AS OFTEN AS she can, Clark escapes the mall—its imprisoning walls, its stale air laced with the tangy smell of fish and woodsmoke—and surrounds herself instead with sky. She spends her days hunting, minding the traps and lures. Though she often finds herself distracted. Her eyes look west. Her feet walk west, her body naturally angling in that direction like the point on a compass. She imagines now, as she did when a sentinel on the wall, mountains. White mountains that appear like teeth nested in black gums.
Then she shakes her head or presses her fists to her eyes. If she thinks about the mountains, she thinks about Lewis. If she thinks about Lewis, she thinks about the final look he gave her—made of equal parts hate and sympathy—before escaping this place.
So she works, and when she doesn’t work, she drinks. That distracts her mind, numbs it, because when she starts to think, she starts to doubt and hate and grieve. The snow is ash and ash is the color of grief. Everywhere she looks, outside and inside herself, she sees death. There was a time she felt nothing but disgust for Reed, but now she understands. He had it right. There is no such thing as the future. The future is what you longed for. There is nothing left for her to long for, except an end to the pain. Death is an end to the pain. Death is the future. Death is curative, medicinal. In her darkest, drunkest moments, instead of Oregon, she feels beckoned by the grave, a deep black hole where she might find her brother. She thought escaping the wall was freeing, but now death seems the ultimate freedom.
She’s sorry she pushed Reed away and she’s sorry she couldn’t save her brother and she’s sorry she betrayed Lewis. She’s so goddamn sorry, and though it’s too late for the others, maybe it’s not too late for him. If she could only find him, if she could only tell him how sorry she was, if she could only get that word out of her, she thinks she might feel better, like coughing up an infection.
Today a warm front moves through, so that fog ghosts between the trees and flows down the river like a second current. The temperature hovers around freezing. Snow sluffs off roofs. The birds are busy, the red flashes of cardinals in the undergrowth, the black nets of crows thrown over trees. More seem to gather by the minute and the air is busy with their muttering.
She prefers to be alone, but the girls call for her this morning and ask her to help, and though she tries to resist them, they beg her and she relents. They are collecting fish from the tip-ups—slitting their bellies and pulling out their guts to use in the shoreline traps—but they can’t seem to reel in this one. It’s stuck.
“Stuck,” she says and tests the line and it hums with tension and when she takes it in her hands it feels like she has taken hold of herself, some central nerve that disappears into a dark place. She rears back—and the line drags—and she waits until it slackens, then reels in until it tightens again, and in this way it takes her a good five minutes before the fish surfaces. She leans over to peer down the hole, more than a foot deep. At the bottom of it, a broad, whiskered, fleshy-lipped mouth gapes. A catfish, a big one, too big, and she orders the girls to their knees to chip and saw away the ice, to accommodate the girth of the massive fish.
Twenty minutes later, her arms ache from fighting the drag, and just in time she hauls out the fish—two-handed, grunting—and it slips and flops and twists on the ice. Snow sticks to it in clumps. It opens and closes its mouth, gaping around the hook. One of the girls gets her arms and legs around it—wrestling it down—and Clark drives a knife into its head and it shudders and goes still. The girls laugh and so does she and the laughter feels strange, exotic, like a language she once knew but forgot.
The fog is beginning to burn away. And the sun seems brighter in the sky, even when filtered by clouds. The crows, thronging in the trees along the river, have been muttering all along, but now they grow wild, kaak-kaak-kaaaking.
When they cut open the fish’s belly, they find a beaver inside, swallowed whole and socked by yellow jelly, like some malignant birth. Clark sits on the ice, for a moment too tired to care about the cold creeping through her pants, and everyone stands around her, commenting on the big fish and the beaver, saying gross and ick and nudging each other and still laughing so that their breath clouds.
Then the laughter dies and there is only the kaak of the birds. And something else, an undersound she can’t quite place. Like a drumming. The drumming of a death parade.
She tells everyone to be quiet and creeps up the riverbank and peeks her head over the berm and sees the men. They are stomping toward Bismarck. They do not roar and brandish their weapons. They come silently, marching in straight lines that match the set of their mouths.
Lewis once called her empathy-proof. Unable to appreciate any desire or despair outside her own. The girls have shared stories—of their village, their families, the nightmare train that brought them here—but Clark hasn’t listened, her ears plugged up with her own private pain. She has even seen the train wreck, way out on the plains, but never considered another engine might follow. It isn’t until now that she understands. Not only what they face, but what Lewis will face without her.
With that understanding comes fear. Fear for the girls’ lives and fear for her own. And if she fears for her life, that means she values her life. If she values her life, that means she’s willing to fight for it. Maybe there is such a thing as the future after all.
She counts them, thirty…no, fifty…no, seventy—as more slavers pour out of the fog as if born of it. She turns to the girls then and tells them to hurry and gather their things. They must run for the mall. They must run for their lives.
Chapter 51