The Night Market (9 page)

“Ugh! That’s fu…that is really disgusting. Tastes like
cinnamon and cough syrup. You want some?”

Yael found a small bottle of lamp oil, but, lacking a
lamp, set it aside in disinterest. Jenny stopped coughing long enough to scoop it
up, shoving it rather haphazardly in one of her many pockets.

“Do I want to try drinking the stuff you just
described as disgusting? No, I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself,” Jenny said, picking up one of the
candy bars and tearing the wrapper open with her teeth. She finished the
remainder of her statement with her mouth filled with nougat. “Beggars can’t be
choosers, you know?”

Yael dug through the cache of costume jewelry and
coins at the base of the chest, surprised that she recognized none of the
currency or the languages on the coins. Some of them weren’t even round, but
rather oblongs or octagons. Some were heavy and milled on the sides, while
others were uneven and smooth. The metal varied from brass and tin to something
that looked a bit like stainless steel.

“You have to
ask
for something to be a beggar,
Miss Frost. We took these things.”

“And they took them from other people. Circle of
life.”

“That is
not
the circle of life.”

“Close enough. You find anything worth finding?”

Yael displayed her salvage: a battery-powered lantern,
two tins of self-heating soup, and eleven mismatched bullets lined up on a rock
like tin soldiers, polished to a fine-sheen by the grease of many hands.

“I don’t suppose you have a gun?”

Yael wasn’t sure what kind of answer she hoped for.
She needed Jenny’s protection. That didn’t mean she trusted her, or the cruel light
in her eyes. Part of Yael felt that Jenny was dangerous enough without a gun.

“Nope,” Jenny said dismissively, peeling open the
wrapper of another candy bar. “Never saw the point in carrying one. I can
always find ‘em when I need ‘em.”

Yael read the back of a soup package, her expression
grim.

“I can’t eat these.”

“Why not?”

Yael made a face.

“They have chicken broth.”

“So?”

“I don’t eat meat.”

Jenny laughed, as if Yael had told a joke.

“You sure you wanna try and cross the Waste, Princess?
You ain’t exactly cut out for this shi-”

Yael kicked over the empty chest in frustration.

“What about you Miss Frost? How long have you been
wandering in circles out here? Do you want to continue without the only guide
you’ve found?”

“Maybe. Depends on whether she keeps condescending and
bitching.”

“Miss Frost!”

“What? I didn’t call anyone a name. Would you rather I
called it whining? Fine. Are you going to whine the entire trip?”

Yael stomped off in what she hoped was the right
direction – she would have to sleep to be sure – leaving the chest and its
spilled contents behind her, too angry to bother with collecting any of the
contents. She didn’t look back, and set as demanding a pace as possible, given
the dust and the wind that impeded her progress. She barely managed to make it
down the ridge before Fenrir caught up to her, the rusted chain around his neck
jingling and his black eyes sparkling with what looked like amusement.

The dog loped casually past Yael, and then settled in
the middle of the road ahead of her, laying peacefully down on its massive
forepaws, as if he expected to be petted. Not that Yael would put her hand
anywhere near that savage mouth. Gradually she slowed her pace to a walk,
waiting for Jenny to catch up. She didn’t have to wait long before Jenny
rounded a pile of rubble behind her, whistling casually with her hands in her
pockets.

“You know, it’s hard to keep track of you when you run
ahead…”

“Miss Frost,” Yael said, her voice quavering with
anger she meant to suppress. “Get your dog out of my way.”

“Fenrir? Okay, but I have to warn you…”

Jenny said, bending over momentarily to grab a rock
about the size of her hand.

“…heading down this road…”

Jenny threw the rock, and Yael flinched automatically.
The stone went far over her head, however, coming down behind a collapsed
building ten yards from where Fenrir sprawled. Impossibly, when the rock hit
the ground the area detonated with a tremendous noise, the explosion hurling soil
and rock in all directions as if Jenny had thrown a grenade.

“…might be a bad idea. If you wanna go running through
a minefield, though, then suit yourself.”

“How… how did you know?”

Jenny grinned, and then paused to spit her wad of
chewing gum to the ground, quickly replacing it with a new piece from one of
the bright yellow packs with Chinese lettering that she had salvaged.

“Because I’ve been camping in the middle of it,” Jenny
explained gleefully. “C’mon. It’s too late to go any further today and the moon
tonight will...”

Yael glanced behind them, nervously surveying the
broken landscape and the empty road.

“Are you sure we can’t keep going? Won’t those men
come after us?”

“I thought you blinded them. I heard that speech you
made about the neurotoxins in the spray…”

Yael was glad she had the mask, because she was
certain that she was blushing.

“Not true,” Yael admitted. “That was a bluff. It’s not
all the much worse than mace. They will be alright in a few hours if they wash
their eyes out.”

To Yael’s surprise, Jenny grinned and ruffled her hair
affectionately.

“Really? Not bad, kiddo. You might survive after all. I
don’t think those idiots are dumb enough to try and walk through a minefield.
And if they do, we’ll be sure to hear ‘em coming.”

Tracking movement in a dark room, warm breath on the
back of her neck. Drawing on a frosted window with her finger, tracing the
contours of the Yellow Sign, by which dreams are remembered and the corruption
of the King in Yellow is invited. Lemon tea and exposed ribs under taut skin,
like the fuselage of a contoured aircraft.

The dusty ground ahead
was threatening to Yael, but Jenny strolled through the area as though she had
nothing to worry about, trailing behind Fenrir. Yael was careful to follow in
Jenny’s footprints. She scanned the dirt in front of her for any signs of
disturbance, any indicator of explosives buried beneath, but there was nothing
out of the ordinary besides a meter-wide crater at the edge of the field where
Jenny had tossed her stone.

“How old do you think the mines are?”

“Pretty damn old,” Jenny said, popping her gum. “They
only go off about half the time.”

Yael preferred not to know how Jenny had made that
particular discovery. She wasn’t aware of how badly her legs were shaking until
they made it to the center of the field, a shallow ditch in the shadow of a largely
intact wall of pitted and scarred marble. She sat down gratefully on the ground
next to Jenny’s dusty sleeping bag and the ashes of a previous fire and tried
not to be sick. Jenny flopped down on the bag next to her. Fenrir sniffed the
air disdainfully then wandered off.

“Will he be okay by himself?” Yael asked, waiting for
her mask’s scanner to make a determination on the local air. “I think those
jerks were serious about eating him.”

“Huh? Oh, Fenrir? I wouldn’t worry. He’s a total
bastard.”

According to the superimposed readout in the mask’s
lens, the air in the ditch was free of the bio-war toxins that abounded in the
Waste. Yael peeled her mask off reluctantly, and Jenny leaned forward to look
at her face.

“Couldn’t really tell before,” Jenny said, pushing
Yael’s hair aside and roughly lifting her chin. “I didn’t take you for a kid.
How old are you, anyway?”

“I’m sixteen,” Yael said, exaggerating by a year and a
half.

“Really? Because you look twelve...”

“Stop that,” Yael commanded, pushing Jenny’s hand away
from her face. “I’m sixteen.”

“I heard you the first time,” Jenny acknowledged,
running her hand along the arm of Yael’s windbreaker. “Hey, what’s your jacket
made out of? It feels weird...”

“It’s called Weave,” Yael said softly. “The Visitors
make it, I don’t know what from. It’s waterproof, fireproof, and it won’t tear.”

Jenny crouched over a patch of ground indistinguishable
from the sand that surrounded them. She seemed, for a moment, to be pulling the
ground away with a flourish, like a set from a movie. Then Yael made sense of
the scene – Jenny had put a blanket over her gear and covered it in sand to conceal
it.

“
Who
made it?” Jenny said, taking a few dry
sticks from a small pile of wood, and then stacking it crisscrossed over the
ash of the previous night’s fire. “Visitors? Like foreigners?”

“No,” Yael said, unzipping her duffel and searching
for her comb. “The Visitors. You know. The others.”

“The hell? I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Maybe there are no Visitors where you came from,”
Yael said, dragging the comb through her damp, tangled hair. “That must be
nice. Where is that, Miss Frost?”

“Lost Creek, and it sure ain’t nice. But yeah,
whatever your Visitors are, I don’t think we have them. More like rednecks,
illegals, and tweakers.”

When Yael let her hair out of the ponytail it was so
compressed that it continued to hold its original shape.

“What’s a tweaker?”

“Long story. What about you? Where are you from,
Princess?”

“Don’t call me that,” Yael said resentfully, drawing
closer to the small fire Jenny built and warming her hands over it. “My name
is...”

“I know. I just don’t care,” Jenny explained cheerfully,
opening a tin can with a small, hooked opener. “You like beef stew? ‘Cause
that’s all I got besides those soups we found...”

“No, Miss Frost. I already told you,” Yael said icily.
“I am a vegetarian. Beef is not vegetarian.”

“Hope you grabbed some of those candy bars, then.”

Yael realized with a rush of shame that she hadn’t even
considered it. Jenny cackled like an animatronic witch on Halloween.

“Is dirt vegetarian?”

“That is enough, Miss Frost,” Yael said icily. “I will
be fine. I have gone without dinner before.”

That was true. Yael had fallen victim to many of her stepmother’s
fad diets, including one that consisted of a banana for breakfast, raw spinach
for lunch and lukewarm lemon water for dinner.

“Then it should be easy for you.” Jenny put a
makeshift metal cooking rack over the fire that appeared to be made of
straightened coat hangers, then placed the can of stew on top of that. “Hey,
how big is the Waste? How long will it take us to cross it?”

“It’s huge, but fortunately we don’t have to cross it
on foot. There is a... a train. It will take us about five days to get to the
station at Hastur,” Yael said, considering her memories of the dream map. “From
there the rest of the trip won’t take that long.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine, not eating for five days
while you trek across the Waste. Most people can go a couple weeks without food.
You probably won’t die.”

Yael stared at the fire so Jenny wouldn’t see how
embarrassed she was. She had left home with nothing to eat other than a
half-sandwich saved from her lunch. She had brought along her credit card and
money she had saved over two months, planning to buy food on the way. But she
had never had the opportunity in Roanoke, and the platinum card with imprinted
holograms and the modest roll of cash tucked into a rolled sock in her bag were
little more than paper and plastic here.

“I had to leave in a hurry,” Yael lied, not wanting to
admit that the whole issue had slipped her mind. “There was no time to worry
about food.”

Jenny fidgeted constantly, poking at the fire with a
stick, turning the can of stew on top of the cooking grill, scuffing the soles
of her shoes in the poisonous dust of the Waste. Yael found her fidgeting
grating, but she was too smart to complain. She didn’t have many options as far
as company was concerned.

“I’m sure you had your reasons,” Jenny acknowledged,
unexpectedly matter-of-fact. “Must have been damn important to skip food.”

Jenny tore open the stew tin with a fork and obvious
enthusiasm. The metal was certainly hot enough to burn, but Jenny didn’t
flinch. Or bother to spit out her gum before she started eating. She must have remembered
it when she tried to swallow, though, because she coughed and then spat everything
into the fire.

“Disgusting.”

“Sorry,” Jenny said, mouth already full with the next
bite. “Not used to company.”

“How long have you been out here, Miss Frost?”

“In the Waste?”

Jenny didn’t say that exactly, of course, because she
had her fork wedged in her mouth when she spoke. Yael nodded her affirmation.