Enid kept her reaction off her face, tamping down hard on her feelings of dismay. No, no one should ever sleep here. Erik’s father, the household’s previous head, had died of a lingering illness—flu, the reporting medic thought. Enid didn’t say so, but she wondered if spending too much time in this house might have caused his health to deteriorate. Did everyone in Semperfi have lingering coughs they couldn’t explain? She wouldn’t be surprised.
The place should be dismantled for salvage, and something fresh, new, with wide windows and a very solid foundation, should be built far away from the mudslides. The other households were right, however much Enid might want to sympathize with Erik. The house had survived the last storm, but the next would likely finish it off. It wasn’t safe. Now it was her job to convince him of that, as kindly as possible. But all she could think of at that moment was this question: they’d hiked a week up the Coast Road for this?
Teeg kept his face entirely turned away from Erik to hide his look of disgust. Expectantly, he waited for Enid’s reaction as a cue to how he should behave. He seemed to be trying to silently ask, What do we do with this?
Out of a sense of duty and professional thoroughness, Enid went through the whole house. She didn’t quite know what more she was looking for. Maybe she was hoping to find a pre-Fall book that didn’t exist anywhere else—a painting or a photo album that would drive some future historian to ecstasy. An artifact that Erik and his household might have overlooked, that would make the whole case—the whole trip here—worthwhile.
In the corner farthest from the front door, she found a pile of rags. Debris, it looked like—shoved out of the way. Cringing every time the wood creaked under her steps, Enid went to poke at it with her foot. Not rags after all, but a whole blanket, threadbare, big enough to wrap around a person. Shifting the cloth uncovered more: a simple leather pouch, and, inside it, flint and steel made from what looked like salvaged scraps. No charred streaks were visible, so likely no one had tried to start a fire inside the house, for which Enid sighed in relief.
“Erik, you said no one sleeps here?”
“Of course not,” he answered, clearly shocked at the idea. He and Teeg came up beside her, looking where she looked.
“Then you’ve got a squatter.” She set the pouch on the blanket, stepped back.
Erik snarled, biting off a word. Far from surprised, he was angry. Furious.
“You know who?” Enid prompted.
“It’s got to be outsider folk. Wild folk from upriver. They spy on us, been stealing from us for years.”
Enid’s brow furrowed. “What have they stolen?” In her experience, outsider folk stayed far away from the Coast Road settlements. According to their stories, the Coast Road folk were villains, demanding tribute and stealing babies.
Erik shrugged. “Well, nothing specific that I know of. But that blanket—they must have taken that from somewhere; they sure don’t have weaving like that.”
“This looks like just one person, maybe trying to get out of the rain.” Someone who knew they wouldn’t be bothered in this sad old house. But why would such a person have left anything behind? The wild folk she’d met never had much to spare. Maybe when Erik brought Enid and Teeg here today for the tour, they’d surprised someone. Chased the person off when they came in. Enid listened for noises, anyone moving outside the house, labored breathing. Inside, there wasn’t anyplace to hide. She didn’t sense anything. Erik was glaring at the abandoned mess. “This is another reason to get this place fixed up. Get the doors and windows fixed, so we can close it off, keep it safe—”
“And make sure no one gets killed if the roof and walls fall in?” Enid asked, brow raised. “Let’s get outside, into the light, yeah?”
Outside, the sky was huge and even the briny, humid air smelled clean. A weight came off her—relief that the house hadn’t killed her. She hadn’t realized that she’d been worried until she breathed fresh air and the space over the wetlands opened up before her.
A dozen people waited outside.
She recognized Jess, Juni, Avery, several others from Bonavista and Pine Grove. She and Teeg had met the first of the area’s households on the walk up here. Bonavista was the first household on the road into the Estuary, something of a gateway to the rest of the settlement, and Jess and Juni had spotted them as they arrived, welcoming them with more enthusiasm than Enid was used to. Jess was a lean man, his skin reddened with pockmarks from old acne or illness. He had a welcoming smile. His partner, the co-head of Bonavista, was Juni, a small woman with a round face and eager manner. Avery, the head of Pine Grove, had bragged that they were under their quota for the month—no overfishing happened here. But he knew very well that Enid and Teeg hadn’t come to investigate fishing quotas. They’d all been happy to tell the investigators that Erik was mad, that the house was a wreck, that he had no business wanting to save it. She’d thought they’d been exaggerating.
Curious, the group must have followed the investigators up here, at a distance. The ones Enid didn’t recognize probably came from the households farther on. She and Teeg wanted to talk to everyone; they hadn’t gotten that far yet. The Estuary might not have had a committee, but the small-town grapevine was working just fine. They all knew that Erik had asked for an investigation, they’d gotten word that investigators had arrived, and now they wanted to come see for themselves.
So this was going to be more complicated than Enid liked. Teeg had moved up beside her and planted his staff. In their brown uniforms, a matched set, they clearly had authority here.
“Hola,” Enid said brightly. “Can I help you?”
“Now do you see it? It’s just like we told you,” Jess of Bonavista said, gesturing to the ruined house with his hand flattened, angry.
“Yeah,” she said calmly. “We’ve had a chance to look things over.”
“Erik’s crazy to think he can save this!”
Anna of Semperfi, Erik’s partner, put her hands on her hips and jerked her head toward the investigators. “Let them decide, it’s what they’re here for!”
Another man, big, with a brimmed hat pulled low over a pale, flushed face, stepped forward. Avery from Pine Grove. “They need to hear all of it. It’s not just the house that’s the problem, it’s the assumption that we should be helping,” he countered.
Enid tried again. “Once we’ve had a chance to talk to everyone, we’ll—”
Erik marched forward before Enid or Teeg could stop him and jabbed a finger at Avery. “You’re just too lazy to put in the work! Can’t face a little challenge, can you?” Lazy. Almost as bad an insult as unproductive or wasteful.
“That’s not it and you know it!”
Everyone started talking at once, then. Yelling, really. They even managed to drown out the racket from the circling flock of gulls. Erik somehow made himself heard over it all.
“You’re not listening! If you just listen, I can convince you, I can make you see, we can save the house! We can, I just need a little help—”
“A little? All the help on the Coast Road won’t save it!” Jess countered.
The two men yelled at each other with just an arm’s-length distance between them, flinging angry gestures that could easily turn into punches. They seemed to forget the investigators entirely.
Erik might have given this speech a dozen times, it seemed so well practiced. “After everything we’ve done for all the rest of you, for you to . . . to turn on us like this!” Erik pointed at each of the households in turn. Pine Grove, Bonavista, all of them. “You know we’re the best builders, so you ask us to help with all your work. We help keep the bridge up. Every time it rains we help pull your dumb goats out of the river. And we’ve been doing it for years. Decades! From the very start, we were here before any of you. And you”—he pointed at Juni and Jess—“back when Bridge House folded, we took in half your people, even though it blew all our quotas and we didn’t have the resources—”
“You were a child then—you don�
��t know what you’re talking about!” Juni bared her teeth, her face flushed. A strange-looking fury rose up in her. She’d been good tempered so far, in Enid’s interactions with her. Jess touched Juni’s arm to hold her back, but she wasn’t deterred. “Your father didn’t have a problem with it!”
“Not that he ever told you! He was too nice to say what he was thinking, but we sure heard about it at home! About what Neeve did and you all trying to cover it up!”
“We didn’t! We reported it right off!”
Enid should have known someone would bring up the old case, from twenty years ago. The Estuary took care of itself, mostly. But twenty years ago, one of them had cut out her implant, presumably to try to have a baby without a banner. She’d been caught. Eventually, her household had disbanded over the incident. Juni had started the new household, Bonavista, in its place. It should have all been left behind. But something like that was never really forgotten.
A banner. What it all came down to, in the end. A household came together, worked hard, proved that the members could take care of one another, manage themselves, not waste resources, and then the regional committee would award them a banner. The right to have a child. Households, quotas, trade, investigations, all of it went toward proving you could successfully bring a new human being into the world.
Dig down far enough, it wasn’t about houses at all.
Enid turned to Teeg and smirked. “See? This is why we don’t start with group meetings. The shouting. All of them at once.”
“Yeah, I guess so. We had enough?”
“I think so.”
Teeg put fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. The whole group fell quiet; a couple of them even jumped back, as if the sound had been a clap of thunder. Enough quiet now so that the soft whining from the scrappy dog was audible. The animal clung to Erik, close to his feet, and seemed worried. Enid sympathized with his sense of confusion.
She looked over the gathering, a dozen people from households up and down this part of the road, come to gawk. Most folk looked away rather than let her catch their gaze. This wasn’t comfortable. Ideally, they’d be having this conversation alone with Semperfi’s folk in their kitchen. Someplace where Erik and his folk would feel comfortable. Or at least, where he wasn’t being attacked. Then again, this way, no one could invent gossip about what the investigators told him. So they stood in the open, with the rotting structure lending undeniable evidence to back up the decision. The sun beat down on them, insects buzzed, and everyone felt annoyed.
In that quiet, another sound carried up the hill from the marshland at the mouth of the river. A desperate, panicked voice, shouting over and over, coming closer until the repeated word became clear: “Help! Help me! Help!”
Across the marsh a figure ran toward the main road at the base of the hill, slipping, recovering, momentum carrying him on. A man in work clothes, holding on to his wide-brimmed hat to keep it from flying off. His other hand was waving. The dog barked and charged out; Erik called Bear back.
“Is that Kellan?” Jess asked.
“Who’s Kellan?” Teeg said.
“One of Last House’s. He’s usually down on the beach, scavenging.”
Details clarified: brown skin darkened and weathered, dark eyes narrowed in a constant squint and radiating crows’ feet, and a rough beard softening the jaw. Rangy limbs, homespun clothes hanging off him loose and comfortable. A machete and a crowbar knocked at his belt. The man seemed to be running for his life, but nothing chased him.
“Teeg, come on,” Enid said, and they took off at a jog, downhill to the mud, to meet him.
“What’s wrong?” she said when they got close.
The man pulled up, panting for breath, glancing back and forth between the investigators and something behind him.
“You, investigators? You’re investigators.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You’ve got to help. Please come!”
He reached out and clung to Enid’s sleeve. Hardly anyone ever got that close when she was wearing the uniform. Teeg stepped forward, his free hand at his pouch where he kept tranquilizer patches. But Kellan wasn’t belligerent. He was scared, upset, blinking with shock.
She held his hand, hoping to anchor him, comfort him. Get him to a point where he could explain. “What is it?”
He gaped a couple of times and then stammered, “There’s a body, a body. Someone’s washed up, she’s dead!”
Enid’s nerves fired, sharpened. A sense of alarm crashed over her, made her stomach clench. Teeg turned to her with a look of shock to match Kellan’s.
“Show us,” she said.
Chapter Two • the estuary
///////////////////////////////////////
Death on the Tide
Kellan led them past the bridge and down into the marsh. The tide had washed out, and brackish mud sucked at their feet as they plodded through it, water seeping into the footprints they left behind. Farther on, they had to navigate around debris—broken sections of chainlink and seaweed-covered rebar with chunks of fractured concrete clinging to them. The path became something of an obstacle course, and Enid couldn’t quite see where they were headed.
The wheeling gulls circled over one spot. Usually the birds appeared alone or in pairs, no more than a few at a time, individual cries distinct. This was a flock, a cacophony, rattling. Something had drawn them here.
Kellan led them to where a pale canvas bag, probably his own, slumped on the ground, dropped when he ran for help. Ten feet beyond that, another shape hunched on the mud. The slope of a back, a length of legs stretched out. Enid, with Teeg following, strode forward for a better look. Cackling gulls scattered.
It was a woman, arms tucked in as if she’d been holding something. She wore a long skirt and a tunic. A loosely knitted kerchief covered her brown hair, tied in a muddy braid, tangled and full of grime. Simple leather shoes on her feet. She was no more than twenty years old, if Enid guessed right.
The body was soaking wet, so she might have washed down the river to the side of the bank and gotten snagged in the mud and debris there. She didn’t seem beaten up enough to have washed in from the sea. It was possible she’d been lying here for days. Maybe drowned in the storm. No one in the settlement had said anything about someone missing, and that was the sort of thing people usually told investigators. So the dead woman was probably from somewhere else. But where? The next settlement, Everlast, was ten miles down the road and quite a ways inland. North of here was nothing. Far up the shore lurked the shadows of buildings, walls fallen in, roofs collapsed, steel bones rusting in place. Even a few hulls of steel ships had washed ashore. No one lived in that region. At least, not that Enid knew about.
Already Enid was making a list of what she would need to do: find out who this young woman was, where she had come from, how she’d ended up this way. At a moment like this, the number of things that needed doing was too long, almost overwhelming.
It was a whole new investigation.
Teeg caught his breath. “Oh no. What do you think happened to her?”
He stepped forward, but Enid held him back. “Take a look around. See if there’s anything else that might have washed in with her. Bag, clothing. Anything out of place, anything that might identify her or tell us how she got here.”
Kellan stood frozen, some dozen yards or so behind. Enid called to him. “Did you touch the body at all?”
He nodded quickly. “Just . . . just for a minute. Just to see . . . I thought she might have been alive. But she’s not. She’s not.” He was gasping, close to hyperventilating.
“Kellan, take a breath. A deep one.” She spoke calmly, slowly, to get him to match her rhythm. “Breathe slow. There you go. And another one.” His shoulders were bunched up to his ears and he shut his eyes tight. He wasn’t calming down. “Did you see anyone else? Anything strange?” She almost had to shout to be heard over the gulls, flocking close again.
“No, no . . . I don’
t think . . . I didn’t look . . .”
“That’s all right. Think about it a minute, tell me what you remember.”
“Enid, look at this.” Teeg had walked a circuit around the body. She hoped he studied the ground as he did so, surveying every inch for anything that might have fallen from her when she washed in. Enid joined him, slogging in the mud.
“There,” he said, hushed, pointing.
Enid stepped closer to the body, crouched down beside it. The dead woman’s brown skin had turned sallow from wet and decay. Eyes half-closed, clouded. Full lips and high cheekbones in a round face. Fingers slender and curling.
But Teeg was pointing at her neck and chest, and the streak of blood down the front of her tunic, the wide brown stain still visible even after what seemed like a good deal of time in the water. Carefully, gently—wondering, as she always did, at this need to be gentle with people who were dead, who were long past needing such kindness—Enid pressed against the shoulder, turning the body over so it lay flat on its back. This revealed a gash, across the woman’s throat and arcing down her chest.
This woman hadn’t drowned. She’d bled to death.
The collar of her tunic was ripped from the cut, which started at the right side of her neck and ended halfway down her rib cage. The cut itself was deep, exposing muscle, even part of her collarbone and a glimpse of rib. It tore into her windpipe as well as the veins and arteries around it. She might have suffocated or even choked to death before she bled out. A real autopsy would determine that for sure—did she have blood in her lungs, for example. But they didn’t have time to get a medic up here to say for sure, and Enid didn’t have the skill to do it herself. Really, the finer points were moot. The awful wound had stopped bleeding long ago and had been washed clean, making its severity all the more clear. Anyone could tell what had happened.
The Wild Dead Page 2
