"What the hell are we standing around for?" He gazed across his men. "Is the day that nice?"
"Trig and Holsen," one of the men said. "They're inside."
A pained look crossed the bearded man's face. He crossed the grass. The screen door banged behind him. Raina wriggled in her dad's grip to face the house. The bearded man emerged a minute later, trailed by the man with the pistol, whose face was flushed, scratched, and grinning, and the man with the club, who walked stiffly, expression as dark as the water beneath the docks.
The bearded man stopped beside her dad and gestured at the sea. "One week. You understand?"
Her dad nodded. "One week."
The men thumped down the dock, joking, pointing north along the shore. Sailors hollered out, bringing in lines, poling the boat away from the pier. Her dad set her down. She turned to the house. In the trees at the edge of the yard, a pale face—Martin—pulled back into the leaves.
Her dad set his hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye. "Stay here. If they come back, shout as loud as you can. Do you understand me?"
She nodded. Her knuckles were stiff around her knife. Its edge was red. So was a line on the side of her dad's gray t-shirt. He smiled. Guiltily, she put the blade away. He stood and regarded the house for a long moment. The surf seethed up the shore.
"Dad," she said.
He started, smiled again, and walked to their home, closing the screen door silently.
Raina sat in the grass and whispered the men's names. Holsen. Trig. Holsen. Trig. She closed her eyes and pictured their faces until she'd never forget them.
Flies buzzed on the kelp stranded along the tideline. She got her knife out and cleaned it. She turned to the house, then stepped closer, telling herself she just wanted to hear them speaking, to know her mother was okay. She paused after each step, but all she heard was gulls and the wind.
Twenty feet from the house, her mother's face appeared in the kitchen window. It was blank and white and drawn. Her eyes found Raina but stared right through her, glassy, without focus, the eyes of the fish on the deck of a ship.
* * *
Her father grunted and wound in the winch. Fish slid across the deck. She clubbed them and gutted them and set them in the cooler. Her dad watched her shuck the guts into the water. She reached for another croaker. He turned away and stared out to sea.
He brought the boat around and tied off at the docks. The yard was empty. Raina brought the coolers to the fire pit and rinsed off her hands. She went into the dark house. Her mom's door was closed. She changed her shirt and got her pack and walked back into the blinding sunlight and headed for the road.
"Going to the ruins?" her dad called.
She didn't turn around. She hiked up the middle of the asphalt, pushing herself, breathing hard. She didn't look back until the top of the hill. Back at the house, smoke rose from the fire pit, a small gray rope climbing up the sky. The alien ship waited in the bay. She looked at it and said the words that kept it from moving, then walked over the hill, keeping to the shade of the trees. She got to the mall, faltered, and kept walking, heading to Western, which didn't make sense, because it ran to the north. After a long, long climb, she looked down on the towers rising from the valley, high brown mountains strung out behind them. She walked until the sun set and then kept walking more.
She came home three days later. Her dad whirled from the kitchen counter, knife in hand. His eyes were baggy and wild.
"What happened to your face?"
"I had to fight a dog," she said.
He nodded as if he understood. "Well, are you ready to fish?"
"Ten minutes."
Her parents' door was still closed. Raina went to her room to change her socks and underwear and eat one of the overripe, half-sweet lemons sitting on her desk. She threw the peel in the pit outside her window and walked down to the pier.
The men came back a week later. Her dad made her stay inside while he walked down to the dock carrying two bags, one large and one small. He handed them to a sun-wizened woman and came back inside. Raina watched the crew shove off and continue up the coast.
"They'll be back every month," her dad said. "The first Sunday. I don't want you to talk to them."
"We should kill them."
He blinked at her, eyes wide in his deeply tanned face. "We can't."
"Why not? Don't they bleed?"
"Of course they do."
"Then we should make them."
His face hardened. For a moment, she thought he might agree. He shook his head. "All they want is a few fish. Some salt. Small price for peace."
Past the docks, a pelican folded its wings and plunged into the waves. Sunlight flashed from the ever-changing water. It was a beautiful day in Los Angeles.
* * *
Her mom's door opened three weeks later. Wordless, she came into the kitchen and sat at the table. Raina brought her tea from the kettle boiling on the wood stove. Finally, her mom smiled.
Days turned into weeks, weeks to months. The sailboat came every month and her dad brought the crew their bags of fish and salt. Raina watched from the window. Once, one of the sailors said something and her dad laughed. Raina went to her room and closed the door and put her face into her pillow and screamed.
She saw Martin every week or two. Just like everyone, he acted like nothing had happened. He didn't talk about it and neither did she. He had collected more of the light-stakes and tiled a board with their solar panels, but most of the time the radio didn't work, and even when it did, he heard nothing but static.
Five months after the men first landed at their dock, Raina finished scraping salt from one of the drying-tarps and went into the house for a drink. The dim kitchen smelled herbal and brackish. Her mother stood in front of the stove. Steam spouted from the kettle.
"What are you making?" Raina said.
Her mom's shoulders jumped. "Tea."
"Can I have some?"
She went still. "This is medicine. It would make you sick."
Raina frowned and made herself some Earl Gray from one of the dried old packets. They were almost out; she would have to scavenge soon. They should start growing their own. This dependence on the old homes was bad. The sailors were due to arrive that Sunday. Raina asked her dad if he wanted anything from the Home Depot, then took his list and her pack and hiked into the ruins. She found his screws and a spare ratchet set and went into the outdoor garden. Except for the cacti and some small yellow flowers, all the plants had died long ago, brown twigs sticking from the dried-out potter's soil. She searched every single rack of seed packets, but she didn't find any tea.
In case the men in the boat were still at the dock, she made her way home through the trees. A broken stick stuck from the roots of the magnolia. Raina shuffled through the crunchy carpet of broad, mustard-brown leaves. The soil around the stick was loose. She scraped it away with her knife. The flat of her blade snagged on something yielding. Too-small fingers curled in the shadow of the tree.
She pushed back the dirt and tamped it down with her shoe.
A new family moved into the house down the shore, a man and two women. At night, their voices drifted on the wind, giggling, shrieking in the surf. Raina scratched her symbol into the trunks of the trees between their house and her parents'; if they came this way at night and they meant bad things, Raina would wake up and be ready. It was the same symbol she'd carved into the pilings beneath the pier in the city, a circle bisected by a vertical line. It had kept her safe from scavengers and dogs. It hadn't warned her when her new parents came for her, but they were there to help, so it had stayed silent.
The year turned over to rain and fog and cold nights. After a few weeks, it got warm again, though she still needed a coat when she went out at night. A group of a dozen people came to the coast and settled up the hill in the big yellow house with the pillars and the reddish tile roof. Raina's dad went to see them and make sure they were good. Except for one shriveled old woman, they were all young and
lean and pretty.
"They don't know what the hell they're doing," her dad chuckled, shaking his head.
He went to see them again anyway, especially on the days when her mom closed herself in her room. He said they needed help, especially with the raiders on the boat, who had begun to ask for firewood and grain as well as their big bag of dried fish and their small bag of salt.
Her dad must not have given the young people good advice. The sailors tied at her father's dock, collected their tribute, then headed up the hill to the sprawling Spanish house. Gunshots crackled from the heights. Screams. Through the kitchen window, Raina watched the men come back to the dock. Trig and Holsen were smiling. The bald man with the beard toweled blood from his hands, a brooding look weighing down his eyebrows and mouth.
After they left, her father climbed up the hill and stayed with the young people for two hours. He came back with eyes so distant they looked like they could see past the end of the ocean. He sat on the dock and watched the birds, then came inside and went into his room without knocking on the closed door. Raina went into the trees to fetch the skull of the little blue shark they'd caught last summer. He didn't smell anymore, but she still called him Reek. She climbed up on the roof and set the skull against the chimney to watch over the house.
She went fishing with her father the next afternoon. When they finished, Raina walked past him on the dock and he hooked a finger into her collar and gave her a smile.
"I'm going to start making some trips soon," he said. "I'm going to need you to watch over your mother."
"Did the pirates kill all those people?"
"A couple." He shook his head. "If anyone comes, I want you to take her into the trees and hide. You're better at that than any of us."
"What if they still come for us?"
"Then you do whatever it takes."
She went to make sure her knife was sharp, but it always was. Her dad left three days later. An hour after the screen door banged, her parents' door squeaked.
"Do you want some tea?" her mom said.
"Sure."
Her mom crumbled brittle yellow newspapers and lit the stove and went to the old laundry room for one of the jugs of fresh water. She sat at the table and waited for the water to boil.
"You never told us how you did it," the woman said.
Raina looked up from her comic book. "Did what?"
"Survived."
She turned the page. "I don't remember."
"Really? But you were out there for over a year."
"All I remember is when you came to find me."
"That's incredible." Her mom gazed at the kettle. "You don't remember how you did it? How you made it day to day? Weren't you scared?"
"At first."
"Then what?"
Raina thought. "I changed."
Her mom leaned forward. "How?"
"I watched the things that scared me. The dogs and the night and the ocean. Then I watched how the cats jumped up where the dogs couldn't get them, and how the possums used the night to hunt in safety, and how the pelicans didn't fight the tide no matter how big the waves."
She gave Raina a funny look. "I thought you didn't remember."
"Only a little," Raina said. "When it was quiet and I was alone."
"You didn't let it get to you. You watched and you learned."
The kettle whistled. After a moment, her mom got up and took it from the stove.
After she finished her tea, she told her mom she was going for a walk, then got her snares from her room and headed to the hills. Once she got high enough and inland from the coast, the houses stopped dead, replaced by wild swaths of trees. She walked in the cool shade. At the first sign of tracks, she knelt and set a snare. She didn't go home until she'd prepped each one.
She washed the clothes, scrubbing out the sea salt and the dirt in the big orange bucket they kept out back, then hung them on the lines to dry in the wind. She busied the rest of the day sweeping the garage and the porches and scraping the boat and mopping its fish-grimy decks. Night came at last. Her mom kissed her goodnight and went to bed early. Raina waited half an hour, then pulled the screen from her window and dropped outside.
With her dad gone, she needed more than her symbols scratched in the trees to keep them safe. It wasn't the best time to ask the moon—it would be the evil eye tonight, the slanted half-moon glowering down from the clouds—but she had no other choice. And if the evil eye appreciated her courage, perhaps it would be the best time of all.
She ran up the hill toward the woods. The moon watched her every step, bathing her in silver suspicion. She ignored it for now. The trees swallowed her up, hiding her from the moon's disapproval. She stopped now and then to listen and make sure she wasn't being followed. Once, she heard the slow, quiet shuffle of a possum, but that was all.
Her first three snares were empty. The fourth held a rabbit. She was afraid it was already dead, but it had just struggled itself into exhaustion; when she reached for it, it jerked limply. She untied the snare from the shrub she'd anchored it to, grabbed the rabbit around the neck, and carried it to the clearing. Offering it in this way meant the moon would get the rabbit's spirit instead of her. She didn't like that. Not because she wanted it for herself; although rabbits could teach you to be swift and alert, she already had many. But she didn't trust what that thing in the sky would do with it.
Yet she had no choice. Under the judgment of the sky's angled eye, she cut the bunny's throat and showed its blood to the moon. In the dim light, the fluid was black. The rabbit gurgled but went still very soon. Raina watched the heavens. Thin clouds streamed in from the south, blinding the moon, but quickly dispersed. When the silvery eye reopened, it was watching Raina's enemies instead.
Its protection proved true; the men from the boat made no unexpected visits. Her dad came home safe, too, gifting her with a small bag of golden raisins. He left again a couple days later. It became routine. Once he left for a week straight. Raina climbed up on the roof and sat down next to Reek.
"Where do you think he's going?" she said. "Do you think he's trying to get away from us?"
Reek's bones grinned up at her, teeth as sharp as the day they had caught him. She wanted to throw him off the roof and jump on him, but he belonged to her. That wasn't how you treated your people. Your family. You had to look out for them even when they laughed at you. They were a part of you; when you hurt them, you hurt yourself.
Besides, Reek was the only shark she had. She might need him some day.
That afternoon, her mom asked her if she knew where to find wine. She did. She brought it back and the bottles disappeared one or two per day. Her mom asked about vodka and she brought it back in big plastic bottles with red labels. These took as long as a week to empty. Raina brought as many as she could find. When you needed something, you had to take all you could get before it went away.
She tried it herself one night, but it burnt her throat and left her gasping. Then she felt warm and had another drink. It was the end of winter, but the wind blew from the south, carrying warmth with it. Only the water was cold. She swam out past the shoreline where the waves were calm and felt the moonlight on her skin. The moon had grown fat, gorging itself on clouds until it was nearly full. It would be too bloated to care for her offerings right now. That's why it was most dangerous to hunt under its full light. But when it shrank away to nothing, that's when it was hungriest, too, and would guide you to your prey in exchange for a sip of the blood.
In the morning she felt awful. She drank more tea and left the house while her mom's door was still closed. A breeze followed her up the hill. Up top, she spied down on the house of the man with the two wives, but they weren't awake yet. Bottles glinted from their back yard. Way up north, the crashed ship still hadn't moved from its place off Venice Beach. She nodded to herself and continued to the mall.
She tried every store around it—the Ralph's, the Smart & Final, the Trader Joe's, the gas stations, the Pollo Loco—
but couldn't find any tea seeds. It didn't make any sense. How had they expected to get more tea when no one had any seeds? She knew there weren't any in the mall, because she knew everything there was to know in the mall, but she went to its plazas anyway, palms flapping overhead. She climbed the metal staircase to the walkway connecting the second-floor shops, scanned the parking garage for movement, then went inside the Macy's. Inside the airy hallway beyond it, she strolled between the squares of light, careful not to let it touch her, remembering how her father held her back while the men in the boat went inside the house.
She didn't hear Martin this time. He was learning. Even so, she saw his movement reflected in a store window, a thin boy who would never be tall. She crept behind the escalator, drew her knife, and waited. He turned the corner.
"Where does tea come from?" she said.
"Man!" Martin leapt back, flailing his arms in front of his face. "I thought I had you."
"Some day."
"Tea comes from China." He straightened, as if delivering a book report. "And India. Japan. All those places."
"Does it grow here?"
"This area is a Sunset Zone 23," he said. "Or 24? Whichever it is, everything grows here."
The air smelled dusty and warm. It would be hot today. "What zone is Catalina?"
"The island?" he said. "Well, all of it's coastal, and it's pretty hilly, so I'd bet it's just like here. Why?"
She stared at him until he looked away. She touched the lucky shell in her pocket. "Who are they?"
"The people from the boat?"
"Yeah."
"I'm not sure," he said slowly. "People started taking boats to Catalina as soon as the Panhandler hit. I think they thought it would be isolated. Within a couple weeks, my mom and I started to see fires." He gazed into the hollowed-out shoe store. "One time, a boat washed up down the shore. They'd tried to burn it but it had gone out. It was full of bodies."
She touched the handle of her knife. "No wonder they're so quick to hurt others. Their people were built by it."
"Well, you'd better get used to them. They annexed us."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 74