MUSA MOVED WEST THROUGH the dusking forest, following a rocky creek. The sun lay low on the ridges, lancing red through the treetops. The shadows were long around him, jagged as claws, and darkness was welling up out of the ground, setting nighthawks and long-eared bats to flight. In old times, the hour when the panthers and wolves would be coming awake, stretching, making ready to hunt. The hour when he felt most at ease, hidden in the falling cloak of night.
He had no map and didn’t know the name of this creek, but he knew by the slope of the terrain that it must feed down into the Guyandotte River. He never gave much credence to map names, knowing most every wet lick and bust of rock big enough for a name had carried one older than what was on the map. Names from the people before his, the people before even them. If you were close enough to a thing, it didn’t even need a name. A scent could be a name. The particular crook of a river. The name and the thing could be one and the same.
Musa stopped. Voices were carrying along the creek, skipping down the rocks. He bent slightly, slowing, slinking from shadow to shadow.
He kept thinking of his father back at the camp. His sweet baba covered in blood, his eyeglasses smeared dirty. His fingernails grimy. His black mustache flecked with ash and dust. He felt protective of the man at times. He knew his father was a very good doctor, but he sometimes lost himself in what he was doing, in his work, forgetting the world around him. Musa did not.
He wanted to stay at the camp, but his father needed him now. His family. He would get them out of harm’s way, and Aidee’s family, too.
Aidee. Adelaide O’Donovan. Already she was a world to him, the scent of blackberries and stinging sweat. The arch of a scar-nicked eyebrow, one bright green eye boring into his. She was the creek behind her family’s back pasture, where they dipped and splashed. The goose pimples that reared up on his skin when her breath touched him.
Musa paused beneath an old bone-white sycamore, listening. The east side of the tree felt cool against his cheek. He could hear the bull-throated frogs bellowing along the creek and the surging thrum of the katydids and cicada, like one giant rattlesnake. Voices, too, tumbling out of the dusk. He crept closer, crouching in a pawpaw patch, listening. He raised his head. Through the gray twilight, a small group of men clustered around an iron pipe set carefully on a rock. They scratched their chins and regarded the curious object.
“Wish we had an airy-plane of our own,” said one. “See how they like one of these coming down in they laps.”
Another man, small and square-jawed in a ragged coat and tie, shook his head. “Aye, but the newspapers would have a fit. If we dropped a bomb, they’d have the Army here in half a minute.”
“What then, Blizz? Haul it back to the camp?”
The small man shook his head. “We’d not want it around that many folk.”
Musa, listening, slowly twisted a pawpaw from a branch above his head. The green fruit was just right, tender between his fingers, the skin black-speckled. He drew his bowie knife, Toothpick, inch by inch.
“Well, we can’t leave it here for a body just to trip over and get blowed up to Kingdom Come.”
Musa halved the pawpaw on the blade of his knife and squeezed the flesh into his mouth, pale and slightly sweet, tucking the toxic seeds into the corner of his mouth for safekeeping. Beneath him, the small man thumbed his chin. “Reckon we ought to get it out the battle zone, across the Guy-n-dotty somewhere. Stash it somewhere safe. Maybe a farmer’s barn or old mine. Somewhere secret, nobody can tamper with it. Might come a time we need it.”
The men around him nodded. It seemed like the best idea.
The small man rubbed his hands together. “Well, who’s volunteering?”
No one spoke. They scratched their chins and tugged their earlobes and took note of their boots.
Musa stepped out of the patch above them with a pawpaw in one hand, Toothpick in the other. His possibles bag was slung over his shoulder.
He spat out the seeds. “I’m heading thataway.”