After (64 page)

It hadn't been a trick. The train was real. The tracks had been cleared, the coal coffers and water tank filled and refilled. The engine tuned and coaxed to life. They hadn't been herded by the dozens into that basement only to be bound and dragged away, doled out to husbands and patrons of the sex hotels.

So the mecca, the paradise, it was probably real, too. Of course it was. Jan had seen it. So why, why was she nauseous with fear?

It was starting to get light out. With daylight creeping over everything, they'd be seen. But they wouldn't be expected. That was the key. The secret of the op. The one-shot beauty of the thing. What could one man, or a little cluster of men do about a train snaking through the country faster than a horse could run for any great stretch, when they didn't know it was coming until it was practically there, when they had no idea why it was chuffing its way east? Still, she kept watch, ceaselessly scanning the horizons for the dust clouds that hooves kick up, every second expecting to see an equine head, a determined rider edge his way into the frame of the window at her shoulder.

Even though there were doors at the front and back of the car, and it was possible to go through them, to walk to the next car and the next, to see liberated women and rebels who'd boarded in Sacramento and Salt Lake City and Denver and Topeka, the doors only opened twice, and both times it was the strangers, the men from the east, coming through to whisper to their comrades, and to announce in patronizingly soft tones to the huddled masses that everything was going well.

The refugees, the runaways and freed women Nix had boarded with were at the front of the car, clustered together in a tight little bunch, instinctively maintaining a comforting distance from the men who'd helped orchestrate and execute their liberation.

In the midst of them, Melissa and another woman huddled on a bench with their infants.

Melissa's little boy was at the other woman's breast, taking the milk his mother had lost in the week of their separation, while Melissa cradled the other woman's baby, probably just two or three weeks old.

At the back of the car sat the men from the east; the men who'd brought the radios and the engineers, who'd restored the train and cleared the tracks. Nix smiled to notice she'd chosen them, not the women. She didn't belong with any of them. But the unease of being near the men was easier to bear.

Except Gareth. He was hard to bear. Even in a train car steaming with people, whispers and nervous laughter echoing all around her. It was like an anchor dragging her down under cold and murky waters, his shy, silent seeking, that anxiety coming off him, pungent as sweat, now that they were hurtling over miles of track, away from the desolate emptiness where they only had each other.

“I was scared,” he whispered.

“I'm sorry.”

She wasn't, really. Melissa had her baby. A minute or an hour of Gareth's fear was a light price. When she wanted to, though, she knew how to give people what they needed. Like letting Gareth hold her and bathe her that night. Letting him wash her clean of their piss.

“I shouldn't have gone. I should have made Miguel find someone else. I promised I'd keep my eye on you. Keep you from getting yourself hurt.”

“No you didn't. You promised not to let me fuck up the op. If I hadn't come back, everything would have gone ahead as planned. Melissa wouldn't have her baby. That's all.”

He nodded, but she caught the glint of defiance in his eyes.

“Get over it,” she said.

“What?”

“This idea you have that you need to protect me. That you can protect me.”

He turned away from her, but she'd already seen the hurt ripple through those twin gray pools.

“It's not that,” he said, staring down at his hands, gripped together in his lap like he was fighting to keep them there.

“So? What, then?”

“You're having a hard time,” he said softly, bringing his gaze back to hers. “Since the other night. I just want to help you through it.”

Had she really liked the smell of him once? Now the scent of him, the sight of him choked her, shrinking her throat, filling it up with bile.

“Do you know how many men have raped me, Gareth? How many times I've been held down and fucked? What happened the other night doesn't matter. It hasn't mattered in years. I told you before. I told you. I wasn't even there when it happened. I don't remember their faces. What they said. How it felt. They raped an empty corpse.

They never touched me.”

Again, that defiant glint.

“Don't call me a liar in your head, Gareth. Say it to me out loud.”

“It's just, it did hurt you. You're. . . struggling. You know it. It's why you asked me to keep an eye on you tonight.”

“Gareth,” she breathed through the choking bile, through her closing throat, her lungs, everything inside cold, almost frozen, “it's not what they did to me. It's you.”

His face turned white and his eyes turned red. She saw that he was shaking, and thought it was like looking in a mirror before she realized she was shaking, too. Even hating him, she felt guilty. Felt pity.

“I can't do it, Gareth. I can't make myself soft for you, can't let myself feel with you, and do what I do. I can live through nights like that, three men roping me like a fucking hog and raping and beating and pissing all over me; I can live through it twenty times a year. But not with you. I can kill slavers and rapists; I can liberate orphans before they go to the auction block and rescue pregnant women, but not with you. I can only do it, earn my brand, do the one thing that makes any sense, that makes surviving worth anything, by keeping myself cold and hard.

“I told you. I can't love you.”

Vaguely, she could remember how it used to feel, pleasantly empty inside, hollow. Everything in her making room for instinct, for fight. Not this weight, this tender mess tangling up with everything.

“People,” Miguel's voice hummed through the car, soft like the start of a chant, probably so he wouldn't startle the refugee women, “have a look outside. You're about to cross the line.”

Stretching away from the train to the left and right, the landscape was a vibrant palette of earthy hues: sedate browns, warm yellows and reds and oranges, vibrant greens, all climbing over each other, scrambling up steep slopes to claim the peaks thrusting into the gray sky, while ahead, off in the distance, the earth seemed to be imitating the sea, belts of peaks rising and dipping and rising and dipping, all blues and grays and violets, with mists like foam cradled between their waves.

“The Blue Ridge Mountains,” Miguel said. “You'll have a nice view of them from the city.”

“What city?” Nix asked. Going to a city, that wasn't part of the plan.

In an instant, everything went black. The day was gone and the train sank into total darkness. Then, just as suddenly, light poured through all the windows, lit up the dozens of faces staring out as the train shot back out of the tunnel.

Miguel laughed. “I guess it's not really a city. We just call it that, the campus. You can't see from here, but just to the north is the main base. We won't stop there. We'll keep on for Sewanee. That'll be home for most of you, at least for a while. Believe me, you're gonna like it there. Prettiest place I've ever seen.”

Four hours later, the train scraped and screeched and huffed to a halt, and the passengers, the sixty of them in Nix's car and the hundreds that poured from the narrow doors of the other fourteen segments of the iron caterpillar filed out and made their way to the nearby road. An uphill hike of less than seven miles got them to their destination: a picturesque university campus founded in the middle of the nineteenth century, whose many residential halls, voided of students during the dying, now offered idyllic communal residences for refugees from the west, and whose thousands of acres of rolling grasses, placid lakes and majestic trees promised quiet sanctuary.

In groups, some as small as twelve, some as large as forty-six, they were guided to the halls that had housed young men and women for their four college years, before the dying, when to be eighteen was to be still almost a child. In ones and twos, according to their preference, the women occupied the small, tidy rooms, each with one or two narrow beds, and a complement of simple wooden dressers and armoires, though no one had enough belongings to fill more than half a drawer.

When she was asked, while Gareth and the other men had been led off on some pretext, Nix told the woman that she wanted a room to herself, but in the one mixed dorm, where the few resistance men were housed with the few resistance women who were close to them. Little as she wanted Gareth too near, the thought of living among a dozen or thirty shell-shocked, trembling refugees was revolting.

Alone in the clean little room that was all her own for however long she ended up staying, she shut the door and wondered at the marvel of a door that locked from the inside. A lock for preserving her own privacy, for ensuring her own safety. Not a jail cell.

She remembered the girl, the wiry orphan, Andrea, and wondered at her feeling of nausea that had been eating at her the whole time she'd been trapped in that humid, whisper-filled compartment on the train. In Andrea, she'd seen a little sister. She'd seen courage and strength and hope. Why, now, when she looked at the others, did she see only weakness and fear? A lack that repelled her, made her sick.

Voices in the hall. So far, she hadn't seen any of the resistance women she knew.

Jan. Kat. Jaden. Rain. Taryn. Kade. Char. Mel. On the road, she'd tried to spot them, but in the swarm of hope and fatigue, it was hard to pick individuals from the crowd. She unlocked her door. Three women, two who'd made their way from Colorado, one all the way from California. Yes, they were done. They'd stay. No, they didn't know the women she was looking for.

Nix retreated from the hallway, back into her room, behind her door that locked from the inside. In the hall, the voices of the three women swelled again after the brief silence left in the wake of her too-abrupt departure. Swelling, dipping, all around her, in the hall outside her door, in the rooms above, the rooms below, voices, voices, dozens of women and a few resistance men murmuring and laughing.

It surprised her—she liked her little room. Small and spare and clean and whole.

The ceiling and walls and floor intact, no reek of rot, of mildew. And from the large, paned rectangle of glass, she had a view of the gently sloping grounds, adorned with grand, towering trees still holding on to their bright leaves, and the other residential halls, some of dark reddish brick, others of gray stone, all nestled among trees and shrubs that had probably once been much smaller, neatly manicured to maintain a sense of man's power over nature, but which now nearly hid the buildings from view.

A soft knock on her locked door. She expected Gareth, but it was a woman. Not one of the resistance women, not one of the refugees. Young and bright, light, no darkness, no weight to her. She'd lived all her life this side of the line, Nix figured, or had crossed early enough in her brief life to still be whole. Her smile and her eyes, a soft brown like a walnut's shell, were warm.

“Welcome,” she said in a voice as soft as her smile and her warm brown eyes.

“I'm Kayla.”

“Nix.” She made herself smile.

“Is your room alright?”

“Yes. Perfect.”

“There's food downstairs. People are going down to eat. Come join us?”

She'd forgotten to say “Thank you,” for the room. She should have said, “Thank you.” Now it was too late.

“I'm not hungry,” Nix replied, then rushed to add, “Thank you, though.”

“Are you sure? I could bring a plate up for you,” the light, bright woman said in her warm, soft voice.

“No. Thank you.”

Kayla gave Nix a wide, bright smile. “I'll let you have your rest and quiet, then.”

The tension wrapped around Nix like a coil of wire slackened a little, but cinched tight again when Kayla turned away from the door without opening it. “They told you about the bathroom, right?”

“No.”

Kayla let out a laugh, lilting and pretty. With each second, the woman seemed more and more like an alien. “I guess we're not doing such a hot job of making everyone at home. Here.” She sprang toward a second door and swung it open to reveal a toilet, sink and tub, their porcelain and the sage and white tile of the floor and even the grout all pristine as fresh snow. “It's probably been a while since you've enjoyed running water. It all works. Have a bath, if you want.”

With one last smile, Kayla disappeared, closing the door silently behind her.

Hot water and soap and a perfectly laundered wash cloth. She was the alien, not Kayla. Transported to an alien world with doors that locked from the inside and houses that weren't rotten and women who laughed as though they've never cried and cakes of almond-colored soap perched on the edge of tubs with taps that spouted running water, hot and cold.

After more than two days and nights with less than a couple hours sleep, she should have been exhausted, should have fallen into deep, empty sleep when she slid between those alien, pristine sheets on that soft, clean-smelling bed. All around her, though, voices swirled, a cacophony more and more animated by the hour as the cynical rebels gradually came to believe that the mecca in the distance wasn't a mirage, as they'd all feared, openly or secretly. Lying still, sitting still, standing still, it was all painful to Nix.

Another soft knock. Really Gareth, this time, saying, “I won't stay, if you're not in the mood for a visit.”

Without having to force it, she smiled and waved him in.

“It's getting pretty merry out there,” he said.

“So I hear.”

“It's good to see. They're so happy. All these women who've fought so hard for this.”

It felt like a rebuke. Like she was a child on her birthday, not grateful enough at receiving a gift she'd begged for.

“Have you seen the others? The refugees?”

“It's the same in the other halls. A few of us made the rounds, just to check up on things.”

“Good.” Her own complacence, her lack of concern for the others, shocked her a little.