My childhood ended there on my seventh birthday, and I knew we’d done well to get that much out of it.
Training—proper training with Maeve—gets going. Stretching so I’m flexible, running and swimming so I’ve good breath, exercises for my muscles. Technique is next and then practice, the top of the triangle that Maeve draws in the sand.
On the beach, I train every day. The ocean is a noisy, angry roar, hurling itself onto the shore like a fist again and again. In the distance are the bones of the whales washed up long before I was born. They’re a pure, stark white, monstrous skeletal fingers reaching up into the sky. The fingers are my goal every day, and every day I try to get to them a little bit quicker against the wind. I run hard, the morning’s coddle making me feel heavy. I pretend something is chasing me, breathing fleshy breath on the back of my neck. It’s not hard to put the frighteners on yourself, so it’s not. Every day I manage it, I get there faster; my legs lengthen, they want the work of it.
Just beyond the fingers is the rocky sea bridge, and I climb out onto it, past the crashing, crushing waves, to check our pots for anything edible. I find a lumpen, squishy purple thing. Neither fish nor fowl, Maeve would say. I hang on to it anyway, and sure enough, the seagulls start shrieking and following me. They’re big birds and smart, but no good to us. I once made a fire and cooked one and took a bite of the greasy, sour-smelling meat. That was me told thrice. “You’ve always got to find things out for yourself” was all Mam had to say about it.
I drop the purplish sea creature in the sand to let the birds dive at it and keep walking, back up the little dunes to the grassy knoll. My hand goes easy to my favorite knife at my hip. I toss it in the air, catch it by the blade, bring my hand back past my shoulder on a level with my eye. I point casually with my left hand, nearly like I don’t care where it goes but am just giving the bird its due, but my next movement is all the opposite to that. I throw hard, the balls of my feet and my hips and everything arcing toward the target, and I know from the hot flash of connection, before the knife has even left my hand, that the shot is good. There’s no getting away from my aim, my power when I throw that knife. That heat is one of the only things I really own.
I train. I train harder than they know, even. On the floor of my room, I get through push-ups, and with each smooth lowering of my arms, I can see underneath my bed, to my collection of stolen things. Objects I can’t figure out uses for: rectangles of glass and plastic that feel weighty in my hand. There are tin cans, still full, yet to be investigated, but it’s words I hoard, mostly, wherever I can find them: books that I know Maeve wouldn’t approve of from the covers on them; half-rotten and faded magazines pilfered from the village and the other houses. Everything I can find on the Emergency, the last newspapers, anything at all with the word “banshee” written, and in the village is where I find it, again and again.
There are posters.
They’re covered in grime, they’re hard to see in the dark and dust of the dead little town, but I find them: a picture of two people in silhouette, standing with legs apart, and on top it says BANSHEES and then lower down FIGHTING FOR YOU. There are pictures of handsome women with smooth, lean muscles, with their hair short and shaved, wearing black. Their arms are folded and they look out at me with appraising eyes.
I think about these women, out there, fighting for me. I cannot stop thinking about them, even though they’d all be dead.
A picture in a magazine of the faces of the women grouped together and looking out over a wall, shielding their eyes from the sun, says VIGILANT FOR YOU. These words are in my dictionary too, “banshee” and “vigilant,” but they’re from a different world, the world that died. I try to make sense of it and can’t, and I ask Maeve who tells me to grow up now and stop asking questions, and then I ask Mam who says she doesn’t know anything about them at all, she wishes she did. I’m not meant to be going to the village by myself, Maeve reminds me.
“Banshees” rings in my head, and “Phoenix City,” and “Here for You.” It is all I can think about; the women who were out there once, the women who weren’t afraid of the skrake.
Mam and Maeve let me know how good they want me to get by showing me how good they are. They’ve their own knives on them always, for throwing and one for sawing, and Maeve and me have our own special ones too, with the gold handle. Mam gave me hers, I suppose. They’ve staffs as well, and I’ve mine, though in my hands it’s only a stick. There are targets all over the island, I see now, ready and waiting for me. I start at three steps out, standing still, and we go from there. When I think I’m getting good, they show me what they can do, throwing and catching each other’s blades, arcing them to shave hair off each other at ten paces. When they spar, it’s the same. They work as a team, even against each other, with knives or staffs or their own bare hands and feet, showing me how to throw a roundhouse and how to step out of it, how to spin and block and hold and release and surprise and jab and weave, and then slowing it down, breaking it down for me to see.
The runs, the swims in the knife-cold sea, the climbs, the drills—they pile one on the other and more on top of that. At last Maeve draws them together into an obstacle course that builds till it’s the size of the island; it shifts and challenges and frightens. I’m tired and sore and hungry all the time. There’s no space to think, even, till nighttime and I’m alone. Then I can imagine the people fighting the skrake out there for us. I stop being scared then in the night, another bit of growing up done. I start to want to be alone so’s I can think.
Mam and Maeve try to keep me guessing, to stop me from getting bored. There are so many things they are trying to keep me from. And all the time they are together, they are a team, and I am the one alone.
I get strong, then stronger again. I mind the chickens and check the traps, so reliably empty that the fullest they ever are is right before I put my eyes to them. I sneak away, I rebel, I go looking for clues around the village to read and wonder over. I practice with my staff, but I love my knives. I make a den in a ruined house on the edge of the estate, and there I put those things Maeve calls nonsense and won’t let me have. That’s where I hide all my banshee pictures so I can look them over again and again. I clean and cook, and I run the obstacle course again just to show them, and then off I sneak when I should be sleeping or drawing water or pulling weeds. I make a secret life with secret hopes.
In the evenings we spar, and I always lose and must not cry or even get cross, not now that I’m properly in training. Mam fights with humor and grace and kindness. She makes me love the fight.
Maeve is cold and hard and unfair. “Like life,” she tells me.
Maeve makes me good at it.