Sometimes I’ll wake from my numb, half-sleeping walk and think it’s Maeve beside me.
We’re getting better at it now, the two of us. We’re aware—if one of us is dragging their feet, we take a break and drink some water. It’s always Cillian, but sometimes I’ll pretend so he gets a rest before he marches himself into the road.
I try not to feel like I’m going in the wrong direction.
We pick our way through a small town—it doesn’t look familiar to me and I worry about that. I wish I’d my map still.
The thunder cracks the sky open, and we both jump. On our left is a small building made out of red bricks, and we run into it out of the rain. Inside, the hall is dim, the light soft. We wander quietly. The building is squat and solid-feeling, I’ve no fear it’ll cave in on top of us. It smells musty, and though the rain makes a racket, the quiet of being inside the place makes us want to move carefully. My solitude with Cillian feels more intense, gathered in here between walls.
We don’t stray far from each other. The floor is littered with dust and rubbish. I’d have loved a building like this on the island. I’d have stayed for hours, rooting around for things to bring home and hide to inspect them later and use as part of the jigsaw I was making to try to put the-world-as-it-was back into one piece.
I follow Cillian into one of the rooms off the main corridor. It’s lighter in here, and warm, the glass of the window is still in one piece. There are rows of tiny desks and little seats, and a bigger table at one side. The drawers are open, and there are papers everywhere.
“I think it was a school,” he says quietly.
On one wall there are tiny faded handprints in different colors. I go to sit, but my backside is too big to let me comfortably in behind the little wooden desk. There’s a board at the head of the classroom on the wall, and in the dust on it some long-ago hand wrote: “Help me.”
In a corner there’s a large brown stain. The smell is old and squalid. I sit quiet, listening, my head on my arms, my eyes closed. Imagine going somewhere where you’d have all these people, each entirely different but maybe all of them friends, and there’d be some of them there to teach you whatever you wanted, and there’d be someone to answer whatever question you had about anything. Someone who had to talk to you, to tell you things.
I think about all the kids here that never got a life at all, the kids this school couldn’t keep safe. I try to feel lucky.
“Let’s make camp here?”
We should wait out the storm and go on again for another few hours, but it is a good place to rest and Cillian probably hasn’t the hours left in him.
We find another room, one that’s nearly clear of furniture and has a way out off from the building through shrubs if we need it, and after I’ve checked everything over, we make little nests for ourselves to sleep in and we settle down for the night.
I don’t say much, but Cillian talks to me anyway, his voice soft, and I try to be warmer. When he hands me water, I take it from him gratefully and drink deep.
“It’s the bag,” he tells me, though I’ve asked him nothing. “They used to make them back when. They’d line them with something, minerals or vitamins or I don’t know, and they make the water taste good. Cold and clean. You can piss in it even and it’ll be okay to drink. After a while.”
I listen intently but say nothing, taking in not so much the words as the voice, the depth of it, and something deep in me answering it.
“It’s called a canten, because if you fill it right up it’s meant to last one person for ten days … These things, they don’t last forever, though. A few years’ use and the water doesn’t taste so good. They don’t have that many of them, in the city, but we took two on our way out, and the pepcho, the fixem, and the shtorella. If they caught us … I don’t know why you’d want to go there.”
“Pepcho. That’s the food stuff that goes warm?”
“Yeah. Most people in the city, they don’t get that.”
“They make those things in Phoenix City?”
“Not now.”
Like with the bombs, the mines.
Cillian doesn’t say more, and I fight the urge to ask him again about the city and settle for watching him closely. He’s so tired, and talking is making it worse. He moves funny, different from the way Mam and Maeve would, like he has energy but doesn’t know where to put it. He’s clumsy.
We sit quietly for a while, and I can feel him nearly asleep beside me. I steal looks in the gloom, at the line of his jaw, his thick eyebrows. He twitches a little and, heart jolted, I look away, and watch the walls instead.
I feel like steel beneath the tiredness. That’s what Maeve and a lifetime of training have given me. Cillian doesn’t have that, but he’d keep going, done in as he is. That’s what love has given him.
“We’ll catch up to them soon,” Cillian says, half asleep.
I don’t tell him that I’m surprised we haven’t caught them already. We’ve been walking hard, and I’d thought they’d be moving slower, watching for us. For him. I saw no footprints in the mud on the road, in the few hours between heat and wet when tracks can be recorded in the mud. They’d a good start on us and maybe they’re walking nearly as fast. It’s a worry, and if we don’t find them tomorrow, it’ll be more like a panic. I don’t know how long Cillian will be able to keep calm.
Soon, he’s breathing evenly, and slowly, carefully, I get closer with my body till I can feel the warmth coming off him.
“Do you think we passed them?”
Cillian is nearly as frightened as he should be. We’re sitting at the side of the road, resting again. The sun is high in the sky already.
“In the night? They could have been sleeping at the side of the road.”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. If I knew, I’d be moving faster, less hesitantly.
If he were Maeve, these words wouldn’t even be necessary. I’d rather they weren’t necessary.
“We should go back,” he says. He starts the sentence firmly but finishes in the end with a question.
I squint my eyes against the sun to look him full in the face, just as he turns to look at me. I look away.
“You always do that,” he says.
“What?”
“You won’t look me in the eye.” He sounds angry.
It’s true. I find it hard for us both to be looking at each other at the same time. Cillian is still watching me. It’s as if he is asking things of me, and I don’t know how to give them or even if I have them to give. I close my eyes and roll my shoulders.
“Maeve and I didn’t. There was no need.” Saying her name is hard and I’m angry now, with him. “What’s the point in it, anyway?”
I don’t open my eyes to look at him, but I can feel him understand.
“Sorry,” I say, and regret it. Then, briskly, “Let’s get moving.”
“Forward or back?”
“We’ve been behind us already.”
There isn’t much logic to this, but Cillian nods.
“Okay,” I say, pretending I’m Maeve and he’s me. “If you want to go back, I’ll come with you.” I try to think, to decide. “My gut’s pulling me west,” I find myself saying, and as I say it, I see that it is true. Another couple of days west, and we’ll be near Slanbeg.
“That sounds horrible,” Cillian says. He rubs his hair with one hand and squints at me, and my heart gives an uncomfortable thud. His smile is small, half secret. “I’m with you.”
It was bad enough knowing I was in charge because I was bullying it out of him. Leading Cillian because he trusts me is worse. I move on, walking faster than I should and making it hard for him to keep up. I want to walk these thoughts right out of myself.
In the afternoon, though, when it starts to lash, we keep on. Every time I look at him now, he’s more wild-eyed. We walk and face up to getting wet. With each other for warmth in the night, I’m not so frightened of the cold and damp.
Thunder rumbles and roars around us, and the rain hits the ground so hard that it bounces back up to hit us again. Steam rises from the hot road, and the air smells of dirt and freshness. It’s delicious.
We won’t be able to hear the noise of a skrake over the racket of the storm. Cillian marches on, though, ahead of me now, and I don’t try to slow him down. By walking through the rain, we leave our prints. Our tracks will dry in the sun and be obvious to anyone looking for us, till the next time it rains. I hope Nic and Aodh are the only ones trying to find us. I keep an eye out for theirs in the road ahead of us once the rain stops.
Cillian is unhappy, quieter than usual and biting his fingers.
“Would we find their ashes?” I ask. As if the rain wouldn’t wash them away. We’re resting a few minutes under a rusted metal roof.
Cillian shakes his head. “I left them the primus.” When I don’t respond he says, impatiently, “It works with a small blue flame. It wouldn’t show up in the dark unless you’re on top of them. Anyway, they don’t need to cook, they have pepcho.” His words are short and hard-sounding.
“Didn’t you think about this? Didn’t you think about what might happen, if you got separated, how you’d meet up again?”
Suddenly I’m angry—it’s popping on my skin and shooting from my fingertips and buzzing from my aching head and bubbling up my throat. The anger feels good, a relief from fear and responsibility. It has been coming for days. “Where were your Just-in-Cases?”
Without realizing it, I have got up from my seat in the damp dirt and I let my voice get loud. I want to scream at Cillian till my throat gives way. My hands tighten into fists.
Cillian flinches away from me and then gets up as well, brushing dirt from his hands.
“Maeve and I would have checklists,” I say, still too loud. I close my eyes against the last of the day’s light and try to breathe easier, go quieter. He is struggling. I am struggling. I don’t know where that sudden rage came from.
“We called it the JICs list,” I go on, trying to calm down, to get my voice quieter. “For what we’d do, just in case. If she disappeared one day off the island. Or if I got lost somewhere, or if I met a skrake, or another person. We’d lists for everything, for every Just-in-Case.”
“Has that worked well for you?” Cillian says in a tight, angry voice, and I feel my cheeks get hot with surprise. “Huh?”
He takes a step toward me, and I see how tall he is—he has a good three inches on me. Disguising the move with a casual half step backward, never taking my eyes off his, I lower my hand to my knives.
“We tried to save you,” Cillian says. “I said no. I said to leave you and you were trouble, and fuck was I right, but we did save you! And still you dragged me back here—for what? Why the fuck are you shouting at me?”
Cillian brings his hands up to his hair again and tugs on it. “You threaten me and Nic, and Aodh. What were you dragging her out here for in that barrow, your Maeve?” His voice gets quieter now, but he’s still furious. It’s been in there, his anger with me, the whole time. “Didn’t you have a JIC for that, for what to do when she got bit?”
I look away.
“You did.” Cillian’s voice changes. “You did, didn’t you, and your Maeve wanted one of your knives in her skull? You stupid—”
Before I know that I’m going to do it, my hand curves upward and I torque my body round and catch Cillian with a stinging right hook. It lands hard; his nose spurts blood and he staggers back.
“I’m sorry,” I say immediately.
I bite my tongue to stop myself saying more and try to take him by the hand, to sit him down, but he shakes me off. Instead, I go looking in his pack for fixem, and after a pause he takes it off me, tilting his head back and putting his fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he spits at me, his voice nasal and wet-sounding. “Violence for everything, except for mercy.”
His strike is better than mine. Tears come to my eyes, and I look away, stay quiet for a while. Cillian carefully touches his face to see what new damage I did him.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. I put my hands on my head and close my eyes and pace. Right on the most damaged part of his nose; it must have hurt like hell. My knuckles sting pleasantly, and I rub them against my thigh.
“She would have wanted you to live,” Cillian says after a bit. He’s still pinching the bridge of his nose, but he’s looking at me out of the sides of his eyes. “You had a good life, somewhere, both of you?”
I nod and meet his eye. “We did.”
“Just you and nobody else?”
“Just us.”
“Where?” His voice is urgent.
“Farther west, off the end of this road. There’s an island.”
“And there’s no skrake there?”
“I’ll show you,” I tell him.