Arc 17: An Empty Town

“The waters here are lovely, dark, and deep,

I give to them my soul to keep,

I give to them my soul to keep.”

* local prayer, considered apocryphal

- - -

The light of a pallid sunrise brushes faint light across my face. A drowsing moment passes where my bed is soft, my room is warm, my hunger sated, and my thirst slaked. Even the fever, with all its attendant chills and aches, is gone. Clarke is wrapped around me, sleep-heavy and safe, her nose in my hair and her arm draped over my hip. Her dreaming fingers twitch and I wonder, in this preciously soft moment, if she dreams of me.

I dream of her, after all. It's only fair.

In the slow ease of leaving her arms, I find the moment's ending: the aches and pains of my body, there to greet me when I wake up. The litany is well-familiar by now, from my sore-worn feet to my spinning, throbbing head. My elbow pops as I push myself up to sit. Muscles cramped by night after night on unforgiving bedding whine. I pick the sleep from my eyes and sigh a quiet, grumbling little sigh. If this what it means to be grown, its miserable and they can keep it.

Clarke frowns in her sleep, her nose wrinkling at the absence of me and my warmth. I smooth the furrows with a gentle touch, finding a smile in how she turns her face into my hand. The pale sunlight makes a contrast of her, deepening the shadows surrounding her eyes and washing away what little vital color remains to her skin. I brush my thumb over the shell of her ear. She hums, eyes fluttering behind shut lids, mumbles, “Zira?” in a voice made slow and thick by sleep.

I should've let her be. She needs all the rest she can get. “Sorry,” I whisper, pulling my hand away, “I didn't mean to.”

She hums again, this one more a groan and a grumble, and wiggles until she can drop her head into my lap. “S'okay,” she sighs, hiding her face in my belly, “don' do it 'gain, though.”

“I won't,” I promise softly, sifting my fingers through her hair. She grunts, and is asleep once more within moments. I lean back on my free hand and delight in the fact that I'll be her pillow until she's had her fill of rest.

Hours pass. I watch the sky struggle to brighten into any other color than this cloudy, anemic gray. I watch it fail, even as the sun nears the height of Her midday strength. Gusts of wind rustle carefully pruned trees and send handfuls of their fallen leaves spinning across the empty plaza. The river burbles, ever onward, and though I cannot hear it, beneath everything: the creaking strain of a hempen rope.

It's there. I know it is.

I don't know why I'm so fixated on it. Why not turn the wheel, pull the damned thing up, and be done with it? I'd know, then, I'd have an answer; and I could turn my fixations onto the far stranger things afoot here than a bucket in the depths of its own well.

That might be why I haven't. It might be that I don't want an answer, that I have enough problems facing me without searching for more. Maybe every answer I've found has hurt me, or someone I care for. Maybe it's killed them, and that's enough. Clarke rolls over and whines at the brighter light of near-midday. She covers her closed eyes with her hands, but the damage is done: she's awake. She peeks at me through a gap in her fingers, eyes soft, and says, “Hi.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I push hair from her brow, tuck some of it behind her ear. “Sleep well?”

She nods and twists into a luxurious stretch, which the illness in her chest doesn't like. It punishes her with a fit of coughing, so long and harsh she's left breathless in its wake, curled around her aching chest and looking small and miserable instead of soft and sleepy. “I hate this,” she rasps, voice an utter ruin, “I – hate – it.”

I bend down to press a kiss to her temple. Smell the sickness on her breath. “I'm sorry,” I breathe into her hair. Her shoulders hitch, holding tears or more coughs at bay. If she hadn't met me, she wouldn't be here, and so I am sorry, so very much. I slide out from beneath her and stand, shaking the pins and needles from my numb legs. “Stay here,” I say, “I'll go find some food.”

She wants to protest, to find the will to insist she comes with me. It's right there, in her eyes. She doesn't find it, finds guilt and relief and nods, dropping her gaze to the floor. “Be careful,” she murmurs. I nod, then I leave.

There's no 'maybe' about it, is there?

- - -

The front window of Amble's Dry Goods is so filmed over I have to press my face against the grimy glass just to get a look inside. It's not encouraging: shelves running the walls, mostly cleared out; a few free-standing tables, nothing on them; and a counter at the back with nothing on it, either. With the butcher's gone to rot and the bakery to mold, this is still the likeliest spot. I try the door.

Locked. Damn it.

Face back against the glass, squinting to see as far into the store as I can. Is that a back door behind the counter, or are my hopeful eyes conjuring what I want to see from shadow and grime? I circle around the building, the riverbank a few paces to my right. The river is a deep and iridescent green, its slow current disrupted into swirls and bubbles by sunken stone.

My mouth and throat are desert-dry, fever-dry, and my tongue is as rough as sandpaper. All that water is sorely tempting, but I've enough things to be dealing with; I don't need dysentery or, Goddess and Lost forbid, cholera added to it. With painful reluctance, I move on.

It wasn't a trick or a conjuring, there is a door back here. It's closed, but not locked. Iron hinges rusted by time and lack of care squeal and grind as I push it open, spilling pale daylight into the storeroom of Amble's Dry Goods. These shelves are decidedly not empty. A trill of joy rushes through me at the sight, followed by a growl of hunger.

Right. To work, then.

As with everywhere else, a thick layer of dust covers everything. The disturbed motes drift through the air and fill the room with a musty scent that tickles a few sneezes from me. I move along the shelves, looking for anything pickled, dried, or salted. The sacks of meal, flour, and grain are ignored. Sealed they might be, I'm taking no chances.

It's towards the front that I strike gold: blueberry preserves, jarred in glass and capped with a tin lid rimed in thick wax. An incredulous smile curves my mouth, the relief so staggering that I almost drop my prize. I clutch the little jar to my chest and close my stinging eyes, tilting my face to the ceiling and the sky beyond it.

Goddess and Lost, thank You!

With new-found fervor, I turn the storeroom inside out; but find nothing more. It's no matter, this is more than enough. After a last, mighty sneeze, I leave Amble's Dry Goods behind and rush back across the plaza, grinning like an idiot and holding the preserves in a white-knuckle grip.

I plow through the Bend's door and startle a shriek out of Clarke. She'd been sat in a chair near the stove, my arrival nearly toppling her out of it. Hand at the hollow of her throat, eyes wide, she says, “Zira, you can't just –” and stops at the dusty, idiot-grin sight of me. Her mouth starts to curve, just as mine did. As if she dare not believe, she asks, “You found something?”

The little jar gets presented for the miracle it is. “Blueberry preserves,” I answer.

The hand at her throat moves up to her mouth, dirty fingers over cracking lips. “You found something,” she says again.

I grin like an even bigger idiot. “I did.”

“I could kiss you,” she breathes, coming over to marvel at it with me.

“Before you do that,” I say, setting the jar on the nearest table, “let's eat!”

She makes a sound of pure delight, her eyes shining with it. We scrape the wax away with our nails and trade attempts at unscrewing the lid until, silly and laughing, we manage. Tin clatters on wood as it's tossed aside, forgotten. Then, we attack; scooping sweet, sticky bites of the best food in all creation and sighing in pure, rapturous delight. Eight days of starvation come to an end.

Clarke smacks a blueberry kiss to my cheek, shaping it to her smile. She leans on my shoulder and watches me chase one of the last morsels around the bottom of the jar before laughing at me giving up and upending it over my open mouth. It works, and I regret nothing.

I lean in to give her a blueberry kiss of my own. She watches me through half-lidded eyes, lifting her chin to receive me, and it's a soft, sticky kiss that tastes like jam and feels like hope. She hums into it, tracing my jaw with her fingers, her palm settling on my cheek.

Eventually, it ends. I closed my eyes at some point, so I don't see what puts such confused horror in her asking, “What's that?!”