The Dust of the Ages: Post Apocalyptic Story

[lieutenant]

The Dust of the Ages



Prologue


The bushes across the fire were shaking in the weak moonlight. The curly haired boy huddled in the depths of the overturned lorry at the side of the decimated highway, wrapped his arms around his bare, gashed shins and waited with wide eyes, hoping this time, whatever was out there would be kept away by the fire.

--

The air was grey, and the ash drifted onto the three teenagers, suited in strips of cloth that wrapped over their hands, and up and around the motocross helmets they’d salvaged from a collapsed garage. Only the dark goggles they wore were uncovered by the wraps. Two of them were armed with spears that had been made from shovels with the blade torn to a point.
The biggest of them stood at the brow of the hill, a landscaper’s trimming blade resting in his hand as comfortably as a school boy in former days might have held a backpack.

In the hollow below them the land made a depression that couldn’t be seen until nearly on top of it. The structures within had defused the light from their cook fires, to prevent it from reflecting off the ash fog and being seen outside. The few survivors moving outside of the shelters had done their best to wrap themselves against the ash, but where their skin showed, the ash clung to the weeping open sores.

The big teenager flicked a hand signal to the other two and they melted back into the fog. There was no point in risking anything at all attacking this camp.

These people wouldn’t be here in a few days, and the Sky Clan would have what they left behind.

--

“This is MY clan, boy!” The man somehow maintained an impressive muscle mass, even while the rest of them wasted away. His bare chest glistened with sweat that clung in his chest hair. The hairs were sprinkled with grey, now, though he shaved his head clean and his square beard was still dark. He was clean, aside from the sweat. His loose pants rustled as he stepped forward, the most formidable fighter in the clan. The only one trained by a Before military. He was carrying a finely honed, perfectly balanced knife, common to soldiers of that era.

The boy was tall, but thin, by nature and from hunger. His face was marked by the characteristic ring of sores where the ash filtered in around his goggles. Even in the camp, stripped out of his wrappings, he still whiffed of the dust that got everywhere outside. His pants hung loose from his hips, not by design, but because the long jeans scavenged from a burned out warehouse had been designed for a “skinny” boy who ate three rich meals a day and sat in a chair, instead of learning with his hands and feet.

The boy tossed the ten inch spar of fencing iron from one hand to the other. “Your clan starves while they scrounge for your food.” He tilted his head, which made his curly hair bob around his ears. On the heels of the condemnation he closed with his leader.


Chapter One- King of the Scavs


Liam popped his head out of the basement from between two boards, shaking his head, causing long dead ash and dust to fly off his wrappings. He didn’t bother to squeeze his body back through the opening. George and Alex Albon crouched between a half fallen wall and some sort of metal cabinet with a shattered glass top called an oven that didn’t look anything like the thick slabbed stone daubed with clay that the Sky clan used for baking.

The two didn’t say a word, and the trees consuming the rest of the fallen house barely moved. The ash fog drifted with no disturbance. Liam gave a signal and the other two moved forward in a crouching run. He balanced, one foot on the top of a shelf, the other jammed against the top of what had been a doorframe, and passed them the cans.

The labels, protected from the sun, and once shaken free of their skin of dust, were eerily bright and beautiful, colored like deadly fruit growing in the ruins of a farm. This bright food would be safe to eat. Once the cans were discarded, the beets within would have been protected from the fallout.

Without a word, George and Alex packed the cans away in their carisacks. George held a hand out and grasped around Liam’s wrist, pulling as Liam shimmied back out of the gap none of the other scavs were small enough to fit through. Alex had moved away before Liam was fully freed, and the other two moved as soon as they could. The boys had filled Liam’s carisack as well, and he slung it on as he ran, low to the ground, and secured it with a strap just in time to reach the still standing wall at the edge of the fallen house’s yard and swing himself up onto it.

There was an eerie yowling in the distance. Only the howlers would announce their presence in this environment. Whispers were that the yowling was deceptive, and where you heard them wasn’t really where they were.

The scavs didn’t wait to find out. It was a long run back to the Sky, and they would be making the run back and forth for as many days as it took to clear that prepper’s stockpile.

Liam settled into a ground-eating pace and concentrated on the salty flavor of the ash in the air.


--


The Sky had been a building entirely for making things. Something inexplicable with sheets of green metal, sprinkled with brass colored metal prongs, all packed into boxes with shiny glass. There was a heap of them outside of the compound. Liam had been warned never to climb on them, because of some unspecified danger of poisoning.

Something different than ash poisoning.

They were a wealthy clan and each family had their own shelter in the safety of the Sky building, where the air scrubbers ran full time and once past the lobby, the livers could go uncovered.

Liam had his own set of nails driven into the wall of the lobby. The uppermost for holding his helmet and he hung the goggles inside. As he unwrapped each of the strips of cloth from his helmet and body, he placed the strip on the lower nail. Each was the size and shape it had taken when it was ripped off an old piece of clothing or upholstery. The thick upholstery pieces went on the outside, durable enough for the climbing and crawling that was the scavs’ lives. Inside were strips of softer cloth for insulation, layered thick to keep the ash from filtering through.

As he undressed, the ritual of untucking and untying the scraps and dipping them in the basin of solution in the center of the lobby, soothed his mind from the eternal alertness that kept he and his boys alive out there.

There was the sound of a rip.

Alex gasped.

George and Liam whirled, mouths agape.

“It was just a little one,” Alex rasped, his shoulders hunching, his body starting to crouch like he was outside again. There was a shred of brown canvas ducking in his hand, and on his left arm the other half, still tied around his wrist, dangled free.

George, the best in an emergency, raised his hands slowly, palm out towards Alex. “Don’t panic.” He spoke over his shoulder. “Go get Dani,” He told Liam.

Liam took two steps towards the inner door and then returned to his peg. His hands were shaking so bad that he had to stop and take a deep breath of the clean, delicious air before he could untie the rest of his own wrappings, slowly, so Alex’s bad luck wouldn’t spread to him, too.

He repeated the untying mantra with each wrapping, and supported the weight of them with the fingers of his left hand as he lifted them out of the solution, like the weight of the liquid would cause them to tear as well. When his chest and head were bare, and he’d removed the big piece of linen the eleven turns around his hips and groin, he completed the unwrapping of the gaiters and pulled his rubber soled boots off, stacking the Wilsoned gaiters on the toes and setting them under his nail.

He had completed the procedure as quickly as possible and in the meantime, George had continued unwrapping, but Alex remained in place in front of his nail, the shred of his sleeve wrap in his shaking hand and his eyes closed, mouth moving silently.

“I’ll be back!” Liam told him, not daring to go close. He took one last look at the boy who’d been scaving with him since they were boys. “I...I’m sure Dani can…” His heart constricted and he ran through the interior door.

The stacks of shelters on each side of the big room were noisy with livers. Dressed in pants or less in the great heat generated by so many cook fires and people alive in the same enclosed space. The livers glanced up at him as he ran by. The avenue between the shelters was crowded with workspaces. Up on the balconies of the second and third story shelters, livers were going about their business. He heard the calls of the craftsmen and children laughing as they recited their lessons in the teacher’s shack, and someone playing a cheerful song on a pipe.

At the end of the avenue, the craftsmen’s workspaces gave way to the readers’ rooms. The whole end of the avenue, was taken up by the leader’s home, three stories all in one, though the upper two were just where his helpers lived.

The last craftsmen’s booth on the right was big in comparison to the others, and three or four craftsmen shared the smithy.

“Dani!” Liam called, skidding into the forge area. The whole interior of the Sky building was warm, but the heat in the forge was like an oven, of whatever variety cooked flesh into steaming meat. The two smiths who were standing beside the pit of coals, holding bars of iron with tongs, watching them for the perfect shade of glow, were wearing almost nothing, except leather shields that covered them from neck to ankle, split and tied to their legs, and completely open in the back. Both of them had shorts that really only served to contain their flapping bits.

They were both heavily muscled enough to beat metal into new shapes, but the slightly slimmer of the two glanced at Liam, thrust his iron back into the coals, and turned away to the bench with his anvil.

The stockier one, Dani, didn’t take his eyes off the bar, which was glowing yellow. “Iron, when overheated, burns to uselessness. Did you know?” He asked. “Have a drink.”

Liam huffed in frustration, but turned to the tea pot warming on the edge of the forge, dumped some of the tea into a mug with a broken handle, held it up to Dani and said, “Your hospitality has saved my life,” And gulped the tea in three gulps.

The mug had a picture of two white animals kissing and read, Somebunny loves you.

Liam set it back down next to the pot for the next person to use. “Alex tore one of his wraps.”

The rhythm of Jorge’s hammer stuttered on the iron. Liam spun to glare at the older smith for fog-listening. Jorge kept hammering away without any pretense that he hadn’t been.

Dani turned the iron bar this way and that, examining the color. “That’s a bad sign.”

“There has to be something he can do! We can’t go out again until our gear dries, maybe three days, but...if he’s not better by then…”

“Move.” Dani lifted the iron out of the coals and Liam dodged back while he brought it to the anvil and took up his hammer. “Well, no one will stop you from bringing him food and drinks, but who can know what condition he will be in by the end of three days.”

“You have to know a ritual to break the bad luck. Dani, please, you are the best reader we have.” Liam was shaking.

“The biggest problem you have isn’t his bad luck. Of course you can’t bring him in here like that, but he can’t stay in his wrappings for the three days until you and George can go out again, and there’s nothing in here to be done,” Jorge said.

Dani looked up from his iron for the first time.

“You remember Casey?” Jorge asked. “When he fell down that sheet metal roof and shredded his suit?”

“Of COURSE!” Dani said. “That could work for them.”

“What?” Liam asked.

Jorge made eye contact with Liam. “Have him wash off in the solution basin. It might make him a little sick, but it will keep the ash from killing him before the three of you can go out again.”

“He can’t...that would be...desecration.”

Jorge shrugged. “If that is more important to you, let him stay in the lobby until his own wrappings kill him, or he walks out into the ash with his skin uncovered.”

“Once you three can go out again,” Dani added, kindly, “There is a place you can go to find out how to break such bad luck, but…” He stopped speaking with his lips pinched into a tight frown. Liam was just about to insist he go on, but he continued. “If you go out with him, you will have to travel under his bad luck, because it will extend to all of you.”

Fear clutched at Liam’s throat, even more than at the thought of leaving Alex to die, trapped between going outside and not being allowed inside. Maybe it would be kinder just to advise him to go. Rather than suffer his bad luck with him.

How could they accomplish anything with bad luck on all of them, anyway?

Was there no hope?

Liam took a deep breath and stood straight. “Where will we go?”

“To Marc, at the Library.” Dani’s voice was punctuated by the ringing metal and the hammer.

“I have never been there. How will I find my way?”

The two smiths exchanged glances. “By finding someone who knows Marc’s clan.”

“Who?” They both had famously travelled with Marc before the other man had left to join another clan. They were readers, now. Their skills were too valuable to risk their knowledge by allowing them outside.

“One of the other clans could lead you there. Wilson knows where the library is. He...might be willing to help you.” Dani said.

“Whoever travels with you will share your bad luck,” Jorge said. “Do everything you can to keep him from finding out why you are going. Tell him something else.”

“It’s a library,” Liam reasoned. “It will be easy enough to say we need some knowledge we don’t have. Will their clan trade for what they hold? What should I take to offer them?”

Dani shrugged. “They will know their own needs, and they will name their price.”

“And there may be no ritual strong enough,” Jorge said, always the ray of light in the ash cloud.

“If that is the case, then…” Liam stopped to think. If there was no ritual to reverse Alex’s bad luck, then they would be out there, all of them, and no way to get better. And Wilson or whoever they brought with them. “I will consult with George. Maybe he won’t be willing to go.”

“May you find tea mushrooms,” Dani said the farewell, and Liam responded with the traditional closing, “May your air stay clear.”

As he walked away he reflected that Dani was one of the few livers he knew who insisted on the tea ritual when someone came to him. Then, Dani had been a scav as a young man. He knew the importance of the detoxifying effects of the tea, and he must have known Liam was just in from outside, and would need a good dose of detox to wash the radiation out of his system.

Something twinged at the back of his mind.

His hand went to his carisack. The outer lining had been left with his gear in the lobby, but the canned beets were still with him.

Beets fought radiation poisoning.

There had been hundreds of cans in that basement. How many had been beets? All the cans he’d shaken dust off, that he’d passed up to George and Alex. The three of them carried enough beets to bribe Wilson, or anyone, to lead them to the Library.

He ran back down the avenue, to the low corridor that led to the lobby, and he couldn’t enter, but when he arrived, George was undressed and waiting. Alex was still half undressed, facing the wall.

“Tell him to wash in the solution,” Liam called through the glass of the door. “Undress and wash, and he can eat the beets in his carisack, and yours, George. They will help keep the ash’s radiation at bay.”

“And then what? He can’t live here. What is the ritual?” George asked.

Liam’s face must have told his intelligent teammate that there was no ritual, even before he could speak, and George’s face fell.

“When we can go back out, we will, and we will go find Marc at the library. He knows a ritual. The three of us will go together.” Liam told him.

“You know how to find Marc?” George asked, incredulous.

“Yes,” Liam answered, full of confidence he didn’t feel. “It will be simple, and we will pay them with more of the beets from the prepper basement.”

Alex turned. His face was streaked with tear lines but his face was calm, now that he’d had time to absorb the certainty of his death. “You two should stay here. I will be worse than useless, if I have bad luck. I will go alone. Tell me where.”

That was going to be too complicated to explain, and Wilson would never believe Alex was on a clan mission alone, nor agree to help, and Alex couldn’t carry enough beets by himself to feed himself AND make an attractive trade with Marc’s clan at the Library.

But that didn’t mean George had to risk his life.

“You’re right, but you can’t go alone,” Liam said. “I will go with you.” Wilson might believe the third member of a team had been unable to come. Or had been lost.

George’s eyes narrowed. “If you go. I go.”

Alex just nodded in gratitude.

“You wash, and keep your head up. We will be back for you, in three days, and then we will all go together,” Liam said. The others agreed, and George opened the glass air sealed doors and stepped inside. Alex looked at them for a long time, and then turned back to his nails, to complete his undressing ritual.

Liam and George trudged back into the Sky.

--

The boys shared a shelter on the third level, or shelf, of the right hand side of the avenue. It was a small shelter, suitable for four scavs without seniority. They climbed a gangway ladder onto the boardwalk above the lowest level.

These shelters were mounted to the wall, but mostly supported by the structures below them, not as big, and not as open as the lower levels, the second shelf was occupied by families and workers who didn’t need quite as much spread as the craftsmen on the street. No weavers’ looms here, but the clothers, the ropers, and occupations of the sort that could be done by hand or with hand tools, were here. Usually the craftsman and his family all lived among the goods and tools. There was no room for houses separate from workspaces, with exceptions like the smiths, who were too many and could not live in the heat of their forge, so they took it in shifts to work in the forge and sleep in a little alcove alongside.

After walking a few buildings down, Liam raised a foot to a block that had been nailed to the wall of a shelter that had housed a family of six when Liam and George moved here, and now served as the teacher’s shack.

The children had gone to their families’ homes for their evening scrounge and chores around the building, and would return afterwards, for lessons until it was time to sleep on their little mats on the shack floor.

Javier, the teacher, came out of the shack. His black hair was pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck, where the curls were a big puff. Like most of the livers in the heat of the building, he was dressed only in pants that fit tightly around the waist and draped loosely around his legs.

“Can I ask you all a fava?” He asked. He had a pretty way of talking, pronouncing his words differently than Liam was used to. His parents had been from somewhere else, and had been unable to return to their home of Before, and Javier spoke like they must have spoken.

“Of course,” George said.

As Javier framed his question, Liam took three of the cans of beets out of his sack and passed them to him. He took them, unthinking, and then said. “I have a student who…” He seemed to have to work the words up from a place of great emotion. “He’s got a problem with his eyes, and if they keep getting worse, he won’t be able to work.”

Liam and George waited to hear what he wanted them to do about it.

Javier leaned around the doorframe and set the three cans on the uncovered framing inside the shack. He brought out a piece of drywall, which most people used when they needed to write something that wasn’t important enough for the precious few pieces of paper. The children were often dusty with learning to cut their words into the surface of sheets of it.

Little paper had survived, but drywall lay in heaps that stretched for miles.

The drywall he handed to Liam had a list of words down one side.
Glasses
Eyeglasses
Optometrist
Opto-
Lens
Sunglass
Spectacle
-6.0 diopters

And a drawing of a figure-8 shaped construction, with straight lines coming off each edge.

Scavs were used to lists like this. Those Before had dozens of different words for the same things, and it was easy for a scav to walk right past a place they were searching for, while a written sign tried to direct them to the proper location, but if the sign said it in a word the scav didn’t know, it was useless. So if either of them saw any signs with any of these meaningless words on them, or found any packages, they would know they were important.

“Glasses,” George said. “You mean Mugs? Windows?”

Javier shook his head and described how people used to use glass lenses held in frames in front of people’s eyes to make them see better. That was the figure 8 shaped drawing.

“Like goggles!” Liam exclaimed.

“Yes. These have clear glass, though. If you find any, I need,” He pointed to the last line, -6.0 diopters. “Or any number higher than 6. If you can’t find that specifically, bring anything you do find. And make sure the glass is intact.”

“You know, blindness doesn’t mean someone can’t work,” Liam said, picking at the ring of scabs where his goggles rubbed.

Javier looked sad. “I know but he doesn’t have to go blind, if we can stop it.”

Liam shrugged and nodded. George handed the piece of drywall back. Both of them had memorized it. It was no good being a scav who wouldn’t remember what to look for. Javier went back inside and Liam put his foot back up on the block, standing up on it and putting his other foot on another block mounted on the haircutters’ next door, reaching up and grabbing the support post of their third shelf shelter’s balcony, and pulled himself up onto the little plywood deck. George scrambled up behind him as easily as they had both walked up the gangway stairs to the second shelf.

Each tier of shelters sat a little further back to allow room for a walkway on the roofs of the structures below. They were cobbled together with wood, metal, and on the lowest level, stone and concrete blocks. Up on the third shelf, only the lightest materials were used. Their shelter was essentially a wooden box mounted to the building wall, and anchored on the ceiling, and their particular shelter didn’t have it’s own floor, they walked directly on the roof of Javier’s shack. The right hand and left hand walls were actually the outer walls connected to the dwellings on either side, and their ceiling was the ceiling of the room all the shelters were built within. In fact, their shelter’s only wall they could properly claim, was the front wall, which was propped on top of Javier’s shack, the edges resting against the buildings on either side, and supported by bolts into the big building’s ceiling.

The back wall, which was also the wall of the big room, was less than a pace from the door. There were four bunks fastened to the back wall, but since there were only three of them living in the shelter, the bunk on the floor was free storage space. Liam swung his carisack into the right hand corner of this space. There was plenty of room, since George and Alex’s carisacks were with Alex in the lobby.

“Hungry?” George asked. Between the spars of the facade wall the horizontal pieces were stacked with their supplies. Scavs ate well if nothing else. He pulled a blue label can of SPAM off one of the cross pieces. He peeled the can open with the pull tab and the, “scoootch” sound, and the smell of the rich meat and goo made Liam’s stomach grumble.

“Not really,” He answered, shoulders hanging.

“If you want some.” George went out the door onto the balcony and lifted one of the stools from where it leaned against the front wall. “Hey Juri,” Liam heard him say, “Can I have a light?”

Liam ignored the pleasant conversation between his teammate and the rookie scav next door, while the two cooked side by side on the adjoining balcony.

It had been a bad day, despite the wonderful discovery of the prepper basement. Alex’s bad luck. Javier’s favor.

Blindness wasn’t a problem for most of the livers. There were plenty of jobs where being able to do them in the dark only increased productivity. The blind could work through the night, or during the blackouts when the whole community had to put out their fires, and wait until the danger had passed. Those long frightening hours could be well filled with activity, for the livers who didn’t need the light to work.

For scavs, blindness was the end of their careers. A scav couldn’t follow a list they couldn’t see. They couldn’t read labels. They might walk right past a sign that was giving vital directions.

And aside from howlers, threats outside were silent. Ash covered scent and taste. And by the time a threat touched you it was far too late.

Threats needed to be seen.

Scavs didn’t like to talk about blindness. Liam hated it.

He would keep this kid from going blind if he could. Even if the kid never intended to become a scav. But he was going to tell Javier to show the list to other scav teams, too, because he didn’t know if he was going to be coming back.

And how likely was it that they could find these eyeglasses with Alex’s bad luck acting on them?

Or even return from this mission?

“Hey!” George yelled suddenly.

There was a scuffling and a clatter. Juri yelped.

“Stay out of this, Juri,” An unfamiliar voice bellowed. Before Liam could rush outside, a big man with a Sky officers’ scarf cowled around his neck, stomped through the door. He, too was wearing just pants, aside from the scarf, but he stood like a fighter, and on his hip he was carrying one of the sheet metal knives the officers kept for themselves.

“Liam,” Guillermo said. “Your father would like to see you.” He grabbed Liam’s arm and dragged him out onto the balcony. George was being held by the arm, too and his one legged stool had been knocked down onto the shelf below. Juri was standing against his shelter’s front wall, silent, and the smell of his chicken noodle soup and George’s SPAM cooking over the little firebowl the two shelters shared was delicious.

“Climb down,” Guillermo said, pointing to the ladder of blocks that led to their shelter. Liam and George climbed down ahead of the leaders’ helpers.

--

“Of COURSE he heard what happened. Everyone must KNOW Alex is hanging around in the lobby,” George hissed at Liam as the leaders’ helpers escorted them down the avenue and right into the leaders’ palace at the end of it.

The leader’s palace was like Liam imagined all leaders’ palaces, though he’d never been to another clan’s compound. It was open and barely furnished. The walls were equipped with the helpers’ gear, and there was an opening in the ceiling that allowed the smoke from the large fire bowl in the middle of the floor to drift up out of the room.

There were helpers kneeling around the bowl, cooking the evening scrounge. There were some others sitting around on the scattered cushions, sharpening weapons. One was cross legged, wearing a frown of concentration and using a pile of twine made from twisted plastic bags to repair a woven twine basket.

Directly across the fire there were two cushions close together. One man was sitting upright, reading aloud from a well preserved paperback book, while the other lounged half in his lap, listening with a relaxed, blissful expression.

Guillermo released his grip on Liam and George’s arms. “Tea,” He told them. Voice no longer a bark, but not welcoming in the spirit of the ritual.

They both walked to the firebowl, kneeling, and Liam took the pot and poured for himself and his subordinate teammate. They raised their cups and drank together.

“Your hospitality has saved my life.”

George’s cup was plastic, with a black and brown animal wearing a blue hat and the words Paw Patrol. Liam’s was an orange terracotta with a hole in the bottom center that had been plugged with a glob of regular beige clay.

The reader had stopped reading and dandled his fingers over the leader’s bare shoulders as the leader sat up from his lap. The reader had his hair tied back under a piece of cloth, and his eyes underlined with kohl, and the effect made Liam avoid looking at him to keep from reacting.

George was staring.

The reader shifted, looking at them with bright eyes over his alluring dark lined lashes, but not saying anything. He rested his hand on the leader’s shoulder.

Liam tried not to think about what George would look like wearing kohl.

“Alex tore a wrapping. I had to leave him in the lobby. We are going back for him when our gear dries,” Liam said, knowing his father liked to have the upper hand, and know things before others expected him to. He went on to explain the plan he had developed, to the point he had explained it to George and Alex. They still didn’t need to know how much more complicated it was going to be.

As Liam spoke, the reader’s hand moved on his father’s shoulder, one motion to signal each expression on Liam’s face as he talked.

The fused skin where Noah’s eyes had been creased as he smiled. “Your plan is comprehensive,” The leader said. “But I don’t think you thought of the other teams.” He raised a hand and beckoned and a fence captain who’d been standing back against the wall came forward.

Monro was wearing a hat with all his hair stuffed up under it. The sides of his head were shaved and he had a neatly trimmed goatee. He was wearing a vest as well as pants, and it was packed with pockets, but none of them bulged with anything thicker than a packet of powder. He carried a skin flask at his belt, even here.

He knelt a step from where Liam and George knelt, and he and Liam sized each other up before Liam reached out for the tea pot and poured the lower ranking captain a cup.

This cup was dark green and said “Brocklehurst Construction,” in white letters, with a white silhouette of a bulldozer.

“Please tell Liam what happened when your team came in from patrolling the fence today,” Noah said, in response to a squeeze on his shoulder from his reader, indicating Monro had finished his drink, and as was the way of fighters, whispered the words inaudibly.

“The patrol was good,” Monro started, “We patrolled to the north, to the border of the dead forest, and saw no tracks. When we returned, we were hungry, because we skipped eating midday scrounge. There was a pack of howlers to the west of us,” He confided.

The same pack we heard, Liam thought.

“So we pushed to get home,” Monro’s low, steady pace of speaking always made Liam think Monro felt unsure he would be understood. “When we came into the lobby we were surprised to find Alex, undressed, wet and stinking of solution, sitting against the wall beside his gear, eating canned beets. We did not ask him what he was doing, but it shook Tonio badly. We all knew why he must be there,” He added. Then he shuddered.

Noah’s reader tapped his thumb twice on Noah’s shoulder, to signal the shudder to the leader.

Liam knew the entire code, and when he was young he and Lane had taken turns doing the job the reader was doing now, serving as Noah’s eyes and giving him the information the leader’s senses denied him.

Monro turned and frowned at Liam. This was conveyed to Noah via finger taps and squeezes as well. “I came directly to report this offense.”

“It’s not an offense,” George interrupted. “There is no rule against it. The lobby is FOR scavs, and patrollers, to detox before coming inside. Until Alex is detoxed he has a perfect RIGHT to be there. According to the laws YOU established when you took over leadership of Sky clan,” George told Noah.

“I know the laws,” Noah said quietly.

George subsided.

“It isn’t an offense,” his face hardened, “If it was, he wouldn’t still be in there- Captain Monro and his patrol would have forcibly removed him, by whatever means necessary- but it is a problem. I appreciate that you didn’t try to bring him inside, Liam, but the reason livers under bad luck are not allowed into the compound is because it spreads.”

Monro closed his eyes and lowered his head. “After we got back inside, Tonio bumped one of the avenue fans. It tipped over and shattered.”

Liam inhaled slowly.

“Oh. Oh no.” George reached behind, past Liam and touched Monro’s shoulder. “Is he…?”

“Tonio is in the lobby, now, with Alex,” Noah said. “I can only hope this has been contained. We changed the factory lights from white to green, so none of the other teams will try to come in. They cannot make their own shelter for long, so the lobby has to be cleared today.”

Monro’s head was still hanging, and he bit his lip and turned so Liam and George couldn’t see his face.

“Your plan seems sound.” Noah rested a callused hand on his reader’s bare thigh. “You will take Tonio with you, he is a good fighter, and a good negotiator. He will be able to help, and if you can find a ritual to get rid of the bad luck, you will have saved two livers who are precious to the clan’s survival.”

“We can’t go back out, now,” Liam protested. “Everything is wet. The ash will just stick to us. We’ll die before we get to the playground, let alone to the metal wall.”

“You won’t be taking your gear. We’re going to outfit you with jumpsuits.”

The boys’ heads came up. “Jumpsuits?” Liam asked.

“Jumpsuits,” George breathed, word trailing into a little giggle.

“We came across a stock of leather motorcycle racing jumpsuits when I was a teenager. My team wore them for years and they never wore out. They are durable and light, a little stiff, but most importantly they are a single piece to the neck.”

“They’ll be immune,” Monro murmured. “Invincible.”

“George, you are about my size,” Noah said. “If you don’t mind yellow. Liam, you are about Casey’s size. Tonio will fit in Sydney’s and Alex may have to squeeze a bit to get into Nigel’s.” The reader squeezed his shoulder. “We are going to have to patch the hole in Nigel’s.”

Monro was staring enviously at them by now.

“Monro, help them get geared up, and make sure Liam knows how to find...the person he’s going to need to talk to.” The way Noah hovered over ‘The person’ made Liam realize his father knew more about this mission than he’d let on.

He always liked to know more than his visitors wanted him to.

Liam walked around the firebowl. Any of the others could have done this, and no one would have said anything. The leader’s palace was informal. The livers were Noah’s people. He had scavenged for them. He had fought and killed for them. He never feared them. Liam knelt down as Noah sat up higher, tracking the sound of his footsteps across the floor, and still guided by the reader’s hand signals.

Noah put his arms out and Liam leaned into the hug.

“Don’t forget to come home to me,” Noah whispered into the fluffy hair- just like his father’s- over Liam’s ear.

[lieutenant]

Chapter Two- Afield


The jumpsuit constrained his movements in a way his customary wraps did not.

The four of them moved through a scraggly stand of trees floored with a crackly carpet of dead undergrowth, beside an inexplicable fifteen foot block wall. There was a wide trail, so they didn’t have to make noise as they went. This wall was near the edge of the Sky’s territory, but the fence crews came and went along the border, and they didn’t take the same route twice in a row, but some routes had been established as having better cover or better vantages.

The blocks had been painted beige, and where moss hadn’t taken hold, the words “Penthouse Playground” were painted in dark red. There was a picture of a naked man, with the strangest anatomy Liam had ever seen. Pectorals round and swollen, and with some serious deficiency in the cock department. Maybe the picture had been damaged by the disaster, or, Alex had suggested, that the artist, having only ever seen himself from above, might have no idea how a person looked from straight on, and thus the oversized pectorals and the...bizarreness between the legs. “Stuff that is closer looks bigger,” Alex explained.

Antonio looked down at himself with a curious expression, trying to work it out.

“That’s stupid!” George said, “That would mean whoever it was had never seen anybody else. And he couldn’t be out here living by himself. Who would watch his back? Who built the wall, Alex? Huh? How about that? You can’t build a wall by yourself.”

“He has pretty hair, though,” Antonio said, looking away from his examination of himself, to the picture on the wall.

Liam looked back up at the wall. The scavs and fencers had all been out here. There wasn’t much to scavenge, so there was little to draw scavs here, but there were a lot of weird things from the Before, and scavs had to be interested in the Before. “We’d better get going,” He said.

He started away from the wall. There were other pictures like this, though he’d never happened to see one that showed the shaping so clearly, and many of them suggested that Before, there had been men like that one.

But pictures also suggested there were animals.

Pictures showed things that weren’t real.

Antonio fast walked until he caught up and passed Liam, looking back at him through clear goggles that showed his eyes and nodding before turning back to watch the trail ahead of them.

They had all kept their own helmets, wrapped in new wraps, which spiraled down around their torsos to keep their necks covered between the helmets and the leather suits. Antonio had a smooth round helmet, without the jutting chin and visor Liam and his team had. Fencers didn’t run when they encountered howlers, or invading scavs, or veruls. They fought. If they could, they killed the thing, if they couldn’t, they chased it off, or brought back more fence patrols, until they had a party large enough to kill or chase off any threat.

Scavs just ran away. They kept knives for cutting and hand-crows for prying, and if cornered, those could do some damage to a threat. Maybe enough to win a moment to scramble away and run.

Nothing that lived would be deterred from an attack by something as minor as being repeatedly stabbed.

Tonio’s helmet was designed to deny a threat anywhere to grab.

Liam let him take the lead.

Tonio was also armed.

Liam had been on one of the teams that had gone by turns to retrieve the hundreds of thin aluminum pipes discovered in an overturned truck on the wall of metal.

The fencers at the time had each been armed with a spear formed from one of these pipes, with the end forged into a vicious point. They bent if used injudiciously, but they were long. No one would argue that being twelve feet from the thing you were stabbing was a disadvantage.

He was also carrying a machete. It had been passed down from his father, made from some source of metal that Liam didn’t understand. Whatever the source was, it had become inviable just after the Before. It was a thick blade, designed for chopping, a single piece with it’s handle, which had been wound in pleather as thin and supple as cloth.

As the ambient light of the ash fog began to fade, they came out from between mounds of rubble that his father had told Liam had once been buildings. He’d brought Liam and Lane out here on their first scavenge, Casey walking beside him, though Noah had barely needed it, he was so familiar with the trail.

When the blind leader had stood where Liam’s team stood now, he had faced out towards the wall, in the red light, like they stood now, and whispered, “The day it happened, I remember the sun. Setting, like it is now.”

Casey had made a noise, something that neither of the boys had realized was a reprimand, and Noah had shaken himself out of his strange mood.

He was just trying to scare us, Liam reminded himself. To make sure we never wanted to go beyond the wall. Telling us there was a huge fireball on the other side.

Tonio led them onto the broken concrete that ran along the wall of metal. The broken glass had long ago been knocked out of every remaining window, and ground to nothing on what had been a sidewalk.

“It’s getting dark,” George said.

“Don’t worry,” Tonio said. “There is a safe place where the fencers spend the night. Just on the other side of that red rubble up there, There’s an old metal bank.” He pointed with the tip of his spear to a stack of red bricks that reminded Liam of the terracotta cup he’d drunk out of today.

“I don’t like it out here. These things are creepy,” Alex looked at the wall of metal beside them. It was comprised of heaps of brightly colored metal boxes and frames. It wasn’t a solid wall, and it was easy to walk between the heaps. Some of the boxes had held useful materials that had kept the first generation of livers busy, back when everyone was a scav.

“Trucks,” Liam said, pointing at the box shaped ones, “And cars.” He pointed at the shorter, usually more colorful, frame shaped ones.

“It’s not them I mind,it’s their passengers.” Alex said, turning away from one of the bigger cars and the six bleach-boned skeletons within.

The brick pile had been cleared, to make a path to the shelter amidst the rubble. Antonio stopped at the path. Liam came up behind him, wanting to urge him forward, but experienced enough to know that disturbing someone who was listening was the worst thing he could do.

Antonio let out a slow groan.

“What?” Liam asked, looking up the path at the black metal that must be the bank.

“We’ve got to go,” Tonio said, voice husky suddenly. Alex stepped forward, eager for shelter, but Antonio put a hand out to stop him. “Not that way.”

“But it’s getting dark,” George said again. Indeed, the low light in the fog had reduced visibility to only barely more than the distance between them and the bank.

“It’s not safe here,” Tonio said. He crouched low and started to weave between the lanes of cars, towards the other side of the wall of metal. The others followed, obedient and silent, away from the twisted remains of the metal bank vault where the fencers had been accustomed to hide, and a wind began to blow, scattering the ancient colored slips of paper that had been littered across the heap of bricks.

--

The wall of metal was the end of the Sky clan’s territory. West of the wall, they were in the Rams’ territory, it would be said by any of the Rams they encountered. Everyone knew their war had left them unable to defend the border they shared with the Sky clan. The area for ten miles on the Rams’ side of the wall was as good as unclaimed land.

Liam’s father had considered taking it, but Noah already defended as large an area as he could, with the number of fencers he had. And this land wasn’t rich enough to bother. It was miles of open soil, walled or fenced off into large square patches, most with the ruin of a house and barn.

No good to anyone. Certainly not worth the danger of sending fencers out to guard land the Rams’ scavs must have cleared the first generation after the Before.

Low walls and fences were not shelter. Some of the buildings were standing but most had simply collapsed, like most buildings everywhere else, except those designed not to.

The four crouched beside a wall, senses straining. Tonio peered around the corner. He darted across to a wall on the other side of a gap. The three waited, still as the wall itself. George and Alex watched Antonio creep along the next section of wall while Liam scanned around and behind them.

As Antonio continued along the wall, the ash fog between them dimmed their view of him, and then concealed him completely.

Their wall ran alongside a narrow crumble of asphalt. There was another low stone wall on the other side, but their side was a ditch that had once been choked with plants. Now they huddled in a neat U-shaped path beside the wall. At the end of the wall, a tube ran to the path that took up along the wall on the other side. Another strip of asphalt crossed here, interrupting their path. Liam wondered if the tube was meant for people using the path to crawl through, to avoid exposing themselves to danger, crossing the open asphalt.

He didn’t think he could have gotten his shoulders through it, and he was smaller than the rest of the team.

He adjusted his grip around Antonio’s spear. It was easier for Antonio to scout ahead without having to carry it along. In the reduced visibility, by the time he saw any threats, they would be too close for the spear to be effective, anyway. If they heard him encounter danger, they were to bring it to him.

There was no sound of Antonio moving, of course, so once he was out of sight, there was no knowing.

Liam continued to scan around them.

Some nights, inexplicably, were lighter than others. Tonight was the bright variety. If they were out here two weeks from now, it would be completely black, and they would have been helpless.

The ambient glow was a different color at night. That disproved his father’s old legend of the fireball “sun.” Fire was orange, not grey.

The wind had been blowing since night had started to fall. That probably explained why their visibility was as good as it was. In fact, it was improving as he watched. The stone wall across the way was plain to be seen.

George touched Liam’s hand. “There he is,” He whispered.

Across the opposing strip of asphalt, things had cleared up enough that they could see Antonio, moving steadily back towards them. He was watching where he was going, and when he looked up and realized he could see them, he raised his hand, beckoning.

As the wind continued to thin the everpresent fog, it revealed what stood on the other side of the wall where Antonio crouched, waving for them to join him.

A black figure twice the height of a man.

--

Scavs run.

George and Alex turned in place, never rising above the height of the wall. When they encountered Liam, they silently flowed around him, moving back the way they’d come. They moved almost as fast at a crouch as any of them could have run standing upright.

Across the way, Antonio’s head tilted as he saw their sudden retreat, puzzled by why they were retreating from his assurance of safely moving forward.

He hadn’t seen the thing that was looming over the wall to take him.

He had stopped, in the worst place, just below it, and it was huge.

It was time to run, because after it finished Tonio, it would come for them, stepping easily over the low walls with what must be tremendously long legs. The broken surface of the asphalt would be no trouble to it. It would overtake them.

And Tonio was only armed with a machete.

Run! Liam’s mind shouted at him.

He did. Gripping Tonio’s spear, he launched himself across the crossroad towards the lanky shape silently reaching for his teammate.

Tonio reacted instantly to Liam’s attack. He threw himself away from the wall in a roll, bouncing hard over the lumpen asphalt and coming up with his machete in his hand.

Liam thrust with the spear at the center of the thing’s thin body. The needle sharp point went in like the thing was made of empty cloth and burst out the other side in an upward angle.

“Pull it out!” Antonio stepped in close, swinging the machete in an arc across the middle of the dark monster.

His machete sliced through it as easily as the spear had pierced it.

The bottom half of it dropped away in a lump that shuffled in the wind, while the top stayed above them.

Liam screamed. He stabbed it again, higher up this time, and there was a sensation of resistance, like it was pinned to its place in the air, and it flailed limply on the end of the spear and started to slide down towards his hands.

Antonio chopped it again, machete hacking through until it connected to the aluminum spear shaft.

The remains slipped off the shaft and dropped to the ground.

“What is that?” Antonio asked, horror in his voice. He bent down and picked up a shirt that had been slashed open by his blade. Dry grass cascaded out of it and they both jumped back. There were gloves sewn to the ends of the sleeves, and the slash across the middle had detached a pair of pants that had been sewn to the bottom of the shirt. The pants were filled with dry grass, too, and the socks sewn to the bottom of their legs.

The worst part was the vacantly smiling face on the bag-head sewn to the neck of the shirt.

“Why would anyone do this?” Liam wailed. He looked up at the pole he now realized the thing had been mounted on.

The mound of barely damaged cloth should have been a treasure to any scav, but he couldn’t bear to think of taking it.

It wasn’t a monster. It wasn’t alive. It hadn’t been reaching for Tonio, just blowing in the wind.

This horrible mockery of a person.

He wanted to get away from it. From whatever had prompted someone Before to do such a vile thing. He wanted to get away from the fear he’d felt when he was sure he was about to see Tonio killed. He wanted to get away from this place that had caused the heart pumping rage that had sent him into the open to kill to protect his team.

He wasn’t a killer. He didn’t want to fight to survive.

“Don’t let your heart sink,” Tonio said, taking his arm. “Battle can do that, even if it was...against an enemy in our mind. We have to find the others.”

As they crept back along the wall, occasionally glancing overhead for more of those terrible things, they found George and Alex creeping towards them from the other direction.

“We heard you go after it,” Alex said.

“We realized you weren’t with us,” George admitted.

“It’s alright,” Liam said, tightening his grip on Tonio’s spear. “But we can’t stay here. You might not have been the only ones to hear. Let’s try the other road.”

Antonio scouted down the cross road instead, and they left the crossroads behind them.

Huddling inside of the farmyard wall where Liam, George, and Alex had spotted the scarecrow, a howler listened to what the four thought was silent progress. After they had gone beyond hearing, it hopped the waist-high wall and darted, low, in the opposite direction.

--

Liam had never seen a river before. The turgid slug of water in the bottom of the gash in the landscape was moving, around and over mounds of refuse. The water was the same color as the air, but so thick it was impossible to see past the surface. There was plant life, here, tough skinned, so dark it was nearly black. Their jumpsuits had once been brightly colored. George’s yellow, Liam’s orange, Tonio’s white with red at the arms and legs, and Alex’s blue except the place over his left kidney where the leatherer had sewn a thick patch of brown leather like the smiths’ aprons, over the bloodstained gaping hole big enough to admit Liam’s spread hand.

He understood when he saw that why his father had spoken, of all his teammates, of Nigel’s time patrolling with them the least. And maybe why, now, three, not four was the number for groups leaving the Sky.

The suits now showed their years of wear and dust. They were scuffed and the dust of the ages was ground into their surfaces.

The four of them blended into the bushes like yet more piles of rubble. They rested on their laurels, listening to the wind, and the water moving. Years of trips outdoors had taught them all what were natural sounds and what were not. Even a man unmoving can cause a change in the way the world sounds around him.

After a long time of hearing nothing, Alex, who Tonio had been coaching on scouting the fencer way, began to move. He reached a hand out, resting first his gloved fingertips, and presently the flat of his hand, on the ground outside their shelter of bushes. He shifted more and more of his weight on it, and then began drawing his leg forward, slow with the wind, and pausing so the movement might not catch the eye of anything watching. When his foot was placed and his weight shifted onto it, he reached forward with another hand. He, and the others listened for changes in the sounds on the wind.

Nothing was reacting to Alex’s cautious emergence from the bushes.

After an eternity of creeping motion, Alex darted. He vanished from their sight behind a rotting concrete balustrade.

A building stretched across the river. Little more than a floor to carry the asphalt from one side to the other. Part of it had crumbled on the upstream side into the river below, and some of the concrete still showed above the rippling water. The bridge looked like a bite had been taken out of it, and there were bars of orange rusted metal twanged out of the remaining body, like tendons and arteries out of distantly remembered fresh meat.

As they watched, a stone that had been embedded in the road surface lost its hold and bounced away into the river with a clink on the remaining bridge stone and a plop.

The wind was still thinning the ash fog, but beyond the gaping wound, the bridge disappeared into the dark dust.

Alex moved, a little faster now, down the length of the bridge, reaching the edge of the gap and peering down into it as he skirted around on the remaining lane.

They moved onto the bridge behind him.

Liam had expected it to feel like the floor of their shelter, moving with their movements, maybe swaying in the wind like standing atop the wooden shed that allowed access to climb onto one of the shelters in the second story of an old warehouse building in the scav’s busiest territory. But it felt no different than walking on the ground.

They walked softly and the loudest sound in his ears was the water. As they walked, they could see more of the bridge ahead of them, walking in the center of their own moving visibility, the shore they’d left vanished into the fog, and as they passed the gap, they could see Alex ahead of them.

He was standing in the middle of the bridge, back arched, staring upward into the impenetrable fog.

The hairs rose on the back of Liam’s neck and his heartbeat throbbed through him, made him very aware of the soreness of the finger he had jammed climbing into the prepper basement, the scrape on his hip where he’d fallen a week before, when a beam he’d been crossing had given way, and the constant sores that ringed his eyes.

His vision blurred with the throbbing for a moment. His left eye glossing completely. He blinked against it and the renewed moisture helped a little. He could see again, and Alex was still standing stock still at the end of the bridge.

Liam and Tonio exchanged glances. They broke into a run, towards Alex. Liam still carried the aluminum spear. He heard George’s footsteps following up behind them and heard the scrape as George stooped as he ran, picking up fist-sized chunks of rubble.

Alex heard them and didn’t turn, but waved a hand at his side, a go-back gesture.

They didn’t stop, and as they came to where he stood, they could see what he must have seen as he approached.

There were two enormous legs. They spanned the road, spindly and so thick the three of them couldn’t have touched arms around. The farther they ran, the more of the legs were visible, coming together and then...ending where a man would have had a waist. The two spars just came together in a point, three times the height of the Sky building.

“Watch,” Alex said, pointing to the top of the tower. It was red, with a few white stripes.

As they watched, a red light ignited, blazed for a moment, lighting the fog in every direction, and died away.

“Is it the sun?” Liam heard himself ask.

Without a word the four stepped closer together.

Then they heard movement.

Not an attack. Not something trying to move slow and cautious. A normal walking pace, like livers used in the Sky, when they had no fears.

Tiny in comparison, a liver figure walked out of the fog, between the legs of the red and white tower.

One of the wraps across his chest had the blue and gold spiral symbol of the Rams. Liam sighed in relief and the four of them touched their fingers around their goggles, like they would take them off to prove they were livers as well.

“There is a cache of three cans of stew, and a good knife, along the river, in a stone cairn,” The Ram liver had a high pitched voice and pointed along the river on his side.

“There is a stock of sheet metal in a pump house, a mile that way,” Liam answered, pointing back the way they’d come.

The Ram touched the edges of his goggles as well.

With the exchange of non-hostilities completed, the Ram said, “I am not alone, do not be alarmed.”

“I agree,” Liam answered.

Three more livers in Ram colors came out of the fog and stood at intervals behind the Ram who’d greeted them. Then another came out, farther along the river bank.

George glanced to their left, where three more Rams had climbed up the riverbank into sight.

Then three more moved out from under the tower.

Liam had encountered other scav parties, and once a lone traveller, and he had brought supplies to a sheltered reinforcement of two fencer patrols who’d grouped together to drive away a particularly stubborn pack of howlers.

The only time he knew for so many livers to group together, outside, was occasions like that.

“War party,” Tonio leaned close and breathed the word.

Indeed, all of the Rams were armed. Some with very prominent weapons, not simply spears and machetes, but scythes and long poles with hooks so sharp the metal shone. One had an ax like the Sky scavs used for cutting wood, but the blade was much much wider.

Some had lumps of metal attached to their forearms. One of these moved up close to the Ram who had greeted them and whispered.

“We aren’t here to attack you,” The Ram said. “Since the war, we use larger patrols. We don’t want to hurt our friends from Sky clan.”

“We are looking for Marc, and the Library clan, and we were told Wilson could help us find him.” Liam didn’t waste time, once the preliminary assurances were complete. All of them had something to get done, so they could get back inside, and they should all be getting to it.

The Ram tilted his head. “They are at the Library.”

“How do we find that?”

The other Ram came forward and whispered again.

The lead Ram stiffened, and raised a pole with a foot long saw blade at one end. The threat was mirrored by every Ram ranged behind him. “You aren’t Casey. This,” The point of the tree trimmer moved incrementally towards George, “Isn’t Noah. Who ARE YOU?”

They think we’re my father’s patrol, Liam realized, because we are four men wearing that patrol’s jumpsuits. Very unique, recognizable jumpsuits.

“I’m Noah’s son!” Liam said. “This is my patrol. My father gave us these jumpsuits because we are on a difficult mission.”

The Ram lowered his weapon and the others followed. “Liam. You were a boy the last time I visited the Sky. I am Wilson.” He spoke to his helper, who had been whispering to him. “Lance, you and Esteban take the patrol and continue the fence. I will catch up with you.”

“Kin, let me leave one of the boys with you.” The helper called Lance had his head lowered, and he spoke in a growly voice, like Liam remembered one of the retired fencers speaking, the one with the massively scarred throat.

Wilson reached up and pinched the wrap beneath the chin of Lance’s helmet and pulled him a step closer. “My little kinsman, If you think I can’t cross my territory without someone nesting me in their carisack, then why don’t you try to challenge me for my position, and we will see who lives longer out of the shelter alone.” He said the harsh words in a loving voice, and when he finished, he rested his helmet against Lance’s and they stood leaning against each other for a moment. Then Wilson released his hold and Lance moved away like the tender moment had never happened.

“You heard my brother,” Lance raised his voice. The Rams picked up their weapons and trotted in a loose group, away along the left riverbank and when their forms were lost in the fog, their steps could still be heard.

“There is a little shelter nearby.” Wilson turned and trotted back between the legs of the tower.

The four Sky patrollers stood for a moment.

“That was the most insane thing I have ever seen,” George hissed. “Did you see how they just came up from everywhere? Like steam rising from a vent. Woosh, Rams everywhere.”

“Did he threaten his brother, or not?” Alex asked.

“What a strong move,” Antonio growled approval. “His brother would have been a fool to challenge him. Wilson is clearly the better patroller.”

“We’re losing him,” Liam said. He lifted Tonio’s spear, holding it at an angle as he had seen the Rams do with their spears, and trotted after the older man.

--

“Are only two of you armed?” Wilson asked as he ushered them between two collapsed slabs that had fallen together and made an entryway into a intact space within, what looked from the outside like a completely flattened building. There were some stones placed in a ring around a fire scarred pit in the floor. There were a few baskets, here, woven tightly enough to be waterproof, and tightly lidded with the lids fastened down. Wilson opened one of the baskets and took out a rumpled plastic bottle of water that, from the cloud sitting in the bottom, hadn’t been filtered. He offered one to each of them.

Tonio pulled the wrap off the chin of his helmet, ducked his mouth to the opening, ricked the cap open, and drank it in one long go. “Thank you.”

Wilson took a tin out of the basket and a metal pie pan out of the long travel carisack he had strapped to his back. He shook some familiar black wizened tea mushrooms into the pan, crushing them with the edge of the mushroom tin, and poured some water into the pie pan.

“Three of us are scavs, not fencers,” Liam told him. “We aren’t trained to fight.”

“Good way for scavs to die,” Wilson muttered, gathering together some broken splinters of 2x4 and tindering them with a fluff of grey hair and dust that could be cleaned several times a year off internal fan blades. On external fan blades, the dust was too poisonous to risk burning. This dustbunny caught fire when he put his lighter to it, and blazed brilliantly, catching the raw edges and splinters of the 2x4. He balanced the pie pan on two stones above the fire so the black painted outer surface could take the heat. He moved two other stones over to help contain the heat.

“Your fencers are very well armed,” Tonio said. “If your war is on your west border, why are so many of you on your east border?”

Wilson's head came up. “This is not our east border. The highway is ours. The land beyond the Thames is claimed. Do you doubt it?” His snarl and the sudden tension in his posture faded away. “The war taught us that we need to know our land. It taught us that we can’t afford complacent Kin, sitting locked in the shelter. All of our scavs go armed. And every fencer scavenges. Everyone who can patrols. All of us read.” His voice got quiet and distant. “Knowledge dies...when not everyone knows the skills. And how can it come back? A man carries a secret, intending to pass it down to his son, and he dies as a young man. The secret is gone. The son will never know. A crafter who doesn’t teach his craft, kills part of his craft. This is not the world before the War. We can’t trust that someone else will do it for us, that’s what led to the winter sky.”

He went very still, goggles reflecting the fire before him.

The four patrollers shifted on their stones. George picked at the cap of his water bottle, and then pulled back part of his wrap to drink from it. None of them said anything to this man’s information.

Then he sat back, a flopping movement that raised dust from the floor and made Tonio and George throw their arms up over their mouths and quickly replace their wraps.

“The Library is on the other side of the crater,” Wilson said.

Liam sighed. “That’s too far to go, then.”

It would take months to skirt the safe zone around the crater. There was no way to make it that far through strange territory, hoping to scavenge enough to survive, not knowing where the enemies’ habitats were. And the creatures living in and out of the safe zone were hard to predict. Veruls three and four times the size they reached elsewhere. Or, horribly, half the size as elsewhere, but mad and unstoppably vicious.

Howlers weren’t known there, as far as Liam knew, but the livers around lived in the fatal expectation that some of what their scavs brought back would necessarily be ash poisoned.

“When do you need to bring the reader back?” Wilson asked.

They looked at each other. Obviously he would assume the mission to the library would be for knowledge. Was there a time they needed to return?

If Dani had known where the Library was, Liam suspected, he hadn’t expected them to come back. He had either intended to send them to Marc to stay or…

Liam thought back to Dani’s calm reaction, the way he had kept his eyes on his work, instead of letting Liam see them. And of the way Jorge had told Liam he should tell Wilson whatever lie was needed, to get his team’s safety.

Had Dani and Jorge told Liam whatever lie was needed to make Alex and his bad luck go away? Liam had heard of greetings that, instead of trusting a friendly visitor with knowledge of a resource to prove trustworthiness, led a friendly visitor to an empty cairn, or worse, into an ambush.

Had Dani sent them out, knowing they would never live to the end of the mission? To make sure they never brought the bad luck back to the Sky?

Dani was a strong man, and hard. He had been a fighter, and killed to protect the clan.

Sending them to their deaths, to protect the clan, would be the right thing to do.

Liam sighed.

Yet, his father had enjoined them to come back to him. Why would he do that if the mission was for suicide?

“If you need to get there in a week, I can help you,” Wilson said. “Ah, the tea.” The water had bubbled black. Each of them handed him the little metal flask they carried for tea, after drinking the few gulps of water they carried inside. He poured tea for himself. Liam poured tea for the rest of them. It was burning hot and when he lifted his helmet to drink it, the steam got in his eyes and his left eye blurred like a goggle that had been breathed on.

They all said the ritual words, and then sat back for a moment while Wilson tapped the leftover mushrooms out of the rapidly drying pan, into a little leather pouch, and put the pan back into his carisack. He tied the leather pouch with a series of three knots.

Liam watched him. He’d seen people do that before. Using different knots or different textured bags for different items as a way of categorizing, knowing what was in them.

He looked at Wilson's glove. The tip of his index finger was wet.

He examined the man’s tinted goggles, which hid any expression. “How can we get so far in a week?”

Wilson made a humming noise of satisfaction. “By paying.”

“We don’t have enough for that much good luck,” Alex muttered.

Wilson sat forward, “Why do you say luck?” He asked. “What is it you are after?”

“Information. Marc knows something we need to know. Or maybe can help us find it, Dani told us to go and ask him.”

“Dani sent you to me,” Wilson breathed. “Yes, he knows about my...little method of travel. He’s also the first liver anyone would ask if they were trying to find out about luck. Especially curing bad luck.” He clicked his tongue on the K at the end of luck. “Which of you has it?”

Alex raised a hand, and then Tonio raised his as well. They both hung their heads, looking away from Wilson's face.

“What is your name?” Wilson asked, turning back to the fire and reaching out to feel the heat over the flames.

“I’m Alex, I broke a wrap coming in from a mission. Tonio saw me and it spread to him. He broke a fan.”

Wilson rubbed his gloves together with a shushing cloth sound. His wraps were the traditional strips of cloth, but the knots were pronounced, and there was also a variously spliced rope twined around his forearm, around his ribs, and down the other forearm.

Liam had seen that before, too.

“You patrollers are brave to travel with these two. Travelling under one bad luck is hard. Sharing two bad lucks. That is a feat.”

“Two bad lucks,” George whispered in his thoughtful voice.

“You must know something of bad luck,” Liam said. “You’ve obviously beaten yours. You live, and you still patrol.”

Wilson tilted his helmet, but didn’t turn away from warming himself over the fire.

“I want my teammates to have the chance to break their bad luck.” Liam told him. “If we have to spend months travelling around the crater, we won’t survive. I understand if you don’t want to help us, but you must understand why we had to try.”

The Ram laughed. The sound seemed choked, but somehow piercing. Drawn out of him like a needle drawing a thread through the material of him. “I didn’t…” He laughed on, “Say I wouldn’t help you,” He said. “I will even travel with you. I have little left to fear from bad luck.” His laugh ebbed away in a series of chuckles. “You are a very funny boy. No. I will help you. I will take you there.” He nodded to himself “Come with me, I’ll show you the way we will overcome the crater.”

He stood. “Put the fire out, will you, Liam?”

Liam reached forward and crushed the last of the coals to death with one of the flat stones Wilson had used to rest his pie pan. There was still warmth coming off them, but the flames had gone. He ground the rock until none of the sticks showed embers when he blew.

Wilson had already gone out of the collapsed slab tunnel, and Tonio had followed him. Liam could hear them chatting about weapons. Heard Wilson say “They’ll need to learn fight. Are you a good teacher?”

“What are we going to pay him with?” George was hovering beside where Liam knelt at the firepit. “Something like this must use resources. I don’t think your father will let us make deals for the clan. This is on us.”

“It’s too much,” Alex said. Liam looked up at him. He was standing in a corner of the space. “This is all too much to ask for me. Crossing the crater? Maybe we can, but how long will we live on the other side? He’s clearly crazy. It’s not worth it. Please. I’ll go. I’ll walk into the fog. You guys just go home.”

George strode across the space and grabbed Alex’s arms cruelly. He shook him so hard Alex’s head flopped. “If you give up there is no for sure that we even get back, so don’t you go on about noble sacrifice when you dying doesn’t HELP anybody. And there is Tonio. We have the best chance together, because we care, we are the ones this is about, and so we look after each other.” He shook Alex again, then let go abruptly and Alex sagged and stumbled a step back.

“O...okay,” He said.

Liam stood up. “Wilson understands us better than you know. So let’s take him up on this. He knows we aren’t speaking for the clan, and he’s not stupid enough to ask something we aren’t in a position to pay, because he’s not the kind of man who would accept not being paid. Whatever he has in mind, it’s something he thinks he can get from us, so we’ll give it to him.”

“Slavery?” George asked.

“Our lives were invalid when we left, we left expecting we might die, being alive to work is a win, and I don’t think the Rams keep slaves. They need soldiers. Do you think you could spend your life patrolling? Carrying one of those fine weapons? In a patrol with men who call you Kin?”

“Never going home,” Alex whispered.

Liam stalked towards the door. “What? Did you expect we were going home?”

[lieutenant]

Chapter Three- The Short Way and the Tale of the Sky


There was a hole in the ground, where the asphalt sloped down and came to a stop at a wall of metal slats. The rubble of the building above had mostly fallen to one side. The ground level had been cleared of rubble, except for a stack of concrete blocks that looked like they had been taken from the wreck, and they were stacked over a section of floor of a size and shape that made Liam suspect they were closing off a stairs.

Wilson walked down into the notch of ground. He bent down and slid his fingers along the front edge of the wall, pushing out a faded orange length of nylon strap. He pulled on this and the wall slid up.

Ready, Tonio rushed forward and rolled under the foot high gap. Alex, George, and Liam followed him. When Liam rolled into the dark, smooth concrete room on the other side, he smacked a hand on the garage door.

“We’re in.”

Wilson slid in, closing the door with pressure from a hand before standing.

The door was well sealed, and the garage was completely dark once it was closed. There was a strange clicking sound.

“It’s dark,” George complained.

A lighter flicked in the depths of the room. It expanded into a bright yellow flame. Wilson was there, slipped past them without any of them hearing him move. He was holding a squat glass bottle with some amber colored fluid. It’s cap had a flame sprouting from it, and he was putting a tube of glass over the cap. He set this on a high shelf and it illuminated the garage.

There were metal shelves against the walls, stacked with equipment and some cardboard boxes. There was a large metal chest of drawers painted bright red, with tools hanging on nails on the wall behind it.

“Wallah,” Wilson said, pointing at the things in the middle of the room.

Each of them was like a waist high bench. They each had a bright colored body, sitting on two round legs.

“Are they sawhorses?” Alex asked.

Sawhorses were benches that workers used to hold things like boards off the ground, because it was easier to work at waist height. Unlike tables, sawhorses were usually narrow on top, like these.

Wilson huffed like the funny end of his joke had been interrupted. “They are dirtbikes!” He said.

The four boys looked back and forth at each other.

“You must be very proud…” Tonio ventured.

Wilson huffed again. “No! You see...Before the war, when…” He started again. “They go fast.”

Silence.

Liam could feel George, even though the other boy was behind him, out of his sight, he could feel George winding up to say they should get out of here, that this Wilson person had obviously gone mad since the last time Dani had spoken to him.

Wilson grunted angrily. He grabbed one of them. “Tonio, open the door.”

Tonio rushed to roll the metal slat door up far enough Wilson could drag the dirtbike forward. Its legs rotated, wheeling beneath it and rolling smoothly.

Wilson stamped his foot and the dirtbike barked and then made a growl like a fan with gravel in it. He swung a leg over it, straddling the narrow top. It sank a little under his weight, until both his feet rested flat on the ground.

He twisted the dirtbike’s ear and the machine sound got louder and more desperate. He lifted his right foot and hooked it into the machinery at the bottom edge of the machine’s body. Then he twisted the ear again and lifted his other foot.

The machine rolled out of the garage and up the sloped asphalt on its own.

Antonio yelled. George ran a step after Wilson on the dirtbike, and Alex threw his hands up to his face.

Liam had yelled, too, and jumped back several steps.

They ran up the slope, surrounding him, gabbling in shock and asking questions over each other. Liam hung back and closed the door behind them, then joined them while Wilson dismounted and pointed out the parts and named them for the boys. Foot peg, clutch, throttle, gas tank, wheel, handle bars. The words washed over Liam like a dust storm and passed into the distance.

There were three machines in the garage.

“You’re going to have to teach them to use these machines,” Liam said. “And there is only one seat on each of them. Who do you intend to leave behind, if you will lead to the Library?” The patrollers looked back at the garage, and then around the group.

“You and I will have to stay,” George said to Liam.

Wilson laughed, this time not the crazy laugh. “We will ride pill-yon. Two on the same machine. We can take turns, two riding on back while three ride. It seems easy,” He warned, “But it is hard work, and you are not used to it, but it is much faster than walking. We will be able to cover a day’s distance in a few hours.”

Tonio whistled. “Moving that fast nothing will be able to catch us. Nothing will even be able to find us. We’ll arrive and be gone through a territory before anything has time to do anything about it.”

Wilson nodded. “You boys go get the other two bikes. These need to drink. Liam, the green metal canisters to the right hand side of the door will need to be mounted on them. There are plastic crates with straps on the shelf above them. Bring the crates as well, we will put gear in them.” Tonio and Alex had already gone, laughing, down to the garage to get the other two dirtbikes out. They rolled them up the hill by walking beside them and pushing them.

Liam took a moment to blow out the glass lamp, and then brought the crates and the canisters, heavy with liquid inside them, and followed Wilson's direction to strap them onto the back parts of the bikes, making sure they didn’t shift when he tugged at them or when the bike was tipped side to side, and making sure they didn’t touch the wheel. Wilson split his attention between these directions and explaining to the boys some of how the machines worked, and what they needed to be aware of if they were going to use them.

“There is no time for you to practice except on the way,” Wilson said. “The little blue won’t be as powerful. That will be the bike for a single rider. Alex, you are the biggest, you ride the little blue, and take point. Tonio, you are the most physically adept, you ride first while George rides with you, you two will take the yellow, it is the most powerful.”

“Powerful?” George asked.

“It takes power for the bikes to climb and run, the yellow one has the biggest engine and it can climb and run with the two bigger men on it. I will ride with you, Liam, on the bigger blue bike. Are all the crates and canisters strapped on?” Wilson asked Liam.

“Yes.” Liam moved towards the larger of the blue bikes. It was shorter than the yellow bike, but not much. Wilson moved forward on the opposite side, resting a hand on the tank ahead of the bike’s seat.

“You know I’ll need to ride behind you?” Wilson murmured. “Up the drive was fine, but not the whole way.”

“Will you be able to tell us the way?” Liam murmured back, voice low enough the growls of the machines kept the words from his team. When had he started keeping secrets from his team?

Wilson reached up and pinched Liam’s wrappings just beneath his helmet’s chin where Liam’s actual chin met his neck. He had a fair pinch of skin in with the wrappings, and Liam squeaked.

“Alright. I won’t try to nest you in my carisack.” Liam batted Wilson's hand away.

He climbed onto the bike and Wilson climbed on behind him, wrapping his arms around Liam’s waist. “West and north,” Wilson said. “Follow this road until you reach a twist of green sheet metal, then turn left.”

--

They had to go carefully, the asphalt was broken and crusted with the ruins of cars and trucks. They still made progress impossible on foot. As Wilson had said, they made a day’s distance in a few hours. They stopped for rests and to change riders, but while Liam rested, taking the passenger place with George while Tonio took a turn riding the small bike alone, Wilson rode behind Alex.

George said something to Liam about Wilson saving himself by letting the others ride while he simply sat and followed along.

Liam didn’t think it was much less tiring acting as ballast, leaning when the rider leaned, and having to hold his legs in an awkward position, to keep from interfering with the canister and crate. He told George not to worry about Wilson. The favor of riding these dirtbikes, the speed and ease of travel, even if their muscles were not used to it, was worth, well worth letting him ride quietly.

At each of the stops Wilson performed a ritual with the canisters and the bikes, pouring a horrible smelling liquid into the tank on the bike. The second time he opened the previously full tank and the Sky livers saw the liquid had vanished, they’d drawn back from the machine. Wilson hadn’t eased their mind when he explained the bike needed to drink the liquid.

After that, Liam knew he wasn’t the only one who worried about what else the bikes wanted to drink. Were they machines or were they alive? What did Wilson use to make that stinking liquid?

It certainly wasn’t water. The smell made Liam more uncomfortable than anything other than one thing, which the smell reminded him strongly of. Not because it smelled the same, but because the smell alarmed the same part of his mind.

It made him think of dead things. Rotten food, waste, and corpses.

Things that had never lived didn’t smell like that. Cleaners, sprays, chemicals. He had smelled all sorts of ruptured containers. His senses knew which were harmful to him and which weren’t. His nose and stomach rebelled at proximity to dangerous smells.

Then there were dead things.

The reaction to that smell wasn’t fear. It was disgust.

This liquid, the gas, smelled like it had lived.

He was glad each time the canisters were closed and the drops of liquid left on tank or hands had steamed away into nothing.

When the light started to go out of the fog, they had to stop much earlier than they would have had to stop walking. Things that became visible, when riding the dirtbikes, approached so quickly there was barely any time to react. When the night visibility started to close in, the obstacles would appear too quickly to steer around.

They left the road and travelled, with the bikes’ motors turned off, pushing them from beside, to reduce noise, through a twisted forest of trees, across crusted ground that cracked and sank their feet into ankle deep powdery soil, until they came to a brick building that stood on a hill. It had been larger, and most of what stood was obviously unstable and unsafe, but Wilson led them down into a basement, and then once they’d removed their boots and wraps, Wilson directed them into another door, into a deeper basement.

The four of them had wraps only to cover from their helmets over their necks and secured around their shoulders and torsos, but Wilson had conventional wraps in strips of cloth that needed to be removed knot and tuck at a time from his whole body and placed in order, so they took off their helmets and went down ahead of him.

The deeper basement had barrels stacked in one corner, and the remains of wooden shelves which had been split for firewood in another. They made themselves comfortable, starting a fire in the firebowl under a vent. George started making a meal in a pie pan like Wilson carried.

At the Sky clan, scavs were rarely out more than a day, but Monro had helped them outfit for a long trip, with gear for sleeping, sheltering and cooking. Antonio had all his own gear for being out for a longer patrol. He crouched on the other side of the fire from George and put together some dry ingredients with water from a water bottle, and soon his pie pan smelled like baking bread.

Moving to a back corner, opposite the stack of barrels, Liam laid out his blanket. The floor here was dirt, which was softer and not as cold as sleeping on concrete. He laid down on his blanket without waiting for food. The travel and the emotions had left him bland as a thick fog. He didn’t fall asleep, but his mind wanted quiet.

He should probably think about the journey ahead, and the price Wilson was going to ask, what they might find at the Library, and whether there was a ritual that would save Alex and Tonio.

Instead all he could think about was the ease with which Wilson moved around his territory, and even now that they had moved beyond the Rams’ northern border, how confident, how sure he was.

Liam buried his face against his blanket, and when he moved, he felt the little wet places on the fabric.

There were footsteps from the stairs that led to the upper basement. Liam didn’t react to the jaunty trot down the steps until Alex gasped. The gasp startled him and he sat up. “What?” George and Tonio were gaping up at the man who’d come into the lower basement with them.

“You’re blind!” Alex said, raising a hand to point.

“Yep,” Wilson strode across the basement, clicking his tongue on the top of his mouth, the same strange clicking Liam had heard when Wilson had moved easily through the pitch black garage, and he crouched down between George and Tonio. “The bread smells good,” He said.

He was a slim man, medium height, with olive skin and a puff of dark curly hair that came, mushroom-like out of the top of a soft cloth that wrapped over his ears and around his head, covering his eyes. He had a wide mouth and a big smile. He felt through his gear, finding the mushroom bag by the feel of the leather and the coded series of knots.

Liam wondered if it was the same code Noah used to recognize things by feel.

“If you are going to be on long trips, it is even more important to have tea first of all things,” Wilson said, holding his pie pan in one hand, and pouring water in until it reached the tip of the index finger he held inside the rim. It left the tip of his finger wet, but he had not overfilled the pan. Just like Noah when he was pouring tea.

“But you patrol. Blind people can’t patrol.” George waved a hand in front of the cloth over Wilson's eyes. Or, Liam suspected, over the sealed sockets.

“Not in new places, but I have a very good memory of places I have been,” Wilson shrugged.

Liam sat up in his blanket and crossed his arms on his knees.

“My father is blind, too,” He said.

Wilson turned his head towards him. His mouth was very expressive and it pinched at the lips and frowned. “I know. I have known your father since before you were born.”

The four of them sat silently. Wilson poured the tea into the flasks that the boys had set around the fire bowl.

“Did you know I came from Sky clan?” Wilson asked. He leaned and held one of the flasks, Liam’s flask, out to Liam. “Put some of that on a clean cloth and wash your face.” Liam took the flask. “I’ll tell you something you might not have known.”

--

“The Sky clan,” Wilson began, settling back on his own blanket, a heavily padded thing with a very fine cloth lining, “Began with a man with a vision and it began the day the Before became the After, but I can only tell you about what I know for myself.”

--

The boy was eleven years old. He was not excited about what he was on his way to do. The parents in the front seats of the car were excited, they kept laughing and smiling, and assuring him he would enjoy himself. He rested his face on the rear window. The glass was cold and smooth.

He watched the other cars on the other lanes of the westbound M4. His father was passing them, and the boy looked into them as they went by. They were all filled with ordinary people. Just like might be seen in any public place.

The sun was setting ahead of and to one side of the car. It was red and looked much bigger than it did when it was overhead in the sky.

A second sun burned into white existence in the sky behind them, like a fire burning through the surface of the sky. It blossomed like a firework for a moment. Eleven year old Noah gasped, turning full around in his seat and staring back towards London.

His father cried out and there was some rough bumping. The boy turned forward to see the edge of the road and the forest rushing towards the bonnet of the car.

The expansion of the white hot sun reached them, and there was a shocking light.

He could still see the bright circle against his eyes when he opened his eyes. It moved wherever he looked. Beyond it, he could see a tree trunk parked in the bonnet of the car. The parents in the front seat didn’t respond to his attempts to rouse them.

He remembered the advice of Alice in Wonderland. If you are lost, it’s good advice to wait where you are, until someone finds you.

He waited.

From time to time he tried again to rouse the parents.

After a long time, he realized that the traffic he could see on the roadway might be able to help him. Someone would have a cell phone. Maybe a policeman or an ambulance would stop. He unclipped his seatbelt. The door wouldn’t open, but the window was open, so he got up on the seat and crawled out through it. The little diamonds of glass cut his hands and his knees, but he reminded himself to be brave, and he walked up the crushed trail of bushes to the road.

None of the cars were moving.

There was no one in most of them. Some had crashed. Into each other or off the side of the road.

He looked east, where the second sun had burned.

It was gone, now, and there was a towering cloud, like a thunderhead. It was mingled with the regular clouds, so he never saw the shape of its top. He didn’t want to go that way. He was alone.

He started to walk west, along the trail of scattered metal hulks.

--

The roadside store had all the windows broken. Noah stepped over the sill of the door and inside. The food was gone from the shelves, the only things that remained were motor oil, windshield wipers. There was a stand full of plastic ponchos.

Noah remembered the camping trips his father had taken him on, using a plastic sheet to catch water and another to make a tent. There was no water bottles here. He took a poncho. Then he went back and took the rest of them, stuffing them in a plastic shopping bag drifting in the breeze that blew through the store. He noticed a bottle of tea that had rolled under one of the shelves. He crouched down to pick it up.

“Hey!” Someone snarled.

There was a man standing behind the counter, pointing at Noah with rage on his face. He didn’t look like he worked there, he was wearing a dirty business suit, with the tie tied around his arm, where the grey of his jacket was stained dark.

“Gimmie that, kid!” He started around the counter.

Noah didn’t bother with around anymore. He scrambled out one of the windows, leaping into the parking lot.

The man ran after him, out the door, but by the time Noah reached the edge of the parking lot, he was accelerating and the man was running out of breath.

--

The things in people’s glove compartments had been left behind, so they were for anyone to take. Sometimes there were snacks. In the trunk of the first car he looted he found an roadside emergency kit. He dumped the jumper cables and the jack on the asphalt, and stuffed his ponchos and his bottles, now filled with water from a spigot beside a petrol station that had been completely looted. He had found two other water bottled in cars, and hadn’t even minded the lipstick marks on the bigger of the two. The emergency kit had a first aid kit and a blanket. It had a flare, but he didn’t know who he would signal with it.

There were no police anymore.

Anytime he saw people he ran. They just wanted his food. Even the nice seeming lady who’d called him to the van where she’d set up a camp.

He had lighters, now. None of the cell phones he’d found when he braved the cars with...passengers...had worked. None of the phones in the petrol stations had worked.

He had seen enough movies to know what had happened. He knew that he’d better find a safe place to set up a new community. In the movies the people always had cars that worked, and they had learned to survive in the army, or were backpackers with backpacks full of supplies to live on, or they found a store that was still full of stuff.

None of the stores he’d found were full of stuff.

Some of the houses had people in them. He avoided them.

He noticed the dogs were following him on the sixth day. There was half a dozen of them, labs and a goldendoodle, and a wiry little one.

They weren't following him to play, and they hadn’t had any food.

They trailed him throughout the morning and afternoon. He threw rocks at them until they learned how far he could throw, and they stayed that far away.

That night he climbed under the bed of an overturned dump truck and set a fire in front of it, because wild dogs were supposed to be scared of fire.

It wasn’t a dog that came out of the bushes that night.

It was an Air Force Sergeant who’d been on leave when the bombs hit.. He was in his late thirties, with bright eyes and strong physique.

“You alright, kid?” He asked, from outside the shelter, crouched, comfortable looking.

“Get away from me. I’ve got a gun,” Noah lied.

The man chuckled. “I’m not going to hurt you, son. There’s not many of us left. I think hurting each other is the last thing we need.” He sat down like he was getting comfortable by the fire. “Mind if I use your fire to make some grub?”

“Get away from me,” Noah said again, but he didn’t really have a gun. He just had a little pocket knife. He could see a big army knife on the man’s belt.

“I think we might really be in trouble,” The man opened a package of something like dried pasta. He poured half of it into a tin can with soot marks on the bottom, then poured in some water, stirred it with a finger, and put it on one of the rocks Noah had set around the fire. “See, I was in the military, and we learned that a soldier has to rely on his fellow soldiers, and has to take care of the civilians that can’t stand up for themselves. Well I’m a soldier, and that makes it my responsibility to help as many people as I can.”

It hadn’t occurred to Noah to use a tin to cook. Warm food would be so good.

“I think a lot of people don’t know how to take care of themselves, without cars and things like electricity.” The man got out a second tin can from the backpack he carried. He poured the second half of the pasta into it and more water. “Since I know how, it’s up to me, and whatever other soldiers are out here, to teach people what they need to know. What do you think of that?”

“You know how to live rough?” Noah asked.

“You want to learn?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I can see. Got yourself a good fire, that’s a lot more than some of those people huddling in their houses have. You’re a strong boy, you’ll probably be fine,” He sighed. “Too bad I can’t find more guys like you. It would make my job a lot easier.”

Well the fire was pretty good, and hadn’t Noah found this great shelter? It was like a safe little house. But a soldier was there to protect people. In disasters they were there to get people to safety, and sometimes they build shelters, and helped the red cross and stuff.

“Say, do you think you could help me out? If there were two of us, we could keep watch, and you could help me teach, since you already know what you’re doing.” The man drank the rest of the water from the bottle he’d used to make the pasta, and then put the bottle back in his bag. “Gotta save stuff I can reuse,” He remarked.

“Yeah. I could probably do that,” Noah said. Maybe if he watched what this soldier did, he could learn some more.

“You want some of this?” The soldier asked, taking the first can off the fire with a cloth wrapped around it and holding it out towards Noah.

“You...could stay in here, if you want,” Noah said, crawling forward to take the hot mac and cheese.

“Thanks,” The soldier said. “I’m Colin. What’s your name?”

--

“Sydney!” Colin called, “Get your face covered!”

Sydney rolled his eyes and pulled the bandana over his nose and mouth. The four of them were used to the smoke smell by now, and the caution they’d used was being forgotten. For 4 months the clear, silent skies, void of airplanes, traffic, or the sounds of cities, had been interrupted, a day or two at a time, by smokey ash floating on the wind. Colin had ordered the scavenging teams to stay inside those days. He’d kept everyone inside the school they’d made into a base.

Then four years ago, a cloud had come and settled. Noah would later learn that it would never lift in his lifetime.

After three days the group of the living had realized their supplies were getting dangerously short. Pushed to make a decision, Colin had ordered the scavengers to take short shifts, to wrap themselves thoroughly, to leave any clothes they wore into the smoke in a special room they set up. The living who were too injured or weak to go out scavenging stayed inside and read the books available in the school’s library. They researched nuclear war, radiation, survival, and farming.

Farming was outlawed after the first harvest the next spring devastated the survivors with radiation poisoning.

The four members of Colin’s scav team were crouched in the basement of a burned out factory. They had taken a good haul of machine parts. Since the fog had settled, it had become obvious they needed some way to filter it out of the air where they lived. Now they took fan parts wherever they found them.

“The other team said they spotted sign of another group of the living by the river,” Colin said, lifting his bandana enough to get the ziplock bag of granola to his mouth. He closed his eyes like he was in bliss, chewing the crunchy snack. “I think we should go bring them in.”

Casey turned and looked up at Noah. There was strain in his eyes.

“Do you think they’ll be okay where they are for awhile?” Noah asked. “It’s going to be a struggle, to bring a group back to health, and if there are...sick ones, they’re going to want their friends treated, even though we can’t help them.”

Colin turned to him with confusion bordering on betrayal in his eyes. “We can’t leave people out there, Vale, especially if they’re sick.”

“Sydneyk people who eat six or ten meals, and then make us burn the calories to dig their graves,” Noah said.

“We’re not discussing this,” Colin said. He resealed his bag of granola and stuffed it into his pocket as he stood. “We’re going to go see what they’re about.”

He strode across to a unit of shelves and started to climb up out of the sheltered basement space.

The boys stood to follow him.

“Vale,” Casey said. “We’re a meal away from starving. That group of nursery schoolers was one thing, those kids wouldn’t have made it without us, but they won’t be able to contribute for years. He can’t keep bringing in everyone he finds. You’re the only one he listens to. Can we just teach them what they need to know and send them on their way? Tell them what to look for? We can’t take care of all of Britain ourselves.”

Sydney had started up the shelves behind their leader.

There was an ominous screech of metal.

The shelves twisted under the mens’ weight. Sydney jumped free, rolling back, onto his back, staring up with a scream as the spars and uprights of the shelved turned back on themselves, falling away from the wall.

Colin, who was near the top, was shaken free.

When the mess settled it was to the sound of screams.

Noah reached Colin first, pushing the goggles and the bandana off his face to let him breathe. His face was pale already and his eyes were white around the edges. He squeezed Noah’s hand.

“Fell on something,” He gasped.

Noah leaned down, pressing the side of his face to the ground. The old soldier was lying on a metal spar that was twisted where he lay, and blood was running down where it jabbed up into his back, just near his kidney.

“Go get help!” Noah screamed at Casey and Sydney.

--

“He’s recovering,” Noah answered the balding man who’d come to speak to him, the delegation of the people the Sky clan had taken in. The middle aged teacher had become a reasonable scavenger, and he handled the group of school children he’d brought in with him. He had ideas about democracy, though, as though the people who stayed inside the building and never risked their lives had as much of a right to say where resources went as the men who risked their lives getting them.

“Now I understand that you respect Colin for all he’s done,” The teacher said, “But now surviving is about more than just banding together with everyone we find. We have to make decisions based on what is best for the people we have.”

“It’s easy to say we should draw a line, but you were very grateful when we took you in,” Noah answered back. “We didn’t have to, you know. We could have taken your supplies and had a surplus for ourselves.”

The man swayed back, mouth opening.

“When our leader recovers from the injury he earned, getting parts for the air filters, that keep the kids we feed. breathing clean air, he will continue making decisions for this clan.”

“You joined Sky clan,” Casey said. “And you can follow the rules that protect you.”

“That’s right,” Sydney agreed.

“Well if there’s more than three of them, they’d better bring a lot of their own food,” The teacher said, “Because we’ve got enough to feed ourselves today, and have nine cans left for tomorrow.” He turned on his heel and went back to the four man tent that he used as his private quarters and to store the books he used to teach the children, including his own six year old son, Javier.

Beyond the teacher’s tent stretched a dozen more, down each side of the school’s central hallway. It had been easiest to fit one big room with the fans and filters, and it was warmer with the bodies sharing the space. The tents were interspersed with portable sunshades fixed with cardboard walls, pallets tied with wire into boxes. It looked like a transient camp, full of confused, tired faces.

Clean faces, though.

They’d learned to wash the ash off.

Noah scratched at the ring of sores that had become the identifying mark of the scavengers. He didn’t have a lot of opportunity to look in a mirror, but he could see his teammates, and he knew his sores had the same black, raw look as theirs.

Sometimes it took all the strength he had to put his goggles on and let the edges press on the ring of sores.

He huffed. “We’re going to get them,” He turned and stalked towards the lockdown area they’d set up to keep their permeated outer clothes.

--

There were six adults in the group. They had been living in a shelter beneath a community center, but the supplies had been laid in decades ago, and they’d gone through the good ones, and then been forced outside to scavenge.

They hadn’t understood about the fallout.

Noah set up a classroom in the far side of the school as a hospice, to keep the others from seeing the bad luck that had befallen these poor people.

It was winter, then, and the ground was too solid to dig.

--

“I can’t wait until you come back out with us,” Noah said. The teams shared living space, like the families did. It reinforced bonding, Colin said. Colin’s blanket was beside Noah’s.

The sergeant grunted. “You might have to.” He folded his arms behind his head. “I’ve been thinking I’ll stay and take care of things.”

“You can walk again,” Noah said. The other two boys were out, at the communal kitchen, getting bowls of soup. Real meat today. Sydney had acted as bait for a pack of ferals while Noah and Casey had waited in ambush with spears from hiding. The whole Sky smelled of delicious cooking dog. It was making his stomach growl.

Colin turned on his side towards the teenager. “My leathers are wrecked, Vale. There’s a hole the size of a football in the back. I spent 6 months on my belly. That’s...it makes a man think.”

“You’re not a coward,” Noah said.

He knew it was a mistake.

Colin’s face turned into that same kind of confusion and betrayal he had shown the day Noah suggested leaving the 6 community shelter survivors to die.

His hand snaked out and caught Noah by the shirt. “The last thing you will dare do, boy, is call me a coward again.”

Noah’s first thought was, “What? I didn’t say so,” But the anger came in too hot and sudden after that. “A soldier doesn’t let others do his work,” He shot back, “Like you are.”

Colin shoved him back. For a moment he studied Noah’s face, and Noah could see him fighting the rage. Then he threw himself onto his other side, back to Noah.

He was wearing pants and a bare torso, like all of the men went in the heat of the Sky.

The scar warped the pale skin of his back beside the kidney. There were six distinct marks where the doctor had sutured the skin back together with a piece of tendon taken from that night’s meal of cat. Noah couldn’t remember her name. She hadn’t lasted long after that. Caring for the six shelter survivors had taken her too.

He watched Colin’s back, wishing there was something to say that his leader would hear.

--

“We’re not leaving! What makes you think you have a clue what makes a shelter that will keep us safe?” Colin bellowed, giving Noah a one handed shove that sent him stumbling backwards through the draped door of their tent, into the space in the center of the floor. “How long have you been planning this behind my back? When did you even find this place?”

There had been plenty of time to find lots of things in the year Colin had refused to patrol.

“It was a computer factory!” Noah snapped. “The factory floor is a clean room. The filters are already there, and it is larger, there are seals on the doors. We will be safer there!”

“After you take everyone and everything through the ash cloud, and get them all irradiated?” People were starting to look now. There was little real privacy in the community in the hallway. They relied on pretending they hadn’t heard or seen what happened in the “homes” of their neighbors. This was happening on the public street.

“We will lead the inside livers, with just what they need, and the scavs will carry the rest. We have the ATV, we can take everything in a few trips.” Noah saw Sydney and Casey move out from the space at the end of the camp that was being set up as a blacksmith’s forge. They were watching, and when he gave a little shake of his head, they relaxed on their feet.

“You think you have the right to use that ATV? I found it. I fixed it. I taught you to RIDE it, you ungrateful little bastard.” He threw himself forward, swiping a hand at Noah, like he was going to grab him. But though he had spend the last year since his injury recovering his muscle tone, he hadn’t been out there every day, honing his reflexes.

Noah swayed away and brought his foot up into Colin’s belly. “Get away from me.”

“This is MY clan, boy,” Colin snarled. He reached for the knife he still carried at his side, despite being in a supposed safe haven.

Noah’s heart broke. It shouldn’t have come to this. He pulled the iron spike he used for a knife and tossed it into his off hand. “Your clan starves while we scrounge for your food.” He lunged forward. Colin wasn’t expecting it, but he brought his knife up and deflected Noah’s blow.

He didn’t see anything left of the man he’d known. The fall had soured him, and then the fear it left in him had rotted his heart away from the inside. The soldier in Colin would never let him give up, Noah knew, and there was only one way to beat him.

Noah couldn’t let himself be sorry, Colin always taught them if it was their life or the clan’s- the clan needed to come first.

It was time for Colin to put the clan first.

--

Three days had gone by without the second fencer team coming in. Noah’s team, down to three, because they considered Colin irreplaceable, had been in for their recovery rotation, consuming monumental amounts of mushroom tea and bathing in detoxifying solution. The third team had gone out and come back, with no sight of the second team in any of the established safeholds.

They had even breached the seal at the school, to see if some extraordinary event had driven the second most experienced patrollers there.

The third team returned to the factory with reports on the state of the territory, but no news of the second team.

The Sky, settled in the clean room of the Micron computer factory, had made themselves at home, building shelves of shelters and setting up, for the first time since Before, the beginnings of industry. They had a forge, now. That, if nothing else made them a power in the region.

When their recovery rotation was done, Noah took his team out, and found the tracks which led them to the bodies of the second team of fencers. Noah’s patrollers swore that what had been done to them, and what was to be done when they found the howlers who had done it, would never cross their lips.

They returned with packs full of travel supplies, and two unexpected surprises.

Noah stood at the head of the Avenue and addressed the crowd of livers waiting anxiously for news. “A pack of howlers took the second patrol. They’re not a threat anymore.” Speeches weren’t his strength. Beside him, Casey sighed.

“The clan is short a fencer patrol, now,” He said.

The people watching were accustomed to scavenging, but scouting and patrolling the border was a different set of skills.

“We are going to form two new patrols,” He told them. “We need more people who can step in for defense. The Mountaineers are moving in on the territory to the west. We’re not leaving the scavs defenseless. Five howlers were brave enough to take on one of our patrols. We need to make our name known. Make them know if they dare Sky territory, there will be a price.”

There were mutters of agreement.

“With only seven experienced fencers, we won’t be able to train two patrols of juniors. We will divide the current patrols into three, lead by myself, Casey, and Lewis. Each captain will have one experienced fencer and between them they will train two new fencers. I want three volunteers from you scavs,” Noah made eye contact with half a dozen of the livers he thought would be most likely to respond to this call. Some eyes dropped from contact with his, but four scavs moved through the crowd to stand behind Casey, Sydney and the members of the third patrol.

“You can’t make two new patrols with just four scavs,” Piped a voice hidden down in among the crowd.

“You’re right,” Noah answered. “It’s time for some of the kids to start learning more than chores around the Sky.” He paused to assess the reaction to this. The survivors they’d collected weren’t a smooth demographic. They were the people who’d been strong enough to survive the bombs and the days until Colin and the Sky clan found them. There were no elderly among them, and of those younger than Noah, few but the nursery school children the teacher had brought with him.

The teacher had continued to teach them, between his turns with the second fencer patrol.

Those nursery school students had grown into young teens and pre-teens.

Noah glanced at Casey, who nodded. It was time to test his authority.

“Jorge,” Noah called, pointing to his side. “You will join Lewis’ team.”

Surprise rippled through the livers.

“Dani.”

“Yes, Noah!” The tiny twelve year old followed in the wake of the thirteen year old Jorge.

“You will be with Casey.”

“You can’t put them on fencer teams, they’re kids!” Someone complained.

“They’re the oldest children. It’s time for them to learn to be adults. We don’t have time for them to be children, anymore.”

“I’ll go. I’m old enough.” A boy of eleven, with his black hair clipped close around his head, raised his hand. He pushed through a wall of tired, grown scavs, who didn’t get out of his way. “They killed my dad. I want to do what you said. Make them scared.”

Noah looked down at him. “Javier,” He said, “No.”

Javier’s shoulders rolled back. “Why NOT? I’m big, I’m bigger than them,” He pointed at the only slightly older boys.

“Your father took the time to teach you about books, and that is more important than fighting. If we don’t have someone to teach, then we won’t have anything to pass on. You are going to keep doing your father’s work, research. You are going to be our new teacher.”

“What?!” The boy’s face screwed into disgust.

The nineteen year old leader came and knelt down in front of him. “If our clan doesn’t know how to survive, then there is no point in sending these boys out,” He said softly, resting his hands on Javier’s shoulders. “I know that is no comfort to you, right now, but you know the sergeant doesn’t go to the war? The sergeant teaches the soldiers. They couldn’t do it without him. You are my drill sergeant, you understand? You teach the scavs what they need to know. Teach them to read and memorize, teach the smiths about iron and chemistry. This is your job because we need you.” He said, looking into the boy’s eyes. Then he leaned forward and whispered in the boy’s ear. “And I have a secret mission for you. Come and see me after everyone else leaves.”

“Okay.” Javier hung his head.

Noah gave his arms a squeeze. “Brave boy.” He raised his head. “Wilson.”

“No,” A woman’s voice answered.

The leader stood up.

The woman made her way through the crowd with the boy in hand. She had the scav sores across her forehead, nose and cheeks. “Not my son. He’s too little. You reject an older boy and take mine? Why?”

Noah leaned forward and whispered something to her, too, and this, unlike the words to Javier, were never known beyond the two of them.

She gasped. “You’re sure?”

He nodded.

The strength seemed to fall off her face. She held her hand out, the one clutching her eight year old son’s, leading him forward. She put the boy’s hand into Noah’s.

“Take care of him,” She murmured. Then she knelt, hugging her son tightly, and nodded to Noah.

Noah smiled down at the boy. “You’re going to be on my team. Are you ready to be a soldier?”

Wilson bit his lip and nodded. “Yep.”

The leader raised his voice for the rest of the group. “Until you hear otherwise, we’re not going to do individual scavving. The scavs will go out as teams of three until we can be sure you’ll be safe.”

There were more groans and protests at this than there were at Noah recruiting the boys.

“If you can arrange a team of three, tell Sydney after all three have agreed, everyone else, look for an assignment in the morning.” The crowd started to disperse, and Noah turned away towards the shelter at the end of the Avenue, leading Wilson with him. Jorge and Dani were following Lewis and Casey, staring up in awe at their new mentors, and listening to their initial instructions. Noah handed Wilson off to Sydney. “Go with him. I’ll be in soon to talk to you,” He told the boy.

He turned around. When the crowd had started to disperse, Javier hadn’t gone back to his lonely shelter where no father waited. He’d gone to the edge of the sharpener’s workshop and stood beside the grindstone. No adult had taken any notice of him.

Noah beckoned him over, now. He came running, and Noah led him up the boards nailed ladderwise to the side of the shelter, up onto the second level where there were three private officers’ shelters. The patrol had been sharing the leftmost one, but there was so much space in the administration area downstairs that Noah mostly slept in there, and now that there would be more patrols, he decided he would have to find a new solution.

Once the patrols were trained, the members would be redistributed where they were appropriate, the new fencers promoted according to leadership ability. Then he would have Sydney and Casey back on his patrol, and he could move them into the big room downstairs, with him. They would curtain off a living area or something.

For now, he led Javier into the patrol’s little shelter.

“Thank you, you can go,” He said to the child he’d asked to stand watch while he was gone. Marc pushed a water bottle into Noah’s hand and cast a glance at Javier on his way out the door. They could hear him climb a few steps down the ladder and jump the rest of the way.

There were two foam mattresses on the floor. They took up almost all the space. It would have been just enough padding for four men to each have a bit for themself without anyone having to sleep on the cold planks or anyone bumping elbows too much.

There were only the three blankets, folded and sewn at the side like sleeping bags, each with their own pillow covered by a pillowcase made of an old t-shirt, too threadbare to be worth taking apart for strips. There were two babies nested among the sleeping bags. They were very thin, the shapes of their skulls showing, where most babies Noah remembered had chubby cheeks. Their eyes looked huge under the drawn skin, and beneath the man sized tshirts they’d been dressed in, which were tied at the bottom, the shapes of their skeletons was clear to be seen.

Javier inhaled. “Where did you get babies?” He asked.

“These are my children,” Noah said, firmly. “They might ask where they came from, but you tell them. They are my children. Their names are Lane and Liam.”

They weren’t infants. They were so undernourished, though, it was impossible to tell how old they were. They had spoken gabling Italian when they were awake, and were strong enough to walk on their bandy legs. They’d been clothed when the patrol had brought them in. In fact they’d been completely wrapped, and secured into bags for good measure. Those wraps and cloths had been discarded and burned. They stank and were crawling with something Sydney had recognized as lice.

None of the livers ever got vermin. Cleanliness was their way of life.

Javier sat down on the bed next to them. His hand hovered over them, but he didn’t touch their soft skin and bald heads.

“I want you to teach them,” Noah said. “I want them to learn to read, and do math. I want them to...have indoor skills. I don’t want them going outside. You understand?”

“I understand,” Javier murmured.

Then Noah knelt down beside him again and rested his hand on Javier’s back. “You are a man, now, and it’s time for a man’s responsibilities, but I know how hard it is to lose a father. If you ever want to talk to an older man, someone to help you like a father would, I am here for you. You will live here, with us, until the boys are old enough to go to learn a job, and even after that, you can ask anything from me.”

In the bed, the two babies curled together.

Lane and Liam.

--

“Ready?” Noah asked.

“Yep,” Wilson answered.

Noah was crouched behind the 13 year old, at the top of the corner of a brick wall, the top as wide as their feet, and longer than the distance Wilson could throw his javelin. It was smoothed off on top where whatever roofing had pulled away. He cast a look over his shoulder at Sydney, who stood cross armed, leaning against a post that rose out of the short side of the L shaped wall.

“Go,” Noah patted Wilson on the back.

Wilson took a breath and started to run. The bricks were as wide as the Avenue, he told himself. This was exactly like running the line scratched in the dead dirt of the pathway through the old football field.

He was a third of the length of the wall when his foot landed at an angle. “Oof!” His foot slid off the wall and he bounced off it, plunging off the side.

He flung his hand over his head, thumb extended from his fist. “I’m OKAY!”

Sydney and Noah burst out laughing.

His two teammates hopped off the foot high wall and trotted over to pick him up.

“That’s mean,” Jorge said. “Laughing at him like that.” He was sitting up on a higher section of wall, eight feet above their heads. He was facing the other way, keeping an eye out for trouble.

“You’re jealous, because nobody thinks you’re funny,” Wilson told him.

Jorge snorted without even turning around.

Wilson noticed the slant of Noah’s shoulder’s change, and the older man rested his hand on Wilson's shoulders.

“I’m going to miss this when it’s over,” He said.

The mood of the moment changed, like night had suddenly fallen, taking the light out of the cloud around them.

Sydney dropped his head to chest. Jorge turned, if possible, even farther away from the rest of them. Wilson leaned against Noah’s side.

“You guys should stay out awhile longer,” Noah said, patting Wilson and moving away. “I feel like going to see my boys for awhile.”

Sydney patted him on the back. “We’ll come back in with you.”

Jorge swung off the high square of wall, flinging his legs out and absorbing the fall with them. “Yeah, we’ll go in with you.”

Wilson wanted to stay out, but this was a big day for Noah, and his team should be with him.

--

“I want to go with you!” Wilson exclaimed. He was standing at the glass door of the Sky building’s lobby, watching the delegation get their wraps on.

“I’m only going as far as the metal wall,” Noah told him. “Liam and I are coming right back.”

“I should go with him. He needs me to protect him,” Wilson protested. He stared through the glass wall at the slim blonde child Dani was helping to wrap.

“Casey will protect him. They will be fine,” Noah said.

“A patrol should be three, Noah,” Wilson said. He stared into the bandage that had replaced Noah’s eyes.

“There are three of them.”

“Lane’s not a fencer!” Wilson's raised voice turned all the heads in the lobby. The older patrollers turned quickly back to their work, but Lane and his smaller brother stared for a moment longer, before turning their eyes away from him.

“Wilson!” The leader was remarkably tolerant of opposing points of view, and willing to explain himself to his followers, but when he’d run out of patience, it sounded like this.

Wilson pressed a hand on the glass of the self sealing lobby door. “Lane!”

Lane looked up again.

“Bye, Lane.” Wilson put his other hand on the glass.

Lane smiled weakly. “Bye Wilson.”

Wilson turned and ran back onto the Avenue.

--

After Noah returned, Wilson couldn’t think why, but he couldn’t stop himself from answering the leader back, and questioning even the most reasonable decisions. The clan was growing, and the trip to the border had brought Noah into contact with the Rams, the clan who held the territory across the highway.

He selected Wilson, his baby brother Lance, who’d been patrolling for a few years at that time, and Lewis, and sent them as a delegation to the Rams, in exchange for a delegation of the Rams’ excess population of children.

He never said it, but the three had all known it was a permanent trade.

Wilson had cursed Noah with bad luck on the day he left the Sky, and when he returned a year later, on a trading mission, he apologized for how wrong he had been. Noah asked his forgiveness, anyway, and sent him away with his own weapon, the limber he had carried as a weapon on his own patrols as a fencer.

--

“That is the story. I thought you should know,” Wilson said. He rested his head back against the wall.

“I remember you,” Liam agreed.

The others exchanged glances. “That was you? You were a fencer, when we were kids?” Tonio asked.

Wilson nodded.

“I can’t help but thinking maybe the important part of that story, for me, was a little bit before that,” Liam said.

His patrolmates looked over at him, puzzled. Then Alex’s eyes went wide, and George’s. “Oh yeah!”

Wilson's face displayed pleasant curiosity.

“I didn’t know,” Liam said, voice low, “That my father was not, in fact...my father.”

Wilson's mouth snapped shut with a popping noise. He buttoned his upper lip over his lower lip

“Howlers,” Liam said. “Why were Lane and I with howlers?”

This question made Wilson's embarrassed mouth move into a series of silent words. “Why not?”

“Are you saying they were going to eat us?”

“Disgusting! Of course not. Even howlers don’t eat their own babies.”

[lieutenant]

Chapter Four- The Hospital


The team withdrew from Liam that night, even after Wilson tried to redeem the howlers with weak excuses that everything must try to survive.

Over the next days, though, their cohesion as a team reasserted itself as they made their way across the dead landscape. Wilson had apparently memorized the description of the route, and he could tell them, location by landmark, where to go. Tonio had been right that the machines made them too fast to be threatened.

They rode past a patrol of some local clan, scavving on a hill, but even though the bikes were struggling, slow in comparison, over mounds of rubble, the travellers had left them far behind long before they could make their way down from the hill. They skirted the crater, and though, somehow, Liam had pictured that they would be riding along the edge of a giant bowl shape scooped out of the ground, the danger zone extended so far away, they never even saw it.

He’d expected some sort of residual heat, or glow or something. Buildings pushed flat in an outward ring, instead of just collapsed from the ground shaking in the aftermath, which he was used to. But they were too far away to see the blast zone, too.

Wilson pointed to some gentle rolling hills in the distance on one day that dawned clear enough to see them and said it was in that direction, that beyond those hills were more hills, and beyond those, more hills, and then the blast zone, and the crater in the center, dead and silently deadly.

Tonio and George had proposed climbing one of the hills in the safe zone, to try to see, but Wilson had been as uninterested as if they’d suggested weighing every rock in the road. It would tell them nothing.

“We’re coming back into a town,” Liam called over the wind, turning his head so Wilson could hear him better, “There’s rubble.” George was ahead, now, on the small bike by himself, he’d raised his right hand at the elbow, signaling back to Liam.

“Go slowly,” Wilson called back. He lifted his arm from around Liam’s waist and held it up as George had, signalling back to Tonio and Alex, on the yellow bike behind them.

George slowed and the others closed up the distance, so they were all riding just beyond the reach of hands. This speed felt slow now. Though Liam knew if any of them were to get down and run, the bikes would outdistance them in moments.

They crawled along the street. They had been riding in open country, with only rare buildings and ruins, and now there were collapsed or half standing buildings all around them, and even some intact structures.

“Crossroads!” Liam announced, smirking with pleasure behind his helmet at his new conversance with the word. He was so used to seeing and recognizing the phenomenon, it was as well as a commonplace experience, nearly beneath notice. The travellers slowed so Liam could identify the landmarks to Wilson. “To the left there is a stone planter about four paces across, in front of a chest high wall. The rubble around us is red brick.”

“Is there a large tree in the planter?”

“No,” Liam said.

“There is a shallow hole in the middle, maybe a tree cut out for wood?” George reported.

“Let’s continue straight,” Wilson said. “Actually,” He amended loudly, “I don’t think that is a good idea.”

“Wise man,” Said a liver voice Liam had never heard before.

“Don’t turn around,” Wilson said. “He’s got a spear against my back.”

The sound of the dirtbikes’ engines had covered the approach of a patrol of fencers, five, counting the one behind Liam and Wilson. The others sidled into Liam’s view, each armed with a short spear, the shafts capped with ragged metal points, like the dark, heavy iron Tonio’s machete was made of.

“Charles,” Commanded a short fencer with a sort of tunic over his wraps, splashed with a painted design on his chest and back, “Take your weapon off him, these are Sky clan.” The others wore the tabards, too, each with a painted symbol, but the short one’s was the most complicated, a series of circles and bent lines. The tallest had a yellow hand print, another had a blue circle with a line coming down from it, and the third was two horizontal black smudges.

The tall fencer turned his helmet, “Sky clan?” He gasped. He threw himself at George, accidentally knocking him against the bike which started to tip and knocked both of them down. The strange fencer was laughing, arms wrapped around George’s ribs. “I knew I recognized these clothes.”

Liam felt Wilson tense against his back.

“Marc!” The tall fencer yelled at the short fencer captain. “Look!” He turned back to George, petting a hand down the outside of George’s wrapped helmet. “It’s my dad.”

--

“I’m not anyone’s dad,” George pushed the fencer’s hands away.

The fencer rolled away. “I don’t know your voice.”

“Marc,” Wilson said, “Noah sent us.” He held a hand out towards the fencer captain. He started to shift his weight to get off the bike.

“We came here to find you!” George burst out, sitting up. “Dani told us you could help.”

Liam stared at the tall fencer. Who thought, like Wilson's clan had, that George was Noah. “Lane?” He asked.

He threw himself off the dirtbike. Not caring that it fell, not caring that Wilson had admonished them to take care with them. He threw himself against his brother. “It’s Liam. I’m Liam. I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Liam?” The voice was so much deeper and richer, and Lane towered over him, now, but Liam knew him. He squeezed Liam, picked him up and twisted back and forth, causing Liam’s legs to swing.

The two groups fell into a chaos of trying to explain to one another their missions, and their surprise at seeing one another here.

“We are patrolling,” Marc explained, dividing his attention between Wilson and Liam, unsure who was leading. “We can’t,” He turned and looked at Lane when he said this,” Leave our mission unfinished, “But I can spare Lane to take you back to the Library, we’ll be back tonight, and you’ll have time to recover from your trip..” He clapped each of them on the shoulders. “I am so happy to see you.” His voice sounded like it was smiling.

The Library fencers moved away, climbing over one of the broken down roadside walls and soon vanishing into stealth and the ash fog.

Lane stood with them and their dirtbikes. “You came all this way,” He said. He was looking at Wilson.

Liam looked at the way they were standing close together. Why was Lane so excited to see some patroller he wasn’t even related to? He hadn’t greeted Wilson with the same display as he’d greeted George, thinking he was greeting his father, or Liam with the squeezing hug, but since those greetings had ended, Lane had never stepped away from Wilson's side, even to greet Alex, George, and Tonio.

Then, Liam remembered, Alex and Tonio had come from the Rams’ clan as part of the delegation, when Wilson had left.

And Casey and Marc had taken Lane to the Library before that.

The last moments kept reeling back through Liam’s mind, the long, exciting walk, their first trip outside the Sky building, with Casey trying to shepherd Noah and Noah teasing, feeling his oats, though he’d barely gone out, that Liam knew of, since his blindness. The first sight of the heaps of cars on the highway called the wall of metal.

His father speaking of the sunset the day the bombs had dropped, taken by his memories back to the day he lost his parents.

Then Noah had said a nostalgia filled goodbye to Casey, and thanked him for the sacrifice he was making, had assured the young Marc that he would enjoy his new home, and then Noah and Liam had hugged Lane, and watched the three of them cross the border, join the honor guard of Rams who would escort them across Ram territory and hand them off to the escorts arranged with the clan to the north, and so on, until they reached the Library.

Before the two of them had returned to the shelter of the Sky, Noah had taken Liam along the wall, to a rusted heap of metal curled against the trunk of a tree, and showed him the two stones of the graves beside it. He had told Liam of a life Liam could barely comprehend, filled with words that sounded sour and unreal on his father’s tongue from disuse.

They had walked back and from the roof of a warehouse on the edge of Sky territory, Noah pointed out a large brick building, surrounded by improvements cultivated in the After. The doors were blocked, now. The blue Sky logo painted on the wall high up was covered over with three yellow triangles.

The radioactivity symbol was a lie, but the symbol had become one for a place no one must stand.

The day he sent Lane to the Library, he’d said the name Colin for the first time in Liam’s hearing.

“What is the Library like?” George asked Lane.

“It’s different than the Sky,” Lane told them. They all moved towards the dirtbikes. Lane followed Liam and Wilson to the blue bike. “I’ll ride with Wilson,” He said to Liam. “You ride with George.”

Liam looked at Wilson. He’d mostly ridden with Wilson behind him, and he’d come to think of the blue bike as his. “Do you know how to ride a dirtbike?” He asked Lane.

“I’ll just ride along,” Lane flicked a hand carelessly.

“Ride with George for now,” Wilson told him, “Liam and I have worked out a rhythm.”

Lane stood in place for a moment. “Okay,” He said, like it was a joke.

They all got on the bikes and started out. Lane held onto George’s waist, but sitting up so he was barely touching him.

“So is the Library big? How many books do you have?” George asked, when Lane didn’t say anything for a few blocks’ distance.

“It is big,” Lane said. “I can’t really describe it, you’ll see it for yourself.” After a few more blocks he said, “Turn left here.”

“How many livers in your clan?” Alex asked after waiting for more.

“Four hundred and seventeen.”

They rode a few more blocks.

“Your patrol is well armed. They seem well trained, you took us by surprise easily,” Tonio said.

“You were distracted and these things are loud.”

No one asked any more questions.

“There. Stop at the end of the wall. We’ll walk these things in the rest of the way,” Lane said. They stopped and all got off the bikes, and without really seeming to mean to, when they began walking, he was side by side with Wilson.

He waved an arm over his head, tapping his tabard.

Nothing happened. Nothing around them moved.

“Who are you waving at?” Tonio asked.

“The sentries,” Lane said.

“There is no one out here,” Alex ventured.

“Sentries you can see aren’t much good, are they?” Lane asked. “You haven’t been a fencer for long, have you?”

Alex, who had begun to take some of the duties of a fencer during the course of their trip, and was proud to have shown an aptitude for it, hung his head.

Beyond the line of hidden sentries, the land changed. There were large tracks of land with no buildings, and all Liam could think of was the dead square of flat dirt back in Sky territory the patrollers called the football pitch.

The open ground here was green. It was thick with bushes. Some of them had long thin dark and light striped leaves, some had pie plate sized leaves with keyhole stripes in them.

“There is a field of plants on our left,” Liam said to Wilson, instinctively lowering his voice, to keep Lane from overhearing. He described the kinds he could see.

Wilson flexed his hands around Liam’s waist.

They passed several fields like this. Then they came up to a four story building which was still standing. There were livers coming and going from the door. Lane waved an arm again and called, “Lane coming in with Sky clan travellers!”

The wrapped livers looked up at them, then went about their business. Most of them were dressed like scavs, but some had jumpsuits, of a looser and thinner cloth than the leather jumpsuits Liam and his patrol wore. Four big livers who were armed with long, heavy spears and two machetes each, came forward, not drawing their weapons, but alert. Lane jumped down away from George like he was worried about catching bad luck, and spoke to the guards, explaining who they were and that Marc had given permission for them to be brought.

The four guards backed away. Lane had the travellers put their dirtbikes to one side of the door. Wilson hesitated.

“We won’t take your machines, Wilson,” Lane said in a soft voice, resting his hand on Wilson's arm. “You don’t have to worry. I wouldn’t take anything away from you.”

Liam saw George’s helmet turn like he was trying to make eye contact with Liam. He ignored the pointed look, but when they walked towards the door, George came up beside him. “Why is Lane so concerned about Wilson?”

Liam shook his head once. “I don’t know.”

“You’re his brother.”

“I don’t know.”

There was a big white sign above the door, and Liam read it aloud as they went in. He had to sound out several of the words. “Cheltenham Hospital Oncology Centre.”

Lane twisted around when Liam said this. “Haven’t you ever seen a hospital before?”

“No,” Liam answered. There were a lot of types of building he’d never seen standing. This one was just like every shelter he’d ever seen, though. The windows were sealed off, so it was dark inside, except this one had the sort of low glow strip lights like the Sky, powered by black panels on the roof that had to be swept daily.

Beyond the generously portioned lobby, where they unwrapped and hung their wraps on rope strung across the room, setting their helmets underneath. Liam’s patrol undressed quickly, and Lane and Wilson, dressed in wrappings, more slowly.

As they were waiting for Lane to finish and lead them inside, a group of five young men came into the lobby and started to wrap, not bothering to hide their curiosity, but a word from Lane quieted their questions.

Liam watched Lane carefully when Wilson pulled his helmet off. His hair puffed and then settled into its usual mushroom shape above his head, and when he turned around and Lane saw his bandaged eyes, Lane’s mouth dropped open.

Then his mouth snapped shut, and he cast a glare at Liam.

Lane had grown up into a fine featured man. He had pale brown hair, pinned back in a bun tight to the back of his head to fit in his helmet, and narrow eyes, skin pale, even paler than Liam’s. His eyes were blue, like Liam’s and Noah’s but seeing his features, it was clear he was built differently than their alleged father.

Liam wondered if Lane knew Noah wasn’t their dad.

And where they had come from.

“Walk with me?” Lane asked, touching Wilson's arm and putting his arm under Wilson's hand like he would guide him.

Wilson hadn’t put up with anything other than verbal directions from any of Liam’s patrol, but he wrapped his hand around Lane’s forearm.

Alex, Tonio, and George cast confused glances at each other, and at Liam.

Lane led them out of the old reception area of the Library clan’s shelter, the hospital.

There were rooms off the edge of the main corridor. Unlike the Sky, the community here was divided into living spaces within the rooms. The private spaces within weren’t filled with constructed shelters, but walls had been set up to offer privacy between two or three groups, which peered out at them from behind their open doorways.

If they had four hundred seventeen livers in the clan, they would need well more than the space the Sky clan’s two hundred twenty needed. Each additional liver didn’t need just the space of another bed, they needed more food production, more cloth production, and workspace of their own. A clan twice the size might need as much as one and a half times more space.

The rooms here were cooler than at the Sky, but still too warm, Liam thought, for as many livers as he saw wearing not just pants, but shirts and vests. There were a few livers back home who habitually wore vests, but not many. He had worn his chest covered for special occasions, and his wraps were as comfortable a part of his wardrobe as his pants and boots, but he couldn’t understand how Lane could stand wearing the stiff leather vest indoors.

The corridor turned left into a two story open space. There had been a window here along the right hand wall, and it had been replaced with blocks of pale amber colored glass that let the light through, but which were as thick as building stones. There was a gallery above, fenced with railing, and a few livers were sitting against the railing with their legs hanging down, watching the scene in the center.

There were more livers on the floor space. Like the leaders’ palace in the Sky, there was a firebowl in the center and cushions scattered around. There were more livers here, occupied in day to day tasks as they listened to a liver in the center, reading off a piece of actual paper from a thin stack of papers held to a board.

The liver was wearing a leather vest that couldn’t hide a significant rounding of his pectorals. His hair wasn’t any longer than anyone elses, and his pants hid any odd shaping between his legs, but Liam’s hair stood on end.

This was one of those men from the Penthouse Playground wall.

He KNEW there had been people with round pectorals and no cocks, once. Sheese, they were called. This liver reading the report was a shee.

He looked at the rest of the patrol to see if they’d noticed it as well, and their mouths were dropped open. They’d obviously seen it too. He noticed Wilson, and stumbled to hurry an explanation of what was in the room, when he noticed Lane’s hand had moved from under Wilson's, to his shoulder and Lane’s fingers were moving in a rapid succession of signals, to which Wilson was nodding and murmuring barely audible acknowledgement.

Liam turned back to the liver in the center, and then his eyes drifted beyond the liver reading the report about something called farming, onto the leader, who was clearly the man the liver was addressing the report to. He was a medium sized man, of an ordinary build, and he had tawny, curly hair, and a wide smile. He had sort of sticking out ears, and he wasn’t wearing a bandage across his face. Like Noah, the scarred skin over the upper half of his face was uncovered. His helper was leaning against his left side with an arm around his shoulders, tapping fingers to signal on the skin of his right shoulder. The leader’s hand was rested on his helper’s leg and he was signalling back.

Seeing them wrapped together made Liam even more uncomfortable than the friendly closeness between Noah and his reader. The leader’s helper was a shee as well.

When the round chested liver stopped reading, he said, “I will bring another report when we finish counting the south field,” in a voice like a singer’s. Then he walked to the side of the room and sat down.

Lane cleared his throat and led them towards the center of the room, but before he could say anything, Wilson said, “Casey you old dog, you’ve got fields packed full of aloe vera.”

“Wilson!” The leader stood, striding forward, confident, stepping around the cushions of livers, each of whom made a small noise as he came within a few paces of them, and he crossed the entire floor without coming near stepping on any of them. His helper followed at a discrete distance, ready to resume signaling when Casey stopped.

Wilson held his arms wide and the two men hugged.

As Casey leaned away, he whispered, “Am I going to have to have my guards kill you?”

Wilson shrugged his shoulders under Casey’s hands. “Noah sent me. This is Liam.”

Casey turned, brows rising in surprise. “It’s been a long time,” He hugged Liam.

Liam examined his father’s old teammate’s face. The smile was the same and the round ears, and his eyes were well scarred over, so he’d lived with the blindness for years, though he’d still had sight when he had left the Sky.

“Dani sent us to Marc,” Liam said. “He seemed to think Marc would be a reader...that he would know a ritual to help us.” He didn’t say what sort of ritual. He had expected to explain to Marc. He hadn’t expected to be brought into the center of this clan, and he hadn’t been able to think of a way to warn them before they had come into their midst.

“Two of these boys are stricken with bad luck,” Wilson said.

Liam drew back from him.

Casey took a step away from Liam, holding his arms up and out to the side like he’d touched something gooey. His mouth was twisted in betrayal. Some of the livers on the nearest cushions had leaned away. One had stood up, clutching his leather cutting project like it had to be prevented from Alex’s bad luck spreading to it.

“Casey, my father sent us to you,” Liam said.

Though Noah hadn’t known Casey was leading the Library clan. They’d had no word since the clans on the route had passed the word back that the delegation had arrived. Between Wilson leading the Rams and Casey leading the Library clan, Noah’s delegations had done well. Much better than the plan had outlined.

“You could have had the decency to tell me privately,” Casey hissed at Wilson.

Wilson smirked and shrugged. “If I could keep my mouth shut, Noah wouldn’t have passed me off to the Rams.”

Casey grunted. “I heard the Rams had a madman leading them.”

Liam tensed. Tonio stepped between George and Alex and the man.

Wilson grinned. He pinched his teeth on his lower lip. “Mad like a fox.”

Then Lane reached out and stroked a hand down Wilson's arm, settling his hand back on Wilson's shoulder.

Wilson turned his head and kissed Lane’s gently shaped, long fingered hand. “And if you think I came this far to leave without Lane, you’re the mad one,” Wilson'ss voice was low and it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t the insane laughter, either. It was scary.

Lane pressed against his side, and looked at Casey through his eyelashes, and it reminded Liam of Noah’s reader, looking at his visitors through kohl lined eyes.

Casey’s helper locked eyes with Lane and then said, “Casey, let her go. She’s old enough to decide for herself. He came across the world for her.” The helper wrapped an arm around Casey in half a hug.

“Thank you, Adriana,” Lane said.

Casey’s helper, Adriana, was a little taller than Liam, but not as tall as George and Tonio. Maybe a little taller than Wilson. Liam had never seen someone with such a sculpted face, and though Adriana wore no kohl, his lips were red like he’d been drinking koolaid. He whispered into Casey’s ear, “And bad luck is nothing we can’t handle. Is it?”

Casey turned and smiled at Adriana. He narrowed his eyes like he was very pleased to have been beaten in a game Liam couldn’t understand.

“Alright, until Marc comes back in, we’ll get you fed,” Casey patted Liam on the shoulder. “Just wait until you try fresh food, Liam, boy. It’ll put hair on your chest.”

--

“Woman,” Liam repeated, staring at Lane. “What does it mean?”

“What do you mean, ‘What does it mean?’” Casey demanded. They were sitting around a plank set on blocks, in Casey and Adriana’s private room, and Casey and Adriana were serving the patrol’s pie pans full of green plant leaves.

“I don’t know what kind of job woman is,” Liam said.

“These are good,” George said, pushing a slice of something yellow into his mouth.

“Those are squash,” Adriana told him. “Woman isn’t a job, Liam. It’s a type of person. Mothers are women?” She hung the word in the air like she was testing to see if he recognized it.

“Sydney’s gender neutrality scheme got bigger after you left,” Wilson muttered. He was chewing, chewing, chewing the leaves he’d spooned by the mouthful off his plate. “No shes anymore, hes or nothing.”

Casey snorted and poured more tea, this kind not mushroom tea but steeped from something very light purple that tasted sweet. Alex asked for a second cup. Casey shied away from him a little, and then steeled himself to come close enough to pour more tea into the tall blue plastic glass which read Pepsi.

Liam swirled the lavender tea in the bottom of his glass. The tea was pale yellow, very different than the black mushroom tea they’d been invited to on entering.

“Sydney always did have Noah whipped, I didn’t think she’d make him stop calling her, her, though.” Casey shook his head.

“It can be dangerous being a woman in some places,” Adriana said.

“Don’t think patrolling isn’t just as dangerous for men. Howlers torment whoever they catch,” Casey said. His voice was rough.

Liam stopped with a bite halfway to his mouth.

“I didn’t necessarily mean howlers,” Adriana said.

Wilson tapped Liam under the corner of the low table. “I’ll talk you through the highlights of women, later.”

“And you have always been one?” Liam asked Lane. “A woman?”

Lane shrugged. “Yeah.”

“You could have said.”

She, Liam was going to have to remind himself of that, shrugged again. She didn’t look like the picture on the wall. She didn’t have full, round pectorals, or big hair, either. He didn’t know about a cock. They’d gone around the Sky in short pants as boys...boy and girl. He’d never thought to question that Lane had everything he had.

“So, you’re lucky,” She said, resting her elbow on the plank table and staring at him.

“I guess so,” Lane touched the little dark mole on his left cheek.

“Me too,” She said.

He nodded.

“But your team…” She pointed her spoon at Alex without looking at him.

Liam stood up, bumping the table hard. “Alex is strong and smart and he’s a great scav, and in the week he’s been learning, he’s gotten a good grasp on being a fencer. You look at him when you talk to him.”

Tonio was on his feet in a moment, resting his hands on Liam’s chest, “Hey, no,” He said, soothing. “That’s not gonna help. She doesn’t need to agree. The leader agreed to help us.”

Liam bit back a cut about how Casey could only look at Alex and Tonio for a moment longer than Lane could. His heartbeat was throbbing and he could feel all of his skin intensely again. His head started to ache, from the tense way he’d been holding his neck, restraining himself against Lane’s rudeness, and from worry and the light, and days and days in the smoke.

“Would it be alright if we took him somewhere to lie down?” George asked, scraping the food from his mouth with the edge of his spoon and standing. “We’ve had a long day.”

Wilson started to stand, but Lane grabbed his arm, “You and I can go look at the farms. I’ll show you the plants.”

He extracted his arm from her grasp. “I’m tired, too, and we need to talk about the plan,” He indicated Liam, Alex, George, and Tonio.

Her eyes narrowed, and then she lowered them. “Alright.” She hung her head. Adriana called into the hallway and a boy, Liam assumed it was a boy, but he was no longer sure how to tell, led the five travellers into another room where there were variously sized and shaped pads and they unrolled their blankets.

Liam laid right down and the others took a little longer, settling to sit on the pads.

“Excuse me,” George said to the boy attending them. “I notice your eyeglasses. Where did you get them?”

For a moment the word eyeglasses hummed meaningfully in Liam’s ears and then he turned his head and looked over his shoulder at the boy. He’d assumed the boy was wearing very lightweight googles, and he hadn’t thought eyeglasses would look quite like that, with teardropped shaped lenses in thick brown plastic frames. They had little plastic sparkles at the corner of each eye.

“They help me see,” The boy said proudly. “There is a man here who knows about healing bodies. He found these for me. There are lots back in the eyedugder building.”

“Eyeglasses,” Liam said, smiling at George.

“We found them,” George smiled back. “We’ll take them back to Javier when we go, and his student won’t have to go blind.” He caught himself and looked at Wilson. Wilson didn’t turn from sorting through his bag, or say anything.

The boy with the eyeglasses stayed to make sure they were settled, and Wilson asked him to guide him to the latrine before bed. He took the boy’s arm and was lead off down the corridor.

When they were gone, Tonio said. “I couldn’t stand going blind. I’d rather die.”

His words were greeted by a hollow silence from the three scavs.

“I don’t think it would be worth that,” George murmured.

Tonio shook his head with a huff. “All these old scavs.” He picked up his blanket and shook it, then laid it out again. “Act like its natural, or unavoidable.”

Liam closed his eyes against this conversation. He hated talking about it.

“Fencers can say that being blind is bad because none of them live long enough to know,” George shot back. He turned and sat on his blanket against the wall, arms crossed and glaring at Tonio.

“Unlike scavs, who pretend being blind is fine because they’re scared to fight,” Tonio straightened his blanket with rough strokes.

Liam sat up.

“Scavs are smart,” Alex said, “They run, so they can live.”

Tonio’s head snapped up, his teeth were gritted. His hair had fallen out of its tie around his face. His eyes were wet. “Maybe if Scavs stood to fight,” He choked out the words through his gritted teeth, “They wouldn’t all end their careers with their eyes being put out.” He turned away suddenly. “I’d rather fight until I die.”

He threw himself onto his blanket, back to them and knees curled up.

Liam saw George’s mouth move as he worked up a response, and interrupted before George could speak. “That’s enough. We just need to go to sleep. Let’s just go to sleep.”

They all laid down and the pale strip light from the hallway shown in on them.

Wilson came in awhile later. “The latrine is down the hall to the right. There are signs. They have an ingenious system…” He must have heard they were all unmoving, feigning sleep, and Liam heard him settle down on his own blanket.

Liam pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes to stop the tears. Not every scav had their eyes put out. Some did die, fighting or otherwise, and some, like Dani and Jorge, retired. Became readers, did something else with their lives.

He wondered for a moment how howler patrollers died. Then he pushed the thought away.

[lieutenant]

Chapter Five- Marc’s Beetles


When Liam woke up the next morning, the other boys weren’t awake, yet, but Wilson was sitting up against the wall, reading. His pad and blanket was lined up along the same wall as Liam’s, but closer to the door. Liam reversed head and legs, laying his head on Wilson's knee.

In his mind stirred questions about what it was really like, being blind, and why Wilson was so much less troubled by it than Noah. Noah could work, and had made arrangements to make his life easier, but patrolling had proved impossible for him, beyond simple walks with someone along who knew how to signal him.

Wilson reached down and stroked Liam’s hair, like a father with a young boy.

“Will you read to me?” Liam whispered.

In answer, Wilson spoke in a voice barely above a breath. “Among other things,” He started, “You'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.”

Liam clutched his hand around the hem of Wilson's pant leg. Wilson put his hand down and stroked Liam’s head and shoulders again, then lifted his hand back to the book and continued to read.

“You're by no means alone on that score,” He assured Liam, in the words of the book. “You'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

He went on. The words tumbled end over end in Liam’s mind.

After awhile, Liam heard Tonio roll over. Liam could see his face, pale in the green lights of the hallway. His eyes dark, but open.

He had his hand up under his cheek, pillowing his head. His sores looked black instead of red in the green light. “My dad read this book to me,” He said quietly.

Then the three sat silent, and if either of the other two boys were awake, they didn’t move.

“I’m sorry, Liam,” Tonio said. “I know you’re lucky. I guess I just always thought I’d be lucky, too. Now. Instead…”

From another room along the hallway a baby cried, and a mother hushed it with soft words, and then a quiet lullaby.

“Marc will know what to do,” Liam said.

Did he even believe that anymore?

Did it matter? They had already done more than most of their clan could have believed. And had shown that, bad luck...the ruined safehaven of the first night, the long, tall monster in the dark. The way Lane had greeted them with such hostility.

“It hasn’t...actually been too bad…” He said.

Wilson stroked his hair again.

“Not to bad? We got sent away!” Tonio whispered. George grunted and turned over, but all of them were used to sleeping where the life of a community was going on around them. Back home in the Sky, the forge was running through the night.

Tired livers slept.

“We came all this way. None of us have been hurt. None of us have...even struggled, really,” Liam said. “We walked across the bridge and Wilson walked out of the cloud to us, he had machines that made the trip possible in days. We were never in danger on our whole trip and when we got here, the first people we met were Marc and my brother.”

“Sister,” Wilson corrected.

“Sister. And our friend, Casey, my father’s teammate, is leader here. He’s willing to help, and let us stay in his clan’s shelter, even thought we told him we have bad luck, but I’ll tell you, Tonio, that doesn’t sound like bad luck to me. That sounds like good luck.”

Alex rolled onto his back. “Does that mean good luck is bad luck?”

Wilson stroked Liam’s hair very slowly, and his fingers trailed along the ridges of Liam’s eyes and around his nose, tracing a figure 8 around them in a pattern that made the painful sores on the nearby skin feel soothed. His fingertip brushed the little mole on Liam’s cheek.

Liam moved away from that, and Wilson's fingers went back to soothing around his eyes.

It felt so good to be soothed, and Liam’s eyes drifted closed.

Then there were footsteps coming down the hallway.

“Wilson?” Asked a soft voice. Marc.

“Ready?” Wilson asked.

Marc answered affirmatively, and Wilson shifted, so Liam sat up. He reached over and shook George by the shoulder. George jerked awake, his big dark eyes fluttering in the low light.

“Huh?”

“Time to get up,” Liam answered.

They left their things in the room, including Wilson's dog eared copy of “Catcher in the Rye,” and walked down the twilight dim hallway. They turned with the hallway and came in on the other side of the gallery that served as Casey’s palace.

There was no Casey yet. Three helpers were working over the firebowl making a big breakfast and a boy was working beside them, using some of the water heating for washing a basin of clothes. The morning quiet, and the clear light was different than the crowd of the evening before.

It reminded Liam of growing up, visiting his father’s palace on overnight trips. The nights were the helpers and whatever fencers and scavs were in from patrol, enjoying big dinners and loud conversation, music and jokes and sometimes, dancing. Then in the mornings the helpers were quiet to keep from waking anyone who’d gone to sleep late. Mornings were a time for chores.

Liam smiled around. There were two older children casting glances at the travellers from beside the wall of windows, where they were working together to wind a ball of twine bigger than either’s head.

He had fond memories of mornings cuddled up on the pads behind the curtain where Noah’s household made their home. The silent security of his father’s presence, so different from the floor of the teacher’s shack, with the handful of other children shifting and snoring and murmuring in their sleep.

Then when either Noah or Sydney woke, or Casey, in the days before he’d taken Lane and left, they would take Liam by the hand, out into the main room of the palace, and the helpers would greet him, and show him how to mix soda bread, or to judge a pot of boiling tea, to sweep, or repair furnishings and clothes. His father, or whichever of the patrollers had woken first, would tell funny stories, about Garfield the cat, or Courage the Cowardly dog, about Jake and Finn, or exciting stories about the Rangers and their Zords, or the Incredible Iron Man and his eternal battle with Captain America.

Most days it wasn’t Noah, he liked to sleep, and Lane was like that, too, but sometimes when the light came up for the helpers to work by, Noah would smile across the shelter at Liam and invite him over to cuddle and Noah would tell stories, about other things, like men who could fly along the ground in incredible machines called Effwon cars, or Mowtojeepie bikes. How they competed to be the fastest, and before he was old enough to read on his own, he knew the story of the brave Airton and Ala, and Meeshale and Meeka, and FN Swans and Rainrainy.

They went through the gallery and out the opposite direction from the lobby.

“Why did we turn left?” Wilson asked when they turned.

“I’m going to take you to the farms,” Marc said. Liam remembered him as being a boy, and he had grown into a man, but he was only a little taller than Liam. He had an elegant face, with a chin that looked carved out of stone, and his hair was shaved on one side, short on the other, and long in the middle, which cascaded over the shaved side. The shave had begun to grow in, like happened with some of the older patroller’s beards while they were out on patrol.

Wilson had gotten a little scruff but he’d been keeping up with it the nights after travel. Having to stop early meant they’d had time for a reasonable amount of personal hygiene beyond just detoxification. Liam had never had much problem, yet, and Tonio hadn’t shaved until just the night before they’d arrived at the Library. The other two’s faces were smooth except for a few stray hairs.

They walked through a tightly sealed door and down a long corridor with windows, unshielded by anything but glass, on either side. This building was a lot larger than the Sky.

They came into another gallery. This one was three stories, and the clear glass surrounded them, light streaming in golden through the ash cloud outside. There were plants in the room. On each of the gallery levels, draping over the edges of the railings, in bowls and pots on the floor in the middle of the gallery, and suspended from a three dimensional box of chain hanging from the ceiling.

“I’m not really a fencer,” Marc said as they walked into the light room. There were a dozen livers moving around, tending the plants, giving them water or picking up the pots, turning them and setting them back down.

The place seemed unreal. The effect was not helped by a young man with hair down to his waist and a shirt that extended to his ankles, playing a pan flute on the second gallery level. He was sitting on a railing, his leg twined around the support, eyes closed, playing a slow song.

There was the sound of dribbling water, like in a refrigeration unit, but here it was caused by water dribbling down the structure of chains, into the various hanging plants and sprinkling down onto those below.

As the travellers took in the sight, the dribble of water slowed and then stopped.

Like the water ceasing had been some sort of signal, the man on the gallery stopped playing and got off the railing, moving away, out of Liam’s sight.

“This is one of the farms,” Marc said. “We grow food plants in this room, and,” He led them through, into another long glass windowed hallway, “This is the beetle farm.”

There had been moisture in the gallery farm, almost like a washing room, or a shelter where someone was boiling a big meal and making steam. There was very little moisture in this room. The air made Liam’s throat feel parched and he had to blink to get water back into his eyes. The plants here were all in round bucket shaped pots on the floor.

Liam recognized the familiar orange terracotta.

The plants were fat and round, like thick discs, stuck together randomly by the edges. They were pale green and had needles coming out of them in patches. Some of them were covered in white blotches like mold.

His eye caught movement. There were little dark colored things moving all over the plants.

“Vermins,” He said, backing up from the nearest of them. They weren’t all over the floor and the walls, though. There were a few on the windows, but not many, considering this long hall was lined with plant containers at least three rows out from the windowed walls.

“I’ll show you,” Marc said. He picked up an empty glass jar with a partly open lid. He walked along the row of plants, reaching down and picking up the vermin between finger and thumb and dropping them into the jar. The dark vermin moved around in the bottom, some lazily and some making their way up the side.

Looking closer, Liam could see they were fat and round, and didn’t seem to have any legs he could make out. They looked like black boogers, except the ones Marc had accidentally squished had popped and gushed red blood in little splashes, and their tiny corpses rolled around in the bottom of the jar, bowling the still living ones out of their way as Marc moved.

“These are cactuses,” Marc said. He turned around and smiled at them. His mouth was even wider and more expressive than Wilson's. “And the beetles are what we use for paint, and what we will use to cure your bad luck. Casey told me all about it.”

“Do I have to touch them?” Alex asked, his lips were drawn back over his teeth and he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the jar full of beetles. As Marc continued down the hall, harvesting here and there, soon there was no space on the bottom and all the beetles were crawling over one another.

The door they’d come through into the hall opened and the boy from the gallery came in with a floating sort of run. Liam realized it was Lane. Her hair was long after all. It must have been much longer than he’d thought, all pinned up for her helmet. She looked much softer in the long shirt than in patrol wrappings. The shirt still fit even over a chest as flat as Liam’s.

“Are you getting beetles for him?” She asked Marc, slowing the last few steps of the run. She looked at Wilson, who Liam was walking with, and Liam signaled with hand motions that she was looking, and looked sorry.

Wilson moved his head a little and Liam stepped back out of the way. Lane took his place with Wilson.

“What are the beetles for?” Alex asked.

“For getting rid of the bad luck,” Lane told him.

She picked a beetle off the nearest cactus and plopped it into the jar when Marc held it out to her. “The Library has been doing research into detoxification. Those plants in the open fields when we came by, they are spider plants, aloe vera and swiss cheese plants, they absorb ash sickness, and then we can remove them and dispose of them, and they carry the sickness out of the ground with them. They make the ground cleaner. Someday, we might be able to, when the ash cloud is gone, grow food outside again.”

Marc led them through the door at the far end of the hallway. There was a room well lit with real lights, here. Not just strip lights, but bulbs, probably powered from an entire array of black panels. There was a table in the middle and the hum of some machines. There was also a familiar stone dome, coated in dried clay, incongruously in one corner of the room. It radiated heat. This was the sort of oven Liam understood.

The jar of beetles was emptied into a square metal pan and a lid put on the top. Lane opened the oven door and Marc put the pan of beetles into the oven.

“Ew!” Alex squealed. He danced up and down shaking his hands back and forth. “Ew! Eeeew! Vermin in the oven!”

“I am not eating those,” Tonio said slowly, “Bad luck or not.”

Marc laughed, a loud, barking sound that made George take a step back. It wasn’t a mad laugh, like they’d heard from Wilson, but it was loud and completely unexpected from the elegant looking young man.

“You don’t have to eat those,” Marc said. “They take a long time to bake dry. I have this,” He turned and got a tin from a table behind him. He opened it to reveal a powder of an incredible blue.

He scooped a little spoonful out of the tin and into a cup on the table. The cup was made of glass, with a pattern of hatch marks making repeating squares and stripes around the base of the glass. He scooped some clear grease that smelled sweet and faintly of nuts out of a different container, and used the spoon to mix the powder into the grease, greeting a livid blue goo.

He divided the goo into rough quarters, piling each half onto its own spoon. He held these out by the handles to Alex, Tonio, Liam, and George. “This is the ritual,” He told them. “Say past the lips and past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes, and then swallow the coconut oil as fast as you can. Don’t choke.”

They all repeated this, in George’s case, including the admonition to swallow and not to choke. Then they gulped the blue grease down. It tasted nutty and sweet. Even sweeter than the brown goo inside a can of SPAM.

Liam was sort of sorry when it was gone, but the greasy feeling on his lips, and the sweet taste in his mouth lingered.

They stood licking their lips for a moment. “What is the next part of the ritual?” Liam asked.

Marc and Lane smiled. “That’s it.”

The room got very quiet.

“We came across the world, around the crater, risking our lives, for a mouthful of blue grease?” Tonio asked.

“Did you want to eat some bugs?” Marc asked, gesturing to the oven. “You could have one or two if it makes the journey feel worth it.”

Tonio paused like he might. He was definitely thinking about it.

“If it makes you feel better, the dried beetles are used to make the pressing blue powder,” Marc said.

Alex grimaced, but there wasn’t much point in getting upset now, over such a simple ritual to their terrible problem. Alex’s lips were a little blue from the goo, and so were Tonio’s. Liam looked at George, who grinned with blue teeth, and Liam grinned back, sure his teeth were blue, too.

“Didn’t Wilson need some?” George asked. “He was travelling with us, too.”

Wilson grinned, and his teeth were just the regular color. “I do not suffer from bad luck,” He said, carelessly, tossing his hair, “I am a carrier, and I enjoy every minute.”

--

Lane’s shelter was shared with her team. Marc’s pad was at the front, with the four younger livers’ behind. The team was neither scavs, nor fencers. They weren’t readers.

They were farmers.

They went armed, their territory was busy and desirable, because even though they had supplied all the nearby clans with the means to plant radiation-fighting plants, they still had a stock of fresh or recent food that was the envy of most clans. Their work, though, wasn’t to find goods in ruined buildings, or protect their border. It was to plant and care for the plants.

One of the pads was empty, of blankets, and the little box on the sill of what had been a window, was empty of the clothing and small personal effects the other four boxes held.

Lane had her things in a pack on her back, and she was holding hands with Wilson.

“We’re going to miss you,” Marc said.

“Be safe,” The patroller with the blue tabard said, giving her a hug.

“Thanks, Pierre,” She said.

“Take this,” Another said, handing her a little book. The cover was pink with green and white flowers and birds and the cardboard of it was bent and nearly floppy with use.

“Your copy of ‘Little things?’” She opened to the first page, there were several small selections of text, “The least flower,” she read, “with a brimming cup, may stand, And share its dew-drop with another near. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Thank you, Marcus.” She hugged the stocky blonde.

Then she turned to the last member of the team. He was a young, brown haired man with the beginnings of a moustache. He had his arms crossed and he was standing beside the boarded up window, swinging his arms back and forth, looking down at the row of belongings that no longer had Lane’s with it.

“Are you going to say goodbye to me, Charles?”

“You don’t even know them,” He said to the wall. “Why don’t you stay with us? We love you. You know us. You know we’d never let you down.”

She hugged him from behind. “I’ll never forget you.”

He grunted.

He turned around and hugged her. “I’ll never forget you, Lane.”

Liam and his team turned away to slip out into the hallway. It was crowded with the travellers and the team in the room.

“You’re sure you won’t come home with us?” George asked Marc.

Marc nodded. “Casey has been planning on sending a team home. I’ll lead it when it’s time. Now that you’re taking Lane, we’ll be expecting a farm started out for us. Let’s see how far you can get without us.”

“It was good to see you again, Marc,” Wilson said.

When Lane joined them, she said, “Are we ready to go, then?”

“One more thing,” George said. “Where is your eyedugder?”

Lane glanced at Liam. “This way.”

She led them down another hall they hadn’t gone into. Here there were livers in very clean clothes that covered almost all of them. The coated livers were coming and going from well lit rooms on the sides of a very clean hallway. A few regular looking livers were sitting on the side of the hallway. One was a boy holding his arm close to his chest. His mother was with him, and when a coated liver came over and spoke to the boy, both boy and mother stood and went into the nearest well lit room.

“Dugders,” Lane said. “They fix bodies.”

“We have Dani for that,” Tonio said.

Lane led them into the last room on the left. There was a table at nearly chest height and a man sitting on it with his back to them, reading what had once been a glossy paged magazine, tracing his left index finger along the text while writing with a pen on salvaged paper with his right hand.

“Bez,” Lane said.

The man turned around. He was much younger than Liam would have expected. He looked at them with wide brown eyes. “Hey Lane,” He piped in a voice that suggested he hadn’t settled into adulthood.

“These are the Sky travellers.”

Bez nodded.

“They need a pair of eyeglasses.”

Bez’s attention turned to Liam. “Won’t help. There’s nothing I can do for that.”

“It’s not for me,” Liam said. “It is for a boy at home.”

“We need -6.0 diopters. Or any number higher than six,” George said.

The boy took his eyes off Liam. “Okay.” He went to a stack of boxes on the floor. They were stacked in rows according to color. He opened a box and grabbed the same sort of brown tear drop shaped frames. He showed George how to put the oval shaped pieces of glass into the frames, but didn’t pop them in. He put the ovals back into the box and then put the frame into a little green metal box that snapped open and closed.

“When you get back to your clan, you put the glass in, tell the boy,” He glanced back at Liam like he believed Liam was lying about the eyeglasses being for him, “Not to wear them to sleep, or when he is washing. Tell him NEVER to set them glass side down, and when he is carrying them without wearing them, put them in the box.” He showed George that lying the frame on the top would be safest for them. “There...will probably never be any more than we have.” He said, letting go of the box reluctantly.

George put the boxes into his bag, making sure to tuck them into the soft middle of his blanket.

They returned to the hallway where Lane, Wilson, Tonio and Alex were waiting. Alex had blossomed since his return to ordinary luck. He was confident, and he had been talking about learning to be a fencer.

As they walked back down the hallway, Lane described the hallway and its inhabitants to Wilson.

They visited Casey’s palace for one final farewell to the Library clan’s leader. They wrapped, and climbed onto the bikes. Lane soon had enough experience to ride, and within a few turns, she was riding the blue bike with Wilson, while Liam and George, as the smallest of the others, were sharing the small blue bike and Alex and Tonio on the powerful yellow.

For five days their rides were uneventful. Then, one day from the Rams’ territory, they stopped at the same brick structure with the double basement.

--

“What is in these barrels?” George asked, taping the five barrels in the corner of the second basement. They resounded with a different sound than both empty wood and wood with something solid on the other side.

“I don’t know,” Alex came over and pressed his ear to one of the dark wooden sides. He thunked a knuckle against it. “Sounds like…” His brow furrowed in concentration. “You know what it sounds like? The fuel canisters. When you dropped that one, and it went, donggggg,” Alex said to Tonio.

“Wooden barrels full of liquid?” Tonio asked. He came over and ran his hand over the words blackened onto the outside. “Is it...wine?”

“Is what wine?” Wilson came down the steps from the room where they’d secured their wrappings and the dirtbikes.

“These barrels,” Tonio said, “In the corner. They’re made of wood but they sound like they have liquid inside. My dad worked at a winery back in Italy. He told me about this fruit juice they’d mix up and they’d let it sit and instead of going bad it turned into harday.”

“You’re too young to drink harday, anyway,” Wilson said, waving a hand. “Only a little makes you woozy, and those barrels would make an entire clan woozy.”

“I’d like to try it sometime,” Alex said.

“You’re too young,” Lane said, coming down the stairs. She set her bag down beside were Wilson was unfolding his blanket and took out some clothes, then went back up the stairs.

“We should take an extra long decon rotation when we get back to the Sky,” Liam said. “We’ve been out so long, with just sheltering instead of real clean air.”

There was a weird silence in response to this, and he looked up. Tonio was looking over his shoulder towards Liam, but glanced back to the burned words on the barrel like he’d been examining it the entire time. Alex had tense shoulders where he crouched, but he, too, was facing the barrels. George was looking at Liam, but he looked caught and went over to his bag. “I guess I’ll change, too.”

“What?” Liam asked.

He looked at Wilson, but of course, Wilson was neither looking at him, nor had he taken notice of the other three’s avoiding Liam’s gaze.

George went up the stairs as Lane came down. Lane had changed out of her pants and vest into a clean pair of pants, and she had her other outfit folded.

“What?” Liam asked again. “Tonio, Alex?”

Alex turned back to Liam with a grimace. “Well, Tonio was thinking he would go with Wilson,” Tonio turned and hissed at Alex, “And learn from the Rams, about fighting. And George and I were thinking…” He stopped talking.

Tonio turned around. “Your father kicked us out. They thought we had bad luck and so they sent us out alone. They thought we were going to be gone for months, getting to the Library, if we ever got there. They wanted us gone.” He shrugged. “So why should we go back? Wilson's clan will take us, and they respect fighters. Alex will be a good fencer when he learns.”

Liam didn’t bother to accuse Wilson. He wouldn’t say anything. He didn’t particularly care if the patrol returned to the Sky. It would make his life easier to have more soldiers, and if they didn’t want to go home, what did it matter to Wilson?

“I want to go home,” Liam said. “Alex, you wanted to go home.”

Alex sighed. “Yeah, but after everything we’ve seen, I want to do more than scav. Noah just...the Sky clan just stays in its own territory and tries to stay safe. It’s like...that story Wilson told, about that guy your dad killed to take over. Now your dad doesn’t want us to go out and risk anything, either. The Library clan is trying to make their territory livable. We’re not doing anything like that.”

“He’s keeping us SAFE!” Liam said, jumping to his feet.

George came down the stairs at the yell. “What’s going on?”

“You’re leaving,” Liam said.

George looked at the ground.

“What do you have to leave for? You don’t want to fight,” Liam snapped at George.

George folded his hands behind his back. “Well I wanted to learn about farming. Lane is going to teach the Rams to use plants.”

Liam whirled on Lane. “You’re not coming home, either?! But dad is at the Sky. We are. Your family.”

She shook her head. She and Wilson had their blankets side by side and they were sitting side by side against the wall. She poked at the mushroom tea steeping in the pie pan on the firebowl. “Dad never expected to see me again. He sent me to the Library for the dugder, and it was my home. I didn’t leave to go back to the Sky. I left to be with Wilson, and he’s the Ram clan’s leader. I’m going with him. To be a Ram.”

Liam’s mouth felt dry and the air felt cold drawing over the skin.

His hands fell to his side.

“Well, what am I going to do?”

Wilson turned towards Liam’s voice. “You’re invited,” Was all he said.

Then after a hostile pause from Liam, Wilson added. “But you want to go home. You’ll have an escort to the wall of metal.”

“And then I’m just supposed to go home alone? Without any of you? It will look like I lost you.”

Wilson didn’t turn away from him, but the rest did, and gradually, Lane set her hand on Wilson's wrist and he turned away from Liam towards her.

Liam sat down slowly on his blanket.

The tea finished steeping and he drank some, and he didn’t notice until after that none of them had said the words of the tea ritual. They all contributed food from their bags, and Lane contributed a big package of fresh plant leaves, and George cooked the canned foods while Lane showed him how to cook the plant leaves until they were soft and flavorful.

Some conversation started after the cooking lesson, but Liam stayed on his blanket in the corner, silent and watching.

“Lane?” Alex asked. “Can I ask you a question, about women?”

“Of course,” She answered, stirring the leaves with a spoon.

“Some women have the round chests,” Alex started. Tonio made a noise and elbowed him. “What? She said I could ask. Why don’t you?”

Lane glanced down at her chest. She was wearing pants, but the vest she’d been wearing under her wraps hadn’t been replaced. She didn’t have any roundness, nor any brown spots like Liam and the other boys had. She had smooth pale skin with scars on either side of her ribs.

“When I was twelve I got a lucky mark,” She said. “It’s gone, now, but it was right here,” She pointed to a place just below where her right pectoral muscle was, where the big stripe of scar was, now. “My father was frantic. He’d heard the Library clan had dugders, and he started making plans to take me there. He was going to take me himself, but his officers. Casey and Sydney, told him the clan couldn’t give him up. Casey swore to take me safely, and my father sent a message to the Rams, and all the other clans on the way, and they agreed to escort us through their territories.”

Wilson put his chin on his chest and clutched his hand around Lane’s.

“He agreed to make a trade, and he sent a delegation of fencers to live with the Rams. He sent another delegation to the Clan to their north. For making sure I got to the Library safely. To trade for the Library clan’s help, he told them Casey, Marc, and I would stay.”

Liam pulled his knees up to his chest and pressed his eyes to his knees. He remembered how scary those weeks had been. Thinking Lane might die of ash sickness, though their father had never until the day Lane left, allowed them outside.

Then saying goodbye and missing Lane after she was gone.

And the delegation, Wilson and his brother going to the Rams, and Lewis, one of the fencer captains, to the clan to the north.

“But why don’t you have round pectorals?” Tonio asked.

“These scars are where the dugders cut them out. To get rid of the ash sickness.”

“The lucky mark saved your life, then?” George asked.

Wilson made a noise. It wasn’t a word, and it wasn’t quite like any noise Liam had ever head. Sort of a gurgle.

“It did,” Lane answered.

Liam put his eyes back on his knees, liking the way the pressure eased the pain. He and his father had said goodbye to Lane, his father had given her up to know she would live. He’d thought he was bringing Lane home.

He wasn’t. They’d still lost her, she’d just gone in the end to another clan.

[lieutenant]

Chapter Six- The Left Behind


Liam trudged, head down, along the intimately familiar path towards the front door of the Sky building.

He was alone. Wilson and the others had come with him to the wall of metal, and seen him off.

He didn’t notice the lights on the outer points of the factory had been changed from white to green. He walked into the lobby and went to the solution basin. The few wrappings took no time at all to remove. He dipped his wrappings, remembering halfway through to recite the unwrapping mantra. The suit couldn’t be dipped, so he treated it as he did his helmet, wiping the outside surface down.

Then he went to his nails and found them full.

His wrappings were still hanging where they had been drying the day he left. They were dry now, and looking to his right, he saw George’s, and Alex’s, and he didn’t know which set of nails was Tonio’s, but those would be waiting for owners that would never come back.

In looking around he noticed that all the nails were full. Except the few that weren’t assigned.

That was strange. It meant all the patrols were in at once.

Why shouldn’t the clan need someone out scavving for today and tomorrow’s food?

He removed the old dry wrappings from his nail and hung them on one of the unassigned nails, then hung his wet wrappings and his helmet on his usual nail. He kept the jumpsuit on and went through the sealed inner doors.

The shelters were remarkably quiet.

Something was different.

The livers were there, crafters at their crafts, and some of them raised hands to greet him as he walked down the Avenue. They seem puzzled by his return.

Alone.

When he’d left under bad luck.

He hung his head.

He walked to the end of the Avenue and into the door of the Leader’s palace. The room was crowded, maybe two dozen people on the cushions and sitting around the firebowl. There was a crowd seated to the lefthand side and someone speaking to them. He slipped in and stood to the side of the door, head down, waiting for a lull.

It came the moment after the man standing against the wall beside Liam glanced over and yelled.

“What are you doing in here, scav??”

Liam stepped back, startled and looked at the man. He was dressed in shabby pants and he had his head covered in long matted hair that dangled around his shoulders. Liam had never seen him before in his life.

“Who...who are you?” He started.

Then he looked around at the crowd of unfamiliar faces filling his father’s home.

And the baubles and decorations that were usually hung along the Avenue, spheres of colored glass, intricately punched leather cuffs, the banner of beautifully multicolored cloth the weaver used to display which materials he could make. Paintings and drawings and laceworks of rope, they were all hanging from the walls and the rafters in the small space, creating a garish display of wealth that was the complete antithesis of what a leader’s space should be.

He stared at the group sitting to the left side of the room, being lectured he realized, now. Or they had been being lectured. Now the speaker, and all the livers in the group were staring at him.

The livers in the group were the only ones he recognized in the room. His experiences in the Library had enlightened him. He could see the connection in the group immediately, and he could have predicted, and certainly recognized their inclusion, now.

All the women in the clan.

Except one.

He looked up to the cushion in the middle of the floor on the other side of the firebowl.

Only one cushion.

Occupied by a man as strange as all these other men. Thin with matted hair. This one beared with beads and strings wrapped in his hair. He sat forward, wrists rested on his crossed knees. His eyes were blue and bright and focused like the point of a spear.

He stared into Liam’s eyes.

And spoke in a yowl.

--

“Don’t fight them, Liam,” Susie called to him. “They’re howlers.”

Liam’s eyes were rolling in fear and his heart was beating fast and he felt faint. The man beside the door, who’d demanded to know what he was doing, who at least spoke British, grabbed his arm and dragged him forward. Liam planted his feet, but another man stood from one of the cushions and grabbed his left arm, and they yanked Liam forward with his feet skidding.

He was aware that he was screaming, but with the same sort of awareness as waking up in the middle of the night hearing someone else screaming in their sleep. The sound shocked him and then he realized what it was, and though it continued, it was distant and he didn’t let it occupy his mind.

The two men dragged him around the firebowl and pushed him onto his knees in front of the bearded howler on the cushion.

Behind him, the curtained space, where Noah’s household had decreased over the years, to a double pad for himself and Sydney, and a small pad in the corner for Liam to visit, but now the curtain was open and the space was visible. Though most livers didn’t have doors, and any liver would have been welcome, for curiosity’s sake, to see their leader’s space, the fact that it had been exposed by these strangers who had no right to expose it, was unbearably offensive.

“You’re on my father’s cushion!” Liam screamed at the leading howler.

The howler said something and to Liam’s horror, it was in British. “All the patrols are in. Where did you come from?”

Liam thought of Wilson and the patrol, making their way back across the unpatrolled Rams’ land between the wall of metal and the river. “I answer to Noah. Not to you.”

The howler huffed in annoyance. “Why did your patrols cross the highway?”

“I...what?”

“How did you survive outside for all this time? Where have you been sheltering? Our patrols have scoured your territory and we didn’t find you.”

“How...how long have you been here?” Liam asked.

The howler growled. “Your refusal to answer won’t save you from answering my questions.”

The howler holding Liam’s right arm shook him and yelled in his face.

Liam cringed away. “Why are you screaming at me? What kind of way is that for civilized people to behave? Why do you people always howl?”

“You people?!” Snarled the howler holding his arm. “Did you hear what he called us, Felix?”

The lead howler held up a hand. “Calm down Kevin.”

“Your name is FN?” Liam looked up at the howler gripping his arm. “Like FN Swans?”

The man looked confused and shook his arm again. “Magnussen. Not Swans.”

The lead howler, Felix, shook his heavy bearded head. “He’s too well trained for this sort of interrogation. Put him aside. We’ll deal with him later.”

FN and the other howler dragged him up to his feet and dragged him forward, into the violated curtained space. Liam cast a frantic glance at the pads, half expecting to see someone he knew in the meager concealment left. There was no one, and the blankets on both pads were rumpled. On the other side, where neat stacks of paper and drywall were kept, there were more of the small single sleeper pads stacked along the records.

Liam saw the howlers were dragging him to a metal door in the back center wall. He jumped in their hands. He shrieked and went wild. He threw himself back towards the crowd in the main palace.

They outmuscled him and opened the door.

It was pitch black inside.

They dragged him through and the door swung shut and clicked behind them. Liam snapped his mouth shut, pinching his lips and squeezing his eyes closed and screaming screaming screaming through his teeth.

--

Liam had been 8 years old.

He had found a space among the stack of records where if the curtain before them were just so, he could crowd between the records and the curtain and no one would be able to see he was there.

He was hiding where he had often hidden, listening to the officers give his father their reports. If he peeked along the stack of records he could see the rest of the curtained off private room, and if he peeked out the curtain he could watch the helpers and the officers in the main palace room. Today, despite it being the middle of the day, Sydney dismissed the officers and helpers. From where Liam was hidden, he saw Sydney wrap her hand around his father’s face, and heard the sound of a kiss.

Dani and Casey had been in the room, and all the adults stood up. Casey closed the curtain between the private space and the main palace. The motion moved the curtain away from where it covered Liam, but since he would have only been visible to the main room, they didn’t see him. Liam stayed where he was until he heard the adults walking into the curtained area and through, into the door that led down the stairs. Liam had been down there a lot of times. There was storage there. It was dark, and cold, and sometimes the fencers practiced with their weapons in the big open space.

All the people who’d gone down were fencers, they must be practicing.

It would be fun to watch them, so he crept to the door, waiting for awhile until he was sure they would all be down the stairs, and then he opened the door just a little way, slipping inside.

The door clicked closed behind him.

There was usually only a little light, patches of green strip light on the walls, unless someone brought a lantern, like they did when they needed to put something into storage or get something out.

The fencers who came down here to practice did so in the dim.

With blindfolds on.

Liam went down the metal grate steps, making no noise. The stairs switchbacked and he ducked under them.

The four adults were in the center of the open space. The light glinted off crates and the old metal horse toy, with its four fat wheels and its ears for steering. Liam and Lane had played on it many times, pretending they were mowtojeepie riders.

There was a firebowl, a big one, in the space. It was lit and it smelled of hot iron.

There was a single pad, with blankets piled nearby, and a little stock of food and water. Sydney guided Noah to the edge of the pad and he felt for it, sitting down and scooting back. Sydney knelt at the head of the pad.

This wasn’t fighting practice.

The door above banged open. It bounced and shut and someone thumped down the stairs.

“Wilson,” Sydney murmured into Noah’s ear.

Noah sighed. “Wilson, you can’t be here.”

Wilson was the best of the fencers in the dark.

“You’re my team leader,” Wilson's teenage voice cracked. “And you expect me to do this, you can at least let me see it.”

Noah turned forward. “I hope you never have to go through this.”

Wilson was standing between Liam’s hiding place under the stairs and halfway across the space where the firebowl and the pad were. He was outlined in the light of the fire, legs planted and hands on hips.

“Alright, come on,” Noah held a hand out. “Don’t cry.”

Wilson ran over and knelt on the edge of the pad beside Noah, giving him a hug. Casey knelt down on the opposite side. Noah laid back so he was laying with Casey kneeling by his left side, teenage Wilson by his right, and Sydney kneeling by his head. Dani was standing by the firebowl, staring into the flames.

“Ready,” Dani said.

“Kiss for luck,” Noah said. Sydney bent down and pecked her lips to his.

Casey and Wilson pressed their knees onto Noah’s arms and folded their hands onto the fronts of his shoulders, pressing down with their full weight. Sydney held his head down.

Dani pulled a yellow glowing metal rod out of the firebowl.

“This better fucking work,” Casey growled.

Liam had just long enough for a moment of disbelief.

Noah’s shriek made the whole room ring like a bell.

It went on after the resounding clang and sizzle when Dani threw the first rod down and it rolled away, the end cooled to red, and the second shriek started even before the second rod did its work. When the second plunge started, a new shriek was wrung from Noah’s body.

The second branding iron hit the floor.

The shrieking started again as soon as Noah’s air ran down.

Then it gurgled away.

In the light around the firebowl, the adults wrapped Noah’s body with the layers of blankets before the shock set in. They padded the burned sockets with medicated pads. Their leader had lost consciousness. They wrapped his face and Casey dissolved three white aspiWilson in a bottle of water, to feed to him when he woke up.

There was light in the center of the room, and behind the rapidly working team, the branding irons smouldered with the stink of flesh. The rest of the room was in darkness.

--

There was no firebowl anymore.

Liam had never again set foot in the place until the day the howlers dragged him down the stairs. The room had been rearranged, and there was more light today. A lantern on a crate, and two men, sitting on the ground with their hands chained to a metal loop that had been hammered into the wall at waist height. They had to hold their hands at head height where they sat.

“They’re bringing someone in,” One of the men said. “It’s Casey.”

Noah raised his head. “Liam!”

The howlers dragged Liam to the wall a few steps away and locked a chain ring around his wrists, to another loop hammered into the wall. Liam threw himself against it. It didn’t budge. He kicked at the howlers, but they ignored him and walked back up the steps.

“Where is Sydney?” Liam wailed. Noah’s reader had been the one person he was sure was a woman who hadn’t been with the other women being lectured in the palace.

“I don’t know,” Noah answered, voice sounding choked. “They pulled him off my side. I heard him scream, but they were dragging me down here. You didn’t see him?”

“Him,” The other man muttered.

“The other women are all up there, the howlers are yelling at them. Telling them they need to do what they are told. Susie tried to help me.” Liam tried to catch the break in his voice.

“They won’t have hurt her. They don’t hurt you if you’re not scavving or trying to fight them when they find you. If they find you sheltering, you’re safe until you try to hurt them,” The other man said.

“Where is your patrol?” Noah asked. He was dirty, smudged with dirt, and Liam was appalled. His father had always admonished them the importance of staying clean.

“This is your boy?” The other man asked.

Liam looked at him. Before two weeks ago the only time he had ever seen unfamiliar faces was when travelling traders came from the Rams, or another nearby clan. A total of maybe five people. Since he’d left, not counting the huge patrol of Rams, and the livers seen in glances from the dirtbikes, he had seen hundreds of new faces, and seen more ways faces could be than he’d ever imagined.

He knew immediately this man he’d never seen before.

His head was sheered short and he wore his medium brown, slightly greyed beard in an around the mouth style. He was bare chested and covered with scars of the irregular sort that fighters collected.

“His name is Liam,” Noah told Colin.

“He’s beautiful, son.” The old soldier said, looking Liam up and down.

Liam wished Colin would shut up. This wasn’t his conversation. “They went with Wilson,” Liam told Noah. “They’re safe with the Rams.”

Noah exhaled in relief.

“Lane is safe with the Rams, too,” Liam said.

“What? WHAT?!” Noah exploded. “That ungrateful little bastard TOOK her?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Liam yelled back. “About her ash sickness? About her being a shee? Why did you hide everything from me?”

“I…”

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME I’M A HOWLER?”

Noah sagged against the wall, “Damn you Wilson,” He whispered at the absent man.

Liam fell back against his own wall.

“He’s not Sydney’s,” Colin said, kicking a foot at Noah’s foot.

“She can’t have children,” Noah grumbled, not lifting his head.

“They’re looking for him. And another, a girl, who would be about sixteen. Is that this Lane?”

“I just won’t tell them who I am,” Liam said.

Noah turned his head to the wall. “I love you so much, Liam.”

Colin looked along his arm at the Sky leader.

“Lane is safe. The Rams are all fencers. There aren’t enough howlers anywhere to breach their territory,” Noah said, like he was reciting a list.

“Dad?” Liam asked.

“The howlers won’t hurt you, Liam. They want you to be safe. They’re hurting the Sky to get you.” Noah said the words to the wall. “They’ll leave if they…”

With a sinking heart, Liam realized what his father was saying. For a moment he felt rage like the patrol must have felt.

He was being sent away to protect the clan.

But had he ever doubted the clan was his father’s priority?

Liam stood up. “I left thinking I might never come back. You pay for trades with people.”

Noah cringed.

“Casey leads the Library. Wilson leads the Rams,” Liam said. “Well I guess I’m going to do something even greater, aren’t I? Well? Colin?”

The older man looked at him. He had bright blue eyes.

“Go tell them I’ll go with them,” Liam told him.

Colin stood up, he twisted his arms and the ring on his chain slid open without even a clicking noise.

Noah’s blind face turned towards the movement and the sound, mouth dropping open in surprise.

Colin smirked and called up the stairs.

The two howlers opened the door and came back down.

“I’m the child you were looking for,” Liam told them. “My sister is dead. Let my father and my clan go.” He refused to lower his eyes. “I’ll come home.”

FN and the other howler unlocked his chain and gestured towards the stairs. Liam walked with them, passing close to Colin and staring the older man in the eye as he passed. “I hope you have friends,” Liam told the man. Then he turned his back on him and followed his fellow howlers up the stairs.

--

“Why do you want me?” Liam asked, walking around in front of the bearded howler when the two howlers escorted him up the stairs back into the palace where the howlers were holding court. “I don’t know your ways. I’m not anything like you.”

The howler’s eyes went wide. He stared Liam up and down, mouth twisted in disgust. “You are one of us, and you will learn you don’t stand over me.”

FN pushed at Liam and pointed to the other side of the firebowl. “You only come close to the leader when he invites you.”

Liam looked down at where he stood, where the howler leader sat, separated from even his own people. Unapproachable.

“Why?” Liam asked. “What are you afraid of?”

He only saw the beginning of the leader’s eyes widening, he was turning his back on the leader, and striding around the firebowl.

He scanned the howlers sitting on the other side. Some of them were sitting on the cushions Noah’s helpers kept for sitting on while they worked. Other howlers, in plainer pants, without or with few ornaments in their matted hair and on their thin shirts. Some of them wore sashes around their bellies. Some of the howlers were clearly women, and all of them were wearing wraps around their chests, under their shirts or without shirts. The howlers on the leader’s right were more highly decorated. Some of those standing around the walls were decorated as well, and FN and the other howler who’d taken Liam down into the basement went to stand against the wall. FN stood close to the crowd of Sky clan women, catching the eye of a particularly tall one with her golden brown curly hair in a fluffy sphere around her head, and kohl lined eyes. He smiled at her, tilting his head like he was having an entire conversation with her.

Liam walked to the most decorated howler, sitting the farthest to the leader’s right. The man was wearing a weight of ornaments that must have been the reason for his thick neck. His hair was long and matted, but pale, nearly white.

“You’re on my cushion,” Liam said.

The howler looked up at him, mouth pressing tightly. He raised one eyebrow. He looked beyond Liam at the leader.

Liam didn’t take his eyes off the howler.

He heard Colin, standing behind and to the leader’s right, guffaw.

“You heard him, Kimi,” Colin said.

“Shut up, Colin,” The leader said. He didn’t interfere, though.

The pale haired howler looked back up at Liam. “Children sit outside. Maybe when you are a man, you can sit there,” He pointed without looking, to the far corner, where the least decorated howler was sitting on the floor.

“I didn’t get asked if I wanted to join you, but it seems like I have to,” Liam said, “I’m the son of the most influential leader in the region, and I’m not joining any clan behind anyone.”

He pulled his handcrow off his hip and held the hooked metal bar loosely.

The howler was unarmed, his eyes went to the bar with the sharp pry hook. Liam could knock a steel padlock off a door and pry it off its hinges with the handcrow in less than sixty seconds.

A man would present no resistance.

The howler rolled to his feet. He gestured to the cushion, and Liam stood unmoving until Kimi had walked over to the wall to stand beside FN. Liam sat on the cushion and arranged himself. He glanced towards Kimi. The older howler was standing with arms crossed, watching him.

FN was standing with his arms crossed, too, and saying something to the woman with the kohled eyes. She had her head cocked in FN’s direction like she was listening to him, but her eyes were on Liam.

She wasn’t smiling, but he smiled, felt a warm glow. Felt pride.

Look at me, mother, he thought. Grown and strong like you taught me.

--

The howlers didn’t leave immediately. They were spread out among the Sky, making sure none of the livers tried to harm them or deny them. Liam figured, from the way Felix, the leader had collected the best things the Sky livers owned, to himself, that the howlers would want to scavenge the Sky clan’s goods, and leave the clan with nothing when the howlers left.

It infuriated him. Noah had made such effort to provide for the Sky clan. Now all their surplus was going to be taken away.

If they were even left with anything.

Maybe Noah was being unduly hopeful. The howlers had proven deceptive.

The howlers had moved the Sky livers out of the best shelters, and now the smaller shelters on the top levels were crowded with Sky families and the howlers were spreading out in the roomy second shelf shelters. Except the officers and the ones Felix evidently trusted or wanted close, who were sleeping in the main room of the palace.

Liam lay in a corner. He hadn’t been able to sleep. He knew his father was still chained in the basement, and he’d learned the patrollers who were considered dangerous, meaning they had fought when the howlers came, were either dead or had been chained in other parts of the storage basement.

As the evening had worn on, and it came time for the black panels on the ceiling to lose power in the darkness, and to stop charging the lights that weren’t the emergency glow strips, FN held his hand out to Sydney and suggested she join him in the shelter above the forge where he was staying.

The fear in her face when she stood up made Liam’s stomach clench.

Liam told himself to stand and charge the howler, to make him sorry, to do to FN what Liam and Tonio had down to the dark cloth monster in the farmland.

In a room full of howler patrollers, his legs didn’t move.

They didn’t need to.

It wasn’t Liam that Sydney’s appeal went out to.

It was to the man who’d guided her through her childhood.

Colin stepped between Sydney and FN and shoved the howler back. “You don’t touch a one of them who doesn’t invite you,” He snarled. “And you touch this one and I open you and pull your heart out.”

FN looked at Felix, and unlike Kimi when confronted with Liam’s challenge, there was fear on FN’s face.

“Well challenge him if you want to die,” Felix said, flicking a hand carelessly.

“You let him threaten us?” FN asked incredulously.

“He raised her, what do you expect?” Felix said, hoisting himself off the cushion and turning for the curtain. “If you’re alive in the morning, I expect you to patrol all the lines of sight on the building. If there are more of this one’s patrol out there,” He indicated Liam with his off hand, “I don’t want them watching us.” He pulled the curtain closed to give himself privacy. From behind the cloth he said, “And Kevin, I don’t know why you would want her anyway. She’s got a knife in her belt and she’s clearly eager to be the one doing the piercing.”

FN...no, Kevin, backed up a few steps, and stalked away, out of the palace room.

“Are you alright, Marcella?” Susie asked Sydney.

Sydney turned to the crowd of Sky clan women. She herded them back to where they had each been sitting on a folded blanket. “We’re going to sleep. No one is going to hurt any of you on my watch.” A dozen of the other women, other fencers and scavs, arrayed themselves on blankets with the younger and older women close to the wall.

When they were settled and two left awake to sit up and watch, Sydney turned to Colin. She took his arm and led him over to where Liam was pretending to sleep. She tapped Liam with her foot.

“No one believes your just-sleeping routine, Liam,” She said. She sat down as he sat up and gave him a hug.

Liam glared at Colin, then decided to ignore the traitor. “What happened?” He asked Sydney.

“They ambushed Guillermo ’s team and came in wearing their wrappings. It was the middle of the night. We didn’t expect Guillermo ’s team back in until morning. They were supposed to be sheltering at the warehouse.” Sydney looked at Colin and he shifted uncomfortably. “The three of them, that Felix and his two officers, Kimi and that Kevin, came straight into the palace. We’d heard the door, so we were getting up. We assumed Guillermo had a problem that brought them back in early.”

“Of course,” Liam said. That was the only thing that would have made sense, under normal circumstances.

“It took three of them but they took Noah down. Monro was here, he’s been training Iker, because we didn’t know how long it would take you to bring Tonio back. I never even had a chance to fight, that big one dived through the curtain and tackled me. The curtain came down and I couldn’t move. They dragged Noah downstairs and I kept screaming for him,” She shook her head. “They went to the lobby and let their fellows in. They overran us. They separated some of us out,” She waved her hand towards the women on the far side of the room.

“What happened to Noah?” Colin asked softly. “For fucks sakes, he looked like he fell into the forge face first.”

Sydney stared at him, baffled.

Liam tilted his head. “He’s been a scav his whole life.”

Then Liam realized Colin had been a scav for as long as Noah. Colin’s face had a rough, patchy circle of scar tissue, instead of the red and black ring of raw flesh, or the bumpy, mole pocked skin of scavs with ash sickness.

“He got cancer,” Sydney said. “They all get cancer. There is no way to wrap around the goggles well enough to keep the ash from filtering in.”

Colin covered his mouth. “But why…”

“We burn it out. They can’t see by then, anyway, and if we catch it early, taking the eyes keeps it from spreading.”

Liam rubbed at the mole on his cheek. The two weeks in the fog had made his eyes hurt more. Made the growths throb more every time, and the one obscuring his left eye was all but keeping the lid from closing properly.

“How long have you been scavving?” Colin demanded of Liam. “You can’t have been doing it more than a year.”

“Three years,” Liam grated, “Dad wouldn’t let me go until I was ten.”

In the dark, Colin made a noise.

It sounded like the gurgle Wilson had made.

“You scaved for more than three years,” Colin said to Sydney.

Sydney shrugged. “I’ve had different problems, and I cut back before Noah did.” She looked down at her hands. “When I think of all those times I pulled my bandana off my face out there, and Vale was the one who went blind.” She shook her head.

Liam and Colin both reached for her hand at the same time. Liam pulled his hand back.

“What are we going to do?” Liam asked. Then he tried out a new word. “Mother?”

Sydney bit her lip and put an arm around him. “I don’t know.”

“They’ll leave,” Colin said. “They’ve got him, now. They’ll go home.”

“And you?” Sydney asked.

“I’m theirs, they’re not going to let me go.”

“I don’t understand,” Liam said. “Wilson said father killed you.”

Both the others’ heads came up and they looked puzzled.

“Wilson is a romantic,” Sydney said. “Noah killing Colin implies he could beat him.”

--

“This is MY clan, boy.” Colin took a step forward. Noah was reaching for the spike at his side. In preparation, Colin unsheathed his bayonet.

Don’t try it, son, Colin thought. Noah had that desperate teenager expression on his face. He hunched his shoulders, bracing himself, and then swayed forward, uncertain, and at the last moment slashing out with the spike in an overhead strike like he was imitating a move he’d seen in a movie.

With a step forward, he blocked the slash, catching Noah’s wrists.

The seventeen year old screamed at him.

Colin pushed Noah’s hands up and moved forward, throwing the boy completely off balance, and brought his shoulder into his chest, knocking him onto his butt.

Noah yelled and Colin twisted Noah’s wrists, locking his elbows and forcing his shoulders down. He stepped over the boy’s chest, crouching and pinning Noah’s biceps under his knees, not minding that the pressure was hurting the boy a little. Colin had both knives in his hands, now, and he threw the spike off to the side where it skittered between the feet of the watching livers.

The boy screamed something about how Colin could kill him now, but everyone would see what a coward he was, while Colin resheathed his knife at his side.

He looked down at the boy he’d found huddled, starving, under an overturned truck, relying on a fire to keep him safe from a dozen domesticated dogs and sighed. Before, his life had been the Air Force. He’d always expected he’d start a family some day, but it had always been sometime in the future.

Then the bombs hadfallen, and the starving boy had become his son, and the gawky big eared Casey, and Sydney’s parents had lived for a few years, until the fog had fallen, and Lewis, and all the others had looked to Colin for protection.

He had never been the gentlest father. Their world wasn’t a place that allowed time for tenderness, and it wasn’t a place that rewarded tenderness. He had taught them to survive. To watch and learn and fight. He’d taught them that they didn’t turn away anyone, no matter how useless they seemed, because being strong meant being responsible to protect people who couldn’t protect themselves.

He reached down with a trembling hand and stroked the scared boy’s cheek with fingers callused by work, hard work. “If I was a man who could look at you and not see the boy I carried miles to shelter when you were sick, with you puking down my back the whole time. I didn’t save you just to hurt you. If I could hurt you, I would be everything you are saying I am.”

That made him angrier of course. Made him cry harder and shriek in rage.

Every boy has to get out of his father’s shadow to become a man.

Colin stood up.

Noah rolled to his feet, crouched, like he was going to attack again.

“Go if you have to,” Colin said. “Take anyone who wants to go. I won’t stop you.”

He was surprised how many of them followed him. He should have been worried by how many of them followed him.

There were two Sky clans for awhile, sharing territory side by side. Never interfering with each other, but leaving caches and supplies for each other. Patrols teaming up to scav or fence with problems too big for one group to face alone.

Until one day the howlers came, and the shelter in the school was emptied out.

Colin didn’t have it in him anymore to deny any people the means to survive, and he helped his new tribe. As a price, he refused them the border with the remaining half of the Sky clan.

And that had worked, until a howler patrol and a Sky fencer patrol had come to grief. And the two children the howler patrol had been obliged to bring along were lost.

The Sky was too strong to take on directly, and there was still food to be gathered, and the Howlers’ own defense to be made. But watch had been kept.

When Felix’s patrollers noticed a weakness, a plan had been laid.

And the entire force of howlers had mobilized.

Colin couldn’t blame them.

He would move hell and earth to get his kids back.

Maybe he should have felt guilty about pushing the howlers to do the same. Now he was here in the Sky.

--

“What is wrong with all your books?” Felix was standing by the pile of records. He had Noah’s copy of “Morning Glory,” the very book Sydney had been reading aloud to Noah the day Alex had torn his wrapping and the bad luck had started. He tossed the book on the floor. Liam cringed as the favorite book skidded, open, pages crumpling, to bump the cushion where he sat.

He picked up the book, smoothing the pages.

The room of the palace was quieter. Now that Liam attended Felix every day, the women had been allowed to return to their work. The howlers were still in the process of inventorying and choosing the best of the Sky’s surplus and necessities, and packing them for removal.

They hadn’t gone scaving, nor had they allowed the Sky patrols to scav, or patrol the border.

They were feeding the Sky livers, but out of the reserve foods.

The reserves were draining quickly, and it wouldn’t be long before there wouldn’t be enough to see the Sky through the dark days.

Liam stood. “There is nothing wrong with our books,” He said.

Now Felix was leafing through the papers and the strips of drywall of the records stack.

“None of these have any WORDS on them!” He yelled. “Your books are all white pages. Where did you even get these?” He grabbed another off the little shelf of books besides the records and threw it at Liam.

It hit one of the howler attendants when Liam ducked.

“Look,” Liam said, approaching Felix’s side and opening the book. “The words are here.” He ran his fingers along the line of text. “Touch me, he thought,” Liam read, “My arm, my hand, a finger. Let me know it's all right for me to have these feelings for you.”

He set the book down, the white page open, and picked up one of the sheets of drywall, looking into Felix’s eyes as he read. Each tiny divot in the surface of the paper made a gritty little place he could detect as easily as he could see the surprise in the howler’s face. “Patrol encountered three veruls on the cross street at the magic roundabout.” His eyes lifted as he realized this was one of his own reports. “Patrol captain was bitten, but all three veruls were harvested. A total of 29kg of meat and body material.”

“Writing is colored marks on a page,” Felix said. There was confusion in his eyes. Fear.

Then the lights went out.

This happened every night, but not for a few more hours.

The emergency glow strips didn’t come on.

Someone had disconnected the black roof panels. Liam giggled. The howlers were yelling.

They had no idea how to deal with the dark.

Liam thrust the heel of his hand out where Felix was making a target of himself by yowling at his tribe. The blow connected with the man’s jaw. There was give and a “Hurk!” sound. He heard Felix fall onto the stack of records.

There was light in the room.

The firebowl was flickering in a low evening light after dinner. Liam put it out with a hiss of liquid that left a sharp sour odor in the air. The palace dropped into utter blackness.

He ran for the door, clicking as he went, and listening for the reflected sound off the walls and dodging easily around the startled howlers. He burst out into the Avenue. There were yells and sounds of fighting, the Sky livers, trained to live without sight, fighting back. As he sought out the next howler, the lights around him were going out.

Soon the building was pitch black.

“Liam!” He heard a welcome voice call.

“George!” He yelled back.

“It’s dark!” George yelled.

“Yeah it is!” Liam laughed.

“We came to help,” Tonio called, then grunted and from near him, Liam heard someone else cry out.

“The Rams said no one had been patrolling, and the lights were white. We knew you would need help,” Alex said.

A series of screams sounded to Liam’s left, one voice after another crying out in surprise and pain. “What are you chatting for?” Wilson's voice demanded from the point of the line of devastated enemies.

When everyone standing upright could identify themself as Sky clan, or Wilson, who no one got close enough to touch, George and Alex returned through the hatch in the roof of their shelter, to the ladder that led to the power panels on the roof and the lights came back up.

When Liam returned to the palace, he found his father sitting on his cushion. He was pale and shaking, Sydney and Colin were with him. He was wrapped in a blanket.

He hadn’t been fed during his ordeal. Neither had any of the other fencers who’d been locked in various dark corners of the storage basement. They were being helped up the stairs by scavs and craftsmen.

When the dark had struck, Colin had run straight for the basement to let Noah and the others out. He had been horrified to find Noah too weak to walk.

“We should kill them,” One of the fencers, from Guillermo ’s patrol kicked the unconscious Felix as he was helped past. “Rid ourselves of the howlers once and for all.”

“No,” Liam said.

“They’re just trying to survive,” Colin told the room. “And they’re not as well equipped for it as the Sky is.” He looked down at Noah with a hard expression, though the younger man couldn’t see it. Colin’s hand squeezed on his cheek.


“Being strong means it’s our responsibility to take care of the people who can’t take care of themselves,” Noah announced. “They came for our resources because they didn’t have enough of their own.”

“The Rams have a farmer, now,” Liam said. “She is going to teach them to grow food, and plants that will clean the land. We are going to send a delegation to them, and I suggest the Sky clan does the same.”

“We?” Alex asked. “We are Sky clan.”

“I am a Howler,” Liam said. “Born a howler, and joined them by choice. They need help, and I’m going to teach them to take care of themselves.”

“Do you need a team?” George asked.

The patrol all hugged Liam.

“I am going to go with them. We’ll reopen the school as a clan base. If you think your father would want that, Javier?” Liam asked.

“My father would be honored that the Thames School for the Blind could save a clan’s worth of lives again,” Javier said.

Liam rested his hand on Noah’s shoulder. “But there’s something I have to do before I go. I can’t go on like this. The pain gets worse, every day.”

--

The room stank of yellow hot iron.

He lay back on the pad and it was his team that braced themselves against his shoulders. He smiled up at them, happy to have finally made his stand.

His ash sickness would kill him if he didn’t make this trade.

He understood what had driven his father to make this decision, and he knew, now, it was the bravest decision he could have imagined. A world had died the day the Before had become the After, and most of the survivors had died in the time that followed, until only a small handful of livers were left.

It had been easy for the dead.

If Liam was going to give his life to the clans, then living had to come first.