Bannerless

by Carrie Vaughn

  Vega told them she suspected there were still people farther on, scattered places where they hunted, scavenged, and maybe survived. Maybe. No one felt inclined to travel on to see. You couldn’t carry enough water to keep going that far.

  After spending a couple of days at Desolata, sharing their stories in exchange for the roof, Enid and Dak turned around and started back north. Neither one said a word about continuing on into the desert or heading east to try to find Kansas.

  Northward, the desert gave way to scrubby plains, then the rocky grasslands near the coast. They came back to the turnoff to Fintown. Enid considered: they could just pop in. Say hello to everyone. Find out what happened with the investigation. Dak didn’t want to. It’d be a couple more days before they reached the next town, and they were low on foodstuffs. But still he didn’t want to go.

  “Not even to see Xander?” she said, her tone biting, but she didn’t really care.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He stopped, turning on her.

  Any other time, he would have laughed her off. Told her she was being silly, toss off some flippant excuse. Nerves were fraying, and wasn’t that an interesting sensation? She could march away from him right now in anger. She’d regret it by nightfall, but even knowing that, she’d still do it.

  She took a deep breath and explained herself. “I’m frustrated. Rain’s coming, and we have friends not two hours’ walk away.” She pointed to gray-green clouds on the horizon. Not close enough to thunder at them yet, but the storm was no doubt causing havoc at sea. It might move to shore; it might blow out. But sometime in the next week, there would be rain.

  “We’ll be fine,” he said. “I don’t want to impose on Xander and Fisher.”

  “You don’t want to be around investigators,” she stated. “Are you hiding something?”

  He was the one who marched off then. Astonished, she watched for a whole round of breaths, giving him a head start. He never looked back. Too stubborn to care if he left her behind.

  “You are!” She ran after him. “What was it? What happened?”

  His steps fell hard, pounding the earth. She matched his stride and studied him, waiting. Imagining the worst. Had investigators broken up his household? Had he been accused of something and kicked out? Was that why he wandered? Was he bannerless?

  He was biting his lip, as if trying to hold back words, but she just kept watching, wouldn’t look away and wouldn’t leave. She wanted to beg him to say something, but suspected that would only drive him further into uncharacteristic silence. Here was a story the bard didn’t want to tell, which made her want to hear it more. So she was patient.

  Finally he said, “I was nine. Investigators came to the household. Two of them, like usual. Talked to everyone separately. Came to me last, and asked if Cole—he was the head of the house and my father—had ever hit me. Just like that.”

  More walking, the only sound their boots scratching on dirt, until Enid asked, “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything. They must have asked for an hour and I froze. What was I supposed to say? Mom had broken her arm a couple of weeks before and apparently Cole did it to her, but I didn’t see it happen so I didn’t really know. And he never hit me. Got close a couple of times, but never did. I didn’t want to believe he’d done it to my mother. But they kept asking and asking, and I sat there with my mouth all stitched up.

  “They broke up the household. Decided we couldn’t be fixed, or they couldn’t just send him away, so they broke us up and scattered us. Odd thing—I didn’t want him to be sent away. I think . . . I think he wasn’t a good guy, you know? But I didn’t want him to go. Haven’t seen the man in a dozen years, and I still don’t know what happened to him.”

  “But you’ve been looking,” she said.

  “They put Mom and me in a new household fifty miles away. The folk there played a lot of music, and I picked it up. The guitar was just a distraction at first. Guess I needed a lot of distracting.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” Enid said, which felt inadequate but she couldn’t think of anything better.

  “Didn’t have to happen at all, the way I see it. The investigators interfered. They go where they’re not wanted and break things, Enid. That’s what they do.”

  Yeah, things that were already broken, she wanted to say. Someone must have called investigators to his house—his mother, she wondered. And maybe she hadn’t told Dak that she was the one who’d summoned them, to protect him. To keep a child out of such serious business. Enid almost suggested this to him, but for once, she stopped prodding.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “I told you, you don’t understand. You don’t understand any of it.” He glared ahead and kept marching harder than he ought, if they were going to keep walking all day.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe she didn’t understand.

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  Auntie Kath had kept journals. Four hardcover notebooks, each eight inches or so long with old, cracking paper and writing in faded black ink and smeared pencil. They were carefully wrapped and stored in oilcloth to protect them, in a waterproof, lined, and sealed box in Haven’s clinic archives, along with a dozen other handwritten diaries and journals and even loose sheets of paper that had been deemed important enough to save. Worth spending resources on, because yes, this was something they should remember. The diaries had all been copied out a number of times and taken to the couple of other formal archives that had been established on the Coast Road, but Haven had the originals, and Enid had spent the previous year begging and pleading and training to handle archive materials, proving herself worthy of the privilege. Mostly, she’d wanted to see what Auntie Kath was leaving out of the stories she told, what might fill in those blanks when she’d paused . . . since she wasn’t around to ask anymore.

  Kath had written most of it before and during the Fall, when she’d been a teenager. She’d said that back then lots of people kept journals and diaries of one kind or another, and that most of it was meaningless drivel. Rambling about life and love and how hard things were, even when they weren’t. What you did and what you ate. She said she’d started the thing because she didn’t have anyone to talk to—which wasn’t true, she had friends, had lots of people to talk to. Right up until she didn’t.

  Many of these journals were recorded electronically, which meant they were effectively gone now. Maybe someday the circuits and servers and things they’d been stored on could be recovered. But probably not. People had so many more important things to recover, like surgery and batteries. Still, the Haven library kept a few boxy computers and disks stored away, just in case. Mysterious plastic boxes with slots and wires and dead lights. Screens that stayed dark. Mysterious and a little bit sad.

  Fortunately, Auntie Kath’s journals were on paper, books with pictures of flowers, forest scenes, and fairies on the covers. “Fairies weren’t ever real,” Kath had felt the need to explain of the pretty, faded paintings of lithe girls with sparkling wings and blue and purple hair, when Enid had first seen the archives, years ago. Enid knew that but didn’t argue with Kath.

  When the first flu epidemic hit, seventeen-year-old Kath had fled. Her parents died, her older brother was away at college on the other side of the country and unreachable—she never did learn what happened to him. There’d been one last panicked phone call with him before networks went down and power went out, where they assured each other of their love, her brother telling her that she should try to stay put, that he would get to her somehow. But that had been a very long time ago. She didn’t stay put but went with her mother’s friend, a doctor who worked at the clinic that would eventually become the core of Haven. And she kept up the journal, though her handwriting became tiny, every line carefully pressed together to conserve space, because she could foresee a time when paper would become scarce.

  That first epidemic was bad enough that it affected every
thing from emergency services to travel to utilities. In just a few weeks, there simply weren’t enough people healthy and able to work to keep infrastructure moving. Schools shut down, stores emptied and didn’t have enough supplies or people to restock them, the economy stalled. And then storms hit. Floods, destructive winds, tornados. One that first year, another the next. Two the year after, and it hardly mattered when they went three years before the next. There was no one to respond to emergencies, to shore up sea walls, to rescue the injured. Buildings collapsed and no one was there to pick up the pieces. The coasts got the worst of it, but the interior of the continent wasn’t immune, when people who could flee packed up and went inland, burdening their resources. A ripple effect, where the ripples bounced back and forth, multiplying and interfering, amplifying outcomes that were already terrible. The still surface of the pond became wracked with turbulence. Any one of the disasters in isolation would not have broken the world. People could survive epidemics, rebuild after storms. But all of it together? Each disaster coming on the heels of the previous, on and on? It had been too much.

  Enid never quite figured out the scale of it all. Kath was a good journalist: she copied numbers and data from news reports, and Enid corroborated the information against newspapers and magazines also carefully stored in the archives. Death tolls in the thousands, just from the storms. Deaths from the epidemics were in the hundreds of thousands. Enid didn’t believe there’d ever been so many people in all the world. She couldn’t even imagine the world itself: hundreds of countries and billions of people. No one she heard of had ever traveled more than a thousand miles from Haven, and that was mostly story and rumor. There were maps; there were atlases. There were pictures showing fantastical shell-shaped buildings on the other side of the world, massive bridges, and skyscrapers—but they all fell, because they needed constant upkeep, and with no one to make those constant little repairs, that fragile world couldn’t stay standing.

  Studying what had happened, learning a history that didn’t much help grow food or build roads, Enid wasn’t really sure what she was looking for. It was another way of getting out, maybe. If she couldn’t travel from place to place, she would travel through time. If Auntie Kath wasn’t around to remember anymore, someone else would have to do it for her, at least a little. No matter how much she traveled, how much she read, or how many places she saw, it would never be enough to satisfy her, none of it.

  Two months after Enid got her implant, Auntie Kath died. She’d been sitting on the porch at the clinic all afternoon. People walked to and fro like they always did, raised their hands, and called hello like they always did, and if Auntie Kath didn’t wave back, well, she must have been napping.

  Only at twilight did Peri come out on the porch to check on her. She touched the old woman’s neck and cried. They all did.

  There at her pyre, when it was so clear that the body that had held Auntie Kath simply wasn’t her anymore, people spoke of a great woman earning her rest. As if death were a resource that had to be earned, that could ever be used up or wasted.

  CHAPTER NINE • PASADAN

  ///////////////////////////////////////

  Interrogations

  Enid’s first case as lead had been relatively simple. A household had been discovered hoarding wheat—two extra fields sown in secret, over their quota, when they should have lain fallow. The two heads of the house declared that they were right to work the land and risk leaching it of its future ability to grow food; they were right to keep it secret, to lie to their committee. Even as they listed off every exact infraction they had committed, they insisted that they were right. To Enid, that had seemed the worst violation of all. You had a problem with quotas, field rotation, any of it—you petitioned your committee. You worked with the committee; you didn’t go haring off on your own. Not when a whole community depended on you for food. Enid had seen what real hunger looked like.

  Everyone thinking they knew best and going off with their own plans with no mind to anyone else was what had gotten the world to the Fall. What had kept people from doing anything about it until it was too late.

  “Did you think of anyone else?” Enid had asked the folk of this household. “Did you think of the next generation that’ll have to work this land and wonder why they’re getting half the yield they should? Or the ones who’ll starve when the land gives up because you”—she had pointed at them, with two stiff fingers—“couldn’t be bothered to take care of it?”

  They hadn’t answered. She hadn’t expected them to. She’d just been angry. That had been her mentor Nan’s major criticism of her work. Not just her, but Tomas, too—in fact, everyone—said the same thing: You’re too angry, Enid. You take it personally, and you can’t do that. Be an arbiter. Be stone. Your anger won’t touch them, so be stone.

  When that case concluded, the investigators had the regional committee move new folk in to run the household, and the two culprits were banned from having a vote in local committee matters and from being eligible for a banner for a decade. This effectively meant they’d never earn a banner at all. If they thought the extra grain they harvested by breaking quota would get them a banner, they were wrong. Instead, they were shamed and shunned.

  Enid hadn’t gotten much better at reining in her anger in the few years since. She always seemed to approach her investigations with a sense of . . . disbelief.

  “It’s no good to ask what they thought they were doing,” Nan told her. “They still think they have the right. The consequences are too far ahead for them to think about. They’re sure the future will take care of itself.”

  “If it could, we wouldn’t need any of this,” she’d muttered, tugging at the hem of her brown tunic and scowling up the road as they walked away from the case.

  “Enid. You’re trying to save a world that went away a long time ago.”

  No, she wasn’t. That old world, everything from before the Fall, might as well be a made-up place in a story. Long ago and far away. She was trying to save this world. She was trying to save everything. “Enid. It’s not your job to save everything. Just do this one little thing, yes? Then do the next little thing. It’s all right.” Funny, how she could still hear Nan’s voice chiding her.

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  Needing to find Ariana, Enid tried to guess the committeewoman’s schedule, where she might likely be this time of day. Probably at her household, Newhome. Enid could go over there and maybe interrupt her and Dak gossiping about the investigation. Enid wasn’t above listening at doorways herself.

  Then she got lucky, and the woman herself brought a crock of stew and cornbread to the meeting room for lunch, while they were still going over Pasadan’s records.

  “Hello!” she announced after knocking, bustling with what seemed an excessive amount of energy. “I saw you were here and thought you might be hungry, and we had plenty to spare if you’d like some.”

  Tomas welcomed her in. “Thanks. I can smell it from here.” They set out bowls and spoons, and yes, the stew smelled wonderful. Full of herbs, onions, vegetables, it had probably been simmering all morning.

  “Would you like to join us?” Enid asked, casually enough. “I have a few more questions for you, if you don’t mind. It should only take a minute or so.” Her politeness felt downright aggressive—to match Ariana’s own. The woman didn’t even flinch; she smiled and settled into the chair like she’d been waiting for the invitation.

  “Of course, I’ll help however I can.”

  She’s the one who wants us here, Enid remembered. She poured them all cups of lemonade, smiling all the while.

  “What do you need to know?” she asked.

  “I’m just curious, mostly,” Enid said, pleasantly enough. This was just a conversation. “We come into a place like this as strangers—it’s hard sometimes to get the feel of a town right off. Every place has its own quirks. I suppose I’m just looking for a little insight.”

  “Pasadan’s
not really any different from any other place, I suppose.” Ariana shrugged. “We’re proud of our households; we take care of our families. There’s not much more to be said than that.”

  “How long have you been on the committee?”

  “Only a couple of years.”

  “You liking it?” Tomas asked. He’d been focused on eating. Easy to forget about him, and Ariana blinked as if surprised that he’d spoken.

  “I do. I like helping. I want to fix problems before they start, if I can.”

  “But some problems are a little harder than others,” Enid said.

  The woman lowered her gaze for just a moment. “I think we do well enough. Under usual circumstances.”

  “And the rest of the committee? What do they think?”

  “I’m sure they feel the same way,” she said.

  Enid still wasn’t even sure how Ariana felt. Not really. “So you and Philos aren’t usually so at odds with each other?”

  Ariana paused to pour herself a cup of water from a nearby pitcher. Enid let her have the moment to think, but was considering how she might press. Get the woman to make an accusation.

  “We do all right,” she said. “Pasadan is stable, isn’t it? We get along well enough to keep everything running.”

  “Except that you called us here to investigate a murder.”

  “I didn’t think it was a murder,” she said softly.

  Enid leaned in, and Tomas rested a hand on her arm. Just a brief touch, then he pulled back. Reminding her to be patient.

  “Then why did you send for us?”

  “I . . . I disagreed with Philos.” She looked ceiling-ward and sighed. “Philos does not see the town’s committee as a collaboration between equals. He expects Lee and me to . . . defer. I was tired of it.”