The Revolution of Ivy

by Amy Engel

  “How’d you get beat up?” Caleb asks. “If you never saw Mark?”

  “That happened before I found the bag.” I keep my voice even, my gaze steady.

  Caleb watches me as the shadows grow longer in the fading light. He probably thinks his silence will force me to speak, that I’ll be so desperate to fill the void I’ll tell him things I’ve promised to keep to myself. But he doesn’t know me. I may not be a very good liar, but I’m an old pro at silence, forever listening for my cues and keeping what I really want to say buried deep. I can match silence with silence any day of the week. It’s when I let my temper get ahead of me, when I open my mouth, that things usually start getting tricky.

  “And when you took the bag, you didn’t see anyone around?” Caleb asks when it becomes clear I’m not going to talk first.

  I shake my head. “What’s the story with this Mark guy, anyway?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice casual. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “I know him,” Caleb says, and although his face doesn’t give anything away, I can hear him measuring his words the way I’m measuring mine. It reminds me of those first days with Bishop, when I tasted each word before it left my tongue. “He went out hunting a few days ago,” Caleb continues. “He never came back.”

  “Well, I can’t help you,” I say, trying not to think about Mark, the look on his face when he was hunting me. “I never saw him.”

  Caleb knows I’m lying. I can see it in the flare at the back of his eyes, the way his body is still slouched in the chair but his fingers tighten on the arms. But he can’t prove it, not without Mark here, and so I hold his gaze as the sun slips behind the house and bathes us both in dusky shadow.

  Sometime in the night Caleb leaves, and Ashley takes his place. She brings water with her and rations it to me in tiny sips so I don’t get sick trying to gulp it all down in one huge swallow. She brings a small piece of rabbit, too, greasy and tough.

  When I wake in the morning, she smiles at me, unlike Caleb, and sits on the edge of the bed, her legs curled up beside her. More like a companion than a warden, but it doesn’t make me any less nervous. She has a wicked-looking knife dangling from her belt, and although her face is friendly, I don’t doubt that she could gut me in a second if she felt threatened.

  “We found you passed out in the road,” she tells me. She hands me a small bowl of blueberries and another glass of water. I think I could drink for a month and still be thirsty. “You didn’t even make it ten steps after you left this house.” She lets out a little laugh. Her voice is deep for a girl’s, her laugh scratchy to match. “Which is probably a good thing, since Caleb had to carry you back here.”

  Caleb carting me around when I was unconscious is not an image I want to dwell on. “You were the ones watching me?” I ask. It’s comforting to know I wasn’t imagining it, that my survival instincts are in proper working order. “Caleb and you?”

  Ash nods. “We didn’t mean to scare you. But we had to see if anyone was with you, what you were doing, before we showed ourselves.”

  “Are you two alone out here?”

  “No, we’re part of a larger group. But Caleb gets restless,” she says with a grin. “He likes to get away sometimes, so I tag along.”

  “So you don’t live here? In Birch Tree?”

  “Nope. In the warmer months we actually have an outdoor camp. When it gets colder, we settle into a town. But not this one. Ours is closer to the river.” She smooths out the blanket on my legs. “You can come with us, if you want,” she says. “Back to our camp. It’s hard to make it out here alone.”

  I still don’t know if I can trust them, but she’s right. I’m not going to survive alone. There is strength in numbers, even if you’re unsure of the people making up those numbers. “Okay,” I say.

  “Good.” Ash smiles, tucks her hair behind her ears. “I don’t even know your name,” she says. “Caleb said he told you I’m Ashley. But I go by Ash.”

  “I’m Ivy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ivy.” Ash holds out her hand for a brief shake, her fingers gentle around my injured hand. “Where are you from?” She must see something in my face, because she’s quick to add, “You don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”

  “Yes, she does,” Caleb says, back to lurking in the doorway. I take the opportunity to glare at him. He glares back.

  “I grew up in Westfall,” I say, my heart squeezing in my chest at the words. “It’s a town not too far from here. And they put me out. I’m not sure exactly how long ago. Maybe about a week.” Ash looks from me to Caleb and back again. “Have you heard of Westfall?” I ask. I’m pretty sure neither of them is from there. Their faces aren’t familiar to me, even vaguely.

  “We’ve heard of it,” Caleb says. “We’ve never had the misfortune of going there.”

  Ash clucks her tongue at him. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know they chuck girls barely old enough to take care of themselves out into…this.” His sweeping hand encompasses more than this dusty room, seems to take in the whole wide brutal world beyond these walls. His hand turns into a pointing finger, aimed right at Ash. “And I can’t believe you’re defending that place.”

  “My parents were born in Westfall,” Ash explains at my questioning look. “They put my mom out when she was sixteen. She refused to marry the person they picked for her. My dad followed her, decided he’d rather take his chances out here with her than live there without her.” She tells the story with a kind of well-worn pride, her own personal fairy tale with her parents in the starring roles. My mind wanders to thoughts of Bishop, what it would’ve been like if he’d come after me, but I sever that idea almost as quickly as I think it. Life is painful enough without my own brain making it worse.

  “Is that why you were put out?” Caleb asks me. “Because you wouldn’t marry who they chose for you?”

  I’m not sure what the right answer is, whether telling them the truth will hurt or help me. For now, it seems better to go with the easiest explanation, the one that they’ll immediately understand. “Yes,” I say, with a pang that surprises me. I didn’t realize until this moment that I was hoping once I left Westfall behind, shed my old life and all the people in it, that my sacrifice would at least leave me free to be honest. Free to end a lifetime of lies and pretending and weighing every word. It’s exhausting to know all that deceit has followed me, hundred-pound baggage I can’t seem to put down.

  Ash tells me that we’re going to head out as soon as I’m up and ready to go and then leaves me for a few minutes. “I left some extra water in the bathroom,” she says on her way out the door. “If you want to wash up a little bit.” She glances at my filthy tank top. “We can find you some clean clothes when we get back to camp.”

  When I finally roll out of bed, I have to clamp my mouth closed on a groan. My whole body aches, head to toe, as though someone has taken a fist to every inch of flesh. I’m thankful for my long pants, just so I don’t have to see what my legs look like. My arms are bad enough, covered with bloody scratches and deep purple bruises. And although my shoulder no longer throbs with pain, I can tell it’s still swollen and tender. I clench my jaw and shuffle into the bathroom across the hall, close the door on a screech of rusty hinges.

  There’s no running water, of course, but true to her word Ash has left a canteen of water balanced on the edge of the chipped porcelain sink. The mirror above the sink is smashed, but a single shard of glass remains, bisecting my face when I peer at my own reflection. It’s the first time I’ve seen myself since I was put out, and it’s hard to comprehend the changes that little more than a week have made. My eyes look huge, staring from a sunburned face streaked with dirt and dried blood. My lip is still swollen from Mark’s beating, my right eye puffy and dark. Freckles I never knew I had dot my nose and cheeks. I’ve lost weight, my cheekbones stark and angular. I look older, harder already. What once was soft has been carved away, leaving only what’s abso
lutely necessary behind. I barely recognize myself and find I’m okay with that. I’m not the same girl I was when I believed in my family, when I was Bishop’s wife. It’s only right that my outside should alter along with everything beneath my skin.

  It seems impossible that only miles away Westfall still stands. People right this minute buying jam in the market or feeding ducks in the park. It feels like a different lifetime from where I am now. I close my eyes, my throat muscles fighting a sob. My hands tighten on the sides of the sink. Grief surges through me, memories flowing against my eyelids. Westfall. My family. Bishop. I don’t want to think about any of this, any of them, but once the door in my mind is open I’m overcome with fear about what might be happening in my absence, whether Callie has managed to get close to Bishop, whether my father has come up with a new plan to take down President Lattimer, if Bishop is safe and how long he can remain that way. They are questions I will never find answers for; just the asking of them is a type of torture. Be safe, I think, wishing there was some way Bishop could hear me across the distance between us. Be strong. Be happy.

  I open my eyes, push away my thoughts along with a few escaping tears. I give my head a little shake, remind myself that the past is gone for good. Here and now is all that matters.

  “You almost done?” Caleb calls from the hallway, making me jump.

  “Give me another minute,” I call back. I take a deep breath, focus on trying to clean myself up. My hair is caked with dirt and blood, matted into knots I don’t know if I’ll ever manage to pull free. I leave it alone and instead take the piece of graying rag Ash left next to the canteen and go to work on my face and hands, scrubbing off as much filth as I can. I’m moving a little easier by the time I let myself out of the bathroom, blood rushing to my cramped muscles. I gather my bag from the floor of the bedroom and join Caleb and Ash where they wait in the stripped-down kitchen.

  “I’m ready,” I tell them. Ash scrambles up from where she’s sitting on the floor, grabs her knapsack off the kitchen table. Caleb is already at the back door, probably annoyed it took me so long. I follow behind Ash, let the screen door bang closed behind me. The sun warms my face, my nose full of the scent of dirt and dry grass on the wind. I step off the back porch and into the next chapter of my life.

  Chapter Five

  We head west, back toward the river, negating every hard-earned step I took away from it a few days ago. I tell myself my journey east wasn’t wasted; at least I found other people, ones who allowed me to join them. Caleb takes the lead and Ash has fallen back to allow me to walk between them. But strangely, I don’t feel boxed in the way I used to when my father and Callie made sure I was always in the middle. Maybe because I sense Caleb would be only too glad to see me break away and disappear forever.

  We walk in silence, other than Ash whistling a four-note melody over and over.

  “Jesus,” Caleb says finally, “give it a rest, would you?”

  In response Ash whistles once more, almost a screech, before falling silent.

  “Are you guys related or something?” I ask, glancing behind me at Ash. “Siblings?” Although they look nothing alike—one dark, one light—their interactions have the love-hate tone of family.

  Caleb grunts something unintelligible, but Ash shakes her head. “Sort of. Not technically.”

  I’m about to ask what she means when Caleb says, “Her dad found me wandering around out here when I was a kid. Maybe seven or eight?” He hooks a thumb back over his shoulder without turning around. “She was just born.”

  “So your parents raised both of you?” I ask Ash.

  She’s pulled abreast of me, and her mouth tightens briefly before she answers. “Just my dad. My mom died having me.” I know that giving birth is dangerous, even in Westfall. Women die more often than people like to acknowledge, so it makes sense it would be riskier out here. Ash’s father must have been very determined if he managed to keep a newborn alive without her mother.

  “Is your dad back at the camp?” I sidestep a hole in the ground, bumping Ash’s shoulder as I do.

  “No,” Ash says. She keeps her eyes on the ground.

  “He died.” Caleb’s voice is quiet, his shoulders and neck stiff. “Last year. Infected leg.”

  “Oh.” I sneak a glance at Ash. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” Caleb says, which is probably the nicest thing he’s said to me so far.

  “So you’re on your own?” I ask Ash.

  Caleb stops so quickly I almost slam into his back. “She has me,” he says. “She’s not alone.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  Ash cuts me off, pokes Caleb between the shoulder blades, hard. “Lay off her. God.” Once Caleb starts walking again, Ash rolls her eyes at me, making me smile. It’s been so long since I’ve smiled that the stretch of skin feels foreign, like learning a new language.

  “You’re, what, about sixteen?” Ash asks. “That’s still the age they make you get married, right?”

  “Yes.” I don’t look at the green of the trees. I don’t think of the rush of the river. “Almost seventeen. How old are you?” She looks older than me, but it’s hard to tell by how much. She has the sun-weathered skin of those who spend all day outdoors, her body stripped of everything but essential muscle.

  She shrugs. “Around seventeen or eighteen. We don’t really pay much attention to that stuff.”

  Caleb snorts out a laugh, but there’s no amusement in it. “No birthday cake and candles around here.”

  “Yeah, well, my family wasn’t big on cake and candles either,” I tell him.

  It takes us several hours to reach the camp. We could have covered the distance faster, but Ash made us stop every half hour or so to give me more water or a piece of food. I could tell the delays made Caleb impatient, but he only blew out long-suffering sighs, back against an adjacent tree, and waited for Ash and me to get up and moving again.

  I can hear the camp before we actually see it. The bustle of humanity, the sounds of voices carried on the warm air, sound all wrong in the world of quiet I’ve grown used to. I’ve been desperate for other human voices, but now that I’ve found Ash and Caleb and I’m no longer alone, the sounds of a larger community bring a hot flush of fear. My heart slams against my ribs, and I don’t realize I’ve slowed to almost a stop until Ash puts a hand on my back, urging me forward. “It’s okay,” she says. “You’ll be safe here. I promise.” I want to believe her, but my safety isn’t something she can guarantee, no matter how good her intentions. What if Mark has already returned, ready to tell everyone his own self-serving version of what happened between us? Who would Ash and Caleb believe?

  We top a small rise and the camp is laid out below us, spread along the banks of the river. There are dozens of mismatched tents, homemade from a variety of materials. I can see a large garden and a cluster of clotheslines strung between the trees on the edge of the camp. People mill around, dodging a few small children who race among the tents. It seems tranquil and unthreatening, which only makes me more uneasy, as if it’s all an illusion meant to hide the ugly core underneath.

  “Why do you stay here, instead of in a town?” I ask, still not ready to move down the hill and into the camp.

  “Some people do stay in town, but most of us prefer it outdoors. I like the freedom. I’m not a big fan of enclosed spaces,” Ash says.

  “It’s safer,” Caleb says bluntly, and Ash gives him a warning look. “Not everyone out here is as nice as we are.” I glance at him, but there’s no hint of irony on his face. “We prefer to be in a large group, able to defend one another. And able to scatter if it comes to that.”

  “Stop scaring her,” Ash says.

  “I’m not scared,” I tell her. “I didn’t think it would be all sunshine and roses out here.”

  Caleb glances at me, and for the first time I see something other than suspicion in his face. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get down there and get you set up.”

  We
start down the small hill, but Ash hangs back a little with me. “You can stay with me, in my tent,” she says. “If you want.”

  “We can find her a tent,” Caleb says without turning around. The man has ears like a bat.

  “I know that,” Ash says, and looks at me. “But if you don’t want to be alone, I don’t mind the company.”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’d like that.” It would be nice to have at least one friendly face close by in this mass of unfamiliar humanity.

  “Great,” Caleb mutters, “pretty soon you’ll be spending all day braiding each other’s hair and whispering about boys.”

  Ash doesn’t dignify that comment with a response, so I don’t either. Apparently I’m getting used to Caleb and his sharp tongue. Already I sense his bark is worse than his bite. At least when it comes to Ash.

  As we make our way into camp, people stop to clap Caleb on the back, pull Ash in for quick one-armed hugs. The eyes on me are curious, but not hostile, and everyone seems to accept that if I’m with Ash and Caleb, I’m welcome among them. There are no formal introductions, but I hear Ash murmur my name from time to time as she greets people, and I nod and give small smiles in return. All the attention is overwhelming, though, and I’m grateful when Ash closes the flap of her tent behind us, shutting out the sights, if not the sounds, of the camp.

  Ash is already hard at work, shifting bedding and making room for me on the left side of her tent. “Caleb has an extra cot,” she tells me over her shoulder. “I’ll have him bring it over here, and I have plenty of bedding.” She turns and surveys me. “I’ll ask around and find you some clothes. Most of mine aren’t going to fit. You’re a lot taller and…you know…” She makes an hourglass motion with her hands. It’s so reminiscent of Callie that tears gather on my lashes before I can stop them. I take a deep breath and tilt my head up until they’re gone. I don’t understand how I can hate Callie and love her all in one breath.