In a Handful of Dust

Twenty-Five

Lynn’s skin was so dry, it didn’t dimple around the needle when the woman put an IV in her.

“She’ll be fine,” Lucy said. “She’s too proud to die.”

“Pride won’t keep your mom hydrated,” the nurse said simply, and hung a bag of liquid next to the bed Lynn lay in. A thin pulse pressed against Lucy’s fingers, light as the wings of a butterfly. Lucy pressed back against it, not bothering to correct the woman’s assumption that Lynn was her mother.

There had been no time for details when Lucy had crawled into the car with the help of the two men who had found her. Unconsciousness had been calling, but Lucy was frantic to explain they had to go back and get Lynn. Fever and fear had driven all words from her brain, and Lucy had only been able to point back in the direction she had come, and then to her own heart.

The drive into the city had seemed nearly obscene to Lucy, the speed at which the car ate up the miles of road mocking the hard-earned progress they had made on foot. Lynn’s head had rocked in her lap, unresisting. The driver had braked suddenly, and Lynn had rolled with the momentum, dropping to the car floor like a bag of rocks. The men had looked back at the noise and shared a glance even Lucy couldn’t miss.

But Lynn had defied them without uttering a single word. Her heart kept beating, her breath kept coming, and Lucy’s pride in her had soared to new heights. Lucy stayed in a wheelchair by her bedside, her own IV trailing behind her, snaked with Lynn’s.

“You should get back to your own bed,” the nurse said. “You weren’t in much better shape than your mother twelve hours ago.”

“I need to stay where she can see me,” Lucy said, not glancing up.

“She’s not been conscious since they brought her in, little girl. She’s not seeing you, or anyone else.”

“It’s best I be here when she can though,” Lucy said. “Otherwise she’s likely to start killing people.”

There was a disgruntled snort; then the woman was gone and Lucy sighed with relief. “I hope she’s here when you do wake up,” she muttered to Lynn. “You should definitely meet.”

The nurse who had been on shift when Lucy was carried into the hospital was an older woman she had mistaken for Vera. She’d struggled from the arms of the man carrying her and fallen forward into the nurse’s arms, weeping for joy. When her wits had been restored to her hours later, Lucy was not sure how her mind had made the leap. The only similarity between Nora and Vera was age and the ability to heal, but Lucy was thankful both for the proof that people could live long lives in the desert, and that someone was around who could save hers.

Lynn’s hand twitched underneath her own, and Lucy leaned forward, eyes searching Lynn’s face for any sign of movement. “Lynn? Can you hear me?”

One eyelid flickered, opened slowly, and focused on the needle in her arm. Lynn licked her lips before trying to speak. “Cold.”

“That’s your IV,” Lucy said, rubbing her hands up and down Lynn’s arm to warm it. “Mine was cold too, at first, but you get used to it.”

“IV?”

“Yeah, it’s like a vein with water in it, and they pour it into your body, kind of,” Lucy said. “So don’t try to move a whole lot, ’cause you’re connected to it.”

“Hurts,” Lynn said, weakly lifting her other arm.

“That’s ’cause they started the IV over there yesterday,” Lucy said, trying to remember everything Nora had explained to her as she had rolled her over to Lynn’s bedside. “Your veins were flat like… like a worm that’s been stepped on, you know? They switched over to this arm today, and had a little more luck.”

Lucy brushed her hand over the deep purple bruise that had formed in the crook of Lynn’s other elbow. “You relax for now. There’s no reason for you to be worried, or…” Lucy trailed off, searching for the right word. “Or scared,” she finished.

Lynn struggled to open both eyes and gave Lucy a brief glance before they slid shut again. “Why do you look scared then?”

Lucy tightened her grip on Lynn’s wrist. “You were so close, Lynn. You were damn close to dying.”

“Close to nothing,” Lynn said vehemently, though it cost her breath to do so. “You said I wasn’t allowed to die without you. I’m still here.”

Lucy’s throat closed in on itself, and she fought against the tears, not wanting Lynn to open her eyes again only to see her crying. “Yeah,” she said. “You are.”

“Where the hell is here?”

“It’s a city called Las Vegas.”

“Well,” Lynn muttered as she dropped back into unconsciousness, “shit.”

Nora showed up later, her warm hands soothing in the dark.

“Lucy, are you asleep, little one?”

“Grandma?” Lucy asked, her groggy voice heavy with sleep and hope. There was a reassuring pressure on her arm, but the answer was disappointing.

“No, it’s me, Nora,” she said. “I’m here to check on you. You fell asleep in your wheelchair.” Clarity descended, and though it was pitch dark inside the hospital, Lucy could feel Lynn’s alertness in the bed next to her.

There was the screech of the brake being taken off, and then Nora was rolling Lucy toward her own bed, the unexpected movement making her nauseous in the dark. She put her head down and felt Nora’s hands moving over her hair. “You all right?”

“Wasn’t ready to move is all,” Lucy said, taken aback by the easy familiarity with which Nora touched her. Though Lynn’s affections were true, she rarely showed them through touch.

“I’ll warn you next time,” she said gently, and Lucy felt strong arms beneath her as she was shifted over to her bed, the neglected sheet shockingly cool.

“Did your mother wake?”

“No,” Lucy said, relieved the dark masked her lie.

“I’m sorry.”

Lucy didn’t know what to say, so she lay still in the darkness.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she answered. “Not well, but not nearly as bad.”

“That’s to be expected. You lost a lot of water.”

“Water, always water,” Lucy repeated. The wave of nausea returned as she remembered the river of rain closing over her head and sweeping her away.

Nora’s hands brought her back to reality as she checked Lucy’s pulse and felt for a fever. “The men who brought you in said you can witch it.”

“I can,” Lucy said, and felt the hand on her forehead tense at the answer.

“That’s good, little one, good for everyone.”

She’d begun to slide back into sleep before Nora’s words trailed off, but she jerked herself awake. “Why’d you call me that?”

Nora’s hands were gone, her voice suddenly distant in the dark. “Call you what?”

“Little one.”

There was a pause, and Lucy strained her eyes against the black to see if Nora was still there. “I had a child that was built small, like you. Now get some sleep.”

Footsteps retreated, and Lucy heard a door shut behind them. Moments later Lynn’s voice cut through the black.

“You told them?”

The words hung between their beds like a weight, and Lucy fought hard to sound confident when she spoke. “There wasn’t any choice. I’m sorry.”

“Who all knows?”

“I don’t know. The men who found me, Nora apparently.”

“So let’s assume everyone,” Lynn said, and the quiet descended again. “How many people are here?”

“I don’t know, Lynn,” Lucy said. “I’ve been awake about five more hours than you.”

“And what’d you learn in those five hours?”

“That we’re lucky we’re not dead, you especially. Nora and the bigger lady have some kind of medical training. We’re in a real hospital, but apparently they don’t have electricity.”

Lynn was silent again, but Lucy could feel her thinking in the dark, and her own mind ran over the thousand things she should’ve noticed while Lynn lay comatose.

“Those men that found you… did they hurt you in any way?”

“I’m fine, Lynn,” Lucy said.

“You understand what I’m ask—”

“I’m. Fine. You don’t need to assume that—”

“Everyone we meet is bad?”

“Yeah,” Lucy answered. “There are good people in the world, like Grandma. Like Stebbs and Fletcher.”

“There are,” Lynn said carefully, “but we’ll start with the assumption most people aren’t, and let them earn their way up.”

Nora’s warm touch and concerned tone flickered through Lucy’s mind. “Nora seems all right,” she said tentatively.

Lynn grunted in reply.

“What do we do?” Lucy asked, even though her foot ached horribly and sleep was toying with her brain again.

“I don’t know that there’s a lot of we involved. I’m draining myself just talking.”

“You’ve never exactly been chatty,” Lucy said. “So I think you’ll be fine.”

Lucy heard something sailing toward her through the dark, and a pillow hit her in the face.

“Nice shot.”

“I have my gifts,” Lynn said, and Lucy would’ve mistaken it for a joke if not for what came next. “Though they don’t seem wanted here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where’s my gun?”

“It’s—” Lucy’s tongue was quick to supply an instant answer to the all-important question, but she couldn’t. “I don’t know.”

“The men who picked us up, did they take it?”

Lucy racked her brain, forcing the fevered car ride from the desert into high detail, but all she saw was Lynn’s limp body, her head lolling endlessly. “I don’t remember.”

“Nobody in this world leaves a high-powered rifle lying beside the road,” Lynn said. “They took it.”

A chill crept beneath Lucy’s skin that had nothing to do with the IV. She curled into herself under the thin sheet and tucked the edges under the sharp contours of her body.

“So what happens next?”

“We’re in your territory now, little one, and me without my gun. You tell me.”

Lucy lay in the dark, her mind at odds with her heart once again. Lynn’s innate distrust of people might be leading her into paranoia. These people had saved their lives, filled their bodies with water again. She was in a bed for the first time in months, her head resting on a pillow.

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” she finally said. “People like to talk about themselves, especially if they’ve accomplished something. And they have, Lynn. We’re in a city in the middle of a desert, and they’re giving out water to strangers.”

“Don’t be afraid to show them how smart you are,” Lynn said, her voice fading further into weakness. “You’ve got a sharp mind; that’s of value anywhere. Watch and learn.”

“And then?”

“And then I get my gun back.”

The other nurse was there in the morning, and Lucy resisted the urge to ask where Nora was. The bigger woman did everything brusquely, as if Lucy were a life-size doll whose plasticized limbs could bend in any direction while being dressed.

“Ouch,” she said as her head was forced through a T-shirt much too small for her.

“You’re fine,” the woman said dismissively, though Lucy pulled the ribbed collar away from her neck and looked with dismay at the outlines of her ribs showing through the fabric.

“Um… I think this might be for a little kid,” she said.

“Mmmm” was all the nurse offered in reply.

“What’s your name?”

“Bailey.”

“Hi, Bailey, I’m Lucy,” she said as politely as she could manage.

“Uh-huh.” Bailey finished folding the gown she’d taken off Lucy and moved over to Lynn’s bed. “Your mom wake up yet?”

“I’m awake,” came Lynn’s voice, though her eyes stayed closed. “And if you try to take my clothes off, we’ll have issues straightaway.”

Bailey stood at the foot of Lynn’s bed with her arms crossed over her chest, but Lucy noticed she made no move to touch Lynn. Even with her eyes closed and her voice pitched low, Lynn looked and sounded dangerous.

“You going to be the one to give me trouble then?”

“You an important person around here, Bailey?” Lucy suddenly asked, switching the big woman’s attention back to her.

“’Scuse me?”

“I asked if you were an important person around here. I’m guessing you’re not, since you’re cleaning up the piss of wandering strangers. So Lynn will give as she’s getting, and there will be no kind words for anybody until you bring me someone who matters to talk to.”

Bailey glanced at Lynn, then flushed three shades of red as she backed out the room, arm muscles twitching.

“Well, that was a nice bit of sass. I’ve heard that tone on more than one occasion as I caught you sliding out the window in the middle of the night.”

Lucy stuck her tongue out at Lynn, but her reservations outlasted her sarcasm. “I don’t know how well I can keep it up.”

“It was a solid start, anyway,” Lynn said, tipping her a wink before they heard Bailey’s heavy footsteps in the hallway. Lucy glanced up to see a boy standing in the doorway, his anxious face torn between amusement and interest as he glanced at her.

“Uh, hi,” Lucy said, highly aware of the fact that the shirt she was wearing clung to her in more places than her ribs.

“You’re requesting to speak to someone important?”

“And that’s you?”

He visibly tried to make himself taller. “Kind of. My dad is… important.”

“So where’s he?”

“Out. He told me to come and see if you can really do the witching.”

“I can,” Lucy said. “Didn’t know I had to prove it.”

“What’s your name?” Lynn asked.

“Ben,” he answered, without taking his eyes from Lucy.

“Well, Ben, bring my daughter a willow switch and she’ll show you.”

“Willows aren’t easy to come by,” Ben said, his eyes still roaming over Lucy in curiosity.

“Doesn’t have to be a willow,” Lucy said, feeling the challenge in his gaze. “Just bring me something wooden, three blankets, and a bottle of water.”

Ben left, and Lynn’s sigh filled the room. “I don’t think you’re going to put much over him. Nasty little weasel, that one.”

“How old do you think he is?”

“Younger than you, by a bit.”

“He acts older.”

“People act lots of ways.”

Ben was back moments later with a pencil, an IV bag, and three hospital gowns. “This’ll have to do.”

“Good enough,” Lucy said, taking the pencil from him. “Now hide that bag under one of the gowns. I won’t look.”

She buried her head under the pillow, taking comfort in the dark and the memory of Stebbs that the game brought rushing back. Long winters had been spent in the basement while he taught her to hone their shared ability to the point that she didn’t even need a switch to point the way. The hum of water called to her fingers, the vibration of life answering in her veins with a voice few could hear.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Lynn had turned her head, unwilling to see her giving away her grace so easily to strangers. Lucy made a show of deliberation even though she felt the pulse the moment her hand passed over the middle pile, strong and sure.

“That one,” she said, and Ben lifted it to prove her correct. Bailey’s white face floated in the door window like a curious moon.

“You really can,” Ben said, his voice breaking on the last word.

“Yes, I really can,” Lucy said, and forced herself to smile at him.

Twenty-Six

“It’s called failure to thrive,” Ben said as they walked into the scorching sun. Lucy tried to ignore the feeling that her skin was trying to creep off her bones upon being reintroduced to the heat. Nora had warned her against walking too much on her injured foot, but she wasn’t going to let Ben know how badly it hurt her to keep in stride with him.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what’s wrong with me,” he clarified. “Up here.” He pointed toward the building that was their destination, mercifully near.

“I didn’t realize there was something wrong with you. Physically,” she added.

“Oh, there is. Failure to thrive,” he repeated, as if naming it provided an enemy. “I’m eighteen years old.”

“You’re not,” Lucy contradicted. “You don’t even hit my shoulder.”

Ben shrugged. “That’s why it’s called failure to thrive. We do very well for ourselves here now, but that hasn’t always been the case. When I was little, I didn’t get everything I needed, nutritionally speaking.”

Lucy was about to point out that he was still little when she stopped in her tracks, awed by an eerily familiar sight she couldn’t quite place. “I feel like I’ve seen that before.” She gestured at the building across the street, which rose into a graceful point in the sky.

“Not that, exactly. At least I doubt it,” Ben said. “That’s a replica of the Eiffel Tower. The original is in Paris, France. Do you know where that is?”

“Europe,” she immediately shot back, suddenly grateful to Lynn for forcing an education on her, even if it was only culled from encyclopedias during the long winter months when their hands could be idle.

“You can’t catch my disease.” Ben changed tracks quickly, obviously surprised that she knew the answer.

“I wasn’t going to ask that.”

“Maybe not, but you were wondering.”

They walked on in silence, the towering presence of the empty buildings silencing any retort she might have come up with. Even though her memories of Entargo were limited by time and the fog of childhood, she could recall uniform skyscrapers like rectangular siblings. The buildings here were different, each a vibrant explosion of glass and cement, their colors dulled by time and the joy of life they strived to express stilled by the emptiness of the streets.

Ben veered to the left, steering her by the elbow toward a huge building, bleached bone white by the sun. “Careful,” he said. “The railing is starting to give in a few places. You don’t want to fall in.”

“Fall into what?”

“That used to be a lake,” Ben said, nodding toward what looked like a miniature desert trapped by white barriers. “We can’t keep the sand out of everything, though we try to keep the streets clean. You step out onto it and you’ll sink.”

Lucy looked over the undulating plains of sand, carved by the hot breeze that felt like a blast from a wood fire. “Would it go over my head?”

“No, it’s not that deep, but digging you out would be a job. I’m not strong enough to pull you out, and everyone else is busy enough as it is.”

She didn’t ask who “everyone else” was, as they had passed no one on the streets. The shadow of the building they approached stretched out toward her, and Lucy resisted the urge to run the last few feet into its inky coolness.

“A lake, huh?” She glanced back over her shoulder at the miniature desert. “Where’d all the water go?”

Ben opened a door for her, and she stepped through into the heat of the building, its trapped air stuffy with the exhalations of generations. “It was all taken out and stored by my grandfather a long time ago,” he said, his chest swelling with the importance of his ancestors. “The pools too.”

“What’s a pool?”

“It’s—” Ben stopped and looked at Lucy as condescendingly as possible, since he was a foot shorter than her. “Exactly how country are you?”

“Very,” Lucy said, her voice lost in the faded opulence that surrounded her. The lobby stretched for what seemed like miles, far past the daylight streaming through the sand-grimed windows behind her. The rounded arcs of light cast by the windows were quickly eaten by the depth of a darkness so complete that Lucy could only guess at the height of the ceiling or where the walls ended on the far side. The heat from the outside had tapped the last of her rebuilt strength, and her lungs struggled to pass the weighty, warm air in and out of her body. Her foot throbbed so deeply she could feel a pulse in her knee.

“I need to sit,” she said weakly, seconds before falling to the floor, the impact softened by a rug so deep her fingers sank into the fibers, and she wondered if it would close over her head like the sands outside, and the raging waters of the river.

Ben walked into the shadows and she heard the scraping of furniture, followed shortly by the reemergence of his face, puffy with exertion, as he pushed a padded chair to her. “Have a seat,” he said grandly, then dropped to the floor next to her, falling back onto the carpet and staring into the emptiness of the far-reaching ceiling.

Lucy could almost forgive his attitude when she saw how much it had cost him to bring her the chair. She lifted herself into it, studying his pasty, pale face while he had his eyes closed for a moment. “Thank you for the chair,” she said.

“Dad says I need to make sure I’m polite. He says a boy built like me won’t get a girl who wants protection. So I’ve got to aim for one who wants someone to be nice to her.”

“So you’re nice on purpose, not because you want to be, is what you’re saying?”

“Is ‘nice’ a naturally occurring trait?”

Lucy didn’t answer, since she doubted failure to thrive was a naturally occurring trait either. Ben sat up and pulled himself to his feet using her chair. “C’mon. Dad’s in the gardens. He’ll be wanting to see you.”

She followed him through the cavernous lobby, their footsteps echoing out and above them, bouncing off the unseen walls and ceiling. They emerged from the darkness into a garden so bright Lucy’s eyes ached from the contraction of her pupils. The garden stood in stark contrast to the hollowness of the lobby, every inch covered with light and green growth. Lucy’s words did not echo endlessly there, instead absorbed by the life around her, drinking in her voice instead of throwing it back at her in defiance.

The loamy smell of good, wet dirt filled her nose and made her soul ache for home, and lengths of green fields drenched with rain. The sudden whiff of life was so direct and strong Lucy felt woozy again. She settled onto the cold marble floor with a soft sigh as her skin drank in the moisture around her, her body answering the life in the room with a response of its own as she felt every pore in her skin opening up to drink air cleaned by green leaves.

“I think she likes it,” said a deep voice, and Lucy startled from her reverie to see a man among the vegetation, his smile a glaring white against the backdrop of green.

“Dad, she can do it,” Ben said by way of introduction.

The smile slipped for a second as he shot an irritated look at his son, and then returned when he glanced at Lucy. “Hello, little one,” he said. The endearment sounded so natural in his deep voice that she felt comforted.

“Hi,” she said shyly, suddenly aware that Ben’s father had a handsome face to match his voice. “I’m Lucy.”

“Lucy, welcome.”

She ducked her head in response but could think of nothing to say. Ben backed away as his father came toward them, emerging from the garden like a god of life. He was a massive man, the biggest Lucy had ever seen; he would dwarf Lynn, and Lucy herself only rose to his elbow. Feeling more childlike than ever, she reached up to shake his hand.

“I’m Lucy.”

“You already said that.” He winked at her, and her hand was immediately lost inside his, which was coated with the rich blackness of the soil.

“I’m Lander,” he said, releasing her hand and clasping her shoulder, turning her away from Ben. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

Lucy’s eyes were still riveted on Lander’s bicep, so she didn’t realize he meant the garden until Ben sighed heavily. “Yes,” she said, redirecting her gaze. “It’s… is that a tomato?”

The inviting flash of red among the waves of green brought Lucy out from under Lander’s protective arm, her mouth watering at the sight of a favorite food so long denied her. “You grew a tomato?”

“More than one, actually,” Lander said. “That’s the first ripe one of this crop.”

Nearer the plants, Lucy could see the bunches of green tomatoes, swelling with life and drinking in the sun from the glass ceiling above, the moisture from the thick air around it. The one that had caught her eye had just turned, the skin a deep orange that would turn to overripe redness in a day or two.

“It’s yours, if you want it.” Lander’s voice was at her elbow.

She reached for it, her hand barely glancing the thin skin pulled taut over the meat of the fruit, vibrant with life. It snapped off the vine easily, the spicy scent of the broken stem delivering the taste to her mouth before she’d touched it to her lips. “You’re sure? It shouldn’t go to someone else, someone who—”

“I grew it,” Lander said. “What’s here is mine, and that is for you. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

Needing no more urging, Lucy bit, her sharp teeth breaking the skin and sending the red juice spilling over her lips and dripping to the marble floor at her feet.

Lynn looked mistrustfully at the green tomato Lucy had brought her as proof of the garden down the street. “You ate one?”

“A red one, yeah,” Lucy said, flooded with guilt that it hadn’t occurred to her to save part of the ripe one for Lynn. “I thought you could set that one in the windowsill, ’til it’s ready.”

Lynn sniffed it, closing her eyes in a replica of Lucy’s moment of bliss at the smell. A small smile tugged at her mouth, but it was tinged with sadness, and Lucy knew she was thinking of home instead of the small miracle in front of her.

“Once you feel good enough, you’ve got to see it,” Lucy said, unable to hide her enthusiasm. “I guess it used to be a botanical garden.” She pronounced the word slowly so it came out correctly, unable to shake the thought of Ben’s mockery even when he wasn’t around. “They had all kinds of weird plants and things there people would come to look at, so when the Shortage hit, Ben’s grandfather pulled up all the flowery plants and they used that dirt for vegetables.”

“Uh-huh.” Lynn ran her thumbnail over the tight green skin of the tomato. “And how do they water this garden?”

“I didn’t ask. But Ben said Lander’s dad took all the water out of the fountains and swimming pools—and there were a ton of pools, Lynn, you should see this place—and stored it in the hot water tanks of all the hotels.”

“You sound impressed.”

“I can’t not be,” Lucy said. “We’re in the middle of the desert and you’re holding a tomato.”

Lynn sniffed the skin one more time and handed it to Lucy to set in the windowsill. “Who is Lander?”

“That’s Ben’s dad. Wait ’til you meet him, Lynn—good God. He’s massive.” Lucy felt herself warming at the memory of his smile. “He might even make you feel feminine.”

Lucy turned from the windowsill to see Lynn staring over her shoulder out at the bright-blue sky. “I’ve never felt more or less of a woman because of a man.”

“I didn’t mean…” Lucy stumbled over her words, but Lynn waved them away.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just sick of being in this hospital bed.”

“It’s actually not a hospital,” Lucy piped up. “This is a hotel, same as the other where the garden is, but they took some of the first-floor rooms and brought over equipment from the hospital so everyone isn’t scattered all across the city.”

Lynn nodded, but her eyes slid shut as exhaustion claimed her again. She licked her lips before trying to speak. “Everyone?”

“Yeah… well, that’s how Ben put it. Everyone.”

“No idea how many?”

“So far I’ve just met Ben and Lander, Bailey and Nora.”

“I doubt it’s the four of them, if they’ve been hoarding pool water for generations. What else did you see when Ben took you outside?”

“Not much, really,” Lucy admitted. “It’s a city that’s falling apart. Ben said they all live in the first one or two stories of the hotels along the strip here because the heat is unbearable if you go any higher, and the sand is blowing back into the city on the edges. They try to keep the main road clear for the cars they send out, but they can’t keep up with much else.”

“Yeah, that’s what has me thinking.”

“Thinking?” Lucy had to prod Lynn when she didn’t volunteer more information. “Thinking about what?”

Lynn opened her eyes again, the strength in them outshining her weary body. “If they’ve got all the water and food they need, why they sending patrols out into the desert?”

“Why question it? We’d be dead, otherwise.”

“Right, but why? Just to find half-gone people like ourselves, bring us back from the edge of death with tomatoes?”

“Why not?”

“’Cause this is a dark world, and I’ve yet to see those who have helping those who have not unless they’ve got their own reasons.”

“We do,” Lucy pointed out. “We gave that family a perfectly good house with a freshwater source back in Nebraska.”

“That was your choice. And you had a reason.” Lynn’s eyes flashed, all her strength pouring into her words. “This ain’t California, little one, and don’t you forget it. These people were driving way out of their way, burning gas without knowing we were out there to save. And I want to know why.”

“Next time they offer to save my life or give me something to eat I’ll question that, okay?”

Lynn ignored Lucy’s tone, her eyes sliding shut again. “Thing is, you’ve got something to offer in return. Me, I don’t matter here. They ask you to show them where water is, you do it.”

“I would anyway,” Lucy said. “We owe them.”

“That’s right, we both do. But you’re the only one who can repay the debt. You’re the one they need, the one they’re going to listen to. You understand?”

“Yeah, I get it,” Lucy said, her voice lacking the conviction of her words. “I’m the one in charge now.”

Twenty-Seven

Nora insisted Lynn remain in bed, a rule Lynn disobeyed until Bailey tried to enforce it. The resulting match of wills ended with a broken wheelchair and the remnants of Lynn’s uneaten overripe tomato running down Bailey’s face. After that Lucy tried to be in the room whenever Bailey was around, but Lynn’s increasing unhappiness and the alluring call of freedom under the bright sky kept her away more than she had intended.

Ben was not ideal company, but his short shadow dogged her footsteps no matter where she went in the city. She soaked up the incessant stream of information he supplied, and regurgitated it for Lynn at night in the darkness of their shared room. She learned much and met new people, always cataloging their names, descriptions, and duties within the city to report back to Lynn in the evening. Lynn listened carefully, but Lucy’s mind was whirring away, analyzing the oasis of a city.

The long, deep pools full of sand fascinated Lucy, and she spent time lounging by their sculpted tops, watching the hot breeze make new patterns and imagining what the world had been like when crystalline waters lapped the concrete banks. But she was not asked to find freshwater, or prove her abilities again. Ben brought four bottles full of water, her allotment for the day. People in physically demanding jobs received six, as did the ill.

“Ugh.” Lynn grimaced, holding the bottle up to the light. “Doesn’t taste right.”

“Ben says that’s on account of the chlorine,” Lucy said, sipping her own water. “He says it breaks down after a while, but there’s an aftertaste.”

“That’s one word for it,” Lynn said, twisting the cap back onto her bottle.

“You drink that,” Lucy said. “Nora says you need to stay hydrated.”

“I’ve drank so much already I feel like I’m pregnant with a water baby.”

Lucy crossed her arms and mockingly raised one eyebrow. “Do I need to get Bailey in here?”

Lynn made a nasty noise in her throat but drank what was left in her bottle and handed it off to Lucy. “Happy?”

Their fingers brushed as she took the empty from Lynn, and Lucy thought hard before answering. “Yeah… actually. I am. This place, it feels good,” Lucy said. Even though Ben’s constant presence grated on her nerves, there was food and water. People had time in their days beyond their duties, playing pool in the rotted-out lobbies of the crumbling hotels in the fading daylight. “It might not be California, but if it’s got what I wanted… why not stay?”

Lynn settled back into her bed, eyes closed against the glare of the setting sun and the weight of Lucy’s words. “Let me meet this Lander fella before I even consider anything, okay? The only people that cross my path over the course of the day are Bailey and Ben, and it doesn’t seem fair to judge the whole city by those two.”

“And Nora,” Lucy reminded her, trying not to sound too hopeful. “Nora’s great.”

“And Nora,” Lynn admitted. She played with the edge of her blanket, focused on the simple task of folding it into a fan, the ridges poking through her fingers. “Let me meet Lander,” she repeated, “and have a little conversation about my gun. We’ll see how that goes.”

“Yeah, we’ll see,” Lucy agreed. For the first night since their arrival in Vegas, she did not sleep well.

The heat was oppressive the next day, the air creeping into every cranny of her skin and opening her pores to bring out each drop of hard-fought-for water she’d drunk in the morning. Lucy peered back into the dark of the lobby.

“You sure you want to go out today?” Lucy asked.

“It ever cool around here?” Lynn asked, as she shuffled out of the shadows.

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“It’s time for me to do something,” Lynn said, though Lucy noticed the sheen of sweat that popped up on her forehead. “I can’t sit in that room forever, letting you take all the risks.”

“I’m not so sure there are risks,” Lucy reminded her, as Lynn walked down the strip toward the hotel where Lander and Ben lived and managed the garden. Lynn was out of breath by the time they reached the hotel, and Lucy tried to steer her toward the chair Ben had pulled out of the shadows, still sitting alone in a bright arch of sunlight. Lynn brushed her off, though Lucy could feel her tightly wound muscles shaking even in their brief touch.

“I’m fine,” Lynn said. “Where to?”

Lucy led her to the gardens, hoping for a few minutes in which Lynn could absorb the life around her and restore her spirits. But Lander was there, moving quietly among the crop despite his size. He emerged from the tasseling sweet corn, golden fronds tangling in his stubble as he passed.

“Lynn, hello,” he said, his voice carrying the same reassuring resonance that had lulled Lucy’s fears when they met. “It’s good to meet you, and looking much stronger than I expected.” His eyes moved over her body in a way that made Lucy suspect he wasn’t just appreciating Lynn’s skills of recuperation.

“Uh-huh,” Lynn said, her interest focused on the corn rather than Lander. “So where’s my gun?”

“Your gun is somewhere safe.”

“Safest place for my rifle is in my own hands.”

Lander spread his hands in front of him, still smiling. “And I’m open to that. Your daughter has shared her abilities with us, and I understand your own lie in a more…”

“Violent,” Lynn provided. “You can say it.”

“A more violent path, then,” he finished.

“True enough.”

“So this is your gift to the world?”

Lynn’s eyebrows flew up, and Lucy felt herself bracing for the backlash. “I don’t remember ever getting a gift in the first place, or signing up for any kind of exchange.”

“Did we not give you life?”

“My mother gave me life; saving it was your choice. The only gift I give is death.”

Something flickered across his face, and Lander moved closer to Lynn, graceful as a cat. He towered over her, muscles rippling in his arms as he put a massive palm against Lynn’s throat, slim and pale after her illness. He leaned in to whisper to her, “Even now?”

Lucy breathed quietly in the shadows, tensing herself to spring, should she have to.

Lynn looked up at Lander, the strength of her voice vibrating his fingers where they lay. “Even now, you big son of a bitch.”

He burst out laughing, a sound so overpowering that not even the living air of the garden could soak it up, and it rolled out into the lobby to echo off the dark walls and back to them. “I like you,” he declared, and slapped Lynn on the back, which pushed her forward a foot. “I like you a lot.”

Lynn shot Lucy a look. “Fantastic.”

His hands fastened onto Lynn’s shoulders, and he beamed into her upturned face. “Then let’s see what you can do.”

Lynn’s rifle seemed to have missed her as its bullets sang out over the city, dropping targets at growing distances as Lander pointed out signs, car windows, anything that caught his eye. Nora had insisted on following them to the roof when she learned her patient would be climbing steps. Lander had carried Lynn the last hundred or so, cradled in his arms like a doll, while she likewise cradled the rifle.

It was soon clear exactly how novel gunshots were in Las Vegas. Bailey appeared shortly after the sharp cracks of the bullets, puffing her way to the roof as if she expected an insurrection she would single-handedly end. Her amazement at seeing Lynn with her gun in hand turned to bitterness in seconds flat, and Lucy kept her eye on the big lady, noting how her pinched face contracted even more with every compliment Lander paid to Lynn.

Ben was hot on Bailey’s heels, his cheeks flushed and any assistance he might’ve been able to bring to the imagined threat spent on the climb itself. He collapsed at Lucy’s feet and began lecturing her on how the long-dead elevators had operated. She made semi-interested noises at the appropriate times, which she’d learned was the only encouragement Ben needed to keep talking.

Lucy could see people in the streets shading their eyes against the glare and looking toward the gunshots. Lander waved to let them know all was well and continued to point out targets for Lynn, whose frail arms could only hold the rifle for so long. Eventually she lay down prone on the roof but kept shooting. “Lucy,” she called out, “some water.”

Lucy came forward and dropped next to Lynn to swap the bottle for the rifle, the easy feel of the weapon changing hands so familiar they could’ve been on the roof of their own home.

“Take a look,” Lynn said, pointing toward the west. “Something new.”

Lucy leaned into the rifle, her eyelashes brushing against the scope and bringing back memories in a flood. It wasn’t the green fields of Ohio she saw, but the burnt-out streets of Las Vegas, with drifts of sand invading the areas people had surrendered back to the desert. Sprawled in the sun, amid the broken buildings and rusted cars, was a huge cat, its tail twitching with pleasure as it soaked up the rays.

“Lord above.” Lucy blinked and pulled away from the scope. “How big is that thing?”

At home there had been a few feral cats, generations removed from their domesticated ancestors and mean as hell. Lucy remembered them as half-starved, hissing balls of fur, nothing like the majestic, well-muscled animal sleeping in the middle of the abandoned city.

“Big. It’s a mountain lion,” Nora said. “Group of them moved into that side of town years ago.”

Lucy rolled onto her elbow to look at Nora. “They a problem?”

“Yes,” Nora said.

Lynn took the rifle back from Lucy. “Why don’t you run them off?”

“Because you’re holding the only gun in this whole city,” Lander answered.

“And it’s time you handed it back,” Bailey added.

“No, shoot it first.” Nora had come up to the edge of the roof beside Lander, her shadow falling across Lynn and Lucy. “Shoot that one lying out there like she owns the place.”

To Lucy’s surprise, Lynn looked to Lander before sighting the cat again, and she found her gut twisting at the thought of Lynn’s crosshairs on the unsuspecting creature. The rifle cracked, and in the distance Lucy could see a streak of color as the she-cat fled for cover.

“Damn,” Lynn said, shading her eyes. “I missed.”

“Let her have the gun, Lander,” Nora said. Lander was about to object when Nora raised her hand to stop him. “Let her come up here while you or someone else is with her. You know as well as I do there are some buildings we can’t even get to anymore because of the cats and the coyotes. If she picks them off, we can recover all that water.”

Lander gave Nora a hard look but she didn’t drop her gaze, and her next words were directed at Lynn. “I’ll give you part of my water ration for every cat you drop,” she added, defiant eyes still on Lander.

Lynn looked between the two of them and unloaded her gun. “No need. I don’t find myself liking the taste of your water.”

“And why’s that?” Bailey bristled, as if personally insulted.

“Tastes bad,” Lynn said, handing the unspent bullets over to Lander.

“Can I be the one to stay up here with her?” Ben spoke up. “I want to see her get some of the coyotes.”

“Since everyone is assuming she will in fact be shooting,” Lander said, “I’d like to be the one who accompanies her.”

“And you’re all assuming I’m staying here in the first place,” Lynn said, her words casual but her tone stopping the very breeze.

Lander’s smile was back, warm and caring. “Where would you go? Even if we gave you water, once you walk out of here there are no guarantees.”

“You can’t walk anywhere, in your shape,” Nora added. “I wouldn’t let you leave.”

Lucy saw Lynn bristle. “I’m not sure you letting me is—”

“We plan on staying until I can find you a good source of freshwater,” Lucy interrupted. “We figure by then Lynn’ll be feeling well enough we can get along and I’ll have repaid our debt to you.”

“That so?” Lander said, holding out his hand for the rifle. “Well, I hope we can convince you to stay, between now and then.”

Twenty-Eight

“So how bad is it, really?” Lucy asked Nora as they stripped the beds she and Lynn had been using.

“What do you mean?” Nora asked, all attention on the sheets.

“If Lander’s willing to give Lynn a gun to free up the route to water you’ve been cut off from, you’ve got limited supplies.”

Lucy moved her small pile of belongings before tearing the dirty sheet off her bed. The clothes she’d been wearing on the road had been washed and returned to her, folded into a tight square so thin she could feel her thumb rubbing her forefinger through it. Her single boot she’d kept, and it stood sentinel on top of her threadbare clothes, waiting to be moved to the new room Nora had cleared them for now that Lynn no longer needed an IV.

“I wouldn’t say they’re limited,” Nora answered.

“You wouldn’t say that ’cause you’re too scared to, or because that’s not the case?” Lynn asked from the corner, where she rested in a wheelchair.

Nora turned to Lynn, irritation chasing manners from her features. “Look, I don’t know why you’ve got it in your head the whole world is made to harm. We’re good people here, and if saving your life without knowing the first thing about you isn’t proof enough, I don’t know what is.” She snapped the final clean sheet onto Lucy’s bed. Lucy could see her teeth digging into her lower lip as she worked.

“That’s great and all, but you didn’t exactly answer the question,” Lynn said, but Nora ignored her, lost in her work.

“That mountain lion was something else,” Lucy said, searching for a different subject. “We’ve got coyotes back home, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“They’re a menace,” Nora said through gritted teeth as she moved to Lynn’s bed. Lucy watched as a clean white sheet sailed overhead. “It began with only one or two down in the residential area. Some of the men would see them when they raided the homes.

“The smaller critters, like skunks and raccoons, came into town shortly after all the water went off. Smelled all the food rotting, I guess. Cats followed them, coyotes too. We all hoped enough human activity would keep them away from the strip, but…” Nora broke off to tuck the corner of the sheet tightly under the mattress. “We started seeing coyotes in the main roads after a bit, and the lions followed them into the city.”

Nora stood straight and surveyed the bright white of the empty beds, as clean as if Lynn and Lucy had never been there. “I’ll show you your new room,” she said.

They went up a floor, the heat rising enough for them to notice. Lucy cracked the balcony door of their new room to see black clouds piling in the distance. “Might rain,” she called to Lynn, but Nora was the one who joined her outside, the long curtains flapping in between them.

“She’s out of breath,” Nora said. “Your mother is weaker than she looks.”

“She’ll be fine.”

Nora came to the railing beside Lucy. “I know you’ve counted on her for a long time, little one. But the type of bodily injury she suffered… some people never come back from that, not fully. I don’t know that leaving would be wise. Ever.”

Lucy nodded, her eyes trained on the darkness rolling in. “I won’t let her leave, if I don’t think she’s able. And if she’s never able, then it is what it is.”

Nora followed Lucy’s gaze to the storm rolling in and reached for the younger girl’s hand. “I know she doesn’t trust us yet, or our ways, but the fact that Lander would let her touch a gun speaks volumes.”

Lucy’s spine stiffened, and she took her hand away from Nora’s. “It’s her gun.”

Nora sighed as a hot wind blew through the city, whipping the curtains around them. A dark streak shot across the road in the face of the storm, and Lucy smiled at the familiar sight of a striped tail. “Never thought I’d miss seeing one of them.”

“Raccoons give you trouble back home?”

“Always. I thought Lynn was going to tear her hair out one year over the sweet corn. Stayed up three days in a row picking raccoons off from the roof, but it didn’t matter. She fell asleep for five minutes and it was a done deal. They stripped every stalk.”

“Lander and Ben keep them out of their garden, though I don’t know how,” Nora admitted. “We do see coyotes up here on the strip occasionally, so they probably keep the population down.”

“But not lions?” Lucy asked, trying to keep her voice casual.

Nora’s mouth tightened. “No, not them, thank God.”

“You hate them.”

The clouds passed over, covering what was left of the sunset and leaving the women in darkness. The air was close and hot, the rain refusing to fall. Lucy could barely see the outline of Nora’s face in the last rays of sun.

“Before the world ended I used to try to find them, ridiculous as that seems now,” she said. “I’d go out hiking overnight, make animal distress calls, anything I could do to call them to me. I loved the way they moved, like liquid under fur. They made me realize some animals are better than others, that the food chain in all of its barbarism is exactly what nature intended.”

“So?” Lucy asked, the hot wind pulling her words from her mouth. “What changed?”

Nora looked at her as the clouds scudded across the sky and the last red rays of the setting sun brilliantly lit her eyes. “One of them ate my daughter.”

Lucy grasped the older woman’s hand, covering it completely with both of hers. “I am so, so, sorry. I wouldn’t have asked…”

Nora waved the apology away but took her hand back to wipe at some stray tears. “You had no way of knowing.”

“Was this… in your time? Before the Shortage?”

“No. It was a few years ago. I had a child very late in life, here in what’s left of the world. I mentioned her to you, do you remember?”

“Little one,” Lucy said quietly. “You called her little one.”

“I did.” Nora nodded, wiping at another errant tear. “She was built small like you, and wiry too. She used to make Lander laugh by showing off how much she could lift. They made a game of it.

“She was twelve when it happened. Her job was scavenging on the western end for food, clothes, little things we needed replaced in the day to day, like scissors or can openers. Lander was going to teach her how to manage the garden, and Ben was going to fill her post as a scavenger. She was showing him some of the areas that hadn’t been picked over yet.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cat hunt, but a lion will stalk its prey same as little tame cats. No matter how many times I tell myself it’s helping nobody, I’ve played it through my head a million times how that cat must’ve followed the two of them, sliding through the shadows and waiting for the chance to pounce.”

Lucy pictured it in her mind as well, drawn in by the grieving mother’s words and the image of two small bodies picking through rubble, hunted by a gliding shadow. She’d seen it in miniature at home before, the silent paws that could deal a crushing velvety blow to the slowest of the stalked.

“But why wouldn’t the cat have gone for Ben?” Lucy asked. “Predators always attack the smallest or the weakest. He would’ve been both.”

The clouds pulsed overhead, refusing to break. Lightning flickered and the thunder rolled in the distance before Nora answered.

“The way he tells it, my girl was outside and he was indoors when it attacked.”

Lucy carefully watched the play of muscles across Nora’s face as they waited for the rain to fall, the flashes of lightning contorting her expression and making it unreadable. “You believe him?”

Nora’s shrug was barely perceptible in the darkness. “Ben wants nothing more than his father’s love and respect. Working that garden with Lander day in and day out is how he thinks he’ll get it. I can’t say for sure what happened the day my daughter died, and knowing wouldn’t change it anyhow.”

“It is what it is,” Lucy said, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder with Nora as the storm passed them by.

Twenty-Nine

Lucy felt a distinct sense of unease when she went out to witch with Ben the next day. She could easily picture him sacrificing Nora’s daughter, allowing her to be taken by the big cat to further his own ends. Lucy struggled for nonchalance as they walked out of the shadows of the city’s buildings, into the bright white stretch of desert.

The rain had refused to fall the night before. The clouds had taunted the city as they slid past. The sky was as clear as glass when Lucy stepped out of the shade and into the sun, the sand throwing the heat back up at her and baking her skin from below.

“C’mon then,” she said testily to Ben, who was struggling with an armload of flags. Lander had been overly optimistic when giving them a hundred of the wire flags used to mark buried water lines, but Lucy hadn’t wanted to crush the hope in the big man’s eyes.

“I’m coming,” Ben shot back. “These keep poking me. I don’t see why you can’t carry some.”

“I need my hands free,” Lucy said.

Ben caught up to stand next to her. “So how’s this work, anyway? You walk around ’til you feel it?”

Lucy stifled a sigh. “Something like that.”

“No, really, tell me. I want to know how you do it.”

“It’s not something I can teach. People either can, or they can’t.”

Ben made a face at her and she walked away from him, closing her eyes and holding her hands outward, hoping the show of concentration would keep him quiet. Lander had cut her a forked stick from one of the trees in the garden, and while it lacked the smooth contours from years of her grip, it would do the trick.

The power to find water was so sacred that Stebbs had lowered his voice when he spoke to her about it, even in private. Lynn would prefer to never speak of it at all, keeping Lucy’s gift in a quiet place where it would draw no attention. But Lucy had always reveled in the spasm of power that water sent toward her, crying out to her it was there and wanted to be found.

“Here,” she said. “It’s not very deep though.”

Ben pulled a flag from his bundle and jabbed it into the ground. “That’s good, right? Easier to get to.”

“Easier to get at, yeah, but if it’s shallow, it might not last long.” Lucy wandered off in another direction, letting her feet go, her mind drift while waiting for the water to talk to her. The heat was drawing her own moisture straight out of her skin, dotting her pores with beads of sweat. A rifle shot echoed across the flat plain and Lucy jumped, drops falling off her forehead and evaporating on the hot sand.

“Shit,” she said. “Scared me.”

Ben looked back at the city, the flags slung across his shoulders. “Your mom. She’s rather basic, isn’t she?”

“What do you mean?” Lucy asked, her sudden clench making the stick jump in her hands.

“That water?”

“The stick wants to hit you and I’m stopping it.”

Ben smiled, whether he thought she was funny or because he enjoyed getting under her skin she didn’t know. “I mean she’s one-sided. She wants her gun, and she wants to shoot things, and that seems to be about where her interests stop.”

“Well, she’s good at it,” Lucy said, repositioning the stick and walking away from Ben.

“You ask questions about the garden, and our people. You want to know how we manage, but all she wants to do is get her gun and move on.”

“Yes, she does,” Lucy agreed. The stick leapt in her hands, viciously jabbing downward, but she felt no rush of pride. “Here.”

Ben planted a flag, eyes still on Lucy. “What if she wants to go, and you don’t?”

“What about it?”

“Would you stay?”

“I don’t…” Lucy looked off into the distance at the blue mountains not unlike the ones Lynn had nearly died getting across, all because Lucy had asked her to. She dropped her stick and glared down at Ben, unsure how he could look so smug when he had to look up to meet her eye. “Lynn and I go together or we stay together. End of story.”

“That’s a shame.”

“What do you care?”

Ben dropped his armload of flags to the ground. “I wouldn’t say I care. It’s obvious you like it here and your mom doesn’t. Did you mean what you said about finding us a clean source of water and moving on?”

“Yes,” Lucy said, taking the bottle of water Ben handed to her from his backpack.

“Because that’s what she wants, or what you want?”

The odd-tasting water slid down her throat, coating her tongue with the residue she could never quite wash away. But it was water, and two weeks ago she would’ve licked puddles off the hot road to save her life.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, handing the water back to Ben.

His smile was honest, and it nearly made his awkward face handsome. Lucy smiled back, unable to help herself. “You almost looked like your dad there for a second.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Better than my mom.”

Lucy dried her palms on her jeans before taking the stick back up. “What’s she look like?”

“Bailey’s my mom.”

“Bailey? The nurse?”

Ben sighed and re-shouldered his backpack. “Oh, I know. How did such a little shrimp of a guy come out of Bailey and Lander? It’s a genetic joke that gets trotted out for a laugh all the time, so go ahead and have your giggle.”

“I wasn’t thinking that so much as… ugh,” Lucy said, turning red for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.

“Well, yeah, there’s that too,” Ben agreed, falling into step beside her with his armload of blue flags. “But my dad can’t exactly be picky, you know? He had a kid with Nora and that didn’t turn out so great—”

“Wait, Nora’s daughter was Lander’s?”

“She told you about that?”

“Yeah.” Lucy looked away, answering the tiny vibe the earth had thrown her. “Here.”

“There was nothing I could do,” Ben said stiffly as he planted the flag.

“So she was your sister then?”

“Half sister, yeah,” Ben answered as they veered away from the smattering of blue flags waving behind them. “Anyway, after Rachel got killed by the lion, Dad started showing me how to manage the garden right, measure the acid in the dirt for the different vegetables and make sure they each have the proper sun exposure. It’s not an easy thing, if you want to do it right.”

Ben was swept away in the surge of importance as he talked about his duties, and Lucy let him go on through the next two flags before asking a question. “So was your dad hoping he and Bailey would be able to…” She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence politely.

“Make a big, healthy baby?” Ben asked, his eyebrows raised in two mocking points. “Maybe. That or by then he’d realized Nora wasn’t going to be having any more kids and he realized it was Bailey or bust.” He giggled at his own joke, but Lucy didn’t join in.

“What do you mean? Surely there’s someone else willing to…”

All humor slid from Ben’s face as he looked at her. “You seriously didn’t know? Jeez, Lucy, open your eyes. How many women have you seen around here?”

A cold tremor passed over Lucy despite the heat, and her witching stick jumped even though there was no water beneath it. “I thought…” Her words gave out as her mind jumped back to Lynn’s first shooting session from on top of the hotel. People had littered the streets, staring up at them with their eyes shaded. But none of them had been women.

“Thought what?”

“I don’t know. I guess maybe that they were out… you know, just doing things.”

“Doing things?” Ben laughed outright. “You’re something. No, it’s been Bailey and Nora for a long time. Then here comes your mom into town with her long hair and her birthing hips—”

“You can’t be serious,” Lucy interrupted. “Lander wants to get Lynn pregnant?”

“Sure, why do you think he’s the one that’s sitting with her while she’s shooting? You really think he doesn’t have better things to do?”

Lucy looked to the city, shading her eyes against the glare and searching for the flash of the rifle among the thousands of panes of glass. “He wouldn’t force her, would he?”

“What, rape her? My dad? Nah.” Ben dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “He likes to get people to do what he wants, not make them.”

“No danger of that then,” she said. “Lynn’s not interested.”

Ben reached up and awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, I don’t like the idea either. I might be small, but I’m still my dad’s son. And right now, I’m the only one he’s got. I’m hoping he’ll realize you turned out small, and kinda stupid too, so he’ll give up the idea of making a baby with your mom.”

“Well, let’s hope so,” Lucy said through gritted teeth, and swept her stick across the sand. The rush of surprise and anger was sending tremors through her skin, making it impossible to listen for the quiet pull of water.

“Oh, and speaking of rape,” Ben said casually, taking his backpack off again. “I have something for you.”

The stick jumped in her hands, and Lucy rested one end on the sand. “You are the worst person in the world to try to do this with,” she said.

“Sorry,” Ben mumbled as he dug in his pack. “Here, these are for you and your mom.” He handed Lucy two black rectangles with prongs at the top.

“What’s this?”

“Push the button on the side,” Ben said.

She did, and a bright-blue arc of light jumped from one prong to the other. The rectangle buzzed in her hand and Lucy yelped, dropping it to the ground. “What the hell?”

“It’s electricity,” Ben explained. “Nora and Bailey carry them too, although I don’t think any of the men would ever consider touching you while my dad forbids it.”

Lucy toed the black object in the sand mistrustfully. “So it shocks people?”

“Yeah, anybody gives you trouble, you—ZZZZZZ—” Ben imitated jerking motions. “Zap ’em. It’s really pretty neat. Catch a turtle and I’ll show you how it works.”

“I think I’m okay,” Lucy said, putting both in her own backpack. She picked her stick up and looked behind them at the handful of blue flags spotting the desert. “We should keep going.”

“Dad wanted us to place all of these,” Ben said, looking doubtfully at the pile still at his feet. “We should stick some in random places.”

Lucy shook her head. “And then people would be digging for no reason. I can’t always be sure what I find is a solid bet, but I won’t set people looking where I know there’s nothing.”

Ben blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Have it your way then.”

She flapped her arms about her, muscles cramping from holding them straight for so long. “Give me a sec, I’ll be ready soon.”

“Whenever,” Ben said, flopping to the desert floor.

“So, were there ever other women? Has it always been just Nora and Bailey?”

“Huh? Oh no, there used to be a whole lot more people here, in general. Then cholera swept through right around the time I was born, and it wiped out a lot of us.”

“Cholera’s bad stuff.”

“We’d taken in some new people and one of them was falling sick but hiding it. Probably one of the females, because not long after that their water supply was infected.”

“The women drank from different water?”

Ben shaded his eyes to look up at her. “Dad said it caused too much trouble and distraction to have everybody doing as they pleased, so men and women lived apart.”

“And people were okay with that?”

“I guess they had water and food, so they were okay with anything.”

Lucy dropped down next to Ben in the sand, pulling out her water bottle. “So one of the women was sick with cholera?”

“Yeah. Whoever it was, they were all drawing out of the same tank in the women and children’s hotel, and a few days later most of them were dead. Dad said it was such a stink they ended up torching the place, hoping to kill off the bug.”

“It work?”

“Seems so. We haven’t had a case of cholera since then, although it made Nora straight paranoid. She made Lander take her out to the hospital—the real one—and the library to get medical books so she could know all there was to know about waterborne illnesses. She had groups of men carrying boxes of books that weighed more than me up into her hotel room for days.”

Lucy’s hand stopped cold on the cap of her bottle, as a bubble of hope rose from her long-dormant heart. “She know about polio?”

“She knows about damn near everything. Even if she doesn’t, I guarantee you anything anybody needs to know is in those books.”

Lucy jammed her bottle into the depths of her pack to hide the quaking of her hands. “All right then, let’s get moving.”

Ben remained where he was, lying in the sun like the big cat she’d seen through Lynn’s scope. “So it doesn’t bother you?”

“What’s that?”

Ben’s smile was slow and measured, nothing like the spontaneous one that had burst across his face earlier. “You gave up your secret way too early.”

Lucy’s eyebrows came together as she looked at him, comprehension only dawning as she remembered the look on the men’s faces as they’d carefully bundled Lynn’s nearly lifeless body into the backseat of the car. In her own state she’d not questioned why perfect strangers would be scared at the thought of Lynn dying.

“You would’ve saved us anyway,” Lucy said slowly, “whether I could witch or not. Because you need women.”

“Well,” Ben said, “you’re not so stupid after all.”

Thirty

“Get that away from me,” Lynn said, when Lucy offered her the zapper in their room that evening.

“It’s not such a bad idea,” Lucy argued. “Lander keeps your gun locked up when he’s not on the roof with you, and you’re weak like a fish on shore.”

“Maybe, but that thing’s no good unless somebody is in arm’s reach. My rifle keeps them farther even when it’s not loaded.”

“Fine.” Lucy put both zappers into her pack. “But I’ll point out again that you don’t have the rifle, period.”

Lynn threw an arm over her face, and her voice came out muffled by the crook of her elbow. “I’ll get it back. Lander’s not the most charming man in the world, but he’s not stupid either. If it helps them to arm me, he’ll do it.”

Lucy unlaced her boots carefully, weighing her words before speaking. “I found quite a few veins today.”

“Viable ones?”

“Think so. Ben was pretty distracting, so I couldn’t get a feel for how deep they were, but there’s water out there.”

Lynn grunted, but offered nothing more.

Lucy stripped off her clothes and slid into her own bed. Darkness had filled the rest of the room, but she could see the outline of Lynn’s arm tented over her face in the moonlight. “Ben said Nora and Bailey were the only women here before we showed up.”

The eruption of panic she’d been expecting didn’t come. Instead Lynn sighed, the simple exhalation a measure of how trapped she felt. “I know.”

“How?”

“Lander can’t always know what I’m looking at through the scope, and I see plenty, but never once a woman. So asking a few of the right questions to Nora today opened her up a bit. She even told me how come there’s no guns around here except mine.” Lucy rolled onto her side to hear Lynn better as her disembodied voice floated through the darkness.

“I was wondering,” Lucy said. “Seems like a city this size there’d be guns somewhere.”

“There was, back when the Shortage first happened. Plenty, to hear Nora tell it. But people were panicking here, same as back home. Mother said when things first went down it was chaos. In a city this size, with the hotels filled with those who didn’t belong, it turned downright nasty. Those that lived here claimed their water for themselves.”

“So what happened?”

“Those who didn’t belong were tossed into the desert, but they didn’t go easy. Nora said there was so much blood the sand was like mud, and people sinking into it up to their ankles while they begged to stay.”

Lucy reached for the bottle she had beside her bed, though she hadn’t adjusted to the taste of the water yet. The burning heat of the desert was a fresh memory, and the image of desperate people driven to madness made her clutch the bottle all the more tightly. “They all die?”

“Seems someone among the outcasts was no idiot, and they made their way over to a place called Lake Mead. Lost a lot on the walk. Nora said there were buzzards in a straight line in the sky. People must’ve been dropping every few feet.”

Lucy had seen enough buzzards in her time, their black wings and long, slow descents marking the final resting place of someone unlucky. “That’s horrible.”

“They weren’t the only ones who headed to the lake. There were plenty of people those days that didn’t like everything this city stood for, and the things that went on in it. So when the people who lived in the City of Sin made judgment calls about who got to survive after the Shortage, it didn’t set well with those who had took up at the lake. When the exiles straggled in, there was no sympathy for the city dwellers among either group, and a common enemy makes for fast friends.

“They came back at night and went after those who had killed their loved ones. Nora said if she had thought the sand was mud before, then the streets were rivers that night.

“The people from the lake scoured the city, took every gun they found, adding to their own strength and ensuring any revenge the people of Las Vegas tried to take would be of the unarmed kind. Nora says still if anyone from the city tries to take the pass to Lake Mead, they get a warning shot. But only sometimes.”

“So all the water they’ve got access to is what’s in the hotel tanks, the stored pool water and such. If they run out…”

“If they run out, they’re dead, and I’ve got no idea how much is left. But the fact they’ll let a stranger like me clear areas where there’s old water stored says a lot.”

Threads of thought spun webs in Lucy’s brain, and when she spoke again it was with a hesitant voice. “Ben says there was a bad wave of cholera back when he was born. For all they know the water in those hotels they’ve been cut off from is infected with Lord knows what all.”

“There’d only be one way to find out.”‘

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

“Well, cheer up. They won’t risk losing us—we’ve got wombs,” Lynn said darkly.

“You really think Lander would have one of his own men drink water that could kill them?”

“I think Lander would pour poison down his mother’s throat if it served his purposes.”

The thin bank of clouds moved on and the moon shone into their room, shining brightly on the two women so far from their home. Lucy swallowed hard, fighting back tears.

“Ben says I spoke up too early, that I shouldn’t have told I can witch. He says the men on the road would’ve helped us anyway, on account of us being women, and I was stupid to give away my secret so soon.”

The words tumbled out into the darkness, hot and sticky in her mouth, leaving as much of an aftertaste as the Las Vegas water. “If I hadn’t told, they might not try so hard to keep us here. They’ll never let us go now. Not when I could be the only thing that keeps them from dying.”

“Well, Ben’s a short idiot. Letting us go is one thing and us leaving is another.”

The giggles started in Lucy’s midsection and worked their way upward, erupting only when she pictured the look on Ben’s face if he knew Lynn had called him a short idiot. Lynn glanced over.

“Not a lot to laugh about.”

“No,” Lucy admitted, wiping the last tears from her face. “There’s not. Shit, Lynn, what’re we gonna do?”

“We’re gonna get out of here before I’m pregnant and you’re failing to thrive.”

Lucy did not sleep well. Dreams filled with bloodied sand and dark drops on black pavement kept bringing her back to consciousness to take deep breaths of the fetid hotel air.

“I’m getting up,” she said to Lynn, moments before the sun began to streak the sky pink. Lynn muttered something from the other bed but didn’t stir. She was not the type to sleep in, and her fatigue was a measure of how drained her body still was.

Lucy dressed in clothes Nora had given her, ones that fit better than Ben’s castoffs from when they first arrived. Lucy’s clothes from the road were so choked with bad memories she couldn’t believe the threadbare fabric could hold up under the weight. She slipped out the door and closed it softly behind her, not wanting to steal whatever moments of sleep Lynn might have left before Lander came calling to take her to the roof.

The hallway air was even heavier than in the room, where at least a window could be opened. Lucy exhaled sharply, and a door down the hall opened. Nora stepped out and Lucy called to her, glad to see she wasn’t the only one awake.

“Hey, Nora,” she said as she walked toward her, and the older woman jumped. “Sorry,” Lucy said quickly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay,” Nora said, but her hands were shaking as she pulled her hair up off her shoulders into a ponytail. “You couldn’t sleep?”

“Nope.” Lucy glanced into Nora’s room out of curiosity and saw what Ben had promised. Medical books lined the walls on shelves clumsily set at awkward angles, sagging beneath the weight. “You a reader?”

Nora pulled the door shut but smiled at Lucy, motioning for her to follow. “Those aren’t the kinds of books you read to pass the time, little one. What’s in those books keeps me sleepless, like you.”

They walked out of the hotel into the warm morning. A stiff breeze peppered with sand picked at them as they walked toward the indoor gardens. “Not a good day for your mom to be up on the roof,” Nora observed.

“No,” Lucy said, “but Lander will probably take her anyway. She’s a good enough shot to account for the wind and still hit her target.”

They picked up the pace as they passed the sand dunes in front of the garden hotel. The breeze was sculpting intricate tops and tossing the extra sand into their faces. Nora held the door open for Lucy and they stood inside for a moment, listening to the sand hitting the glass windows.

“That’s quite the ability your mom has. I’m surprised she has no problem doling out death, when her own mother was a healer like me.”

Lucy splayed her hand on the glass window and studied it to buy some time as she made up a lie. “My grandma was trained in the city as a doctor, but when she had to leave, Lynn learned a harder way of life.”

“And which one do you take after?”

“I don’t know enough about myself to know,” Lucy said honestly. “I guess I could kill if I had to, but Lynn’s made sure I haven’t had to.”

Nora spread her own hand on the glass next to Lucy’s, equally small but with wrinkled skin. “I think you’ve got potential as a healer. You have small hands and a quick, gentle touch. Your mom said you were helping your grandmother back home when polio went through.”

“Yeah.” Lucy pulled her hand away from the warm glass, a sudden vision of familiar faces contorted with pain filling her mind. “My best friend was the first one to go.”

Nora touched her arm, her hand warm and sure. “I’m sorry.”

Lucy watched the pattern of her hand fading from the window, the tiny amount of moisture she’d left behind evaporating quickly on the hot glass.

“Ben said you know a lot about water sicknesses, that you gathered up those books and learned all you could. Is polio something you know a lot about?”

“I do, yes.” Nora smiled at her. “Is that the first thing you would like to learn about? The illness that drove you from home?”

“Definitely,” Lucy said, smiling back despite the nervous churning of her stomach. “I was wondering about something in particular. I know someone can have polio and not show any symptoms, but still pass it on to other people, right?”

Nora nodded. “Yes, they’re called carriers.”

Lucy’s words came out in a rush, the miles of road in between her and Carter insignificant in her mind if she could deliver him from the hell of loneliness. “So will that person always have polio? Can they continue to infect people until they’re dead?”

“No,” Nora said automatically, and Lucy’s heart leapt in her chest. “The carrier’s body will pass the virus out within a few weeks. They’d definitely need to be quarantined for a while and monitored, but after enough time, the carrier would pose no more danger.”

Lucy shut her eyes against the pounding heat of the lobby, her heart beating in her chest so loudly, she wondered if Nora could hear it.

“Morning, ladies.” Lander’s voice bounced off the glass in front of them to reverberate back through Lucy’s bones, reminding her there was still a game to be played, and with more consequences now than ever.

She turned with a smile. “Good morning.”

Thirty-One

Witching with Ben was more tedious than ever, now that Lucy knew she would never benefit from the wells she was marking. Fletcher’s warning about dragging Lynn back over the mountains echoed in her mind, drowning out Ben’s complaints about the blowing sand. With each quiver of the stick Ben drove a flag, and Lucy didn’t stop him even when she was well aware it was the quickness of her own pulse and not the call of water.

“Can we be done already?” Ben whined. “This sand is getting everywhere, and I mean everywhere.” He pulled the band of his pants away from his stomach to illustrate his point.

“Don’t forget this stick still wants to hit you,” Lucy teased, her spirits high enough to put up with Ben’s misguided humor.

He was concocting a smart remark when Lucy spotted a flash of light over his shoulder. “What’s a car doing out there?” Lucy framed her hands around her eyes to keep the sand out and squinted. “The highway’s the other direction.”

“It’s nothing,” Ben said, jamming the diminishing stack of flags under his arm. “C’mon, I’m done with this.”

“What if it’s someone lost, like I was?” Lucy argued, still staring into the distance.

“I said, it’s nothing,” Ben insisted. “But if it’ll get you moving, I’ll tell Dad once we get back and he’ll send a car out.”

“All right,” Lucy agreed, readjusting her pack. “Don’t forget, though.”

Ben’s eyebrows shot up. “You can tell him yourself if you don’t trust me.”

“No. I need to get back and talk to Lynn.”

“About what?”

“Just to check on her,” Lucy lied quickly, alarmed at how easy it was becoming. “She wasn’t feeling well this morning.”

Ben stopped in his tracks and grabbed Lucy’s arm. “Do you mean she was vomiting? Like morning sickness?”

Lucy jerked out of his grip. “No, moron, just like, you know, I-nearly-died-in-the-desert-and-don’t-feel-so-great-yet kind of sick.”

“Okay, good,” Ben said as they started walking again. “You’d let me know if she was, right? Pregnant?”

“Oh, you’ll be the first person I tell,” Lucy said. “Another good indication would be your father’s slit throat.”

“Lynn?” Lucy burst through their door, the news of her early morning discovery about Carter on the tip of her tongue.

“What?” Lynn was resting in the chair, her head leaned to one side, eyes ringed in dark circles. Lucy’s words died on her lips.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Lynn said. “Though I could do without Lander watching every move I make. I’ve got a gun and all he’s got is his eyes, and somehow I feel like he’s got the drop on me.”

“Is there… did he…” Lucy trailed off, unaccustomed to being the one asking after the other’s safety.

“He didn’t lay a finger on me,” Lynn answered the unasked question. “Though he’s not very good at hiding the fact he’d like to try.”

“Well, he probably doesn’t have a lot of practice with flirting.”

Lynn smiled. “It worries me though. Him and Ben both are used to getting what they want and probably don’t know how to handle it when it doesn’t come easy. We need to get out of here.”

“I need to talk to you about that,” Lucy said, sitting on the end of the bed.

“You want to stay?”

“No,” Lucy said. “I want to go home. For Carter.”

Lynn sat back in the chair. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I talked to Nora this morning,” Lucy said. “She knows all about polio. She said a carrier—like Carter—they don’t have it forever. It passes out of their body.”

Lynn’s eyes slid shut, her body suddenly so still the only movement was the pulse in her throat. “Christ,” she said after a while. “Oh, Christ.”

“Carter is out in the wild by himself. I owe it to him to go back and let him know. I can’t—” Lucy’s voice cracked as she thought of the few hours after she’d left Lynn behind on the road, her footfalls no longer echoed by someone else’s. “I can’t imagine anything worse.”

Lynn was silent in the chair, the last red rays of sun hitting her hard and showing lines Lucy had never noticed before, as if she’d aged in the last few minutes. “Lynn?”

“I can set your mind at ease about that,” Lynn said. “Carter’s not wandering alone by himself. I killed him.”

“You…” Lucy stared at Lynn blankly, all reason having left her. “You’re kidding.”

Lynn shook her head slowly, and opened her eyes to fix them on Lucy’s.

The hope that had gathered in Lucy all day was sucked out of her so forcefully it felt as if her lungs collapsed, leaving the only word she could think of weak and flat as it escaped her. “Why?”

“He was following us for a ways, and back at Lake Wellesley I went out and found him. He was ready to go, Lucy.”

A white heat leapt from Lucy’s gut, igniting her muscles and driving her up off the bed before she knew what she intended to do. Her hand cracked against Lynn’s cheek, and the older woman’s head bounced off the side of the chair with the force of Lucy’s blow.

“No!” she screamed at Lynn, tears erupting from her eyes. “You shut up! Don’t you say it, don’t you tell me it was a mercy!” Lucy beat at Lynn with her bare hands, bruising the soft skin of her palms with every strike. Lynn curled into a ball, letting Lucy’s anger break against her body. But Lucy’s rage was not receding, and soon Lynn’s nose was bloodied while Lucy still screamed.

“Carter wanted to live, he wanted babies and a home, he wanted life. He was like me. And you took it from him because all you know is death!” She struck Lynn over and over, but the outpouring of words and tears did nothing to touch the deep pool of grief that had been opened inside of her.

She didn’t stop until Nora pulled her off Lynn, her hands and forearms slick with the blood of the woman who had devoted her life to protecting her. “I hate you,” she screamed, her hysterical voice breaking on every word. “I hate you and your fucking gun!”

The last thing she saw as Nora dragged her from the room was Lynn curled into a bloody ball on the floor, eyes as blank as they had been when Lucy had left her behind in the desert.

Nora wiped Lynn’s blood from Lucy’s hands while tears and truth flowed from Lucy in an unbridled wave. She talked about Carter and how his smile was one of her first memories, how years of building tree houses together in the woods had evolved into thoughts of something more permanent for both of them. How broken she had been when Maddy had died, the pain of leaving home knowing Carter was damned, and that she would never see her grandmother or Stebbs again. She talked about Joss left to die on the road and of the mother who had put a gun to her temple. She told Nora that Lynn was not her mother, and now she was glad of it.

Nora drew a warm washcloth across Lucy’s face, and the last trails of pink from Lynn’s blood were blotted away. “You’ve exhausted yourself,” Nora said, pressing gently on the swollen skin around Lucy’s eyes.

Lucy held her hands to her chest to feel the emptiness there, the place where so much love had been.

Nora leaned Lucy back on her own bed and tucked a blanket around her shoulders. “It sounds like Lynn’s had a hard life.”

Lucy nodded, unable to deny it even in the empty aftershock of her wrath. “She’s had to do horrible things to survive.”

“I understand,” Nora said softly as she wrung the washcloth out over a pan. “But when people have to do things like that, it changes them. I can’t say what kind of person she would’ve been in a different situation, but I can say what she is now. And it’s not the kind of person I think you want to be.”

Years of emotion tangled up with Lynn revolted in Lucy, and she had the sudden urge to throw the blood-tinged water in Nora’s face. But then the thought of Carter’s life evaporating from his spilled blood made her shake her head. “No,” she agreed. “I don’t think I ever could be.”

“We don’t live like that here, not anymore,” Nora said. “We are strong and healthy, with good food and—now you’re here—plenty of water in our future.”

“And soft pillows,” Lucy mumbled, as what remained of her energy slipped away.

Nora smiled and squeezed Lucy’s hand. “And soft pillows, as many as you’d like.”

Nora wasted no time surrounding Lucy with books, elated to finally have someone with a quick mind who wanted to learn her craft. Bailey was acceptable as an assistant, Nora explained, but her calloused hands and abrupt manner made her a less than desirable caregiver. Nora sat on the floor across from Lucy for days, showing her how to navigate the huge books and pull the streams of information from them. They were piled all around the two of them like a paper fort, the words protecting them from the many-faced specter of illnesses, the pages muffling the sounds of Lander moving Lynn from her room. Lander and Nora had both thought it best if Lucy and Lynn were kept separate for a while. Nothing should strain Lucy’s nerves as she searched the desert for water.

As the days crept by, Lucy felt as if her emptiness was growing to fill all her corners, leaving room for nothing else. Worry and fear slipped away, anger and happiness following shortly thereafter. Even Ben’s ill attempts at humor could not grate on nerves that didn’t exist anymore, and Lucy floated in a cloud of nothing as the cooler breezes of fall played with the short ends of her hair once Lander set her to the witching again.

The big man’s patience was stretched. Two of the wells she had marked earlier had run dry only days after being struck, and his hands fell on her shoulders more heavily than when she had first arrived. Lucy tried to ignore the increasing pressure of his fingers on her arm as they walked the flags together and she tried to discern which veins ran deeper than others. She’d been able to make out the wild maelstrom of Lynn’s hair in the wind on top of the hotel where her rifle still rang from, and while she could ignore Lynn’s presence, she couldn’t rid her mind of Lynn’s words that had warned of danger.

“So you staying?” Ben asked as they roamed the desert to the east of the city, his arms loaded with flags dirty from reuse after marking failed wells.

“You don’t sound too happy about it,” Lucy said.

“I don’t care either way what you do,” Ben said airily, striking a flag into the ground even though she hadn’t told him to. “But I know who does.”

“I’m not talking to you about Lynn.”

“Didn’t mean her,” Ben said. “It’s my dad. Every well you’ve marked has been as useful as a stream of piss.”

“Know a lot about those, do you?”

“Lynn’s mowed a path to every unreachable water tank we had. She’s earned her way, even if she’s not warming up to Dad. You were supposed to save us, but so far all you’ve done is set us to digging holes with mud at the bottom.”

Lucy snapped her stick upward, grabbing it with both hands to keep herself under control. “Oh yeah, and what about you? What do you do that’s so special?”

Ben looked at Lucy, imperious even with a bundle of muddy flags clutched to his puffed-up chest. “I’m smart.”

“Really?” Lucy slung her stick over her shoulder, finished witching for the day even if there were flags left. “That’s your big contribution? You’re smart?”

Ben’s upper lip curled and his small face contorted into a grimace so fierce that for a moment Lucy forgot she was bigger than him.

“I’ll show you. You need to learn exactly where you stand. And where I stand too.”

Dormant emotions laced through her and Lucy glared back, grateful to feel something after the weeks of nothing. “You don’t know the things I’ve been through in order to stand at all.”

A grim kind of satisfaction rippled across Ben’s eyes, and he smiled. “Tomorrow then.”

Thirty-Two

“Lucy?”

Lynn’s voice crept into her dreams, bringing visions of home and green fields. The present evaporated like the rain that never fell, and Lucy turned toward the voice, reaching her hand out before she was fully awake. The familiar touch of weathered hands brought Lucy to consciousness and she sat up quickly, a streak of fear pulling her forward.

Lynn sat at the foot of Lucy’s bed, her face a pale circle in the moonlight, her dark hair lost in the inky blackness of the room. She had one finger to her lips, her eyes cautiously sliding over to Nora’s bed.

“How did you get in here?” Lucy hissed, yanking her hand away from Lynn.

“Just be quiet and listen to me,” Lynn whispered. “That’s all I’m asking.”

Lucy pushed herself up against the headboard, knees pulled protectively to her chest. “Talk fast.”

“I’ve been watching, ever since they put me up to shooting the cats. I can see everyone and everything goes on in this town, whether Lander knows it or not.”

“I already know all this,” Lucy said in a regular voice, and Lynn shushed her.

“They still send out the cars,” Lynn said quietly. “Real normal, like, on a schedule. They go out, and they come back with nothing to show for it. Two days ago one of the cars came back way early, with passengers. They picked up three men in the desert.”

Lucy shook her head. “I haven’t seen anybody new. I know every face around here, and Nora hasn’t said anything about having patients.”

“I doubt she does,” Lynn said. “They looked healthy enough to me. Nothing wrong with ’em but a bit of sunburn and a big thirst, I imagine.”

“So where are they?”

“That’s the question. I’m asking you to keep your eyes and ears open. And be careful.”

“Careful?” Lucy’s voice rose. “Who’s to say they didn’t let them walk out of here on account of them being men? Last thing we need is more mouths to feed.”

Lynn raised an eyebrow, an accusatory black line tented in the moonlight. “We?”

“Yes,” Lucy spat. “We. There’s no reason to think any harm was done to them, any more than’s been done to us.”

“Yeah,” Lynn said quietly, the word coming out harsh and ragged. “And what has been done to us?”

Tears sprouted in Lucy’s eyes, all the more painful for having been absent for so long. “Get out of here before I wake up Nora,” she said. “And don’t ask me to look for something to fight in every shadow that crosses the path. I don’t want to live like you.”

Lynn watched Lucy for a moment before rising, her renewed health evident in the hard lines of her body as she stood. “I didn’t want to live like me either, little one,” she said. And then she was gone.

Ben was at her door early the next morning, a fresh bundle of flags gripped to his chest.

“Really?” Lucy picked sleep from her eye as she stood in the doorway. “I thought today was the Let’s-Show-How-Smart-Ben-Is Day.”

“Oh, it is,” he said. “But work before pleasure, Dad says. Get dressed, he’s picking us up when everything is ready.” Lucy dressed quickly, and as the two of them marched out of the city she heard Lynn’s bullets flying overhead and wondered if the ghostly conversation from the night before had only been a dream. The sun soon burned away thoughts of anything except water, and Lucy’s stick pointed sure and true, as if her own limbs were suddenly clear of confusion.

“You’re confident today,” Ben said as he placed a flag.

“I feel good,” Lucy admitted. “It helps.”

“You haven’t felt good before?”

“I was… unsure.”

“What changed?”

Lucy didn’t answer for a moment, thinking of Lynn’s stealthy conversation in the night, the heavy words weighted with dread. Whether it’d been a dream or not, it had solidified in Lucy that she didn’t want to live in fear and suspicion. Lander and Nora would never be Stebbs and Vera. But her affection for them would grow, and she would let it.

“Hello? Water monkey?”

“You, however, I will never like,” Lucy said aloud.

Ben shrugged. “Like me, not like me, whatever. After today you’ll respect me.”

Lucy ignored him, switching her stick over the dry dust in front of her. When the sound of the car engine cut through the air hours later, Lucy realized how lost in her own reverie she had been. Ben’s arms were empty, the sterile desert behind them populated by waving blue flags.

“Well done,” he said. “I’ve not seen you that involved before.”

The car pulled to a stop in front of them, sending a spray of dust into Lucy’s eyes. She shaded her face to see Lander emerging from behind the wheel, his shadow far outreaching either of theirs.

“Lucy.” He smiled at her, casting an arm behind them at the expansive waste littered with flags. “You worked hard today.”

“I did,” she said cautiously, still unsure of his smile.

“How about a break? Ben said you’ve made a decision to stay, and Nora agrees you’re ready to understand the importance of what you do for us here.”

“I couldn’t ever not understand the importance of water,” Lucy said as she slid into the backseat. “Whether it’s some I’ve found or not.”

“Maybe not,” Lander said as he drove, “but Ben thinks you should know exactly what’s at stake.”

Lucy thought of the endless desert, her tongue so swollen it stuck to the dry roof of her mouth, Lynn falling in her tracks and unable to rise. “I know what’s at stake.”

“Just enjoy the ride then, and you’ll see when we get there,” Lander said, his good nature uninhibited by the tartness of her response.

They crossed over the highway, the car bouncing as it made the transition from sand to asphalt and back to sand. Lucy took her backpack off and set it next to her on the seat, rummaging for the bottle of water. It tasted bad as ever, but she forced it down, determined that someday she would forget the cool sweetness of water from her own pond and be thankful for what she had.

A flash caught her eye on the horizon, and Lucy realized they were heading toward the same spot she had noticed weeks before, drawn to her attention by a similar wink of light.

“Where we going?”

“You’ll see,” Ben said, his tone all the more lofty with his father nearby. Lucy rolled her eyes and took another swig of water, resting her head against the back of the seat.

When the car stopped, Lander came around and opened the door for her, offering his hand. She left the cool of the car for the blast of heat from the desert, and Lander’s forearm was suddenly tight around her waist, pulling her back into him and pressing her lungs flat. His other arm snuck around her chest, pining her arms to her side and crushing every inch of her body against his. Lucy gulped hot air into her lungs, feeling as if Lander’s body were taking over hers, enveloping her tiny skeleton into his frame and making it his own.

“I’m going to turn you around in a moment,” he whispered into her ear, his voice low and thready. “And when I do you’ll understand how badly I need those flags to be in the right places. Are you ready?”

She nodded slowly, aware that he was fully capable of snapping her in half. He turned her and she saw what they had dragged her out into the desert for.

A huge plane of glass hung suspended from crudely formed metal beams, their angles awkward and imprecise. The glass was a patchwork mess of different shapes and thicknesses. Lucy spotted tinted car windows, broken pieces of mirror, and even a riot of color where a stained-glass window from a church had been soldered in, all forming an uneven surface that swayed from the unsteady poles. The baking sun’s rays bent and refracted through its twisted surface to glisten off the red meat that lay underneath, cooking in the heat of the day. Lucy lay limp against Lander’s chest, confused.

Until she saw the finger among the red mess.

She bucked wildly against him and Lander clamped down harder, squeezing the last breath of air from her lungs, the words she would’ve screamed dying in her throat.

“Listen to him,” Lander said. “Ben wants to show you how it works.”

Ben nearly pranced in front of her. “I made this,” he said proudly. “Well, I drew the plans for it anyway. I can’t actually lift things, you know.”

Lucy gasped and slid to the ground as her oxygen ran out and Lander went down with her, lessening his grip so she could breathe.

“Tell him it’s nice,” Lander said. “He wants you to be proud of him.”

“What is it?” Lucy managed to ask, and Ben lit up at her interest.

“It’s quite simple really. There’s another pane of glass underneath that mess. Heat from the sun bounces in between both of the surfaces. Once it’s hot enough, the moisture starts to evaporate. And then—check this out, it’s the best part… .”

He walked to the edge of the suspended pane, his thin arms shaking as he pressed down on the edge. It tilted with a groan of metal that perversely reminded Lucy of a teeter-totter Lynn had shown her in an abandoned park. Accumulated beads of pink water slid to the edge, where they dripped into waiting buckets.

“Moisture?”

“Yeah.” Ben grabbed one of the buckets and brought it over to Lucy, grandly depositing it in front of her to look into. “The human body is over eighty percent water. I found a way to get some of it out.”

Lucy turned her head to retch, the tepid water she’d drunk frothing over her lips and mixing with the sand only inches from her face. “Oh God,” she said, staring at it. “Oh God, that’s why it tastes so bad.”

Ben crossed his arms, and Lander pulled her back up to face him. “Well, I can’t be held responsible for the quality,” Ben said. “It’s the quantity that’s the problem. Nora and I had a long talk about swelling a few years ago, and I figured out that if we broke every bone in their bodies first, there was a much better yield.”

Lucy went over into her own mess then, kicking Ben’s bucket away from her and spilling the pink water over his pants. Ben wiped at his jeans, looking distastefully at the spreading stains.

Flat on her stomach, Lucy stared at the pile of red that had once been human beings—three men, she guessed—and the tiny amount of water that had come out of the bucket she’d kicked. “What a waste,” she cried into the sand, her tears drying on her cheeks before they could cut tracks in the dirt griming her skin.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Ben said, hands on his hips. “True, we can’t cook them long before they start to rot, but everything left over goes right into the garden for the plants.”

Lucy dry-heaved, her stomach clenching so tightly she cried out with the pain of it.

“What?” Ben asked. “I thought you liked tomatoes?”

The ride into the city was silent. Lucy sat in the backseat, the blooming hope of a new life here having been plucked and withered within a short time. The emptiness swelled again, making her limbs so heavy Lander had to carry her to the room she shared with Nora. The older woman gave her a smile and tucked her into bed, explaining in her calm and reassuring voice that there was no other way.

“Now do you understand why we need you to witch for us, and to do it well, little one?”

“I can’t find water if it’s not there,” Lucy said. “If the veins dry out, that’s not my fault.”

“It’s not about fault,” Nora said. “It’s just important you know the situation. We’ve been adding the water Ben’s machine gathers to what we had left of the pool and fountain water.”

“Why don’t you say what it is?” Lucy asked. “It’s not water you’ve gathered. You killed for it pure and simple, and you’re drinking… I’ve drunk…” Her lungs hitched, spiking her blood pressure and sending black dots across her vision.

“All right, that’s enough,” Nora said sternly, pushing Lucy back onto her pillow. “I understand you’ve got your reservations about the process, but you’ll understand in time. And remember, if it weren’t for our ways we’d have been dead in this city long ago, and you on the road with no one to save you.”

Lucy nodded meekly.

“Good then.” Nora smiled. “You get some sleep for now. We can talk about it more in the morning.”

Nora slid into her own bed, and Lucy listened to her breathing even out and soon hitch with the light snore she’d become accustomed to hearing. Once she knew Nora was deep asleep, she slid from bed, dressed in her threadbare clothes from the road, and dug in her pack for the two Tasers Ben had given her.

“Sorry, Nora,” she said, before striking. “I kinda liked you.”

Thirty-Three

She’d never been in the hallway in the middle of the night. The blackness was so deep, Lucy couldn’t see her hand in front of her face and had to feel the walls until she reached the stairwell. The walk felt infinite because of her blind, measured steps, and the slow simmer of panic began deep in her gut as Lucy wondered if she’d made a mistake and was on the wrong side of the hall. If Nora was conscious before they were gone, she could only imagine what Lander and Ben would do. She doubted the grisly contraption in the desert was the only machine Ben had created.

The stairwell door wheezed open beneath her hand and she inched forward, toes reaching for the drop-off of the first step, hands flailing for the railing. She found it and latched on, counting each step and sliding her foot forward once she reached the landing, her hands following the curve of the railing as she made the turn to the next set of stairs. The barest smear of gray marked the window in the stairwell door, and Lucy emerged into the lobby to the pulsing light of clouds racing across the face of the moon.

She hit the outside doors at a run now that she could see, the cool desert air threaded through with the smell of rain rolling in. A bank of black clouds lined with the reflected silver of the moon was piling up in the west, and Lucy could smell the electricity in the air. A storm was coming. A homegrown surge of elation at the promise of rain lent new strength to her legs, and Lucy sprinted past the sand-filled fountains into the lobby of the hotel Lynn now shared with Lander and Ben.

Lucy burst into the lobby and came to a sudden halt. She had no idea where Lynn would be. She could assume Lander and Ben would live on the first floor, as the rising heat would make it unbearable to live any higher. They would probably have Lynn nearby to keep an eye on her, but Lucy could hardly go down the hall knocking on doors when she didn’t even know which room Lander and Ben used.

“Shit,” she said to herself. Lucy peered into a window, teeth sinking into her lip as she thought. A fat drop of rain hit the glass, sliding down to leave a streak in the grime, and inspiration struck. Lucy raced outside, looking for a fluttering curtain. Even though nights were cool, the trapped air inside still baked with the heat of the day long into the night, and Lucy slept with her window open, anxious for the freshness of outside air.

She could only hope Lynn did too.

The face of the hotel stared at her blankly, curtains drawn. A rumble of thunder rolled through the desert, shaking the ground beneath her feet. Lucy’s panic grew with it, taking over her body and sending a spasm of fear down her spine. She ran to the back of the hotel, tripping over her own feet in her haste and flying out of control, skidding on her knees and crying out as her jeans gave way and then her skin.

Lightning flickered and she pulled her knees up to her chin, the black threads of blood mixing with the tattered denim. Tears of frustration pooled in her eyes, and Lucy swiped at them viciously as she tried to stand. The thunder boomed again, seconds after the lightning, and this time the vibration was so great Lucy could hear thousands of windows rattling in their panes.

Movement caught her eye and Lucy lunged for the Taser, springing to her feet. Only a few feet away a white hand was pressed against the window, aching to touch the fat spattering of raindrops as they struck the glass.

“Lynn,” Lucy breathed, but the other woman hadn’t seen her yet, only drawn to the window by the storm. Lucy shuffled toward her, wincing with pain as the newly exposed pink skin on her knees stretched with every movement. The top of her head barely reached the windowsill, and she had to stand on her tiptoes to reach the glass, her own hand spread against it.

Soon she felt the answering warmth of Lynn’s hand pressed against hers from the other side.

There was a guard at Lynn’s door, a man whom Lucy had exchanged nods with as she passed him in the city from day to day. He was asleep, and the gray line of light that fell from Lynn’s cracked door made his spasms all the more gruesome as Lucy tased him. She hadn’t been able to see the grimaces of pain on Nora’s face, only hear the bucking as she convulsed in the dark. When he was still, Lucy looked up at Lynn, hating the tears that ran down her face as she did.

“Huh,” Lynn said. “I guess those things are useful after all.” She was dressed in her clothes from the road, her backpack drawn tight against her shoulder blades.

“We have to be fast,” Lucy said as Lynn dragged the unconscious man into her room and shut the door behind them. “I knocked Nora out too. Once they find out, we’re dead.”

“Probably,” Lynn agreed. “But we can’t leave without my gun. There’s more danger between here and Sand City. We can’t face it with two Tasers that’ll run out of batteries.”

“Shit, Lynn,” Lucy said. “We have to go now! They’re…” Her words failed, cut off in her throat by the memory of dark red against white sand. “They’re drinking people. We’ve been drinking people.”

Lynn took one Taser from Lucy, face grim. “I’m not going to ask what you mean by that until we’re out of here. In the meantime, I’m sorry if this hurts much.”

“If what hurts?” Lucy asked a second before Lynn zapped her.

Lucy felt a strange vibration coursing through her body, and her wounded knees gave out underneath her as she slid to the floor. “What the hell?” she asked Lynn, curling into the fetal position.

“I set it real low, but you’ve still got a mark from it. Can you stand?”

“I think so.” Lucy pulled herself to her feet using the foot of the bed. “So now what?”

Lynn’s mouth set in a grim line as the storm clouds enveloped the moon, leaving the room one shade above black. “Now we go get my gun back.”

Lucy sank back against Lynn’s strength as they stood before Lander’s door, the metal prongs of the Taser biting deep into her neck.

“Knock,” Lynn said, and she did, the sound echoing eerily down the empty hall.

Lander answered quickly, already awakened by the storm. If finding Lucy held captive on his doorstep in the middle of the night threw him in any way, he did not show it. Instead he smiled at Lynn over her shoulder.

“I’ve been hoping you’d come to me in the night sometime, but not quite like this.”

“I want my gun, and I want keys to one of the cars,” Lynn said. “I know you’ve got both of them squared away in your room, so let’s make it easy and be done with it.”

Lander shrugged. “Or what?”

The prongs dug deeper into Lucy’s neck, and she felt a trickle of blood slip down her skin. “I’ll do her in, Lander, don’t think for one second I won’t.”

The big man’s eyes searched Lynn’s, then Lucy’s, sliding off her face down to the burn mark left on her collarbone from the earlier shock. “You’re a cold woman, Lynn.”

A white sheet flipped off the second bed in the room, and Ben staggered from the darkness, eyes heavy with sleep. “What’s going on?”

The jolt of electricity going into her neck sent Lucy to the ground in an instant, her teeth grinding against one another.

“Holy shit,” she heard Ben say. “She actually did it.”

Lynn’s hand was on her neck and hauling her to her feet before Lucy trusted her own legs, and she buckled slightly against the older woman.

“And I’ll keep doing it, ’til she’s of no more use and you all die a dry death.”

Lander watched the two of them, his mind moving much faster than Lucy’s as she struggled to stay on her feet. “I don’t know I need her all that much, really. Ben says she was confident about those flags yesterday, wasn’t she, son?”

Ben came forward to stand next to his father. “She was,” he said enthusiastically. “Although if you think sticking her again might make Dad change his mind, go ahead and do it. I haven’t seen a girl dance in a long time.”

“Listen,” Lynn said, her voice barely masking the beginnings of a quaver. “I don’t—”

“LANDER!” Nora’s scream ripped down the hall, her robe flapping behind her making her seem like a white specter in the darkness. She ran awkwardly, limbs still deadened by the jolt Lucy had given her. “She’s got away from me!”

Lynn turned toward this new threat, and Lucy’s legs collapsed without her support. Nora careened to a halt, grabbing the doorway to stop herself and glaring at the huddled form in the darkness of the hall.

Lucy peered up at her, a new kind of electricity surging through her limbs as her body warned her to get up, to get away from Nora, seconds before the older woman fell on her.

“You ungrateful little bitch!” Nora screamed, blood trickling from one nostril as she smacked at Lucy’s face. Lucy fended off her blows, scooting herself up against the wall. From the corner of her eye she saw Lynn barrel into Lander with all her strength, barely knocking him off his feet. The two of them rolled into Ben together, sending him into the wall. The hard click of Ben’s teeth slamming together ricocheted around the room, and the moon came back out for another moment, turning the blood that flowed from his mouth a dark purple and starkly illuminating his own fascination with it as he lifted his stained fingers in front of his face.

Lucy pulled her Taser from her belt and slammed it against Nora’s torso, forcing the other woman away from her before delivering the shock. Nora jerked and was still, a matching stream of blood now flowing from the other nostril.

Lynn screamed as Lander bent her arm behind her back, forcing her face down into the carpet and digging his knee into her spine. Lucy dove for Lynn’s Taser, knocked free during their struggle. Lander let her have it, eyes watching her as she rose.

“I’ve got all kinds of ways I can hurt this one, little girl,” he said, teeth stained with blood from where Lynn had got a good kick in. “You know I will.”

Lucy pressed the button and bright-blue electricity jumped from the prongs. “Get off of my mom.”

Lander bent Lynn’s arm upward. She writhed but refused to cry out, bringing a blood-tinged smile to his face. “She’s not your mom.”

“The hell she isn’t,” Lucy said, grabbing Ben from where he lay and digging both Tasers into either side of his neck. “Now you give her back to me or Ben’s dead, and not missed by many.”

“That’s more true than you know,” Lander said. “Go on then.”

Lucy felt the thunder roll through the room as clearly as the rage that pulsed through Ben as he knelt in front of her, disbelief sagging his shoulders. “Dad?”

“What?” Lander asked. “You really don’t think I can make one better than you?” He reached down and touched Lynn’s hair with fondness, despite the fact that his other hand was still threatening to crack her arm in half. “This woman here and me combined? Now that’s something I want to see.”

Ben sprang so quickly that Lucy lost her grip on the Tasers, one of them nearly sliding from her sweaty palm. Ben hit Lander in a ball of fury, his attack so unexpected it sent his father reeling off Lynn, who dragged herself out of the way as the two struggled. There was a loud crack and a squeal of pain from Ben, and then Lucy was above both of them, jamming the Tasers into Lander’s temples and delivering a jolt that sent electricity flowing from father to son as their entwined limbs danced.

Lucy’s arms couldn’t keep the connection anymore, and she fell to the ground. The smell of singed flesh and burning hair filled the room, tinged with the tweak of ozone, when another flash of lightning ripped through the night air and the building shook with the rumble of the thunder. Lynn dragged herself to Lucy’s side to cradle the girl’s head in her lap.

“You okay?”

Lucy nodded, the tender skin of her cheek rubbing against Lynn’s jeans. “Did I kill them?”

“Well, Lander’s hair is on fire and he’s not doing anything about it, so my guess is yeah, you did.”

Lucy turned her face into the bend of Lynn’s knee, tears dripping onto the denim and the delayed twinges of shock sending her into a rippling mass in Lynn’s lap. Lynn’s hands moved through her hair, gently pulling the short, damp ends from her sticky face.

“I know it’s not easy, little one,” she said. “But this is the world we live in, and if we want to keep doing it, sometimes our hands are forced.”

“Lucy?” Ben’s weak voice floated above the still bodies. Lynn rose to her feet, pulling Lucy with her. Ben’s small hands patted out the fires on either side of his father’s skull, surprising Lucy in their gentleness until she realized some of Ben’s own clothing had begun to smolder, and he’d put those sparks out first.

“Ben?” She hovered over him, leaning down as close as she dared to hear his whisper.

“Lucy, we’ve got to go,” Lynn said as she opened a closet and pulled out her rifle, along with a set of keys. “Others live here too, and the storm will be waking them if that ruckus didn’t.”

Ben’s hand grabbed for hers, and she let him hold it. “I think Dad broke my back.”

“Time to go.” Lynn’s hands were on her shoulders, pulling her back from his weak grip.

“B-Ben,” Lucy stuttered, backing away from his pleading eyes and hands still reaching for her. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

The plea changed to wrath in a second, and his hands went from penitence to fists as he struck the floor around him. “You will take me with you! You can’t leave me broken.”

“Ben,” Lucy said from the doorway, “you were broken long before I got here.”

He screamed at them with all the air left inside him, his wordless anger following them down in the lobby, along with the sound of his upper half dragging his useless legs behind him in a futile effort to catch up.

Lucy followed Lynn on wobbly legs to the parking garage. Ben’s screams had brought others from their rooms, but no one was willing to face Lynn’s gun, and they had the streets to themselves. Lucy slid into the passenger seat with relief, dumping her bag in the back and letting her body go entirely slack.

Lynn drove quickly; Lucy watched her eyes darting back and forth in the rearview mirror, not relaxing until they were well beyond the pale fingers of the dead buildings that reached for the sky. The desert opened up around them again, the emptiness of it all somehow reassuring after the cluttered rot of Las Vegas.

“You know where you’re going?” Lucy asked.

Lynn tapped her temple. “It’s all been up here for the past two states.”

“All right,” Lucy said, her head tilting to one side to rest against the cool window. “I trust you.”

The three small words swelled in magnitude in the confines of the car, and Lynn tightened her grasp on the steering wheel. “I want you to know there’s a lot of things in my life I wish I could take back. If I could only choose one, it’d be Carter.”

“I know it,” Lucy said, eyes still shut. “But it’s done now. It is what it is.”

“Maybe so, but I need you to know he asked me for it. Said he couldn’t stand the guilt of dead children, bodies of the people he knew burning in a pit, and him being what put ’em there. He didn’t want to be alone and… he said he couldn’t help but hope you’d be happy, but he hated that it wasn’t with him.”

Tears that she didn’t bother to brush away poured down Lucy’s face. “But it didn’t have to be that way. He didn’t have to die.”

“I didn’t know that, and neither did he. You’re the one that holds on to hope, Lucy. The two of us, we’d already accepted that life is unfair. And he died for it, and I can’t put together enough words to tell you how sorry I am.”

“Neither one of you can be blamed for it,” Lucy said eventually. “This is a hard place we live in.”

“It is indeed,” Lynn answered. The storm finally broke around them, dropping water in great sheets that rolled off the windshield as they headed west.

“But I’m still glad I’m here,” Lucy managed to say as her eyelids closed.

The last thing she heard before she drifted into unconsciousness was Lynn heaving a great sigh and saying, “Lord, I wish I had a five-gallon bucket about now.”