“Yeah, about fifteen years,” Elijah said, softer. “The kid’s almost thirty?” For a moment he sounded wistful.
“Time’s a bitch,” Darla mumbled. “The kid grew up and he’s got amazing aim. Now get out of my land with your bullshit.”
She paused, something ticked—a nervous tapping of someone’s foot. Someone else let out a small whimper. Lark wished she could see where her parents stood—whose gun was trained on whom? Her parents said she had no reason to learn to shoot a gun but she was accumulating the arguments against them as she lay on the ground praying no one started firing.
“Look at this. Here you are,” Elijah said with a droll laugh, “packing your arsenal to this charming luncheon. You greet an old friend, escorted by your son, with a gun. You’ve got no girl here, of course.”
“We’re skeptical of intrusions without communication,” Grant offered. “Seems like you would know that after all these years.” He sounded brave, assured, and Lark was emotional for the first time since she’d started listening—she often under-estimated how strong her father truly was and how she wished she could be more like him: restrained, funny, guarded.
“Believe it or not, I am here to help you,” Elijah said.
“The Children of the Lake are here to help us,” Grant replied. “You’re here to finish some argument you started when we were too stupid to be making arguments. Put down your gun, friend. We grieve with you for the losses and will do anything to help—”
“Grant’s always been our soft-spot. I’m going to stop him right there because I’m not feeling charitable today…we don’t help people who call us liars while risking leading the enemy to our door. Get out now,” Darla rumbled through clenched teeth and, no doubt, clenched hands. Someone, her mother maybe, attempted to calm the fifty-year-old woman, whose aim was also merciless when it was required. Darla responded to the attempt with a guffaw, and a loud crash of glass shattering. Someone mourned an unopened Malbec.
“Stop—” Theo said and only then did the room settle and breathe easier, calmed for the moment. Lark hadn’t needed to watch the scene unfold to know exactly how it played out. She’d seen the calming of Darla time and time again and knew the fragments of it by heart.
“I’m fine,” Darla replied.
“Is this what you’ve become?” Elijah’s voice carried, although he sounded more resigned than angry. “Our allegiances never wavered despite the high costs these years. You needed my help and you took and took. I know all of it…the whole story. So, when they come for the girl…which they will…our objective remains the same.”
“You’ve gone too far—” Theo tried, but his mother quickly cut him off.
“Someday you’ll realize you’re spewing nonsense. I don’t know what you’re talking about but if you want a tour of every inch of our land?” Darla hissed. “Done.”
“I want the girl,” Elijah demanded again. “I’ll find her.”
Lark, tired of the argument, hoped someone would end it a draw and retire to the lobby.
“Lower the weapons,” Darla commanded. Guns clicked off. Lark breathed out slowly. “Go home, Elijah. You can’t find something that isn’t here. Take your men from the mountain, too. Don’t waste your defense at the Jackson Colony because we are not your enemy…yet. If you’re so sure the Islands are coming, go home to your own colony and start moving. We’re staying here.”
“A threat?” the man challenged with a laugh on his voice. “I don’t think you see how this works.”
“No. Threatening isn’t my style. It’s an observation,” Darla replied. “Our allegiances are secure—we’re not fighting you, Elijah. Go home.”
“You’re not fighting me,” the visitor said, but his voice had changed slightly. Lark detected a sense of warning, sadness and loss. He’d softened though she didn’t know why. “But you are fighting something, Darla. And I’m here to tell you the murder of my people is not a price I’m willing to pay for your machinations.” Elijah gargled up a lob of snot and spit and hawked it to the ground in an act of snappish triumph. “My men in the mountain stay where they are. And I’ll be close for a bit. Both for your protection and for mine.”
And with that, the party moved from the dining hall and into the lobby.
Lark waited until all the voices died down, determined to wait until every last person dispersed the Lodge, and after a glacial five-minute wait, she stood and dusted off her bottom and her pants.
“So, she emerges,” a voice called to her.
When she looked up, she screamed and held her hand over her mouth.
After a few seconds of terror, she collected herself.
“You scared me,” she said and blew out a breath. “Have you been waiting this whole time to catch me?”
“Yes,” Theo said. “I thought I could smell you.” He crossed his arms over his body, his long legs sticking out from a chair—where he sat, amused, and patient.
Lark hissed and rolled her eyes. “What do you mean smell me?” Lark lifted an eyebrow ready to be offended.
“A whiff of that lotion I picked up on the sweep down to Vegas. I gave it to you, and several of the other young kids, as a gift. Don’t you remember? It’s a distinct smell. Too distinct for a place at smells of real flowers but mostly sweat…”
“Do my parents know I was here?” Lark looked down at the floor, her anticipation growing. She’d suffer some bought of her mother’s rage, pent-up worry that manifested itself in fits of control and anxiety. They really thought she’d abandoned the eavesdropping game, and they’d be sore in ways Lark couldn’t expect.
“Not yet, no,” Theo said, not easing any worries.
“I have a lot of questions,” Lark said and crossed her arms. She took a deep breath and tried to gain a whiff of her own scent. She couldn’t. “You can smell that?” she asked with incredulity and moved her hands to her hips. Earlier that morning, she took the cracked pink bottle full of Cherry Blossom Dewdrop from the shelf in her cottage bathroom and put a small dollop behind her ears and on her wrists, like her grandma taught her before she passed.
She couldn’t smell the lotion anymore.
Just like it was hard to remember her Grandma Maxine—the women who helped build the backbone of the Jackson Colony, imbuing it with a system that worked, a schedule that ran, and a constitution that spoke to the world they inhabited. Their little tribe covered the entire hill outside her old house in flowers that bloomed near her birthday, Maxine Day—a holiday to remember maternal figures in all their complexities. That was what Grandma Maxine had wanted; she picked the day for herself because she was entitled to, after all.
Lark missed her grandmother daily and felt the woman would understand her complaints greater than her own parents who’d struggled the past few years to run the colonies and their own household smoothly.
It was her heart. Grandma Maxine’s heart. She’d been young when she passed.
“How long did you listen?” Theo asked Lark, uncrossing his own arms and pointing to the seat next to him. Lark slid past a table and climbed down over the wall. She plopped down in the chair and shook her head, shamed by getting caught by such a rookie mistake. No more lotion, she admonished herself.
“Not long,” Lark said but he knew it was a lie immediately.
He tilted his head with reproach. “Come on. How much did you hear?” His question was stoic, concerned; she knew that he could see the tightness of her mouth, the redness of her eyes, the flash of anger that she reserved just for him when she thought he was overstepping.
“I heard it all?” she admitted, shoulders slumped. “Unless there was threatening talk about us having to leave the Colony in the lobby or whatever.”
Theo winced. He bit his lip and waited to see if Lark would elaborate. She wouldn’t. He knew what she’d heard and he was going through it all, line by line, to understand how bad the damage was.
Lark sniffed and didn’t dare look at him, but she could imagine his parental glare, trying to ma
ke her feel guilty.
When she didn’t continue with a confession, Theo didn’t move or react—Lark searched every twitch and movement, waiting for a tell and a hint about how bad this was for her, getting caught. She’d grown up with the boy, an additional parent-figure, and apparently, he’d helped birth her which was too much to understand for the moment, so she pushed it aside. Theo despite his raw energy and Roosevelt-esque masculinity was a pure diplomat. He wouldn’t break trust or protocol for her and it maddened Lark to know that he was one of the adults she couldn’t work over with some charm.
He was impervious to charm.
“You have questions then,” Theo said.
Lark couldn’t help but smile. “And you’re not going to answer them for me. Right?”
“If you did hear it all,” Theo shrugged, “then you heard it all,” he said with a distinctive punch after each word. “Elijah Acorn can accuse us of knowing about something we didn’t know about…but you’re safe…it’s just some lies and when they get sorted out, everything will be fine…”
“Where are the Islands? Who lives there?” she asked and watched Theo for any flinch or tightening around his mouth.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said easy and simple, believable. He was good.
“Sure. You do, but I get it. While we’re at it…where’s the Bayou? Was I born there? And let’s not even…”
Theo clamped his mouth shut.
“Okay,” Lark said, feeling vindicated by his silence. “Elijah Acorn, right? He thinks you’re hiding a girl which is in violation of what agreement?” she asked and put her hands on the table, stretched in subtle supplication of information.
“There’s nothing here. I think he’s mistaken and angry,” Theo replied with a nod. “It’s just a safety agreement. Between the known survivors, the nomadic tribes and us…to collectively fight a single enemy. But there’s no enemy. They’re delusional. It’s like he’s telling us we have to go fight dragons…”
“The Islands,” Lark repeated, piecing it together. “The Islands are your enemy…”
“Shit, little girl,” Theo replied and he couldn’t help hide his supreme worry. He brought a hand up to his brow and worked out a headache against his temple. “I gotta go let your parents know…”
“I only said what the man thought…” Lark said, throwing herself into an immediate panic. She shouldn’t have let him know she’d understood. She should’ve played dumb. Lark didn’t want to cry, and she wasn’t about to because she’d been caught, but because she’d made so many missteps. “I don’t know anything, Theo,” she said and moved her chair back, eager to stand. “I was just asking…”
“Sure. But,” Theo said, downplaying the entire interaction. He could spin the narrative, but they both knew she’d heard the guns drawn and the Malbec shatter—he forgot how it would’ve really sounded to someone soaking it in for the first time, there was only so much he could explain away and Lark was always, would always be, curious. They both knew she was in trouble.
“We know we’re being lied to,” Lark said then, not sure why the worrying statement slipped. When she saw Theo register her statement, she saw his strong façade falter and flicker. She lifted her voice and doubled down, as the accusation echoed through the empty dining room. “The Colony knows my parents lie, you lie…
Theo laughed, but it was dismissive, unkind, and condescending. He stood and glared down at her.
“No more spying, kid.”
“No promises,” Lark whispered, feeling only a bit brave, but Theo’s eyes went stormy and he turned on her lifting a reproachful finger.
“I’m serious, Larkspur. This is not some game. Do you need me to spell it out for you? This whole following everyone around thing was cute when you were a child but you’re too old for the shtick. Got it?” Theo didn’t wait for a response. He turned and stormed off through the dining room, crunching over the leftover broken glass underneath his feet for emphasis.
Lark drew herself back and lifted a defiant chin and she kept her composure. Theo never spoke to her like that before—never. And he had no right to use intimidation to keep her quiet; he had no right.
As he reached the door, she felt a burst of snide rage and she called out after him, unwilling to let him have the last word. “Tell my parents I heard everything! Go ahead. If you think you can bully me into not asking questions then you’re wrong about me. This is my grandmother’s—”
Theo spun, her words reaching him just in time, and even though he was far away, she could sense the flash of anger that rocked through his whole body. His posture exuded ego and Lark resisted the urge to march right up and slap his disgusted face with a tiny plop—not enough to hurt him, of course, just enough to get him to understand: she was scared, but she wouldn’t back down.
“Whenever the King or Trotter families want to tout some kind of moral superiority over the rest of humanity, I know it’s my time to stop listening,” Theo called to her, his voice high with self-righteousness. “Go play in the woods, Little Larkspur. You’re a child and you don’t know what goes on here. Which also makes you a fool.”
He didn’t wait for her reply.
Theo stormed out of the dining hall after the others in a flurry of anger. Lark took a breath, steadied her hands, and then walked forward, following in his footsteps over the aftermath of the meeting. Half-full wine glasses, dirty plates, abandoned napkins. Someone left a knife exposed on the table, its blade sharpened to excess. She leaned over inspected the weapon, running her hand over the inlaid metal of the handle. Swiftly, Lark swooped up the knife and a wine glass in one pass. She swirled the contents of the glass, inhaled and sipped.
The sweetness filled her belly with warmth and she put the glass down before temptation forced her to finish it. No, things were happening and she needed to be alert and tuned-into the environment. Theo hadn’t understood her, so his admonishment could not act as a rebuke. She wouldn’t cower and tremble at his command. But still, he’d never spoken to her like that in her entire life; sixteen years of brotherly attention and smiles and jokes. People will eventually reveal who they are on the inside, her mother used to tell her with a soft sigh. But that was not Theo—no one could hide for that long.
Lark tucked the knife into the back of her pants and hitched the hilt above the waistband, the metal resting against her hip.
She grabbed a chunk of bread and cheese and shoved them into her mouth, relishing the anger of the moment combined with the beauty of their community cooking. It was amazing cheese. How had that alone not won Elijah over? Mouth full, Lark stomped back out into the Lodge lobby and turned to the commanding windows facing North.
A beam of sunshine lit the room with an amber warmness that belied the revenge brewing inside her heart.
“What?” she asked with a curtsy and a sneer toward the Grant Tetons—the only thing that had been constant in her short but event-filled life. No, Theo was right, she wasn’t a child anymore. “He knows exactly who I am and the damage I can cause,” she said to no one. She imagined the mountain understanding exactly what she meant. If they were trying to keep something a secret, Lark was the last person they’d want knowing.
Chapter Two
The Atlantic Ocean
Somewhere between the former
United States and the former Europe,
Aboard the Queen
KOZO
Kozo stayed on deck as the captain of his domain. Six weeks ago they lost contact with the two other boats—and lost four days of their journey when he tried to double-back for them. But without the other captains, he’d become the temporary de facto leader of the Queen of the Atlantic.
She was one of three vessels on the Search for Life mission.
They heard the SOS only once—in a burst—but a small group from the Trash Islands made a choice to seek out the location and find the people who needed their help. They sent three cruisers west to answer the call and it wasn’t a small sacrifice. T
wo other cruise ships never made it back from the last mission west, and dangers in the ocean and rumors of monsters on the shore kept everyone mapping their current and staying as far away from the Atlantic coasts as possible.
Kozo knew they wouldn’t be able to stay isolated forever.
He’d volunteered on the mission aboard the Queen because he needed to get off the Trash Islands.
His hunger to escape his scavenging childhood and his bitter parents led him to the cruise ship and her promises of adventure. She often advertised for capable sailors—Kozo didn’t hesitate.
The Queen had sailed around the seas in her golden years and docked in New York and Miami, cities that existed before the release of a deadly virus. A long time ago, those places teemed with life and sound and vibrancy, but they were nothing now. When Kozo’s people found the abandoned ghost ship in the waters, they scrubbed it clean of its former occupants and sailed upon a transatlantic journey west from Europe with a live crew at the helm.
Their job? To map the sea and answer radio calls.
And now, after a docking gone wrong, the men and women in command of the Queen were on a different ship, and Kozo found himself one of the few who could drive the ocean liner, avoiding the squalls that threatened to tip them into feisty waters.
Kozo inherited a large captain’s suite with French doors leading to a den and his own security to oversee visitors, per the rules of the ocean.
He loved the privacy.
Growing up, he’d had little time alone, without walls, always watched. But now the suite had books and lamplight and pictures of old captains from all the different eras since the ship set sail in the mid-twentieth century. That era, ninety-odd years in the past, held some fascination for the remaining representation of the human race, and they were drawn to it with rich intoxication and nostalgia. Kozo, for his part, never understood why they celebrated any part of the Old World, but he was intentional about preserving its history nonetheless. That was per the rules of the ocean.
The Bedrock Page 4