Prue and her father shared a long hug. A flurry of plastic bags floated around them like revenant angels. “Careful out there,” said Lincoln McKeel.
“I will, promise,” said his daughter. She walked down the hill of trash to join the bear at the doorway to the underground.
CHAPTER 3
The Forgotten Place
Either the flash or the boom from the explosion—she couldn’t know which—startled Elsie from her sleep. Thing is: She hadn’t realized she was sleeping; she’d only begun telling herself she was simply resting her eyes and the world dropped away and she was transported, weightless, to some other place, some other world, when the sound of the explosion anchored her rudely back to her present circumstances. She rubbed her eyes and squinted against the dark of the night; somewhere, a fire was raging, a flickering glow on the distant horizon. A few months ago, such a sound would’ve set her heart racing, but now, two months into her newfound life, it served only to remind her that she was neglecting her duty.
Answering a pleading ache from her crisscrossed legs, she stood up and stretched, her hand holding tight to the broken brick wall. It was a long fall from this distance, she judged. She kicked at the ground; a piece of rock flew from her perch and sounded, some seconds later, on the ground below.
Another explosion lit up the dark; this time she saw it happen. Some chemical silo, miles distant. Flames erupted skyward and showered the surrounding buildings with light and stray metal. The fire smoldered a little but soon became indistinguishable from the gas flares and yellow electric lights that dotted the landscape of the Industrial Wastes. They were curious, these explosions. They happened fairly regularly, enough that it was clear they weren’t part of the normal workings of the Wastes. The older kids said there was a war going on, but between whom, they couldn’t say. They’d all grown accustomed to the noise—the flash and the boom—and treated it as you would the sound of the garbage truck appearing at your curb, or the mailman knocking on your door.
She was tempted to press the voice-box button of the doll she held in the crook of her arm—it was an Intrepid Tina toy and so came preprogrammed with every manner of confidence-building aphorism—but held off, having been forbidden by the older kids to do so for fear of alerting anyone to their presence in the warehouse. Instead she pulled the doll’s face close to hers and gave it a quick pat on the shoulder with her fingertip.
“It’s okay, Tina,” said Elsie. “No explosions here.”
The dark was taking on a tinge of blue, heralding the coming sunrise. To Elsie’s left, just below her, a light winked. She looked at it; a voice came in a loud whisper: “Elsie!”
“Michael?”
“It’s five. Hit the hay.”
“Got it.” Elsie grabbed the small bag at her feet. Opening it, a burlap bag one might carry onions or potatoes in, she stowed the provisions she’d packed for the evening: a flashlight, a bag of raisins, and a yellowed pamphlet on earthquake safety (her only reading material). By the time she’d finished, Michael appeared at the top of the stairs that led from the perch. For a moment, they shared the narrow space that was the warehouse’s stairwell, the brick wall that had once hidden it long broken away.
“How’d it go?” he said.
“Fine,” said Elsie. “Nothing special. Couple explosions, just now. One after another, real quick. Otherwise, normal stuff.” She paused, remembering. “Oh. And I saw him.”
“Him. The Weirdo?”
“Yeah, but it was a ways off.”
The boy sniffed a few times, looking out at the vista. They’d called the figure the Weirdo, or at least that’s what Carl had called it—he was the first one to have spotted the figure—and it had first made its appearance a few weeks prior. They couldn’t tell if the Weirdo was a he or she—it was too shrouded in clothing and blankets to be discernible. They’d quickly deduced that this person—whoever it was—was mostly harmless, as it rarely strayed very close to their hideout and when it did, a well-placed rock seemed to scare the thing away handily, like a sad, stray dog.
Clearly, Michael was unalarmed, saying to Elsie, “Well, Sandra’s got some oats on the stove. If you’re quick, you could be first in line.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Elsie. She handed Michael the rusty machete she’d propped against a pile of bricks at her side. He accepted it with a grunt of thanks. It was the only weapon the Unadoptables carried—they’d found it nearly a week into their residency in the Wastes, lodged amid a thicket of half-hacked blackberry brambles. She took a few careful steps down the wooden stairs before lighting the flashlight, as she’d been taught. It was one of many precautions they took; the more invisible they remained, the less likely they were to be found out. Even in this farthest redoubt of the lonely Industrial Wastes, a vast wilderness of burned-out warehouses and buildings, which the Unadoptables had taken to calling the Forgotten Place.
The light was growing as Elsie made her way down the twisting stairway, lighting the path ahead through the great breaks in the brick walls and the emptied window frames. By the time she’d made it back to the floor of the abandoned warehouse, the place was filled with a dim light and a fire was raging in a metal barrel in the center of the massive room. A few pigeons darted between the eaves and the rafters, high above her head, and the sleeping forms of the other children were like the peaks of little waves on the weathered wooden floor. Sandra was stirring something in a black metal pot, and she greeted Elsie as she arrived.
“Morning,” said Sandra.
“Morning,” said Elsie. “Whatcha cooking?”
“Gruel. I think,” the cook said, smiling. She scooped up a ladleful of the pot’s contents by way of demonstration: It looked like phlegm.
“Yum,” said Elsie. “I love gruel.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Sandra. She grabbed a tin bowl and, filling it with the pasty stuff, handed it to Elsie. “Dig in.”
Elsie could feel her stomach growling as she made her way over to the children’s dining area: an old cafeteria table, rotted by weather and disuse. By now, the rest of the kids were rousing and pulling themselves from their salvaged blankets. A familiar mop of black hair appeared from one such blanket and proceeded to shake itself out: It was Elsie’s sister, Rachel, fifteen years old as of this morning. She sat in her pile of blankets as if marinating in them, clearly mourning inwardly about having a birthday in such desperate circumstances. Elsie put a spoonful of gruel in her mouth and let the warmth descend into her chest and fan out across her shoulders and into her arms. She watched her sister stare into space until she couldn’t take it anymore. “Rach!” she said.
Rachel looked in her direction; her eyes were sad, quiet.
“Happy birthday,” said Elsie, stirring her gruel.
Her sister smiled and pushed herself up. Many of her fellow sleepers had made their way over to Sandra’s pot of morning mush. Rachel walked over and sat across the table from Elsie.
“Thanks, sis,” said Rachel.
Elsie spoke around a mouthful of food. “Get some gruel. It’s good. Sandra made it.”
Rachel looked into Elsie’s bowl and attempted a meager smile. “Guess I’m not hungry. You had lookout last night, right? How’d it go?”
“Fine,” Elsie said. “I saw him. The Weirdo.”
“Get a better look?”
“Nah. He didn’t come close or anything. I think Michael’s right. He’s just some lost hobo.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing special,” said Elsie. “Couple explosions. Pretty far off.”
“Oh yeah?” This came from Carl Rehnquist, a boy about Elsie’s age, who’d come and joined them at the table. Steam rose from his bowl of breakfast. “What kind?”
“What do you mean, what kind?”
“Like, big explosions? Or little ones? What blew up?”
“I don’t know,” said Elsie. “Just some buildings. A ways off.”
“Cool,” said Carl.
Elsie shrugged an
d took another spoonful of gruel. “It’s just the Wastes, right? Seems like it’s just industrial . . . stuff.”
“Michael said that it’s happening more often, the explosions,” said Carl.
“Really? He didn’t say anything to me about that,” replied Elsie.
“I overheard him, just yesterday. He said that they’re happening a lot more. And they’re closer.”
“Yeah, don’t trust everything that kids tell you,” said Rachel.
Carl took a big bite of his breakfast. “Next thing you know, right here: boom!” Bits of wet, white oats flew from his lips; whether he did this on purpose for effect or accidentally, the girls couldn’t know. “Whole place goes up. Doesn’t matter to you guys, though. Aren’t you out of here in a bit? I mean, didn’t you say your parents would be back from their trip soon?”
The two sisters didn’t say anything. Rachel toyed with the strands of her hair; Elsie stirred her gruel in silence.
Carl sensed he had overstepped. “They are coming back, right?”
What Carl couldn’t know was that the two girls had received another postcard from their parents, the second since their adoptive orphanage had gone up in flames in the winter’s violent uprising. The first had arrived just after their discovery of the abandoned warehouse in this, the children’s new home in the Forgotten Place. It was postmarked February 20 from Iğdır, Turkey: Their parents wished them well and reported briefly that their attempts to find their son, Curtis, in the slums of Istanbul had been a dead end; however, they now had actionable intelligence that the boy had been smuggled over the border into Armenia by a group of gypsy circus performers, and the elder Mehlbergs were likely to stay abroad for a further two weeks (a check, payable to the Joffrey Unthank Home for Wayward Youth, would be on its way, presently, to the orphanage’s address). The second postcard, received only the day before, had their intrepid parents now in the farthest-flung reaches of the Russian continent: a black-and-white photo of a ship frozen in thick, jagged ice, with their mother’s clean handwriting on the flip side saying, “Greetings from Archangel’sk! Ignore that bit about the Armenian circus; was a red herring. Good news: A young American boy was spotted near here, on an island off the north coast. Nearly the Arctic Circle! Brrrr! Back in two weeks, promise! Check en route to Mr. Unthank; tell him sorry for delay.” Rachel, the unofficial archivist of the two Mehlberg sisters, kept both cards folded neatly in the pocket of her jumper.
Elsie deftly changed the subject. “You know it’s Rachel’s birthday today?”
“Really?” Carl’s eyes had lit up. “No kidding?”
Rachel grumbled an affirmative.
“May ninth,” said Elsie. “Nineteen . . .”
“Ninety-eight,” finished Rachel. “Yup.”
“Well, we’ll have to have a party or something,” said Carl.
“That’s okay,” said Rachel.
“No, really,” continued the boy. “When Michael gets back, we’ll have to do something, you know, special.”
“Like what?” asked Rachel. “Fry up an oatcake? Pop the cork on some rat pee champagne?”
Elsie gave her sister a withering look. “C’mon, Rach. He just wants to be nice.”
“Suit yourself, grump,” said Carl, unaffected. He shoveled more breakfast into his wide mouth.
It was true: Any kind of celebration they threw in their new home would have to be a fairly scanty one. In the two months since they’d been there, a few of the orphans’ birthdays passed by uncounted save for a few cheers from their fellows and an extra ration of bread for the birthday boy or girl at dinner. Anything beyond that was deemed an extravagance. And so most of the kids kept their celebrations to themselves, not wishing to somehow highlight their destitute circumstances just when they were all trying to get their feet under them. They still had faith in Martha Song’s clear vision for their future: They would build their own insulated world here, free of the strictures of either the Periphery, their previous prison within the boundary of the Impassable Wilderness, or the world of the adults, which loomed beyond the Industrial Wastes like a disapproving parent. Here, they were Living Free. So far, they had the freedom part down pretty well; the “living” side of the equation was proving to be a challenge.
Food was scarce; every day, a scavenging party set out into the occupied areas of the Wastes, pulling half-eaten apples and sandwich scraps from Dumpsters and trash barrels. The stevedores, the maroon-beanie-wearing hulks who populated the silos and warehouses of this industrial zone, congregated for lunch on the stoops and staircases of their factories after the noon whistle; whatever they left behind was quarry for the orphans. While modest, it was enough to eke out a subsistence.
Protection was another matter; not only did they have to thwart the occasional stevedore sentry, still bitter from the hiding they’d received during the Unthank Home uprising, but packs of wild dogs were known to inhabit this reach of the Wastes, putting the children’s lives, if not just their food stores, at risk. Hence the nightly vigil at the perch in the warehouse’s bombed-out stairwell. They all took turns, trading shifts. They’d established a simple system: One whistle meant stevedores. Two meant dogs. They’d gotten it down to a science: In the case of the stevedores, they’d send out a decoy party to lure the sentries farther away from the warehouse. At the sound of a second whistle, they knew to batten down the hatches, secure all the doors, and wait for the marauding dogs to find some other place to terrorize. The rusty machete, which the kids had taken to calling Excalibur, seemed to serve only as a bravery totem: They were all emboldened by it but were a little afraid of what it would mean to actually use it. But with every invasion scare, with every drill, they became more and more proud of the home they were defending. The home that Martha Song had envisioned; just without Martha herself.
That was the thing that still stuck in Elsie’s craw: the fact that two of their family—Martha and Carol Grod—were still, as far as they knew, in the grip of the stevedores. They’d been captured by the stevedores during the orphanage rebellion; their whereabouts were anyone’s guess. This fact had become even more important to Rachel, something she was keen to remind the rest of the kids anytime they felt like they’d become more acclimated to their new situation.
And so, that evening, when the nightly meeting was called to order, Rachel was poised for confrontation. Michael, holding the machete, hushed the crowd: Seventy-three children, varying in age from eight to eighteen, sat around the burning steel drum fire and squirmed to attention. “Unadoptables,” he said. “Gather round.” Even though most of the kids hadn’t earned the title of Unadoptable, they’d all taken it on as a show of solidarity to those who’d been sent off by Joffrey Unthank to molder in the Periphery.
“First off,” said Michael, “we should all wish one of our family a happy birthday. Rachel Mehlberg is—what—fifteen today?”
The crowd murmured their congratulations.
Rachel seized the opportunity. “Thanks. So what about Martha and Carol?”
Michael gave her a weary smile. “We’re going to get to that.”
“When?” challenged Rachel. “We’ve been ‘going to get to that’ for two months now.”
“Well, it will take time. . . .”
“Time enough. We’ve been sitting here like a bunch of, I don’t know, whatevers while our friends—our family!—are out there, being who-knows-whated by those clods. I think it’s pretty simple: We just—” She was interrupted by Michael, who was waving the machete, Excalibur.
“I’ve got the sword,” said Michael. “So you’re talking out of turn.”
“It’s not technically a sword,” one of the boys at Michael’s feet said. “It’s more like a machete.”
“Whatever,” Michael shot back. “Whoever has it does the talking.”
This seemed to quiet the room. Michael cleared his throat and continued.
“Carol and Martha, believe me, are really important to me. Martha was a good friend. She was one of the
first people I met at the Unthank Home.” Here he turned to Rachel. “And I remember it was me who introduced you to Carol, Rachel.” He paused, soaking in the silence of the dead room. “You might even say we wouldn’t be in this situation if I’d had my way. We’d still be happy and safe, all of us, in the cottage in the Periphery.”
“And I wouldn’t be having a birthday,” pointed out Rachel. A few of the other kids nodded sagely; time was literally stopped in the Periphery, the protective boundary around the Impassable Wilderness, and none of the children aged while they lived there. It was part of Martha’s pitch to leave: She, astutely, questioned the benefits of not growing old.
“We’re still getting on our feet here,” said Michael, ignoring Rachel’s riposte. “It’s going to take some time. As soon as we’re strong, that’s when we’ll act.”
“We’re strong now,” said Rachel. “We’ve waited long enough as it is.”
Michael began to interject, to insist to the girl that he was still the one holding the machete, when the rest of group began to howl in support of Rachel: “Give her Excalibur!” “Give it up, Michael!” “Give her a chance!” With a begrudging grimace, Michael walked over to Rachel and handed her the machete, hilt first.
Elsie watched as her sister took the grip of the blade in her hand, weighing it, and walked to the front of the assembly. Change comes over people slowly, gradually, Elsie reasoned. But ever since their exit from the Periphery, along with the revelation that the Mehlberg sisters were able to walk through the boundary itself unaffected, Rachel had become a new person, a stronger person. Gone was the cross-armed girl who seemed to vanish beneath her long, straight hair, her chin burrowing ever farther into her threadbare black T-shirt. The fact that it was Rachel’s birthday today only seemed to underscore how much Elsie’s sister was in the process of some grand transformation that she, Elsie, could barely comprehend.