During breakfast, Tulli and Moraine hovered over Kristi, prepared to steady trembling hands as she drank lukewarm black tea. Full-body shakes were a late-stage plague symptom, but they begin with subtle tremors, and Kristi shivered when she choked down the dregs in her cup.
“It’s just chilly,” Moraine said, wrapping a black Pendleton blanket around Kristi’s shoulders. “We need sunlight. Open the curtains.”
“Good idea.” Tulli obliged, revealing the yellow desert. There were mountains in the distance and barrel cacti in the foreground. Nearby, a bird’s tattered, desiccated corpse hung from a coil of barbed wire. “You should both have a nap,” she suggested. “Terrible scenery.”
The Apparently Siblings first met during the Maria de Soto University Pow Wow and Cake Walk for Charity. As poor college freshmen, they were enticed by the one hundred dollar “best student intertribal dancer” prize, not community togetherness or actual dancing, pinkie swear. Tulli had to scour the boxes in her dorm room to find her neglected dancing regalia: turkey feather fan, knee-high doeskin boots, and thirty-pound jingle dress. It had been years since her last pow wow, and the dress clutched her hips and arms, uncomfortably tight. Do it for money, she thought. And maybe you’ll win a free cake, too. German chocolate would taste so good right now.
That year, the MdSUPWCWC, normally held on the soccer field, was moved to the indoor gymnasium in defiance of sparking, mountainous clouds overhead. The drum group sat in the center circle of the basketball court. They were surrounded by the dancing ring and crowded benches for participants.
Tulli noticed Moraine on the bench next to hers. Under the vibrant red fringe and sunset-colored beadwork that covered his grass dancer regalia, he resembled somebody in her music composition class, the kid who always answered Dr. Brumford’s rhetorical questions.
“Are you a music student at de Soto?” she asked.
“Yeah!” He lowered his Navajo taco to shake her hand. “I’m Moraine, like the glacial deposit. That’s a well-crafted jingle dress.”
“Thanks. My mom made it.”
“Blue suits you.”
“Maybe, but I wanted black and orange. Halloween colors. Mom hates the holiday.”
“Mine does, too! She thinks focusing on death and gloomy junk attracts evil.”
“My mom says I have ghost sickness.”
“What?”
“A mental shroud, a preoccupation with death, a fearful obsession that manifests as physical illness and psychic anguish. So basically I’m haunted because my favorite movie is Ringu.”
Moraine laughed.
“What if it’s real, though?” Tulli asked.
“You believe in the supernatural?”
Tulli shrugged. “I’m skeptical, but Moms have been right before.”
“Let’s test it. My throat hurts, and you’re wearing a jingle dress.”
“Okay?”
“Jingle dancing is supposed to heal people, right?”
“Maybe. It healed at least one person. Like a hundred and fifty years ago. Reputedly. An Ojibwe girl, I think? Dunno, man.” Jingle dresses, draped with hollow silver cones, clang with every leap. Tulli loved their rhythm, that’s all. She knew zilch about the origin of the dance, its significance. Not like they taught that in public school.
“Try to heal me,” Moraine insisted. “I want to believe.”
A young woman—fancy shawl dancer, her regalia cluttered with shades of yellow and pink—stepped between Tulli and Moraine. “First,” she said, “ghosts are real. They look like shadows, and your jingle dress test doesn’t prove anything. Actually, it’s borderline offensive, so don’t let respectable people hear you. Second: I think you’re both in my music composition class. Hey. I’m—”
“Kristi,” Moraine said. “Yeah, I know! Great to officially meet you!”
They spent the pow wow arguing about ghosts—Moraine insisted that the shadowy figures Kristi saw at night were symptoms of sleep paralysis, Kristi thought he was just scared of the unfathomable truth, and Tulli remained noncommittal. However, they didn’t annoy each other too much, so friendship inevitably blossomed.
None of them won the competition. That prize went to a hoop dancer math major.
Five years later, Tulli truly loved her buddies. She couldn’t envision better people to live with. To die with.
Hopefully, the death part would take its sweet time.
The White Train’s mechanical heartbeat, a low whir that sounded nothing like the chug, chug, chug in movies, was punctuated by Tulli’s fingers drumming on the windowsill and her steel-toed boots tapping the vinyl floor. They were nearing the Mojave Desert, where several compounds, including Mariposa, treated high-threat contagious citizens away from the lucky uninfected.
Kristi’s reflection appeared in the glass, her wide eyes transposed over the cloudless sky. The Pendleton fell in a heap at her feet.
“Sorry, Hon,” Tulli said, turning. “Did my drumming disturb you?”
“My dream…” Kristi pointed to a silhouette that cut the white-blue sky with long, sharp wings. “She was in my dream.”
“That’s just a turkey vulture. Strange. I didn’t know they lived here. Don’t quote me on that before I Google it, though. Go back to—”
“She sent them. They’re her children, vultures. Eating… eating sick, old meat. To help make the world clean.”
“What? Whose children?”
“The Plague Eater.” With a sleepwalker’s drowsy gait, Kristi stumbled back to bed, pulling the cotton sheet up to her chin and murmuring something about dancing. Tulli tucked the Pendleton over her friend.
“What?” Moraine asked, waking. “Did Kristi have a nightmare? Must be exciting. I’d love to experience her brain for just one REM cycle.”
“Nightmares aren’t pleasant, last I checked.”
“Better than the tedious junk I experience. This time, I dreamed of notes in the major key.”
“You’re a true musician, Moraine.”
“Guess I’ll try again.” He pulled the sheets up to his chin. “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Keep an eye on her, okay?”
“I promise.”
Once her friends drifted off to sleep, Tulli sat on the end of Kristi’s bunk and held her hand. The muscles in her long fingers—a violinist’s fingers, spidery and dexterous—tensed, relaxed, and tensed. Her livelihood, if not her life, was rapidly expiring.
Where were the powers their mothers swore by? The great forces that heal faithful children and make bodies strong? “I’ll do anything,” Tulli whispered. “You just need to ask.”
In the silence that followed, she chuckled. The Apparently Siblings reveled in gallows humor. It was much nicer than weeping.
Later, as the train chugged through Mariposa Compound, it passed rows of white barracks with slatted pitch roofs. Laundry lines, sun-bleached plastic toys, and potted plants cluttered the residential grounds. The train stopped between sprawling, nearly identical facilities. To the right: a hospital. To the left: a community center. Beyond them were convenience shops, the kindergarten to twelfth-grade school, a computer lab, a library, and a cafeteria. Tulli had memorized her compound map during the trip, knew where every facility was located. Where she and her siblings would live. Where they would be treated. Where they could eat, rehearse, and hang out. Where they would be memorialized, if the plague consumed them.
Nurse Jon helped load their bags on a trolley. “I have to ask something,” he said. “Are you three related?”