The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  He sat on the blanket beside her, legs crossed. He held a plate mounded precariously with a monster portion of beet salad, nothing else. Noticing her glance, he grinned and shrugged.

  “I’m paying penance for lunch,” he said. “Eighteen hours and a long hike and all my principles went out the window. I’m supposed to be vegan.”

  “On the bright side,” said Edie, “if you’re calm enough to worry about your diet, that probably means that we’ve made it past the primal terror portion of the day.”

  “For now, anyway,” Wes said.

  “I mean, look at Jesse. He’s already found an adoring audience.”

  Wes peered at her in the dark.

  “That’s me teasing,” Edie said.

  “Oh, good.” He stabbed his salad with a fork and pulled a huge pile of greens into his mouth. “I couldn’t tell for sure,” he said around the food.

  “I shouldn’t tease.” She leaned back on her palms, watching Jesse on stage. He had gotten the trio members to harmonize with him on the chorus, giving the words “right night” a spectral quality. He looked good. Even with his shaved head, even in his scrawny white microsuit that could pass for long underwear in this light and context. Edie was reminded of all the things that had drawn her to him, not the least of which was his talent, though his talent was obscured by his desire to be widely known, widely adored. Did she love and adore him? She had tried, hard. But gratitude wasn’t the same thing as love. And what he’d done for her—had it cost him much, really? What did it say about Edie, that she felt so indebted to, so unworthy of, this person who may well have been the baby’s father, who had every self-interested reason in the world to make the offer he’d made to her?

  But he hadn’t had to stay with her. He hadn’t had to publicly claim her, at a time in his life when dating a bartender at a shitty dive bar was a liability to his career, at best.

  “He’s a lot to take,” Wes said.

  “Yes,” Edie said tiredly. “But there’s more to him than this.”

  “Sure. Of course there is. And none of us is at our best right now.”

  “That’s true, too.”

  Wes sipped from a glass of water. “Earlier today, at the Town Hall,” he said. “That didn’t go so well.”

  “You mean, plotting our escape?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t think this is a group of people who are used to collaborating,” Edie said. “Or maybe there were just too many of us. Too many people, not enough time. Too much pressure.”

  “Yeah,” Wes said. “I thought that, too.” He looked around—a bit obviously, Edie thought—and leaned in. “So yeah. I want to tell you something. But I’m not sure about your boyfriend. Sorry about that. I know it puts you in a weird position.”

  “It does,” said Edie. She was instantly on edge. She’d sensed his—well, crush was probably a strong word for it, but his notice of her hadn’t escaped her own notice, nor had it escaped Jesse’s, she was sure. Was he going to declare himself?

  “I’m not saying you can’t tell him,” Wes said. “I mean, I’d rather you didn’t. But I’ll trust your judgment.”

  “Okay,” Edie said. Now she was just confused.

  “So what do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “About whether or not you’ll tell him,” Wes said impatiently.

  “I guess that depends on what it is,” Edie said. “I mean, obviously it does. How couldn’t it?”

  The trio (plus Jesse) finished “Right Night for You.” Edie and Wes clapped a little with the rest of the audience. Edie held herself stiff, wondering if Jesse would stop singing now and rejoin her—if his doing so would mean her never hearing what Wes had aimed to tell her—but they kicked into another song, and she exhaled. “I don’t want to be rude, but you need to just spit it out.”

  “All right. Just, you know. Discretion and all that.”

  Edie circled her hand impatiently.

  “Marta snuck something out here. Something useful.”

  Edie leaned forward, thinking phone. Thinking, gun. “What, for God’s sake?”

  “A canister of Quicksilver.”

  Edie slumped back. “Quicksilver.”

  “Shh!” Wes hissed.

  “Quicksilver. Like, pepper spray.”

  “It’s a lot more than that and you know it,” Wes said. “Or you should. It’s fast and it’s quiet. She said she has at least four sprays’ worth.”

  “OK, OK,” Edie said, raising her hands in surrender. “You’re right. It’s something. It’s better than nothing. But what can we do with it?”

  Wes sighed and picked at a thumbnail. “I had a thought about that. Half-formed.”

  Edie sensed there was something here to dread. “Yeah?”

  “Marta’s fifty-four. She’s in good health, but she’s led kind of a sheltered life, from what I can tell.”

  Edie waited. Wes stole a glance at her, then went back to his thumb.

  “Lee—well, you know what we’re dealing with there. Which isn’t much. The Tanakas might be part of whatever that woman’s cooking up. Like I am. So our presence here might, like Anastasia said, be some protection to the rest of you.”

  “You want me to be the one to try to steal off and get help,” Edie said. She felt sick with fury at this realization—and also just sick. And disappointed, and embarrassed. She had thought Wes liked her. Actually, he had just been sizing her up, gauging whether she might risk her life in his place.

  “Please lower your voice,” Wes whispered. He was pink-faced, and still not making eye contact. Ashamed, maybe. Good. “It wouldn’t just be you. Tia—I talked to Tia. She knows these woods. She feels pretty sure she could get to a Quarantine or even slip back past the Salt Line if necessary. She wants to do it. But she can’t go alone. She’s going to need help.”

  “Berto and Anastasia? What about them? God, Wes. At least they look like two people who could handle a night in the woods. Aren’t they supposed to be survivalists or something?”

  Wes’s face darkened. “Yeah. I thought so, too. But they said no. They’re all for the idea. They just don’t want to be the ones to do it.”

  Edie shook her head, disgusted. “Well, neither do I.”

  “And I can’t make you,” Wes said. “You might not want to leave Jesse. I don’t think it would be a good idea to take him with you. Or maybe it is, and my judgment’s clouded by my dislike of the guy. I’m sorry. He seems like he’d be a liability. But maybe he has—I don’t know—hidden reserves.”

  He did, Edie thought. But not the kind that helped you survive a night flight through a dangerous forest.

  “If you want to do it, I think tonight’s the night. There’s a lot of activity. The ones with the guns are half-drunk. You and Tia tell them that you need to go pee, break off from the group, use the Quicksilver. Then you run.”

  “With no weapons, no food, no Stamps,” Edie said. “No map. No clue. You have got to be kidding me.”

  “It’s a huge risk, I know,” Wes said. “But it’s a risk not acting, too. Some of them are nice, sure. Got themselves a little country idyll out here. Bluegrass band and Town Hall and moonshine. But there’s something we’re not seeing, or they’d leave the zone alone. They’re driven by desperation. That makes them dangerous.”

  “Or maybe they’re driven by their ideals,” Edie said, thinking about June’s story. Thinking about Violet.

  “That might be worse, honestly,” Wes said. “Ideals make people stupid. Believe me, I know.”

  Edie stared at a distant bonfire until her eyes watered. She closed them. The fire printed the backs of her eyelids in neon.

  “You know what I notice about all this?” Edie said.

  “What?” His voice was wary.

  “Tia and me. We’re the disposable ones.”


  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes you do,” Edie said. “You’ve basically laid it out already. Everybody else is precious for some reason. Tia’s the hired help. I’m the girlfriend. We won’t be missed. So we walk our poor asses out into God knows what and maybe die trying to rescue the rest of you.”

  “That’s not the situation at all,” Wes said.

  Edie nodded hard. “Andy tried to warn me off back at the training center. He said that I wasn’t like the rest of you. I wish I’d listened.”

  The band had stopped playing. Jesse, seated now on the edge of the little stage, was smiling and talking to someone, picking at his ukulele in an offhand way. He laughed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Edie thought for a few seconds about escape. Enter the woods. Exit the relationship. An extreme measure, you’d have to call it. Comical, almost.

  “I apologize,” Wes said. “Honestly, Edie. That wasn’t my line of thought at all. It was not. But I see why you’d read it that way.”

  “Big of you,” Edie said.

  Wes gathered his plate and his glass. “It’s a no. Gotcha. Please keep it quiet, though. What we’ve got. Will you do that?”

  Edie sighed. “Of course I will.”

  “I admire you,” Wes said. “I think you could do it. Maybe I think that because Andy is right, and you’re not like the rest of us. Maybe that’s a good thing, Edie.”

  He bobbed his head at her in goodbye, and she watched him walk away. Marta, downhill, waited for him. For the verdict. Edie was sorry to let her down. A little sorry. Maybe that’s a good thing. Easy for him to say.

  Jesse dropped to his bottom beside her. “Feingold,” he said. Growled. “What did he want?”

  “Just chatting,” Edie said.

  Jesse slung his arm around her shoulders. “Should I be jealous?” He was trying to sound like he was joking, like the idea was absurd.

  “No,” Edie said. “I’m not interested in what he has on offer.” She took another swallow of her beer. “Not even a little.”

  —

  Wes shook his head—a quick, negative gesture, imperceptible unless you were looking for it—before taking to the grass beside Marta. Her stomach twisted.

  “She said no?”

  “She said no,” Wes affirmed. He bit his lip. “I think I insulted her, actually. Jeez. I should’ve thought of how it might sound to her. Like—” He shook his head again. “Anyway. It was no.”

  “Perhaps I should be the one. It’s not fair of me to put it on someone else. I came out here. I did the training, such as it was. I’m as good a candidate as anybody.”

  Wes ran his fingers across his smooth scalp. There was a rasping sound—his hair, already starting to grow back in.

  “But I keep thinking about my sons. I’m sorry, Wes. That’s what it boils down to for me. In what scenario am I likelier to see my sons again? I think it’s staying here and seeing what happens.”

  “I understand,” Wes said.

  She patted his hand. “I know you do.”

  “I don’t want you to be the one, either. I don’t feel like there’s anyone else here I can trust. Not for sure.”

  Her gut twisted at that. Could he trust her? Her intentions by him were pure—but she hadn’t told him about her real name, about who her husband was and what he’d asked her to do. She hadn’t revealed to him the means by which she’d smuggled in the Quicksilver masked as a Smokeless. As for that last, he hadn’t asked. Not in so many words. But the question was in his eyes. Should she tell him? She wanted to, in a way—how strange it was, at this point in her life, to feel that her dearest friend in the world was a boy not much older than her sons, a boy she’d only known for a few short weeks—but she also worried that the information could do him more harm than good.

  They sat, watching the flow of the river and the flow of the villagers along its banks.

  “I have no idea what to make of all this,” Marta said after a while. “The people here seem happy. Don’t they?”

  “They are happy,” said a voice from behind them, and Marta jolted so hard that she spilled her glass of water all over her lap.

  “May I join you?”

  June. Marta and Wes stared.

  “That was a stupid question,” June said. “I try not to ask those. What I mean is, will you join me? Or, rather, join me. Let’s go on a walk.”

  “Where?” Marta asked. Another stupid question.

  “Wherever I say,” said June mildly.

  They started upriver, away from the crush of activity around the food, music, and bonfires. Marta, looking over her shoulder at this, noticed that they were being trailed. Thirty feet back, maybe: three figures, armed. Hard to tell in the moonlight, but she thought that one was the big guy from their kidnapping nightmare, Randall. She had believed that he, Andy, Violet, and the other one were absent tonight. Sleeping off their rough all-night march. A foolhardy assumption. Maybe it was a stroke of luck that no one had agreed to stage an escape attempt with Tia.

  They were heading uphill, back toward the flower beds where they’d first spied June. They—the beds—extended as far as Marta could make out in the starlight, a patchwork of tall, slender stems topped with heavy blooms, nodding as if in sleep, rustling eerily in an otherwise imperceptible breeze. June halted beside a bed, reached out, and grabbed a thick, hairy stalk, tilting a red flower toward them—its black eye, its crepe petals.

  “This is why you’re here,” she said. “This flower. My father’s life’s work.”

  “Poppies?” Wes asked.

  “Not exactly,” June said. “It’s a hybrid. Secret recipe. It’s our cash crop and our salvation.”

  “You produce heroin,” Marta said. For the first time since the kidnapping, it occurred to her with a sinking certainty that this situation was connected to David’s situation. The one that necessitated her and the boys hiding out somewhere. Did June know who she was? Had David, instead of protecting her, sent her right into the camp of his enemy?

  “No,” June said sharply. “Heroin is an opiate. I’ve told you this is not a poppy.”

  “Some drug, then,” Marta said, surprised at her own superior tone. The fifteen-gram vial of Salt, hidden in its NicoClean cell camouflage, was still in her knapsack back at Town Hall. She hadn’t used any of it. She hadn’t been tempted to—yet. But a year ago? A month?

  And David, of course. She knew how he made his living. Some of it, at least. She knew, and still she ate the fine foods and drank the fine wine, slept between the silken sheets, walked her bare feet across the cool marble floors. She enjoyed the bounty and accepted it as her due, for having to live with a man she no longer recognized.

  “There are good drugs and bad drugs,” June said. “We make a bit of both, and both of them allow us to survive.”

  Wes ran his finger along the furred stalk. “This is all interesting,” he said. Marta thought he sounded genuine. “But I don’t understand what it has to do with me.”

  “We have distribution and a market for the drug that bankrolls our little operation. Salt. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

  Marta stiffened. Wes shrugged.

  “I can’t say I’m too happy with our business partner,” June said. “Our situation here is precarious. Marta, you said that people here look happy. I told you that we are.”

  “OK, great. You’re happy,” Marta said. “Let us go.”

  June smiled a thin smile. “Our happiness is contingent on the whims of a very bad man. It’s fragile. If that man decides he doesn’t like how we’re doing things, or what we’re doing—we’re done.”

  A very bad man. Marta’s hands started to tremble, and she hid them behind her back.

  “Again,” Wes said, “very interesting, very unfortunate. What’s it to me?”

  June pressed the Stamp scar on her cheekbone
. “This is the only Stamp I’ve received since I was a child. I gave it to myself fourteen years ago. Not because of a bite. I haven’t been bitten in a long time. Wes, I haven’t been bitten in your lifetime. And it’s not because I spend my days wearing fancy long johns, either.”

  Wes fumbled with the pull on his microsuit’s zipper self-consciously.

  “No. This Stamp was an act of solidarity with my people. A symbol of what we’ve lived with. A reminder of what we’ll never again endure.” Aware, it seemed, that her tone had strayed too far from its winning folksiness, she dropped her hand from her cheekbone and wove her fingers together across her midriff, as if she were about to sing a few notes from “Do Re Mi.” “The upshot is that we have a cure. Or, rather, a kind of medicinal repellant. Against the tick bites.”

  “That can’t be true,” Wes said. “If such a thing were even possible with the current technologies, it would already exist. Atlantic Zone alone has spent billions on research. Everyone in the world has been working on this thing, and you’re trying to tell me that the cure’s been out here all along?”

  “Not all along,” June said. “But yes. It’s here. And I tell you, it’s possible. It exists already. My father spent his life hybridizing this flower. I refined the processing methods, and with the help of this community, I standardized an inoculation dosage. Haven’t you noticed our young people? The ones working the flowers earlier today? Did you see a mark on them?”

  Wes was shaking his head, hands on his hips. “I just—I just can’t. I don’t know. If you have what you say you have, I don’t know why you didn’t have Andy or someone on the inside notify the proper authorities.”

  June laughed. “The proper authorities! You’re so accomplished, Mr. Feingold, that I forget how young you are.”

  He flushed dark red. Marta could see this even in the smeary light, and it occurred to her that this was, oddly, the first time Wes had seemed anything other than genial to her. June had triggered a threatening vulnerability in him. She’d be wise, Marta thought, to proceed carefully.