“Shut it, you do not,” Lynn said, a real smile pushing through. “Now tell me about the satellites before I break one of these ugly chairs over your head. Lucy told me you were aiming for my house?”
“Yeah.” Eli nodded, all traces of teasing gone from his face. “Bradley said it was big enough for us to survive, not big enough for anyone from the city to bother with.”
“Unless the city went south?”
“What’s that?”
“Went south,” Lynn explained. “It’s a country way of saying when something goes bad.”
“That was the idea, yeah,” Eli agreed. “Basically, the people that my brother and some of the other soldiers hired themselves out to for information had the money to get it, and the foresight to know that the water in the city couldn’t last forever. Bradley took their money, then their plan for his own once they knew Neva was pregnant again.”
“It’d be a decent plan if you knew the first thing about surviving.”
“That was supposed to be on Bradley,” Eli said, his eyes not meeting hers anymore. “He knew all kinds of stuff from his training. Berries you could eat, roots even. To eat bugs if you got in a bad enough situation.”
Lynn thought of Lucy chasing grasshoppers, her tiny palms smacking against the dry bodies in desperation. “He taught you what he knew then?”
“He tried, back in the city. But I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. He was supposed to be with us, you know? The whole way. I’m good with my hands, but I always learned better actually doing something, so I figured once we were outside I could learn from him as we went a lot easier than trying to remember everything he told me over a table. We couldn’t keep anything we wrote down, so I had to memorize it all. I focused on remembering the maps, thought there’d be more time for everything else later.”
His voice trailed off, and Lynn thought about how Eli had watched his brother bleed out in the city while people who were able to help had done nothing. Her own desperation beside Mother’s body shot through her memory and she had an unexpected rush of anger at the crowd that had let Eli’s brother die in front of them. She cleared her throat.
“In that case, remind me to show you what poison ivy looks like, come spring.”
Eli glanced up at her, a teasing smile back on his face. “That’s a date.”
Lynn’s brow furrowed. “It’s a season.”
“No, I mean . . .” Eli sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “We’re going to have to find a shared vocabulary before I can flirt.”
“Flirt?”
“Yeah, it’s how a boy shows a girl that he likes her. Or vice versa,” he said pointedly.
“Sounds like a waste of time,” Lynn said carefully, trying to keep the skip in her pulse out of her voice. “Seems like it’d be a lot easier to just say so.”
“Easier maybe,” Eli said, the smile that came so effortlessly to him spreading again. “But less fun.”
“Fun,” Lynn grunted.
“Yeah, it’s what—”
“I know what fun is,” she shot back.
Eli’s hands went up in the air. “I’m only teasing.”
“Is that part of flirting?”
“A very important part,” Eli said with mock seriousness. “Looks like maybe there’s a thing or two I can teach you after all.”
Lynn rolled her eyes. “Yes, flirting. A necessary part of survival.”
“Well, technically—”
“Shut it,” Lynn said, and Eli snapped his jaw shut. “Is this what you city kids do all day? Sit around and let each other know how much fun you were having?”
“Sometimes. We go to school, some of us played sports or took music lessons. Read in our spare time. Just normal life, you know?” Eli shook his head. “No, I guess you probably don’t know. What I used to do with my day probably seems silly to you.”
“No,” Lynn said slowly, thinking over every word as she spoke. “It seems like it’d be kind of nice not spending every minute living working against dying.”
Eli watched her for a second in the quiet that fell between them. “When we found your place, when I saw you and your mom living there, I didn’t even consider taking it from you. I’d lost everything I had. I didn’t have the heart to take from someone else.”
“Plus I would’ve sniped your ass.”
“That too.”
“I guess maybe I’m glad I didn’t,” Lynn admitted.
“I’ll take that as flirting, country girl.”
Lynn kicked him under the table before standing. “We’re done for today, I need time to get back to the house in the light.”
Eli got up quickly. “Could you talk to Neva, before you go?”
Lynn’s mouth fell into the flat line that made her resemble Mother. “I’ll talk to her, but I can’t promise anything.”
The little grave was around a bend in the stream, not far from their new house, but out of sight because of the meandering path of the water. Lynn could make out the hunched form of Neva, perched on the dead trunk of a tree, keeping her vigil. Lynn purposely stepped on a twig, which snapped under boot like a gunshot. Neva did not move.