by Colin Meloy
“Rappelling,” he said, smiling. “Third period.”
A whistle sounded from across the chasm; Prue could see someone on the other side of the rope bridge swinging a lantern. Brendan whistled twice, quickly, and the three travelers began crossing. The wind whipped through the gorge; the bridge bowed and shivered as they reached the midway point. Prue, her hands fixed tightly to the rope that served as the handrail, concentrated all her powers on not looking down. Arriving at a platform on the far side, they were greeted by a bandit.
“Eamon,” said Brendan.
“King,” replied the bandit.
Prue now recognized what had been those elusive, dancing lights she’d seen from the other side of the bridge: All along the steep, jagged wall, lanterns dotted the cliff face, illuminating deep recesses in the rock where crude structures had been built of knobby tree limbs—door frames and vestibules, covered here and there by deer-hide flaps. More rope bridges could now be seen, linking these many cave openings together—several crisscrossed the gap farther along, where other lanterns could be seen shining; wooden steps led down deeper into the chasm, and Prue saw that this dizzying constellation of lantern light continued on downward beyond the range of her vision. Having heard their whistle, faces began appearing from within the fissures in the stone—the hardened faces of the bandits could be seen peering down at the newly arrived travelers.
“You moved,” was all Prue could manage to say.
“Yeah,” replied Brendan. “We change hideouts when the assembly determines that the camp ain’t safe. We’d been compromised by the coyotes; we had no choice but to move.” He stood on the platform and proudly surveyed the entire camp, extending out as it did in all directions along the cliff wall. “It was a doozy to set up, but I think we’ll be able to stay here a while.”
Prue looked over the edge, trying to make out the farthest lights and the cave entrances they illuminated. Beyond was total blackness. “How far does it go down?” she asked.
“No one knows,” said Brendan. “We found some sign of ancient settlers, cliff dwellers, farther below, but the way gets harder beyond that. So don’t be droppin’ anything you might value, ’cause you won’t see it come back.”
A rickety wooden staircase led farther down the face of the wall to what looked to be a launching area of some kind: a long platform that extended out into the chasm, surrounded by a wooden handrail. At one end of the platform, a hole had been routed to allow a gnarled tree that had grown out of the cliff face through the planking; the stout tree anchored a cable that bowed out into the distant dark. Attached to the cable was a wheeled pulley assembly, which in turn supported the weight of a large box, big enough to support four or five people. Brendan waved the way forward, and Prue gingerly climbed in. “Hold on,” instructed Brendan as he and Curtis climbed into the box beside her. Curtis undid a line that was holding the box in place and the vehicle took off, zipping down the cable past a dazzling array of lantern-lit hovels and cave entrances, platforms and walkways.
The box stopped sharply at a lower platform. As another bandit attendant greeted them, Prue could see beyond to a massive opening in the cliff face, where throngs of colorfully clad bandits gathered around a large fire pit; the smell of cooked venison hovered in the air. As soon as Prue arrived on the stone floor of the cave, everyone’s attention immediately swiveled to the new arrival.
“Prue!” one said.
“The Outsider girl!” said another.
Brendan swiftly allayed their curiosity. “Fellow bandits: Please welcome back to the camp our friend and ally, Prue McKeel. We’ve been asked to give her asylum; her life is in great danger.”
There followed a murmur of consent. Prue heard someone mumble something about another mouth to feed, but the voice was quickly shushed. One voice rang out above the rest: “What’s the danger?”
Brendan addressed the assembled bandits, telling them everything he’d been told; he explained in detail their desperate flight from North Wood, the skirmish on the street in the Outside. After the story, a hush fell over the crowd; more bandits had arrived, and Prue could see the dirty faces of young children peering at her from behind their parents’ legs. Finally, one bandit stepped forward. He was a younger man, dressed in a kind of ratty sashed coat; Prue didn’t recognize him. She guessed that they’d needed to recruit a whole host of new bandits since the war with the Governess.
“But Brendan,” he asked haltingly, “what if it comes for us?”
Another voice chimed in, a woman’s voice. “Yeah,” she said. “We’ve only just got settled here. Will we have to move again?”
“It ain’t going to come for us,” said Brendan. “It won’t even come close. This is the best-hidden camp we’ve had in a generation. I don’t expect to leave it till the babies born here are old. But if it makes everyone more at ease, we’ll post extra watches—tighten security. Even if a Kitsune does get in here, it won’t survive the fight. Clear?”
A litany of “ayes.”
The Bandit King continued, “To many of you, this may be just another body to feed and clothe. That’s a reasonable concern. I know the stores are thin. I know the robbing ain’t bringin’ in what it should. But we’re a strong band, and we’ve weathered worse. My great-grandfather, Ben, survived the Bandit Wars with his people eatin’ naught but grass and moss tufts and still came out the victor. We’re made of that stock. We can weather this.”
The crowd talked among themselves; after a time, consensus was reached: Prue could stay. She smiled warmly at the crowd. “Thanks, everyone,” she managed, though her voice was hoarse with exhaustion; it’d been a very long day. Curtis guessed as much and nudged his friend with his elbow. “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll take you to the trainee barracks.”
The two friends bid their good nights. They followed a wooden walkway that snaked along the cliff wall away from the common area; Curtis carried a red lantern, lighting the way. Prue studied him as they walked, a dusty halo from the lit wick revealing a Curtis she didn’t think she recognized from before. His face looked longer, older. It seemed to her that his shoulders filled out the raggedy uniform he was wearing in a way she hadn’t remembered. The left lens of his wire-framed glasses had a hairline crack in it, just at the nose. The eyes behind them seemed somehow more worldly.
He noticed her looking. “What’s up?” he asked, smiling embarrassedly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Prue. “You look changed, is all.”
“Well, I am a Greenhorn Bandit, first class.”
She laughed at the terminology. “Oh, Curtis. Who knew this was how you’d end up?”
“It’s where I belong, Prue. This is my life now.”
A rope bridge split off from the walkway, leading across the gap. They followed it.
“What about your parents? Your sisters?”
“They’re fine. I convinced a migrating crane to do a flyby recently, just to see how things are. He sent word that he saw them packing bags for what looked like a vacation or something. So I think they’re getting along just fine without me.”
Prue nodded, placated, though she sensed that her friend was not entirely convinced of his own story. “Think you’ll ever tell them?”
“I dunno,” replied Curtis. “Maybe someday. It’s complicated. I wouldn’t want them to try coming in here to find me; they’d get lost in the Periphery.”
“Though you’re a half-breed,” suggested Prue as she stepped off the rope bridge and followed Curtis down another wood-plank staircase. “Like me. Wouldn’t that mean that your parents can cross over?”
“Who knows where that blood comes from?” said Curtis. “Maybe one has it, not the other.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose my sisters are probably half-breeds, huh?”
They arrived at the end of the staircase. Another wooden promontory stretched out into the chasm. A wire, looped around the top of a tall post, disappeared into the blankness before them; a flickering campfire could be seen in the distan
ce. Curtis put his fingers to his lips and gave a shrill whistle. Within moments, a noise could be heard, the sound of something sliding along metal. A wooden cross, fixed with copper wire to a pulley assembly, came down the zip line and loudly thunked against the pole. Curtis grabbed it. “You want to go first?” he asked.
“Okay,” Prue said, with some trepidation. She positioned her hands along the wooden handle.
“Just hold tight,” instructed Curtis.
“You think?” said Prue, laughing. “Listen, I’m a natural-born bandit. Maybe I can teach you a thing or two.” And with that, she lifted her feet from the ground and was carried at a breathtaking pace across the Long Gap. The wide rift’s cool wind whisked up and bit at her face and hands; she could feel her face flush from the cold. Once the initial fear had fallen away, she found herself smiling so widely that her cheeks hurt.
It seemed to Elsie that she’d barely closed her eyes, barely drifted into a half sleep, when an alarm bell rang loudly in the dormitory, followed by a renewed round of distorted barking from the loudspeaker: “MORNING BELL! AEROBIC REGIMEN, COMMENCE!” Immediately, the room was filled with the complaining voices of sleepy girls and the cumulative rustle of thirty woolen blankets being thrown aside. Elsie followed suit; she noticed that not only had Rachel managed to ignore the command from the loudspeaker, but she also seemed to have slept through it. Elsie whispered loudly to her sister, “Rachel! Wake up!” There was no response.
A short, aged woman in a gray housedress entered through the double doors. Using a long wooden dowel, the woman pulled down a white screen that hung on the east wall. She then walked to the far side of the room and removed a shroud from a short pedestal, revealing an ancient-looking Super 8 projector. She turned it on, and a shivering ray of light fell on the screen, showing grainy black-and-white footage of a woman in a leotard. The film looked very, very old. As the figure in the film began to move, so did the girls in the dormitory, imitating the woman’s every action. Elsie did likewise: The woman touched her toes, so did Elsie. The woman executed a series of jumping jacks, so did Elsie. This routine lasted about ten minutes, with the wooden floor of the dormitory vibrating with every shift and jump of the roomful of girls. Rachel managed to stay sleeping. Between activities, Elsie tried to wake her by kicking one of the legs of her sister’s bed frame, to no avail. Finally, the program came to an end and the projector shut off with a series of noisy clacks. The loudspeaker sparked afresh: “BED TWENTY-THREE.”
No response. Elsie shuffled over to the bed and discreetly kicked the frame again. “Rachel!” she whispered.
“Hmmph?” answered Rachel, her face burrowed into her pillow.
“BED TWENTY-THREE! RISE IMMEDIATELY!”
Rachel’s hand snaked out from beneath her thin blanket and began feeling around the side of the bed, presumably for the nonexistent alarm clock. “Mom!” she mumbled. “Ten more minutes.” This elicited a chorus of giggles from the surrounding girls.
“MISS TALBOT?” squawked the loudspeaker.
The gray-haired woman who’d been manning the projector tottered over to bed twenty-three and, taking a deep breath, lifted the metal bed frame, spilling Rachel’s dormant body onto the hard wood of the floor. Rachel scrambled to her feet, trying to reorient herself to her bizarre reality. The girls around her had ceased their giggling and were looking at their feet.
“MORNING REPAST, OH SEVEN HUNDRED HOURS. THEN ALL WORK CREWS REPORT TO MACHINE SHOP.”
An army of compliant souls, the girls in the dormitory began slipping their grease-marked gray coveralls over their woolen long johns. Some spoke in hushed tones to their neighbors; others prepared for their day in silence. Rachel and Elsie watched in awe, unmoving, until Martha kicked at Elsie’s footie’d foot. “Get your work clothes on,” she hissed.
“What, these?” asked Elsie, pointing to the coveralls she’d been given the night before; they were still shrouded in their plastic wrapping.
Martha rolled her eyes. “Yes,” she said, before adding, “Do I have to hold your hand through all this?”
An older girl, sitting on the bed next to Martha’s, spoke up out of the side of her mouth as she carefully laced a pair of black steel-toe boots. “Bein’ awfully charitable with the newbs, eh, Martha?”
“I’m a gracious person,” said Martha snidely.
“Are we supposed to go to work, too?” Elsie asked.
The girl in the boots stifled a laugh.
Martha: “Yes, you’re supposed to work. We’re all supposed to work.”
Elsie cast her eyes around the room, perplexed. “But I’ve never really worked before. I mean, I help out with chores around the house and stuff. But I’ve never been to, like, a job.”
“Well, welcome to the working week,” said Martha.
Rachel, still half-asleep, was taking this all in wordlessly. “Hey, goggles,” she said finally.
Martha gave her a look.
“I don’t know who’s told you what, but we’re only here for a couple weeks. We’re not officially ‘orphans.’” Here, she made air quotes with her fingers. “So I don’t think we’re going to be doing any work, thanks very much. ’Specially not in a machine shop.”
“That’s what they all say.” This came from the girl next to Martha, who’d just finished stringing the last eye of her boot.
“That’s what who say?” asked Rachel.
“Newbs. Newbies. Newcomers. They’re all like: ‘I’m not going to work; my parents are coming for me any day.’ Or: ‘I might get adopted today! I’m not going to muck around in some machine shop.’ It’s all the same. You’ll break. Trust me, you’ll break.” The girl’s voice seemed to have been long hollowed out, like a dead log.
“Or what?” challenged Rachel. “What if I refuse? There’s, like, laws against this stuff.”
Martha chimed in, “You’ll get a demerit.”
Rachel laughed. “Oh no! A demerit?” She held the back of her hand to her forehead, feigning horror. “What’ll I do then?”
“What’s a demerit?” whispered Elsie.
Martha ignored the younger sister, focusing her increasing annoyance on Rachel. “Well, you chalk up enough of ’em, and you’re Unadoptable.”
“Una-what?” asked Rachel, her hand falling from her face.
“Unadoptable. You know, like you. And no adoption,” answered the girl.
“But what does that even mean? I’m not an orphan! I’m not even up for adoption!” Rachel had abandoned her snarky tone and was instead beginning to sound genuinely upset.
“Everyone is an orphan, here,” said Martha. “It’s not like anyone ever comes for us. But if you’re Unadoptable, then you’re sent to the Mister’s study. And then we never see you again.”
Elsie stammered, “R-really? Never?”
“Never,” said Martha.
Rachel, still shaking the sleep from her head, looked back and forth between the two younger girls. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “They can’t do that. We’re just boarding here. Mom and Dad are coming back in two weeks.”
“You said they weren’t, Rach, before,” offered Elsie.
Rachel shot her sister a glare. “I was joking. That’s not for real. Of course they’re coming back.”
Martha began slipping into her gray coveralls. She wiped some grease from the lens of her goggles and slid them over her hair. “Hey, then you’re fine,” she said, sounding indifferent to the sisters’ plight. “Just don’t rack up any demerits.”
Rachel’s temper was growing. Her face was turning the shade of a ripe, late summer tomato. Elsie had seen this happen before—a similar hue had risen to her sister’s cheeks in the wake of her mother sneaking into her room to throw away all her black lipstick; Elsie cradled Tina close to her chest, as if protecting her from the inevitable explosion.
“They … can’t … do … this,” said Rachel, enunciating every word, each one louder than the last, until she capped the phrase at the top of her lungs with: “We’r
e … Americans!” With that final declaration, she marched toward the front of the room. Her red woolens were a size too big, and she had to hike up the leggings as she walked. Positioning herself below the loudspeaker, she addressed the disembodied voice angrily.
“Hello?” she called. “I’m a, you know, temporary resident here. My sister and me. We don’t belong to the orphanage. And we’re not going to be working in any machine shop.”
No response.
“And for the record, I don’t think kids are being treated properly here. I don’t think it’s legal to make kids work in a factory. I’m pretty sure.”
Still, silence.
“This is not fair. I’d like to get a phone call or something?”
A pair of girls could be heard whispering discreetly in the back of the dormitory.
“Okay, then,” Rachel said, stepping up her air of defiance. “How about this: I refuse to work at your stupid machine shop.” Then she stuck out her tongue and walked proudly back to her bed. Everyone in the room was watching her silently. Martha had frozen in place, her hands still on the goggles at her forehead. At a loss for what to say, Elsie pushed the button on Intrepid Tina’s back. “A GOOD DAY ALWAYS STARTS WITH A BALANCED BREAKFAST,” said the doll helpfully.
Before Rachel had reached her bed, the loudspeaker sputtered alive. She stopped abruptly at the noise. “BED TWENTY-THREE,” came the voice, and then: “ONE DEMERIT.” If a robotic voice could sound unfazed, it did so now.
Everyone gasped at the speaker’s denunciation. Rachel’s facial expression went from pride to shock back to anger in the span of a few seconds; Elsie witnessed them all. But before Rachel could turn and shout a damning retort, Elsie grabbed her by her arm.
“Please, Rach,” she pleaded, “don’t do anything! Just … be quiet!”
Rachel stared at her sister’s hand, her muscles twitching beneath the grip. Finally, like a dissipating cloud, the anger vanished from her face, and her eyes retreated again beneath her bangs. Elsie could feel the muscles in her arm relax; she let go her grasp and looked at her sister squarely.
