“Thanks, Blue,” I say, and lay one hand on her shoulder. I can feel her trembling slightly beneath my fingers.
The cold is a wall, a physical force. I’ve managed to find an old wind breaker in the collection of clothes, but it’s far too big and doesn’t stop the wind from biting at my neck and fingers, slipping beneath the collar and freezing my heart in my chest. The ground is frozen and the frost-coated grass crunches under our feet. We walk quickly, to stay warm; our breath comes in clouds.
“How come you don’t like Blue?” Hunter asks abruptly.
“I do,” I say quickly. “I mean, she doesn’t really talk to me, but…” I trail off. “Is it that obvious?”
He laughs. “So you don’t like her.”
“She just reminds me of someone, that’s all,” I say shortly, and Hunter turns serious.
“From before?” he asks.
I nod, and he reaches out and touches me once, lightly, on the elbow, to show me he understands. Hunter and I talk about everything except before. Of all the homesteaders, he is the one I feel closest to. We sit next to each other at dinner; and sometimes we stay up afterward, talking until the room is smudgy with smoke from the dying fire.
Hunter makes me laugh, even though for a long time I thought I would never laugh again.
It wasn’t easy to feel comfortable around him. It was hard to shake all the lessons I learned on the other side, in Portland, warnings drilled into me by everyone I admired and trusted. The disease, they taught me, grew in the space between men and women, boys and girls; it was passed between them in looks and smiles and touches, and would take root inside of them like mold that rots a tree from the inside out. Then I found out that Hunter was an Unnatural, a thing I’d always been taught to revile.
Now Hunter is Hunter, and a friend, and nothing more.
We head north, away from the homestead. It’s early, and the woods are quiet except for the crunch of our shoes on the thick layering of dead leaves. It hasn’t rained in several weeks. The woods are starved for water. It’s funny how I’ve learned to feel the woods, to understand them: their moods and tantrums, their explosions of joy and color. It’s so different from the parks and the carefully tended natural spaces in Portland. Those places were like animals at the zoo: caged in and also flattened, somehow. The Wilds are alive, and temperamental, and beautiful. Despite the hardships here, I am growing to love them.
“Almost there,” Hunter says. He nods to our left. Beyond the denuded branches I can see a crown of razor wire, looped at the top of a fence, and I feel a flash of fear, hot and sudden. I didn’t realize we’d come so close to the border. We must be skirting the edge of Rochester. “Don’t worry.” Hunter reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “This side of the border isn’t patrolled.”
I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.
We veer away from the fence again. Soon we come to an area of enormous trees, bare branches gray and gnarled like arthritic fingers. It may have been years since they’ve bloomed at all; the trees seem to have been dead a long time. But when I say so to Hunter, he just laughs and shakes his head.
“Not dead.” He raps one with his knuckles as we pass. “Just biding their time. Storing up energy. They tuck all their life away deep inside, for winter. When it gets warm, they’ll bloom again. You’ll see.”
I’m comforted by his words. You’ll see means We’re coming back here. It means You’re one of us now. I run my fingers along a tree, feel the bark flake dryly under my fingertips. It’s impossible to imagine anything alive under all that hardness, anything flowing or moving.
Hunter stops so abruptly I almost run into him. “Here we are,” he says, grinning. “The nests.”
He points upward. High in the branches of the trees are massive tangles of birds’ nests: curls and spray, bits of moss and hanging creepers, all woven together so that it looks as though the trees are crowned with hair.
But even stranger: The branches are painted.
Drips of green and yellow paint stain the bark; delicate forked footprints, also colored, dance along the nests.
“What…?” I see a large bird, about the size of a crow, wing toward a nest directly above our heads. It pauses, watching us. Everything about the bird is black, except for its feet, which are painted a vivid shade of bright green. It is carrying something in its mouth. After a moment it flaps into the nest, and a chorus of chirping begins.
“Green,” Hunter says, looking satisfied. “That’s a good sign. Supplies will be coming today.”
“I don’t understand.” I’m pacing underneath the network of nests. There must be hundreds of them. Some of the nests are actually strung up between the branches of different trees, forming a dense canopy. It is even colder here; the sun barely penetrates.