“Katie girl,” Aunt Maddy said, turning around. “How are you?”
Katie hugged her happily; even though Maddy Freeman wasn’t her real aunt, Katie loved her almost as much as she loved Mum. Aunt Maddy knew how to have fun; for as long as Katie could remember, she had always been the one who could think of a good game, or a way to pass a rainy afternoon indoors. But she was also a good listener. It was Aunt Maddy who had told Katie about sex when she was nine, two years before Mrs. Warren broached the subject at school and long before Katie could bring herself to raise the topic with Mum.
Aunt Maddy’s hug nearly crushed her. She was strong enough to work on the farm, or in the stockyards for that matter, but if Aunt Maddy had any job, it was advising William Tear. Mum, Aunt Maddy, Evan Alcott . . . Tear never went anywhere without at least two of them along, and despite Katie’s ambivalence about the man himself, she couldn’t help being proud when she saw Mum or Aunt Maddy at his side.
“Come on out to the backyard with me, Katie,” Aunt Maddy told her, and Katie followed, wondering whether she was in trouble. Aunt Maddy didn’t have kids of her own to worry about, so she had far too much time to spend keeping an eye on Katie.
Their backyard was wide open, separated from the other houses only by a roundpole fence that Mum had built in order to keep out the Caddells’ dog. The sun hung low over the houses, a blinding ball of orange just touching the horizon. Katie could still hear the shouts of other children, several houses over, but they would soon quiet down. The Town was always quiet at night.
Aunt Maddy sat down on the broad wooden bench under the apple tree and patted the space next to her.
“Sit down, Katie.”
Katie sat, her anxiety increasing. She hardly ever misbehaved, but when she did, it was usually Aunt Maddy who caught her.
“You start as an apprentice next year,” Aunt Maddy remarked.
So this was to be a discussion about her future, not her past. Katie relaxed and nodded.
“Do you have any idea what you’d like to do?”
“I want to work at the library, but Mum says everyone wants to work there and it’s a fight to get in.”
“That’s true. Ms. Ziv has more helpers than she knows what to do with. What’s your second choice?”
“Anything, I guess.”
“You don’t care?”
Katie looked up and found, to her relief, that she was not speaking to Aunt Maddy the disciplinarian. There were two Aunt Maddies, and this was the sympathetic one, the one who had helped Katie hide a dress she’d ruined in a mudfight when she was seven years old.
“I’m just not interested,” Katie admitted. “I know there are some apprenticeships I’d hate for sure, like beekeeping. But even the ones I wouldn’t hate, I just don’t care about.”
Unexpectedly, Aunt Maddy smiled. “I have an apprenticeship for you, Katie girl, one I think you’ll like. Your mother has approved it, but it needs to be a secret.”
“What kind of apprenticeship?”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“Not even Row?”
“Especially not Row,” Aunt Maddy replied. Her face was deadly serious, and the protest Katie had been formulating died on her lips.
“I can keep a secret,” she replied.
“Good.” Aunt Maddy paused for a moment, clearly choosing her words. “When we crossed the ocean, we left behind weapons, and therefore much of our ability to defend ourselves from violence. We didn’t believe we would need such things here. You’ve read about weapons, haven’t you?”
Katie nodded slowly, thinking of the book beside her bed, in which men shot other men with guns. There were no guns in the Town, only knives and arrows, and those were used for hunting and trades. No one was even allowed to carry a knife in the streets.
“Before the Crossing, your mother and I were both trained as weapons,” Aunt Maddy murmured, her gaze fixed on some far-distant place. “We had guns, but we didn’t need them. We learned to kill with our bare hands.”
“Kill people?” Katie blinked, trying to wrap her mind around this idea. Such things happened all the time in books, but they were only stories. She tried to picture Aunt Maddy or Mum killing someone, and found that she had no idea what that would even look like. To her knowledge, only one man in town had ever died by violence, and he had been killed by a marauding wolf out on the plains, years ago. There had been an argument about it at meeting, though Katie had been too young to understand at the time. Several people had demanded that guards be posted around the edges of the Town, guards with bows. Such decisions were always made by democratic vote, but William Tear had spoken against the motion, and when William Tear said no, there was only one way for a vote to go. Katie looked down at Aunt Maddy’s hands, then at her arms, muscular and dotted with scars.
“Is that why you always follow William Tear around?” she asked. “In case you have to kill someone?”