Stranger

by Rachel Manija Brown

  Mia’s voice rose to a nervous squeak. “This is Ross Juarez. Our guest.”

  “Hello, Ross.” Sujata’s sleek black hair shone as she stepped out of the shadow of Felicité’s hat. “I’m Sujata Vardam. If you’re getting a tour, be sure to stop at our orchards. You might meet my grandmother. She’s a judge and a member of the town council.”

  Jennie listened in amusement, wondering if some rivalry had developed between the two school leaders.

  Meredith Lowenstein elbowed between them, unconcerned with social hierarchies. She and Mia had always been small for their age, but while Mia had hidden behind schoolwork or Jennie, Meredith had learned to push back.

  She smiled at Ross. “I saw Sheriff Crow bring you in. Where did you come from?”

  Yuki Nakamura appeared behind his sister, his long ponytail like a fall of black silk against his unbleached cotton shirt. It was odd how tiny Meredith, with her challenging saunter, took up so much more space than tall, powerful Yuki, who moved so economically.

  The prince. Jennie had trained herself not to think of Yuki’s old title. But sometimes he got angry, or needed to get people’s attention. And then—still without making a single unnecessary movement—he seemed to tower over everyone. That was when she remembered that he’d been raised to rule.

  “Is it true that you’re a prospector?” he asked, his expression not giving anything away.

  Before Ross could speak, everybody was jostling to be heard.

  “Were you in a gunfight? Pow!” Will Preston made a shooting gesture. “That’s so cool!”

  “Wasn’t it a knife fight? Even cooler!” Jennie’s sister Dee squealed.

  “I rang the bell for you!” exclaimed little Hattie Salazar.

  “Did you meet anyone on the road?” called Alfonso, ten feet off the ground.

  “Where’s your family?” asked Carlos Garcia.

  Felicité raised her hand to adjust a fluttering ribbon. Ross sidled away as if he thought she would hit him. He reminded Jennie of a colt unused to the training rope.

  Mia touched Ross’s arm. He flinched, and she pulled back. “That’s the schoolhouse,” she said, her voice calm. “And here’s Jennie.”

  Ross followed Mia onto the porch, pursued by a swarm of little kids.

  Now was the time to interfere, thought Jennie. Before Ross either got pulled into pieces or smacked someone in sheer self-defense.

  She raised her voice. “I see a lot of eager volunteers to clean the windows.”

  The kids stampeded. Felicité obligingly beckoned the older students away, giving Ross space.

  To Jennie’s surprise, Becky Callahan stayed. Her voice was so soft, it was almost inaudible. “They’re only crowding you because you’re new. Once they get used to you, they’ll stop.” It was fascinating how a stranger could stir people up. Becky rarely spoke, much less to anyone she didn’t know well.

  Ross nodded cautiously, and Becky darted away, almost colliding with Brisa Preciado.

  “What did you say to him?” Brisa asked curiously. Becky’s lips moved, but Jennie didn’t hear her answer. “Oh, is he shy?” Brisa sounded disappointed. “Are you sure? I won’t bother him then.” She patted Becky’s pale arm. “It was sweet of you to notice.”

  On the other end of the porch, Felicité seemed to have missed this entire exchange. “Shall I throw a party to welcome Ross? Paco, when is your band playing?”

  Paco Diaz was drumming on the railing. His eyes were closed, and his hands moved so fast that the sticks left blurry trails in the air. It seemed impossible that such an intricate piece of music could be created by one boy with two sticks and a fence post.

  “Paco?” Felicité called.

  “He’s gone,” Henry said. “Just forgot to take his body.”

  As everyone laughed, Jennie spoke. “Come inside, Ross.” She stood back so she wouldn’t seem like yet another threat.

  He surveyed the ceiling as if enemies might be lurking in the support beams, then examined the rest of the room. Finally, he came in. That was odd. Even the older Rangers, who tended to check any room they entered, didn’t often look up at the ceiling.

  “Ross,” Mia said, “this is Jennie Riley, the teacher.”

  His eyes were on the floor, the windows, the chalkboard, anywhere but on Jennie. Though he was terribly thin, he was also one of those boys who made girls jealous with their foot-long eyelashes. His hair was black as soot, and his broad shoulders made her wonder how much muscle he’d put on if he ever got enough to eat.

  “I thought you’d be older,” he said, then blushed.

  She spoke quickly, so he wouldn’t feel awkward. “I’m not that young—I’m eighteen. In some towns, I’ve heard, teachers start at sixteen. How old are you?”

  That seemed to make him a hundred times more awkward. He hunched his shoulders and muttered, “Don’t know exactly. About eighteen. I think.”

  Jennie couldn’t think of a reply other than “I’m sorry,” which she suspected he would hate. She was trying to think of a better response when Mia took her by surprise.

  “Jennie, Ross wants to come to school.”

  He stared down as if his shabby boots had his future written on them. Behind him, Mia flapped her hands and mouthed some words that Jennie couldn’t figure out.

  She was dying to ask him for any news he’d picked up—maybe she could put it in El Heraldo!—but she could see how tense he was. She kept her voice friendly and casual. “So, where’d you leave off when you were last in school?”

  Ross glanced up for half a second before mumbling, “Never really started.” He gave her an even briefer look. “Where do the little kids sit?”

  Jennie had always thought “heart-wringing” was merely an expression, but she actually felt something twist inside her chest. And she suspected that half of what was making him so self-conscious was the thought that people were pitying him. “I’ll bet you know more than you think you do.” She was rewarded by a glance of a full two seconds. His eyes were very dark brown, almost black. “A prospector is a kind of engineer, like Mia.”

  Mia blinked. “You’re right. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.”

  Ross’s expression eased into genuine interest. Encouraged, Jennie went on. “Mia designs and builds things, and prospectors . . . what do you do? How do you get into those ruins? How do you even find them?”

  “Maps. Old stories.” He spoke slowly, but with a tentative confidence. “If you get up high, you can see ruins, sometimes.”

  “Go on,” Jennie said, smiling.

  Ross flicked a glance at Mia, who nodded encouragingly. “But even if they’re buried, the way the plants are growing can show you there’s something underneath. As for getting in, you can dig if they’re not too deep. If it’s a collapsed structure, you have to shore it up so it won’t fall on you. Sometimes you have to blast your way in.”

  “How do you do that without blowing up the whole thing, or making the collapse even worse?” she asked.

  Behind Ross, Mia automatically raised her hand, then quickly lowered it, embarrassed.

  “See what the structure is made of,” said Ross. “Look for a wall that isn’t the sole support of anything. To figure out how much explosive you’ll need, you have to calculate the overpressure.”

  As Jennie had suspected, however spotty the guy’s overall knowledge was, he knew a lot about his own field. “How do you do that?”

  Mia caught her hand halfway up, then sat down abruptly on the little kids’ bench, trapping both hands under her thighs.

  “With a slide rule,” he replied.

  “I see,” said Jennie. “Ross, there’re only three or four people in town who know how to do that, and two of them are here in the room with you.”

  Mia extracted her hand to tap the slide rule dangling from her waist.

  “How
much can you read?” Jennie asked.

  Ross ducked his head. “Only numbers. Well, a couple letters you use in math.”

  “What about history?”

  “I don’t know anything. I just wonder. How the things I find got there. What people used them for. Why all the cities were destroyed.”

  “I know that one!” exclaimed Mia before Jennie could answer. “According to the accounts we’ve found, it was a natural disaster. There was a storm on the sun, and it released radiation. Do you know what that is?”

  “No,” Ross muttered, embarrassed.

  Jennie wished she could tell him that she’d never heard Mia this eager to talk to anyone but her father, her old master, Mr. Rodriguez, and Jennie herself. However had Ross gotten Mia to trust him so quickly?

  “It’s a sort of energy,” Mia went on. “Like light. It changes living things. Some animals and plants died, and some mutated. Some people died, and others got the Change. Also, the solar storm caused a geomagnetic storm on the Earth. Not a storm with rain. It was a change in the Earth’s magnetic field.”

  Ross glanced up. “That’s what makes a compass work, right?”

  Mia’s head bobbed enthusiastically. “Yes! Exactly. And back then, nearly everything was mechanical. When the magnetic field changed, most machines stopped working. People had to leave the cities and start farming, and eventually the cities got overgrown and knocked down in earthquakes and storms. And then singing trees started growing around them, so no one could get back in.”

  Ross pulled his left arm in across his chest, rubbing it as if it hurt. “The books. Tell me what happened to the books.”

  Under his direct gaze, she fiddled nervously with her glasses. “Maybe Jennie could explain it better.”

  “You go on. You’re doing great.” Jennie winced inwardly once the words were out. She sounded like she was talking to a little kid.

  But Mia didn’t look insulted. “Back then, most books were machines. I don’t understand how that worked. But all the book-machines were destroyed in the geomagnetic storm. That’s why so much knowledge was lost.”

  “Were they destroyed, like smashed to bits?” Ross asked. “Or did they stop working?”

  “Stopped working,” said Mia with a sigh. “And never started again. We’re not even sure what they looked like.”

  Ross indicated Mia’s old slate. “Can I draw on that?”

  “Yes!” She shoved a piece of chalk at him. “Do you know what the book-machines are?”

  “No, but there’s some artifacts I find a lot. They’re made of black glass and plastic.” As he spoke, he sketched rectangles and squares and ovals, using shading to give them dimension. He was no artist, but, like Mia, could draw accurately.

  “If you take them apart, there’s more plastic and metal parts inside.” He drew some of those parts as he went on. “They’re the right size to hold in your hands. They could have been book-machines. They were obviously something, or I wouldn’t find so many of them. But like you said, they’ve stopped working. I don’t even pick them up anymore. No one buys them.”

  Mia stared intently at the slate, then whirled to face Ross. He slid backward, his left hand coming up in a block and his right hand going to his hip for a weapon that wasn’t there.

  “It’s okay!” she exclaimed.

  Ross dropped his hands, his brown skin darkening with a deep blush. “Sorry.”

  “I was going to say, I never get to talk to anyone like this,” she continued. “I mean, other than Dad and Jennie.”

  Jennie barely caught Ross’s mumbled, “I don’t either.”

  Jennie had been writing out math problems while Mia and Ross had been talking. Now she set the slate and abacus on a desk. She was sure he would be relieved to take a break. “Ross, can you try these?”

  The haste with which he did so proved her right. He handled the abacus so awkwardly that she was puzzled—surely he didn’t only use a slide rule?—until she remembered that he’d been injured. Finally, he gave up trying to use the abacus with his left hand, and began switching between it and the chalk with his right.

  “What did you give him?” Mia asked softly.

  “I have no idea how he’ll do with non-practical math,” murmured Jennie. “So I started with arithmetic and finished with some calculus and physics from our last academic decathlon.”

  “Those were so fun,” said Mia wistfully.

  Jennie laughed. “They were fun because we always won.”

  Mia looked disappointed. “Was that why you liked them? I liked them because it was you and me against the world.”

  “You and Me Against the World.” That had been their motto, back when all it took to be best friends was being the two smartest kids in their age group. Jennie had forgotten.

  Mia was only a year younger than Jennie, but in a lot of ways she still seemed like a kid. She’d moved into Mr. Rodriguez’s old cottage right across from her father, and Dr. Lee still cooked all her meals. She still blushed and talked too much when she got nervous, and social situations made her nervous even though she’d known everyone her entire life. She’d never had a boyfriend or girlfriend, or even wanted one, though she had confessed to Jennie that she wanted to want one.

  Jennie wished none of that mattered. But recently she’d found herself talking about certain subjects with Indra or Meredith, not Mia. Without Jennie even noticing it, they’d drifted apart.

  A burst of cheers rose up from outside. Glad for a distraction, she looked out the window. Yuki Nakamura, bow in hand, stood before a target with an arrow in the exact center of the bull’s-eye.

  It was too bad Yuki didn’t want to be a Ranger. He shot as well as his sister Meredith, and he was the best of the guys his age with a sword or hand-to-hand. But he tolerated rather than enjoyed working in a team, and the Rangers relied upon teamwork. She remembered Sera commenting, “Anyone who’d want to be a prospector wouldn’t make a good Ranger.”

  Ross’s glossy black hair hid his face as he worked. Mia was hovering anxiously, as if it were her test. From the way he twitched every time she moved, he didn’t like people lurking in his peripheral vision.

  What turned someone into a prospector, traveling alone in the dangerous world? Trading, she could understand. Traders were usually families, people you’d trust to have your back. Like your fellow Rangers . . .

  Ross put down his chalk. “I’m done.”

  “Already?” Jennie hoped he hadn’t given up halfway through.

  Mia snatched up the slate. “I knew it,” she exclaimed in glee. “If this was a decathlon, he’d be a real challenge for us.”

  “Mia’s right.” Jennie examined the awkwardly written numbers. “When it comes to math and physics, you could teach the class yourself.”

  Ross gave her a doubtful glance.

  “Seriously. And if you’re handling explosives, you have a head start on chemistry. I’ll help you catch up on reading, writing, history, and literature. Maybe biology, depending on what you already know.”

  She had to lean forward to catch his muttered, “But reading. Aren’t I too old?”

  Jennie shook her head. “Absolutely not. You watch. By the end of tomorrow, I’ll have you reading entire sentences.”

  “You can do that?”

  “You can do it,” she said firmly.

  Ross took a deep breath, those amazing lashes lifting. He touched the line of writing on her teacher’s slate as if the words themselves were precious. For the first time since she’d begun Ranger training, Jennie remembered the joy that had first drawn her to apprentice to Grandma Wolfe—the joy of teaching someone who loved learning as much as she always had.

  “Welcome to school, Ross,” Jennie said. “Now, let’s go outside. We always start the day with drill. Ever done any fighting?”

  8

  Ross

  T
HOUGH MIA HAD SAID JENNIE WAS HER FRIEND, ROSS had assumed the teacher would be an adult who would make him feel ashamed of how much he didn’t know—or worse, laugh. He hadn’t expected another teenage girl, let alone a nice one. Let alone a pretty, nice one.

  And they were as different as two people could be. Mia’s skin was light, while Jennie’s was nearly true black. Mia’s hair was clipped into a raggedy bowl cut, while Jennie wore hers in a lot of little braids decorated with colored beads. Jennie was taller than Ross, Mia shorter. And Jennie was much, much curvier. But he liked how they both smiled: Mia in sudden wide grins, and Jennie with her lips barely parted, and the left side a little higher than the right. They kept smiling at him.

  Like everything in Las Anclas, Jennie had been a surprise. A pleasant one, this time, but Ross was unnerved by how hard it was to predict what would happen in this town. At least with the scavenger gangs that roamed the desert, he always knew where he stood.

  The students outside had split up according to age and size. The younger kids wore padding and masks.

  Jennie called out, “Ten-and-unders, follow Laura.” Ross noticed the girl’s cat claws as she beckoned to the kids. “Mia? Want to practice with us?”

  “I have to get back to work,” Mia said hastily. “Pick you up at lunch!”

  He joined the warm-ups, though he had to sit out the ones that required the use of both hands. The others eyed him curiously, and the guy with the ponytail gave him a suspicious stare. Ross had seen that look when he had accidentally wandered onto another prospector’s claim. He wondered what he’d done to annoy him.

  “Seniors, line up by height and fold around,” Jennie ordered. They formed two lines facing each other, and she partnered with him. “I can see from your stance that you’ve trained before. Good! We’ll go easy on your left side.”

  He was unfamiliar with some of the moves, and others had different names from those he’d learned. But it was basic stuff: kicks and punches, slides and blocks.

  “Free sparring,” Jennie announced.