Broken Moon

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Broken Moon Page 15

by Sarah Beth Moore


  Now the only way to honor his memory is to complete the task he set before me, without letting doubts get in the way.

  I know he had the tendency to be quite … zealous.

  I shrug aside Achilles’ words, brushing my hair vigorously and pulling it back up into its usual ponytail. Turning my socks inside out, I pull them on with a shudder, then a camisole, tee shirt and pants. I put my boots on last, feeling almost normal as I straighten out.

  Walking back to my bedroll, I sit down gingerly with my knapsack in my lap. Reaching inside, I dig to the bottom and extract the small, leather-bound Bible. Its blue cover gleams dully up at me, letters glinting like seams of gold. Taking a deep breath, I open it, half expecting some explanatory message to have materialized on the first few pages. Their virgin whiteness mocks me. I flip to the first page of text, leaning close to squint at the tiny letters.

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

  Though I faithfully continue to scan the print for any hint as to my next move, my mind wanders almost immediately. I feel almost betrayed by my lack of interest: if at any point in the last several years someone had given me a Bible, I would have been ecstatic. Now I am just disappointed, confused. An hour passes, then two, three, as I slog through stories of gods and angels and women and men, none of it related to my mission or my life. None that I can see, anyway. The sun moves slowly across the sky as the afternoon wanes.

  “Find anything good?” Enoch flops down beside me, handing me a fresh canteen and a bag of mealy nuts.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. I flipped through it a couple times while you were out. It was all I could think to do while … well, anyway.” Something in his tone makes me look up at him, but he’s staring across the space, watching Pip dash from one end of the huge building to another. He scrapes each wall with his fingertips before turning and racing back across the wide expanse of concrete. “Got him running drills,” he adds.

  “Drills?”

  “Sure. Just like a Collector.”

  I smile. “I guess we did do a lot of that.”

  “We did.”

  “Where’d he get that new knife?”

  “Tate. She got you one too. We never found yours.”

  I close my eyes sadly. The knife was yet another gift from Papa. I wish I could tell Enoch I don’t want anything else from Tate, but he’d just argue with me.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I did look, but only briefly. There wasn’t much time.”

  “I know.”

  There is a long silence. Then, hesitantly, Enoch slides closer to me and puts his arm around my shoulder. My breath catches in my throat, and I keep my eyes steadfastly on Pip, hands clasped in my lap.

  “Look, Naiya,” he begins, then hesitates. “It seems weird, I know, but I trust Tate. She means well, I’m sure of it. If not for her, you’d be dead. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.”

  I focus on exhaling slowly, naturally, willing the flush from my face.

  “But she could never take your place,” Enoch finishes in a rush, as though he knows what’s bothering me and has thought long and hard about how to say this.

  I look at him. “No?” I desperately want him to say more, to say it’s not weird, to give me some scrap of hope to hang on to.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “She could never be a sister to me.”

  The air whooshes out of me all at once. Even without looking at him, I can see Enoch’s head turned toward me expectantly.

  “Right,” I mumble, with some difficulty. My voice rings in my ears. “You – you too.” He gives me an odd look, and I realize belatedly how little sense this makes. “I mean, you know. Thanks for saying that.”

  He nods, looking awkward. After a moment he withdraws his arm and we sit in silence. I pick up the Bible once more, and he flips open the cover of his power pack, but I get the sense that both of us are faking.

  I hear Tate before I see her, descending the stairs with a steadfast tread. Enoch, still looking awkward, unfolds and stands, leaning nonchalantly against a square column as though that’s where he’s been all along. For some reason this annoys me intensely.

  “So,” Tate says, her flat alto soundly oddly loud in the large space. “We need food.”

  She comes to a stop in front of the huge bank of windows, looking down on me intently, though no particular emotion registers on her face. She looks as she always looks, sour and entitled, standing there in her expensive leather jacket with her opinions. Against her slim form the sun is setting, lancing through the warehouse and setting dust motes aflame.

  “We’re doing okay,” Enoch says.

  “No, we aren’t. I didn’t bring enough for all of us,” Tate insists, her eyes flicking up to meet his. “And you’ve got almost nothing left. Now is as good a time as any, and she’ll need it. To heal.” She tilts her head toward me as though I’m not there, or unconscious.

  Enoch looks at me too. “We just can’t risk stealing it,” he says eventually. When I say nothing, they look at one another. The glance that passes between them tells me this is an ongoing discussion.

  “I’m not talking about anything we’d have to steal. I’m talking about the kind we can find ourselves.”

  “This area doesn’t have much,” Enoch told her. “I’ve been all over this part of the City, plenty of times. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find some old fruit. And that’s all the way over at the Painter’s Palace, which is where we’re going anyway. Besides, in case you didn’t know, that’s considered stealing as well. Technically.”

  “Well, I’m not talking about that kind either,” Tate says, waiting for the implication to sink in.

  “Not a good idea.” I rub my eyes tiredly. “What you’re talking about is hard to catch, and often belongs to someone. Either that, or it’s diseased.”

  Very few animals live in our City, aside from cats and dogs and those that dwell happily amongst human refuse. I’ve never thought of them as anything but friends, or minor nuisances.

  “And I’ve never killed anything,” Enoch adds doubtfully.

  “I have,” Tate says stolidly.

  I want to ask her how “finishing off” a guard counts as procuring a meal, but I don’t. Disagreeing on this point is tantamount to challenging Tate to bring back the first raccoon she manages to club to death with that baton.

  “What’s the big deal?” Tate continues. “What do you have those daggers for, anyway?”

  “Not for food,” I say shortly.

  “So branch out.”

  “Tate, it just isn’t practical. We’re not hunters.” I think of Achilles, feel a strong urge to pull out the communicator and call him up. Hey can you bring us some more venison? Sweet, thanks. Nope.

  “I’m aware,” Tate says. “But if you’re not hunters and you’re not stealers, you’re going to starve within the next few weeks. So what’s it going to be?”

  She’s right, of course. We’ll have to find food somewhere. We pretty much cleaned out the Cache, and can’t risk going back there anyway. We’ll have no luck foraging for food on the City floor or anywhere else inside its walls, as Tate surely knows. Stealing is really the only option, and she is merely the first person brave or stubborn enough to say it.

  “What are you suggesting?” I ask.

  “We have to make a raid on a dispensary.”

  “It’s way too dangerous, Tate,” Enoch says, sounding genuinely angry with her. This pleases me. Because I am a child, apparently.

  Enoch is in no way pleased, though. “How could we ever get away with it? I’d rather starve than get caught!” Judging by the force of his words, Tate hasn’t broached the subject quite this boldly before. My waking appears to be the catalyst.

  “You won’t get caught,” Tate insists. “I’ll go.”

  “They’ll be watching them!”

  “They can’t watch them al
l at once.”

  “Oh no? I’ll bet they can. How many are there, anyway?”

  “At the most recent count, there are 251 dispensaries serving 456,792 Citizens. Though since I last checked, 12 women were slated to give birth and I estimate 353 people have died,” Tate says.

  “O – okay,” Enoch says, looking a little startled. “Well, your odds still aren’t good.” He flushes, obviously aware that this is a poor recovery. With a pang, I realize how little we know about certain aspects of the City; since rescuing me eight years ago, Papa’s never subjected me to another food dispensary. The most I’ve ever done is walk past one, and only with my eyes averted. “What if you got caught?”

  Tate sighs, looking at Enoch as one might look at an obnoxious bug. “Better than waiting for food to appear.”

  “If you get killed … ” He trails off, looking flustered. It’s infuriating that her safety, rather than ours, is his biggest problem with this plan.

  “I won’t.”

  “Fine,” I say, unable to stomach Enoch’s anguished look for another second. “But if you bring them back with you, Tate, so help me – ”

  “I won’t,” she says again. “What’s it going to take for you to trust me?”

  “Do you have a time machine?”

  She stares at me levelly. Finally she says, “You need rest. I’ll meet you at the Painter’s Palace tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? How will you find us?”

  “I know where it is,” she says stiffly. “I’ve been there.”

  “What?” I say in surprise. I wouldn’t have thought a Party member would let his daughter go anywhere near the old citadel. “Really?”

  “Really,” she says levelly, bending to pick up her knapsack, already packed and cinched. “You don’t know everything about me, Naiya Barrigan.”

  “That’s the truth,” I agree.

  She turns and walks away without another word.

  SIXTEEN

  That night I insist on taking first watch, intending to let Enoch sleep until morning.

  “You’ll wake me at three o’clock, right?” he asks, sliding into his bedroll.

  “Of course,” I lie. I feel like I’ve slept enough for a lifetime.

  “You need sleep more than I do,” he warns, squinting at me suspiciously. “Tate says you won’t be fully healed for a few more days.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I can’t believe my bullet wound has almost fully disappeared in only four days. Thanks to the Party’s medicinal magic, no doubt.

  Enoch gives me a long look, but then shrugs, wriggling into the covers against the cold air. Here in the poorly insulated warehouse at the edge of the City, the fall nights are getting chilly. I wait until he’s asleep, then get up quietly, throwing my blanket over him and Pip. I’m not cold anyway; I haven’t been all day.

  In fact, I’m burning up. Since I woke up this afternoon, each flash of irritation or frustration sends an electric charge spinning down to the tips of my fingers. The conversations with Enoch and Tate seem to have intensified the feeling, and now every time I touch metal, I get a static shock.

  Reaching down to my belt, I find the buckle and press a finger to it, receiving a satisfying snap. It helps to cool me down, ground me out, like one of Papa’s projects. The why presses against the backs of my eyes, but I can’t deal with it right now.

  Idly I check the map on Enoch’s power pack, keeping it open as I wander over to the stairwell that leads above the space. I mount the stairs slowly. In the darkness my hand creates a slow shower of sparks as I run it along the cool metal railing. The pain is unpleasant, but less so every moment; by the top of the stairs my fingers feel numb rather than raw.

  The landing is a simple cement pad, only about ten feet long, cracked in places but still sturdy-looking. At the end, a door stands slightly ajar, its frosted glass obscuring the room beyond. I push it open slowly, gazing through the bank of windows into the warehouse, and through its wide panes at the bright Broken Moon.

  It occurs to me I could be making better use of my time, searching through the Bible, sharpening weapons, cleaning out my knapsack. But my mind feels fuzzy, and instead I merely move to the edge of the floor, right up against the moldy old glass, and stand there. Next to me is a desk, and on it a barely discernable photograph in a frame. The picture that no one came back for when the world ended. I pick it up, using my thumb to clean off the glass: a woman with two smiling children. I look for a long, long time.

  A light step comes from the stairway. Roused, I look over my shoulder at Enoch, who is walking quietly through the space.

  “I wanted you to sleep,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Three,” he smiles crookedly. “Just like you promised.”

  I’ve been up here for almost six hours. Slowly I realize that my legs are numb, my knees are locked, my eyes itch. Enoch’s gaze moves surreptitiously to my hand, and I place it hastily down on the desk.

  “Go to bed, Naiya.”

  “I’m not really that tired.”

  “Come on,” he ignores me, leading me gently back down the stairs by my elbow, as if I might turn and bolt. Lacking the energy to resist, I lay on the blankets. Enoch reaches down, trying to cover me, but I wave him away. “I’m hot.”

  “Okay,” he says resignedly. The tone makes me want to cry; before the last week, Enoch and I seldom fought. Now it seems we’re always at odds, in one way or another.

  But then, isn’t that how siblings are? My mouth twists with despair and self-loathing, and I shut my eyes as though to shut out my thoughts. Surprisingly, it works, and my mind goes blissfully blank. Within moments I’m asleep.

  In the dream I walk alone on a grassy hilltop. I inhale the scent of clean air, gaze up at a full, white, pearly, unbroken moon, and wait for the rest: the flitting shapes, the swirling ground.

  Instead, the horizon begins to fade, first to blue and then a deep indigo. Clouds roll over the sky, and the grass darkens to a sludgy, poisonous mass beneath my feet. Only then does the ground begin to move, sodden patches forming eddies through which I can see the world below. The lights of the Cities are, today, muted. As I watch they blink out one by one, until everything below and above is ugly and black and dead.

  Lost in horror, I don’t see the guard until she is upon me, her silver knife whistling through the air. Its brightness catches my eye and I try to duck out of the way, but am not fast enough. Before I even begin to move, her blade has done its deadly work, burying itself to the hilt in my throat. I wait to die, but feel instead only a burning heat in my hands. Looking down, I am almost blinded by the purple fire that flickers in each, coating my palms with silver licks of flame.

  What is this? I think in wonder, turning them over to see perfectly ordinary-looking knuckles, wrists, arms. Belatedly, I remember the guard, cringing instinctively as I seek her out. Far from dangerous, she is standing a few feet away, the knife at her feet. Her weapons belt and metal vest, her spiked boots and even the lithe, dangerous muscles have all fallen away, leaving a black-haired woman who looks at me with calm, kind, compassionate eyes. They burn with an unearthly fire, but it is not red. It is violet.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  But she merely smiles, holding a hand up in front of her heart, palm facing outward. It burns with the same silvery sheen as mine.

  With I gasp I wake, sitting straight up in bed to find Enoch looking at me quizzically. We share a long look, the faint tinge of dawn just beginning to lighten our faces. Then I turn away and lay back down.

  * * * * *

  When my eyes open once more, the large building is flooded with sunlight. I sit up slowly, marveling at the continued good weather. It usually begins to rain again sometime in September.

  I stretch, throwing off blankets that have mysteriously reappeared in the night. I’m sweating all over. Disgusted, I remove my tee shirt, wearing nothing but a camisole.

  “Hungry?” Enoch asks, coming to
sit next to me. Pip has crept to the bed as well, sitting quietly. I nod, and he passes us both a cup of thin tea and a slice of bread with a scant serving of cheese. It’s not much, but it could be nothing. At least the streams of the Lower City, making their ceaseless journey toward the coast, keep us well-supplied with water, even if here it is a little cloudy.

  “Will it be a long walk today?” Pip asks.

  “Yeah,” Enoch tells him. “But you’ll do great.”

  “I know,” the little boy grins. “I’ve been practicing. Did you see me, Naiya?”

  “I saw you,” I smile, finishing my bread. “You were great.”

  “You think I could be a real Collector?”

  “Nope.”

  “No?” He looks crestfallen.

  “I don’t think it. I know it.”

  “You tricked me!”

  I laugh, a sensation that’s growing increasingly novel. “I try.”

  “So will we see anything at the Painter’s Palace?” Pip asks animatedly. It’s good to see he’s starting to bounce back.

  “Not if we don’t get going,” Enoch says, suddenly brisk. Hoisting our packs onto our shoulders, we exit the warehouse and head west along the Wall, walking slowly for my sake. For the first few hours we talk quietly, mostly Pip and I. Despite his stamina, he slows by midafternoon, and Enoch picks him up, carrying him like a much younger child. Though a few months ago he would have found it humiliating, today Pip curls up and falls asleep. As always, he seems perfectly harmless with his eyes closed.

  It’s impossible to tell where he ends and the monster begins.

  Wanting to banish the thought, I switch my gaze to Enoch. He looks sad, but peaceful. He’s always preferred movement to anything else. I wish I could tell him about the guards, about what’s happening to me, but something stops the words from coming. I’ve never been a killer, and don’t want him to see me as one now. Papa wouldn’t have liked it, and neither will his son.

  “I had a strange dream last night,” I murmur, opting for a safer subject.

  “Seemed like it,” he comments, looking over at me. As always, his green eyes seem to hold more than he’s saying. He watches me closely as I recount the dream, nodding. He waits to be sure I’m finished before opening his mouth, but all that comes out is “Strange.”

 

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