The Order sends us food and water tanks and everything we can possibly need, so it's hard to hate them, especially without my father there to call them terrible names, words my mother would never allow me to say.
If the air raid continues, we're buried too deep to hear it. We have peace in the bunker. Real peace. Even my father would be hard pressed to dispute it.
And then, just as quickly as the mists came, just as quickly as that first big, poisonous bomb burst through the clouds and shattered the North, everything changes all over again.
Chapter One
The day that Nathan comes to visit me at the bunker is a weird day.
"Huh," he says when I sit down across from him. "I thought...well, I thought you'd look younger."
"I'm seventeen," I say.
"Yep," he says. "I know."
He's taken the chair I normally sit in, but I don't tell him that. The way he watches me, with a bent upper lip and a low brow, makes me wish I had a comb or at least a shirt without stains on it.
I’ve been up doing chores since 8 AM. Dark hair falls out of the lopsided bun at the base of my neck. Wispy strands of it stick to the sweat on my cheeks. There’s dirt on my clothes, there’s flour on my knuckles and knees. A perfume of bread and compost sits on my skin like a coat of paint.
To be fair, no one told me I’d have a visitor today. I've never had a visitor before, except for Dr. Brant, and he only comes in February. I don't fix myself up for him; nobody does. He's got gray hair around the ears and no hair up top. He's a lot older than we are. But this boy looks like he's about my age.
I think about my bunk mate, Adrienne, how she braids her hair every night, setting pretty waves for the following day, how she lays books on top of her clean clothes to keep them from wrinkling. I'm like a dish rag, always wrinkled from head to toe.
"Should I know who you are?" I say. "Because I don't." I wonder if he's a hybrid. Adrienne says there are ways of knowing when a boy is human, but I always blush and hold my hands over my ears when she starts to say what they are.
"Nope," he says. He holds out his hand. It's larger than mine and his skin is tough when I shake it. "Call me Nathan," he says. "Or Nate."
"Alright." He doesn't so much shake my hand as squeeze it, and I feel a little loop-to-loop at the pit of my stomach. He's handsome. I think Adrienne would keel over if she saw him. "I'm Cassidy," I say.
"Yep," he says. And then he sits back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest and just stares at me.
I've heard about relationships cropping up in the convent before. People on the outside who want pen pals. My bunk mate Adrienne has about a half-dozen of them. The nuns pass letters back and forth for her. Is that what this is?
I feel a little creeped out, watching Nathan watch me, so I inspect a loose thread on the cuff of my sleeve. I think I'll say something rude if I'm not careful. I'm not usually impetuous, but there's something so superior about the way Nathan's assessing at me. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a self-important snob.
"Cassidy," he says. "That's an American-sounding name."
"Nathan sounds English, too," I say, because it sure doesn't sound French.
"Do you speak English?"
Until now, he's spoken with a perfect French accent, so I'm surprised to hear him speaking English so well.
I nod. I'm beginning to feel strange about this stranger, and I think it’s best to leave him with some false assumptions, so I say, "A little bit," even though I speak English first and French second.
"Good," he says. "A little bit is good."
I want to ask him if he'd rather I spoke more or less, but I can't do it without giving myself away.
We're sitting in the cafeteria. The table between us is an irregular shape, made from planks of scrap wood. This is where we eat, where we have church on Sundays, where we used to do our schoolwork when we were small, where Dr. Brant sedates us and examines us once a year. I scrape my heels against the legs of the chair I'm sitting in. I've had the same chair since I was six, and this isn't it.
Nathan's got his eyes glued to me so I try not to squirm. The chair feels too big for me; the room feels bigger than it ever has before. I wonder how tall Nathan would be if we were standing hip to hip. I think I might be almost as tall as he is, but it's hard to tell when we’re both sitting down.
"I've brought you a ticket," Nathan says.
At first, I'm not sure what he means. I know what the tickets are, but he can't mean one of those. No one from our bunker's ever gotten a ticket to the Reservation before, and besides, I'm a teenager. Teenagers don't get tickets. At least that's what I've always heard.
But then he reaches into his coat and comes out with a small, yellow envelope. I've heard of those envelopes before. Everyone in the entire world has heard of them.
I take it from him, not because I want to, but because he's handing it to me. I'm not sure I want a ticket at all, which is absurd. Everyone wants one now that the continent is so bleak. I bet even my father wants one, wherever he is, if he's even still alive.
The Reservation is a paradise. That's what the Order says, anyway. It's where all the best humans go, whatever that means. The nuns used to make us pray for yellow envelopes. Some bunker kids still do, I guess, but I've never put much stock in prayer.
I stopped fantasizing about the Reservation when I stopped playing make-believe. It's never been a real place, but now it's real. Too real. This is the envelope that will get me there.
"I'll come back tomorrow," Nathan says, and then he leaves.
I'm alone in the cafeteria, but not quite alone enough to leave the envelope laying out in the open. I tuck it into my sock.
Chapter Two
The bunker is strategically positioned beneath a convent. There used to be nuns who lived in the bunker with us, but they mostly stay upstairs now, counseling people who live on the outside.
I lay in my bunk, one of six in the women's quarters, and examine the envelope. I fold its sun-washed edges between two fingers. I try to remember the last time I saw anything that was so vibrantly yellow. It’s the yellow of pollen, like bright granules of sulfur on the back of a bee.
I wonder where there's dye in the world anymore, but that's silly. The envelope was probably manufactured decades ago and squirreled away. People don't make pretty stationary anymore. They hardly make anything anymore. All of the things we really need get shipped in from the Reservation.
I know all about these yellow envelopes. Everyone knows about them. You submit a blood sample and a waiver with your census form when you're a little kid. Really, your guardians submit it; they can refuse to let you sign the waiver, but they can't sign it for you. You have to prick your own finger and sign your own name or it's considered void. And then you might receive a yellow envelope, maybe that day, maybe that year, maybe many years down the road, or maybe never.
For most people, it's never. I thought I was most people. I haven't kept a single doubt about it, or one hope otherwise. But it seems I'm not most people. I'm an eleven-years-later person.
I know what's inside the envelope. But I don't open it. Not yet. I just turn it over and over in my hands, getting more and more afraid with every rotation, with every second that creeps past and brings Nathan's next visit closer.
What will he say to me tomorrow? I don't want to think about it.
Adrienne comes through the door and I shove the envelope underneath my blankets, holding it between my hands, on top of my chest.
I pretend to be asleep.
Adrienne snuggles in next to me. She says my name, but I don't reply. I don't open my eyes until I hear her start to snore.
chapter Three
In the middle of the night, I'm scared. I feel like I've woken up from a bad dream, like I'm caught in those first few seconds of consciousness after a nightmare, when your body and mind haven't fully reconciled with reality.
I don't usually have nightmares. Adrienne has them all the time. She say
s her nightmares are so real, so ordinary, sometimes it's hard to tell them apart from memory.
I slip my arm underneath her neck and tug her close to me. She's mumbling in her sleep. She almost always does that. I shush her and she stops, but when I'm quiet, she starts it up again.
I hope I'm like Adrienne, having a nightmare. I hope she's shushing me right now, but I know she's not.
I know a bad dream when I'm having one.
Just this once, I wish I didn't know myself so well.
Chapter Four
I remember the way morning used to come, soft, like rabbit's fur, like a double coat, and cool. I remember how it broke through the fog, always a different shade but always distinguishingly day. I don't remember a lot about the outside, but I remember morning. It crept through the gaping slats of our house, making webs of gold on my skin, on my mother's skin, before Dr. Brant brought me to the convent.
Now morning is just the chime of a bell and the scrape of a match against a matchbox. We have intercoms in the bunker running up to the convent and the greenhouse, but we don't use them much. We don't want to wear down the batteries.
The nuns say we'll run out of batteries soon. Matches, too, so they've taught us how to make our flames with flint and steel. I always use the matches, though, when it’s my turn to light the room. Matches make fire so easily, and flint is stubborn, at least in my hands.
I can't strike flint as well as Adrienne can, but I don't want her to know it. I hate for anyone to think I'm incapable of anything; I've hated it since I was six years old. So I pretend to like the matches better and only practice striking flint when I'm alone.
Adrienne usually lights the room for me, anyway. It gives me a few extra minutes to sleep after I've been up half the night cooing and coaxing her nightmares away. I don't need the extra minutes this morning, though; I haven't slept a wink.
In the hall, Sister Nanette is making her rounds with a tarnished cow bell. She bangs a wooden mallet against its steel husk, rousing us for breakfast. Beside me, Adrienne starts to stir and I squeeze my eyes shut. I don't want to face the day. I want to go back to the day before yesterday, the day before Nathan came to visit me with his yellow envelope. I think I would be happy reliving that ordinary, uneventful day until the end of time.
It's a silly wish, but I wish it anyway. There's a sleepy optimism in my heavy bones, a delirium borne of unslept hours. It scurries off when Adrienne shifts away from me. I feel her absence like a harbinger of loneliness. I don't want to leave her behind. I like my life in the bunker; I don't want to leave any of it behind.
Adrienne and I have always been bunkmates. I know all of her little habits. I can recount them with my eyes closed. She sits up, stretches out her gangly arms, makes a sigh like the mew of a cat. Then she sidles off to find her flint stone in the dark.
The women's quarters are muggy. They're always muggy in summer. My hair separates into stringy pieces in the damp heat. My skin smells like sweat, and not just mine; Adrienne's, too. She takes the warmth of her body with her when she goes and in an instant, I'm cold.
I bury my chin into the fabric of our linen quilt. I make a cocoon for myself, but Adrienne is back already, undoing it. She makes room for herself next to me and combs the hair off of my face with her fingertips.
"Wake up, buttercup," she says. That's something her parents used to say. That's what Adrienne remembers, little phrases, sound bites. She has so few memories from her time before the bunker and they're all disjointed and handicapped.
She tucks the crown of her head beneath my chin. Her flyaways tickle my nose, but I stay put. I wouldn't shove her off now, not for anything in the world; not when our minutes left together are numbered.
All around us, girls about our age are waking up, girls we've known almost as long as we've known each other. They're stretching and rubbing their eyes and groaning at the earliness of the hour, but I'm certain none of them can hate this morning as much as I do.
Adrienne's lit candlesticks and candelabras cast an orange glow over the room. Soon, the light will shift. A half dozen flames will twitch with the breeze our bodies make as we pull on our day clothes and tug the wrinkles out of our bedsheets. For now, the light is steady and soft. It puts a bronze sheen on our hair and yellows our skin.
Adrienne inches away from me. I want to cling onto her, but then she'll know something's wrong, and I don't want her to know. Not yet. She hugs a pillow instead of me. She's always holding on to something or someone. I wonder if she'll pretend her pillow is me after I'm gone.
She was younger than I was when she first came to the convent, barely four. Dr. Brant brought her, too. We're the only Americans here, the only former citizens of the North. Not that it really matters anymore. There's just one government now, the Continental Order, and we don't have much cause to mind them. Living in a bunker, we can't break any of their rules. None of the important ones, anyway. I hardly know what constitutes a law on the outside anymore, except for one thing:
If you get a ticket, you go. That's why you sign your own name on the census form; why you prick your own finger for the blood sample. It's a contract. If they choose you, if you get a ticket, You. Go. There is no choice.
Maybe that's why I haven't opened the yellow envelope yet. Opening the envelope, or not opening it, might be the last choice I have. Who knows how they live in the Reservation. We don't know, the nuns don't know. I bet Nathan knows, though. I wonder if he lives there.
"Who was that yesterday?" Adrienne says. "I saw him leaving. Sister Nanette says he came to see you."
I shrug. It's a lie, I guess, because I know his name. But there's more to knowing someone than that, right? His name doesn't really tell me anything about him.
"Well, give him our bunk number," she says. She thinks he's a pen pal. She's got so many, and they visit her sometimes. Mostly, they just send letters. The nuns don't like us to have visitors very often.
"Okay," I say.
"And if you have any questions, you can ask me. He's beautiful, Cass." She clutches her chest. "You were smart, holding out," she says. "To think, my first time could've been with a boy like that!"
I don't think she really means it. Adrienne loves it when boys track her down. She begs for a visit in every single letter she sends out, even though the nuns scold her for it and make her spend an extra hour in church.
Adrienne's always been a little boy crazy. Me, I don't know the first thing about sex. Adrienne talks about tingles and butterflies like they're the end-all, be-all, but I'm not so sure. That measly flutter I felt when Nathan shook my hand is the closest I've ever come to having a winged insect flapping around inside of me, and I'm not sure I liked it. "He was alright, I guess," I say.
"Alright?" Adrienne fans her face. I tuck my hands under my pillow. I can feel the envelope there where I've hidden it, but I don't take it out. "If you don't want him, I'll take him," she says. I kick her under the covers and she grins. "You know who's going to have a fit?"
I roll my eyes. We both say Narcisse at the same time. He's my best friend aside from Adrienne. He's always liked me, and he's always told me so.
I think he will have a fit when he finds out I'm leaving. Adrienne will, too. I don't want to tell them yet. I don't know how much time I have left with them, and I don't want to spoil it. I want everything to stay the same for just a little while longer. But I know the sameness of my life, of all of our lives, will expire very soon. Already, I'm keeping a secret from my best friends. That's something I've never done before.
Chapter Five
The green house is above ground, on top of the convent. We access it by a tube and ladder. It's a hub, an umbrella made of yellow glass. Sunlight bakes the space inside. Slabs of transient gold are broken up by the shadow of the church's steeple, a black cross that animates as the day becomes brighter, reaching out to dull the vibrancy of plants in the farthest corners of the glass paneled room.
It's a hot, living postcard of what life was like befor
e the bombs came down. Every inch is accounted for by green, flowering things. Vines slither upwards like kudzu over flat, wooden pallets. Above our heads, waterlines make an iron grid. Pots are hung to the bars by hooks. Herbs and grasses sprout out of them, leafy splinters of violet and white that reach for the sun.
Long, narrow tables segment the green house like pleats in a freshly pressed skirt. They're made of great blocks of wood, hollowed out like canoes and packed with black compost, as wet and as cool as silt.
At the end of each table is a flat, square panel fitted with a vacuum sealer. It’s a rust-stained, solar-powered contraption the size of an old world microwave, used to preserve a portion of our harvest for the off-season.
Only the oldest of us are allowed to operate the vacuum sealers. That chore belongs to Adrienne, Nars, and me. It's what we're doing now, picking and sealing the vegetables and herbs that have ripened in the night.
I love working in the green house. I know every plant by its head. I've fawned over saplings, I've nourished the soil with our table scraps and trimmed off dead limbs. I’ve felt a skip of satisfaction in my chest, recalling how great, green bushels were once just seeds, hard and dry when they first came to my hand.
I wonder if I'll plant things when I get to the Reservation, if I'll dive wrist-deep into dirt, if I'll know the names of seeds when I see them, or if I'll know less than everyone else there.
I turn a grape tomato over in my hand, searching for green speckles and stripes, the markers of immaturity. From end to end, it's the red of new bricks, so I pinch it's stem and pluck it from the vine.
I should add it to the small heap of tomatoes in the wooden crate at my feet, but I roll it between two fingers instead, impressed by how red and bulbous it's become while all of us slept.
Cargo (The Reservation Trilogy Book 1) Page 2