At the end of the day, Sewey and Fan would head down to the huts, where most of the children and teenagers lived. Sewey shared a bedroom with Loreen in the main house, but he spent as little time there as possible because he said he was too old now to be bunking-up with his mother. So whenever he could, he slept in some section of the huts where he had a friend, and now that Fan was moving around without much difficulty she tagged along with him, though she always hiked back up to the main house to sleep in her cot in the storeroom. She was lucky that it was Sewey who’d befriended her; he treated her like his baby sister, if one smarter than he, and being Loreen’s son, he was humored by everyone with at least a wary kindness, and so Fan was as well.
The people of Quig’s might not have been inclined to treat someone from B-Mor or another facility with any hospitality at all. The Charters were much more exalted settlements but they might as well be constructed up in the clouds; there was no way a counties person could even dream of residing there. But a place like B-Mor, with its safe, clean streets and full employment and the promise of a gentle end, was a theoretically attainable and thus resented possibility to them. One need not even mention its legacy of foreign settlers, which, of course, was expressed in Fan’s face and name, and could only catalyze certain feelings of unfairness and displacement, whether they were justified or not.
Eli, Sewey’s best friend in the huts, had no such feelings, being entranced by Fan from the moment he met her. Like Sewey, he was thirteen, though of more typical size and mental capacity for his age, a strawberry-blond-haired kid with a face so thoroughly mottled with freckles he looked like some aboriginal boy in an old-time nature vid, the skin around his eyes and nose and cheeks inked by the unmitigated open counties sun. No doubt if he lived in a Charter village, where on UV-alert days they project a special scrim into the skies and have public dispensing stations of specially formulated lotions, Eli might have been still unsullied and pink; but out here he went unprotected, and his mother couldn’t always corral him inside on full-sun days or much scare him anymore with the story of what befell his father, from whom he got his coloring. Still, whenever Sewey and Fan appeared at his hut and there were no more tasks or chores to do, Eli pulled on his floppy bucket hat for their forays into the land surrounding the compound. The three of them hiked along the numerous streams and brooks coursing through the small valleys and followed them up to their sources, like one tiny but deep lake that was hidden behind a rise of rock that Sewey and Eli had named Cold Pond, which they said was icy even now. They spent afternoons sitting on an exposed mound of granite that pitched down right into the clear water where you could see tadpoles skittering over the brownish-greenish bottom, the boys throwing rocks at the fish rises or launching a raft of twigs Eli lashed together with weed stems and then throwing rocks at that. Eli sometimes made a separate one for Fan and might festoon it with pretty leaves or wildflowers and nudge it in a different direction and tell Sewey not to aim for it, though soon enough Sewey would forget and do it anyway.
Fan liked that Eli never got mad at his friend, just sort of chuckled to himself as a much older person might when faced with so natural a way, and we can’t help but think she was reminded of her sweet Reg, who never raised his voice in anything but song (he was a lovely karaoke singer, favoring pop ballads), who never complained about always being passed over for promotions, who never pressed her to do anything she was uncomfortable with, matters of love included. Sometimes during breaks they would sneak down to the sublevel nurseries of the grow facility where amid the endless trays of tender sprouts and shallow bins of fry fish and the drip-drip murmur of feed and nutrients they would kiss, Reg bending way down and his big hands cupping the small of her back through the neoprene suiting and staying there, even though nobody else was around, until Fan would tippy-toe or even give a little leap so he’d have to hold her by the bottom. The facility cameras caught such a glimpse of them, and if you viewed similar vids of other couples, you knew things would accelerate and there was nothing else to do but watch, but with Fan and Reg you couldn’t help but keep wondering, for they only kept kissing, and you couldn’t help but think about what it felt like to share a satisfaction so thorough that it compelled one not always to blinded fervor. For isn’t this what any citizen of our difficult world would want if she had her choice, not to tilt ceaselessly or push-push for its own sake but to be quartered by her own best nature, the one most loving and restful and calm?
It was this she found fetching in Eli, though, unlike Reg, he seemed tinged through with what she could only describe as a somberness, his eyes peering out over the water as if waiting for something that would never come, or else had long come and gone. One bright afternoon while sitting on the slab of rock, Eli announced that he was burning up and was going to go in.
What? Sewey said, certain he’d not heard him right. Are you crazy! It’s poison!
Eli replied that it was probably the very water they all drank (if after being boiled), and that the fish and frogs didn’t seem to mind.
But it’s too deep, Eli!
I won’t go far in.
Don’t!
But Eli had already kicked off his flip-flops and pulled his T-shirt over his unruly hair and the glare from his bony shoulders and back momentarily made Fan squint. She was going to warn him, too, as the fall-off was especially steep where he was entering, but he was in before she could say a word, his cargo shorts soaked nearly to the waist with his very first step. He was steadying himself to take another when he lost his footing and in an instant he plunged into the dark but clear water, going in right up past his head, his flowing hair beneath the surface looking like a sea frond inflamed, his arms and hands now stretched stiffly outward as if he were already dead. Sewey slid on his rear to the water’s edge, extending his foot to try to let his friend grab it, but Eli, oddly unbuoyant, was only slipping down farther into the remarkably deep water, and so Fan jumped in after him.
The water was cold; the shock of it nearly forced her mouth open, her heart sprinting, the chill flowing past her feet as though it were being fed by an underground river spewing forth from just beneath the slab of the rock. Of course, she hadn’t been in any water since leaving B-Mor, and without her suit or mask, a spark of panic momentarily froze her, and when she opened her eyes, all she could see was Sewey’s block of a foot thrashing uselessly just beneath the surface and then, at what seemed too far below her to believe, the waxen glowing of Eli’s hair. She hauled herself up for a full breath and snapped herself downward and right away she was with him. His eyes were closed and his lips were shut tight and she thought he must be caught on something, not to rise. But his arms and feet were free, and he was not yet at the bottom, and when she hooked him by his torso and kicked, it was not as easy as she expected, given his frame, which was slightly larger than her own. But now he was suddenly grabbing her around the neck, clawing at her ears, her hair; he was desperate to breathe. She fought him off and tugged at him and kicked upward with all her might when she felt a heaviness in his buttoned pockets. They were full of stones, which he must have collected during the hike. And although he’d gone limp, Fan had to undo the buttons and strip out the stones before she could swim him up to the surface, where Sewey easily lifted him out in one swift pull.