The Dead Lands

And then the knife bites the boy’s back, just above his pack, the place where his neck meets his shoulders.

 

He spins around. He is such a little thing. Narrow headed and wide-eyed and slim limbed, like a skinned cat. He does not seem capable of lust. And when she takes in the sight of him, his hand gripping a bouquet of panties, she feels somewhere between amused and disgusted.

 

“What is your name?”

 

He says nothing until she leans the blade into his chest and then he says, with a whimper, “Simon.”

 

“You’ve come here to steal my panties, Simon?”

 

“No.”

 

“That’s certainly what it looks like.”

 

His eyes flash between her and his fistful of underwear. “I’ll admit, I was going to grab a pair.”

 

“Good. It’s good to tell the truth.”

 

“But that’s not why I came here.”

 

“Isn’t it?”

 

“No.”

 

“Out with it, then. Before I open you up.”

 

“I came to deliver a letter. He sent you a letter.”

 

“Who did?”

 

“Reed did. That’s who. Reed.”

 

She takes two steps back and lowers her arm, nearly dropping the knife when it swings limply at her side. At first she cannot say anything, cannot make words, all of her attention on the flower of blood blooming at his breast where she nicked him. He reaches to touch it, as if bitten by a bug, and examines his red fingertips.

 

Then she goes to the hallway and checks to make sure it is empty before closing the door and gathering her breath and saying, “Show me.”

 

*

 

 

 

Ella asked how long Simon would be, how long it would take him to break into the Dome, creep through its many rooms, find whatever it is Lewis meant for them to discover. You must expose what is hidden in the Dome, he wrote to them—and there the letter trailed off.

 

Simon told her he might not find anything at all. And he didn’t know how long it would take. He would do his best and doing your best takes time. This sort of thing can’t be rushed. The necessary silence of his trade came with stillness, slowness. He might be two hours or he might be four hours.

 

“Four hours, then,” she said. “I’ll start to worry after four hours.”

 

“Don’t worry. I don’t want you worrying and I don’t want to feel rushed.”

 

“Four hours. It will be dawn in five, so you’ve got no choice but four.”

 

She tries to sleep but can’t. Of course she wonders what he might find—locked away in some closet or hidden in a drawer—whatever secret might serve them. But that seems secondary to him coming home to her. Home—that’s how she thinks of the museum—as belonging to them both. They share a room—with beds opposite each other—just as they share meals and duties and conversation. She might bully him, but with tenderness, every rough shove another opportunity to touch, every hard word a breath between them shared.

 

She waits in the kitchen—a long room crowded with cupboards and counters—where he will enter through a side door. She paces the floor and then collapses in a chair and rests her head in her hands. She imagines him whipped. She imagines him dead. She imagines him trapped somewhere, hiding beneath a bed or in a closet while people move all around him. She hates to admit it, but she cares about him, feels about him as she would a cherished possession, not wanting to let him out of her sight.

 

Dawn comes. There is a soft knock. The knob rattles. She hurries from her chair and yanks open the door and hisses, “Where have you been?” Her eyes take a moment to adjust to the light, blinking through a red haze, and then she makes sense of what she sees: Simon standing before a hooded figure.

 

“What’s this?” Ella says, her whole body suddenly numb. “What’s happened?”

 

Simon drops his eyes and lifts his shoulders in a shrug. Ella looks to the figure for answers. The hood holds a shadow, the face lost to it. “I’m supposed to just let you in?” Ella says, and Simon says, “Do it, please,” and she steps aside to accommodate them, then checks the alley before closing and bolting the door.

 

She doesn’t know what to do. She alternately wants to smack Simon and smash him into her chest as if to smother him with her heart. But before she can act on either impulse, the figure pulls back her hood, revealing the white-blond hair and sharply cut face of Danica Lancer.

 

There is a held breath of a moment before Danica says, “Let’s sit down, everyone.”

 

They gather at a table in the corner of the kitchen. Simon and Ella sit on one side and Danica on the other. “We certainly have a lot to talk about.” She looks at them and talks to them as a mother would her disobedient children. Ella knows that Danica wants them to feel that way, as children, because children do as they are told. Lewis would do the same to Ella and she would not tolerate it then and she will not tolerate it now. She crosses her arms and pinches her mouth into a frown.

 

Danica says, “No one knows I am here, and no one will know I was here, so long as we all understand each other.”

 

The second bell is ringing. The day is brightening, beginning to heat up. Sweat dots their temples. Danica reaches below the table then and withdraws a black dagger like a nightmarish piece of cutlery. “You must realize how complicated this situation is.”

 

Ella has a biting way of speaking when she says, “I realize that very well, thank you.”

 

“I am grateful to you for delivering the letter, but I am worried about you too.” Danica runs the blade along her arm, tracing its bare length, pausing a moment in the pale hollow of her elbow, continuing to the snaked veins of her wrists, across her palm, to the very tip of her middle finger, where she scrapes away some sand embedded beneath the nail. “You know things about me you shouldn’t. You know things about me that could get me killed.”

 

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