"That's it?"
"It's the start. You don't set off any suspicions, so nobody double-checks what you say. Then, day by day, you get to know people in a natural way—people in classes, at jobs, in your neighborhood. You're just a nice girl with a cute little baby, who's trying to qualify as a teacher. Your story doesn't threaten anybody, and it's not the kind of thing that confidence women make up. They're always the daughters of billionaires, or runaway rock stars that nobody ever heard of because they're from Brazil."
"I'm pregnant and I'm not married."
"Is that a big deal to you?"
"Yes. It makes me feel like people think I'm a slut."
"It's been a long time since anybody actually thought that way—at least a generation. But if it makes you uncomfortable, let's fix that, too."
"Fix it?"
"You're in the process of getting a divorce. That way, you can wear a wedding ring during the rest of your pregnancy. You won't feel as though anybody thinks of you as an unwed mother. Later, when you're ready to date, you take the ring off, and the divorce is final. If you tell people the divorce story during those months, they'll not only believe it, but later on they'll be under the impression that they saw it happen."
"You've done all of this before?"
"Many times."
"And it works?"
"It always has." Jane checked the mirrors again, then nudged her speed up a little. Her manner had conveyed a confidence she didn't feel. It had been more than five years since she had taught a person to run. Since then a thousand obstacles must have been invented to keep people from changing identities, and she knew about only a few of them. Right now, the things she was doing to make Christine safe might be killing them both.
7
At ten in the morning, when they were a few miles south of Buffalo in Hamburg, Jane pulled off the highway and stopped in the big parking lot of the McKinley Mall across from the Wegmans grocery store. "Are you ready to drive?"
"Sure," said Christine. "I slept really well on that last stretch."
"I know." They got out of the car and traded seats. When Christine sat behind the wheel, she adjusted the mirrors and the seat to her shorter stature, started the engine, and looked around her twice before she put the car in gear and let it glide forward up an aisle toward the exit from the lot.
To Jane her behavior was a promising sign. Jane had stayed alive this long by observing people minutely—how they carried themselves, where they looked when they walked into unfamiliar buildings, where they chose to sit in movie theaters. The way they drove a car was a huge indicator. It warned her if they were stupid, crazy, careless, or selfish.
She pretended to relax and adjusted the passenger seat so it leaned back, turned her face slightly away from Christine, and closed her left eye. She was asleep as a napping cat is asleep, eyes barely closed and muscles ready to react in an instant.
Christine drove with a tentative quality at first, holding the wheel tightly with both hands and readjusting the mirrors once more. Jane waited and watched the window to her right, judged the speed of acceleration, and felt the deceleration when Christine applied the brakes. Jane opened her eyes while Christine got out on the main highway, and watched her test the car's power on the Thruway, take a space in the right lane and stay there for a time until she needed to get around a slow truck, then pull back in. She performed those operations with competence and assurance. She was not an aggressive driver or a timid one.
When the car crossed over into the Cattaraugus Reservation, Jane watched the familiar landmarks pass—Mile Strip Road, then Irving-Gowanda Road, and then Cattaraugus Creek and the ponds just past it. Jane closed both eyes. Christine was all right. She might not turn out to be a hero or a genius, but she was a good driver. A person who could be trusted to maneuver a metal and glass box containing one's fragile bones and tender flesh down a highway at a mile a minute was a valuable ally. In a moment, Jane began to dream.
IT WAS NIGHT, but she was not feeling safe enough to sleep. She was in her compartment in a longhouse that belonged to the women of the Wolf clan, but her husband was somewhere else—out in the forest with a party of warriors, going south along the crests of the mountains to fight. There were always men out in the endless woods. So many men were killed in the fighting that more men had to be sent out to find captives to bring home and adopt to take the places of the dead.
There was shouting. She wanted to find out what it was, but couldn't get her muscles to respond. Someone threw back the hide that covered the doorway, and she could see bright orange flames outside. There were dark silhouettes crossing the doorway, footsteps thudding on the packed earth outside the longhouse.
There were sounds of fighting. Then she saw fire fifty paces down the longhouse wall, licking up the elm bark wall on the inner side, beginning to reach the support laths. She rolled off the platform to the pounded earth floor and stood.
She looked around her, and saw the shapes of two children in the compartment across the hearth from hers—her cousin's children, a boy and a girl. "Where's your mother?" They said nothing, so she said, "Come on. Come with me."
They both came to her and clung to her legs, but she took their hands and said, "There are men out there who want to kill us. We're going out, and we're going to run for the forest and go as hard and as far as we can. If one of us gets caught, keep running. There won't be any reason to look back."
She moved to the western doorway, opened the flap only slightly, so the light from inside would not show, and peered out. There were many people running—women and children. The men all seemed to be enemies, all dashing from one longhouse to the next with torches, or chasing fleeing people and bludgeoning them to the ground with swings of their war clubs.
Jane couldn't tell by looking at the dark silhouettes who the attackers were. There was only a shine of reflected firelight on glistening skin, a flash of red or yellow or black paint across a face, scalp locks, and feathers. She watched them for a few moments, then whispered, "It's time." She pulled the two children out with her, timed her run to pass one of the raiders from behind before the next one could appear.
She was a very fast runner, her long, strong legs dashing for the dark ring of palisades that surrounded the village. Right away she saw that the children weren't going to be fast enough. The flames from burning longhouses were rising higher now, and they would be seen. She knelt and said to the boy, "On my back." When he had climbed up and clung to her neck, she scooped up the girl and said, "Hold tight." The vertical logs were set in place so they formed a spiral, leaving a narrow corridor as a portal. She stood and ran toward the gap in the stockade.
As she ran she heard terrible shrieks, some of them cries of final agony and others of wild exhilaration and joy. She could see the gap in the row of tall, sharpened tree trunks now. It was the opening she had used each day to go out into the fields. She ran hard for it. She knew that by now there must be enemy warriors who had seen her in the light of the fires, and as though her thought drew it, she heard an arrow flit past her ear. She tried bending lower, and almost stumbled under the weight of the children, then regained her footing and ran harder. She sensed that enough time had passed now for a bowman to nock an arrow and draw the bow, so she abruptly dodged to the left. The arrow flew past her right arm into the ground ahead of her. As she passed it, she tugged it out of the earth and clutched it as she ran.
The gap was close. She ran into the space made by the overlapping palisades and saw the man blocking the passage. His face was painted red below the mouth and black above, so he seemed in the dim light to be headless. He lunged toward her in the narrow space, his arms out to reach around her and the two children, but Jane thrust the head of the arrow toward his abdomen just below the sternum.