Dawn stopped digging and leaned on the shovel. “What?”
“You said ‘this relationship,’ and I wondered what you meant by that.”
“Uh… I don’t know,” Dawn said. “I thought we both said we might want to get married or something. Was I dreaming that part? Or…”
“No,” Jed said, “you weren’t dreaming at all. I just… It was just weird hearing it all official like.”
“Weird, huh?”
“No… no.” Jed held up his hands in mock surrender. “Wait a minute. I don’t mean weird. I meant it was… nice. It was nice to hear you say it. That’s all I meant to say.”
Dawn scowled at him. “Yes, I’m sure that is what you meant to say, Jed.”
“It was. I liked hearing it.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’d like hearing it too.”
Jed looked down at his boots, and shuffled them for a moment before he spoke again. “Dawn… listen… we have ways we do things. You know that. We don’t have girlfriends and stuff. We don’t ‘date.’”
“I know,” Dawn said. “But your parents aren’t around, and mine aren’t either. I mean, who are we going to ask for permission, or tell, so we can make things official?”
“When we’re ready, we’ll talk to the elders,” Jed said.
“I’ve been married before, and I’m not Amish.” Dawn didn’t say it like she was apologizing, because she wasn’t. She spoke in a very matter-of-fact tone, as if to say, “Okay, how do we deal with these facts?”
“You’re a widow, and you can be Amish again whenever you want to be,” Jed said.
“It’s just…” Dawn threw down the shovel and climbed up out of the low hole. She stood very close to him, and looked deeply into his eyes. “All I’ve wanted to do since Ben died was fight his enemies. It’s all I have done. But now…”
“But now?” Jed asked.
“But now, all I want to do is be with you. Wherever you are. I just want to build a life with you, Jed.”
Jed looked at Dawn and inhaled deeply. This was what he’d hoped for—maybe not openly, but he’d felt very strongly for Dawn almost from the moment he’d met her. From the instant his eyes had opened up in that pod in the Transport Station and he’d seen her looking down at him.
“Billy talked to me yesterday,” Dawn said.
“Oh… Oh, he did? What…” He put his hands into his pockets. “Well, I guess it’s not my business to ask.”
“Of course it’s your business, Jed. That’s why I’m telling you.”
“Okay, so…” He threw up his hands, showing that he was flustered.
“He asked me if there was any hope for the two of us,” Dawn said. “He wanted to know if he could take care of me. Like Ben did.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him that I loved you, Jed. That’s what I told him.”
Jed smiled. “I love you, too.”
“I just want to be with you.”
“Okay, so you’ll give up TRACE? You’ll leave the resistance?”
“I… I… I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I haven’t thought it all out yet. I don’t know what to do.”
Jed smiled at her. “I understand.” He pushed a loose strand of hair out of her face, and smiled wider when he saw a grin break across her face. “We’ll wait until we know exactly what we should do, okay?”
Dawn looked up at him for a moment and then nodded.
“Okay.”
That night, worn out and dirty from a day’s work, and while they were delivering the evening milk to the neighbor, Jed asked Tom Hochstetler if he could sleep in his barn again. He didn’t mind sleeping on the floor of Matthias’s little house, but Jed thought back to how comfortable he’d been in the Hochstetlers’ hayloft, and he wanted to get online to see if there were any messages from his brother.
Once the milk was unloaded, and after Eagles and Ducky had turned the wagon around to head back to Matthias’s place, Jed took a sponge bath in some of the frigid water he drew from the springhouse. Not long after, shivering while he drip-dried in the evening air, he climbed into the hayloft for the night.
The sun was just dipping down below the horizon out to the west as Jed sat down in the hayloft door and took in the beauty of the evening. It was the gloaming; dark blues and shadows were becoming one, and fading pink-orange fingers of light touched the few puffy clouds still visible in the sky. Jed watched as the last sliver of the golden orb disappeared below the high walls of the Amish Zone—the tops of which barely poked up over the hills in the distance. The first stars—he couldn’t name them, and after what his brother had told him, he wasn’t sure if anyone could—were blinking on in the deepening sky, and a soft breeze made him shiver again, but not really from the cold. The weather was perfect, and taken altogether it was a scene out of a picture book, and Jed reveled in it, so exactly did it bring back to his memory the halcyon days of his youth.
From down below he heard a mild disturbance coming from the chicken coop as the Hochstetlers’ hens established their own sleeping roosts for the night. Even the simplest of God’s animals argue and fret over position and authority… asserting, sometimes with force, just who deserves what. The difference is, of course, that the wars of the chickens won’t ever break the world.
After he’d taken in his fill of the beautiful evening, Jed opened the small package—a meal wrapped in rough brown paper—which Dawn had given him when he told her he was going to stay in the neighbors’ barn for the night. He spread the paper with his hands and examined his supper. There was a piece of cornbread, with home-churned butter already spread on it, and three thick slices of bacon too. There was a pint-sized mason jar, with lemonade sweetened with the very smoky caramel-tinged sugar that was made by another one of Matthias’s neighbors.
Jed prayed over his meal and then chewed in silence as he watched the world get bathed in darkness. He lit one of the small lanterns and hung it on a hook from an overhead beam, making sure to be extra careful with it. Barn fires were still quite common in Amish country, so he was always very aware of how he worked with fire in any structure such as this one. In his mind’s eye, just for a moment, he was back in the old barn… back in the old world. He could see himself hanging a lantern on a hook up in the hayloft, and when he turned, he could just make out the window in the gabled end, and the coffee-can pane winking at him from the lower right-hand corner.
But he wasn’t in Old Pennsylvania. Wherever he was now, it was a different world altogether. He popped a Q pill in his mouth and chewed it up, and while the drug began to take effect, he prepared himself a little pallet and made it into a bed for the night.
There weren’t any messages from Amos, so Jed decided to take a look around in Transport’s files to see if he could get any news about what might be happening in the world of the English.
He searched through some file areas he was familiar with, and started to ask himself questions. This is how he sometimes made breakthroughs. Because even if he didn’t know what he was looking for, if he asked himself enough questions, usually he’d get onto an interesting trail at some point in the journey.
Is Transport’s Internet system still up and running at full capacity?
It seemed to Jed like it was. He did some cursory checks around many of the major hubs he knew about, and he didn’t see any serious problems with the flow of data.
What is Transport doing now that they’ve fled beyond the Shelf?
Jed found the data routes with the most traffic passing between points to the west, and tagged along—disguising himself as an innocuous email—until he found a portal where the messages were being distributed. Once there, he used some of his previous methods (along with Dawn’s pre-placed camouflage tactics) to hack in and begin scanning some of the raw data.