“The story’s moral, of course, ought to be ‘Never live somewhere where wolves are running around loose.'” — Lemony Snicket
Tuesday morning. Mex sits in Rolly’s chair, in Rolly’s office, resting his elbows on the stack of Rolly’s paperwork. Rolly’s promotion ahead of Mex came two months ago, but Mex still behaves as if their positions haven’t changed.
“Thought you’d be in by now, Champ,” Mex says.
“I am in by now.”
“Don’t hang up your coat.” Mex smiles without showing teeth. “We’re going to the Outskirts.”
Rolly, by virtue of his birth and position, has an active pass and all his vaccinations. He stares at yesterday’s To Do list, written in a blue ink that bleeds to indigo against the purple paper. Mex’s shifting weight from foot to foot, scratching his neck, cracking his knuckles, stir up enough air that Rolly’s note to himself falls to the floor.
“Grab what you need,” Mex says.
“They’re supposed to police themselves,” Rolly says.
“Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?”
“We have jurisdiction.”
Jurisdiction doesn’t mean Rolly wants to spend a day with Mex in the Outskirts. But he knows better than to let Mex leave by himself, and, of course, in the auto pool, Mex picks a junker.
“Camouflage against shakedowns,” Mex explains.
Then, before any shakedowns can happen, Mex pulls the car up by the final City guard post and turns off the engine; they’ll do the rest on foot. The tunnel’s entrance, a dark mouth, gapes in front of them. A guard waits, slouching, to check them over before they go through.
“Did you bring a light?” Mex asks.
“No.”
The tunnel lasts three hundred and twenty-nine steps (Rolly counts) and then they are there, in the Outskirts.
The air feels the same. The sun. Perhaps the changes happen farther in, farther than spitting distance from the tunnel. Mex leads them to a building of poured concrete tinted a subtle brown. Concrete balconies on the lower floors face an empty parking lot. Concrete balconies on the higher floors face the view of the mountains and the forest. Underfoot, the gravel of the lot, once they get there, feels like concrete too, like huge concrete blocks that have been smashed with hammers and crushed by machines. Exposed stairwells and open hallways. Concrete. A barrier running four feet high alongside the halls, shards of glass worked onto the top as deterrent. Concrete. A rushed build of holiday-lets, a nature-walking-ski-chalet-second-home of sorts for those who once could just barely afford to shuttle between the City and the Outskirts, abandoned to squatters. Concrete.
Their squatter lives on the second floor, the sixth door from the stairway, number sixteen, illogically sandwiched between apartments four and twelve.
Mex knocks and after a minute the door cracks open. The clink of chain says the door won’t be opening any further.
“Yes?” A face peers through the crack of the door. A clear voice, that Outskirt affliction avoided. The top of her head doesn’t even clear five feet. Rolly slouches his shoulders to feel less like a giant.
“Yes?” she says again.
Rolly, as the superior officer, should step forward. He doesn’t.
“We are here—” Mex begins.
“Warrant number?” the voice asks.
“This is a friendly—”
“No, it isn’t.”
Of course not and of course they have no warrant. The door closes. Rolly doesn’t give an order, leaving Mex to figure one out for himself.
“I’ll walk back to the guard tower,” Mex says since the City jams all the electronics in the Outskirts, more so by the border. “I’ll call in and see if I can get some clarification. I’ll drive back if I have to. You stay, make sure she doesn’t leave.”
Rolly starts to pull rank, but then again, he left Mex to take the initiative, and sitting here wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Let Mex do the work. Rolly sinks to the ground, his back resting against the barrier that closes in the hallway. Grit underneath him scratches through his uniform pants. He shifts. The door opens again, this time on no chain.
“I knew your sister,” the woman says. She leaves the door open and goes back inside.
Rolly brushes himself off and follows her in.
They’d found his sister’s clothes, torn, shredded really, in the field where the children played. They found his parents later. Throats ripped open. A proof to the City relatives who took him in of the insanity of the Outskirts.
But his sister, no body. Never a body. Just gone.
Rolly comes from the Senatorial class. When his grandfather, older beyond all reason and ability, dies, his Senate role will pass to Rolly, since Rolly’s mother, torn apart by canines and claws, can’t accept. Rolly plans to refuse, though. To let the legacy die.
The thought makes him dizzy.
He enters an apartment of white carpet and white walls. Like an upside-down L, the bathroom folds into the L’s indent. Straight ahead: the living area. A far wall of windows and a sliding door to an empty balcony. Past that: the parking lot. Higher floors, more costly apartments, look out on the woods.
The living area splits itself in two. One side has a couch and glass table. The other side an efficiency kitchen, a counter with barstools, a rack above where cracked wineglasses dangle from their stems. Sparse, uninspiring. Rolly can’t see what here should merit attention, what here should merit coming all the way from the City to investigate. He takes another view of the room.
“You’ll see him walking across the gravel when he comes back,” she says, misinterpreting Rolly’s watchfulness. “You can be back out there by then.” She narrows her eyes before rubbing her face. “You are Rolly aren’t you?” she asks, doubting herself.
“You knew my sister?” he asks as an answer.
“You look just like her,” she says. “And she looked just like your father, so, I suppose you do too. Small world.”
She takes a seat on the couch. Rolly has nowhere else to go. The dust devours the light coming in from the windows. Decorations hanging from the curtain rods thin to silhouettes against the light. Wind chimes, he supposes. Sun catchers.
“I want to apologize for what happened to your family,” she says. “When I realized who you were—I’m so sorry.”
Once, Rolly would have reassured her that all was fine, at least shrugged half-heartedly. Then he learned that these sorry‘s were precursors to questions. What was it like? Did you see anything? Why won’t you reassure us something like that can’t ever happen here? His eyes go back to the window, to the wind chimes made, not of old forks and bits of metal like he thought, but bones. They are bones. Tiny bones from mice or voles, bones strung together with knots and thin, ivory string.
“What do you do?” Rolly asks.
“Fortune teller.” Not even embarrassed.
“Would you tell me mine?” He doesn’t know why he asks, but he does, almost before he realizes he has.
“Only girls,” she says.
“Why not men?”
“Your friend has come back,” she says. Rolly moves to the window, ostensibly to see Mex, but really to stare at the hanging gallery of bones. She watches him and then crosses the small room, the thin hall, to the door.
“Are you going to tell me that we’ll meet again soon?” Rolly jokes in leaving. He almost never jokes since no one can tell when he does, but this tiny, pixie woman who knew his sister, who met him as an infant, would understand the humor, Rolly is certain.
He has to maneuver around her to get out the door. She doesn’t smile.
Rolly sinks back to the ground, lays his legs out in front of him, as Mex hops up from the stairwell.
“Let’s go,” Mex says. “Dispatch can’t find the record. They don’t know why we’re here. What a waste of time.”
On the stairwell below, at the bottom vestibule, an animal scuttles sideways before bolting at their approach. They see its body sliding into the underbrush outside, mangy grey fur the same color as the parking lot gravel. More gravel thrown up by the animal’s mad spurt away.
“Did you see that?” Mex asks, quickening his step and craning his neck around the parking lot dumpster to see where the animal went. “A fox?”
“Wolf,” Rolly says.
“Really?”
Really. Wolves killed his mother and father. Wolves killed his sister. Rolly knows his wolves.
“As always, you’ve pissed someone off,” Mex says. Shift ends in five. Rolly is startled that Mex is even still here.
“I’ll fix it later,” he says. He grabs his overcoat from the hook, running a hand down the streaks in the varnish from all the days he hangs his coat up wet.
“Now,” Mex insists.
“Because you’re telling me to?” How to pull rank without undermining what little camaraderie he and Mex have?
“There’s a Senator on the line.”
Rolly pushes three fingers into his forehead. The pain is sharp.
“She wants to talk to someone about this morning’s visit. Better you than me, Champ,” Mex says. “Play up your family credentials and they’ll let you get away with stuff they’d never let me.” Mex presses some buttons on the phone and passes the handset over. “Go,” he mouths.
“I—” Rolly says.
“Rolanther,” the Senator interrupts with his ridiculous name saddled on him by his ridiculous parents. An ambush, orchestrated by Mex, if she already knows his name. The pain in his forehead crescendos. “Explain to me why you did not arrest that woman in the Outskirts this morning.”
Rolly writes outskirts on a page and flaps the word in the direction of Mex, who hasn’t left and won’t, until Rolly makes this problem go away. But to make the problem go away, Rolly has to speak, and he doesn’t want to because he’ll slip back into the accent of the Senate, pronouncing vowels long and consonants clipped, and then Mex and the others will rib him for weeks. He envies people like Mex, who are just one person all the time. Rolly is nothing more than a pretender in each different situation, hiding in plain view.
“We concluded that no further investigation was necessary,” Rolly says slowly.
“I have information that she was flaunting her operation this very afternoon.”
“How reputable is your source?” Rolly asks.
“If you weren’t one of us,” the Senator says, “I’d find that question insulting.”
“Could you elaborate on your information?” Rolly asks. “Nothing of note happened this morning.”
The Senator must be thinking on the other end of the line. Rolly hears the breath, long breaths in, short breaths out, but the Senator doesn’t speak.
“What’s she saying?” Mex whispers. “What’s going on?”
Rolly shrugs. “We wait,” he says silently back.
Finally, the Senator begins again. “I’m somewhat reticent to tell you all of what I know, Rolanther, but Talissa called me this afternoon, in a frenzy. There is a girl in that apartment and, if it is like the others, that girl will not be coming out.”
This Talissa must be related to the Senator and Rolly can guess the rest: young, not in a direct line for a Senate position, but eager for one anyway. Ergo, working on Border Control, which no one wants to do, to get herself into a pool from which Senators are chosen when/if necessary. With a pair of binoculars and a view from one of the towers, Talissa would see straight into the concrete building, into the exposed hallway or the fortune teller’s apartment. Whatever’s happening, she can survey from afar, but not investigate in person: Border Control patrols the border, not the Outskirts. They aren’t trained for the Outskirts. They aren’t vaccinated against any of the diseases. They haven’t yet learned that the tales of dark magic and curses and paranormal phenomenon that run through their ranks are no more true than the stories Outskirters tell about them. And now this Talissa has made something fueled by boredom, impotence, and fear, into Rolly’s problem. He rolls his head back. Great.
“The woman who lives there –”
“The woman who lives there,” the Senator snaps, “is the problem. She is taking these girls! She does something and then, later, that woman takes a large crate into the woods.”
“How would she carry a crate of girls down the stairs? She’s barely five feet.” His skepticism leaks out. “This story lacks plausibility.”
“I agree with you, Rolanther, that the story is far-fetched, but Talissa is not one for imagination, or one to be swayed by any of these rumors. I assumed that whatever was going on would have been apparent with a superficial police visit. Clearly not.” The Senator’s tone suggests that her reticence in giving the police all the necessary information should not have hindered their ability to do their job. “Nefariousness is afoot in that building, with that woman. Find out what is happening. I expect a report by the morning.”
“I’ll look into it, Senator. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.” In the periphery, Mex makes rude gestures.
“I expected more, especially from you, Rolanther. You, of all people, you know how barbaric the Outskirts can be.”
Put in his place, the Senator rings off.
“What was that all about?” Mex asks. “One of your impolitic reports upset someone else?”
“No. Advice from a Senator on how to do our job.”
“That’s rich. What do they know about work, no offense.”
“We have to go back out. You ready to go back out?” Rolly asks.
“Always,” Mex says.
They go down to the auto pool and get the same car as before.
She apologized. Not condolences. “I want to apologize for what happened to your family,” she says.
Not “I’m sorry for your loss” but “I’m sorry.”
She’d assigned the blame to herself.
Rolly thinks.
A woman, not like what Rolly imagined, stands at the border station for them. Rolly imaged slim, glamour, make-up, and gets solid, buzz cut, tattoos. He understands now why the Senator said Talissa isn’t one for fairy tales. He likes her on sight.
“My aunt told you I was hysterical,” she says.
“No.” He likes her more.
She takes them to one of the lookouts. “She takes girls,” she says, pointing.
“It’s her job,” Rolly says. “She has a business telling fortunes for women.”
“The girls don’t leave.” Talissa crosses her arms and stands firm. “We may have to wait,” she says. “There’s no schedule for drop-offs.”
They set up shifts. Eight hours each. Rolly has third watch, so he goes to a room with a cot and lays down. He thinks of Talissa before he falls asleep. He thinks of the fortune teller. He thinks of the girls that go in and never come out.
Three days.
Just keep waiting,” Talissa says. “Any time now.”
“She’s wasting our time,” Mex says at shift change. “How long are we supposed to stay here? You’ve been in there.” Mex knows that now; Rolly having been forced to tell him all that transpired during their previous visit. “You said the woman’s harmless.”
“We stay until something happens.”
“And when it never does?”
Rolly doesn’t have an answer for that.
Eight days.
Twelve.
Fifteen.
“Champ.”
Mex shakes him awake. Talissa stands by the door, not wanting to enter. Sun shines bright behind her, washing her out. She channels the bones hanging from the fortune teller’s curtain rod, a thinned silhouette.
“She’s leaving,” Mex says.
“She’s carrying the crate,” says Talissa.
For appearances’ sake he should bolt upright and take action, but he wants to roll back onto the cot, face the wall, go back to sleep.
“So girls went in?” Rolly asks.
“No, she’s coming out,” Talissa replies.
“Talissa can’t go into the Outskirts,” Mex says.
“I’ll go first,” Rolly says. “You approach after. Quiet. We don’t want her to hear us coming.
Wolf pups cower within. They’re the only movement; the trees aren’t rustling in the wind, the grass underfoot is still. She nudges the pups, rattles the cage, encourages them to step out into the wilderness.
“Come on,” she says softly. “Go on.”
They nose forward, the two of them, the same greyish fur, the same flattened ears.
“At least you have each other,” she says.
The pups sit in the scrub. One licks a paw.
“Fine,” she says. She reaches into her coat pocket and tosses a wet ball into a clump of pine trees. They both sniff, at full attention, then dash after the scent, or the object, or the noise, with tails bristling. She leans down and closes the crate.
“Done,” she says. “Ready to head back?”
The wolves she’s released are gone.
Rolly had stumbled onto her trail earlier, starting with the grass she’d packed down at the edge of her building, following until he found himself at the wood’s real edge, following what he thought was a path when the trees grew too closely to have any more grass to follow on the ground. But he’d gone blindly, really, once the grass died out. He didn’t know.
She found him. She’d set down her crate and doubled back to find Rolly.
“You’re lost,” she says. “You don’t want to be lost in these woods.”
His parents had been lost in these woods. Hopefully Mex won’t get lost too. Rolly doesn’t want for her to have to rescue them both.
She deftly leads them back to her concrete building through the trees. The sun ripens the leaves and blanches the trunks. Dead plants crunch underfoot. The birds, no fear of humans, sing like an ache.
“What about the girls?” he asks her. “I’ve been sent out twice now because they say girls go into your apartment and they never come out.” Rolly doesn’t want her to lump him in with the Senator who ordered him to come here, with Mex, with Talissa, with anyone who views the Outskirts as a disease to be destroyed. He wants her to know that.
“Them?” She points toward a yapping sound in the direction from which they’ve come. “They’ll be fine.”
Rolly carries her empty crate.
“It won’t be so bad for them now,” she says. “It’s always worse being a woman, especially out here, especially for some girls. They deserve to know what’s in store for them otherwise,” she says, in answer to a question Rolly hasn’t asked. “Then they can choose. I don’t make the decision for them.”
“I’d pick birds,” Rolly says, caught up in the nature around him. “To fly away.” She stares right at his face. “What?” he asks.
“No,” she says finally. “Never mind.”
The sun should have set by now. Perhaps less time has passed than Rolly thinks. Perhaps they haven’t walked as far as he thinks. He keeps expecting to run into Mex, but they never do.
“Why were you sorry?” asks Rolly. “The first time we met, you said you were sorry.”
She gives a chuckle. “That wasn’t the first time we met.”
And Rolly waits for more of an explanation to come from a woman who releases wolves into the wild that will grow and breed to murder more children like his sister and adults like his parents.
“You can be angry, Rolly,” she says. “Do they still call you Rolly?”
“Some.”
She doubles her pace so that she’s now ahead of him. It’s a long walk back in silence, carrying her empty crate.
“She breeds wolf pups,” Rolly tells Talissa and Mex. “Repopulation. The crate is for wolves.”
“But the girls?” Talissa asks.
“What girls?” Mex says. “We’ve been here for two weeks. We saw no girls.”
“That doesn’t prove she isn’t up to something,” Talissa says. “I’ve seen girls go in without ever coming back out again.”
“There’s another stairwell,” Rolly says. “The girls leave that way.”
“The imaginary girls,” Mex mutters.
“I know what I’ve seen,” Talissa says.
“We could get you a transfer,” Rolly offers. “A post could get you into a Senate pool immediately. Come to our department on furlough.” He almost reconsiders his own Senate stance in a daydream of them working there together.
“No,” she says, crossing her arms. “I know what I saw.”
“What other stairwell?” Mex says in the car. The car clicks and groans after more than a fortnight of disuse.
“I know,” Rolly says.
“That Senator of hers will make us go back there once Talissa tells her we’ve left.”
But she doesn’t. Rolly waits for the call, but none comes. Instead he gets a note, from the muscular, tattooed Talissa he assumes.
You will believe me it says.
Rolly crumples the paper to toss the note into the trash.
I am Talissa, child of the child, daughter of the daughter of the Revolution. Stick with me, release guaranteed.
But we almost never go out in pairs.
“Who are you?”
“Talissa.”
We dug quiet a while. Bone fragments, none large enough to call in.
“You’re awful close to the mesh. You don’t want to touch it because—” she warned like I wasn’t here first.
“How far you dug?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, a foot?”
“Did you hit any clay?”
She shook her head.
“Then keep digging.”
At first, I didn’t watch them, when they paired us up. But then, whoever I got partnered with, they keep getting set free.
So I started to watch.
“Some camps are,” she started up again, “weekend only. You know, for the lightweight cases, I guess. They come, they get their gruesome fill, and then they go back to work on Monday. But not us, right? We need twenty-four-seven brainwashing to fix us.”
“I’m not broken.”
“But you’re still here?”
Obviously.
“There mustn’t have been anything left after they finished with him. Or her,” she added. The pictures of the bodies after the fact. The pictures of what we become if we don’t repent.
Then she clinked. Metal on bone makes one note only. I made my way over, leg chains a-shuffle.
“Any skulls?” I asked.
She whimpered.
I hopped into her pit, crowded with corpses. A whole block, buried here, like a party. A celebration. The skeletons lay dreaming in rows. No bullet holes.
“There’s still hair,” she said as I found a skull to examine. She started to retch.
We did this, our side: we don’t have bullets to spare. In the end, neither will they. When the Revolution ends, we promise, all those who die will become martyrs, no us-versus-them. Adults who fought against us. Children to whom we strap bombs. People trapped between worlds. We don’t fault a person because of the accident of their birth. We apologize and so forth. Restitution is planned.
My mesh partner, for all her bravado, vomiting up bile.
“Like you’ve never seen a mass grave before.” Back to me riffling through skulls.
The day starts at six.
Dress and feed. Report to processing. Eye spray to ensure that we see no farther than the end of our shovels. Then transport to the fields, where they wrap a mesh around posts to keep us, as blind as we may be, from fleeing. The size of prison varies, as large as one person, as small as ten, fifteen if we stand close. On the other side, people, maybe guards. Mesh tear down at the end of shift, back in transports, back to the center, back to processing. Undress and feed.
A goal not to re-educate, the voice from the Tannoy grumbles. A goal to educate.
Some days we return and the klaxon goes before we have our boots off. Six a.m. Repeat. Dress feed eye spray transport shovels mesh dig transport undress feed repeat.
Try to tear down the mesh—a paste strips the melanin from your skin: sunburnt in minutes, deep, third-degree burns. I have the scars down the side of my body where I brushed up against it once.
They didn’t burn.
The blustery one, she left in the week. I’d do what she did but for me to weep at what I’ve seen, now, after so long, they wouldn’t believe. Plus, I did the wailing a long time ago. I refused to eat, refused to move, refused to dig, sat down on the field, stared up at the sky, the sun no more than haze, a dot of yellow through the eye drops.
They won’t let me leave without more of a fight.
Klaxon.
Remember.
I am Talissa, child of the child, daughter of the daughter of the Revolution.
A new field with grass a shade of green I have never seen. Translucent. Alone in the mesh. The other side growls of electricity, motors, heels on cement.
What do they think, the people out there, as they saunter past? Do they notice the mesh? Do they know about the bodies lying under their feet, near their homes, in their parks? That we dig them up to be categorized? To be chastised? For their illumination? For ours? Why guarded mesh fences pop up like toadstools and then disappear?
I could have screamed. I have screamed. No one cares about screaming.
At the wall, by the eye-wash station, they pulled me out of line.
I try again. “I think I understand now how they feel. How you feel. How my side was misguided and your side was right.”
Except they’ve pulled me just for a check-up. Three more teeth pulled. I’m an oddity. The dentist takes x-rays and writes about me in journals.
“In another life,” he said to himself.
In another life, I’d still be Talissa, child of the child, daughter of the daughter of the Revolution.
They say she was like me. That she led the Revolution. That we didn’t fail. That we just didn’t succeed yet.
I toss another skull.
I haven’t found her skull. Find me her skull. Talissa searches for her skull.
The bones will be marked.
Except she’s not underground.
She hasn’t been taken against her will.
She’s still fighting for the martyrs, for the Outskirts, for the City.
I close my eyes and push forward into the mesh.
I am the child of the child, the daughter of the daughter of the Revolution.
The sun burns.
After dark. The General walked through the house to the terrace, tiles underneath him all the way through. They lay on an angle, like diamonds, across each room.
His wife sat so far away, by the railing. She’d wrapped herself in bedclothes. Watched the fires below. Whole neighborhoods burned. The air smelled of it.
“They hate us,” his wife said.
“Until they hate somebody else,” he answered. The terrace, large, more square footage than even the house, dotted with planters and stone benches. But his wife, along with her blankets, had brought out a wooden chair from the dining room, to sit with her knees pulled up to her chest. An imitation of an ingénue, in someone even older than himself.
“Think of them like toddlers,” the General said. “What do you do with a toddler having a tantrum? Ignore them until they wear themselves out.”
Except the General had never once turned his back on his sons’ screaming. He’d pick them up, throw them in the air, promise sweets and presents, anything they wanted. At three and seven, the General spoiled his sons more than any other parent in the whole City.
His wife watched the fires.
The next morning, really the same since the General had come in in the weak hours of the morning, they ate along the bar in the kitchen. A house this size, his position, they should have a cook and housekeepers and a general staff, but his wife preferred the loneliness. Small bottles laid across the counter. No butter. Not even the General could secure butter. Their jam jars had only scrapings and soon they’d be forced to consume the small coppery jars of rancid marmalade. The sooner these protests ended, the better.
“The boys fell asleep,” his wife said.
“Still?”
She shrugged. The General would never fault his wife for her attitude toward her boys, but she could be warmer, he thought. They should try again. For a girl.
He’d missed what his wife said.
“I was talking about the next Senate opening,” she said. “I won’t make the list.”
“You will,” he said, mouth full of toast. “I can—”
“Don’t.”
“I can get you to the top of the list,” he continued despite her. “We need Senators like you.”
“Like me how?”
He didn’t want to fall into this worn argument. He knew to avoid talking of noblesse oblige. That infuriated her. That led to accusations of him picking sides.
“Because you would be a good Senator,” the General said.
“Maybe.”
What sounded like footsteps came from the boys’ room, but no children tumbled into the kitchen. His wife’s back straightened.
“I’m doing good work with the refugees,” his wife said. “They accept me, sort of. If I did get a Senate spot, they’d call me a traitor.”
The General’s gaze never wavered from the jam spoon. He tossed his toast, half-eaten, back to the plate.
“I’ll get the boys,” he said.
“Why?” his wife said. “There’s no school. If they sleep, I get some time to myself. And they’ll make you late for work.”
True, but he couldn’t recall the last time he saw his sons. He’d see them and then notice all the differences, the gradual ones his wife ignored and never mentioned to him. Height, hair length, the fluctuating shape of their bodies. They would be new boys completely. He wanted to go to work with his pant legs sticky with fingerprints and his briefcase decorated with stickers and sellotaped drawings
He turned and came back to the counter.
“No fighting,” he said. His wife could needle him all she wanted, he wouldn’t give in.
“No fighting,” she agreed.
“And don’t take them with you to the refugee center.” He put on his overcoat, his overshoes. “They’re rising up against our generosity, they’ve caused the school closures with no butter and no time to yourself.”
“Don’t oversimplify the situation.”
“Since they accept you, sort of,” he said, “ask them to calm down, to take their problems up rationally, and then we can get back to regular life. Or have them assassinate some Senators to free up more spots, more chances for you, and then you can push through all the refugee-friendly initiatives you want.”
“Don’t be facetious.”
“Don’t let the boys out of your sight,” he said and left.
The General worked in the basement, three floors down, below the main processing center. How likely would the refugees be to risk their own? the reasoning went. Quite likely, it turned out. The General and his staff spent the day assailed by hodge-podge revolutionaries who managed to get underground. Not hard to do: someone was always propping open a door with a bucket, sneaking out for a smoke, falling asleep on the job. It was like working in a circus. It was like having to depend on house cats for safety.
“We got a walker,” one of his lieutenants yelled into the comm unit, not even two seconds after the General had lowered his bulk into his office chair.
“Where’s he heading?” he asked.
“She. Your way. You should see her any second now.”
The General looked up. Sure enough, a wizened woman shuffled down the hall.
“Ma’am,” he said, stepping into the hallway. “Let me take you back to the main processing floor. They can help you there.”
The walker had gone past his door, but at the sound of his voice, she whirled around. Her eyes were rimmed with red around the edges and streaked with red across the white. Her mouth soured and she launched herself at him. “Where is she?” she screeched, fingernails sharpened and clawing. “Where did you take her?”
“Ma’am.” He grabbed her arms to pin them behind her, to frog-march her back upstairs, to find the grunt that had let her past and knock him over with a hard punch to the head. But the crone slipped from his grip, slashing him diagonally down his cheek.
“Your goons arrested her, took her away.” She spat on him. “Filth. You’re all nothing but filth.”
“All arrests are done according to City protocol, with due diligence, legal precedence, and Senatorial oversight.” He didn’t know why he was babbling about this, rather than subduing the intruder, all ninety pounds of brittle bones and cloudy hair. The blood, the wetness running down his cheek, the red drops on his shoes, on the floor, distracted him. He hadn’t bled in a long, long, long time.
“Your laws don’t apply to the Outskirts,” she said. “Your rules aren’t Outskirter rules.”
The scratch on his cheek throbbed, his patience draining out with the blood. “Then you should have stayed in the Outskirts,” he roared.
She opened her mouth to respond, but instead crumpled, every muscle in her body loosening. The General’s First Lieutenant stood over her body, stun gun in hand.
“Sir,” he said. “You’ll need to go into Quarantine.” He motioned to the blood.
The General rubbed his sliced cheek with his hand. Now he had blood on his cheek, his shoes, his collar, his hand. And still he bled.
“Did we arrest anyone last night?” he said.
“Loads.”
“Then find out who this one is harping over and string her up so she can see. Every orifice should be leaking blood.”
“I don’t understand. Am I supposed to kill her–” the First Lieutenant kicked at the collapsed woman, “and make someone watch that, or kill someone else and make her watch?” His voice quavered.
“I don’t care as long as someone pays for this.” The General waved his hand. “You and her, out of my sight, now.”
“Yes, sir.” The First Lieutenant hupped the old woman over his shoulder.
“Sir?” he said suddenly.
“What now?”
“Quarantine, sir? Just until her tests come back?”
Fucking underlings. Fucking Outskirts. Fucking propaganda. Fucking life.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the General said. “That will be all.”
“You said you’d be home early,” his wife said from her chair on the veranda.
“I had a long day.” His arm ached from the shots and he couldn’t see his wife’s face in the darkness. Fewer fires burned in the City that night.
“The boys missed you. You said you’d be home.”
“I had a long day,” he repeated. “They can deal with it.”
The tiles here were green, a bottomless green, a soup-pot-tureen green. He knelt down next to his wife, rubbed his hand across hers.
“Did we arrest the wrong people?” he asked. She didn’t flinch, didn’t tense. “I know you took the boys with you today.”
“I left them with Thaïs,” she murmured.
“But you went?”
After a long while, she nodded.
“Any news?”
“These people trust me,” she murmured again. The General wondered if she was drunk, if she had gotten high from something passed to her by her Outskirter friends. Her voice fought to escape her body. “I’m not your spy.”
“You’ve done it before. Think of all the lives you saved because—”
“City lives. At the expense of Outskirter lives.”
“Lives are lives.”
“They need to see we’re not all like that. That we value compassion over force.”
“You know they use children. You know they strap bombs to children.”
“Stop.” His wife held up her hand. “Just stop.”
“They’d do it to the boys if they had a chance.”
“I know.”
The General stood up.
“Don’t wake the children,” his wife said. Then, “I might come in later.”
At ten, the General wandered down to the staff doctor’s pod, the only place underground not lit by fluorescent tubes.
“Ah,” Talissa said. “Keeping up appearances? Coming in for your post-vaccination checkup?”
But the arm where Talissa injected her placebos, her saline solution, whatever, had swelled. The General couldn’t touch the skin without wincing, couldn’t raise his arm over his head. In the last half hour, it had taken to throbbing, along with his cheek at the same pace and rhythm as his heartbeat. If he didn’t need Talissa to lance the damned growth, the General would accuse her of having injected him with something virulent. Mistakenly, of course; subterranean Talissa would have made an honest mistake.
“Here.” The General slipped his arm out of his sleeve. “Fix this.”
Talissa sucked in her teeth.
“A mild infection. Bacteria must have got into the injection site. Didn’t you keep the bandage on after the injections?”
“I had to take the bandage off because of the swelling.”
She poured alcohol on a swab and dabbed at the General’s arm.
“This will hurt,” she said, pushing down with an exhale. “I’ll give you some topical antibiotics to try first. If that fails, we’ll move onto more drastic solutions.”
More pressure applied. The General flinched.
“Drastic?”
“Maybe oral antibiotics,” Talissa muttered. “There.” The General’s arm stung, but the skin on his upper biceps felt looser, like the contagion beneath had begun deflating.
“Maybe that woman did infect you.” Talissa smiled. The General snorted quietly. Mass induced hysteria to sow discontent. Rumors of viruses. Rumors of magic.
“Pretend like you have a headache,” Talissa reminded him. “That’s a noted side-effect of the viral prophylaxis.”
“Fine,” the General said and the whole building shook. Floors, walls, ceiling tiles, dust lifting like a fog underground. Two of Talissa’s true-to-light lamps crashed to the floor.
Another tremor.
The lights from the hall, bleeding through the doctor’s door, shut off. A whine, a wail of a siren, security lights flickered on.
“Them bombing us, us bombing them, us bombing us as them,” Talissa mused, turning on a flashlight she’d taken from under her desk. “Which one is it today?”
The General glared.
“Okay.” Talissa shrugged. “What do I know? Just a doctor. You’ll be busy today, General.”
A response was useless. The General took the salve Talissa handed to him and stalked back to his office.
Three centers hit. Bombs strapped to children. His center, above, then two at the City edges. One in the hills. In his neighborhood. Where his wife liked to go.
“Patch me through,” he yelled at the Operator, not knowing himself how to patch through a telephone line, not even knowing what “patch me through” meant, other than heroes yelled “patch me through” in in times of distress.
His wife didn’t answer. The phone, maybe lost under layers of brick dust, rang.
His boys would be with Thaïs. Another patch through to her. Thaïs answered on the first ring.
“Your wife dropped them off, then picked them up not even an hour later.”
But when, what not-even-an-hour-later hour? Before or after? The reports lined up all the explosions at around the same time, give or take minutes.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Thaïs said.
Before the bombs or after? the General demanded.
But Thaïs hadn’t heard; he was the first to tell her. The General wanted to scream at her, her obliviousness, her empty head, her daft voice, but what would that do? He slammed the phone in its cradle and slapped his door open.
“Find my wife,” he told the Second Lieutenant, attentive in the hall. “Find my boys.
“And why,” he yelled at no one and everyone all at once, “are they bombing themselves now? Figure that out!”
His officers scurried. Blood seeped through the white arm of his shirt. He tore at the buttons and flung the shirt to the floor. He popped open the tube of Dr. Talissa’s salve. Reports flowed in. Senators visiting the centers today, the precise one to be visited obscured in a list of possibles. More bomb reports. Instead of targeting one, all possibilities targeted. Bombs strapped to children shouting slogans before they set off. He smeared more salve, smeared around and around, over and over the wound until he buried the flesh underneath the unguent and rubbed salve and pressed down on his skin until everything blurred and all he saw was the hurt.
“Find my wife,” he repeated. “Find my boys.” Even though he knew they wouldn’t be able to. His wife, his boys, bombs strapped to children, were gone.
The Pied Piper are back. One or many. Who knows.
The air changes like scorched air from a campfire when the Pied Piper comes. No other way to tell. The Pied Piper don’t announce their presence. They don’t put a sign or a tent on the road. They don’t make an announcement. They come and they go and when they leave, they leave for good, unless they choose to come back, whenever that may be.
You have what they want this time.
Not that they’ve come door-to-door telling you, but you know. A trade would be enough to live on, plus extras.
You could really use the extras.
You could really want the extras.
Or you could tie yourself here. Stockpile beforehand, all around the bed, food that won’t go off, rope handcuff around the ankle, after a few days of struggle, you can escape. A few days to gnaw through the ropes. Maybe the Pied Piper will have left by the time you free yourself, your jaw cramped and teeth dulled and flossed by the threads in the rope.
How long? A week? Two? Trapped, alone in this room, only dust mites for company.
And the baby.
Alone with the baby.
You and the baby.
Nothing to look at but the baby.
To look at the baby.
Look at the baby.
Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby. Look at the baby.
Look at the baby.
Who will starve first, you or the baby?
If you’re both going to starve, then why not trade the baby?
You know why they want the baby. No one takes anything out here, out of goodness. But the Pied Piper promises. They promise no harm.
Not that you believe them.
Look at the baby?
Who will starve first?
You gather up scarves and tie them around yourself like sashes, Miss Outskirts. You wrap until you make a pocket in the fabric. You drop the baby in there.
You didn’t trust the Pied Piper those other times. You never believed what they said before. But now, this time, this specific, exact, exacting time, you don’t care about not believing them. You need to get out of here when all you care about is getting rid of the baby.
Outside the air burns worse than before.
Like being roasted alive.
You expect the baby to cough. You cough. The baby should cough.
It nestles instead.
A long walk. A hike. You might walk through the night. You might walk through two. Meaningless distance. Meaningless time. You don’t need either. You only need to figure out where to go when you’re already there, up the stairway with concrete dust crumbling, breathing in like mud slipping down your throat, drowning.
You knock. Number Sixteen.
“How old?” you say when she opens the door. “How old for you to tell me her future?”
The baby has been squalling the last hour or so. A whine and a scream then a whine again. You could have dropped the baby over the side of the building, gone up a few more floors to guarantee a hard fall. Or you could have smashed the baby against a wall, against a pine tree, spinning first to gain enough momentum. The sound the baby’s head makes, a sound full of s‘s and qu‘s and cr‘s. Or a bucket. Or a tub with a lid. No need to check until the water goes cold.
Or the Pied Piper. Give the baby to the Pied Piper.
“I’ll take her,” the fortune teller says. “Give her to me.”
“How much?” you ask. “How much will you give me for her.”
“I don’t pay for babies,” the fortune teller says. “You wouldn’t have come all the way here if you wanted to be paid.”
You wouldn’t have come all the way here if you wanted to be paid.
“My grandmother had those,” you say, pointing to the bones hung on the walls. You don’t believe in those superstitions. Evil can’t be caught.
“But if they could be,” the fortune teller muses.
She takes the baby out of your homemade cocoon. The door closes behind her and locks. Light reflects from the forest toward the City and catches in your eye. You’d swat the City away if you could.
You didn’t even give this one a name.
You have a long walk back.
They would run together, in the sun, laughing and touching, nine years old, tumbling, in love, uncertain where one began, where the other ended. On the grass, the sun burning plants to yellow. Their feet touched the stream, they waved fingers through ripples, stained from leaves and berries and pastes. Mud. Grass stains. Bones. That she’d chosen her, this exotic girl with her strange vowels and clothing, her parents who argued, who tore each other into pieces in their house on the lane, everyone heard them, this girl El had chosen her.
“I hate him,” El said. “If I had a moment alone with him, I’d bash his head in. A rock, a rolling pin. It wouldn’t matter. As long as he died.”
A frisson ran through Talissa. This was friendship, she thought. Friendship feels like this.
El moved from the City with her family. “You couldn’t pronounce my actual name. Just say the first letter.” El.
They hoped to vanish.
They couldn’t go back.
If her mother had had another girl, none of this would have happened, but she’d had a boy. The City would want the boy back.
“Do you want to play?” El said to her, the first day in the grass.
And Talissa had thought to say no.
“Show me magic,” El ordered.
“What magic?”
“They say all the people in the Outskirts know magic.”
Then later, when it all got bad, she begged, “A bird, a house fly, please, let me fly away.”
But no, not yet.
“In the City,” said El like a textbook, “girls inherit from their fathers, boys from their mothers. Such a system stresses equality and shows what an advanced civilization the City has become.”
“Okay.”
“You give me something now. You tell me something.”
“We don’t have anything to inherit.” Talissa’s eyes kept closed against the sun. Drowsier, pulled under, El’s head on her arm. Two fingers, smallest and the next, tingled. El’s weight had pinched the nerve.
“There must be ways,” El said, “to kill the baby.”
“You’d go back if the baby died.”
“They’d never go back. They’re taking a stand. They’ll go farther into the Outskirts before they ever go back.”
Return or go. Either way, El left.
“I hate it here,” El said.
“But you hate the City?”
“I hate everywhere. I’d be by myself if I could.”
Talissa’s heart broke. She would never be enough for anyone. “Where would you go?” she asked, trembling.
“Alone in the woods, after I kill him.”
“Don’t kill him,” Talissa said. “He didn’t choose this.”
“I’ll kill my parents, then. They chose this.”
They did.
“You can sleep in my room, in my bed,” she told El. “It’s large.”
“Is it?” she asked.
But Talissa’s aunts sent her home.
“Once you give her what she wants,” one aunt said. She flicked her fingers open like smoke. Poof.
Never mind, El’s back seemed to scream. I never wanted to stay in your home anyway.
She lived with three aunts, although one must have been her mother, although they never would admit which one. They sold trinkets and made potions and told fortunes and scraped by.
Talissa’s hair smelled like wood smoke. Her skin sat sallow and loose over fragile bones. Her feet ached and jolted her spine with each step.
Compared to El the angel who could lay down in mud without mucking the fabric and when she stood again, her dress flowed without wrinkles or tears. Her teeth, none missing. She could bend and touch toes with knees straight.
“You could be in a fairy book,” said Talissa, breathless.
“In the City, we have better than fairy books.” But El wouldn’t say more; she’d turned her back on the City.
“I’ll go into the wood,” El told Talissa.
She would. That Talissa had seen.
Aunt Number One: brown hair, brown eyes.
Aunt Number Two: brown hair, brown eyes, longer, thinner fingers, almost skeletal.
Aunt Number Three: lighter brown hair, still brown eyes.
Body types: undefined.
Faces: pale.
Aches: constant.
Jobs: hazy.
Talissa brought in trays of root and flower teas for the customers, her aunts’ guests. Guests paid in eggs, shawls, wools, doing the aunts’ gardening, thatching the aunts’ roof. El’s obtuse mother had given them bills from the City.
“Will they find us?” she asked. Talissa stayed in sight but El’s mother gave no sign she knew who Talissa might be. She had orange nails. In their panicked flight, El’s mother must have grabbed bottles of polish, thinking nail polish had worth just like those bills.
“The farther you go—” an aunt trailed off.
“Maybe bring us payment we can use next time,” another said.
The woman sprung up like an angry, wet, cat. She stalked out as haughty.
“Are you coming to the bonfire? Talissa asked.
“No.” El’s arm hung awkward along one side, held by the opposite.
“Your father donated some wood.”
The day cleared but fell, as muggy as the days they had run their feet alongside the river. The months of summer stretched with having El there. Goats behind gates maaa‘d at them, head butted crossbars to try and get free. Birds cried. Hawks.
“What are you going to do instead of going to the bonfire?”
“Don’t know.”
“We can race,” Talissa said. “We can fly.”
“Would you hide me?” El asked, suddenly, too many breaths after Talissa’s previous suggestions to be in response. “If I asked you to?”
“But where would I hide you?”
They went to the pine trees and climbed, laughing now, giddy, hanging upside down from branches on their knees. They threw seeds and nuts at each other. Chestnuts. Or acorns. Talissa knew fewer of the names than El even though her friend climbed ineptly, as if trees hadn’t existed for her before she came here. But then, El didn’t belong in a tree. She was no squirrel. She was no bird. She needed the ground, the forest floor, the underbrush. Once, as newly made friends, they had cavorted more on the ground. Above the ground now was a test. El wobbled as she stepped further along branches. Children fell from branches all the time. One little jump. One little push and Talissa would, could.
Friendship wearied her. Friendship wore her down. All encompassing. Talissa’s stomach always queasy.
She grabbed hold of a branch, then another, swung herself down. The sky, for Talissa, too tempting. She loved the ground. How solid and straight.
Talissa’s teeth shone like a wolf’s.
“Do any of these work?” Talissa asked her aunts.
“Yes,” distracted, one aunt said.
“No,” the other two corrected.
“They work in how well you believe them. To believe creates possibility. Think of what we do as boosting our guests’ confidence. Removing one’s obstacles. A focus, like a pure yellow light.”
“All this is for show,” they admitted. Old superstitions. But what else did they have? At night, the world came alive with searchlights, explosions, banging on doors, being dragged into the night.
“But maybe,” Talissa persisted. “Out of all those stories, at least one must be true. At least one magical spell.”
The aunts laughed.
“You think if magic worked, we’d be here, right now?”
But the line of people seeking out her aunts for advice grew. The whole of the Outskirts was foolish. They were all lying to themselves.
Talissa kept to the aunt with the lighter brown hair. If anyone knew how, what, why, when, where, it would be her.
The wildflowers grew up to their knees, her long shirt covering the rest so Talissa couldn’t see a millimeter of El’s skin.
“You’d inherit from your father,” Talissa said.
“But before I was born, he gave his position up. That was the end of his line. The Senate chose a new Senator instead.”
“The obvious solution,” Talissa said, picking the longest blades of grass, tearing each one to threads, shred, shred, shredding the greenery, “if your grandfather dies, rather than hiding or your mother refusing, your mother accepts and that saves your brother. She makes your brother swear to not take the position when she dies.”
“Sure.”
“It’s stupid running away and hiding,” Talissa said. “I came up with a solution in a minute that’s better than the one your parents came up with.”
“So you’re cleverer than my family. Congratulations.”
The flowers in the field were yellow. Tossed in the air, the pollen fell back down on them like rain.
But the aunt with the lighter brown hair laughed even harder.
“And then what? You think you’ll keep your City shadow so easily? She’ll drop you. When she looks at you, it will be like she’s never seen you before.”
“Come on,” Talissa wheedled. “Please.”
They found a cat, orange back with a white stripe on its neck, a white belly, white paws, a few strips of brown.
“We need to watch how it moves,” Talissa said. “Get down on all fours.”
“My legs don’t bend like that. See how the back legs, the knees, they’re bending backwards.”
“No. Here.” Talissa pushed her into place, hands shoved on El’s back. Legs splayed. Each ankle pulled. An arch. “There.”
The cat, by then, had changed positions to fall asleep in the box, wrapping its tail around itself like a scarf.
“This is stupid.”
“My aunts say to believe. Wait, no, don’t.”
But El had already, awkwardly, gone back to standing. But that no longer seemed right: El on two legs, erect.
“Do cats even move in the same way as wolves?” she asked. “Doesn’t one of their hind legs come up between the front ones.”
Talissa shrugged.
“I can’t see why we don’t find a dog. At least dogs came from wolves.”
“Because your City soldiers killed them all.”
“If you hadn’t rebelled, though, they wouldn’t have viewed them as a threat. You taught them to attack the soldiers.”
“They were only defending themselves.” Talissa stared down the cat, whose chest rose and fell while the rest of it slept.
“I didn’t teach them to attack,” Talissa said at last.
“But you know who did.”
The big dogs, white coats, faces slathered in slime, starved and lean. But when they were still puppies, still crawling over each other in a jumble with no way to tell one from the next. Exactly like them. The two of them.
Talissa petted the cat.
“Couldn’t we find a wolf?” El asked. “Couldn’t we trap a wolf that we could mimic?”
“How many wolves around here?”
El smiled. “Then I guess we’ll be the first. The first wolves.”
“You need to learn to howl,” Talissa said.
El turned to the moon and made a noise like a baby’s wail.
“That was,” Talissa struggled to find what she wanted to say. “An attempt.”
They both laughed as much as Talissa’s aunts laughed at her.
Three quiet nights in a row. Maybe they’d decided to try out a peace. Talissa, unused to a night without bullets, stayed awake, tossing.
On the third night, Talissa heard her, still a wail, but animalistic. Tribal. She shivered under her sheets. Then she started to sweat.
The next morning, El didn’t mention it. Talissa didn’t either.
Next would be hair. Hirsuteness. Not intrinsic to El.
“In the City, you can get drugs for men losing their hair,” El offered.
“And that helps us how?”
Talissa could feel El’s stare, uneven, moving down her spine.
Her aunts had grown people hair. Talissa scraped as much of their paste as she could into a plastic bottle. Highland Springs brand, label faded..
“The first thing I’ll do,” El said, between gulping the concoction down, “is to tear my parents to shreds. See.” She poked Talissa in the waist with a fattening finger. “I listen to you. I’ll leave Rolly alone. Maybe later, he can join us.”
“Maybe.” But Talissa didn’t know how to work this for him.
“Maybe,” she repeated. “Maybe.” Again.
Next time, when El’s mother came, she brought a basketful of wildflowers, the same ones that rained pollen on them that summer day. No one needed flowers that grew will-nilly in each and every surrounding field. The aunts let El’s mother into the room anyway. Talissa served the El’s frantic mother grey tea.
“Don’t let her fall asleep,” an aunt warned.
“Keep her upright.”
“Check her pupils.”
“Her pulse.”
“Once an hour.”
“This wouldn’t have happened if you let her stay here,” Talissa said once the woman had gone.
“She’s not our problem,” the aunts said. “Don’t make her yours.”
“If she wanted to grow hair?” Talissa asked her aunts. Playing under the pine trees, the small ones with branches so near the ground they had to squirm on their stomachs to go forward at all. No way to walk. No way even to crawl. She had no more hair than before, her fingers bare as if waxed.
“You’ll need to take a mixture stronger than that,” the aunt said to Talissa’s Highland Springs bottle. She mixed a new paste, a new jar to give away.
“This will be all you’ll be known for,” her aunt warned. “Think hard if you are willing to be known only for this.”
But to help El means to help herself. For Talissa, there was no difference.
“You can’t use scissors,” Talissa scolded. “They make straight cuts. Even cuts. See.” Talissa cut a strip along the bottom of the fabric. The orange tweed fell away in a perfect, straight line.
“But I can’t,” she protested. She’d just stopped being sick from the raw meat, hunks that made her vomit all the way until bile. Pink streaks ran down her chin, the glistening strands of flesh against her white, almost green from being sick, skin.
“Just try,” Talissa urged. “Do it.”
“I can’t.” Near tears, with a voice rising octaves in a lament.
“You have to.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t.”
But Talissa overpowered her. She sat on El’s chest, a weight so El couldn’t breathe without struggling. The fabric, ripped into bandage-sized strands. Talissa tied these around El’s throat, her mouth, her eyes, tight enough to be uncomfortable once Talissa got off her chest. She tied her hands up to the wrists so they would be of no use. She tied the wrists together. Talissa flipped El to her knees.
“Bite your way through,” Talissa said. “Chew.”
Then she sat back to watch.
“Grow your nails long.”
“Stop combing your hair.”
“No more fruit.”
“No more vegetables.”
“You want food, catch food yourself.”
Blindfolded, Talissa led them into the forest.
“Find our way back. Smell for the humans.”
El growled.
“Better.”
Her nails had cracked.
“Even my mother noticed.”
The orange nail polish. Of course her mother would have.
Talissa ran a finger along a weeping cut on El’s arm. “Whose nails did that? Not yours.”
She glanced away. “My parents plan to leave soon.”
“What?”
“We’re not safe here. My father says if he climbs a tree, he could see our house in the City.”
“Really?” Talissa pushed aside her dislike of tree climbing. “Show me.”
El’s imperious look stopped her. “We’re too close to the City and soon someone will find us. We’re running out of time.” El pulled at some grass. “That’s what he says.”
But they weren’t even ready! Talissa’s chest heaved while her stomach dropped. Such a pull. She felt sick.
“You’re my only friend,” Talissa said. “Don’t go.”
“They decided, not me.”
Talissa rolled to her stomach.
“We need to work faster. Maybe your aunts can—”
“They can’t.” If they ever could.
“Why isn’t it working?”
After the day darkened, she got up.
“I didn’t want to do it today anyway,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Talissa listened for the howling that night. She fell asleep, fitful and waking at every noise that wasn’t a howl.
“El?” she called. “El?”
Outside El’s house, the light brown wood and sliders that covered the windows, it smelled of everyone having left.
“El, El, El, El, El, El, El!” Talissa shouted.
The windows stayed shut.
At home, one of the aunts dandled the baby.
“Such a shame,” an aunt said.
“They haven’t even found the body of the girl.”
“They were packing up to leave too.”
“There have never been wolves here before.”
“And for them to attack.”
“They’ll have to let us have our dogs back now.”
“To protect ourselves.”
“I think he’d like a puppy,” Talissa said, giving the baby her finger to grab.
“He isn’t staying.”
“But,” Talissa said.
“He isn’t one of us.”
“I thought he was the point,” Talissa said.
“My dear,” said the aunt with the lighter brown hair, “the point is and always has been about getting our dogs back.”
Rolly gurgled. The hidden pups growled.
Days later, winds cooling, she took Rolly to the wildflower meadow. The yellow grass, no longer knee-high, crackled under their feet. Rolly, too young, too weak to sit alone, propped up between her crossed legs, his back on her stomach. He sucked on the end of the pelt, the orange fur with long streaks here and there of white, bits of brown, she had meant to give El, fashioned to look like a tail.
“Shhh,” she said to the baby. “Shhh.” If someone saw them, they’d send Talissa and the baby back inside for their safety.
Finally, at the edge, she saw the eyes. They were worse than feral. Feral meant a memory of the two of them. These eyes were wild.
“This will be all you’ll be known for,” the aunts said.
She tossed the makeshift tail toward where the wood overtook the grass. Rolly, with the loss of his toy, let out a howl.
The reeds by the wood shifted.
She was gone.
“Here.” Rolly passed the girl, some weanling, into her arms. Foundlings in the City, a dime a dozen. A dime a hundred really. A thousand.
The child squalled.
And then Rolly went outside by the concrete railing to wait.
| Meghan Rose Allen has a PhD in Mathematics from Dalhousie University. In a previous life, she was a cog in the military-industrial complex. Now she lives in New Brunswick, Canada, and writes. Her short work has appeared in FoundPress, The Puritan, and The Rusty Toque, amongst others, and her story “Good Fences” was an honorable mention in the 2022 Dreamers Sense of Place and Home Contest. Her first novel Enid Strange is published by DCB/Cormorant and was a finalist for the 2018 New Brunswick Book Awards. One can find her online at www.reluctantm.com. |  |
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