Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

“They’re way too big for me,” Clover complained, clomping down the stairs in their father’s scuffed work boots. Both brothers had lost most of their clothes over the past year, so they’d become dependent on their father’s wardrobe, salvaged from the old house before it had been sold. “I’m wearing three pairs of socks to keep my feet from sliding around.”

  “Better than goin’ barefoot.”

  “Is it, though?”

  “Yeah. It is.” Clive shouldered his bag and led the way back outside.

  “How are things at Notre Fille?” Clover asked.

  “Madness. As always.” Clive had spent that morning as he did most mornings, helping Burns administrate what was now known as the Civic Protectorate; the erstwhile military organization was tasked with overseeing the reconstruction effort—not to mention quite a bit of original construction as well. “Zeno wants the whole city wired for electricity by the end of the year, and apparently we’re expected to do most of the work.”

  “She’s right, though,” Clover said. “It’ll be a lot easier to create the infrastructure now than after everything gets rebuilt.”

  “I know, and Burns is fine with it, but Athène is making things difficult. She says that she visited Sophia once, and all those electric lights made it so you couldn’t see the stars.”

  “So what?”

  “I guess she likes the stars.”

  Clover frowned. “I kinda like the stars too.”

  Another shock of dislocation to see the men guarding the Western Gate wearing something other than red and gold; the old uniforms had been retired before a new design could be chosen, so the guards were dressed in their civvies. At Athène’s insistence, they were armed only with swords, as if time had turned back to before Chang excavated Hell. They nodded at Clive and Clover—perhaps recognizing them, perhaps not. Inevitably the Hamill brothers had become rather well-known, for reasons both good and bad.

  “What do you think Da would’ve made of all this?” Clive said.

  “What part?”

  “A Wesah chieftain running the Anchor. A Sophian overseeing the Library. All of it.”

  “I don’t know. The Da we grew up with, I think it would’ve horrified him. But the one who came back from Sophia—who knows? Maybe this is exactly what he hoped would happen.”

  “Yeah.” Clive hesitated. “I hope I feel it, at some point. Losing him, I mean. It still hasn’t hit me. And that doesn’t seem right somehow. Like I didn’t really love him.”

  “There’s no point thinking about it that way. You feel how you feel.”

  “I guess.”

  They didn’t speak for a while, and then they did, but not about anything that mattered. Clive shed his wool jacket. The day was cold but they were moving fast, following the course of the Tiber, which itself was only following the inescapable dictates of water and gravity. That was gravity with a small g now, gravity that Clover insisted could be scientifically explained—except insofar as any question of cause and effect eventually reached a point of inexplicability, except insofar as everything could be called a mystery, or an aspect of the divine.

  When they passed someone on the road, they stopped to shake hands and discuss the news of the day. When they were hungry, they ate something from their packs. When darkness fell, they stopped and put up the canvas tent, cooked beans over the fire, slept. When the sun rose, they rose with it, continued on. They had a mission, of course, but it was a moving target, maybe even a fool’s errand. Clive didn’t mind. In fact, he felt this was the perfect amount of intention—traveling as much for the journey as the destination. Three days out and the Tiber deepened, slowed; frost collected in still pockets, cracked underfoot. The road bent up and away from the river, forcing them to hike along the steep, rocky bank so they could remain close enough to see what they needed to see.

  Clover was out in front a ways, kicking at stones for the hell of it, when Clive thought of something their mother had once told him.

  “You know they wanted to change your name?”

  Clover stopped, and for a moment Clive was afraid he’d hurt his brother’s feelings somehow. He could still remember the days when the smallest slight could set Clover to brooding for days. But so much had happened since then. So much had changed. Somewhere along the line, his little brother had become a man.

  “Really?” he said, turning around. “When?”

  “You were about three, so I would’ve been five, and I guess you wouldn’t answer to ‘Clover.’ Plus people were always getting our names confused.”

  “Eddie Poplin used to do that all the time.”

  “Yeah. Michael thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”

  “And Gemma would always try to cover for it by changing the subject, ’cause she knew how much I hated being called Clive.”

  They let a moment of silence pass for Eddie, Michael, and Gemma without needing to acknowledge it.

  “Anyway,” Clive continued, “they tried to think up new names for you. Da wanted to go with something from the Filia, but they settled on some old family name of Mama’s. For a whole week they called you Emmett.”

  “Emmett?” Clover cried, offended at the very sound of it. “Emmett?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No! So what happened after that?”

  “Well, at first you didn’t seem to notice. But after a couple of days, you started bawling every time either one of them said it. Like you were allergic…” Clive trailed off. Clover was squinting at something down in the river. “What is it? Do you see something?”

  “Look there, between the rocks.”

  A glint of silver, caught in a backwater: one of the barrels Bernstein had sent downstream before the Library was set ablaze. A fragment of the knowledge collected over the centuries, one step in an unending staircase that connected the benighted past to the enlightened future—bobbing there as innocently as a duckling.Their job wasn’t to bring them back, of course; the Civic Protectorate would come with a wagon for that. Clive and Clover had only been tasked with dragging the barrels out of the river where possible and marking their locations on a map.

  “I always loved my name,” Clover said. Clive had almost forgotten they’d been in the middle of a conversation.

  “Yeah?”

  “Of course. It’s a plant, first of all. And a good one, by the way. Smells nice. Tastes nice. Horses love it. Bees love it. Plus, it’s lucky.”

  “Some of the time.”

  “Yeah. Some of the time. Also…” Clover paused, and Clive could sense something like embarrassment in the silence. He gave his brother time to work through it, watching the barrel slowly spinning in the scintillant water, like a lazy compass point. “Also, I like that it sounds like your name. I didn’t always, but I do now. I don’t even know why. I just do.” Clover smiled experimentally, seeking the same thing he’d always been seeking, ever since he was a red-faced and squalling selkie gripping Clive’s index finger like it was the most important thing in the world. “What about you?” he said.

  Clive felt the foolish grin growing on his own face. It was a wonderful thing, when you could make someone happy just by telling them the truth. And suddenly the future didn’t feel quite so uncertain, or so frightening. They’d nearly killed each other. They’d ended up on opposite sides of a war. And yet here they were. Still standing. Still brothers. Still friends.

  “You know what?” Clive said, throwing an arm over Clover’s shoulder. “I feel exactly the same way.”

  Epilogue

  SUNLIGHT—A BRIGHT WHITE LINE BETWEEN the curtains, slicing open the dark room like a cantaloupe, advertising the quintessential summer day about to begin.

  Nora hated sunlight.

  She rubbed the sleep from her eyes angrily, as if she might dull the glare that way. If she’d had her way, it would always be raining, or at the very least, there’d be a nice thick layer of clouds between her and the sun, turning the golden light to pewter, casting the whole world in a lovely,
morbid pall. Her parents had taken her on a visit to Edgewise a few months ago, and she remembered the difference the weather made to the color of the ocean, which her da explained was functioning as a giant mirror. On a sunny day, it was just one dull, flat expanse of stolen blue. On a rainy day, it became molten silver, cresting and collapsing in a never-ending dance, spackled with droplets, beating insistent as a hungry baby against the shoreline.

  She put on an old blouse and ratty jeans—how much more enjoyable it was getting dressed in winter, layering colors and textures, and nothing hardly ever needing washing because you weren’t sweaty and smelly at the end of the day—and went to the kitchen. Her father was already out for the morning, and she could hear her mother tending to little Blanca, cooing and tutting as if she were a child herself.

  “I’m going for a walk!” Nora shouted, and didn’t bother listening to the response. It was always some injunction or another—don’t go there, don’t talk to him, don’t touch the whatever. As if she needed to be told over and over again. She was eleven years old, not four. She knew what was what.

  “Morning, Nora!”

  That would be Mr. Selman, the old widower who lived in the apartment upstairs. He seemed to spend his whole day looking out the window, checking on everyone. Nora didn’t like being watched, so she stuck out her tongue at him, but he just laughed as if she were only pretending not to like him. She wanted to tell him that she actually didn’t like him, but somehow whenever you got into a conversation with Mr. Selman, he’d start talking about some dumb thing and you ended up having to stand there listening for an hour. So she just marched right past him and on down to the Green Road, joining the weekend strollers as they perused the wheeled farmer’s stalls that would spend the day rotating slowly around the city, such that each quarter got slightly worse produce, until the Seventh would be left with nothing but rotten apples and wilted cabbage.

  She had two bronze shekels of chore money clinking in her pocket and used one to buy a bunch of bananas. As she walked south, she tore one away from its brethren and began to peel it. She did so slowly, and for emphasis, threw in a drawn-out and agonizing scream, as if flaying someone alive. A middle-aged couple gave her a dirty look; she smiled back, chomping lustily into the top of the banana and chewing with her mouth open until they turned away in disgust. Somewhere close by, music was playing—cheery guitar and accordion. Nora hated cheery music. She only liked slow ballads sung by miserable people about how miserable they were. It was best if the balladeer was ugly too, and if her guitar was a little out of tune, or she had a dirty old dog, or no shoes. Then you could believe what she sang about and relate to it without thinking she was just lying to you so you’d throw some shekels in her case.

  Nora reached the gate and kept on going around the Ring Road, toward Portland Park and the Tiber. Her plan was to keep walking until she found a place without any people, but this turned out to be harder than she’d expected. It was the first nice day since the warm turn, and a Sunday to boot; the banks of the river were dense with canoodling couples and screaming babies and old people looking all wrinkly and content. She’d probably walked at least a mile already, and had decided she would tell her father it had been five, even though she knew he wouldn’t believe her. Sometimes you had to describe things the way they felt, not the way they were.

  The sun beat down a little harder every minute, like some annoying toddler trying to get your attention. She threw a banana at it, but came up a little short, and the fruit ended up landing a few feet shy of the riverbank.

  “Hey!”

  The boy was maybe a year younger than her, dressed in a leather skirt and a bandanna: a member of some local naasyoon come into the city for the day. She hadn’t seen him sitting in the bower of a weeping willow whose branches looked like so many fishing lines dangling in the water.

  “Did you throw this at me?” he asked in perfect English, holding up the banana.

  “No. I just threw it,” Nora replied. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  The boy had begun to peel the banana. “Finders keepers.” He took a bite, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed. “You wanna see my toy?”

  “No,” Nora said, which wasn’t true. “I don’t play with toys,” she added, which also wasn’t true. “But you can show me if you really want.”

  “Okay. It’s here.”

  She stepped under the shade of the willow. Somehow it was hot even here.

  “I hate sunny days,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because they make you all sunburned. And because you feel like you’re wasting the day if you just stay in the house reading a book, so you go outside, but then there are people everywhere, so you couldn’t enjoy yourself even if you wanted to.”

  “You can’t enjoy a thing if other people are enjoying it too?”

  “No,” she said curtly, rather than think about his question. “So what is this supposed to be?”

  The “toy” was made up of a few wooden dowels, a diamond-shaped swatch of silk, and a long spool of twine, all laid out in the dirt at the boy’s feet. Nora was annoyed that she didn’t know what it was—and even more annoyed that she wanted to.

  “I’ve been waiting for the glue to dry,” the boy explained. “But I think it should be ready by now.” He picked it up by the frame. The silk had been affixed to the dowels like a sail to a mast. It fluttered in the breeze, light dancing on the surface of the fabric. “We’ll need more wind than this. Come on.”

  Nora desperately wanted to tell the boy she was bored and had better things to do, but she couldn’t leave before she knew what his dumb toy did. They left the river behind and scrambled up some big rocks to the south. Beyond was a hilly field where groups of children were playing kickball and tag while the adults lounged about on blankets. The women wore big fancy hats to keep the monstrous sun at bay. The men smoked cigarillos and looked extremely serious.

  “Just tell me what it does,” Nora said, but the boy ignored her, and she immediately regretted admitting curiosity. He kept walking until he’d reached the top of one of the hills. Then he handed the spindle of twine to her. “Here.”

  She refused it on principle; nobody willingly gave up anything worth having. “Why? What is it? What does it do?”

  The boy laughed. “Are you scared?”

  “Of course not.”

  She grabbed the spindle; one end of the twine was tied to a corner of the toy’s frame, like a dog’s leash. The boy backed away, twine unspooling as he went. When he was about ten feet away, he stopped. “Ready?” he said.

  “For what?”

  He turned around and launched the silk diamond into the air. It arced up, and then by some inexplicable magic, didn’t fall back to the earth. Instead the wind caught the fabric and held the whole thing aloft. Nora understood the spindle now; without prompting, she gave the line more slack, freeing the diamond to rise even higher into the blue. Some of the other kids in the field had noticed, and now they ran over to try to figure out how the toy worked. Nora also saw an elderly couple glance at the diamond and grimace, as if there were something immoral about it. She liked that.

  “How’d you figure out how to make this?” she said to the boy.

  He shrugged. “I was watching the leaves swirl around a couple weeks ago, and I thought about how you could probably make your own leaf, if you wanted. That’s how I tried it first, with just one sorta spine thing running down the middle, like a leaf has, but it didn’t work. I figured it needed to be more—”

  “Like a sail,” Nora interrupted.

  “Yeah.”

  Something surfaced in her memory, a conversation she’d only half attended to, because it was about her mother’s childhood and so boring by definition. “It’s called a kite,” she said.

  “A kite?”

  “Yeah.”

  The wind fought her; the kite gyrated in the invisible eddies of the sky, a metaphor for something she couldn’t quite determine. She fed it more line and then
reeled it in, back and forth—a delicate, instinctual dance—until finally something shifted irrevocably and the diamond plummeted to the ground like a meteor. The boy ran to fetch it.

  “Is it okay?” Nora called out.

  The boy held it up for her to see; one of the dowels had snapped clean in half, and the silk was torn. He carried it back to her, stoic on the surface but clearly dejected over the loss.

  “I can fix it,” Nora said.

  “Really?”

  Too late to take it back, so nowhere to go but forward, deeper into the unfamiliar waters of voluntary human interaction. “My ma and my uncle both like to tinker with things, so we’ve got a whole workshop downstairs. At my house, I mean. If you want. You don’t have to. It’s stupid.”

  “No, that’d be really nice,” the boy said, sniffling a little. “I just have to be back home before dark.”

  Her invitation accepted, Nora felt no need to be civil anymore. “Obviously. I didn’t invite you for a sleepover. You’re a boy. We’ll just fix your dumb toy and then you can go.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  He walked beside her, cradling the broken kite, not saying anything. Nora had to admit there was something nice about moving silently through the world with someone; maybe her baby sister wouldn’t be too much of an imposition after all. Nora would just have to teach her how not to be an annoying idiot, like almost everybody else in the world.

  “We might have to be quiet once we get to the house. There’s a baby. She’s always sleeping, except when you want her to.”

  “Okay.”

  “She won’t like you. She doesn’t like anyone except me and my momma.”

  “Okay.”

  The sun disappeared behind a bank of fluffy white clouds just as a breeze picked up. Nora shivered. She and the Wesah boy would fix the kite together. It was fun, fixing things. She’d always liked the idea that with a little effort, you could transform a piece of junk into something useful again. Fixing even the tiniest little thing—a snapped dowel, a torn scrap of silk—was enough to make a person think that maybe everything could be fixed, maybe everything wrong could be set right again.