Laura turned back to the room. She picked up her bread-and-dust man and put him on the windowsill between the bars. “I want you to jump down, run around the hut, and figure out how to climb up and unbolt the door.”
The tiny Nown didn’t hesitate. He jumped out the window. Laura heard the pattering sound he made landing. She didn’t hear his footfalls.
She went to the door and waited. Eventually, she heard noises, as if someone with sticky fingers was touching the door. She put her ear to the wood and concentrated till she could hear that the noises were progressing up the outside surface. Then she was deafened by the rattle of the bolt. She pulled her ear back, and the door swung in, the little man riding it, his elbows locked around the loop of the bolt and his legs braced against its sleeve.
Laura poked her head around the door. A few of the yellow-clad people looked at her, some smiling but none with any real interest. She put out her hand, and the bread-and-dust man stepped onto her palm. She slipped him inside her shirt, where he clung like a lizard.
Laura stepped out of the hut and bolted the door behind her. Then she put her head down and ambled away, smiling to herself and swinging her arms as though she was filled with some private, sunny monologue. She imitated the other people. As she went past one of the tent dormitories, she petted its canvas wall. She walked in a weaving, indirect way, in the opposite direction from the isolated rangers’ barracks. She didn’t attempt to keep the rail line in sight—she would have to find it later.
She sat down for a time where the bare, beaten earth of the compound began to sprout grass again. She kept her back to the buildings and tried to look relaxed, drizzling dust through her fingers and talking to herself. Now and then she glanced back till—at one glance—she saw the buildings, the yellow-clad bodies, but no rangers nearby or facing her.
Laura immediately ducked down and stripped off the yellow pajama top and pants. She was still wearing her own clothes underneath. She pushed the pajamas down the front of her pants, then rolled and wriggled away into the thin grass, headed for the scrub. As she went, she rubbed herself in the dust—her face and hair, her dark pants and pale shirt—till she was as dun-colored as the ground she crawled along.
For a long time she slid from bush to bush. Her bread-and-dust man now nestled in the small of her back, holding on to her belt. The heels of her hands, her fingertips, and the skin on her feet dragged on the ground till they were scraped and burning. Her palms filled with splinters of dead vegetation. She didn’t dare put her head up until she could no longer hear any noise from the Depot. Finally she got to her feet and, stooped over, hurried away.
It was hours before Laura let herself turn back toward the rail line. She took a course only tending in the direction where it lay. At every few steps she glanced around, looking for rangers on foot or riding on a handcar. When the handcar did appear, Laura was surprised how close it was. She threw herself down on the ground and lay completely still. Her bread-and-dust man tumbled off her back and lay still too, by her ear, with his cracked and drying hand against her cheek.
When Laura looked again, the handcar had traveled out of sight.
She went on, parallel to the railway. She just kept putting one foot in front of the other, hour after hour. She walked, straining her eyes, looking and looking for any sign, however far off, of The Pinnacles and the tower.
She slept for a time, but badly. She was thirsty and feverish.
A nosebleed woke her. The blood only oozed, sluggish and tacky. While she held her nostrils closed, trying to stanch it, her bread-and-dust man leaned against her knee and watched her.
“He knows where I am. Wherever I am,” Laura said to him, in a pinched, croaking voice she scarcely recognized as her own.
Eventually she got up and went on, not noticing that she’d left the small man behind till she felt him leap and cling to the leg of her trousers. She scooped him up and put him on her shoulder.
She walked. Nothing moved but her. Hours went by, transparent, emptied out, even of time.
Laura’s lips cracked. Her tongue gradually grew a coat of some thick, salty stuff. Then it began to swell.
Many hours later her bladder began to cramp. She fumbled at her trousers and squatted to urinate. It burned. There were only a few drops, and it went on burning deep inside her.
Laura sat down and cried—cried without producing tears.
The bread-and-dust man tugged on her hair.
She got up and went on.
Later—a long time later—Laura had a lucid moment. She thought: “I’ll die unless I let the rangers find me.” She lifted her head and took a good look around. She could see no sign of The Pinnacles, not even a smudge on the horizon. She turned and saw she had wandered close to the raised railbed. The steel lines were shining at her like water. She went toward them, clambered on all fours up the little slope and sat there, slumped.
Her bread-and-dust man scrambled off her and onto the railbed. He doubled up and pressed his whole little length against the steel.
Laura thought, “He’s listening for a handcar.” Then she lay down.
Someone touched her. It hurt. A hard something rasped across the stinging fissures on her mouth.
Wet parted her lips. At first she could taste only water on her tongue, then, as she took more, its true taste came—musty warm, stale water.
It was taken away from her before she was full. She croaked a complaint and drooped, her head lolling against the yielding, creaking arm that held her.
With a ghost of decision, she whispered, “I don’t want to be happy.”
She was lifted up. She was gathered in her loose skin, in her own weakness; she was gathered in his strength. She was lifted, cradled, carried in safety.
And they went so fast there was wind to cool her skin.
6
AURA AND NOWN EMERGED FROM THE PLACE JUST WEST OF THE RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE SVA. IT WAS dawn, but the air seemed to cool only Laura’s skin, not to reach the parched, burning core of her body. Her chilled skin had formed a shell around her. She’d lost touch with the world. She was being carried, but the movement seemed to pantomime walking. Perhaps Nown was only pretending to move. Yet, when Laura opened her eyes, she saw that they were farther out on the tide-bared sands of the Inlet.
Nown sat her down by a channel of the river and slid her forward so that her feet dangled in the stream. Its cold burned her blistered skin. She cried out and tried to flex her knees but was too weak to withdraw her legs from the water. Nown held her in place until her feet went numb. Then he picked her up again and carried her back to the train stop by the bridge. He put her down on the gravel of the raised railbed and lifted the metal flag that would signal the next train to stop. He came back, hunkered down, and drew Laura into his lap. “I have nothing with which to wrap your feet,” he said, then, “From now on I’m going to put things that might be necessary to you into my body.”
Laura puzzled over this remark but couldn’t make any sense of it. Minutes later he said, “I’ve filled the water skin.The tide is going out and the stream flowing seaward, but its water might be tainted by salt. I wouldn’t know. I can’t taste it.”
Laura tried to answer him but only croaked. It seemed to her in her fever that her sandman was brooding on his shortcomings. The water skin pushed against her. She fumbled for it with her hands and scabbed mouth, but it was too heavy for her to lift. Nown raised it and eased the nozzle into her mouth. The water was a little salty, but Laura liked its taste. Perhaps she needed salt.
“Not too much at once,” Nown said, and they had a little tussle, she clinging to the skin and he trying to take it away without upsetting her. The water gushed out onto her face and shirt. Laura felt the cascading coolness, then the panicked scuttling motion of the creature who—all this time—had ridden clinging to the inside of her shirt. Laura’s bread-and-dust man emerged, clambered up her, finding handholds on her collarbone, then the ends of her hair. For a moment he swung bumping agai
nst her jaw, then Nown closed a fist around him and plucked him from her.
The bread-and-dust man surveyed Laura, the rail line, and the Inlet from his perch in Nown’s fist. His mittlike, fingerless hands were folded across the top of Nown’s thumb. His flat and vestigial face looked mild and perhaps curious.
Nown stretched back the arm that held the little creature, then punched it into his own chest. Laura had one glimpse of a tiny, gaping mouth and kicking legs, then both Nown’s fist and the bread-and-dust man vanished, buried in the sandman’s chest.
“No!” Laura rasped. She was horrified.
“It is better if there are not too many of us around at one time,” Nown said. His buried wrist began to separate itself from the sand of his chest, and he withdrew his hand, whole and empty.
“Is two too many?” Laura’s eyes were stinging, but no tears would come.
Nown didn’t answer her.
“Why did you do that?” She knew he could hear her, however insubstantial her voice had become.
“There were too many of us.”
“Is two too many?” she asked again, and again Nown didn’t answer her.
“Can you do that?” she said. “Destroy him? Don’t I have to do that?”
“It isn’t destroyed; it is only swallowed.”
Nown put his hand on the rail line. He announced that there was a train on its way. He set Laura on her feet by the train stop signal, then lifted her arm and hooked it around the signal pole. “Stay there. Stay standing,” he said, then he left her. He picked his way down the embankment and strode along a reed-lined beach beside one channel of the river. Some distance from her he hunkered down and wrapped his arms around his legs, dropped his face onto his knees, and imitated a tide-worn stone.
The train was a local headed toward Sisters Beach.
On a clear day the red painted steel flag of the stop signal was visible to the engineer from the lowest turn of the Mount Kahaugh spiral. He had miles to slow and stop. The Secretary of the Interior had a house in the Awa Inlet—and it was Doran who most often used the train stop. There was never any question that the train would pause, though stopping always put at least ten minutes more on a journey.
It wasn’t until he was going very slowly, and approaching the bridge, that the engineer spotted the small, ragged figure by the signal. As he pulled to a halt, he saw that it was a girl, her clothes torn at the knees and elbows and white with dust.
A conductor got out to inspect the prospective passenger. He took in her bedraggled appearance and lack of luggage. He went up to her ready to ask whether she even had the fare, but, when he reached her, he saw how young she was, and how she trembled, and how she was holding herself up against the signal pole. Instead of demanding money, the conductor placed his strong hand under one of her elbows. “What happened?”
Passengers were pushing down their windows and poking their heads out to take a look.
“Are you a dreamhunter?” the conductor asked.
“Yes. I got lost,” the girl whispered.
“Can you walk?” the conductor said, then looked at her feet and gave a little yelp of sympathy. He put an arm around her and took some of her weight. They tottered together toward the nearest door. Another conductor leaned out and lifted her up. He said to the first, “The only house here is up beyond that border.”
“Yes,” the girl whispered. “I couldn’t look for help there.”
There was a clatter of stones behind them as someone came running along the track beside the train. It was a passenger, who had jumped from one of the second-class carriages. He was wearing a dreamhunter’s long duster coat. The young man said, “I’ll take her.” He sprang onto the steps behind the girl and scooped her up.
The second conductor retreated into the carriage ahead of him. The first followed, leaning out only to wave all clear to the engineer.
The train exhaled and began to move.
“We have an empty compartment in first-class,” the first conductor said to the young man. “She’ll be more comfortable there.”
The girl had her eyes closed and her head on the young man’s shoulder. Perhaps she had fainted.
“I can’t pay.” The dreamhunter looked stricken and stiffly angry at the same time.
“Was anyone asking you to pay?” The first conductor was irritated. “If you’ll please just carry your friend this way.” He set off up the carriage. The young man followed.
The other conductor went to find towels and soap, bandages and ointment, food and drink.
Laura woke up to see a man in a brass-buttoned uniform bandaging her blistered feet. Her head was in someone’s lap. She looked up, said, “Sandy.”
“Laura,” said Sandy. Then, “Love.” Then, “What have you been doing?”
“I got lost,” she said, and closed her eyes again.
7
AURA DIDN’T REALLY COME BACK TO HERSELF TILL SHE AND SANDY WERE IN A TAXI TAKING THEM FROM SISTERS Beach Station up to Summerfort. The driver was sitting out in the open air. They were in the back, and she was leaning heavily on Sandy. He thought she was still faint and feverish; then she started to speak.
As she talked, he realized that she’d postponed answering his question, “What have you been doing?” and that what he was now hearing was her answer.
“The Regulatory Body has built a rail line beyond The Pinnacles at Z minus 16.” The map reference made her sound lucid, despite her ravaged little voice. She said, “They run handcars on it. They move supplies. There’s a kind of camp far Inland along the line. A camp they call the Depot. It’s full of dreamhunters, missing dreamhunters, and, I guess, a few no one misses—like little Gavin Pinkney. Rose told me she saw Gavin on St. Lazarus’s Eve after the riot. And Aunt Grace saw him before she went into quarantine in the forest near Doorhandle. I bet if you asked Plasir where his apprentice was, he’d say Gavin had suffered a breakdown and was under treatment.”
Sandy saw Laura’s eyes glimmering at him in the gloom of the cab. He saw her tears spill and how her skin grew instantly red where the tears were running. She wasn’t sunburned—no one ever got sunburned in the Place—but the skin of her face was so parched and damaged that it flared wherever salt touched it. Sandy drew his cuff up over his hand and dabbed gently at her cheeks.
Laura went on. “The camp is on the site of a dream, a master dream called Contentment, which makes people perfectly happy. Perfectly, slavishly happy.” She shuddered.
Sandy put his arms around her.
“I didn’t sleep,” Laura said. “I got away.”
“Good girl.”
They had arrived at their destination. Sandy opened the door, dropped his pack onto the shell driveway. He pulled money out of his pocket and paid the driver. He said, “Keep the change,” which felt as strange as anything else that was happening since it was something he’d never said, or been moved to say, before. He eased out and lifted her up—she was so light, so small.
Sandy watched the taxi backing around the corner of the drive, its tires kicking up clanking scallop shells. He asked Laura, “Is anyone here?” Then he turned to the house in time to see someone appear—a small man with graying black hair and a badly scarred face.
The man looked alarmed and hurried down off the veranda.
Laura croaked, urgently, “It’s all right. I’m all right!” She sounded even more worried than the man looked.
The man reached Sandy and for a moment, despite his slightness and fragility, looked set to snatch Laura out of Sandy’s arms.
“I can walk,” Laura said. “Don’t try lifting me, Da. It’s only my feet that hurt.”
Sandy finally recognized the man. He was Laura’s father—Tziga Hame—reported missing a year ago, declared dead shortly after that.
“Take her inside,” said Tziga.
“I’m all right, Da,” said Laura.
“Shhhh,” said Sandy and Tziga together.
Sandy carried Laura indoors. Tziga went ahead. He led Sandy up
to Laura’s room and pulled back the covers on her bed. Sandy put her down, and Tziga shook out a down comforter and draped it over her, leaving her bandaged feet uncovered.
Laura lay looking at Sandy, then at her father. Her gaze went back and forth between their faces, and her eyes began to close. For a moment longer her eyes went on moving behind their shut, smooth lids. Then she was asleep.
Tziga said, “It’s probably best just to let her rest. I’ll sit with her. I have a nurse, who is out at the market. When she returns, could you please send her up to me? Laura’s aunt Grace went In yesterday to catch something for The Beholder. Laura’s cousin is in Founderston with her father for a dress fitting. I’ll cable them tomorrow. You can help yourself to something to eat. The kitchen is on the right at the foot of the stairs. And, Sandy, if you can be so good as to not go off anywhere before I’ve had a chance to talk to you.”
Sandy was puzzled that he was known to this man he’d never met, and by Tziga Hame’s tone, which wasn’t just gratitude but a kind of warm eagerness that Sandy knew he didn’t deserve. “Um” was all he managed to say.
“Good,” said Tziga, as though Sandy had said, “Yes, sir.”
Sandy retreated from Laura’s room, went downstairs, and wandered around examining everything. The house wasn’t at all what he had imagined—what he had been imagining since the day the previous summer that the two beautiful, forward, tangle-haired girls had edged up to him when he was lying on a lounge chair on Sisters Beach in order to read over his shoulder. They had talked about their libraries, two libraries in two houses. They had talked about their town house in Founderston and their beach house, Summerfort. Sandy had spent the following few days looking up at the big house on the headland. And—more recently—he’d looked at it from the sea when he sailed into Tarry Cove on a coal barge. Sandy had thought Summerfort would be full of brocaded chairs and tasseled lamps and furniture darkened and gnarled with carving, with gilded mirrors and brass fire screens and Turkish rugs and crystal lamps. He wandered around looking at the bare floorboards—oiled timber—the few rugs, the faded, comfortable sofas, everything showing the wear of sun and sand. Everything except the books in the library, whose windows were shaded by white Roman blinds. The chairs in the library were studded leather, but so aged and scuffed by use that in some places the leather was pink, not red.
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