Tonight she would serve them a special treat. Hawk would be bringing back apples, and she would make pie. They lacked electricity, but could generate sufficient heat to bake from the woodstove Fixit had built for her.
She thought about the boy for a minute. An enigma, he defied easy categorization. He was a talented craftsman and mechanic; he could build or repair almost anything. He had constructed the makeshift appliances in the kitchen and the generators and solar units that powered them. He had rebuilt her wheelchair to make it easier to maneuver and laid down the ramps that allowed her to reach all the rooms. The catchment systems on the roof were his.
Using scrap and ingenuity, he had constructed all of the heavy security doors and reinforced window shutters that kept them safe. He claimed to have learned his skills from his father, who was a metalworker, but he never talked about his parents otherwise. He had come to them early, when he was not yet ten, but already knew more than they did about making things.
Now, at fourteen, he was old and capable enough to be given responsibilities reserved for the older members of the tribe, but he had a problem. As he had proved repeatedly, he was unreliable. He was fine when he was working under someone’s supervision, but terrible when left on his own—prone to forget, to procrastinate, even to ignore. Sending him out by himself was impossible. The last time they had done so, he hadn’t come back for two days. An old broken-down machine had distracted him, and he had been trying to find a way to make it run again. He didn’t even know what it did, but that didn’t matter.
What mattered was that it was interesting.
His closest friend was Chalk, which made a sort of sense because they were polar opposites. Chalk was easygoing and incurious, uninterested in why anything worked, only that it did. He liked to draw and was very good at it—hence his name. But he was not a dreamer, as so many artists tended to be.
He was practical and grounded in his life; his art was just another job. Fixit was something of a mystery to him, a boy of similar age and temperament who could make everything run smoothly but himself.
Inseparable, those two, Owl thought. Probably a good thing, since each boy had a steadying effect on the other and neither was much good alone.
She was midway through the piecrust assembly when Cheney scrambled to his feet and stood facing the iron-plated door once again. This time he did not growl, and his posture was alert and un-threatening. That meant Hawk was coming.
Her hands covered with pieces of dough, she called to Sparrow to open the door. Moments later Hawk and the others surged into the room, laughing and joking as they hauled in the boxes of apples and plums and deposited them in the kitchen where some could be separated out and the rest put into cold storage.
Chalk and Fixit reemerged, Sparrow wandered out, and soon all of them were gathered in the common room exchanging information on the day’s events. Owl listened from the work space as she finished with the crust and began cutting up apples, watching the expressions on their faces, the excited gestures they made, and the repeated looks they exchanged, taking pleasure in their easy camaraderie.
This was her family, she thought, smiling. The best family she could imagine.
But when Panther started talking about the dead Lizard, the good feelings evaporated and she was reminded anew that she lived in a world where having a family primarily meant having safety in numbers and protection from evil. The word family was just a euphemism. The Ghosts, after all, were a tribe, and the tribe was always under siege.
She finished with the pie, adding cinnamon, sugar, and butter substitute, stuck the pie in the baking oven, and started making their dinner.
Forty minutes later, she gathered them around the work space on their collection of chairs and stools and sat them down to eat. They did what she asked, she their surrogate mother, and they her surrogate children. So very different from her days in the compound, where she had been merely tolerated after her parents died.
Here, she believed, she was loved.
When dinner was over, Bear and River cleared the table, and Sparrow helped her with the dishes. They used a little water from the catchment system, just enough to get the job done. They were lucky they lived in a part of the world where there was still a reasonable amount of rainfall. In most places, there was no water at all. But you couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t be like that here one day.
You really couldn’t be sure of anything now.
She had just finished cleaning up when Hawk wandered over to stand next to her. “Tiger says that Persia has the red spot,” he said quietly. His dark eyes held her own, troubled and conflicted. “He wants me to get him a few packs of pleneten. I agreed. I had to. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made the trade for the fruit.”
“She must be pretty sick. He needs the trade as badly as we do.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “Will you try to get the pleneten from Tessa?”
He shrugged. “Where else would I get it?”
“We have some. We could give him that.”