They began walking again side by side. As they did, one slow step after another, Petra slipped her arm in Kendra’s. “My son loves you so very much. You can see it just coming off of him. Do you believe it?”
“Believe what?”
“That he loves you?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know.” Petra gave an almost indiscernible shrug. “You can’t prove such things, after all.”
CHAPTER 23
A month later the bony finger of winter had dug itself deeper into the outcasts’ ribs. The wind blew hard and raw across their provisional town. The snow piled up thick on the north-facing parts and made the level site feel uneven and uphill. After a while, red-cheeked and exhausted, people stopped trying to keep lanes clear and stayed indoors to wait for some kind of thaw. Food stocks brought from the city during their exodus, already low, were now facing rationing. A fever plague had burst through the camp to baffle their doctors. Too many had been buried in their blankets under piles of stone on the unrelenting frozen ground. The survivors were weary with an exhaustion that was more than physical. Even the younger and more energetic outcasts felt as if everyone’s lot was just beyond enduring, each load a pound or two too heavy, each ration of happiness lacking that particular ingredient that would make it true joy. A single thought held sway: enough, no more.
Still, a few joys were had among them. Four hale and hearty children were born to Seconds. Eight couples announced betrothals with marriages planned in the spring. Petra had expected a similar announcement to come from her son and Kendra, especially after it became clear that they were sleeping in the same bed each night. But no announcement came, and no explanation for their relationship was given.
Many Remnants were mortified. Petra tried to explain to them how it was like marriages of old. Theirs was a pledge made to each other in the sight of God in his wilderness. It wasn’t carnal, but a commitment formed by the circumstances and challenges they faced together in primordial isolation. The elders, she felt, needed to understand that.
She also knew such talk was to be expected. How many idiotic words had passed among them in the last month? A hundred thousand? A million? And what percentage of them were joyful and without malice? What percentage perfunctory? And how many things were left unsaid? If the bean counters among the Remnants were really counting sins, none could say any of them had been very charitable in even the most general sense.
Petra spent the morning wandering along some mountain paths, deep in reflection. The day had come on sharp and clear and cold. The thin and frosty air at this altitude was purifying and had to be pulled in deep. It made her feel at ease, as did the wide-open landscapes of snowcapped mountaintop groves of evergreens. Her prayers and meditations since sunup were all focused on material concerns—food and water and medicines. But these problems were only a symptom of a greater illness. If they didn’t find some relief soon, there would be an attack on the city. She was sure of it. The talk was there—and propped up by hunger and desperation. They had come so far in the last fifty years. To kill one another over scraps of bread . . .
Most of the talk was coming from the youngest generation. And while her voice had been influential, she knew it wasn’t what it had been, especially among them. Too much of this life had gotten between her message and her audience. There was a lack there, not of faith but of trust. And if you wouldn’t trust the messenger, how could the message, however pure and pacifistic, get through?
The bare trees around her swayed in the wind. A sprinkle of snow swept off the branches above before coming to rest on some rocks near her. She went toward them, her heels crunching the fresh pack of snow in the stillness of the forest. The snow had been warmed by its flight and had begun to melt on the rocks. She loved it so. It was all such endless beauty, right there. Even though she knew the snow, and the cold, was bringing death with it, she found it hard not to be overwhelmed by its purifying grace.
Grace. She looked to the sky and wondered what her mentor thought of her now. A married woman living without her husband. A preacher whose own son ignored the sanctity of marriage. A believer whose faith was battered by facts and weakened by doubt. She thought of paying a visit to Grace’s son or daughter, who were both here among the outcasts. Through their eyes she might glimpse her old friend and perhaps know what she might have thought. She snorted at the idea of needing such a physical lifeline. So faithless. No wonder no one listened to her anymore. No one should. They needed someone far better than her. But there was no one.
And yet—and yet—some of the greatest figures in history only became saints after emerging from the midst of their own depravity.
“Thank you,” Petra said to the sky and the wind and the trees, and watched her frozen breath join the rest of nature. And with that she walked back to their rough scrap of civilization.
Kendra was warm in her bed when she felt the first hint of the morning chill on her bare skin as John slipped as unobtrusively as he could from under their pile of blankets. She watched him through slitted eyes as the first snap of cold air hit his lungs and he slipped back into the clothes he had tossed on the floor the night before. He kept his slim back to her until he pulled on his thermal undershirt. He stepped toward their stone hearth and lifted the percolator coffeepot, shook last night’s cold contents twice, decided there was enough there, and rekindled the coals.
Kendra kept her eyes half-closed and her breathing steady. She didn’t want him to know she was awake. His mind was struggling with something, and she knew he didn’t need an audience. Still, she did want him back in bed with her. Their morning routine these days never included shaking coffeepots or getting dressed. After a while she thought she had figured out what was troubling him and decided there wasn’t any point in keeping up her pretense.
“So ask me,” she said with a sleep-clogged voice. “Better hurry if you’re gonna do it. Life doesn’t last forever.”
He turned and smiled, his face broad and showing he hadn’t known she was awake. “Ask you what?”
“Ask what you’ve been wanting to ask me.”
“You’ll say no. You’ll think it’s a bad idea.”
She found herself grinning wide. “You’re not gonna know unless you ask, right?”
“Things have changed.”
“Not between us.”
“No, Ken. But things have changed. We’re not sure of anything anymore.”
“I’m sure of you.” She sat up before she said this, knees up, blanket wrapped around her chest. He was sitting on the edge of the bed now. Goose bumps rose on her forearms, but she wasn’t sure if the chill was causing them.
“And I’m sure of you. But is that enough? Do we go through a ritual without complete faith?”
“You don’t think it’s right what we’re doing now, do you, Johnny?”
“No. I guess I don’t. But is that just a reflex?”
“You’ve got a better understanding of right and wrong than anyone I know.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re kinda my moral compass.”
He laughed, chin down, and squeezed her thigh. “I could say the same about you. So will you?”
She laughed too. “Do you even have to ask?”
“And here I was thinking that my needing to ask was what had started this conversation.”
A clear knock at the cabin door interrupted them. Kendra let out a groan and lunged over the side of the bed to grab her clothes as John went to answer it. On the other side, Petra was waiting patiently.
“May I come in?”
“Sure, Mom.” He held the door open. In a one-room cabin there wasn’t much place to hide a half-dressed Kendra shimmying into her uniform pants.
“Kendra,” Petra said as she moved toward a chair by the hearth, “good morning.”
“Good morning, Petra.” Kendra bit her lower lip while giving John a wide-eyed look behind his mother’s back.
After an offer of coffee had been extended and accepted, Pet
ra sat watching as the pot started to percolate on the grill. “I’ve come to discuss a matter with both of you.” Petra turned to them, her green eyes catching the warm light from the hearth’s fire, her face wan and weary. “I’ve given considerable thought to what we’ve been hearing around our camp. And I’ve come to believe that we need to do something to prevent such talk from getting out of hand.”
“Petra,” Kendra began.
“Look, Mom, we—”
Petra glanced from one to the other. “We will go to war with those left behind in the city if we don’t do something to stop such talk.”
A burst of laughter erupted from John. “That’s what you came here to talk about?”
“What else could be more desperate?”
“What would you have us do?” Kendra asked with relief as she poured each of them a strong cup of coffee.
“Talk to your generation,” she answered. “The ones here—they still have faith. Otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen to come into exile with us. Have them listen to reason.”
John scratched his earlobe. “To many of them, reason is going back to the city and fighting their way in if need be.”
“That’s not reason; that’s their stomachs talking.”
“Still justification enough, Mom.”
“Justification?” Petra set her mug down on the table nearby. “What justice can be found in children fighting parents, in siblings warring over salted meat and blankets? There’s nothing in that except the old thinking, acting like beasts. That’s the thinking that led us down the path from where our race was meant to be.”
“And you know that how, Petra?”
“Ken, please.”
“No, John.” She turned back to his mother. “How do you know that? Did God tell you? Did you get specific instructions from a burning bush or from a finger writing on your wall? How do you know that fighting our way back into the city isn’t the right thing to do?”
Kendra watched Petra contemplate her for a time with a seemingly profound sadness.
“I know you’ve been troubled, Kendra. But your troubles cannot excuse the idea that murder is ever justified. And that’s what we’re talking about here—not fighting for survival against Hostiles or predators, but premeditated murder on a separated part of our own people, members of our own family.”
“Mom,” John said after a long time, “I agree with you that this kind of talk isn’t the best answer. But more talk, more preaching and evangelizing to our disheartened people, isn’t the solution either.”
“So what should we do, then?”
John folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head. “Not sure. But I’m pretty sure that seeing the general might help.”
Kendra shook her head, eyes wide. “You’re both insane. Whether we uphold principles won’t matter one bit if we all damn well die out here.”
“You’re wrong, Ken.”
“Tell me how I’m wrong.”
“Staying true to ourselves in a world that’s always trying to make us less than what we are is everything. It’s the only thing. What we really are or however we got here, how we live here and now is all that matters.”
The Weiss brothers still walked together when they needed to talk. It felt good to do something familiar, despite their changed circumstances and the difficulty two aging men had walking in foot-deep snow. As they walked they often found themselves talking in hushed tones in the woods. An outside observer would never be able to tell why, but it was clear that a greater affection was emerging between them as they moved deeper into their mortality years. Their eyes lingered on each other’s expressions longer; unsaid words rode across an invisible bridge between their eyes. But mostly, they also had less to argue about. The losers usually do. Politics, prophecy, the Tylers, even Sofie and her children—all in the past now. What was left was what had been there at the beginning: an older brother and a younger, two lifelong compatriots who knew each other better than anyone else would ever know them. However imperfect, it was the closest to unconditional love either man had ever known.
“A month more, two tops,” Jake said as he snapped dead branches from a nearby pine tree. “After that we’ll start to contemplate eating the dead.”
“God forbid,” Andrew said, unable to stifle a shudder.
Jake glanced sidelong at his brother’s phrasing. “We have to do something, Andy.”
“Go back to the city?” Andrew asked, his bushy gray eyebrows raised. “I guess we have to. But go back with our tails tucked between our legs, hoping they won’t kill us? Or go back to lay siege?” He shook his head. “The first option is . . . risky. The second is blasphemy. We’d be going there to kill our own children, Jake.” A pause. “My own child.”
“Know what I’ve heard?”
“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”
“A lot of Seconds have been talking about finding those portals around the city. Figuring out how they might be able to use their systems to slip past the perimeter.”
“How in God’s name did they find out about them?”
“Dunno, Andy. I know it wasn’t either of us. But secrets have a way of leaking out when so many conversations begin and end with what food you’d most like to eat if you could get hold of it.”
Andy mused on that one. “Fair enough.”
Jake continued their slow walk, gloved hands thrust hard and deep into his coat pockets, his brother a step behind. “Had a visit this morning from John Giordano.”
The older Weiss brother sniffed, then rubbed his cold nose to mute his displeasure. “With his mother? Or his mistress?”
Jake let that pass. “Alone. He thinks attacking New Philadelphia would be a mistake.”
“He got out of his warm bed and trudged through all this snow to tell you that?”
“He thinks there’s another way, Andy. He wants to go back home and talk to them, make them see reason.”
Andrew looked at the sky, now clearing in the east. A bright-blue dome was sliding out from under the gray overcast. “Talk to who? Sofie?”
“Possibly. His recent experience in the city makes him think Lee is willing to listen to reason. He also believes Lee doesn’t have it in him to lead. So if he can exploit any doubts—”
“A big if. And the bigger if is if they let him in.”
“Huge. But what other choice do we have? We can’t let the people here starve—and we’re not going to be able to stop the ones who want to attack for much longer.”
“It’s a hard road back in deep winter,” Andrew mused as he glanced down the slope in the direction of the coast. “When does Giordano want to lead his party out?”
“No party. Just him.”
The brothers walked downhill back toward their campsite. Andrew stopped at a fork in the clearing. By continuing south for a half mile they would arrive at camp. To the west and they would find themselves in another little clearing that had been serving as their cemetery. An obvious place to make a decision.
“I say let him go,” the former chairman said with a sigh. “Men with empty hands have nothing to offer but hope.”
Kendra didn’t know John was gone until she came off guard duty the next morning. She entered their tiny cabin stamping snow off her boots. The cold tingled out of her as she bent closer to the hearth’s warmth. At first nothing seemed out of place. The fire was low—but only because no one was at home. His coat was missing—but maybe he had gone out to help someone who was sick or someone else in need. Just this week he had twice raised roofs that had partially collapsed under the weight of all that snow. But his rifle was gone too. Out hunting? Possibly. Nothing seemed amiss as she stirred the coals and put another log on the fire before pulling off her hat, gloves, and greatcoat.
Then she saw it sitting on the crate that passed for their nightstand. She lifted the quill and inkwell off the parchment and knew what he had written before she read it. She read it twice through anyway before pulling her coat on again and heading down the lane to
Petra’s.
She didn’t bother to knock. Petra was inside drinking tea with five of her disciples. They were men and women both, almost all Firsters.
“You no-good bitch.”
Petra glanced up at her, nonplussed, then turned to the others. “Would you mind giving Kendra and me some time alone?”
Kendra waited until they had all filed out in silence. “This was your idea, his going.”
“Ah, so that’s what this is about. And no. It was his.”
“Going back to the city? Without telling me?”
“He does a lot of things without telling you—or me. You know as well as I that John has always been his own man.”
“And you know we barely escaped from there with our lives. Yet you allowed your only living son—”
Petra held up a hand. “I didn’t ‘allow’ him to do anything, Kendra. He told me that he was going, and that’s all. He felt he had to do this.”
“He said nothing else?”
Petra allowed herself a small smile. “He did say something like, ‘When Kendra storms in and asks why,’ I should tell you, ‘To keep you safe.’ He said you’d understand that.”
Kendra said nothing, just shook her head.
“He also said to say, ‘Semper fidelis.’ But he thinks you already know that.”
CHAPTER 24
Kendra McQueen spent that night assembling her supplies and stuffing them into her pack for her excursion back to New Philadelphia. It was more than a day’s journey overland in good weather. It seemed unlikely she’d get there that quickly. So she packed three days’ worth of rations as well as snowshoes, a winter tent, some rope, plenty of dry matches, two sidearms, and the carbine she had taken from that Novice, along with a hundred rounds of ammunition split between the three. She broke down the weapons, cleaned and oiled them, then reassembled them and set them next to her pack. Then she took up John’s bowie knife and held it in balance resting on the edge of her hand as she sat on their bed. It had been his grandfather’s. It was a precious thing. Why would he leave it?
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