by Jeff Sweat
“He will,” Apple says. Lady can see his jaws working. He’s seen the bodies of those who’ve been forced to wander alone. Only the girls can accept an Exile, though, so he can’t say anything.
Lady sees Jemma’s mouth start to open, her shoulders tighten. She’s not sure why Jemma cares—they’ve rejected lots of Exiles in the past, and it hasn’t bothered her. Lady elbows her. “You can’t. You just gonna get more trouble.” Trina’s already mad at her for staying out, Lady heard. Heather shot her dirty looks after she walked in with Apple. Why make it worse?
“Do we accept him?” Trina says. Jemma’s mouth almost opens again.
“Do we accept him?” Trina says. It’s the third question, the last question, then the boy will die unwanted as he should be. The Angelenos have stayed strong by only taking the strong.
There’s no fear in the boy’s eyes, though, and Lady wonders if they’ve read him wrong. His eyes are filled with an almost lazy curiosity, and they alight on everyone in the Circle, touching faces and moving on.
Whatever happened out there today, Jemma doesn’t seem to care anymore. So when Trina says, “Exile from the Malibus, the Holy Wood people don’t accept—”
“I do. I accept you,” Jemma says. The rest is a clanging of Lady seconding the acceptance, of Trina shouting, of Apple squeezing Jemma’s waist—squeezing Jemma’s waist?—and through it all, the little Exile staring at Jemma without emotion.
Jemma, stepping on the world’s neck again. Lady is proud of her, even though she doesn’t know what it will cost them. “I hope you like trouble, puta,” Lady says, watching the Olders watching Jemma. “Cuz you just bought it.”
* * *
Jemma’s ribs move under his hand. Apple’s aware that she is speaking but feels it as a vibration under his fingertips and not a voice in his ears. Claiming the Exile. Saving a life. He smiles wide at that, at the good under the tough.
Until he sees Hyun tramping toward them through the Circle, Apple in his sights. Hyun’s cheeks puff out, building himself up for a fit. The leader of the Muscle. The Head. That’s the perfect name for Hyun, who has the biggest head in the Holy Wood, sitting on his shoulders like a sweaty egg. If there ever was a visible neck, Apple doesn’t remember it.
Hyun motions him away from the fire into the shadows, and Apple steps toward him at the closest speed to disrespect. He doesn’t want to leave Jemma. He catches her eye, though, and walks into the dark.
“You went past the Bear Wall,” Hyun says.
“I pass it every day,” Apple says.
“Nobody asked me.”
“Gatherer needs protecting, I protect her.”
“You heard Heather. One Muscle to five Gatherers. She wants to go off, you let her.”
“That ain’t safe.”
“You heard Heather.”
“Why you letting Heather tell the Muscle how much Muscle we use?” Apple says. “You the Head.”
Apple should have been the Head, until Pablo terrified the Olders with his rebellion. Anyone smart enough to do the job was ruled out after that because they were too big of a threat to the Olders, and Hyun was the most qualified idiot left.
“Yeah, I’m the Head. And I tell you this Muscle stays home if Heather says.” Hyun grabs Apple’s arm, and Apple remembers his one qualification. Hyun is strong, maybe stronger than Apple, even with a coat of fat and a chest like a girl’s. That he’s fat in a village where no one’s fat shows how good being the Head has been to him.
Apple brushes off the hand as if he weren’t really being held. “We got bigger problems than your boner for Heather,” he says. “The Last Lifers.”
“Stupid jwi,” Hyun says. It’s an old Koreno word for rat but means something else now. “They ain’t getting over the fence.”
“They changed. They got smart. They got a gun.” Apple remembers the way the Last Lifers ran in formation, the way they plotted to head him off—most important, the gun. None of that is like any Last Lifer pack he’s ever seen—usually they’re just a pile of crazy. But Last Lifers who can plan? That’s a danger.
“I ain’t believing that if I ain’t seen it.”
“Then you gotta see it.”
“Nah, I don’t,” Hyun says. “Heather says no.”
This time it’s Apple grabbing an arm and Hyun brushing it off. “This matters, pendeja,” Apple says.
He shouldn’t have called him that, because Hyun puffs up even bigger. “Oh, pendeja? Don’t you got some sentry work to do?”
“That’s for juniors,” Apple says.
“You a junior now,” Hyun says. “Ya lo cagaste.” You screwed it up, Apple.
Apple never cared about being passed over as Head of the Muscle until now, until he sees how vulnerable the Holy Wood is, from inside and out. He shouldn’t care. His time is Ending, right? No, that’s not right. Apple looks back over his shoulder and sees Jemma with Trina and Lady and the Exile.
The End is gonna have to wait.
* * *
The Exile seems untouched by the uproar he’s caused. The tribe flows around him like he’s a boulder in a flood.
As the only one who spoke, Jemma will have to introduce him to the Holy Wood. For the next thirty days, he will be her shadow. She’s not sure what she expected from him—gratitude, fear?—but she doesn’t get any of it as she approaches. He just watches her, and she doesn’t say anything for several long seconds. “You little for an Exile,” she finally says.
“Yeah, but my mouth is big,” he says.
“I believe that,” Lady says. “You got a name?”
“Pico.”
“From the Malibus, right?” Jemma asks. He nods, and she whispers the next question without intending to: “It true that someone lived?”
“Ah,” Pico says. “Only question worth asking. Yeah, it’s true. And I think I know why.”
Jemma feels the shock run through her chest, little tremors pushing into her lungs and stealing the breath. “We could live longer?” The picture Apple was holding settles in her head, and in it the two of them are now the Parents.
“Maybe. But not sure you’d want to.”
She’s shaking her head at that, at the stupidity of that, when Trina blows in like a dark cloud, trailing angry daggers of rain. “You!” Trina says, digging her fingers into Jemma’s arm. “You…!” she sputters again, but she runs out of words.
“What, Trina, what?” Jemma says, matching Trina’s anger.
“Accepting this Exile when you never cared about Exiles before. You messing with me?” Trina says.
“This ain’t got nothing to do with you!”
“Then what?”
“Ain’t gonna kill someone else today,” Jemma says. Softer than she meant.
“What?”
“I saw Andy today, me and Apple did,” she says, hearing her voice crack but unable to stop it. She meant to sound like a Muscle, a warrior. She doesn’t. Instead, she sounds like someone who had to kill a friend she loved, and that opens her insides to the world, raw and sad. “Me and Apple got chased into the Bowl by the Last Lifers. And one of em was Andy, and he tried to kill us, and I split his head.”
“Oh,” Trina says, and their argument is forgotten. She’s the Oldest again. She pulls Jemma to her chest and holds her there until Jemma finally feels herself stop sobbing.
Trina releases Jemma, gently pushes her toward Lady and the Exile. “Go to bed,” Trina says, but catches Jemma’s wrist. “We gotta talk, though. About the Mamas.”
Jemma sees Apple standing there watching them. She doesn’t know how long he’s been watching. She feels herself floating toward him, away from Trina and the others. “About the Mamas, sure,” she says. “It’s all about living, right?”
“About making babies, about keeping us alive as a people,” Trina says.
“I think it’s about live like you’re alive,” Jemma says.
Apple takes three steps, Jemma takes five, and she folds herself into him. His arms form a protective she
ll around her and she’s kissing him, kissing him hard, with everyone watching, and she doesn’t care.
In the Holy Wood, they want you to kiss, they want you to roll. Your whole life is meant for you to be a Mama, because making a baby will save the tribe. You don’t have to like someone to make a baby. But touching lips and brushing thighs, that’s one thing. This feels different. This feels as if they’re a whole.
Apple holds her face in his hands. “Jemma,” he says wonderingly.
“Why does it feel like this?” Jemma asks.
“It’s deep, it runs deep.” Apple points to the gaps in his teeth. “I earned these when I was a Tween, the day I learned it. Two Muscle was talking about you, and I told em I didn’t like it, and so…” He smiles.
She touches his lips, says, “It’s always been you, ain’t it?”
“It’s what the Parents—what the Parents called love,” Apple says. “But we don’t got time for love.”
Love. If that’s what it meant, then yes. If it meant being two halves of a circle, meant breathing the same breath, meant melting into each other’s hips. Maybe she could be a Mama and more than that. She would love like the Parents did.
“Jemma,” Apple says again. She sees smiles in the firelight, then the glare from Heather, the Older. Heather has never liked seeing Jemma with Apple. And even as Jemma pulls Apple tighter, she realizes: It’s not just that we don’t got time. We’re not brave enough. The most dangerous thing in this world is to love.
CHAPTER SIX
THE LONG WALL
Lady pushed Jemma hard—really pushed her, with her hands—after Apple left the Circle last night. “What’s your problem, Jemma?” she said. “You can’t tell me?”
“Which piece?” Jemma said. “Almost getting killed? Or kissing a boy?”
“Hell yeah, the boy,” Lady said. But she really means almost getting killed. Lady should have seen it, should have asked more. Jemma should have collapsed into Lady’s arms the second she walked through the gate. But she didn’t tell. Instead, she leaned on Apple.
On Apple. Who was at the edge all their lives, and now was in the middle.
Ah.
It’s no surprise to Lady that Apple likes Jemma. They’re good with each other, even though she’s pissed that Jemma didn’t tell her. The real surprise is that Jemma likes him back. She’s never admitted to Lady to liking a boy, nothing real, nothing more than weak Tweeny talk of rolling.
But yesterday Jemma moved as if the End were chasing her. Zee was dead. Andy was dead. It was time to become a Mama. Jemma whispered something as they argued last night, her chin tucked in to her chest. Lady couldn’t hear.
“Repeat it,” Lady said.
Jemma lifted her head. “We gotta live now, Lady. We all gone tomorrow.”
We all gone tomorrow. Life is always running out. That’s how Jemma sees it. As Lady combs the Holy Wood for Jemma this morning, she can see it, too. A pair of sixteen-year-olds walk through the village before her, but they don’t talk to the younger kids. The old kids don’t mix the way they did before. They cluster in groups of two and three, drawing back as if afraid to touch the life around them.
Some of them will slip away altogether, like Andy did. He was dancing in the Circle one night, and then he was gone, off to the Last Lifers. She’s found Last Lifers collapsed on the streets of Ell Aye, no one to light their body fires.
Lady shakes her curly hair, clearing the thoughts as if they’re hovering gnats. They don’t have a place in her head, because no one loves the Holy Wood, no one loves life, the way she does. Chasing through the streets, Gathering in the Parents’ houses, lazily kissing a boy in lemon-scented shade—it’s as if they created this life for her.
A Carpenter named Ricky steps away from the food sheds, carrying a potato roasted in coals. He won’t wait until it cools to eat it, so he bobbles it between his fingers while he licks his burning skin.
“You seen Jemma?” she says. He yelps and drops the potato.
“Tall one? Nah.” He leans over to pick up the potato, and she stops him.
“Use your head,” she says. She stabs it with a stick and hands it to him.
He just shrugs. “You wanna roll?”
“Help me find Jemma and maybe.”
She’s not really interested. He’s only thirteen, with a skinny body. Okay, maybe she’s interested. Maybe she’s always interested.
Lately she feels as if her skin is always tingling, as if her eyes are always wide, as if her breaths are always shallow. It’s all about the boys. It’s all about becoming a Mama.
Life running short? She feels as if she has enough life for the entire Holy Wood flowing through her fingertips.
Ricky doesn’t help her find Jemma, being the age where a hot potato still matters more to a boy than a kiss. So she leaves him behind and enters the Casa de las Casas.
The Casa de las Casas was the first house, the one where the First Mamas fled the End and the madness in Ell Aye below. It was the house where the Three Peoples—the Tinos, the Korenos, and the Whiteys—became the Holy Wood.
It echoes silent today, just her footsteps and the whisper of her fingers along the Long Wall. On the Long Wall are stories in pictures, drawn by each new batch of Children. Traveling its length takes her back in time to the First Mamas.
On her right, Lady sees the memories that are still fresh: the raw red lines of the Winter Fire that licked the hills right to the edge of the Holy Wood and burned down seven houses, the brown of the cabbage blight, black arrows of Pablo’s Rebellion.
The people change as she moves. The drawings are crude at first. With each step, the lines become clearer, the shapes more graceful as the pintadores get closer to the Parents’ time. The Long Gone pintadores could make pictures that practically breathed, but the Children lose the feel of the brushes with every new batch of kids.
The skin colors shift along with the shapes, from the dusty brown they all share now to shades of the Tinos, Korenos, and Whiteys, who used to hate one another but when the world was in trouble became one. She traces over the details of the first drawings with her fingers. A fold of skin over the corner of an eye, white skin with freckles, broad cheekbones, all gone now. Well, not gone—peeking out here and there among the Children of the Holy Wood. All one now.
The wall farthest away from the entrance is different, because there they used letters. She sees letters everywhere on her Gathers, but now they mean nothing. Whatever magic the Parents found in them, it’s gone. The only letter that matters is the aytch, the one that stands at the beginning of the Holy Wood sign and tells the people of the Holy Wood where they belong.
“Buddha Teevee Jesucristo,” she says, and whispers the other ones: “Mama. Dad.” They all add that whisper laced with longing, because what is a god next to a Parent?
Padres. Mamas. Parents. Fathers. Bumonim. So many words lost and still they have words for Parents.
Even in the Daycare they whispered about the real Mamas, the real Dads. Not the ones who made them, but the ones who could save them from the End. “Be good and the real Mama comes back,” they’d say. “Drop that stick or they’ll never come for you.” The priestesses who talk to the gods don’t talk like that, but they don’t have to. Some longings run deeper than churching.
“Catching up on your stories?” Trina emerges from what would have been the kitchen back in the Long Gone. Lady’s a little scared of Trina, and Lady’s not scared of anyone.
“Looking at the First Mamas,” Lady says.
“We wouldn’t be here right now, none of this would be here now—not if they hadn’t been brave,” Trina says. “They knew the need.”
Lady knows. That back then they used to wait to become Parents to roll, to make babies, and the First Mamas were the first to realize they’d have to roll younger in order for the Holy Wood to survive. But Trina seems to need to say it. So Lady just nods, and remembers why she came to the Casa de las Casas.
“Looking for Jemma,” she sa
ys.
“Walk with me,” Trina says. “This matters more.”
Instead of turning left to the lake when they leave the gates, they walk to the right until they reach one of the streets that snakes along between the Holy Wood sign and the Circle. It’s part of the Holy Wood, but no one lives there. It’s too far from the Circle. Lady and Jemma used to sit in a glass house, an old mocycle parked inside the house in front of the window, and pretend they were the old starlet priestesses they found in tattered magzines.
“People used to live up on this street,” Trina says. “My nanny in the Daycare used to.”
“Why’d they leave, then?”
“They didn’t need to live here no more. There’s enough space down by the Circle now.”
Lady doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know why Trina is saying what she’s saying.
“They didn’t need to live there cuz the Holy Wood has less and less people every year,” Trina says.
“We always been small,” Lady says. “Right?”
“We used to fill the houses of the Holy Wood. All the Holy Wood, not just the streets by the Circle,” Trina says. “You think that was all Parents down there?”
“I—”
“We getting smaller. There was nine hundred Children in the Holy Wood when my Mama was alive; now there are eight hundred. The numbers don’t work,” Trina says. “It takes two to make one. Sometimes a Mama has twins, sometimes she gets two babies in before she dies. But mostly they don’t.”
“Oh.” Lady sees it now. “What if we started Mamas younger than fifteen?”
“The Olders tried that once. You think we lose a lot of Mamas now? We lost a lot more then. Ain’t enough bodies ready to have babies.”
“Mine is,” she says, and she can feel it. She’s not even two months away from fifteen, and she’s ready. The way her stomach tightens when she’s with a boy, the feel of a baby in her arms. She’s ready.
“It is,” Trina says, looking at Lady’s body like the Farmer she used to be, looking at a goat. Lady feels no shame. “Those hips, you ain’t gonna lose no babies.”