Nana’s nine faithful wasn’t even the record for a Zawisza woman. Before Kaja, that belonged to Aunt P. Three months before Aunt P died, a gang of thirty-two faithful strayed near New Creemore’s battlements, when Aunt P was on patrol. In fewer than ten minutes, she picked off every last one of them with her rifle like they was the old beer bottles she and I liked to use for target practice. Aunt P claimed she shouldn’t have got the record for that—I was far up and they was stupid from hunger, not in no condition to fight—but Mam and Aunt C and I insisted that it counted.
Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO
Like Nana, Aunt P died in the wild. I was the one who found her: her chest ripped up with buckshot, her skin pecked by seagulls, her hand still curled around her rifle.
I had one picture of Aunt P. When I was fourteen and Kaja was thirteen, a convoy of traders visited New Creemore. Most traders skipped us and headed straight to Georgian City, but these one set up aboveground for a few days. While I was trading for bullets, Kaja snuck away from me and swapped three jars of her good preserves for a broken camera.
I told Kaja she was stupid to do it. She was forever trading for unnecessary things: an old sewing machine, the kind you powered with your foot; a necklace of blue beads; a red hair bow. The silliest was a magazine from before that was filled with pictures of clean-looking, white-teethed, once-famous boys.
But Kaja was always a whiz at fiddling with things. She took that camera apart and had it working in no time. There wasn’t a way to print the pictures or even put them on a computer to look at proper like people used to do, but you could squint at them on the camera’s small screen.
Kaja and I ran around for days with that camera. I can’t remember if it was me or her who snapped the one of Aunt P. But after Aunt P died, I would sneak to the school to plug in the camera, since Mam would’ve given me an earful for using power for something unnecessary, to look that one picture. To me, Aunt P was beautiful and always in motion, like a hummingbird, a creature you can’t catch in a quiet moment. In that picture, she was static and sour and her face looked worn out and over, though she was thirty when it was taken.
Anyway, Nana’s words. They were the closest thing I had to a personal creed. The women in our family die young. When I got shot or banged up bad—or once, had half my ear bit off—it was a comfort to be able to tell myself I was fine, I was fortunate, I’d cheated my fate a while longer.
And when I found Aunt P dead out in the wild, I lit her body on fire and let it burn down to nothing as the sun set red around me. I didn’t cry. I figured she’d met her natural end. I swept her ashes into a canteen and buried them beside Nana. Through it all, I whispered Nana’s words again and again.
The women in our family die young.
NOT A YEAR AFTER AUNT P died, I turned twenty—older than three of Nana’s six daughters ever got to—and I found out I was pregnant.
I didn’t know the name of the man. I still don’t. He came from Sixteenth Line along with three others; New Creemore had sent four men in exchange. With little settlements, you have to change people up, elsewise the babies might turn out funny. When I was waiting for my turn with one of the men, I heard a girl behind me laugh and whisper to her sister—both of them Pollocks, and working in the underground factory because they couldn’t be rangers; Pollocks can’t shoot for shit—oh, we’re outta luck; Nika Zawisza’s going to scare them soft for days.
But it wasn’t like that. I liked the man that made me pregnant better than any of the men I’d been assigned to before. He wasn’t handsome like the unformed boys in Kaja’s magazine. He was around my age but his hair was already going. He had large hands, and his clothes smelled of smoke, and he kissed my poor ruined ear.
At the time, it made me think it wouldn’t be bad to have what anyone could have before, when people—sane, healthy people, I mean—were plentiful and you could be in love with someone all your own and not have to share.
I think Kaja felt the same, and that’s why she’d traded for stupid pictures of boys who’d died long before she was born.
Although I’d liked the man who’d got me pregnant, I didn’t like being pregnant. It seemed like something that couldn’t happen to me, not Nika Zawisza, who frightened other people, even other rangers.
So—and it was stupid as all hell, I know—I didn’t tell Mam or Kaja. I would have had to stay in New Creemore. At that time, with Aunt P dead, I was its best ranger. Mam was thirty-eight, and her years of ranging in the wild had made her knees achy, and I didn’t want her to worry. (Mam never did live as long as Nana. She died suddenly at forty-two, not on the road but in our house, from a heart problem nobody knew about.)
And Kaja—well, I just couldn’t tell Kaja.
There’s this thing about families. I suppose some families are generous when it comes to one another, but that’s not the Zawiszas. Families like ours remember your vulnerable moments like they’re a light shining on some deep truth about you. When they see you, they see you when you were hurting. That’s what they measure you by.
Like Aunt C once up and had a breakdown. I never knew how apt that word was until I saw Aunt C in the clinic: it was like she’d broken down, like a rusted car coming apart, its frame bent and its wheels flat. Aunt C got meds and started ranging again, but after that she was always, always Aunt C, who had a breakdown, even if she was just coming round for dinner.
When Aunt P and Mam first brought me outside New Creemore to teach me how to handle a rifle, I shot four of five targets and turned around and asked when could I start practicing on real faithful.
A year later, when Mam did the same for Kaja—Aunt P didn’t even bother to go; she knew how Kaja was—Kaja couldn’t do it. She hated it. She cried. Fine, Mam said, Kaja didn’t have to be a ranger like the rest of our family if she didn’t have the guts, but she had to be useful.
Kaja first got pregnant at fifteen. She made it three months with that one. I was home then. That was when Kaja still lived with Mam and me; we shared a bed. I woke up to her sobbing and bleeding through her skivvies. I took her to the clinic and told her it’d be all right, which turned out to be the wrong thing to have said.
I wasn’t there—I was out ranging—for the second, third, fourth ones, and after that Kaja was ordered not to line up again when men from other settlements came around.
Kaja did find her place. She apprenticed with New Creemore’s biochemist. She learned hundreds of things, like how to brew up the shots everyone had to take. I got injections from her four times a year. She was smart and quiet and read more books than the rest of the Zawiszas put together. Yet, in our family, Kaja was forever Kaja, who hasn’t a use.
IT WAS A JULY MORNING, heavy and humid, when I returned to New Creemore from a four-day range. The power went out that evening.
The range had been a good one, though I’d thrown up each morning and I’d steadfastly ignored that my khakis had begun to feel uncomfortably tight. I’d killed three faithful. Two of them were furious things, shouting at me about how I was damned before I shot them down. Nothing good from either of them, but the third, him a got I haul from. He’d been old. He’d had on him a handgun; a backpack with three books; a packet of still-good plantain chips; and a knit scarf, blue and orange and coming apart. Worthless, but I took it for Kaja, since she liked to collect fabrics and yarns.
He also carried a big sheaf of drawings I couldn’t make head or tail of and had a crumpled photograph in his shirt pocket. Three smiling children. I took the drawings but left the picture on him when I burned him.
When I got home, Kaja was there for dinner. She lived in an apartment underground, and most of the time she didn’t see Mam or me, but that night she’d come for her token once-a-month appearance. I gave her the scarf. She unfurled it in her hands and said, “I don’t use things like this anymore.”
“I didn’t know.”
I expected her to give it back, but instead she sighed and folded it carefully and set it by the door t
o take with her when she left.
I told her about the faithful I’d got it from. “Strange that he managed to get that old,” I said. “He might’ve been around, you know, before. Like Nana was.”
“So you killed him,” Kaja said.
“He was a faithful,” I said. Mam plunked down three plates of bean paste, and I took out the papers I’d retrieved. “Got these, too. Reckon the library can figure them out.”
“No need for that,” Kaja said, taking them from me. “They’re blueprints, Nika.” At my blank expression, she added, “Like a map, but for a building or a piece of equipment.” She paged through them, her brow furrowing. “Blueprints of Feversham Station.”
Feversham was a research and power station to the north of us. I knew it, but Kaja hadn’t ever been there. “How would you know?”
“There’s nothing else they could be. Nothing around here, at least.” She showed me a page. “This one’s of the interior of a power station. See, here’s a combustion engine.”
She might as well have been showing me something writ in a foreign language. Through a mouthful of bean paste, I started to tell her so, but the dim light that hung over the kitchen table flickered and died.
It was the whole house out. I went to the window. New Creemore’s battlements had gone dark, though I could still see the shadows of the turrets, the razor wires, the rangers on the walls. “It’s hot,” I guessed. “Power’s out because it’s hot, but it’ll be up and running in no time.”
“Could be,” Kaja said. She headed for the door, the blueprints rolled under one arm. “But the power’s generated at Feversham. It’s a remarkable coincidence, a faithful carrying these the same time the power goes out.”
I didn’t like it, either. I followed Kaja outside. A little crowd had gathered; flashlights bobbed in New Creemore’s square. (Square makes it sound fancier than what it was, which was the well-trod junction where the clinic and the school and the radio station and the armory met.) Kaja’s boss, the old biochemist—Alvaro, that was his name—motioned Kaja over to him.
There were murmurs about what could be going on. Aunt C was there, and I went to say hello to her. Before we got past our pleasantries, though, someone grabbed my shoulder: Ranja, who ran the radio station. With her were Kaja, Alvaro, and the mayor. “Nika Zawisza,” Ranja said. “Come with us.”
We went down the road past the radio station. In darkness, the rest of New Creemore looked like one of the hundreds of ghost towns I’d passed through on my travels. When we were far from the square, the mayor said, “I don’t want there to be a panic, Zawisza, but—well, Ranja can explain.”
“Before the power went out,” Ranja said, “I received a message from Feversham. It was in code. There must be something what stopped them from using their audio channel. Two words: SOS, then faithful, again and again.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Eloquent, as ever,” Kaja muttered.
“With no power,” the mayor said, “we can’t communicate with Georgian City or elsewhere. I’m sending out messengers, but we’ve got to find out what’s happened to Feversham. Zawisza, I understand you killed a faithful who had on him blueprints for Feversham Station?”
“If that’s what Kaja says they are. I couldn’t tell you different.”
“Anything else stick out about him?”
“He was old,” I said. I strained to remember more. The details of his face had disappeared. I’ve heard some rangers say that they’re haunted by the faces of all the faithful they’ve killed. Never been a problem for me. I came up with, “He had books.”
“What kind of books?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “I was going to drop them at the library tomorrow.” I didn’t read the books I collected out in the wild. That was more Kaja’s thing.
We went back to the house to check them. There wasn’t much to them: an old course guide for an engineering class at a long-dead college; a battered paperback of Hamlet, which I’d once been assigned to study in school but had neglected; a loose-bound copy of The Parson’s Prayer.
This last was the scripture of the faithful. Like many of the copies I’d seen, it was a photocopy of the original handwritten version. I’d never read it, but Kaja had; the only thing I ever heard her say about it was that it was full of spelling errors.
“Was the man you killed going to Feversham? Or coming from it?” Ranja asked.
“West of it, heading east,” I said. “So he might’ve been on his way. You’ll appreciate that I didn’t quite sit him down for a nice chat about his intended destination before I put a bullet in him.”
“If the faithful have done something to Feversham,” the mayor said, “we’ve got to understand what’s happened. Before there’s a panic. Zawisza, how long would it take you to get there?”
“Day and a half if I hoof it,” I said. “I’ve been there before.” Feversham had rangers, too, and I’d helped them a time or two. “Give me fifteen minutes to get my things. I’ll be on my way.”
“Good,” he said. “You and your sister will scope it out—don’t do anything foolish, not before we can get help from Georgian—and report back.”
“Kaja?” I asked, and at the same time Kaja spluttered, “Me?”
“Alvaro can’t keep up,” said Ranja.
Neither can Kaja, I thought, but it was true about Alvaro. He was in his sixties and had bad knees. He hadn’t a year of life left in him, though of course I didn’t know that then. “No need for Kaja to come with,” I said.
“Sure there’s a need, Nika,” Ranja said. “Feversham’s full of scientists. Biochemists. If there’s a threat as regards the work being done there, well, Kaja’s the one who can comprehend it.”
I could tell Kaja was balking at the idea; her small face shone, bright and anxious, in the starlight. She’d never gone far into the wild. “She’ll slow me down,” I said.
But Kaja bit her lip and straightened herself up and said, “I will not. We ought to get going.”
IT WASN’T UNTIL AFTER WE’D crept outside the walls, after I’d patted Nana’s grave, after we’d put New Creemore half a click behind us, that I spoke to Kaja further. “You sure you’re all right with this?” I asked.
“It’s not like I have a choice,” she replied. “Unless you’re going to tell me you’ve secretly studied engineering and biochemistry and apprenticed with Alvaro yourself.”
I was tempted to give her the finger. Kaja could be a bitch about the fact that she was smart. But she was afraid. Her eyes were darting around every which-way, like she expected a dozen faithful to pop out from behind a bush and start shooting. “It’s safer than you think,” I said. “Faithful got to sleep at night, just like us.”
She let out a hmmph.
“And I got your back, Kaja,” I added.
Kaja didn’t say anything to that. Lips pursed and shoulders squared, she looked everywhere but at me. With a big backpack on, she seemed tiny. We had different fathers, of course, and she was darker and shorter than me, and knobbly, and near swallowed by her swathe of curly black hair. She was the prettier of us, was Kaja, but I didn’t mind that. That wasn’t the sort of thing people got jealous about, not anymore. Watching her, I felt a protectiveness I hadn’t felt about her in a long time.
Outside New Creemore used to be farms, but it had turned to dead land, rendered barren and scarred with trenches from the last desperate days of the fighting that had gone on before I was born. There weren’t many buildings in the wild. Just the hollowed shells of them. I knew every half-gone fence, every collapsed silo, every slab of burnt barn board; I could use them for hiding places if I needed to. I checked them off in my mind as we went. I was surer by them than by the north star that Kaja and I were heading the right way.
When the first morning light began to crest over the horizon, Kaja broke the silence between us. We’d just climbed the hill that looked over the first big ghost town on the way to Feversham, a row of rotting buildings I had nicknamed Rubber. (I
thought of it as that because the first faithful I’d ever killed in it had on her a pair of black rubber rain boots that fit me nice.) And Kaja asked, “How can you like this?”
“How can I like what?”
“This,” she said, swooping her arm to indicate Rubber and the land around it. “Here. Being out here, in the wild. It’s so quiet, and, well, sad.”
“It isn’t sad,” I said. “Not to me. Gives me space to clear my head. Out here, I don’t have to worry about anything.”
“Except being killed by faithful.”
“That’s what makes it interesting.” I waggled my eyebrows. “See, there’s a real good way to fix that worry. You got to shoot them first.”
“Very funny,” she said.
“Shush,” I told her, not to piss her off, but because I’d spotted two men down in Rubber, coming out from behind one of the abandoned storefronts. “Get down. Now. Flat in the grass.”
Kaja obeyed, unstrapping her backpack to lay it beside her. I crouched beside her, pulling out my rifle as I did.
Kaja was breathing very hard. I blocked her out. There is a calm that descends on me when I’m concentrating on shooting, like the rest of the world fades. I fired and fired again, and in the space of a few seconds both faithful were down on the ground.
I got up and jogged to where they lay. One I’d shot in the chest; he was dead. The other I’d got the shoulder, and he was holding his wound and keening. He rolled to look up and me, and I put him out of his misery with another shot. I knelt down to check them; that was when Kaja caught up with me. She stood a few paces away, looking a bit stunned as I retrieved a small knife from one and a box of rounds and a canteen from the other.
When I took out my little pack with matches and lighter fluid from my satchel and began dousing the bodies, Kaja asked, “What are you doing?”
“Burning them.”
“What? Why?”
I shrugged. “Just something I do. You’re the one that’s read The Parson’s Prayer. You know what they believe. You’ve got to be burnt if you’re going to have an afterlife. I figure I ain’t going to deny them that.”
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