “The pink bottle.”

  Coryn found it. “But a lot of the people in the city are happy. When I go back, if I go back, I think I could find a way to be happy. I miss my AR games and being able to run for hours safely. I bet you didn’t know that I won marathons last year.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “At home, I don’t have to worry about getting killed every five minutes.”

  “But do you agree that the city isn’t an easy place to be happy?”

  She focused on washing the grit from her hair. The water finally felt warmer. “I always think everyone else is happier than me.”

  “Maybe everyone thinks that. All this time, I thought you were happier than me.”

  Coryn couldn’t think of any way to refute that statement. She rinsed her hair.

  When Coryn didn’t answer, Lou asked, “What about out here? Is Outside like you expected?”

  Coryn stood on firmer ground here. “You pretended you were out here riding horses through the hills and planting native plants.”

  “I do that.”

  Soap stung the inside of her thighs. “You’re leading a revolution.”

  Lou’s answering laugh sounded a little bitter. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You were just bossing around the people who killed my friends.” She should have saved that comment for when she could see Lou’s face. “That dog, Aspen, he’s all I have left from the first people who were nice to me out here. Those people—Bartholomew and his creep women—killed my friends.”

  “Be careful who you make friends with.”

  “You too.”

  “Let it go. You’re safe now. Shit happens out here, and you live or you die. I’ll try to teach you to live, but out here we appreciate every day.”

  Coryn put the top back on the shampoo bottle and turned the water off. “Why is it so bad out here? Why all the violence?”

  “There aren’t any big corporations killing things out here anymore, but there are a lot of people trying to kill each other and trying to stop us. I’ve lost two wolf packs this year. Two. The Returners hate the cities more every year. If the cities don’t stop staring at their navels and start paying attention to the great wilding, it’s going to fail, and we’re all going to die. It’s like we’ve become two different planets instead of part of the same whole.”

  Coryn opened the shower door and stared at her sister. “It does feel like that.” She should have a million questions, but the simplicity of the statement struck her like a truth and set her mind racing. Everyone was on sides here, although there were far more than two. She toweled off, the rough nap bracing against her skin. The inside of her thighs were bright red, too tender to rub. It probably wouldn’t do any good to complain. She glanced
at Lou. “That doesn’t mean we should hurt the cities. Or the people in them.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “So tell me. What are you going to do?”

  “I will.”

  “When?” Coryn winced as she patted her thighs.

  “Soon. You’re safe enough for now. We’re home. I’m able to keep some order here. But don’t ever think we’re ahead. We’ve lost a lot of the rewilded land to squatters, and there are stealth towns and small armies like the one that caught you.”

  “Weren’t they your friends?”

  “I don’t make friends with religious fanatic hackers. But I need them.”

  “For what? To catch me?”

  “No. You’re only here because of raw, stupid luck. And Blessing.”

  Coryn hung up the towel and started getting dressed. “What about the Listeners? A group of them called the ecobots that saved me and Paula from a self-styled warlord when we were just a day or two Outside. They seem like a force of order.”

  A brittle laugh escaped Lou’s lips. “So you almost died on day one?”

  “That was day two.”

  “You can’t trust Listeners. They work for so many masters they don’t have any.”

  Coryn frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

  Lou sighed. “I can’t teach you everything. Not all at once.”

  Coryn ran a brush through her wet hair, warm from the shower and sleepy. “You sound like you don’t trust anything about the cities.” None of it made sense right then, but she was exhausted. All the sleep she’d had was in the damned tent, and under the trees, where she’d woken up a few times at night when things scurried close to them, and before that in the barn before the ecobots saved her and before that . . .

  Lou took the brush. “Let me.”

  It was something she used to do for Coryn, something Paula had taken over whenever Coryn didn’t want to do it herself. It felt good. In spite of how confused and sore she was, Lou brushing her hair felt like she had thought this whole trip might feel, and she had to struggle not to cry. “That feels good,” she whispered. “Thank you. And thank you for saving me. Blessing isn’t really the one who did that.”

  “We’re a team out here,” Lou murmured. “We have to be.” She stayed longer than Coryn expected her to, brushing and brushing and saying absolutely nothing. Once, Coryn noticed that her hands were shaking as she held the brush. When she stopped, she whispered, “I’ll bring you something. Stay put.”

  Coryn managed to sit still and wait, although her hands shook a little and she felt light and exhausted but awake.

  It took Lou ten minutes to come back with a cup of water and a single pill in a bottle. She handed it to Coryn.

  “What’s this?”

  “Something for PTSD. You know what that is, right?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t feel that bad right now, but she didn’t want to go to sleep very much. Almost every time she slept something bad happened, like getting caught by Erich or having Liselle killed. “I don’t know that I have that.”

  “It’s a danger for all of us out here. Things happen. The more things happen, the more it builds up. This is new, but it works, especially if you take it right away.”

  “Like the windstorm that almost killed us on day one?”

  Her sister whispered, “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  Coryn took the pill and drank the water. “I haven’t had time to tell you half of everything.”

  “Tomorrow.” Lou kissed her on her forehead and tucked the heavy cotton covers around her. She left quietly, and Coryn lay still and wondered what it would feel like for the medicine to work. Aspen stood, stretched, and then lay beside her, warm and alive and comforting.

  Moments later, Paula opened the door and slid quietly in. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Mmmmmm. Did you learn anything?”

  Paula set an extra glass of water down on the small bedside table. “Only that some people thought Lou was crazy for rescuing you and some people think she was a hero.”

  “Which side was bigger? Crazy or hero?”

  “Hero,” Paula said, walking around the bed and climbing onto the far side.

  Coryn turned toward her, burrowing her head into Paula’s side. The robot’s slender fingers stroked her damp hair, and Coryn gave up on not crying and wondered if the medicine and crying went together and then stopped wondering much of anything. It was good to be in Paula’s arms, with Aspen at her back and in a big, safe place with a window they could escape through if need be.

  Even better, they weren’t in a barn.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The urge to cry had left her entirely by time she woke up. God, she must have needed sleep, and maybe also that pill Lou gave her. Her legs felt so stiff from riding that she had to hold them up and grab them to stretch them out before she could move fluidly enough to get out of bed. The air chilled her, and her bare feet slapped against the hard, cold floor. The gentle light of early morning spilled through pale curtains that did nothing to muffle the birds singing outside.

  The room was empty; Paula must be off on an errand, and Aspen must have gone with her.

  She went to the window, threw it open, and gulped fresh air, damp and filled with the scent of hay, horses, and damp grass. Rolling hills looked like they had been dusted with a fine sage-green sugar as the sun lit up the morning dew. Here and there, low yellow flowers ran in loose lines, like erratic stripes of paint. The hills went on and on, graceful and full of gentle curves. Even though she knew there had to be mountains somewhere, there was nothing sharp in her vision except the edges of the roof, a corner of the barn, and the pointed ends of a flock of small dark birds that wheeled over the land like punctuation marks.

  Other than looking out toward Puget Sound from the highest bridges and buildings, or looking back toward the city right before she left, this was the widest vista she had ever seen.

  The door slid open and Lou poked her head in. “Good morning.”

  Coryn turned to her. “No wonder you want to save this.”

  Lou stood beside her, and they looked out of the window together. A soft smile played on Lou’s face. “It goes like this forever. You can ride for days and see nothing but this, nothing but land and sky and river, hill and sky, river and sky, mountains and sky, always sky.”

  “You sound poetic.”

  Lou’s cheeks pinked. “Open land does that to me.”

  “I never imagined a place could be this empty.”

  “It will change you. It changes everyone.”

  “Like it changed you?” Coryn asked.

  “Maybe differently than me,” Lou mused. “The wild has its own way with everyone. All you can do is be open to it.”

  “Like I had to be calm for the horses?”

  “Like that. You’ve got be aware. Aware of beauty.” She pointed out the window. “And aware of dangerous things as well. You get an opportunity to die at least once a day out here.”

  “I know.”

  Lou turned to face her. “Don’t. In fact, for the next few weeks, don’t leave my side without telling me. It’s perilous here. It’s always been, but it’s far worse now. I can’t keep you safe unless I know where you are. This is my own fault for not telling you how it really is out here, not telling you to stay home.” She crossed to the side table and picked up the brush again, her voice losing some of its intensity. “Here, you’ve gotten all tangled.”

  Lou hadn’t usually been this tender to her. Maybe she was glad to see her after all? Or in spite of whatever else was happening.

  “Do you promise?” Lou slid behind her and started running the brush through Coryn’s sleep-mussed hair.

  “To tell you if I go anywhere?”

  “To do what I tell you.”

  The tone in Lou’s voice crawled up her spine. “I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t just do what I’m told.”

  The brush caught in a tangle of hair, and Lou resorted to h
er fingers to free it. “If Blessing hadn’t told me where you were, and if Paula hadn’t found us shortly after, so I actually believed him, you would have died last night. They were going to kill you.”

  Coryn swallowed. “I think I knew that. But why?”

  “There’s no time for distraction now. That’s all. Another time, they might have ignored you or encouraged you to join them or even simply helped you. You were a distraction, and a liability. You saw the ecobots in the camp. If you talk about that, you might ruin all of our plans.” Lou found another tangle. “I know you won’t talk about it.”

  Coryn felt cold. What would Lou think if she found out she had spied for the Listeners? But she was learning not to say the first thing that came to mind anymore. “I won’t talk about it. Except maybe to you. I want to understand, though. What were they doing there anyway?”

  Lou ignored, her, lost in her own train of thoughts. “I may not be able to save you next time. You’ll learn, eventually. Like I learned. Like everyone who survives learns. But right now, you know nothing.”

  Stung, Coryn took a deep breath before she spoke. “Teach me. I’ll stay near you, and I’ll even promise not to leave without telling you. But I can’t promise not to do anything you don’t tell me to do.”

  “You’ve gotten more stubborn than you used to be,” Lou muttered.

  “The orphanage wasn’t always a great place.”

  Lou stopped in mid-stroke, clearing her throat. “I’m sorry. I’ve always regretted leaving you. But if I’d stayed in the city, I would have killed something or someone.”

  “I didn’t blame you most days. I was lonely, but I didn’t think it was your fault. It was just how my life turned out.” She took the brush from Lou’s fingers, looked into her eyes. “Your eyes are the color of the sky out here. You belong here. You always have. I don’t know where I belong, not yet. Maybe with you, maybe in the city. At any rate, when I chose to leave there, I came to find you, to understand you.”