The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “It’s lunchtime,” Violet said, taking a seat on the big old sofa with its tattered upholstery and blown springs. She remembered the day it had come in on a scavenging trip. I’ll take it if no one else’s interested, June had quickly said, and of course no one had expressed their interest after that. “What are you doing sleeping?”

  “The usual. Up late worrying. And my sciatica’s been bothering me.”

  “She don’t do her exercises like she’s supposed to,” Roz said. She’d gone to the kitchen, and she came back with the teakettle in hand. “You going to want some, Vi?”

  “No,” Violet said. “Thanks,” she remembered to add.

  “Lunch? We’re having cheese sandwiches.”

  Violet thought about it. “Just the bread. And some water.”

  “Ask her if she wants one of the cookies Loti made,” June said.

  Roz threw June an exasperated but amused look and turned her head pointedly at Violet. “Do you want one of the cookies Loti made?”

  “Sure,” Violet said. “Two of them.”

  “And the bread, too?”

  “Yes,” Violet said.

  June was rocking now and kneading her palm into her hip. “What a lunch. Bread and cookies. I hope you still brush your teeth morning and night, Violet. The last thing you need on top of everything else is an infection in your mouth.”

  “I know,” Violet said. “You’ve said that before.”

  “I’ve said it a million times. It’s still true.”

  Violet shrugged and scraped her thumbnails against each other.

  “I don’t know how you’re supposed to get over a nutritional deficiency when you just eat bread and cookies for lunch.”

  “The cookies were your idea,” Violet said.

  “I guess it’s better than nothing.” June stopped rocking and peered at Violet. “Are you sick?”

  “Huh? No.”

  “I heard you didn’t make it to harvest this morning. I almost sent someone in your place to fetch the lunches.”

  “I guess you can’t keep a secret around here,” Violet said, savoring the irony. “I had a headache, but it’s better now.”

  “It looks bad for me when you skip out on your part of things. I can’t seem to treat my own daughter differently than I expect everyone else to treat theirs. People are sensitive right now. Especially after Miles and Leeda.”

  Violet bit back a sharp retort and said instead, “Well, that’s what I’m here about. I’d like to take on more of a role again. I’ve been talking to Doc about it, and he agrees I’m doing better. I’ve put on some weight.”

  “I noticed,” June said.

  Violet cleared her throat. “Anyway, whatever it is you’re planning with the Zoners, I want to be a part of that. I want to help.”

  June stopped rocking. “Why?”

  “Because I’ve always helped.”

  “Close to always,” June said. “If I’m going to be honest, you haven’t been quite yourself lately.”

  “I came through for you getting the hostages here, didn’t I?”

  June’s gaze sharpened. “I guess that’s true.”

  “And I let you use me as a prop to tell your story. Your ‘saving Violet’s life’ story.”

  Now June dropped her eyes. “That, too.”

  “I’m telling you I want to help now. So let me. What’s the plan?”

  “All right,” June said as Roz came back in with a tray and handed out plates and glasses. On Violet’s were two thick slices of Errol’s sourdough bread, buttered, and two big oatmeal cookies. This was one of those times when Violet wished she could smile. She loved Roz a lot. She wasn’t sure Roz knew it, or that she’d done a good enough job of letting Roz know it.

  “Andy got back last night, finally. The thing I’d thought might happen—it happened. For better or worse.” June bit into her sandwich and chewed.

  “We saw the footage,” Roz offered while June swallowed and sipped some Salt tea.

  “I had asked him to stay and monitor the feeds for information. So I knew not to expect him back right away. But I’ve been climbing the walls.”

  “No pun intended?” said Roz.

  June gave her a sour look.

  Violet peeled the crust off a bread slice and tucked it into her mouth, processing all of this. “What now, then?” she said finally.

  “That’s what I spent the night mulling over. All of this hinges on something we can’t know, and that’s what they did with the bodies once they had them inside. If they followed procedure, they dumped them into the incinerator and filed a report, and it’ll take weeks before that info should trickle down to Perrone. If it ever does. And even then, it shouldn’t mean anything to him. There’s no reason for him to expect that four people from the excursion would break off and end up shot at the Wall.

  “But there will be video surveillance. And maybe one of them would have been recognized. That singer. Andy says he’s on a popular webshow. I never once thought about that.”

  “And Andy didn’t think to mention it to you until it was too late to do anything about it,” Roz said irritably.

  “If someone saw him, knew his face . . .” June shrugged. “Well, the situation might be real different. Andy didn’t see a big news story, and that’s good, so they’ll have kept it hush-hush. But that doesn’t mean anything when David Perrone’s involved. Anyway, there’s an argument—a good one—for leaving it like this and seeing what happens. We follow through with Feingold like we talked about and have Andy take them back to Quarantine on schedule.”

  Roz was shaking her head, lips pressed together.

  “I know,” June said. “My father was a wait-and-see type of man, and it cost him. Besides, we have Marta Perrone. Do you realize how extraordinary that is? All along I thought Feingold was the ticket, and then Marta Perrone is dropped in our laps. And I wouldn’t have even known it if she hadn’t told me.”

  “Why do you think she told you?” Violet asked.

  “Because she’s no fool. She bought herself some time.”

  “How much time?

  “I don’t know,” June said. “Still, I think I’d be inclined to wait if not for the stolen seeds. That’s what keeps me up at night. More than the Pocketz deal. Even more than what he did to that other village. We’ve been so goddamn careful, and he got to us anyway.” She leaned forward and scooted her chair toward Violet. Took her hands. “Your beautiful hands.” She ran her fingertips along the tendons, knuckles. “I’ve always loved them. You have elegant hands. If you’d have been born in a different time you could have been a surgeon or a musician . . .”

  This was another thing Violet had heard many times over.

  June stopped, frowned. Turned Violet’s hand over. “What is this?” She touched one of Violet’s most recent Stamp scars, a grayish-red weal on the inside of her wrist that had slipped into view out from under her sleeve. “Violet?” Her eyes were wide and frightened. “Is this a Stamp?”

  Violet jerked back her hand. “No. I did it when I was helping Errol with the baking a few weeks ago.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “No, goddammit!” Violet shouted. “Why are you like this with me? For God’s sake, I’m thirty-seven years old! You make me fucking hate myself!”

  She wasn’t even sure why she said this last thing. It burst out of her. And it wasn’t precisely true, though it circled some truth, some even darker thing Violet couldn’t dare to name, even to herself.

  June pulled back. Stood. Very deliberately, she tucked her cloud of frizzy hair behind each ear.

  “June,” Roz said warningly, and June held up a stopping hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but her voice was cold. “So you want to help. That’s why you’re here.”

  Violet, not meeting her eye, nodded.

&n
bsp; “I think I’m decided. We’ll take Marta Perrone to the Lenoir house tomorrow morning. We’ll have her contact her husband and see what that buys us. If we tell him we’re ready to take his deal, let him have the credit and the money for Salt, maybe he’ll leave us alone. We hold on to Feingold as collateral. If he won’t work with us, he’s not going to be able to fall back on the microsuit deal.” She paused. “But I don’t see why he won’t do it. We’re not asking for much.”

  “You’re not asking for anything at all,” Violet said. “Except not to be killed.”

  “And you think that’s nothing?” June asked sharply, her pale gray eyes flashing.

  Violet snapped her head Roz’s way—a gesture she paid for when the scarred skin around her neck pulled painfully. “Do you agree with her? Roll over and play dead?”

  “Yes, I do,” Roz said. “I trust your mother. I always have. We have four hundred sixty-six lives to protect, and the most valuable thing we’ve got is this town. So yes, if we get our lives out of the bargain and nothing else, I’m fine with that. Thrilled with it, in fact.”

  June peered at Violet. “Do you have something to say?”

  Violet thought. After a few beats, she shook her head.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You still want to be part of the group going to Lenoir tomorrow? Are you up for it? Honey, are you behind us?”

  “Yes,” Violet said. “I want to go. And yes, I’m behind you.”

  “I’m glad, honey,” June said. She looked to Violet, briefly, like an elderly version of herself. “I’m glad.”

  After lunch, Violet returned to her bed at the bunkhouse. She was tired, so tired. Afternoons were the worst for that lately—around 1:00, 2:00, she started to feel as if she were not walking but wading, and her limbs ached dully from the effort. The bunkhouse was empty, the others still out at the fields, probably eating their packed lunches now, perched in the shade of the flowers, brown young legs tangled up together. The thought didn’t make her angry, or wistful, as it once it had. She begrudged them nothing. Not their youth, not their beauty. Violet had something else, something better.

  She lowered herself to her mattress with a sigh and nudged off her boots, toe to heel. It was sweet to lie down. And she needed to think hard about what was to come, but first a nap. She drew a light blanket over herself, nestled into her pillow. Sunlight printed hazy dots against her closing eyelids.

  Before she drifted off—by habit, by reflex—she put down her hand and wormed her fingers under the fitted sheet, nails catching the edge of the slit she’d carved into the mattress about a month ago. She pushed her fingers in, flexing until her middle finger touched it: the edge of the seed pouch. Reassured, she withdrew her hand, rolled to her right side, and slid one arm under her pillow, the other around her growing middle. She wouldn’t risk having this baby out here, losing it, dying in a bed of blood the way her own mother had.

  She wouldn’t.

  Eighteen

  Edie had barely begun the final novel in the fat Austen compendium, Persuasion—“A few years before, Anne Elliott had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early”—when the door to the storage shed opened. She didn’t know the time, but the slant of light through the narrow windows told her that this was earlier than usual, perhaps by as much as half an hour.

  The one who entered—for the second time today—was Violet. Odd for her to tend to this task more than once in a day; odd, too, that she was early.

  “Her,” Violet said to the person manning the door now. Randall. Edie hated Randall the most of the guards; though, actually, she didn’t really hate the others, even Joe, who struck her as decent people driven by desperation to actions even they weren’t entirely comfortable with. Not Randall, though. He was—she could tell—a bully and a blowhard. She hoped there never came a day when she was left alone with him.

  Then Edie noticed where Violet was pointing. On reflex she touched her chest in the universal gesture of “Who, me?”

  “Her?” Randall replied in disbelief. “Are you sure you don’t want to just watch the door while I go? I can haul it without any help. Or at least take the big guy.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do it, and I didn’t ask for the big guy,” Violet said sharply. “You,” she said to Edie. “Grab the water cooler. You’re going to the well with me.”

  “I don’t have any shoes,” Edie said.

  “You won’t need them. It isn’t too far.”

  Doubtful, but excited about the thought of fresh air and sky, Edie folded her book open and facedown on the floor, stood, and dusted off her bottom, which must be so grimy by now as to make such an effort pointless. Wes looked at her with wide eyes. Edie shrugged.

  “Come on,” Violet said. “Grab a handle.”

  She took one of the cooler handles and followed Violet out of the shed; it swung between them, banging awkwardly against the door as they went.

  “We’re going this way,” Violet said, indicating upriver with her free hand.

  For a few moments they plodded forward in silence. The ground was damp, and Edie’s feet were quickly soaked, but still, she didn’t mind. The air had a fresh, after-rain summer smell, and the lowering sun brindled the river. God, it felt so good to walk, to really extend her legs. She drew some odd looks from the few villagers they passed this far upstream, but no one asked Violet about her. No one said much to Violet at all. A nod, a “hidey,” a small wave. And Violet herself made no reply.

  They reached not a well—or at least the stone-lined ring in the ground Edie had pictured—but a large galvanized hand pump with a poured concrete base. “Get the lid off and the lip under there,” Violet said, adding, as Edie complied, “They’re all dead.”

  If Edie thought anything in the ten bewildered seconds she spent trying to process this statement, it was, vaguely, that Violet was as crazy as she was scary. Then she looked at Violet’s face—into that startlingly blue eye, the white so damp and fragile surrounded by such ravaged flesh—and the half-formed thought drifted away.

  “What?” Edie managed.

  “Your people. The four June sent back home, supposedly.” She started cranking the pump and a gusher of water rushed out. “They were shot by border guards trying to cross over. June knew it might happen. She sent them knowing it might.” Violet cleared her throat. “Hoping it might.”

  Jesse. Tears spiked her eyes and she rubbed them fiercely away. You and I split up, and that’s the end, he had said. And he’d been right.

  “But why?” Edie said.

  Violet watched the cooler fill. “She’s in over her head. She didn’t know what to do with all of you, and she knew she couldn’t make you all cooperate.” It was hard to read Violet’s scarred face, its limited range of movement. “She wanted the problem to fix itself.”

  How could that diminutive woman with the kindly aunt’s fluff of hair have done such a thing? That woman Edie had come so goddamn close to admiring?

  Edie, not caring about ticks or about Violet or what anyone else might see, sat, put her head between her knees, and wept. She hadn’t cried throughout this whole ordeal. Not once. But now, she gave in. She cried for Jesse and the others, and she cried for herself. Because a person who would do what Violet was saying June had done was a person who would do pretty much anything.

  “You need to pull it together. If you come back looking like you’ve been crying people are going to ask questions. Here.” Violet pressed something into Edie’s hand. Cool, damp. A rag she’d run under the well water. Edie held it against her eyes.

  “Why did you tell me?” Edie asked, words muffled against the cloth.

  “So you’ll listen when I ask for your help.”

  —

  It took Edie and Violet twenty minutes to haul the cooler back to the storage shed. They progressed in units of a dozen
or so shuffling steps before one or the other had to stop and catch her breath. At least it gave Edie an excuse for coming back with her face damp and her breath hitching, though the efforts made it difficult for her to think ahead, to plan how she was going to break this news to Berto and Ken. Especially Berto. She remembered Anastasia’s flat certainty that they’d all be killed by their captors. Had she really believed it or was it bravado? The four had, if Edie understood Violet, all been within sight of the Wall when they were taken down. So close—if they’d harbored doubts, they must have been on the verge then of believing. Which was cruel, but maybe also better. Maybe it had all happened so suddenly that they didn’t have time to change their minds again. There was hope—and then there was blackness.

  But this was still nothing she could explain to the others. To Berto. There had been Anastasia’s flippant fatalism on the walk to Ruby City, but there had also been the dogged hope of a woman injecting herself with fertility drugs in a bathroom in the godforsaken out-of-zone wastes, a woman who believed enough in the future—one possible future—to do that to herself again, and again, and again.

  “Look at you two. I don’t know why you didn’t just let me do it,” Randall said as they approached. He came forward, rifle pushed around to his back, and grabbed the cooler before they could muster the breath to protest—though not as easily as he’d expected to, Edie noted. He bounced it a little, setting off the contents to loudly sloshing, to save face. “Get the door for me, Violet. I’ll take it from here.”

  Violet gave him a look of disgust that Randall missed entirely. Then she went to the door and drew her key out from where it was tucked under her shirt.

  “Like your little walk?” Randall asked Edie.

  “Sure,” she said dully.

  His face was reddening, but he bounced the cooler again and took a deep breath through his nose. “Violet must like you.” He said this loud enough for Violet to hear. “Violet doesn’t usually like anybody.”

  Edie, whose mind was full of the things Violet had told her, just stared ahead, waiting for the door to open.