Sinead laughed. “Well, Jesus. Thank god, you arrived to point out the injustice of it all.”
The two of them sat in a cold silence as Sinead wrapped the two bandages around his ankle. She finished after a long quiet, setting his well wrapped foot back down on the pillow. “There. Can I get you anything else while I’m here?”
Theron glanced down at his foot and frowned. “No. You’ve done enough to alleviate your guilty conscience.”
Sinead’s nostrils flared and he almost relished to see it.
“You’ll be happy to know you and Darrell and startlingly similar. Have a nice day,” she said. Then she turned and marched out the front door of the trailer, pulling her coat up around her jawline before she disappeared from sight.
Despite his anger, he felt almost disappointed to see her go.
Theron spent the next two days curled up on his grandmother’s couch, his sore ankle wrapped and elevated with pillows and blankets. He learned very little about The Extension as he convalesced, Grandma Pearl focusing wholly on organizing and dispensing the supplies from Baird Davenport’s crates much of the first day. Each family group stopped by her house over the course of the day to receive shares from the cache – a share per each family member. Theron watched Pearl divide two massive blocks of cheese, ten jars of peanut butter, or thirty loaves of bread – he then saw gratitude the likes of which he’d never seen before as frail looking fathers and mothers arrived to pick up their share.
These things were meant to last a month.
Though there were only thirty two people on The Extension, there was no question this food wasn’t enough. Especially since they were bears.
All of them. Every single person on The Extension was a shifter.
“Thank you, Chief,” they’d say as they bowed their heads to Pearl Holden. She gave them a friendly nod, patted their children on the head, and sent them on their way.
“Thank you, Chief. Qujannamiik,”
Theron knew that phrase. His mother taught him to say it when he was a boy, back before Karen and Pearl’s fighting finally ended and Karen severed ties with everything up north.
Theron’s ankle was well enough to walk by the second day, and given Grandma Pearl’s stoic nature, he was aching for human contact. He found his mind was fixated on one human in particular, but he didn’t dare seek her out.
“Bring this down to the third house on the right and say a proper hello to your Uncle Gregory and Aunt Pam. They will appreciate it,” Grandma Pearl said, and the tone was hauntingly familiar. Chief Richard Talbot had spoken with a similar air of authority.
Hell, even his father spoke with that same ‘respect your elders, tend to your family’ kind of purpose. Still, he’d never so much as spoken to them on the phone. He wasn’t sure what use he’d be as company.
The Extension houses were all quiet, the same stillness as Pearl’s trailer. There were voices in the distance at times, even children’s laughter, but for the most part it was still – as though the cold stifled sound itself that far north.
Uncle Gregory came to the door with a confused look, but offered up a half smile when he saw Theron standing there, his arms heavy with supplies.
“Come in, come in. You’re Karen’s boy, right?”
Theron nodded, stepping into the almost identical trailer. A woman with long black hair, graying slightly at the temples, sat in a ratty old recliner, a worn paperback copy of Tom Sawyer in her hands. She glanced up at Theron and was quickly on her feet to greet him. Gregory took the supplies from Theron as Pam offered him a hug.
“God, you couldn’t mistake that jawline. Karen’s son, indeed.”
Theron forced a smile and took up residence on their weathered couch. The room was so similar to Pearl’s, he almost joked about a glitch in the Matrix.
Pamela caught him eyeing the place. “This was an old base of some kind. Army or Navy. As far as we can tell. It’s not the only fishing village that’s been abandoned this far north, but it is the only one with a fifteen foot electric fence around the perimeter.”
Theron gave a half laugh and Gregory appeared at his shoulder, offering a cup of tea. Theron took it and was startled to find it actually tasted like tea. Pearl watered hers down to nearly tasteless.
Uncle Gregory offered a smile before sitting down in the seat across from him. Gregory had short hair and deep lines across his cheeks. Still, despite the weathered state of his face, he shared features with his little sister that couldn’t be denied. Gregory looked just like Theron’s mom.
And like Theron’s mom, he was particular about hospitality. The guest gets the best cut of cake, the last slice of bread, the biggest marshmallow in their cocoa. Here, Theron got the full tea bag in his tea, steeped until it was spent.
Theron felt guilty, and as a result, determined to drink it all.
“You look to be getting along better, yes? How is the ankle feeling?” Pamela asked. Theron didn’t know much of Pamela. He’d heard Karen talk about Gregory over the years, always speaking fondly of her older brother. Yet his wife, who seemed a gentler sort than the rest of the Holdens, he knew nothing of.
Theron shrugged. “It’s feeling better. Thank you.”
“I’m sorry that you had such a rough introduction to the place. Darrell is understandably suspicious. But I see our Sinead patched you up well enough.”
Theron frowned. He hadn’t crossed paths with his cousin since the incident by the fence. “I guess she did,” Theron said, smiling at his uncle. “She’s an interesting addition to the clan, no?”
Gregory chuckled. “You’re telling me. Don’t know what we’d do without her, though.”
“Yeah, I was actually wondering – Grandma Pearl isn’t exactly the most talkative person.”
Gregory chuckled. “No, that she isn’t.”
“Would you mind telling me what’s going on up here? I stopped at the old reserve, but as per usual, I couldn’t get anyone to tell me a damn thing. How did you all end up here?”
Before his aunt and uncle could speak, the front door to the house opened and a young boy with similarly short hair to his father marched inside, followed by a second small boy. They gave Theron a quick once over, then turned to their parents to say hello. Theron quickly learned their names were Sivoy and James.
Sivoy. Buniq. Pauloosie.
In among the familiar English names, there were traditional names. That wasn’t uncommon in Theron’s tribe either, but most had one of each, not one or the other.
Karen once told him she’d thought to choose an Inuit name for him, but felt his spirit was more of his father’s tribe than hers. He didn’t protest. Theron wasn’t exactly the most common of names, either.
Pam and Gregory found a way to side step the question. Just as Pearl had.
Theron sighed. He wasn’t unaccustomed to that lack of candor.
He sat with his aunt and uncle until his tea was done, sharing details of home back down south in Maine. They seemed to relish the simpler details. Finally, Theron took his leave before Gregory could offer a second cup of tea.
Theron stood outside the small houses, scanning the world around him as though some wall might have answers written on it if he just looked long enough. Finally, he shoved his hands in his pockets and started marching down toward the gate. If he had any chance of finding a straight talker, he knew exactly where to look.
CHAPTER SIX
SINEAD
Sinead was standing at the back corner of her classroom when the door opened. The children were done for the day, having enjoyed her lesson on gravity.
At least it seemed as though they did.
She felt the presence at the back of the school room for a long moment. The lack of greeting startled her after a moment, and she turned to find the stranger, Theron Talbot standing at the back of the classroom.
Her throat grew tight at the sight of her. She turned away so he wouldn’t see her reaction. “Are you just gonna gawk all day, or do you have something to s
ay?”
“Sorry, didn’t want to disturb you.”
Sinead turned around, setting the stone on her desk. “It’s -” She caught herself. She’d heard the frustrated tone, knew he was about to storm right back out, and she wanted to stop him. If for no other reason than simple curiosity.
Curiosity. Sure. That’s all it was, she told herself.
“It’s fine. Come in. Sorry, the heater’s back off now that the kids are gone.”
Theron made his way slowly across the room, pulling up a desk near the front of the room. He looked almost comical with his long legs tucked under the small desk.
Sinead turned back to the chalkboard, straightening up from the confines of her coat. The air seemed to warm in his presence again. She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. Her hair was up today, leaving just a couple wisps of ginger hanging at the sides of her face. She had a fleeting moment of regret. She always thought she looked prettier with her hair down.
Wait, why do you care about looking prettier? This guy is an abrasive ass.
“So to what do I owe the pleasure?”
Theron raised an eyebrow. “Pleasure? I’m sure.”
There was that jackass tone, again.
Great. He came to be an asshole.
Theron exhaled out his nose and met her gaze. “Alright, well. Look,” he said, leaning onto his desk. “I’m having trouble here. You see, no one will talk to me. About anything. I say I want to do a perimeter check, Gram hisses like a snake at me. I ask how everyone got up here, I get ignored. I ask how you ended up here, given you’re clearly not -”
Her eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t say anything.
“You’re not exactly a family member. So, yeah. You said you haven’t been allowed to leave in two years, so then – why did everybody come here?”
Sinead stared at her hands for a moment, then she sat down at a small table, just a few feet away from him. She felt warmer the closer she drew to him, but still, she didn’t want to welcome his company. He was as cuddly as a cactus thus far.
She took a long moment before she spoke. She’d never needed to tell this story before. Everyone on the Extension knew it. Still, it wasn’t one she looked forward to telling.
She talked about her parents and growing up in Halifax. She explained that after college, she decided to go off on some humanitarian exodus. Sinead heard all about the Indian Reserves and how they had trouble getting and keeping teachers – that many reserves didn’t have any at all. She didn’t have a degree in teaching, but she was a biologist.
“I contacted some First Nations foundation and found my way up to the reserve. Then I got there, and instead of teaching science, I taught everything. I was the only teacher there at the time.”
Theron listened, quietly.
“My parents were proud of me at first, but when I told them I was going to stay after my first year was up, they were a little upset. Said they didn’t want to see me ‘wasting my life’ in the Arctic.”
Theron laughed, slumping back in his seat.
“See, I couldn’t bring myself to leave after that first year. They didn’t have anyone new coming in, and I’d grown really fond of the children, so I stayed. I remember my mother’s shocked reaction when I told her we’d started having polar bear sightings. She thought I was living in wild kingdom.”
Theron fidgeted at this.
Sinead took a deep breath as she remembered the events at the end of her second year. This was the part she’d relived a thousand times. Every second of it.
“The tribe was contacted about a clinic coming to the area – that they would be offering physicals to all the kids. There’s practically nothing up here a lot of the time, so the parents all signed off. The bus and everything were paid for. I packed lunches for everyone – it was going to be a good day, I thought. But when the bus drove right past the nearest town, I asked the driver where we were going. He said not to worry, and asked me to sit down.”
They’d driven for two hours on roads that were only open two months out of the year. When the bus finally stopped, they were here.
On the Extension.
“They bussed us through the gates, pulled up to this ratty old schoolhouse, and herded the babies inside,” she said, and she had to take a moment to settle herself. The memory of their scared, confused faces. The look of helpless terror – that they were far from home, that they wanted their parents, trying to behave perfectly so they could go home. She’d never seen such wariness and strength before in her life. “Then they lined the kids up, took their temperature, took blood samples. They didn’t check their ears, or their heads for lice, didn’t look at their eyes. Just a temperature check, and a pin prick to the finger.”
Sinead swallowed, staring at her hands. The bones in her knuckles had become more prominent in the past two years, a sign she wasn’t eating like her normal, soft self. “An hour later, they pointed to twelve of the eighteen kids and told them to climb back on the bus. At that point, I started screaming.”
She was losing herself in the memory of that day. She’d never felt so helpless and lost in her life. She remembered staring into the emotionless faces of the technicians and guard-like men who stood around, eyeing them, demanding to know what they were doing, why they’d brought them there.
“They assured me the bus would return in a short while to collect the rest of the children, that they would be safe in the interim. Then they told me to get on the bus with the rest of my kids.”
Sinead felt her body trembling under the weight of her winter coat. She wasn’t cold, but she was shaking none the less. “I refused. The bus didn’t come back for eight hours. When it finally returned, it had every one of the kids’ families on it. They’d been told the only way they’d see their children again, was if they got on the bus. Thirty two people in total, including me.”
Sinead stared off into space for a long while. She was reliving every little piece of that day. Reliving that day wasn’t new. She’d remembered flashes of each moment, each instant where some part of her brain scolded her for not doing more, for not seeing what it was that was happening.
These families were a little disconnected from the rest of the tribe back on the reserve, but not shunned. Not looked down upon. If anything, they were revered. Still, they kept to themselves. That day she learned why.
She caught herself after a long while and turned to find Theron sitting forward in his seat, watching her.
He didn’t turn away. He continued to stare at her, unbidden by her sudden awareness. She stifled under his gaze, unable to hold it.
“Sorry. It’s not something I’ve ever talked about before.”
“It’s alright,” he said, and the tone had softened. There was no snark there now, no sarcasm. Sinead felt her cheeks flushed and turned away. Despite their terse interactions before that moment, Theron’s expression as he stared at her had rattled her.
She felt seen. In a way, she’d never felt before – while reveling in the darkest memory of her life, she felt seen.
It was almost too intimate to take.
“What happened then?” He asked, his voice still soft.
Sinead shrugged. “That was the day we all met Baird Davenport. He explained that for public safety, these families were to be relocated to The Extension. At that time, I didn’t know. Then Baird dropped one of those god awful crates at their feet, and everyone lost their minds.”
Stoic, almost eerily peaceful members of the family went ballistic. It had startled her almost as much as the separation. “They chased the truck back to the gate, but he got through before anyone could stop them. Darrell and his brother, Eddie, were hollering after the guy, threatening to murder him.” Sinead gave a sad laugh. “Baird just smiled at us all through the fence. That’s when Eddie went running toward the gate.”
Sinead pinched the skin of her fingers, watching it turn pale white, then seeing the pink return.
“I had no idea what they all were until that moment. Al
l of a sudden, this kid who I’d taught in his last year of school went from being Eddie anymore to – something else. Suddenly, there was this bear – this just massive bear where Eddie had been.
Sinead’s throat grew tight, but she fought to steady her words and continue. “Then I watched his beautiful animal charge toward the gate, throw his full weight into the metal frame -” She took a deep breath and blew out through pursed lips to settle herself. “Then the bear dropped to the ground, and he didn’t get back up.”
Theron leaned forward, his hand drawing closer to hers. She half expected him to take her hand. She realized at that moment, she wouldn’t have protested.
“They knew – what we are?”
Sinead nodded. “They did. They offered to let me leave more than once that day, but once Eddie died, they stopped offering.”
“Has no one come looking for you?” Theron asked.
She forced a smile, but this question hurt more than she ever wanted to let on. He seemed to lean in further.
She shook her head. “If they have, no one’s told me. Baird makes me write letters home.”
“And they read them?” Theron said. It was a question, but his tone said he already knew the answer.
“Like good prison wardens.”
Sinead felt startling warmth wrap around her fingers. She looked down to find Theron holding her hand. She exhaled. She didn’t pull away.
“This is internment,” he said, softly, and the tone hurt her heart. She knew it for what it was, but somewhere in Theron’s world there was a different kind of knowledge, a different memory that could only be harbored by those with certain ancestry – those who’ve heard stories of darkness, those who’d seen a different world than hers. It felt as though the Holdens saw this darkness arrive not with shock, but with an almost defeated expectation.
It broke her heart every time.
True North (The Bears of Blackrock Book 4) Page 5
