THIRTY
The figure moves. It’s hunched down, creeping forward, gaze on the clearing where we were sitting. It stops, and its head tilts, and something in that tilt suggests it’s a woman.
She starts forward again. Soon she’ll be close enough to spot Anders poised on one knee, looking straight at her. Through the undergrowth, he catches my eye, and I make a split-second decision. I tell him to turn around. Put his back to the approaching figure. He does, without hesitation, and my breath catches, heart thumping harder. He trusts me implicitly. Now I need to prove I deserve that. I lift my gun, finger still off the trigger.
I take another step. The woman creeps forward and then ducks her head, as if to see through an opening. She must spot Anders, because she goes still. Then she sees that he has his back to her. She reaches up, and my gut chills. There’s something long and dark in her hand.
My mouth opens to shout a warning to Anders. Then she pulls back a branch for a better view, and she uses the hand h
olding the object. It’s not a gun. I squint. The object is black, maybe a foot long, thin enough that she can move that branch while gripping it. Thinner than a knife. Lighter, too, from the way she moves it. A stick?
My gaze moves to her other hand. She’s holding something in it, too. Something round. A rock? A stick and a rock?
Anders keeps his back to her, and she takes another step. I can’t see her face, but I see her clothing. It’s hide, which isn’t unusual out here. Some settlers wear well-mended jeans and shirts. Others wear clothing homemade from hides. The homespun clothes are works of art, craftsmanship well beyond what we buy down south. What this woman wears is another thing altogether. The hides have been roughly cut out and roughly sewn, the sort of thing you might expect to find on someone lost in the forest for years, forced to create her own clothing lest she freeze.
Yet this woman isn’t lost. Not in the literal sense of the word. She’s chosen to be here, like the settlers. She hasn’t chosen their lifestyle, though. She’s chosen one beyond my comprehension.
She is a hostile. That’s our name for those who go into the forest and revert to something baser. When I met hostiles, though, I didn’t see people who’d willfully reverted. No more than I’d see someone ranting on a street corner, lost in the throes of mental illness, and decide they’d chosen that. Yes, people do choose to not treat their mental illness, deciding the cure is worse than the disease. Yes, people do choose to live on the streets. But I don’t believe they choose that—wandering the cities, lost in the mazes of their own disturbed minds. They make a choice, and it turns into something they wouldn’t have imagined. I’ve talked about my past as falling down a dark pit. That’s an exaggeration. The true pit is the woman I see before me.
She takes one more step, and a lone strip of sunlight illuminates her face. With no start of surprise, I realize I know her. The moment I saw that it was a woman, I’d thought immediately of Maryanne, whom we’d met in the forest a week ago. Shot by Val, she’d taken off into the forest before we could stop her. Now she’s here, and I proceed as carefully as I can, knowing one false move will send her fleeing like a spooked deer.
I move forward, and so does she, slipping toward Anders, who still stands with his back to her. She’s focused on him, and even when a leaf crunches under my foot, she doesn’t notice. She takes two more steps. Then she crouches, dropping from view. A moment later, she rises, her hands now empty, and she steps backward, retreating.
Another step. Then another. I match each, my feet coming down in time with hers. Soon I’m so close I can smell the sweaty musk of her. One more step, and I’ll be able to touch her. To grab her.
I force myself to stop. Then I holster my gun and say, “Maryanne?”
She wheels, leaves crackling. Her hands fly up. Mine do, too, rising to show her they’re empty.
“It’s me,” I say. “Eric’s girl.”
A curse sounds to my left. Maryanne spins that way. It’s Anders. He’s turned, and when he saw her, he’d let out a curse of shock. Horror fills his face, as if he’s stumbled onto something far worse than a scavenged body.
The rough hide clothing is the least of it. Her hair is matted and wild. One ear blackened and ragged, lost to frostbite. The ends of two fingers the same. She’s filthy, and a week ago, the dirt had seemed rubbed on like war paint, patterns clear. Now it’s smeared and smudged, revealing ritualized scars below. Her mouth is open, showing her teeth, the edges of the front ones filed into rough points. Thousands of years ago, she could have stepped onto a battlefield, a Neolithic warrior woman. Today, she seems to have stepped straight out of a nightmare.
She sees Anders. She sees his expression. And deep in her eyes, there is a flash of realization. A long-buried hint of the woman she’d been. She sees what she looks like to Anders, and she lets out a gasp. Then she spots his gun. Her gasp turns to an animal shriek. She wheels and charges into the forest.
“Maryanne!” I shout.
I take off after her. Anders is at my heels. He’s already apologizing.
I ignore him and run, calling after her, telling her it’s okay, we won’t hurt her. She only runs faster, easily cutting across paths I don’t see, leaving me dodging and darting around obstacles as she disappears into the shadowy forest.
“I’m sorry,” Anders says once she’s gone. “Shit, Casey. I am so sorry. I’ve just never seen…”
“I know.”
“She startled me. That’s all. I’m sorry.”
I nod and start walking back.
Anders jogs to catch up. “I know I don’t do as well with this stuff as you and Eric. The hostiles. The settlers. Even Brent. I just … I’m not used to that. I’m sorry I scared her off.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I know that was a shock.”
“She’s the woman from the forest, isn’t she? The one you mentioned.”
I nod.