Maeve came alive them last few days before she died.
“You’re gone quiet, huh?” she says to me after a good half day of ignoring my surliness. “Good girl. Hide yourself.”
Already her voice sounds better, stronger.
I keep up my stony silence while we make camp and eat eggs and potatoes with seaweed and peas. I keep half an eye on her while she watches the country around us as it darkens; her eyes are lit up, her movements quick and sure. It’s nearly like going back in time, so it is. It’s disorientating.
We stay mostly out of the rain, and in the late afternoon I see where she’s bringing us to: a mostly fallen-down building in the sheltered side of a hill. It’s hidden away, part of the land around it. The walls are intact enough and there’s clear air above us for a fire. Once it’s dark, nobody’d see the smoke.
Maeve bids me light one, and I think about disobeying but I’m cold, as well she knows. We’d the dinner ate then, and I’ve not a word to say to her nor she to me till the next day, so we turn into ourselves and look for sleep.
I wait a long time for it, listening to Maeve coughing, but then she’s shaking me and it’s light, so I must’ve slept long and well. I slept better than I should have, and I wonder did Maeve keep watch. Had she any sleep herself?
“Let’s go hunting,” she says to me, and she smiles.
We walk a little back the way we came, and then northwest till we get to a jagged, wooded place. Maeve knows well where to go. At a stream we fill our bottles, and then, walking quietly on, Maeve stiffens and points to the ground. The markings are hard to see at first, and then I recognize them everywhere: smudges and lines in the mud, leading through the cover ahead of us. I know already that it’s hard to come across tracks, that the afternoon rain washes everything clear again, unless it’s under cover. Even with Maeve knowing where to look, we’re lucky to find these.
“One kill,” Maeve tells me, her voice low, “and we’ll head for home. Come on.”
I’m silent and not because I’m getting her back for all her silences, or because she made me leave Danger at home, or because of Mam, or because she wouldn’t let me go, even. I’m silent because my heart has pulsed up through my throat into my mouth, and if I open it, I think it’ll fall right out and I’ll die there on the damp ground of pure fright.
We come upon the skrake in a clearing. We’re upwind and hidden well, but Maeve is moving too fast to let me stop and catch my breath and prepare.
“Ready?”
I shake my head, eyes pleading with her.
“You’re ready.” She brushes my hair back from my forehead so she can kiss me, and then throws herself into the clearing, yelling like a madwoman wielding her stick, her staff, like a weapon.
I know if I wait even an instant, I won’t be able to move, I’ll be stuck, so I throw myself after her. I try to find my voice to scream.
I shriek, I burst from the cover, my hands to my knives, my feet flying. The skrake and Maeve are facing off, but when it sees me, it turns, just like Maeve said it would, and just as we practiced she gets behind it. She’s in close and has her staff up across its body so it’s pinned against her. Its teeth snap, inches from Maeve’s face. I never knew how brave she was till this moment, I never understood the pure guts she had, she and Mam.
I am frozen, staring and caught while it writhes and screams for me, and Maeve hangs on dearly, shouting over the screams of the skrake for me to go for my knives. She cannot hang on forever.
It’s only once the monster is nearly away from her that I remember to attack, but I’m flustered; my knife seems to stick and I drop it. Maeve is struggling and, thoughtlessly panicking, I run for the skrake and leap, wrapping my arms around it while Maeve gets out away.
Oh god, the smell, the rot, the feel of it under my fingers.
Maeve has the space now to do that thing I’ve seen her do a million times, a leap and spin in the air, all of her strength and speed bundled up into the end of her staff, and it connects so solidly to the skrake’s head that I feel it all the way into my toes. I leave go, step back. The skrake barely pauses, but Maeve’s already on it, her legs pinning its arms. I watch for what’s needed, but she’s her knife in her hand and her fingers skin-deep in the neck, and the whole thing is over quicker than I could count to twelve or twenty maybe.
We’re in a heap, breathing hard. Laughter bubbles up from nowhere, and I let it out.
The second skrake we see coming from ages off, that same day on our way home. It’s midday-ish and I’m feeling so cocky walking that road, my back straight and arms swinging and eyes flashing. Let them at me, I’m thinking. It’s good to see another skrake, to have another go before we’re home again, and I can take stock and think about the next thing.
The skrake is a dull shape, and you’d know it by its movements more than anything else at this distance. The twitching and shambling. The speed of it, though. It shambles toward us, the third skrake I’ve ever seen, awkward but fast, and Maeve tells me to get ready.
“I’m ready,” I tell her, and I smile at her, and she nods back at me, her eyes smiling at me.
My heart climbs up into my mouth and takes residence there again, despite how full of myself I am, but Maeve is smooth and strong and easy beside me. We fall into our stances, protecting each other. Our knives fly. When it’s time, though, it goes for me instead of Maeve. I get my hands up, and Maeve is on it in a flash. Things happen the way they’re supposed to, and Maeve and I put it down together.
Maeve and I, we put it down together.
Of course the skrake gets up again.
Maeve is careless, just for a second, and for maybe the first time in her life. It’s her cold, muddling her head. She rests close to the corpse, her hands on her knees, and she’s wheezing and bending forward so she can stifle her cough with her forearm, even then, a movement that is about caring for me. The skrake jerks up and gets her, going in deep for her hip. Not so far from where Mam was got. Before I can even yell Maeve has her knife hilt-deep in the skrake’s skull, and it’s dead a third time.
I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Maeve won’t die this way, now, in front of me, despite all my experience of what terrible things can happen so quickly.
Maeve knows better. She lifts up the layers of clothes to look, but she already knows. The bite barely breaks the skin, it’s a scratch. It doesn’t matter.
“Make it quick, little warrior,” is all she says to me, and then she grits her teeth and rides out the agony of turning.
I watch her, hugging my knees. Nothing happens in my head, not even fear; there’s only a stale blankness, an aggressive whiteness of silence while Maeve writhes. I can’t even get up to hold her hand.
After a while her screams die away, and her eyes find mine and hers are full of fear. Something in her is gone and I never see it again. Her gaze moves away from mine, and then her eyes go still and they half close. And then I’m watching two bodies on the ground and feeling a long way from home.
It happens so fast, violence like that, but the silence afterward is always the same. Eventually the world starts to encroach again; I hear the wind, and birds, and feel stones underneath me. Nothing has changed in the world except everything, forever.
Maeve, my whole family.
My whole world and the last person in it.
I try to imagine pushing my knife through her head. I think about dragging her body along the ground and away from the mess of skrake beside her. Her lovely hands limp, her strong legs useless, her head dragging against the ground because I cannot lift her right. I think about burying her body, badly because I’ve only my hands. I think about the dirt getting all over her hair, getting into her eyes and ears.
I imagine going home, then, after I’d buried her, frightened and sobbing and done.
I imagine sitting in the house on my own with that silence around me.
Forever.
I know I’d rather die than stay there on that man-made afterthought of land by my lonesome, loathsome self with nothing but the ghost of a dead world all around me, and that’s the truth of it.
Twelve days. That’s how long it took Mam, and she came round at the end; she was like herself, nearly. She could talk, she listened to me. A little, at least.
And Maeve knows, I know she knows, where Phoenix City is.
She’ll come around. And maybe if we’re close, if we’re off east, she can show me; maybe in her final madness, she’ll tell me how to find it. Maybe she’d even tell me where they came from, the two of them.
Maeve said it was different for everyone, and she is strong but she’s no fight left. I’ll hurry. And if we can’t get there, or if we get there and it’s gone, or if we don’t get there and die on the road, each one of those things is better than going back to the island and living and dying alone.
I leave Maeve’s body. I go back to the island and I try again to imagine staying there, and instead, I get the barrow, the same barrow Maeve carried my dead mother in, I pack chickens into a crate, I let the dog come out with me this last time, and I say goodbye to the house. I head out toward hope. There’s nothing for it now but what I can do with my feet and hands and head and heart.