The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Well, go on in. Ladies first,” Randall said.

  The others looked up at her with relief, then curiosity. Edie turned her gaze to the floor, afraid of what her expression might give away or what their expressions might set loose in her.

  Randall slung the cooler back up on the table with a grunt. “H-2-0,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

  Violet hadn’t followed them inside. When Randall left, the door closed, and the OLE travelers were once again alone. Edie saw that supper had arrived in her absence. A platter of tough-looking pieces of meat. More beans and potatoes.

  Edie sat by the door and peeled off her muddy socks. No way to clean them. Her bare feet were cold and shriveled, and she drew them together and grabbed her toes, feeling the question no one had quite yet dared to ask: What happened?

  Finally: “Are you OK?” Wes.

  She nodded mutely.

  “Did something happen? Did she hurt you?”

  “No,” she said. “She didn’t hurt me. But—” She swallowed, her throat tacky and dry. “She told me some things. I don’t want to be the one to say this. I guess I’ve got no choice, though.”

  “What?” said Ken. “Say it.”

  She looked up at Berto. He seemed genuinely baffled.

  “She said the others are dead. Anastasia, Wendy, Lee. Jesse.” Her breath hitched. “She said that June sent them to a part of the Wall where she knew they’d probably be shot on sight, and they were.”

  “Bullshit,” Berto said. “You believed her? Why would you believe her? She’s the one who shot Mickey. She’s obviously some kind of psychopath.” He was shaking his head fiercely, and he got up and started to pace. Ken stared ahead, expressionless. Marta scooted forward and grasped Edie around her shoulder, then pulled her close. Edie turned her head by instinct, some muscle memory from earliest childhood, and hid her eyes against Marta’s soft neck. It felt wonderful. Wonderful to be held, wonderful to finally let go, and she did, and Marta rocked her a little, humming and rubbing circles on Edie’s back, and she whispered, “I know. I know. I know.”

  “Bullshit!” Berto said, getting loud now, and Marta said, not raising her own voice, “You need to stop. I know you’re hurting. But you need to stop before that man out there hears you.”

  “What do I care if he hears?”

  “Stop,” Marta repeated with gentle firmness.

  He did. When Edie pulled back, she saw that his eyes were streaming, chest heaving, the planes of his face cut with anguish.

  “Thank you, Berto,” Marta said. “Thank you. OK, Edie. Listen to me. Tell us everything she said.”

  “She said—she said that June’s going to come to you tomorrow.” Edie said this to Marta. “And maybe also Wes, but you specifically. You’re going to go to a house they have near the Wall. She’s going to have you contact your husband and make him some kind of offer. She said your husband is someone important. Does that make sense to you, Marta? Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  Marta exchanged a glance with Wes, then nodded.

  “She said that you need to demand that we all go. Say you won’t do it if we’re separated. If she threatens you, stick to your guns. She said June will give in because you’re too important.”

  “OK,” Marta said. “What then?”

  Edie relayed Violet’s instructions, though there wasn’t much to them, nor were there many reassurances. I don’t know how many guards there’ll be, Violet had said. It’s going to be dangerous, no matter what. And I don’t want June killed. Whatever else happens, I won’t see her hurt.

  “Why is she going to help us?” Wes asked. “She’s pretty much this woman’s daughter, isn’t she? What’s her angle?”

  “She’s pregnant,” Edie said. She turned to Berto. “She’s pregnant and she wants to have the baby in-zone. She wants us to get her across the border with us.”

  Berto laughed sharply. “Wait a minute. Didn’t you just say people going up to the Wall get shot on sight?”

  “I asked her about that, of course,” Edie said. “And the truth is, she doesn’t know for sure. She said there are some other entry points. Some other things she knows we can try. But she was pretty straight that she couldn’t guarantee anything. It’s a risk.”

  “It’s more than a risk,” Berto said.

  “But what choice do we have?” asked Ken.

  The five sat contemplating that question in silence.

  —

  That night, after a meager dinner that she all but choked down, and more talking and planning (and fretting) with the others, Edie stole to her pallet to be alone. It was too dark to read; she didn’t think she’d be able to focus on the story, anyway, though she had not, despite everything, stopped longing to know what would happen to Anne Elliott in her long-ago time so different from Edie’s own.

  Marta had given her not just a spare pair of socks but a fresh, unworn pair, still wrapped in its little cardboard sleeve with the Canteen logo. “I was saving these for a day when I really needed a pick-me-up,” she had said, smiling a little. “I think today’s the day.”

  Edie took them, lifted them to her nose. Unblemished cotton. A hint of the perfume Marta must have been wearing the day she bought them. Edie was probably supposed to argue with Marta, try to give back this gift, but she didn’t have the energy. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Try to get some sleep tonight.”

  She lay back now, slid her finger under the lip of the cardboard sleeve. The glue separated with a satisfying little rasp. She unfolded the socks. It was a shame, in a way, to sully them on her disgusting, unwashed feet. Nonetheless, she rolled one up over her toes, heel, ankle. She could just about melt with the pleasure of it. Then the other foot. These were the socks, she promised herself, that she was going to find her way home in. It was a comforting thought.

  She allowed herself, then, to think about Jesse. She was an old hat now at grief, but this was a different sort of grieving than she’d done—was still doing—for her mother. That was the grief of the routine, the everyday, grief that leveled Edie as she toweled a dish dry or when she caught the scent of honeysuckle on an evening walk. This grief for Jesse was the grief of mystery, of having the story suddenly halt but not really end. Would they have stayed together? Married? Would they have chosen one day to have a child, a child conceived not in self-destructive anguish but love? She would never know now. She’d never see his slim hands pick out another song on the guitar. She’d never rake her fingertips through the dark curls on the nape of his neck, or bristle at his insecure bluster, or groaningly cover her head with a pillow when he cued up his tablet in the dark of night, writing down the dream gibberish that may or may not eventually become a song.

  She was restless, not sleepy at all, so by feel she packed what was left of her belongings, sliding the book into the bag, too. There was no way to know what would happen tomorrow, where she’d finish the day, how much living she had left to do. But she’d like, if possible, to finish Persuasion before her time was up.

  Nineteen

  They loaded, as they’d done a couple of weeks ago, in two vehicles: June, Violet, Randall, Edie, and Berto in the lead car; Joe, Andy, Marta, Wes, and Ken following behind. The hostages, once again, were zip-tied, and June didn’t bother to offer an explanation, make an excuse. Marta, wrists chafing against the neon orange plastic, view obscured by a blindfold, passed the time by imagining a zip-tie general store: Ruby City Old Country Zip Ties. After today, God willing, she would never again wear a zip tie.

  What would her boys think if they could see her now? Would they be scared for her? Proud of her? They’d not yet grown into the men she hoped they’d be. They were spoiled, no doubt about it, and Sal had picked up on his father’s habit of speaking to her with harsh impatience, and Enzo—maybe this was a consequence of being the younger twin?—had a frustrating vagueness, a lack of init
iative or direction about everything from what he wanted to eat (“I don’t know, Ma, anything’s fine”) to what he wanted to do with his life (“I don’t know, Ma, anything’s fine”). But they were hers. She loved them. She would love them no matter what they did or who they became, and yet she also believed that goodness resided in each of them, and someday, perhaps, she would help them access that goodness. If Marta could make it through this experience, then she had the courage to face her husband, and she could finish the work of raising her boys to be decent men.

  It had not been as hard as she’d feared it would be to convince June to bring all of the hostages along. “The only way I’m going to be certain they’re OK is if they’re in my sight,” she’d said this morning, after June came to her with news of the journey east to contact David, exactly as Violet had told Edie she would.

  “What if we just bring Feingold? Will that be enough?” June asked. “I hate to take two cars. Gas is precious for us out here.”

  “No,” Marta said. “We all go, or I don’t go.”

  June had stared at her for a silent few seconds that felt like much longer, probably biting back some threat that she really didn’t have to make, flanked as she was by armed guards. In the end, she shrugged. “Fine. Violet, let’s bring Joe and Randall, too. Will you go get them?”

  “Anyone else?” Violet had asked.

  “No. I think five and five should be safe enough. We’re all friends here.”

  Yes, a guard for every hostage certainly seemed safe enough, especially when each of those guards was toting a semiautomatic rifle. Marta, contemplating this, hoped that Violet knew what she was doing, because she certainly didn’t know the group she was depending upon to execute her plan. Berto—well, he was strong enough, and his grief could maybe be channeled into a useful rage, but for now Marta just hoped that he wasn’t in the lead car sobbing, as he’d done throughout most of last night. Ken, to her right, was bouncing his leg so hard that Marta kept having to touch his thigh in a friendly(ish) stopping gesture. He would stiffen, stop—and then, a few minutes later, start again.

  The car slowed and veered right—Marta was pushed into Wes—accelerated, slowed again, and swung left, pushing her into Ken. Then the terrain got very bumpy. She lifted her bound hands to tweeze the bridge of her nose, fighting the rise of her gorge, and Andy snapped from the front passenger seat, “Don’t touch your blindfold! I see you back there.”

  She dropped her hands back to her lap. “I wasn’t—I’m sorry.”

  Wes’s shoulder pressed into hers. She returned the gesture. Please let him get through this, she thought. This dear, extraordinary young man. Please let him be safe.

  An endless time later, during which the terrain seemed only to worsen and worsen, the vehicle slowed again, made another left, then twisted and turned uphill enough times that Marta lost any remaining sense she had of the shape of their travels. Soon gravel was grinding under their wheels.

  “Almost there,” Joe said.

  And finally, the car stopped. The engine died. Marta waited.

  “You can come out of your blindfolds now,” Andy said.

  She pulled hers off and squinted against the sudden brightness of the day. When her eyes adjusted, she peered out Wes’s window, then Ken’s. They were parked in front of a ranch house with boarded-over windows and faded tan siding. It sat atop a little rise, on a clearing skirted in pine trees. The other car was parked ahead of them, the doors already open and passengers climbing out. Joe and Andy exited, then opened Wes’s and Ken’s doors. Marta scooted out after Wes.

  “Go stand over there,” Joe said. He waved with his rifle stock at Berto and Edie, who were leaning against the front of the house. Marta, Wes, and Ken did as he said. Violet seemed to be the one tasked with watching the hostages while June ordered the men around, and Marta studied her carefully, hoping for some look or signal or sign of reassurance—a reminder, now that she was behind a gun, that she remembered whose side she was really on—but she wore the same stony expression she always had. It was enough to make you doubt, well, everything. Even Edie. Maybe she’d misunderstood. Confused something Violet said. Maybe Violet was manipulating them, testing them, setting them up—

  June strolled over. “This is a little satellite of ours. We’re close enough to the Wall here to be able to scan feeds from in-zone. Andy, get the door, would you?”

  Andy popped the padlock.

  “Let Randall through first. He has his hands full.”

  Randall, arms straining with the weight of a large square plastic cooler, said, “Where you want this?”

  “Kitchen,” said June. “Through the door and to your right.”

  So Randall had never been here before, Marta noted.

  Violet followed, then the hostages. June, Andy, and Joe brought up the rear. Marta, entering the dark living room, took in its contents with surprise. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this—especially that huge 3D display playing the waterfall animation. How in the world had they gotten that kind of technology out here? Those monitors went for ten thousand credits in-zone.

  “First we eat,” June said. “Then we get down to business. Sound good?”

  Knowing what she knew now about June, Marta was more disgusted than ever with June’s little shows of joviality. She didn’t bother to react. She accepted her sandwich with her bound hands and dropped down on the ladder-back chair Violet indicated. The sandwich was folded in a faded, almost transparent square of cotton: some of the excellent Ruby City sourdough (though she’d had enough of it in the last couple of weeks that she was sick of it), a salty slice of ham, some bitter greens. The usual fare. They were all given a couple of skins of water to share.

  Marta, chewing through a pasty bite, found herself staring at Violet. Yes, there might have been a thickening around her middle—hard to make out, given the baggy local uniform. If Edie had told her anything else about Violet’s motives—that she wanted revenge on June, that she wanted in-zone to get her face worked on, that she simply wanted to see how the other half lived—Marta probably wouldn’t have believed it. A baby, though: that she bought. When Marta was pregnant, she’d read in one of her baby books that DNA from the fetus could migrate back into its mother, so that the mother didn’t just carry her child, she became changed by him—or, in Marta’s case, them. Pregnant, she had merely seen this as interesting trivia. In the years after Sal’s and Enzo’s birth, however, she’d come to understand both the wonder and horror of such a concept. She had felt the impact of that reprogramming. It called her home even now, even if home meant returning to David, his mansion, his rules, his rule. If she could make it over to London, or get the boys back from London, she’d have some options. Until that time, she had only the one.

  Violet, perhaps, was also answering a call.

  As if hearing this thought, Violet looked over at Marta, piercing her with that bright blue eye. The look lasted only a second, but Marta’s doubts dispelled. They were in this—whatever this turned out to be—together.

  “OK, it’s time,” June said. “Let’s make the call.”

  —

  Things got to a rather humdrum start with an argument over technology. Joe and Andy disagreed about the best way to transmit information through the feeds without being traced. Andy wanted to ping off an IP in Gulf Zone, then worm through a back channel in the dark web; Joe wanted to “hitchhike” on an automatic signal burst from the Lenoir substation. They also disagreed about how to best set up the TI Dimension-Tech display and cameras before at last remembering that one of the cofounders of Tanaka Industries was in fact stowed on a nearby couch, and then Ken, offering the caveat that his sister had been the product engineer (a slip of tense that the Ruby citizens seemed, thankfully, to have missed), gave them his recommendations, which seemed to satisfy them and settle the matter.

  Andy consulted a nearby laptop screen. “
Looks good,” he told June.

  At last Marta was positioned within the wings of the display, so that her field of vision was occupied by app icons and the waterfall wallpaper, and the conversations happening behind her were muffled with the soft roar of churning water. Andy snipped the zip tie binding her wrists.

  “You ever used a display like this?”

  “Not much,” Marta admitted.

  “Your script will appear on screen. The adaptive software’s good,” Andy said, “so the text document will adjust to your vision, and you can look beyond it to see your husband if you want to make eye contact or whatever. Try to stick to the talking points. If you’re not sure about what to say, ask June. The big no-no is anything about Ruby City: what we’ve got, how many we are, hints about where we’re located, or where this house is located. If you start trying to be sneaky, if you start saying stuff to him we don’t understand, we’ll have to stop you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” Marta said. Yes, his meaning was perfectly clear.

  “And you say he always answers calls?”

  “In my experience, yes.”

  “We’ve labeled the trace-code Marta Severs, so that should create some urgency. You ready?”

  Marta craned her neck around so she could see her captors, her fellow prisoners, the cramped, dark room where the rest of this would play out. Wes, seated in a recliner by what had been the fireplace, lifted his hands in a little wave.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Andy typed in the trace-code Marta had given him—the one that went to David’s most private line (or at least the most private one she had been allowed to know about). The waterfall desktop vanished; in its place, an animated fishing pole cast out a line toward a distant vanishing point, splashed softly, tugged, and then reeled in, accompanied by the appropriate winding sound effect. Marta’s heart beat harder as the sound grew louder, and the animated spool fattened with line. A beautiful big fish burst out of glassy water and flapped on a bright golden hook.