The Wild Dead

by Carrie Vaughn

  She hesitated. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “This was just a mediation, yeah?”

  “It turned into a murder.” She explained, trying to keep it simple, not sure she was making any sense. Most cases never lasted longer than a week or so. She’d been on this one too long.

  “That’s awful,” said Denis, Patel’s partner. A slim brown man with an eager gaze, scruffy chopped hair he must have cut himself.

  “Yeah,” Enid said with a sigh.

  The closest thing the Coast Road ever got to a trial then ensued. In the pre-Fall world this would have been so much more formal, bound by rules and traditions and ceremony. The Coast Road didn’t have much time, or call for anything like that. It was one of the things that encouraged towns to solve problems on their own. So solving them didn’t become a production.

  Murder was something that simply couldn’t be solved, Enid was coming to believe. It could only be dealt with. The regional committee was there, along with the investigators who would take over the handling of the case, Patel and Denis. A handful of other investigators, some in uniform and some not. They’d already begged for copies of the report. One of them said, “I read your report on Pasadan from last year. You’re becoming the expert on this.” He smiled kindly enough, but the words sat like a rock in her gut.

  Teeg still wasn’t talking. He hung back from the others, arms crossed, answering questions in monosyllables.

  The committee’s meeting room had gotten chaotic, three committee members on one side of a long table, Juni sitting in a chair by herself, hugging her pack. An audience of investigators and assistants clustered in. Enid went over the details again and again, answered question after question. Teeg corroborated, answered some questions himself. Like what he’d been doing the three days Enid was gone in the wild. Asking the same questions of the same people, apparently. By then, they’d gotten used to not answering. So he decided Kellan was guilty and finished it himself.

  Enid was still angry about that.

  Ahn, the chair of the committee, peered through antique reading glasses and studied a set of notes Enid had copied from her book, right before the hearing.

  “You went up to the hills, into the wild, to talk to witnesses?” The notes said so; the question was spoken in a tone of disbelief.

  “I did.”

  “Was that necessary?”

  Enid shrugged. “Wouldn’t have been, if Kellan or Neeve had just told me the truth. But nobody talks, not about that sort of thing. I had to dig it up.”

  “Right. Well. You don’t suggest that anything be done about Neeve’s infraction?”

  “I think everything’s already been done that possibly can be. There’s nothing left.” Enid suspected word would get out: the bannerless child had been discovered. Twenty years later, maybe. But the pregnancy had been discovered, and such pregnancies always would be. A useful kind of tale, that.

  “Right,” the chair said. “About this next part—”

  Juni burst in. “Can I appeal? Is there some kind of an appeal process? I want to tell my side of it.” The whole trip here, Juni had likely been thinking of this, exactly what to say, exactly what her strategy should be. There was always a chance for appeal, wasn’t there? She could request an investigation.

  Ahn took off her glasses and stared at Juni. “You confess that you killed a young woman, direct and on purpose.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t like she was a real person.”

  Enid walked out of the room at that. She might have strangled Juni otherwise, and had her own murder investigation to face. The heat of her anger closed in on her like that moment on the marsh, right before she passed out, when her vision closed to nothing. She hardly noticed the silence, the wide-eyed expressions of a dozen faces watching her go. Teeg stood, but didn’t try to stop her. She needed air, so she went to get it. Charged straight out and settled on the building’s front steps and tried not to think about what was happening inside.

  A long stretch after that, Patel came outside to sit with her. Enid had been watching traffic go back and forth. A crossroads passed through Morada, where the Sierra Road met the Coast Road. She’d seen horses, dogs, wagons, and even a couple of cars. All of it nice and normal. Soothing.

  “Well, she’s something,” Patel said.

  “I finally see why capital punishment was so attractive back in the day. It’s not a deterrent, it’s catharsis. I just . . . I’m angry.”

  “They’re trying to decide where to send her. Whether she should be exiled out of the Coast Road entire.”

  Enid shook her head slowly. An indirect death was still death, and they were supposed to be better than that. “I think she should go to Desolata.”

  “Oh. I like that,” Patel said.

  “I put it in the report. Maybe I should tell them in person.”

  “I’ll let them know, you don’t have to worry about it. And how’s our newly minted Teeg working out?”

  “New as puppies,” she said. “He left me, Patel. Let me walk into the hills alone. And I don’t think he’s sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I miss Tomas,” she said.

  Patel persuaded her back inside to hear the verdict, and then went around the table for a whispered conference with the committee. They kept glancing at Juni, the perpetrator. Enid told herself she’d already left the case behind, that this didn’t mean anything. But she ought to be here to see the end of it.

  The chair announced, “It’s been suggested we send you to Desolata when the next trading expedition heads out that way. You’ll go along, and they’ll leave you there.”

  Juni leaned forward. “Where’s that?”

  “It’s the other end of the world.”

  “But why? Why are you doing this to me?”

  Enid spat back, “Why did you kill Ella?”

  Juni didn’t have an answer.

  “You can always leave, anytime you like,” the committee chair said. “But nowhere else will take you.”

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

  It was out of Enid’s hands, then. The committee arranged the exile, asked Patel and Denis to take charge of Juni until the traders left for the long trip south. Juni would be cared for until then. Given a room and food. But nothing else. No one wanted even to talk to her. Enid decided she didn’t need to see the woman again.

  The whole process took long enough that she and Teeg spent the night at the town’s way station, which had a hot shower. Enid would never get tired of hot showers. She tried not to take too long, not to drain the tank and leave nothing for the next person. But it was hard, and she still felt worn out and grubby when she finished. The clean clothes, though—those felt marvelous.

  When she went out to the front porch to get some air, to watch stars come out, she met Teeg slouched on the steps, apparently with the same idea.

  He held his brown investigator’s tunic scrunched up in his lap.

  Instead of his uniform, he wore a sleeveless linen undershirt. His arms were lean and strong, the brown skin shining with a glow of summer sweat. Elbows on knees, he stared out at the street, at the normalcy of it all. He didn’t react to her approach. She was sure he’d seen her. Maybe he felt that nothing needed to be said.

  “Hola,” she said, when she got close enough that staying silent would be rude. “You okay?”

  When he looked over, his lips were pursed, like he was working to keep his expression still. She didn’t know what to say to draw him out. Finally, after too much silence, he reached out, handing her his tunic. “I’ve decided I can’t do this.”

  She stared at the offering, leaving it hanging between them. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not meant to be an investigator. This proved it.”

  “One rough case and you’re ready to give it all up? Is that it?”

  When she refused to take the tunic from him, he let his arm drop, and his shoulders slumped. “I was wrong. I was wrong on everything. I don
’t want to do this.”

  She didn’t know why she should feel panic at this declaration, why her immediate urge was to talk him out of it, explain to him all the ways he was wrong. Like she’d been telling him he was wrong all week. Maybe this time he wasn’t wrong. But she didn’t want him to quit, and she couldn’t even say why.

  “I think you’re in a rush. You need to think this over. Talk to regional, talk to Patel.”

  “Already thought it over. Sorry, Enid. I know you’re disappointed.”

  “I just want to understand.” His handing over the tunic—she felt like she’d failed. She was supposed to mentor him on his first case, yet here he was, ready to quit. She’d failed him.

  His sigh was desolate. “I didn’t follow you up the river because I thought you were wrong. I stayed behind because I was scared. And this job, this thing we do—you can’t be scared and still do the work.”

  She couldn’t argue with that.

  “I hate that,” he added. “That I didn’t follow you. Thing is, even knowing how it all turned out—I still wouldn’t.”

  He had the tunic wadded up like a rag, squeezing like he was angry at it. She wanted to take it, smooth it out, fold it neatly.

  Neither of them had spoken aloud the obvious: that someone who didn’t want to be an investigator absolutely shouldn’t be one.

  And Teeg didn’t want it. He wasn’t asking questions anymore.

  “I’m not going to take that from you, Teeg,” she stated. “Take it to the committee and talk it over with your folk. You’re not thinking clear right now.”

  “I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we left the Estuary. Done enough thinking about it.” He bit the words off.

  Enid didn’t feel much like sitting and taking in the evening air anymore. She wanted to take a walk, even in the dark. She wanted to walk all the way back to Haven.

  “Anyway, I wanted to thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For making it all clear. What the job’s really about.”

  “I’m not sure I know what it’s about.”

  “The truth. Not justice, not the rules. Just truth, the very bottom of it.”

  That was a grand statement. She wasn’t sure she agreed, truth with a capital T. She smiled sadly. “Tomas always said it was about being kind. The only reason any of us is here is kindness.”

  “I’m not sure I know what that means.”

  “Yeah, I know. Neither do I. I’m leaving at dawn. I need to get home.”

  “I’m going to stick around here. Talk it over with folk, like you said.”

  “All right. Well. Come say hi, next time you come through Haven.”

  And Enid walked away.

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

  Six months or so later, Patel found Enid in the clinic waiting room at Haven. Enid was balancing sixth-month-old baby Rose on her lap, distracting her before she got her first vaccinations. If the baby started happy, maybe this all wouldn’t be too distressing. Olive refused to watch while the medics inflicted pain on their precious girl, so Enid did the deed. Someone had to.

  Rose was beautiful. The most perfect baby ever. She had Olive’s dark hair, already growing curls, and Berol’s mischievous smile and bright brown eyes. Olive insisted the baby had Sam’s good sense and Enid’s bravery, but that was pure fancy. Already they could all see that Rose was who she was; she liked grabbing hair and beards and clinging to chairs. She babbled, but they could tell she listened close when anyone spoke.

  “Who is this?” Patel asked, settling in the chair beside her.

  “Patel, meet Rose. Rose, say hello to my friend Patel.” Enid bounced Rose, held out her pudgy hand, smiled when Rose reached out her other hand herself, grabbing for Patel’s fingers The investigator chuckled.

  “I have a message for you, Enid, but maybe I should wait,” Patel said, letting Rose grip his finger. People almost always reached for babies, Enid noticed. Even folk who didn’t particularly get along with babies would hold a finger to them. The babies almost always reached back. The connection was primal.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s obviously grim, might as well get it over with.”

  So he told her: after only a month at Desolata, Juni had walked into the desert and not returned. It happened sometimes, folk there said. Someone said they wanted to see how far they could walk. When really, they didn’t want to come back at all. The woman had sentenced herself to execution.

  Enid wasn’t surprised, though maybe she’d hoped that Juni would find something useful to do with herself. Really, she wasn’t sure Juni’s story could have ended any other way. It was the woman’s choice, she told herself. She could have lived. Just not the way she’d done before. And it was her choice to wreck that as well.

  “Well. Thanks for letting me know,” she said, and Patel nodded and left for the rest of his errands, giving Rose’s little hand one last squeeze.

  Rose was listening to it all. Not understanding, surely. She’d be all right, sheltered from the hardships of the world for as long as Enid and the rest of the family could manage it. But Rose lived with an investigator. Enid might not manage to shelter her for as long as she might wish. After Patel left, she kissed Rose’s silky baby head, pressing her face there a long time to breathe in the scent of her, and Rose burbled happily.

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

  Six months before that, when she hadn’t yet met Rose, Enid left Morada by car. Dropped off the car at Silt and continued on foot. This was the longest walk Enid had ever made in her time as investigator; the last ten miles back to Haven took forever. She kept speeding up, her feet shuffling to a jog without her realizing it, and she had to make herself go slow and steady, at a normal walking pace. She didn’t want to collapse when she got home, or worse, before she got there. Might do that anyway. But if she did, the others would worry, and she wanted to avoid that.

  There’d been no point in sending a message ahead, as she made various stops at towns and way stations. In fact, she was the one carrying messages. She would be delivering her own message, telling that she was on her way and hoping that everything was well.

  That last day of travel, she wasn’t going to beat sunset. Normally, dusk meant finding a way station, someplace to spend the night. But she was so close to Haven, she’d already passed Ant Farm and Potter, the outlying households that marked the edge of the region. Another hour and she’d be home. She wasn’t going to stop now. This part of the world, the road was wide and well traveled. Plenty of electric lights glowed by the front doors of houses. One thing about walking in the dark: no one much was out and about, and the ones who were were clearly on their way to somewhere else. They saw Enid and waved; didn’t try to stop and talk. She had no idea what she’d say if someone tried to stop her. How she was supposed to explain.

  On the other hand, if she stopped to talk, someone might be able to tell her if the baby at Serenity had been born yet.

  But no, she waved back and hurried on. Past the clinic, the original heart of the town. The pre-Fall cement building had been cared for and maintained and built onto, and wasn’t sitting on a mud bank. No chance of it falling over.

  Serenity was on the other side of town, down its own path. She reached the turn, came in view of Serenity’s cottage, two stories, simple and neatly kept.

  Home.

  Somehow, now, at the end of the trip, Enid hesitated. Lights were on in the front room but not upstairs. This time of evening, everyone should be home. Everything looked normal. Nothing seemed out of place. Nothing told Enid what she might find inside. If her world had changed while she had gone.

  She went to the door. Was about to touch the handle to open it when a sob rang out.

  The sound of a baby crying.

  Enid stopped, closed her eyes. Stood for a moment just listening.

  All was well.

  A noisy, demanding baby was a healthy one, and all was well. S
he was furious that she’d missed the arrival. Full of shame, regret at the broken promise, this empty hole in her gut that she’d missed a thing that might never happen again. But that all passed in a moment, in a flash, leaving behind joy.

  She’d dreamed of this sound.

  Carefully, she opened the door.

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in the Bannerless Saga series.

  About the Author

  Carrie Vaughn is the best-selling author of the Kitty Norville series, as well as the superhero novels Dreams of the Golden Age and After the Golden Age, the young adult novels Voices of Dragons and Steel, the fantasy novel Discord’s Apple, and the post-apocalyptic mystery Bannerless. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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