“Don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to argue.”
He moved into a squatting position on the mattress. He was still naked, and it made her laugh. He almost tipped over, then righted himself, like a surfer.
“What are you doing?”
“Look out the window with me,” he said.
They both perched on the scratchy mattress, hands against the wall and headboard for balance. Cal pulled the cheesecloth from the window, ripping it off its staples.
“Cal!” Frida whispered, but she couldn’t help but laugh again.
They looked through the square of window. The scent of animal shit—or was that human shit?—wafted into the room. The air outside was cool, but, judging from how sweaty Cal had been after Labor, she knew it had to be warm in the sun by now. Frida leaned back and stuck her arm through the window. She put her palm against the side of the building, which was hot to the touch and rough as a pier and gritty with dirt.
Their room was on the north side of the Hotel, and from the window they could see beyond the main street to the areas Sailor and others had alluded to since their arrival, but which Frida hadn’t yet been curious about. Until now. The space was wide open as a meadow. It was mostly free of trees, except at the edge, where things grew wild and uninviting; a Spike rose menacingly above this patch of untended land and, next to it, another lookout Tower. Someone must be on duty, Frida thought. She wondered if they ever trained their binoculars in the other direction, toward the Land’s inhabitants.
To the left was the showering and laundry area, where clothing hung like prayer flags on multiple lines stretched between four trees. Frida watched as a man walked naked from one of the shower stalls to the lines. He grabbed a pair of pants hanging there and put them on.
Across the field was a structure that looked as if it had been recently constructed, perhaps out of materials collaged from various ghost-town buildings and whatever else the Land could get its hands on: the wood was both old and new looking and placed side by side; the planks gave the building stripes. The roof was made of corrugated metal and held secure with tires and wire, like their shed had been. The doors were tall and wide, like a barn’s, and a man came walking out with a goat on a rope. Along the outside of the building were animal pens.
“Is that where August’s mare lives?” Frida asked.
“I assume.”
“Where is he, you think?”
Cal shrugged. “You should ask Micah. He’d tell you.”
“I doubt it.”
“See if you can get him alone.”
“I want him to come to me. He’s been so cavalier about seeing me, after all this time. He just left us with Sailor this morning.” Frida felt the tears coming, and she tried to laugh them away. “Jeez, I guess the hormones have arrived.”
Cal leaned into her. “You deserve to spend time with him, Frida. He’s your brother. Just ask him.”
“I’ll try.”
It felt good, Frida thought, to be talking like this. They were plotting again; they were on the same side. They had returned to each other. They were something the world could understand. This had been how she’d imagined it, when Cal had first asked her to leave L.A.
*
Over the next two days, Frida began to get a handle on things. The lingo, for one. Residents on the Land didn’t work; they labored. They didn’t garden; they farmed. And those Spikes that surrounded them? They were called Forms.
Learning these terms gave Frida a thrill. It was easy, like learning pig Latin or the gibberish she used with her friends as a girl. Her new Land friends couldn’t keep her out of conversations for very long—not that they were doing it on purpose; it was just the way they spoke about their world. The vocabulary was so simple, it was impossible not to start using it.
Frida was officially out of her half coma. After all, the Vote wasn’t far off. Not that she and Cal had talked about that. He was too busy asking Micah question after question to notice that his wife was campaigning.
If anyone noticed what Frida was up to, it would be her brother. Nothing ever got past him, never had. He’d always seemed to see her for what she was.
Was that still true? There was something weird about Micah now, and not only that he was alive when she’d been grieving him for the past five years. He didn’t participate in Morning Labor, for instance, nor did he seem to have a security shift, as far as Frida could tell. At dawn, when everyone else was headed to work, he disappeared with a handful of others, all of them men, Frida noted, including Peter. (His cabal of yes-men, she imagined Cal saying, but she didn’t dare bring this up with him.)