“Yes you do,” Edie said. “You’ve basically laid it out already. Everybody else is precious for some reason. Tia’s the hired help. I’m the girlfriend. We won’t be missed. So we walk our poor asses out into God knows what and maybe die trying to rescue the rest of you.”
“That’s not the situation at all,” Wes said.
Edie nodded hard. “Andy tried to warn me off back at the training center. He said that I wasn’t like the rest of you. I wish I’d listened.”
The band had stopped playing. Jesse, seated now on the edge of the little stage, was smiling and talking to someone, picking at his ukulele in an offhand way. He laughed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Edie thought for a few seconds about escape. Enter the woods. Exit the relationship. An extreme measure, you’d have to call it. Comical, almost.
“I apologize,” Wes said. “Honestly, Edie. That wasn’t my line of thought at all. It was not. But I see why you’d read it that way.”
“Big of you,” Edie said.
Wes gathered his plate and his glass. “It’s a no. Gotcha. Please keep it quiet, though. What we’ve got. Will you do that?”
Edie sighed. “Of course I will.”
“I admire you,” Wes said. “I think you could do it. Maybe I think that because Andy is right, and you’re not like the rest of us. Maybe that’s a good thing, Edie.”
He bobbed his head at her in goodbye, and she watched him walk away. Marta, downhill, waited for him. For the verdict. Edie was sorry to let her down. A little sorry. Maybe that’s a good thing. Easy for him to say.
Jesse dropped to his bottom beside her. “Feingold,” he said. Growled. “What did he want?”
“Just chatting,” Edie said.
Jesse slung his arm around her shoulders. “Should I be jealous?” He was trying to sound like he was joking, like the idea was absurd.
“No,” Edie said. “I’m not interested in what he has on offer.” She took another swallow of her beer. “Not even a little.”
—
Wes shook his head—a quick, negative gesture, imperceptible unless you were looking for it—before taking to the grass beside Marta. Her stomach twisted.
“She said no?”
“She said no,” Wes affirmed. He bit his lip. “I think I insulted her, actually. Jeez. I should’ve thought of how it might sound to her. Like—” He shook his head again. “Anyway. It was no.”
“Perhaps I should be the one. It’s not fair of me to put it on someone else. I came out here. I did the training, such as it was. I’m as good a candidate as anybody.”
Wes ran his fingers across his smooth scalp. There was a rasping sound—his hair, already starting to grow back in.
“But I keep thinking about my sons. I’m sorry, Wes. That’s what it boils down to for me. In what scenario am I likelier to see my sons again? I think it’s staying here and seeing what happens.”
“I understand,” Wes said.
She patted his hand. “I know you do.”
“I don’t want you to be the one, either. I don’t feel like there’s anyone else here I can trust. Not for sure.”
Her gut twisted at that. Could he trust her? Her intentions by him were pure—but she hadn’t told him about her real name, about who her husband was and what he’d asked her to do. She hadn’t revealed to him the means by which she’d smuggled in the Quicksilver masked as a Smokeless. As for that last, he hadn’t asked. Not in so many words. But the question was in his eyes. Should she tell him? She wanted to, in a way—how strange it was, at this point in her life, to feel that her dearest friend in the world was a boy not much older than her sons, a boy she’d only known for a few short weeks—but she also worried that the information could do him more harm than good.
They sat, watching the flow of the river and the flow of the villagers along its banks.
“I have no idea what to make of all this,” Marta said after a while. “The people here seem happy. Don’t they?”
“They are happy,” said a voice from behind them, and Marta jolted so hard that she spilled her glass of water all over her lap.
“May I join you?”
June. Marta and Wes stared.
“That was a stupid question,” June said. “I try not to ask those. What I mean is, will you join me? Or, rather, join me. Let’s go on a walk.”
“Where?” Marta asked. Another stupid question.
“Wherever I say,” said June mildly.
They started upriver, away from the crush of activity around the food, music, and bonfires. Marta, looking over her shoulder at this, noticed that they were being trailed. Thirty feet back, maybe: three figures, armed. Hard to tell in the moonlight, but she thought that one was the big guy from their kidnapping nightmare, Randall. She had believed that he, Andy, Violet, and the other one were absent tonight. Sleeping off their rough all-night march. A foolhardy assumption. Maybe it was a stroke of luck that no one had agreed to stage an escape attempt with Tia.
They were heading uphill, back toward the flower beds where they’d first spied June. They—the beds—extended as far as Marta could make out in the starlight, a patchwork of tall, slender stems topped with heavy blooms, nodding as if in sleep, rustling eerily in an otherwise imperceptible breeze. June halted beside a bed, reached out, and grabbed a thick, hairy stalk, tilting a red flower toward them—its black eye, its crepe petals.
“This is why you’re here,” she said. “This flower. My father’s life’s work.”
“Poppies?” Wes asked.
“Not exactly,” June said. “It’s a hybrid. Secret recipe. It’s our cash crop and our salvation.”
“You produce heroin,” Marta said. For the first time since the kidnapping, it occurred to her with a sinking certainty that this situation was connected to David’s situation. The one that necessitated her and the boys hiding out somewhere. Did June know who she was? Had David, instead of protecting her, sent her right into the camp of his enemy?
“No,” June said sharply. “Heroin is an opiate. I’ve told you this is not a poppy.”
“Some drug, then,” Marta said, surprised at her own superior tone. The fifteen-gram vial of Salt, hidden in its NicoClean cell camouflage, was still in her knapsack back at Town Hall. She hadn’t used any of it. She hadn’t been tempted to—yet. But a year ago? A month?
And David, of course. She knew how he made his living. Some of it, at least. She knew, and still she ate the fine foods and drank the fine wine, slept between the silken sheets, walked her bare feet across the cool marble floors. She enjoyed the bounty and accepted it as her due, for having to live with a man she no longer recognized.
“There are good drugs and bad drugs,” June said. “We make a bit of both, and both of them allow us to survive.”
Wes ran his finger along the furred stalk. “This is all interesting,” he said. Marta thought he sounded genuine. “But I don’t understand what it has to do with me.”
“We have distribution and a market for the drug that bankrolls our little operation. Salt. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
Marta stiffened. Wes shrugged.
“I can’t say I’m too happy with our business partner,” June said. “Our situation here is precarious. Marta, you said that people here look happy. I told you that we are.”