After the End

by Plum, Amy

  As we approach the city center, more and more shops appear until we are walking along a broad road lined with businesses on either side. I hear a noise and freeze as a car approaches us from behind. The dogs’ fur bristles and they nudge in closer to me as a man steps out of the car and walks up to one of the shop doors. He takes something out of his pocket and begins wiggling it in the door handle.

  Opening the door, he stomps the snow off his boots, glancing briefly up and down the street before stepping inside. Catching sight of me, he smiles politely, nods his head, and calls, “Morning!” And then he disappears into the shop. I remain frozen for another ten seconds, and when he doesn’t come back out with a loaded gun or other deadly weapon, I breathe out my relief in a cloud of warm air.

  In my seventeen years I have known only forty-six people. The same people, every day, each of whom I know everything about. And I just saw a man who I will never speak to and will never know. I walk past the shop and see him inside bustling around and—poof—I continue walking and he no longer exists to me. I can hear Dennis teasingly chiding me in school. “Juneau, give us all a break and save the existentialism for our philosophy discussion group.”

  A few minutes later, a woman with white hair steps out of a doorway, and once again I am petrified with alarm. Her face is wrinkled, and although I’ve seen pictures of old people before, this is the first time I’ve witnessed one with my own eyes. I feel like I’m looking at an alien—someone from a world away. My spine tingles with the newness of the experience.

  She turns and catches my gaze but, after casting a curious glance at me and the dogs, ignores us as she goes along her way. I spy a fenced-off area of grass and trees, make a beeline for it, and take refuge on a bench. I sit there with the dogs as the city comes alive. Until I can watch people come and go without my heart racing.

  A man sits down on a bench across from me, sets down a steaming white cup next to him, and pulls out a newspaper. I tell the dogs to stay and walk over. He looks at me, and his eyebrows shoot up in surprise. I can tell I look odd to him. No one else I’ve seen is dressed in furs and skins. “Can I help you?” he asks.

  “Where are we?”

  He looks around us and back at me. “In a park,” he says, shrugging.

  “I know we’re in a park,” I say, “but what city is this?”

  “Anchorage,” he responds. He narrows his eyes like he thinks it’s a trick question, and then his expression changes to concern. “Are you lost?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, and whistle for the dogs, who flank me in seconds flat. We begin to leave the park, but I hesitate. When I turn back around, I see the man is still watching me, and I have to ask.

  “Tell me—how did this city escape the war?”

  “What war?” he asks, intrigued.

  “World War III. The Last War. The War of 1984,” I reply, identifying it in every way I know.

  He opens his mouth and out spill the words that, since last night, I have suspected were true. “There hasn’t been a World War III,” he says, “knock on wood,” and he raps his knuckle against the park bench.

  I feel a wave of nausea wash over me. I have to sit down. My face and palms feel clammy, and I think I’m going to throw up. I return to my park bench and put my head between my knees until the nausea passes. I see the man leave, throwing a worried look my way before pushing through the metal gate and disappearing. I try to reason through what he told me.

  There was no war. I still can’t believe we were so close to this city, yet we knew nothing. How could my father and the other elders have been so mistaken?

  There’s no way they could know what happened, I realize. They’ve been isolating themselves for thirty years.

  I push these thoughts aside. I have to find my clan. Even if their kidnappers aren’t brigands, they took my people and killed our animals. And I still have to find Whit. I need a clear sign to know what to do.

  And suddenly the right person comes along. Someone whose thoughts are free of the restrictions of reality. Whose mind is open enough to access the collective unconscious shared by all humans past, present, and future.

  She is an old woman dressed in a coat of rags. She pushes her way through the iron gate, dragging behind her a metal cart piled high with strange objects: old shoes, stacks of paper, aluminum cans laced on a string that clatter as they drag behind her.

  She crosses the park and, seeing me, approaches. Beckett and Neruda glue themselves to either leg but don’t growl. She stops at the other end of my bench and slowly lowers herself to sit. Stowing her cart next to her, she pats it lovingly, like it is a baby in a carriage instead of a mountain of garbage. Then, turning, she looks vaguely in my direction. Her expression is glazed-over. Opaque.

  “The men—they put a movie camera inside my television and watched everything I did,” she says matter-of-factly. “They even put a camera in my shower.”

  I ignore her disheveled appearance and paranoid speech and see her for what she is. A gift from the Yara. “Can I hold your hand?” I ask. She hesitates, and suspicion flashes across her face. Leaning forward, she holds my gaze in hers. Then, finding what she is looking for, she gives a satisfied nod and pulls her right glove off. Removing my mittens, I take her gnarled, chapped hand in my own and hold my opal in the other.

  “Thank you,” I say, “for being my connection to the Yara. I need to ask you some questions. Very important questions. Are you willing to answer them for me?”

  “Of course, dear.” The woman’s eyes begin to look more focused, and a serene expression settles upon her face.

  “I am looking for a friend. His name is Whittier Graves. I am picturing him in my mind right now. Can you see him?”

  The old lady closes her eyes abruptly and then, opening them slowly, focuses on a spot in midair to the left of my head. “I see your friend,” she says.

  “Where is he?”

  “He is on a boat. Leaving our harbor.” She lifts her free hand and gives a distracted wave toward the invisible boat floating over my shoulder.

  “What!” I exclaim, and then quickly control my emotions before I pass the shock on to my oracle. “When did he get on the boat?” I ask, my heart pounding painfully, but my voice as steady as I can manage.

  “Moments ago.”

  “Was he alone?” I ask, my already-cold face turning numb with fear.

  “No, he was with a group of big men. Bad men. Two went with him and the others stayed.”

  I fight to stay calm. “Do you know where his boat is going?” I ask. This is asking a lot of the woman. Using her to see the present and recent past is well within the bounds of realistic expectations. But from the oracle-reading exercises that Whit used to practice with me, I know this question verges on divination. The woman has to see into the future or even tap into Whit’s subconscious to give me an answer. The response I get will be cryptic at best. I focus on her, ready to catch every vital word.

  The woman’s face crinkles in concentration. “Say it another way,” she responds after a few seconds.

  I consider that, and finally ask, “Where must I go to find Whit and my clan?”

  “You must go to your source,” she answers immediately.

  “My source?” I ask, confused. “Denali?”

  “No.” She shakes her head, frustrated by my incomprehension. “No, before that.”

  “But I was born in Denali,” I respond.

  Her frown deepens. “Aren’t you listening? You have to take a boat.” She is getting upset, and I know that her link with the Yara is fading if not already gone. I have so many questions I still want to ask. I flail around for the most important.

  “Can you see my father? Do you know if he’s okay?”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” she says stubbornly, and tugs back the hand I am holding.

  Disappointed, I take her glove and fit it carefully back over her fingers. She has returned to the mad world in her mind. She blinks, as if surprised, and
I clasp her gloved hand until she is oriented.

  “Thank you for your help,” I say, standing. The dogs are at my side in a flash.

  “They’re watching me. They know everything I’m thinking,” the lady says.

  “Tell them to go away, and maybe they’ll leave you alone,” I respond.

  “Now that’s an idea,” she says, her lips forming a surprised smile. Her smile broadens as her mind recedes into some pleasant memory, so that when the dogs and I leave her, she looks almost happy.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  12

  MILES

  IT LIES THERE ON HIS DESK LIKE AN INVITATION: The notepad with my dad’s writing:

  The girl is the key. No drug without her. Possibly still in Alaska, but coming by boat to the continent. Around 17. Shortish: 5’5”. Long black hair. Two huskies. Gold starburst in one eye.

  What’s a gold starburst? I wonder.

  I push the notebook back to where it was when I found it. And then I get the hell out of there before Dad comes back.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  13

  JUNEAU

  IF I HAVE TO TAKE A BOAT, I WILL NEED MONEY. Currency. “The root of all evil,” Dennis called it in our history class. He claimed that it was the cause of World War III. That capitalism and greed set the whole thing off, beginning with a war over oil and ending with the destruction of the environment. Although he was wrong about the war, everything I have read and heard about the world confirmed that money has always caused corruption. Now I have to find some money of my own. Just the thought of it makes me feel compromised.

  I consider stowing away on a boat for about a second, like a character in one of our old books. Then I realize that’s way too eighteenth century. What am I going to do—hide in an empty ale keg? No, there’s no way around it. I’m going to have to buy a ticket. I saw something on the way into town that may prove useful: a sign in a shop window.

  I have to turn toward the harbor to remember which direction to go in. The buildings are confusing me. If I were standing in the middle of a mountain field, I could find my way. But with glass buildings reflecting one another every way I turn, I have to concentrate. I glance at the sun and then the water, and head north-northwest.

  In ten minutes we are there. CA$H FOR GOLD, the sign reads. The window display holds a treasure trove of fragile-looking rings and necklaces. I swallow my fear and stare at the door for a moment. There is no handle. But there is a small sign on one side that reads PUSH. I push, and with a whoosh of warm air, the dogs and I are inside the building and blinking in the artificial light.

  “How can you help me?” comes a voice from the far side of the room. I blink again, and then focus on a small man standing behind a cupboard made of glass. His eyebrows are gray, but his hair is raven black and looks strangely crooked. He is wearing a pelt on his head, I realize, and try not to stare. He rubs his hands together and plasters on a large smile.

  I walk forward and force myself to speak to this stranger. “I saw the sign. Cash for gold.”

  “That’s right, young lady,” he says, looking me up and down.

  My buckskin trousers and fur-lined parka are very different from his clothing, which is made of shiny woven material. I push my hood back and sweep my long hair out of the back of my coat to fall around my face, using it as a curtain between us.

  He stares oddly at my eyes and clears his throat. “What can I do you for?” he asks, with a joking smile.

  I am having a hard time understanding him—both from his strange expressions and the fact that he speaks through his nose—so instead of talking, I lay my pack on the floor and crouch to dig inside. My fingers find the bag holding my brigand insurance. The objects I was told to use if I needed to negotiate with them.

  I pull it out and, after opening the drawstrings, choose carefully and set a stone on the glass in front of the man. I watch his face attentively as he flinches in surprise and then draws a blank expression over his features. A term my father used when we played cards pops into my mind: he is using a “poker face.”

  “Well, now, what do we have here?” the man asks. He picks up the stone and fits a black spyglass type of lens to one eye. “A gold nugget”—he pulls a measuring stick out from beneath the counter—“measuring almost two inches.” He weighs it in his hand and then places it on a metal contraption, squinting as he reads numbers off a little screen. “Weighs a hundred twenty-five grams.” He peers at it again through the lens. “Low to medium quality, I would say. Well, little missy, today’s your lucky day, because I have just the buyer for this sort of nugget, and I can offer you the top-notch price of five hundred dollars.”

  There is something wrong with his face. I lay a hand across Neruda’s head, my thumb pressing one of his temples and my middle finger the other. I grasp my opal as I crouch down to whisper into his ear, “How do you feel about this man?”

  The man chuckles nervously. “Do you always consult your dog for your business decisions?” he jibes, and a bead of sweat forms on his brow just below the black pelt.

  I stare at him and feel the tingle as I connect to Neruda’s thoughts. Animals don’t think in words. It is my dog’s primal instincts that I Read, and Neruda’s instincts tell me the man cannot be trusted. My dog sees him as an inferior pack member that must be expelled to ensure the security of the others.

  I stand and hold my palm out. “My nugget,” I insist, and wait.

  The man’s hand trembles slightly. “Let’s not be hasty, girlie. I’ll check my charts and see if I can do any better on that offer.”

  I pluck my nugget from his fingers before he has a chance to pull his arm away, and turn his scales around toward me. Placing the gold atop the scales as I saw him do, I read aloud from a shiny strip near the base. “Two hundred grams, not a hundred twenty-five.”

  I nod toward a sign I saw when I entered the store. “That says you pay forty dollars per gram of gold. According to your chart, you should be offering me eight thousand dollars for this nugget.” I slip the stone back into its bag.

  “Now just wait a minute here, missy. You have no idea what standards the pricing is based on. A gold nugget is not as valuable as gold dust, which is what is melted down to make this high-quality jewelry.” He waves his hand to display the ugly jewelry inside the case.

  His eyes tell me that he is lying. That my nugget is rare, and that he desperately wants it. I think of Whit’s satisfaction whenever one of us finds a nugget in the Denali riverbeds. “That may serve us well someday,” he says before ordering us to take it to the shelter and stash it with the rest. Unlike plentiful opals and semiprecious stones, the gold nuggets are hard to come by, and this man’s excitement confirms their value.

  “I saw another ‘cash for gold’ sign by the waterfront,” I say, and nestle the bag into my rucksack.

  “Stop!” he shrieks. Sweat courses down the sides of his face. “Okay, I’ll give you seven thousand,” he says, pain audible in his tone, “as well as some valuable information.”

  I hesitate. “What kind of information?”

  “Someone is looking for you,” he responds.

  We stare at each other in silence for a minute before I fish the bag back out of my rucksack. He ogles it and licks his lips.

  “Talk,” I say.

  He walks back to where a red plastic apparatus is attached to a wall. Telephone, I think, as I recall the picture of a similar one in the EB.

  The man pulls a card off a board stuck full of scraps of paper and slaps it down on the counter in front of me. On it is printed a ten-digit number, and scribbled in pencil in one corner is “Girl w/star.”

  “They were big guys. Dressed in camo,” the man says. “Came in here yesterday
saying they would pay top dollar for information on your whereabouts.”

  My chest clenches painfully. The man’s description sounds like Whit’s captors, the big men I saw in the fire holding his arms. Why are they looking for me? “What does this mean?” I ask, pointing to the scribbled words.

  “They described you as a teenage girl, long black hair, probably accompanied by two huskies.” He hesitates and studies my face suspiciously. “And what looks like a gold starburst in one eye.”

  My starburst. The same as the rest of the clan children. The sign that we are in close union with nature. Yara-Readers. Our parents tell us it is something to be proud of—an inheritance from the earth. But now it marks me as someone to pursue.

  And how do these men know what I look like anyway? I could ask the same about how they found my clan. Or how they knew I wasn’t with the rest of the group. But the knowledge that they may actually recognize me chills me to the bone.

  I slip the card into my rucksack, pull the nugget back out of the bag, and place it on the counter. The man makes a grabbing motion, but I keep my hand on it. “Count the money out for me first,” I command, and he darts to the back of the room, disappearing through a doorway and then emerging with a handful of paper money.

  He begins counting it, and I watch the numbers on each bill as he does, totaling them in my head until he reaches seven thousand. He pushes the stack across the counter toward me, not even looking at my face. His eyes are only for the nugget.

  I withdraw my hand, and he plucks up the gold and pushes it under the counter. I have no doubt that the value of my piece is much more than what he has given me. I only hope that it is enough to obtain a boat ticket to wherever it is I am supposed to go.

  I turn to leave, and the dogs leap to their feet, rushing before me to the door. They are as uncomfortable as I am in this artificial space with this artificial man.