I wouldn’t have recognized this part of the road. I see it now, in the distance, the fork and then the lift up the hill. I stop to hunker down and breathe carefully. I close my eyes and concentrate on not wasting the food that Cillian gave me. The word “banshee” is still echoing in my head, but I can’t focus on it now. I need to think of Maeve.
Once this is done, the world will change into something sadder and lonelier and scarier. We’ll never be as close again as we are now, Maeve and me. I’ll be on my own, properly and for good.
I finger my knife.
Beside me, Cillian is tense and alert. He’s watching the hills around us, and starts every time the wind rustles through the bushes. He’s trying to look out, but he’s no good at it; he’s not still enough. Mostly what I can hear is the blood sloshing belligerently around between my ears.
This might have been a crossroads once, I see. Two smaller trails, one leading left and the other right, down a hill, can just about be made out, and there are signposts. I’d noticed that dimly, coming along the road—there are only signposts where roads meet. That’s how it would be, once, long ago. You’d go along the road and could assume you were heading the right direction, but every now and then you’d come across another road and be reassured by the world around you, by the safety of a country that was organized to help people. You’d have a family and a community and a government all in place to help keep you going the way you were meant to be going, and now all we have is one person meeting another and trying not to be killed or have to kill.
I can see four signs, all pointing in different directions, and one big one too, half overgrown with ivy. They were green once—you can see it around the edges—but they’re a reddish-brown now. They have been drawn over with some brown stuff, and then symbols have been scratched over them. There are shapes I can just make out, the snake with the cup you see everywhere, but also a circle with an X in it again and beside it a circle on its own. There are words too: TURN and NOT SAFE and HE JUDGES. And PHOENIX CITY RISES.
I breathe in and out through my leaking nose and close my eyes. I won’t throw up, and I’ve got the crying under control. I’m okay. Cillian is watching me, nearly twitching with anxiety.
“They were drawn in the olden days,” he says.
“The words?”
He’s looking at me closely, thinking hard. I can’t tell at all what’s going on in his head, and that blindness to what he’s thinking is disconcerting all over again. I’ll never know people again the way I knew Mam and Maeve, I think, and tears start prickling my eyes again.
“Do you have those letters?”
I blink at him, confused.
“The signs,” he says. “The words, do you know what they mean?”
I stare at him. “Don’t you?”
“Educated,” he says, quiet, and then louder, he points and asks, “What does that say?”
“It says we’re near Dublin,” I tell him, and since we’re talking now, since I’ve stopped crying, more or less, and he’s nearly stopped shaking with fear and anger at me for dragging him back here, I ask the question I need to ask. “Tell me what happened.”
Cillian’s expression changes, but he’s still edgy, still trying to keep eyes all around us. Two lookouts are better than one. Maeve.
“I’ll tell you as we go,” he says. He steps toward me and holds out a hand. I’m not sure what he means by that gesture, but after a worried moment I put my hand out toward his. He grasps it and helps pull me to my feet, and I marvel quietly. If Maeve had ever put her hand out to me, it would have been a test, an attack.
It’s nice to feel a hand in mine.
Once I’m up, he lets go and starts walking fast. I bend and grasp the handles of the barrow and move quickly to catch up.
“We left Phoenix City three days ago.” He stops for a moment to look back at me, to wait for me to be beside him and then says, “It feels longer. Come on.”
I think about this for a moment. I’m not sure anymore how long I’ve been on the road. “Where is it?” My heart in my mouth; the question I’ve always wanted answered more than any other, the reason I carried Maeve the whole way across the country. One of the reasons.
“In Dublin,” he says. “It used to be called Phoenix Park. You can follow the signs to that.”
That’s why it wasn’t on the map; it wasn’t a city before. But I’d have got there anyway without her, I was going the right way, into Dublin. I needn’t have even brought Maeve. I could have done the thing I was supposed to do and come across Ireland without her. She could be resting with Mam; I could’ve buried them together.
I’ve stopped dead in the road, breathing hard. I think again that I’m going to vomit after all, and then I do.
“Why did you leave?”
After I’ve thrown up the food that’s been given to me, rested for a long time with my hands on my knees at the side of the road, and counted to a hundred, I am able to get moving again. I’m light-headed and weak and I still want to cry a lot, but beside me Cillian is loud and impatient and frightened. I’m asking him questions to keep us moving, to keep both our minds off other things.
“I told you. There’s no living there.” His voice sounds as if it’s being strangled when he says this. I wonder do I need to prod him more, but he goes on by himself. “We left three days ago, Nic, Aodh, and me.”
“Is she your daughter?”
“She’s Nic’s, but she feels like mine too. She’s smart, that child, she’s special. You should see her with a knife, already. After we got out, we ran. It’s stopping that’s dangerous. And going back…” He stops and for a moment I think he’s going to cry. It is alarming. Instead, though, he gives his head a small shake and says, “We saw you, on the second day, yesterday. At first, we thought you were one of them, but there was the body. Nobody from the city would ever do that. So we knew. You’re an outlier, aren’t you?”
Maeve was my pass after all, I think. She saved my life again. My stomach clenches.
“What’s an outlier?” I think I know, but I want to hear everything he has to say.
“You know, a person from the outlands. Someone not from Phoenix. We’ve heard stories but…” He moves his shoulders up and down, and I think he expects me to know what this means. “We hid while you passed us on the road. We watched you. Nic didn’t want to stop. She didn’t want to turn round, but you were heading straight for Phoenix City. Straight for them. Carrying a dead woman, and with a dog. So we followed you.”
“Why didn’t you let me go?”
“You were running straight to Phoenix City,” he says again with a different tone.
My mind stumbles over this, but Cillian is still speaking quickly, huffing out breaths as we walk quickly along the road. “You’re from somewhere else. And that means you’ve survived out here on your own. You know how to, how to keep ahead of the skrake and to find enough to eat … And maybe there were even more of you. Maybe you have a little village somewhere. Maybe there are others? Somewhere safe.” His speech is urgent and always too loud.
“No,” I say quietly. I feel dizzy. “That’s why we were running.”
“How did you survive out here, all on your own?”
“I’m not alone,” I remind him, and my voice comes out broken and too loud. I slow a little. “What happened?”
“I told the others that maybe you could help us,” Cillian says, panting.
He wipes his lips with the back of his hand and scrunches up his eyes to look at me. I keep moving, eyes straight ahead, but I watch him out of the corner of my eye.
He rubs the back of his neck. “Nic didn’t want to, but Aodh knew you were heading straight for the minefield. She took off after you to save you, and I followed her, and Nic came after us.” He moved his shoulders up and down helplessly. “It was Aodh saved you.”
“Quiet,” I tell him, wiping my nose on the back of my arm and trying, trying to pull myself together. “Speak quietly. What’s the mind field?”
“The minefield. Where they buried mines. Do you know what a bomb is?”
I nod.
“It’s an underground bomb. You can’t see it, and when you get near it, it explodes. It’ll kill you; it takes your legs off and leaves you bleeding to death.”
The things people do to one another.
I imagine the barrow rolling on to a bomb that I couldn’t see and everything going up. Lying cut in half on the road, Maeve gone, Danger gone. And then dying. It doesn’t feel that different from where I am now.
This is what happens when I try to save things—they just die worse.
“And the dog?” I have to ask. I have to be sure.
“He ran right on to one. He wouldn’t have—”
I suddenly can’t have him speak one more word so I choke out, “Okay. Let’s move.”
“It was fast. It happened all at once,” Cillian says.
I’m grateful to him for saying that.
We walk on, quickly, Cillian a few steps ahead of me.
“How do they make them? The minefields?” I ask.
“They don’t.” His voice has got loud again. “There were some left from before. We just use them now to help keep the city clear of skrake. They’ve set down a load, all around the city from the outskirts in. Some places are worse than others. The road is one of the heaviest set places. You’ve to know where to put your feet when you get through.”
“You got through.” Cillian says nothing to that. “What’s the city like?”
He stays quiet, and after a minute I look over at him, and he looks at me, right in the eyes. “It’s so good to be out,” he says. “I never thought I’d see anything else. If they catch us … Come on.”
It’s ahead of us now, I see—the fork in the road, and there, right there, will be the bushes where I left Maeve facedown, discarded.
The sun is going down, and Cillian is moving so quickly now, he’s nearly running. I’m keeping up, just about, but the truth of course is that I don’t really want to get to where we’re going.
“Did you hear that?” Cillian stops suddenly. His hands are by his sides and his fingers splay out with tension. He is totally still while he listens. I’ve cocked my head to the side, but I can’t hear anything. He breaks into a jog before I can respond. He runs noisily, too noisily—anything could hear us coming. Still, I say nothing. He’s frightened enough already. I jog along behind him and once again try to keep my brain from getting too far ahead of my feet.
“You saw her; you saw Maeve.” They left her there and took the barrow to take me away from her. My chest is tight, and something heavy feels like it wants to scratch its way out of it.
“We’re here,” Cillian says. “I think.”
I glance at him and see he’s sweating and winded. His long, thin arms rise and fall with every breath he takes. I want to ask him if he’s all right, but I say instead, quietly, “Show me.”
Cillian points to a bush and begins to walk toward it.
“This is where we … where we found the barrow.” He hunkers down on all fours and pulls back some branches. I keep moving. I step forward slowly and kneel beside him. Everything feels as if it’s happening very slowly, but I can’t stop it. I can’t look at the spot where she lies, I cannot.
“Look,” Cillian says. “That’s where the barrow was tipped over, and you can see the—”
I can’t hear the rest of his sentence for the blood rushing in my head. I have looked up, and yes, I can see where the earth has been disturbed. A thick line for the wheel and two indents for where the barrow was put down fast and then some mess from when it tipped over.
Here we were, the three of us, together, not even a day ago.
The loss of it.
There is no body.
“Where is she?” I choke out.
There’s a noise, suddenly, a crackle of undergrowth in the bushes, coming from behind us. I feel Cillian tense beside me.
“What is that?” His whisper is terrified.
“Where is she?” I say again.
Cillian says nothing. I turn to look at him, but he has his back turned to look where the noise came from. “What is that?”
“Cillian,” I say, louder. “Where did she go?”
“We have to get out of here,” Cillian whispers, and already he’s getting up.
“No,” I say, “no.”
I crawl deeper into the brush, toward the space where Maeve last lay.
“Come on,” Cillian says, too loudly, and he tries to grab my arm, but I shake him off and scrabble forward, my breath loud in the dark of the undergrowth. There must be a sign, a track, something. I’m half aware of noises coming from behind me, a scruffling, but I keep going, elbows digging into the earth, branches scratching at my face. My knives push uncomfortably against my thigh and upper hip. I search desperately; I’m not sure for what.
A touch of her hand on mine.
I hear Cillian cry out in fright, as if from a long way off. Something, it must be him, grabs my ankle and pulls me hard, but I shake him away from me, push forward again. Cillian is shouting from behind me. I can hear him now, and I know, I know I have to go back to him, but then the sun breaks through the clouds, and all in a flash I see the way ahead of me. Through the undergrowth, past this bush and not quite into the next, there’s a track … something rolled away here, down the incline, into the thicker bush and off toward the thicker forest.
“Ah!” Cillian’s cry sounds like he’s in pain, and, cursing, I turn. I back my way quickly through the undergrowth toward the road, over whatever tracks there might be beneath me, ruining them.
I emerge arse first back into the light of the road’s clearing and blink into the day. Cillian is on the ground, on his back, feet and hands flailing wildly in the air, the skrake all over him.