“Lie still,” the woman said. She placed a hand on the young girl’s shoulder and forced her back against the pillows. There were two boys in the room. They were the boys from one of her dreams. “Can you take another small sip?” the woman asked.
The young girl nodded, and a jar was brought forward, the water inside as clear as glass. She lifted her hands to help, but they were bandaged and useless. The water burned her mouth in the best way.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Violet,” she said. Her voice was small in that strange room.
The woman smiled at this. “Like the flower.”
The older of the two boys moved closer to the bed, and Violet remembered his face from her dream, but it wasn’t a dream. Conner. He had picked her up and carried her. She knew where she was, that this was real. She turned to the woman with the water, who was asking about her name.
“Father said violet was the color he saw when I was born, that it was like seeing the air from beneath the sand. That’s why he named me Violet.”
The woman smoothed the hair back from the girl’s forehead and frowned like this was the wrong answer.
“Can I have more water?” she whispered. Her mouth was so dry.
“Just a little,” the woman said. “It’s possible to drink too much.”
Violet nodded. “You can drown,” she said. “Like in the river. Or what happens if you drink the bad water from the trough.” She lifted her head and took another sip. The younger of the two boys stood at the foot of the bed and stared at her. She knew who this was. “You’re Rob,” she said.
The boy startled as if someone had stomped on his foot. Regaining his composure, he bobbed his head.
“Father said we were about the same age.”
“Then he wasted no time,” the woman with the jar of water muttered. She sounded upset. “Where is he now? How far away is your village?”
“How did you get across No Man’s Land?” the older boy asked.
“How old are you?” Rob wanted to know.
The woman snapped her fingers at the two boys, and they seemed to know this meant not to talk. And something occurred to Violet. “You’re my second mom,” she said. “You’re Rose.”
The woman’s cheeks twitched at this. She shook her head and opened her mouth to say something—Violet thought maybe to say that she wasn’t her mom—but instead she just wiped at one eye and kept quiet. The two boys seemed to be waiting for Violet to answer all their questions, but she had already forgotten most of them.
“I don’t come from a village,” she said. She rested her head on the pillow and gazed longingly at the jar of water in the woman’s hands. “I came from a camp. It doesn’t have a name, just a number, and we aren’t allowed to leave. There are tents and fences, and we can see the city from the camp. Kids from the city come to the fence—there’s two fences, so if you get through one the other will stop you—and some of the kids from the city throw candy through the fence and some throw rocks—it’s usually the bigger kids with the rocks, which means the rocks come harder than the candy, but we’re told to stay away from the fence anyway—”
“What kind of camp is this?” Rose asked.
“Like camping in a tent—?” Rob said, but he got snapped at again.
“A mining camp,” Violet said. “It’s where they blow up the ground and grab the worthy stuff out with their nets. That’s what the foreman calls them, but Father says they aren’t really nets. They have magnets in them. He knows all about wires and magic and stuff. They make us work the troughs for the heavier bits that drift to the bottom. We work with water up to our elbows all day, cold water. It makes your hands and fingers shrivel. People in the camp who come from the south call it the pruning flesh—”
“Water up to your elbows,” Conner scoffed. “And where’s all this water come from?”
It was clear he didn’t believe her. Father warned Violet this would happen, that no one would believe. “The water comes from the river,” she said. “But you can’t drink it. Some do, and they die. Because of the metals and the mining. The water for drinking comes from way upstream, past all the camps, but they don’t give us much of that. Father says they starve our mouths and drown our arms just to drive us mad. But it didn’t make me mad. Just thirsty.”
Saying this won her another sip from the jar. Violet felt better. It was the sheets and the roof over her head and the jar of water and people to talk to.
“What’s the name of this city?” Rose asked. “Where’s my husband?”
“The city is called Agyl. The people outside the fence call it that, but they talk funny, and Father says I talk too much like them because I was born in the camp. They say it’s a small city, but Father says it’s bigger than where he comes from. I don’t know. It’s the only city I’ve ever seen. Just a mining town. The big cities, they say, are more to the sunrise, all the way to the sea. But that’s—”
“What’s a sea?” Rob asked.
More snapping.