Jenny offered her hand. Fenrir whined in disappointment. Yael folded her arms across her chest defiantly.
“No more swearing. That’s part of the deal.”
“You have to be kidding... oh, whatever. I’ve been wandering around in circles for days. If pretending we're in elementary school will get me out of here then I guess I can try.”
They shook. Yael half-expected Jenny to crush her hand, but her grip was barely there and then gone again, hardly a handshake at all.
“And you can’t call me that anymore.”
“What?”
“That. You know.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about. Call you what?”
“My name is Yael. Call me that.”
“Instead of...”
“You know.”
Jenny laughed and returned to her manic cresting of the ridge.
“Whatever you say, Princess.”
Yael had to run after her to keep up.
“That! You can’t call me that!”
***
“I think it’s safe for you to take off that mask.”
“Are you kidding? We are aboveground and outside. Not a chance.”
Jenny looked at her oddly.
“Where are you from, anyway?”
“Nowhere you have ever heard of,” Yael said evasively.
“I am so damn tired of people saying that...”
“Hey! No swearing!”
“What?” Jenny blinked, staring at her blankly. “I didn’t swear. What are you – oh? You mean damn counts as a swear word? I thought you just mean the real ones, like cu-”
“All of them.”
“What about ‘bitch’? They say that on TV...”
“That especially.”
“Okay, what about...”
“Did you find the stash yet?”
“Yeah,” Jenny said, pushing a small trunk out from the small space beneath an exposed foundation jutting out from a hillside like the petrified bones of a very angular beast. “Give me a hand?”
It took both women and several minutes of pulling and tugging before they managed to lift the trunk from the confines of the hole and onto the road. Yael had the disquieting notion that Fenrir was staring indecently at her.
“These guys have been out here a long time, stealing sh-”
“Miss Frost!”
“...stuff. Stealing stuff. Let’s hope they took something,” Jenny said, kicking at the lock, “that we can use.”
Yael watched Jenny batter the chest with her feet and hands for a while, then sighed and pushed her aside. Yael took a velvet-wrapped pick set from the pouch at her waist and knelt in front of the chest. The tools did not belong to her brother – actually, he would have disapproved of the entire affair, especially how Yael had come upon them and arranged for instruction in their use.
When Yael was eleven she caught her cousin Ravi rifling through her stepmother’s underwear drawer, despite a number of locks designed to prevent such things. She chastised him, assessed the situation with her usual practicality, then blackmailed him for lessons in the art of opening closed doors. It wasn’t hard once she got the fundamentals down, learned to feel the tension and release through her fingers and ignore her eyes entirely. Yael was hardly a master thief, but she could manage basic locks, given time and the opportunity to concentrate.
It took about two minutes to get the trunk open. Yael probably could have done it faster without Jenny leaning over her shoulder, avidly curious, but she was flattered by the attention, so she didn’t try and shoo her away. Jenny shouted triumphantly when the lock clicked open, then kicked open the lid to the chest, hardly giving Yael time to get her hands out of the way.
“Holy sh-”
“Language!”
Jenny grimaced.
“Argh! Fine. Those bastards really had a sweet tooth, huh?”
“That is a swear as well.”
“What? Which part?”
“Never mind.”
A single look confirmed Jenny’s observation. The chest was with candy bars, gum, cellophane packages of cookies, and brightly-wrapped hard candy. Jenny glanced at Yael, shrugged indifferently, and kicked the chest over, sending candy bars and liquorice sticks sliding down the hillside.
“I guess nobody ever said you had to be practical to steal for a living.”
Yael and Jenny dug through the pile. Not all of the contents were entirely composed of sugar, but it was pretty close. They found a collection of dull knives and battered tools, a handful of poor quality jewelry, and a half-dozen mismatched shoes – a stark reminder of the unfortunate travelers ambushed in the lonely wilderness of the Waste. There was a first aid kit in a metal tin, a bunch of small flares, and a motley selection of things that sparkled and gleamed underneath the grey sky. Of the three bottles they found in the chest, one was empty, one held only a mouthful, and the other was still sealed.
Jenny pitched the empty bottle down the hill, followed by the almost empty one.
“Germs,” she said, shaking her head.
Yael paused in her search to stare at Jenny in confusion.
“I thought you didn’t worry about stuff like that, Miss Frost?”
Jenny made a face and then turned and spat into the sand.
“Did you see those guys? Whatever they had, I don’t want it.”
Yael completed the eerie task of digging through what was likely the clothing of murdered people, trying to ignore the unpleasant thoughts that the rust-colored stains and the deliberate tears brought to mind. Jenny unscrewed the long green bottle, sniffed the contents with obvious suspicion, then shrugged and took a drink. For a moment, she looked as if she had something important to say, something she wasn’t quite done formulating, then she began a coughing fit that left her bent double.
“Ugh! That’s fu…that is really disgusting. Tastes like cinnamon and cough syrup. You want some?”
Yael found a small bottle of lamp oil, but, lacking a lamp, set it aside in disinterest. Jenny stopped coughing long enough to scoop it up, shoving it rather haphazardly in one of her many pockets.
“Do I want to try drinking the stuff you just described as disgusting? No, I don’t think so.”
“Suit yourself,” Jenny said, picking up one of the candy bars and tearing the wrapper open with her teeth. She finished the remainder of her statement with her mouth filled with nougat. “Beggars can’t be choosers, you know?”
Yael dug through the cache of costume jewelry and coins at the base of the chest, surprised that she recognized none of the currency or the languages on the coins. Some of them weren’t even round, but rather oblongs or octagons. Some were heavy and milled on the sides, while others were uneven and smooth. The metal varied from brass and tin to something that looked a bit like stainless steel.
“You have to ask for something to be a beggar, Miss Frost. We took these things.”
“And they took them from other people. Circle of life.”
“That is not the circle of life.”
“Close enough. You find anything worth finding?”
Yael displayed her salvage: a battery-powered lantern, two tins of self-heating soup, and eleven mismatched bullets lined up on a rock like tin soldiers, polished to a fine-sheen by the grease of many hands.
“I don’t suppose you have a gun?”
Yael wasn’t sure what kind of answer she hoped for. She needed Jenny’s protection. That didn’t mean she trusted her, or the cruel light in her eyes. Part of Yael felt that Jenny was dangerous enough without a gun.
“Nope,” Jenny said dismissively, peeling open the wrapper of another candy bar. “Never saw the point in carrying one. I can always find ‘em when I need ‘em.”
Yael read the back of a soup package, her expression grim.
“I can’t eat these.”
“Why not?”
Yael made a face.
“They have chicken broth.”
“So?”
“I don’t
eat meat.”
Jenny laughed, as if Yael had told a joke.
“You sure you wanna try and cross the Waste, Princess? You ain’t exactly cut out for this shi-”
Yael kicked over the empty chest in frustration.
“What about you Miss Frost? How long have you been wandering in circles out here? Do you want to continue without the only guide you’ve found?”
“Maybe. Depends on whether she keeps condescending and bitching.”
“Miss Frost!”
“What? I didn’t call anyone a name. Would you rather I called it whining? Fine. Are you going to whine the entire trip?”
Yael stomped off in what she hoped was the right direction – she would have to sleep to be sure – leaving the chest and its spilled contents behind her, too angry to bother with collecting any of the contents. She didn’t look back, and set as demanding a pace as possible, given the dust and the wind that impeded her progress. She barely managed to make it down the ridge before Fenrir caught up to her, the rusted chain around his neck jingling and his black eyes sparkling with what looked like amusement.
The dog loped casually past Yael, and then settled in the middle of the road ahead of her, laying peacefully down on its massive forepaws, as if he expected to be petted. Not that Yael would put her hand anywhere near that savage mouth. Gradually she slowed her pace to a walk, waiting for Jenny to catch up. She didn’t have to wait long before Jenny rounded a pile of rubble behind her, whistling casually with her hands in her pockets.
“You know, it’s hard to keep track of you when you run ahead…”
“Miss Frost,” Yael said, her voice quavering with anger she meant to suppress. “Get your dog out of my way.”
“Fenrir? Okay, but I have to warn you…”
Jenny said, bending over momentarily to grab a rock about the size of her hand.
“…heading down this road…”
Jenny threw the rock, and Yael flinched automatically. The stone went far over her head, however, coming down behind a collapsed building ten yards from where Fenrir sprawled. Impossibly, when the rock hit the ground the area detonated with a tremendous noise, the explosion hurling soil and rock in all directions as if Jenny had thrown a grenade.
“…might be a bad idea. If you wanna go running through a minefield, though, then suit yourself.”
“How… how did you know?”
Jenny grinned, and then paused to spit her wad of chewing gum to the ground, quickly replacing it with a new piece from one of the bright yellow packs with Chinese lettering that she had salvaged.
“Because I’ve been camping in the middle of it,” Jenny explained gleefully. “C’mon. It’s too late to go any further today and the moon tonight will...”
Yael glanced behind them, nervously surveying the broken landscape and the empty road.
“Are you sure we can’t keep going? Won’t those men come after us?”
“I thought you blinded them. I heard that speech you made about the neurotoxins in the spray…”
Yael was glad she had the mask, because she was certain that she was blushing.
“Not true,” Yael admitted. “That was a bluff. It’s not all the much worse than mace. They will be alright in a few hours if they wash their eyes out.”
To Yael’s surprise, Jenny grinned and ruffled her hair affectionately.
“Really? Not bad, kiddo. You might survive after all. I don’t think those idiots are dumb enough to try and walk through a minefield. And if they do, we’ll be sure to hear ‘em coming.”
5. Theoretical Inedita
Tracking movement in a dark room, warm breath on the back of her neck. Drawing on a frosted window with her finger, tracing the contours of the Yellow Sign, by which dreams are remembered and the corruption of the King in Yellow is invited. Lemon tea and exposed ribs under taut skin, like the fuselage of a contoured aircraft.
The dusty ground ahead was threatening to Yael, but Jenny strolled through the area as though she had nothing to worry about, trailing behind Fenrir. Yael was careful to follow in Jenny’s footprints. She scanned the dirt in front of her for any signs of disturbance, any indicator of explosives buried beneath, but there was nothing out of the ordinary besides a meter-wide crater at the edge of the field where Jenny had tossed her stone.
“How old do you think the mines are?”
“Pretty damn old,” Jenny said, popping her gum. “They only go off about half the time.”
Yael preferred not to know how Jenny had made that particular discovery. She wasn’t aware of how badly her legs were shaking until they made it to the center of the field, a shallow ditch in the shadow of a largely intact wall of pitted and scarred marble. She sat down gratefully on the ground next to Jenny’s dusty sleeping bag and the ashes of a previous fire and tried not to be sick. Jenny flopped down on the bag next to her. Fenrir sniffed the air disdainfully then wandered off.
“Will he be okay by himself?” Yael asked, waiting for her mask’s scanner to make a determination on the local air. “I think those jerks were serious about eating him.”
“Huh? Oh, Fenrir? I wouldn’t worry. He’s a total bastard.”
According to the superimposed readout in the mask’s lens, the air in the ditch was free of the bio-war toxins that abounded in the Waste. Yael peeled her mask off reluctantly, and Jenny leaned forward to look at her face.
“Couldn’t really tell before,” Jenny said, pushing Yael’s hair aside and roughly lifting her chin. “I didn’t take you for a kid. How old are you, anyway?”
“I’m sixteen,” Yael said, exaggerating by a year and a half.
“Really? Because you look twelve...”
“Stop that,” Yael commanded, pushing Jenny’s hand away from her face. “I’m sixteen.”
“I heard you the first time,” Jenny acknowledged, running her hand along the arm of Yael’s windbreaker. “Hey, what’s your jacket made out of? It feels weird...”
“It’s called Weave,” Yael said softly. “The Visitors make it, I don’t know what from. It’s waterproof, fireproof, and it won’t tear.”
Jenny crouched over a patch of ground indistinguishable from the sand that surrounded them. She seemed, for a moment, to be pulling the ground away with a flourish, like a set from a movie. Then Yael made sense of the scene – Jenny had put a blanket over her gear and covered it in sand to conceal it.
“Who made it?” Jenny said, taking a few dry sticks from a small pile of wood, and then stacking it crisscrossed over the ash of the previous night’s fire. “Visitors? Like foreigners?”
“No,” Yael said, unzipping her duffel and searching for her comb. “The Visitors. You know. The others.”
“The hell? I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Maybe there are no Visitors where you came from,” Yael said, dragging the comb through her damp, tangled hair. “That must be nice. Where is that, Miss Frost?”
“Lost Creek, and it sure ain’t nice. But yeah, whatever your Visitors are, I don’t think we have them. More like rednecks, illegals, and tweakers.”
When Yael let her hair out of the ponytail it was so compressed that it continued to hold its original shape.
“What’s a tweaker?”
“Long story. What about you? Where are you from, Princess?”
“Don’t call me that,” Yael said resentfully, drawing closer to the small fire Jenny built and warming her hands over it. “My name is...”
“I know. I just don’t care,” Jenny explained cheerfully, opening a tin can with a small, hooked opener. “You like beef stew? ‘Cause that’s all I got besides those soups we found...”
“No, Miss Frost. I already told you,” Yael said icily. “I am a vegetarian. Beef is not vegetarian.”
“Hope you grabbed some of those candy bars, then.”
Yael realized with a rush of shame that she hadn’t even considered it. Jenny cackled like an animatronic witch on Halloween.
“Is dirt vegetarian?”
“That is enough, Miss Frost,” Yael said icily. “I will be fine. I have gone without dinner before.”
That was true. Yael had fallen victim to many of her stepmother’s fad diets, including one that consisted of a banana for breakfast, raw spinach for lunch and lukewarm lemon water for dinner.
“Then it should be easy for you.” Jenny put a makeshift metal cooking rack over the fire that appeared to be made of straightened coat hangers, then placed the can of stew on top of that. “Hey, how big is the Waste? How long will it take us to cross it?”
“It’s huge, but fortunately we don’t have to cross it on foot. There is a... a train. It will take us about five days to get to the station at Hastur,” Yael said, considering her memories of the dream map. “From there the rest of the trip won’t take that long.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine, not eating for five days while you trek across the Waste. Most people can go a couple weeks without food. You probably won’t die.”
Yael stared at the fire so Jenny wouldn’t see how embarrassed she was. She had left home with nothing to eat other than a half-sandwich saved from her lunch. She had brought along her credit card and money she had saved over two months, planning to buy food on the way. But she had never had the opportunity in Roanoke, and the platinum card with imprinted holograms and the modest roll of cash tucked into a rolled sock in her bag were little more than paper and plastic here.
“I had to leave in a hurry,” Yael lied, not wanting to admit that the whole issue had slipped her mind. “There was no time to worry about food.”
Jenny fidgeted constantly, poking at the fire with a stick, turning the can of stew on top of the cooking grill, scuffing the soles of her shoes in the poisonous dust of the Waste. Yael found her fidgeting grating, but she was too smart to complain. She didn’t have many options as far as company was concerned.
“I’m sure you had your reasons,” Jenny acknowledged, unexpectedly matter-of-fact. “Must have been damn important to skip food.”
Jenny tore open the stew tin with a fork and obvious enthusiasm. The metal was certainly hot enough to burn, but Jenny didn’t flinch. Or bother to spit out her gum before she started eating. She must have remembered it when she tried to swallow, though, because she coughed and then spat everything into the fire.
The Night Market Page 6
