“I picked up an old book at an estate sale,” Ruthie said. “Inside was a folded sheet of paper with a list of cities that don’t exist anymore. I didn’t realize at first that’s what it was. It was just a list of city names and dates. When I looked up the cities … or tried to … that’s when I realized they had been destroyed, reclaimed by the wild country.” She looked sad. “How many of those cities vanished because someone couldn’t be bothered to explain something as simple as taking notes?”
Meg watched Ruthie turn to a clean page in her notebook. “What are you doing?”
“Mr. Wolfgard hired me to teach the Others about human things, and that’s what I’m going to do. And not just how to order from a menu or what utensil to use when in a restaurant or how to make a purchase in a store. Karl thinks we have an opportunity to interact with the Others in ways that might make a difference for all of us, and I think so too. So I’m going to teach the terra indigene in the Courtyard about social skills and what to do when they attend a school that employs human instructors. I’m just going to take a minute to make a note about this.”
Merri Lee nodded. “While you do that, Meg and I will start working with the Lakeside map to figure out how she got here.”
It sounded simple. It wasn’t. Meg hadn’t realized how little of the journey she had absorbed. Or, more to the point, she wasn’t sure what had been real and what had been training images. She had focused on following the images that had guided her escape and somehow managed not to see anything that might have created confusion or doubt—the very things that would have helped them now to follow her journey.
There had been a train. She remembered being too scared to sleep and too tired to stay awake. Caught in that mental vagueness, the images that guided her were sharp but had no context. She’d bought a ticket for the last train leaving that night, but she couldn’t remember how she’d reached the station. There must have been a vehicle that had left the compound, but … She remembered riding on the train a long time and seeing something that triggered the decision to get off before the stop listed on her ticket. Which city? She didn’t know. And there had been buses, the kind that provided transportation between cities. And another ticket for another train? But, again, she had followed the visions, and most of what she’d seen had faded too much to recall.
Before the three of them became too frustrated, the first set of pictures was delivered for a review of region.
The pictures of alligators, panthers, and snakes fascinated her. Her training images of these creatures had been line drawings that weren’t the least bit scary. These images were of predators. Maybe even terra indigene. The trees and flowers were like nothing she’d seen before, not even in training images.
“Okay,” Merri Lee said, making notes. “You didn’t recognize the critters or the plants, so I’d say you didn’t live in the Southeast or come through there when you ran away.”
“It was dark a lot of the time,” Meg said. Or had that been her mind’s way of protecting itself from absorbing too many images as the train sped on? There had been daylight at least part of the time, but not bright. Winter light and gray sky.
“You were wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a denim jacket, and sneakers,” Ruthie said, making her own notes. “You didn’t have a winter coat, so you came from someplace warmer than here.”
Meg frowned. “No. The denim jacket was part of the outfit. The Walking Name was wearing the winter coat.”
They looked at her.
“They wore white uniforms and changed out of their regular clothes. She took the coat out of her locker because she went outside for something. She didn’t close the locker properly. That’s why I could take the clothes and the money in her wallet.”
“It was cold when you went outside?” Merri Lee asked.
Meg nodded. “Very cold. But I was so afraid. Maybe it felt cold because I was so afraid of what the Controller would do to me if I got caught. Jean … Jean and I were going to run away together. It was before the visions that helped me escape, so it was just talk, just wishful thinking about having a real life. But a Walking Name overheard us, and the Controller didn’t think I would run away by myself, so he … broke one of Jean’s feet. I still wanted both of us to run away, but she said if she went with me, we’d get caught. By myself, I would escape. And I did.” Meg didn’t realize she was crying until Merri Lee handed her a tissue. “But Jean is still there.”
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I’ve never been in the Southeast. I’m sure of that much.”
They crossed off the High North next. Theral was using the library computer to check details for them, and she confirmed that the lake-effect storm that had touched Lakeside the evening Meg arrived had shut down rail and bus transportation in the High Northeast for the whole day.
Tess brought over coffee, sandwiches, and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, as well as another stack of pictures.
Meg, Merri Lee, and Ruthie drank the coffee, ate the sandwiches and cookies, and crossed the West Coast region off the list.
Midafternoon, Heather showed up with a handful of magazines and eyes that were puffy from crying.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she said, setting the magazines on the sorting table. “They used to make more effort to stay human, and they don’t anymore. Have you noticed that?” Heather looked at Merri Lee, who had been working at A Little Bite for over a year. “And most of the customers were human, so it wasn’t too bad. And with the Market Square credit, I was making as much working part-time hours as I would make working full-time in another bookstore in the city.”
“Then why can’t you do this anymore?” Merri Lee asked.
“Last night my father told me he doesn’t want me setting foot in his house again while I’m working in the Courtyard. He said it was hard enough to find work in Lakeside, and being tarred as a Wolf lover was the first step toward losing a job and then sleeping in a homeless shelter and begging on the streets, and how that brush spread the muck over everyone in a family. And while he was saying those things, my mom just sat there and wouldn’t look at me. She didn’t say anything to me until I got up to leave. Then she stopped me at the door and told me if anything happened to my younger brother or sister because I was being a whore for the Others, it would be on my head.”
“That’s awful,” Ruthie said. “They had no right to say those things!”
“Like your family hasn’t said it to you?”
Ruthie took a step back.
“You lost your job because of this place.” Heather looked at Merri Lee. “And you were beaten up and can’t go back to school.”
“The Others didn’t do those things,” Merri Lee replied. “Humans did.”
“Because of them! And now we’re being asked … Do you even know what they’re going to do with the information we’re providing? What if we’re helping them do something terrible? What happens to us if we’re branded traitors to humankind?”
“I don’t think anything about working with the terra indigene is as black-and-white as that,” Ruthie said carefully. “Maybe it is that simple in places like Cel-Romano or Tokhar-Chin, where humans control a big chunk of land and only brush against the Others at the borders between human-controlled land and the wild country. But our ancestors settled on a continent that didn’t belong to humans, so it’s different for us. If we can’t work with them, they’ll turn against us.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that Heather has been given a choice: give up the job or lose her family,” Merri Lee said.
What will happen to Heather if she makes the wrong choice? Meg thought, knocking her hand against the underside of the sorting table as she reached for the magazines. She almost cried out at the sudden stab of pain, but she swallowed pain that turned into mild agony, too surprised to speak when the cover of a magazine kept shifting into a different picture. Only pieces, so she never saw the whole image, as if she was seeing bits of several pictures. Then, struggling to focus on the vision, she saw a date—and blood soaking the paper.