“This was always going to be a problem,” Harold said, adding his third pinch of tobacco to the pipe bowl and packing it tight with his yellow-stained forefinger. “We started small. We were going to have to bring in some outsiders no matter what, or else start inbreeding.” He stuck the pipe stem between his teeth and lit a match, then touched the flame to the bowl, tasting the smoke with what appeared to be deep satisfaction. “The current situation just—you know—underscores the problem.”
“Well, it does more than that,” June said. She tried to imagine some new order, where women—some women—stopped taking the Salt in the hope of getting pregnant. What a choice. To live with all of that fear and uncertainty again while your man kept bopping along on his merry way? An image flickered across June’s mind: all-male hunting groups, all-male fishing and scavenging groups, the women hanging back at the hearth, venturing nervously out into the village, maybe, their worlds suddenly very small, their existences defined by one hope: a baby. It was not a course of action June would have ever taken herself. She had known, even before committing to Roz eighteen years ago, that children weren’t in the cards for her, that caring for Violet was the only parenting she ever wanted to do. And there would be others like her, others content to forgo motherhood. But she recognized what was at stake. She recognized how betrayed the women would feel, this done to them without their knowing, without their approbation. And June might be forgiven if ceasing the dosage eventually restored a woman’s fertility, but if it didn’t? And what about the girls, the ones who’d gotten their first exposure to Salt through their mother’s milk? What would this mean for them?
And there was another problem: David Perrone. If David knew that regular consumption of Salt caused infertility, would he keep buying from them? What about that big, onetime deal he kept offering? And if this killed any hope of a deal, what were the chances that he’d simply leave them alone?
“Tell me what to do,” June said. “What’s the right thing here, Harold? We call a meeting tonight and show them what you just showed me? Leave it up to the individual to keep taking the dosage or not?”
Harold shrugged. “Maybe. But we don’t know anything for sure yet.”
“What, then?”
“Well. We could quietly try some things first. See what effect there is, if any.”
“What things?” June said. Her throat was very dry. It seemed to stick to itself when she swallowed.
“Leave that to me,” said Harold. “I’ll put out a feeler or two. I have some ideas.”
“We can’t risk this getting out. There’ll be a panic. People’ll say I kept it from them.”
“Like I said, I have an idea. The less you know about it, the better.”
—
Once a few years back, Roz had gotten word from a villager who’d been out hunting that there was pack of abandoned wolf pups trapped in a crevasse on the other side of the mountain. “Thought you might have some use for ’em,” he’d said, and Roz, who’d always hoped she might breed a little wolf into her princes, had gotten downright chipper, which itself was quite a sight. June, amused by Roz’s excitement, had accompanied Roz and the hunter back to the puppies, and what she’d seen when she looked down into the hole had made her very nervous about Roz’s rescue plan. There were seven of them: one dead, two close to dead, lying on their sides, stomachs fluttering. The other four, who had been eating the dead pup, looked up at the three humans not with relief or even indifference but a wary desperation, muzzles red.
“Goddammit, Billy, those are coyotes,” Roz had said. “I can’t believe I dragged my ass a half hour up a mountain for a pack of goddamn coyotes.”
Anyway, after only a couple of days’ incarceration, the nine hostages looked a bit to June like those four puppies had. The room smelled nauseatingly of their unwashed bodies and old urine.
They’d left the coyote pups where they found them, June remembered.
“Here’s what I’ve decided,” June said, without preamble. “I’m sending five of you back with Andy. He’ll drop you within walking distance of the Wall. You’ll be given a story about the group getting separated during a hunting party. You’ll say that Tia was leading your half of the group and was killed in a bad fall, and her communication devices went down with her. You’ll say you found your way to the Wall through pure luck. Andy’s going to make an emergency call to report the separation, and he’s going to try really damn hard to convince the folks in-zone to let him complete the excursion as planned, once word comes through that you five are safe in Quarantine. That’s where Feingold’s microsuit deal is going to help us, I hope.”
“Sounds risky,” Ken Tanaka said.
“It is,” June agreed. “You’ve left me no better choice. Unless you’re all willing to stay. That offer still stands.”
“Offer,” one of them snorted—the man who’d called Violet a “thing.” Lee, was it? “Well, my answer’s no. To your offer.” He sneered around the word.
“Which five go?” the singer asked. June stabbed the air at him with her left index finger. “You,” she said, noticing that a flash of relief passed across his face before he could reconfigure his features into the anger he wanted others to think he felt, or maybe even wanted to believe he felt. She turned to point to the other four. “You, you, you, you”: Lee; Wendy Tanaka; the woman with the long blond hair; and Marta Severs. She had consulted with Andy. Splitting the pairs was a no-brainer. Keeping Feingold, ditto, and the two who’d already volunteered. But the other choices were trickier. June wished she could have held on to both Tanakas—and she trusted Wendy Tanaka, with her purpled forehead and cheek, to keep her end of the bargain least of them all, maybe—but she’d recognized that uneven treatment would cause a panic, and she knew from Andy that Ken Tanaka was already wise about the Salt, had purchased a top-secret Elite excursion package with its “bite-free guarantee.” That, she hoped, would make him compliant.
“I don’t want this,” the blond woman said. “I don’t want to leave my husband.”
“Don’t be stupid,” her husband snapped. “We’ve talked about this. Go.”
Wendy Tanaka looked from her brother to June and back again, as if checking his reaction before forming her own. “But why are you even willing to do this? Why not hold us here by force?”
“It’s the best compromise I could hope to reach with you,” June said. “We need time. This seemed like the surest way to proceed with your cooperation. And we want your cooperation.” She cleared her throat, thinking about Roz’s face this morning in the mellow Sunday light. The love in it, and the understanding. “We’re not bad people.”
“When do we go?” Lee asked. He seemed calm now, even content. He was going home, and he was leaving no one here to worry about. Good riddance, June thought. She was glad to be shed of him.
“This afternoon,” she said. “Eat lunch. Say your goodbyes. Andy will be here with a van in two hours.”