Lydia be sitting next to this freesteader AB boy, reading a book. She crouch back on her heels even though her belly be eight months big and she should be sitting down for real. She want to show him pictures in the old mildewed thing she reading.
Lydia beautiful, even here in the low light of this death room. She in her own simple dress, made from homespun cotton, hair piled high in black braids on her head. She look like a queen. I be a scarecrow next to her.
She run a long-fingered hand across the boy’s forehead, leaving a trail in his sweat. His skin must’ve been as brown as hers once, but it yellow now and graying from his own bad blood. His eyes be glazed over and his arms and legs don’t bend the right way. He shudder like a puddle in a storm. She lean in to him and whisper the last line of the book. “‘And it was still hot.’”
The boy smile an ugly smile, lips peeling back from his face in a grimace. He nod and I see him try to say the words back to her. Lydia press a finger to his cracked lips. “Rest, Ezekiel. Rest.” The boy nod again and close his eyes. His chest be moving up and down. He ain’t dead yet, but he will be soon.
“Fen, what is it?” she ask me, rising slow, one hand on her back, the other on her round belly.
“Time to go,” I say. No use telling her she a fool for being here when she carrying a new life and her time be so close.
She don’t argue. “Powwow’s tonight,” she say, and I nod. Lydia got peace talks on the table with the O-Negs tonight. Plenty enough to worry over with that. No need to add a dying boy at the Market. She push back the black curtain and wave one of the nuns over. The woman glide up and kneel by the boy.
“The City takes,” the nun say, bowing her head.
“And God receives,” Lydia reply. The nun will stay. Someone to hold the boy’s hand when he do finally cross over. Lydia always make sure of things like that. Shepherd, that’s what she be. It no wonder I follow her out of the hospital tent and back into the light of day.
• • •
“Leaving!” I sing out when Lydia and me reach the gates of the Market. We nod at the guards flanking the entrance, and I signal Harney and his boys. We walk past the row houses with they rusted bits of ironwork. We past the preserved streets now, and it ain’t all picturesque like them old photographs at the library. The pavement be broken here, and I be glad I got me some new boots. That old smuggler be good for something, even if not for what I really need.
“You sure we ain’t got to go to the library?” I ask Lydia. There be a jerry-rigged computer there, run on a foot pedal and who know what else. Electricity be rare in Orleans, so most folks do without. But somebody keep that computer running, and Lydia use it sometimes to send messages over the Wall. She use the old e-mail system left behind back when the Wall first went up. When I been real little, I got to send e-mails, too, at Father John’s mission. But that a long time ago, when it looked like the Wall weren’t gonna be there always, and folks on the other side still cared enough to sponsor kids in Orleans. Now there just be the one machine, and only chieftains use it, contacting smugglers and looking to set up trades. Maybe one day, the old computer be gone, too. Then Orleans be on its own for true.
“With the powwow and the baby, all my concerns are here, Fen,” she tell me. “Orleans has got everything we need.”
A skitter of stones behind me say the boys be running to catch up. Good. They got to learn. Ain’t never a time to be fooling around at the Market. You in, you out. Just ’cause there be guards there don’t mean a problem can’t follow you home. Harney come jogging up all out of breath, but Erik and Matthias, they too young to know they should be tired from messing around in the sun all day. They skip ahead of us like a couple fool puppies. I grunt. See if I don’t talk to them about that later. We OPs. We got to act dignified, for Lydia’s sake.
“Let them be boys for a little while,” Lydia say to me, laughing. “Once a week is all they ever get; don’t let us be the ones that take it away.”
“All right,” I tell her. She the chieftain, so we do as she say. But if we don’t break them of that foolishness, someone else will. And they’ll keep on breaking them, too.
Even with they jumping and clowning, Harney and the boys keep pace with Lydia and me ’til we out of the Quarter, then out past the old cemeteries, St. Louis Number 1 and Number 2, and into the woods, where we separate like always. This time, I stay with Lydia. That baby got less than a month before it leave her belly. And I won’t let her out my sight ’til it do.
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