Next to her — in fact so close it could have killed her — landed the body of a woman in an indigo flower-print dress, her head exploded into blood, her face rearranged until it was just an array of shapes, arms and legs splayed in wrong directions, the shape of her body slack and bent. Laisvė felt dizzy. She squatted down low to the ground, closing her eyes until she stopped seeing spots and her breathing felt real again. She stared at the woman. No breathing. No sound at all. Laisvė looked up to the sky, past the top of the buildings. Nothingness.
She waited for a feeling. Terror. Anger. Sorrow. But nothing came. Instead, when she stared at the dead woman in the street, she saw colors — red and blue and gray and a putrid yellow, all in waves. The colors were the word dead. She smelled piss and shit. The woman’s blood began to travel on the pavement.
Laisvė did what came most easily to her: she studied what she saw. She let her eyes wander like fingers across the terrain of the body, pausing here at the place where a shoulder made a rounded boulder, peering in toward the creases made in the indigo dress by the woman’s bulk. She let the woman’s hips and legs bathe her in their humanness; she felt the body before her lose its hold on reality and become fluid, like air or molecules or water, so that maybe their two bodies were no longer even two separate things at all. Then, aiming her focus at one hand, she counted out loud the fingers on the woman’s right hand, then began to count the fingers on the twisted left hand, nearer to her. Cupped in the woman’s left upturned palm was a small object. It was the object that made Laisvė’s imagination vibrate.
For a moment, nothing moved except Laisvė’s breathing. Her eyes fixed on the object. It was a locket on a chain, gold, dirty, old, or just scratched and faded with time. She couldn’t not reach for the object. She couldn’t not yank it free. She couldn’t not open it.
Inside, under glass, was a lock of baby-fine hair.
She was studying the object and the hair until she saw a flash of color and movement in the corner of her eye, low to the ground, something about the size of a hand, coming closer to her. A turtle — a northern box turtle. The turtle ambled up to the dead woman’s hand and stopped.
“Please, girl, can you help me back to the Narrows?”
Laisvė looked at the turtle. The turtle strained its neck up toward her.
“It’s not a rhetorical question,” the turtle groused. “What’s that thing?” The turtle turned its little head toward the mound of dead woman. Was that a furrowed brow? she wondered. Did box turtles have brows?
“A woman fell here. Next to me,” Laisvė said. “That’s her. She’s dead. She almost landed on me.”
The animal raised its voice. “Well, that’s nothing to do with me, is it? Is it anything to do with you?”
Laisvė puzzled on the question. She did feel a tug at her attention, if nothing else. The color of the print on the woman’s dress was impossible to ignore. Along with the pattern of the turtle’s shell, god, you know, the flowered fabric was mesmerizing.
“Look,” the turtle said. “I’m in need of aid. I have an injured leg. Might you return me to the Narrows Botanical Garden’s turtle sanctuary?”
Laisvė was still staring at the dead woman’s dress when she answered. “That sanctuary has been gone for years and years. It lives in another time. I read about it.”
“Right, I know. However, there is still an overgrown plot there where we are relatively safe from predators. Nothing that existed before isn’t something else now. And, anyway, it’s not the sanctuary but the old Narrows I’m trying to reach. If you are able to help me, that is. I’ve a relative in greater need than I am. I could just use a lift. Besides… there’s trouble about.”
Laisvė’s gaze drifted to the mud and yellow shapes on the dome of the turtle’s back. She could not help but admire the creature’s shell, the bright orange-yellow eyes, even the skin — the slime-green bumpy jaw and upper neck giving way to the smoother folds of the lower neck, the yellow-spotted legs, even the toenails. Well, phalanges, actually, but to her they resembled beautiful elongated toenails. She wondered at the perfect body, the plastron connected to the carapace. Briefly, she imagined herself shelled and immediately felt less exposed and anxious. Why had she been born a human girl?
Her choice was not difficult. With one hand, she snatched the locket’s chain from the dead woman’s grasp; with the other, she picked up the turtle. “I can take you to the old Narrows.” She began a brisk walk across the street toward the waterway, bypassing the Awn Shop, which made her heart beat fast enough that she could feel it in her neck. “But you have to show me which current path to take.”
“Current path?” The turtle’s little head swayed back and forth as she carried him. “What are you talking about?” Now the girl was running.
Soon they were at the lip between land and the old Narrows.
The turtle was grateful, if a bit suspicious. This girl seemed strange. He wished she would put him down. Or even just throw him into the Narrows. He could smell where he wanted to be. He was craving earthworms, wishing he’d sucked one down back at the dirt patch.
The girl stopped running at the edge of a dock, or what remained of one. He could see the surface of the Narrows.
Laisvė held the turtle up to her face, so that they were eye to eye. “I know about you box turtles,” she said. “You appeared abruptly in the fossil record, essentially in modern form.” She turned the turtle over to glimpse its belly and then back again. “In just a moment,” she said, “when we reach the water, I want very specific directions. A deal’s a deal. There’s a penny I need to carry.”
What was this girl thinking of? “What do you mean, carry?”
“You know, like carrier pigeons. Derived from rock doves. The ones with magnetoreceptive abilities.” She scratched her head. When had she become a carrier anyway? Maybe the moment they shot her mother and she watched her sink into the sea, her outstretched hand sinking into the water Laisvė’s very last glimpse of her mother. Or possibly the day her brother dissolved into a crowd on the ferry, nothing left but the words of him in her, a forever floating boy. The holes in a girl have to fill with something. Her fingers twitched. “What’s your name?” she asked.
He sighed. “Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Chordata. Class: Reptilia—”
But she continued for him: “Order: Testudines, suborder: Cryptodira, family: Emydidae, genus: Terrapene. Not what I asked, though. What is your name?”
The turtle studied her. He turned his head from side to side. He considered lying. Who the hell did she think she was to demand his identity? But something in her eyes compelled him. “Bertrand,” he said. “And you?” he asked, though he wasn’t necessarily interested. Still, she had a head on her shoulders, this one, underdeveloped and odd as she was. Most humans were stupid; the rest of them suffered from a melancholia that was something like an irrational addiction to nostalgia, or so it seemed to him. A decidedly human ailment. They were addicted to dead things.
“My name is Laisvė,” she said. “But please don’t mention any of this to my father. I’m supposed to stay inside every day, now that the Raids are getting closer.”
The turtle nodded. “Best get to it,” he said, nodding toward the previous trouble.