Our luck has turned. A few hours later, Tack takes down a deer.
That night we have our first proper meal since I’ve arrived. We dish up enormous plates of brown rice, topped with meat braised and softened with crushed tomatoes and dried herbs. It’s so good I could cry, and Sarah actually does cry, sitting and sobbing in front of her plate. Miyako puts her arm around her and murmurs into Sarah’s hair. The gesture makes me think of my mother; a few days ago I asked Raven about her, with no luck.
What does she look like? Raven had asked, and I had to confess I didn’t know. When I was younger she had long, soft auburn hair, and a full-moon face. But after over ten years in Portland’s prison, the Crypts—where she had been my whole life, while I believed her dead—I doubt she resembles the woman from my hazy childhood memories.
Her name is Annabel, I told her, but Raven was already shaking her head.
“Eat, eat,” Miyako urges Sarah, and she does. We all do, ravenously: scooping up rice with our hands, lifting our plates to lick them clean. Someone from the other side has even thought to include a bottle of whiskey, wrapped carefully in a sweatshirt, and everyone cheers when that makes the rounds as well. I had alcohol only once or twice when I lived in Portland, and never understood its appeal, but I take a sip from the bottle when it makes its way to me. It burns hard going down, and I start coughing. Hunter grins and claps me on the back. Tack nearly tears the bottle out of my hands and says, curtly, “Don’t drink it if you’re just going to spit it up.”
“You get used to it,” Hunter leans in to whisper, almost an identical refrain to Sarah’s remark a week ago. I’m not sure whether he’s talking about the whiskey or Tack’s attitude. But already there’s a warm glow spreading through my stomach. When the bottle comes around again I take a slightly larger sip, and another, and the warmth spreads to my head.
Later: I’m seeing everything in pieces and fractions, like a series of photographs shuffled randomly together. Miyako and Lu in the corner, arms interlinked, dancing, while everyone claps; Blue sleeping curled up on a bench, and then borne out of the room, still asleep, by Squirrel; Raven standing on one of the benches, making a speech about freedom. She is laughing, too, her dark hair a shimmering curtain, and then Tack is helping her down: brown hands around her waist, a moment of suspension when she pauses, airborne, in his arms. I think of birds and flying away. I think of Alex.
One day Raven turns to me and says abruptly, “If you want to stay, you have to work.”
“I work,” I say.
“You clean,” she counters. “You boil the water. The rest of us haul water, look for food, scout for messages. Even Grandma hauls water—a mile and a half, with heavy buckets. And she’s sixty years old.”
“I—” Of course she’s right, and I know it. The guilt has been with me every day, as heavy as the thickness of the air. I heard Tack say to Raven that I’m a waste of a good bed. I had to squat in the storeroom for almost half an hour afterward with my arms wrapped around my knees until I stopped shaking. Hunter’s the only one of the homesteaders who’s nice to me, and he’s nice to everybody.
“I’m not ready. I’m not strong enough.”
She watches me for a second, and lets the silence stretch uncomfortably between us so I can feel the absurdity of the words. If I’m not strong by now, that’s my fault too. “We’re moving soon. Relocation starts in a few weeks. We’ll need all the help we can get.”
“Moving?” I repeat.
“Going south.” She turns away, starts retreating down the hallway. “Shutting up the homestead for the winter. And if you want to come, you’re going to help.”
Then she pauses. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course,” she says, turning around and raising an eyebrow. “Although winters are deadly. When the river freezes, we can’t get any supplies. But maybe that’s what you want?”
I don’t say anything.
“You have until tomorrow to choose,” she says.
The next morning, Raven shakes me awake from a nightmare. I sit up, gasping. I remember a fall through the air, and a mass of black birds. All the other girls are still sleeping, and the room is full of their rhythmic breathing. There must be a candle burning out in the hall, casting a tiny bit of light into the room. I can just make out Raven’s shape, squatting in front of me, and register the fact that she is already dressed.
“What did you choose?” she whispers.
“I want to work,” I whisper back, because it’s the only thing I can say. My heart is still beating, hard, in my chest.