The slow pace of their progression through the village, at first a relief, had lulled Marta, allowing her exhaustion to catch up with her. Her feet, tender and slick with sweat that had worked its way down her legs, throbbed with pain. The Stamp on her calf pulsed hotly. Her stomach was empty to the point of near nausea, and she wished that David had thought to cleverly disguise a piece of candy in her Smokeless rather than the Salt, though the thought of the Quicksilver—a miracle that the hideous woman called Violet hadn’t confiscated it—still gave her a small measure of courage and hope. Tiny. Minuscule, really. But better than nothing.
There was a bar of sorts—a long low building with a shed roof, doors thrown open to a dirt yard with half a dozen picnic tables. More old people, adorned with punches of color—four of them, heads bent over mismatched glasses filled with tawny liquid. If Marta hadn’t seen the woman called Vic and the middle-aged tradespeople, she’d have wondered if Ruby City weren’t some kind of outer-zone retirement village.
They walked on. The land around flattened and broadened away from the curve of the river, climbing gently uphill, and Marta saw where at least some of the town’s younger residents were spending their day: among dozens, maybe hundreds, of long raised beds, shoulders brushing the leafy stalks of a flowering plant. She couldn’t have named the plant if she tried. Gardening didn’t remotely interest her. The blocks of green were punctuated occasionally by crimson blooms with black centers—beautiful, but the sight unsettled her in some unnameable way. The plants seemed swollen, out of proportion. They didn’t belong, so red and vibrant on this cool autumn day.
As they drew closer to the nearest bed, Marta could hear the rustle of the stalks, the murmur of the women and men working among them. “Seen June?” Curtis asked the first person they encountered—a young man, late teens or early twenties, of a beauty as improbable as the nearby flowers. He was tan, lithe, with wide-set eyes so light blue as to be almost clear, and he was, so far as Marta could tell, utterly unmarked, as fresh and unscarred as a Zoner. Again, she wondered at this—and she wondered if Wes had also noticed. How could he not?
The young man thumbed uphill. “Number six or seven, I think,” he said.
They moved in the direction he’d indicated, passing more beds, more gardeners—or maybe you’d call them farmers?—two or three of them to a bed, most youngish, around her sons’ ages, and there was a general atmosphere among them of cheerful industriousness, and it occurred to Marta that industriousness—and cheer, frankly—weren’t qualities she associated with the youth back home. There wasn’t a tablet in sight. When was the last time she’d seen a group of twenty-year-olds without at least a few heads bent over an electronic device? And yet they were recognizable. A burst of laughter erupted from somewhere a few beds over, followed by a shushing sound, but the shushing was amused, lighthearted. There wasn’t any real fear of reprisal in it. It was almost warm here, where the midday sun could hit the slope with full force, and a pretty young woman had her brown face lifted up toward that rich light, as if she herself were a flower. Beside her, another girl drew a small, scythelike blade across the chalky green flesh of a golfball-sized bulb or fruit on one plant. She made three quick hash marks, and as Marta passed close, the girl pressed the tip of her pinky to the milky liquid that had surged from one of the slits, then, eyes locked fixedly on Marta, placed the fingertip between her puckered lips. She winked. Marta looked quickly away, flushed.
What on earth was this place?
Their guide finally stopped. Andy and his armed associates, who had grown uncharacteristically quiet during the walk through the village, flanked him, turning to face the group and lifting their weapons again, though Marta doubted that any among the OLE travelers had the energy left for raising their voices, much less staging an attack or making a run for it.
“Here they are, June,” Curtis said. “Andy got ’em here. He did good.”
His words seemed to be directed at the back of a diminutive figure standing in one of the flower beds. The figure turned, lifting a forearm to brush hair and sweat off her forehead, revealing an almost ordinary middle-aged woman’s face, the face of a woman maybe a few years younger than Marta, a woman who, in-zone, might have been tending the flowers lining the front walk of a trim bungalow with a screened-in front porch. The only thing compromising this effect was a single Stamp scar on the woman’s freckled high cheekbone. The rest of her visible skin—neck, chest, bare arms—was unmarked. She had something in her hand that resembled a trowel; it was coated in maroon-colored sludge.
This, Marta supposed, was June.
“Why, yes he did,” the woman said. “Well done, Andy.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He lowered his gun to bob his head and shoulders toward her, nervous, it seemed, as a boy called in to the principal’s office.
“And it’s all of them?” she asked. She appraised Marta and the others with a more genial version of the interest those back in the village had shown them.
“All that matter,” Andy said. “Along with several that don’t.”
“Well, that remains to be seen.” She had a soft but commanding voice with a southern lilt you hardly heard any longer in-zone. She stepped up on the plank lip of the raised bed, and even those seven or eight inches didn’t bring her to chin level with their guide; she was not just short but practically rendered in miniature, with narrow shoulders and wrists as delicate as a ten-year-old’s but a woman’s curves, a woman’s laugh lines, and a woman’s frizzy cloud of amber-going-to-silver hair. She wore the trouser half of the local getup—grayish brown, baggy, rolled at the ankle and cinched at the waist with a leather belt—but the shirt tucked into them looked like something that could have been purchased off the rack at any one of the in-zone department stores: red and blue plaid, soft flannel, also oversized. Cheap. Nothing special. But anomalous out here, robbed of its mundane context.
“I’m June,” she said, unnecessarily. She set her trowel down carefully in a ceramic bowl at her feet, hopped down from the flower bed, and approached the group. Andy and the other guides stiffened, but she took the hand of the first person she approached—it was Anastasia—with the confidence and measured warmth of a schoolteacher or an aunt you only saw once a year at the family reunion. Anastasia towered over her. She let her hand be shaken, but the expression on her face was dazed and disbelieving. June released her hand, smiling, and reached for Berto’s. He, too, consented to being touched. June proceeded to shake the hand of each of her captives, that mild smile still on her face. When Marta’s turn came, her fleeting thoughts of staging some sort of protest—withholding her hand, turning her back—dissipated in the face of June’s calm reserve. Her hand was cool, dry. Very small. She placed her free hand over her and Marta’s grasping ones. She fixed her hazel eyes on Marta’s, demanding contact.
“You look tired,” she said. “That trek in is a bit much for women our age. I do apologize.”
“The trek was fine,” Marta managed to say. “The treatment we received wasn’t.”
June continued holding Marta’s hand. Marta’s palm prickled with sweat.
“I’m afraid,” June said, “that prisoners of war don’t often get the red carpet rolled out.”