“Two of yours. Two of ours,” June said. “So here’s my question: Can we put an end to this?”
“There’s a big difference between your dead and ours,” Wendy Tanaka said. “You caused this situation. We didn’t. This isn’t even our fight. Everything you told Wes about your situation could be true, and that doesn’t change the fact that no one here is that Perrone guy.”
June closed her eyes and made a temple of her hands, pressing the index fingers between her eyebrows and inhaling deeply. “I am asking for a few weeks of your time. Weeks. Weeks you planned to spend out here anyway. I am offering you protection during that time. So this”—she pointed at Tia—“can’t happen to you. And you don’t have to use a single Stamp, and you don’t even have to sleep in your tents if you don’t want to. I’m asking you that in the name of four hundred sixty-eight innocent people.” She stopped. “Four hundred sixty-six. We’re not an army. We’re not bad people. We gave teenagers guns because we didn’t have a better option. I made a call, and it might have been the wrong call, but it was the best I knew to do at the time, and I’m asking you now for some understanding, for some humanity. Wait three weeks. Andy will take you to Quarantine 1 on the scheduled date. The end.”
“May I speak?” Wes asked.
“Please,” June said tiredly. “Go ahead.”
“I believe you. I sympathize with you. With everything you said. I’m willing to stay; in fact, I want to stay. Send the rest back. Do it as a gesture of goodwill. If Perrone wants his Pocketz deal so badly, he’s not going to blow you up while I’m unaccounted for.”
June shook her head. “No. I send the rest back, and as soon as they’re over the border, and they’re getting asked, ‘Where’s Feingold?’ they spill everything. And then Perrone’s the least of our concerns. Then we’ve got the Atlantic Zone cavalry charging, and I know how these people work better than you do. They shoot first, and then they burn the bodies. They don’t ask questions. They don’t investigate.”
“What if we just promise to tell them Wes wandered off, got lost?” Anastasia asked. “We say that’s why we came back early.”
June faltered, looking down at the bodies. Edie felt for her now not just an intellectual sort of sympathy, impersonal, hypothetical, but something more acute than that. And the thing was: she was out here now. What did she have to get back to in such a hurry? Jesse’s apartment, where she tried to make herself unobtrusive and small, so he would like having her around, so he’d never tire of her, so he’d not get to the point of saying: Maybe it’s time you found your own place. That? Or her grief? Or the job she quit, because she thought she hated it, and she no longer needed it, only to discover that hate is relative—that when you have no money of your own, no outside force shaping your days, you might long for even some low-wage drudgery?
“I’ll stay,” Edie blurted out. “I’ll do the three weeks.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jesse said. “Are you nuts? Why would you say that?”
She hadn’t even thought of him, honestly—she hadn’t thought of what her intention to stay would mean to him or require of him. When she gave Jesse the go-ahead to book her on this excursion, it had occurred to her that the trip would fall during what would have been her due date. It was one of the reasons she’d decided, Fuck it. I’ll go. A strange impulse—she knew it even then. Was she trying to distract herself? Punish herself? The baby might have not been Jesse’s, and he had never, probably, done the math she had done, the counting forward of squares on a calendar; there was no reason he’d have known to mark the day when it came, and he probably wouldn’t have understood, even if Edie tried to explain it to him, how she could be both gloriously relieved, and grateful, and free of regret, but also . . . something else. The abortion wasn’t the great loss of her life, but it would probably always be the greatest mystery; with no other choice could Edie imagine a drastically different parallel version of herself, an Edie catapulted into a radically different future with its own joys and miseries.
“I’ll stay,” Edie repeated. “But Jesse goes back. And you’ll know he’ll stick to any story you want him to because you’ll have me here.”
“Fuck no,” Jesse said. “I don’t agree to that.”
Berto put a hand into the air. “Me, too. Same deal. I stay, Anastasia goes back.”
Anastasia blanched. “No, Berto! No, I stay, too. We don’t split up, ever.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, and Berto grabbed her, pulled her tawny head close and buried his face in her neck—a rough embrace, Edie thought at first, but then she saw that he was whispering something in her ear, and she kept shaking her head, and then she finally stopped and just leaned on his chest, shoulders quaking.
“I’ll have to think about this,” June said. She was looking at the bodies on the floor, but she seemed to be seeing through them, or just short of them, her mind working on an equation, carrying the one, moving the decimal.
“I don’t agree to it,” Jesse repeated. His jaw moved, and he shot Edie a look of anger like she’d never once seen from him. There was no threat in it; that wasn’t what rattled her. He seemed gutted. Like she’d betrayed him. Like he was realizing, suddenly, that he didn’t know her at all.
“Take them back to the shed,” June told Andy, still off in her own head. “I need to consider this from every angle.” Her pale gray eyes sharpened as she looked up, and she seemed to direct her last words right at Edie: “Sounds like you all do, too.”
—
That night, the hostages talked around the lantern for hours, circling the same handful of worries and hopes, reaching no new conclusions. Finally, exhausted, they doused the light and retreated to the shed’s corners, as far from one another as the small space would allow. Togetherness had accomplished nothing, Edie supposed. So now they were planets, flung away from the warm center, alone and committed to their own solitary orbits.
Edie was no longer sure if she and Jesse shared an orbit, but she followed him to the spot he’d staked out near the door, and she slid into the sleeping bag behind him, pressing her chest, her stomach, her thighs, against his back, his legs. He held himself rigid, all bony shoulder and hip. Making a wall of himself.
She wriggled up, so she could put her mouth near his ear. “Don’t be mad at me,” she whispered.
He pulled his shoulder roughly forward. “What do you want from me?” He wasn’t keeping his voice very low. “I’m supposed to leave you here? Or you want me to stay, maybe. Say I’m going to stay with you. Or maybe you want me to volunteer in your place. Maybe that’s what you’ve been angling for.”