The rain had refused to fall the night before. The clouds had taunted the city as they slid past. The sky was as clear as glass when Lucy stepped out of the shade and into the sun, the sand throwing the heat back up at her and baking her skin from below.
“C’mon then,” she said testily to Ben, who was struggling with an armload of flags. Lander had been overly optimistic when giving them a hundred of the wire flags used to mark buried water lines, but Lucy hadn’t wanted to crush the hope in the big man’s eyes.
“I’m coming,” Ben shot back. “These keep poking me. I don’t see why you can’t carry some.”
“I need my hands free,” Lucy said.
Ben caught up to stand next to her. “So how’s this work, anyway? You walk around ’til you feel it?”
Lucy stifled a sigh. “Something like that.”
“No, really, tell me. I want to know how you do it.”
“It’s not something I can teach. People either can, or they can’t.”
Ben made a face at her and she walked away from him, closing her eyes and holding her hands outward, hoping the show of concentration would keep him quiet. Lander had cut her a forked stick from one of the trees in the garden, and while it lacked the smooth contours from years of her grip, it would do the trick.
The power to find water was so sacred that Stebbs had lowered his voice when he spoke to her about it, even in private. Lynn would prefer to never speak of it at all, keeping Lucy’s gift in a quiet place where it would draw no attention. But Lucy had always reveled in the spasm of power that water sent toward her, crying out to her it was there and wanted to be found.
“Here,” she said. “It’s not very deep though.”
Ben pulled a flag from his bundle and jabbed it into the ground. “That’s good, right? Easier to get to.”
“Easier to get at, yeah, but if it’s shallow, it might not last long.” Lucy wandered off in another direction, letting her feet go, her mind drift while waiting for the water to talk to her. The heat was drawing her own moisture straight out of her skin, dotting her pores with beads of sweat. A rifle shot echoed across the flat plain and Lucy jumped, drops falling off her forehead and evaporating on the hot sand.
“Shit,” she said. “Scared me.”
Ben looked back at the city, the flags slung across his shoulders. “Your mom. She’s rather basic, isn’t she?”
“What do you mean?” Lucy asked, her sudden clench making the stick jump in her hands.
“That water?”
“The stick wants to hit you and I’m stopping it.”
Ben smiled, whether he thought she was funny or because he enjoyed getting under her skin she didn’t know. “I mean she’s one-sided. She wants her gun, and she wants to shoot things, and that seems to be about where her interests stop.”
“Well, she’s good at it,” Lucy said, repositioning the stick and walking away from Ben.
“You ask questions about the garden, and our people. You want to know how we manage, but all she wants to do is get her gun and move on.”
“Yes, she does,” Lucy agreed. The stick leapt in her hands, viciously jabbing downward, but she felt no rush of pride. “Here.”
Ben planted a flag, eyes still on Lucy. “What if she wants to go, and you don’t?”
“What about it?”
“Would you stay?”
“I don’t…” Lucy looked off into the distance at the blue mountains not unlike the ones Lynn had nearly died getting across, all because Lucy had asked her to. She dropped her stick and glared down at Ben, unsure how he could look so smug when he had to look up to meet her eye. “Lynn and I go together or we stay together. End of story.”
“That’s a shame.”
“What do you care?”
Ben dropped his armload of flags to the ground. “I wouldn’t say I care. It’s obvious you like it here and your mom doesn’t. Did you mean what you said about finding us a clean source of water and moving on?”
“Yes,” Lucy said, taking the bottle of water Ben handed to her from his backpack.
“Because that’s what she wants, or what you want?”
The odd-tasting water slid down her throat, coating her tongue with the residue she could never quite wash away. But it was water, and two weeks ago she would’ve licked puddles off the hot road to save her life.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, handing the water back to Ben.
His smile was honest, and it nearly made his awkward face handsome. Lucy smiled back, unable to help herself. “You almost looked like your dad there for a second.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Better than my mom.”
Lucy dried her palms on her jeans before taking the stick back up. “What’s she look like?”
“Bailey’s my mom.”
“Bailey? The nurse?”
Ben sighed and re-shouldered his backpack. “Oh, I know. How did such a little shrimp of a guy come out of Bailey and Lander? It’s a genetic joke that gets trotted out for a laugh all the time, so go ahead and have your giggle.”
“I wasn’t thinking that so much as… ugh,” Lucy said, turning red for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.
“Well, yeah, there’s that too,” Ben agreed, falling into step beside her with his armload of blue flags. “But my dad can’t exactly be picky, you know? He had a kid with Nora and that didn’t turn out so great—”
“Wait, Nora’s daughter was Lander’s?”
“She told you about that?”
“Yeah.” Lucy looked away, answering the tiny vibe the earth had thrown her. “Here.”
“There was nothing I could do,” Ben said stiffly as he planted the flag.
“So she was your sister then?”
“Half sister, yeah,” Ben answered as they veered away from the smattering of blue flags waving behind them. “Anyway, after Rachel got killed by the lion, Dad started showing me how to manage the garden right, measure the acid in the dirt for the different vegetables and make sure they each have the proper sun exposure. It’s not an easy thing, if you want to do it right.”
Ben was swept away in the surge of importance as he talked about his duties, and Lucy let him go on through the next two flags before asking a question. “So was your dad hoping he and Bailey would be able to…” She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence politely.
“Make a big, healthy baby?” Ben asked, his eyebrows raised in two mocking points. “Maybe. That or by then he’d realized Nora wasn’t going to be having any more kids and he realized it was Bailey or bust.” He giggled at his own joke, but Lucy didn’t join in.
“What do you mean? Surely there’s someone else willing to…”
All humor slid from Ben’s face as he looked at her. “You seriously didn’t know? Jeez, Lucy, open your eyes. How many women have you seen around here?”
A cold tremor passed over Lucy despite the heat, and her witching stick jumped even though there was no water beneath it. “I thought…” Her words gave out as her mind jumped back to Lynn’s first shooting session from on top of the hotel. People had littered the streets, staring up at them with their eyes shaded. But none of them had been women.
“Thought what?”
“I don’t know. I guess maybe that they were out… you know, just doing things.”
“Doing things?” Ben laughed outright. “You’re something. No, it’s been Bailey and Nora for a long time. Then here comes your mom into town with her long hair and her birthing hips—”
“You can’t be serious,” Lucy interrupted. “Lander wants to get Lynn pregnant?”