Nic is trying to give me something.
“Put this on your face. And your feet, probably.”
I don’t know what to do with it, so I don’t take it off her.
“The sooner you heal, the sooner we can get out of here.” Nic glances at Cillian. Aodh sits a little ways away, drawing in the dust and humming, but watching us as well. Nic reaches for me and I flinch, my hand dropping as ever to my knife belt.
“Stop, would you?” she says quietly, taking my foot, my worst foot, and studying it. “You need a load of rest is all,” she says. “Aodh, bring some water, good girl.” The two of them together clean my torn-up feet and put something on them and wrap them tight in cloth from their packs.
The whole time Cillian is pacing, shielding his eyes from the sun and watching the horizon. I’m glad someone is as worried as I am about the skrake. We’ve been in one place, making too much noise, for too long. We are on borrowed time here.
Cillian keeps his eyes on me but says nothing. I watch him back; it’s hard not to stare, everything about him being so foreign.
Maeve is abandoned, dead or dying, and with every moment I sit here, more skrake might gather to overrun us.
“We need to move,” I say.
They agree between them that Cillian will stay with me, and that the others will go on, head west, staying on the road and getting as far as they can. We’ll catch up with them.
It’s all a stupid idea, but the man says this is the way it’ll be. I wouldn’t listen to him, but Nic and Aodh do. There’s not much I can do about it and I don’t try too hard; dealing with one will be easier than three. We grew up in different worlds, these people and me. Theirs kept them safe a long time and they trust it the same way I trust my training. I know I’m right, but I haven’t the words to say it to them, and as long as someone can show me Maeve, it doesn’t matter.
“I don’t know if this is true where you came from,” Nic is saying to me. Her face is quiet and she keeps her eyes fully on mine. She has a cloth and she’s rubbing off the stuff she put on the little cuts on my feet none too gently. Cillian and Aodh are taking things out of their packs and putting them in again. All the touching and help and eye contact has me feeling uncomfortable. I look about anywhere but back at Nic.
“In Phoenix City there’s a code among women. We look out for one another, we take care of one another if we can.” She won’t leave her eyes off my face. “You seem … you’ve been out here a long time. But you’ve survived. You carry your dead, I don’t know why.”
She looks down, and the moment her eyes are off mine I feel free to look at her again and I do, taking in her pale skin and red lips and the lightness of her long hair. “I want to be able to trust you,” she’s saying. “That you’re not going to kill him or let him get killed. You’ll bring him back to me, won’t you? You’ll come back.”
I say nothing, but I force myself to meet her eyes. A long moment passes and I’ve nothing to say to her. I can barely understand what she’s trying to tell me. It’s partly the way she speaks and partly the way I feel and partly the language of it.
“I need him.”
I glance at her belly. “Is he a father?” I ask, not knowing if that’s the right word exactly.
Nic looks away, rubbing her stomach softly. “I wish it were him,” she says, and as I watch, her eyes fill up with tears. She rubs them away with the heel of her hand and I feel a pain, deep and sharp, in the middle of my chest.
“I’ll bring him back,” I tell her, and regret it and don’t regret it all at once.
“Do you have to go?” Nic tries one more time. “There’s nothing you can do for your—for the woman.”
I don’t bother responding to that but say again, “You should come with us; we should stay together.”
She shakes her head. “Cillian’s right, probably.” Then she’s getting up, arduously, and when the man sees her, he comes over to help her. I sit in the dirt and keep watching while he puts his arm around her. Their heads are close together, the way Maeve and Mam’s used to be.
Watching them say goodbye to each other is hard. “I’ll find you,” I hear him say. Nic blinks and a tear squeezes out over her eyelid. Cillian’s thumb moves across her cheek, and I look away.
He goes to hug the little girl, hunkering down so he can put his arms around her. “I love you, kid. Watch Nic for me, okay?” He squeezes her hard, kisses her hair, and stands to walk away from them quickly, shouldering his backpack and not meeting my eye. I look around for the barrow and find it keeled over on its side, the way we left it last night. I rummage and find a half-full bottle of water and a large, smelly knitted jumper that belongs to Maeve. I don’t want to rely on anything they have, so I pick up the tipped-over barrow and throw these measly things in it and take off after Cillian. All the time I’m half listening for Danger, and every time I don’t hear him, I remember what’s happened and I feel again like crying.
We get moving. When I look back, Nic and Aodh are watching us, holding each other’s hands.
He goes so fast, I have to concentrate to keep up. My feet are numb, I’m light-headed and sweating, and my throat is rough. I slow to take a slug of my own water, dirty and warm, and have gulped half of it before I think to stop.
I move on faster, then, wheeling my barrow, nearly on Cillian’s heels. We don’t talk. I pull the barrow behind me for the relief of walking in his shadow. My back feels broken.
Quiet your whisht, Maeve tells me, pull yourself together.
We walk for a long time, and I’m lulled, nearly dozing, with the rhythm.
Cillian stops suddenly, and I knock my forehead against his back, clip the barrow against the back of my legs, and fall so that I’m sitting in the dirt with my legs splayed awkwardly around me. I see spots.
Cillian hunkers down to dig around in his pack.
“Here,” he says, holding out something that looks like a piece of flattened wood. “Eat.”
My stomach gives a great empty rattle on cue. I take it from him and sniff it. It doesn’t look like food, and it doesn’t smell like anything.
“What is it?”
“Food. Eat it.”
My jaw feels stiff when I open my mouth to bite the wooden stuff. My teeth sink into it easily, and I chew and swallow. It is not unpleasant. Cillian watches while I eat a few more mouthfuls. My eyes are so heavy then that I can’t keep them open, and I put my head down on my arms for a few minutes.
I’m not sure how long Cillian lets me sleep, but when he shakes me awake, I still feel exhausted. It’s only when we get going that I realize my headache has let up, that’s why I feel so light. My thoughts are easier to get to, and I remember to keep an eye on the landscape, to listen out for whatever’s coming next. I walk just behind Cillian. I’m afraid of letting him at my back.
Cillian doesn’t look at me and isn’t interested in talking now. He is strung tight. He should be, I think. I always feel like I’m going the wrong way; it’s nice to know I’m not the only one.
I’ve trouble understanding what’s going on in the heads of any of them, so I do. After knowing nearly every thought that passed through Mam and Maeve’s, it’s like suddenly being blind. Even apart from feeling weak and sad and afraid at being put alone with a man, it’s uncomfortable.
I miss Mam and Maeve suddenly so hard, so thoroughly, I feel faint again. I try hard not to think about their voices, talking quietly at home in our ghost house.
I need to know everything about Phoenix City and how far we are and what happened last night, but it’s nearly all I can do to keep up and try to make sure the countryside around us is clear and safe. I thumb my knives. I put one foot in front of the other. I breathe deep.
Cillian is waiting for me to talk. He can’t know how well I can hold my silence.
We’ve been walking a while, and I’m watching out for my own tracks from the day before in case I can see them—the snaking track of the wheelbarrow, my own two feet behind it—and again half listening for Danger and half waiting for Cillian to speak. When he does, it’s a surprise, the sudden deep voice next to me.
“So. Where are you from?” he says at last. “How are you out here, on your own?”
I keep walking. It’s hard not to say anything, but I squint my eyes against the glare of the sunshine and on I go quietly.
“I knew you weren’t from the city. I knew you were an outlier, the moment we saw you.” My thoughts trip on this word, “outlier,” but he keeps talking. “There is a lot we could learn from each other.”
Beware beware beware, I’m thinking, my senses like a string pulled tight. I have to be ready, to fight or run or kill.
“You must have seen a skrake, being out here?” He’s talking like he’s sure I want to listen to the noise of him. “The way you grew up, you must have. They tell you in the city that the country’s crawling with them, but we’ve not seen one yet.”
I stay quiet, and hope that he’ll talk more, but he keeps his lips closed for a long time. I think again about how the way he says words is so different from the way I say them. The rhythm sounds wrong.
“So look, after we find her, once we’ve met up with the others, where next for you?” he asks me. His voice sounds different now, deeper, and he says the words more slowly. I glance over at him, and he’s looking at me closely as we walk. “Back to your little hideaway?” The way he looks at me makes me feel like he needs something from me that I don’t have to give. I look away and he sighs. He tries again, speaking slowly and clearly, making his accent sound even more pronounced.
“Somewhere there are no skrake?”
I look away, and I think about home. The house with our things, the magazines full of nonsense hidden under my bed. The white fingers on the beach. Maeve’s room, quiet of her now. I think about her bed, carefully made with her sure, firm movements, with the sunlight streaming in on the soft coverlet from the window. I think about Danger’s wet nose and the way he’d put his head to the side and prick up his ears when he was waiting for me.
I blink hard.
“You tell me about the city.” My voice comes out like metal. Why, why were they running, what do they think they’d find out here? Only loneliness and death? They don’t know anything about Ireland.
He’s quiet for so long that I think maybe I shouldn’t have asked him, ordered him so simply, but then he gets going.
“I used to think living in the city was the only way,” he says, his voice bitter and hard. “You know. Fighting for the cause. Every year, though, it just gets worse. People are going hungry now.” It sounds like he’s thinking of a way to put things, even in the silence. “The women have the two options, and they’re not good ones, but men have only the one.”
“Options?” The word is out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“Breeders and banshees.” The way he says it makes me think it’s a phrase he’s heard a million times before, but I can’t take it in. My heart is in my ears and eyes suddenly, my hands are shaking.
Banshees.