Shan stands for Sigrid Haywood Alis Nova, the four people in charge around here. It’s also the name of the buildings in the middle of the intersection of all the tracks, because it’s where the Shan people can always be found. I’m starting to understand how things work around here. A few days after Bayan arrives in Tent City Ava decides she wants to make a picnic. So Bayan goes to talk to some of Alis’ food people, and Penny digs up an old red checkered blanket to borrow from one of Sloan’s information runner friends. They spread it out on the ground next to the room with the map in it, the room where Nua and I met Penny and found Bayan again. Shan the building area always has lanterns around it, always lit, and the light just barely reaches all the way up to the high curved ceilings. Nua sits with Ava on the blanket, but I stand up before Bayan and Penny come back with the food, wandering away.
Nano is lying next to Ava, her head in her lap, and I wonder if Ava misses Shiv. I wonder if Miss Lilly is even feeding her. I sit down on a pile of bricks near the southern track, looking around at the people who live in Shan. Most of the tents in Tent City are in the tracks, but a few people have pitched theirs in Shan. I wonder if they’re the oldest people here, or the newest. I wonder how long people can go without any sunlight. That’s probably why Alis always gives us orange juice, or is that some other vitamin? I wonder if they’ve figured out a diet for the people who have been down here for a while so they don’t deficit anything. I wonder how long we’ll be down here, how long it’ll be until I’ll see the sun again.
“Aber,” says someone, and I jump. When I look up, I see Haywood standing nearby, and he smiles a little and sits down next to me on the bricks. “Ava told me that you wanted to talk.”
I feel nerves suddenly blossom in my stomach, and I don’t know why. I like Haywood, he’s always been helpful, and he’s the information person. I take a deep breath, staring across Shan to where Ava and Nua are sitting on their little blanket together, and say softly, “My name is Aberworth Ahman.”
His eyebrows go up. I don’t know why, but I assumed he would react somehow when he heard my last name.
“My parents ran a shelter,” I say quietly, unsure of where to start. “That’s how Ava’s mother found me.”
Haywood looks at me for a moment, and then just nods. “That must have been hard.”
I glance at him. “Hard?”
“You grew up around people all like this?” he says, gesturing around us. “You heard everything, first-hand?”
I shrug, twisting my fingers together. “I never really knew anyone who wasn’t…traumatized.”
“That can be traumatizing for you,” says Haywood softly. “Or hard, at the very least. I know we’ve been talking about things like the agencies…and such a lot lately. But there are people out there, who lived normal lives.”
“I wish my parents didn’t care so much,” I say suddenly, looking at the ground. I don’t want to look at Haywood, he’s looking at me, but I’m ashamed of saying it. “They helped people, I know that, but they were always so worried, all the time. We never really got to be happy.”
And Haywood just nods slowly, exhaling, as if he knows exactly what I mean. “That’s something we don’t talk about a lot, is it.”
I glance at him, and then look away.
“Young people nowadays. I can see it when I look at you, and Nua and Penny, and even Ava. The reason we do this whole marriage thing, at least the way that we’ve been doing it for the past few decades, is so that there will continue to be life, human life. But if this is how you have to live, in constant fear and pain, is it even worth it?”
Bayan approaches Ava and Nua on the other side of Shan, with Penny at his side. I’m pretty sure they’re sharing a tent now. They sit down with Ava and Nua. Haywood follows my eyes, and says, “What do you think happened to your parents?”
“I don’t know,” I say quietly, turning to him. “Have you heard anything about them?”
“Maybe,” he says with a shrug. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know I should have been listening specifically for the name Ahman. I will now, though.”
“That’s okay,” I say softly. “I should’ve said something sooner.”
“Not your fault,” says Haywood with a slight smile. “We’ve got a lot of things to be worried about.”
“Miss Lilly raided the shelter,” I say quietly, and something flickers through his eyes, but I can’t tell what it is. “She took my parents away, and I think she took my sister away, too.”
“Your sister.”
“Abigala,” I say, and this time I recognize the look in his eye: he knows the name. “Abigala Ahman.”
“Yes,” he says softly. “Abigala Ahman.”
“I know she has a job,” I say quietly. “In the government. Ava told me that. But I think that there’s something she still isn’t telling me.”
Haywood stares at me. I can practically see the wheels spinning in his head, and I furrow my eyebrows. “What?”
“What?” he says in surprise, and I glance at Ava, and then back at him. “What? Do you know something?”
Haywood opens his mouth, and then closes it. Finally he says, “I’ve heard of your sister.”
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“Do you know anything about her?” I ask quietly, feeling heat and pressure behind my eyes. I blink to push it away. “Anything she’s done, anything that’s happened?”
“No,” he says softly. He studies me for a moment, and then says, “What’s wrong, Aber?”
“She got married,” I say softly. “To four men. And I don’t know why she would do that. She would never do that if my parents were around. So I don’t know what happened to them, and I don’t know what happened to her, if she’s okay, if she’s, if she’s…”
“If she’s helping or hurting,” says Haywood quietly, and I swallow, and then nod. Haywood smiles gently, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll talk to Sigrid and the women. I’ll let them know to keep an ear out. We’ll figure it out.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, closing my eyes for a moment, and then opening them. They’re pulled immediately to my wife, and Haywood follows my gaze, looking over at Ava and Nua sitting on the ground a little ways away. They’re on the picnic blanket, sitting cross-legged facing each other, and Ava gives him a piece of fruit from the bowl next to her. He takes it, saying something, and she smiles. I smile too, and Haywood looks at me. “You can love them both, you know.”
I feel heat rising in my neck, and I look over at him. “What?”
He laughs a little, leaning back. “Love is weird, Aber Ahman. You know that, because you’re a boy. Did you ever think you’d be married, though?”
“No,” I whisper. “Not until they took my parents away.”
Haywood nods. “Yeah. And all you knew about marriage was the bad parts. We’re told, ever since we’re old enough, that it’s really hard to love a woman.”
Ava laughs, over on the picnic blanket, and I see a smile on Nua’s face, too.
“And of course,” Haywood says, “no one ever even tells us that we could love a man. The whole point of it all is supposed to be babies, right?”
I look at him, and he grins, too. “We’ve both grown up in a world where the only destiny for us is one that will most likely hurt us. But it doesn’t, not all the time. Some people get lucky.”
My father got lucky. Keol got lucky.
“Do you love her?” asks Haywood, and I look back over at Ava. Nua says something to her, and I smile a little. Haywood does, too. “Do you love him?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. Haywood shrugs. “That’s okay. You’re young, you don’t have to know, or decide. But know that people like me and Alis have always existed. So have people like Sigrid and Nova.”
“How did you know?” I ask. “When did you find out, that you, that you couldn’t love a woman?”
“When we married,” answers Haywood. “Alis and I became friends right away, and we even liked Nova, as a person, at least, but she never wanted us.”
“You were married to Nova?” I ask in surprise, and he laughs. “I mean, we still are, technically. Me and Alis both. But the whole time we were on the surface, acting all married, she only ever had eyes for Sigrid.”
I laugh a little, and he smiles too. “You ever notice that the three of us all wear rings, but Nova doesn’t?”
“No,” I say, and he smiles a little. “Alis and I got our wedding rings when we married Nova, and she got one too, of course. When we ran away, she gave hers to Sigrid. So Alis and I, we have ours for each other, and Nova finally actually got to choose to give a ring to someone who she really loves.”
“Oh,” I say softly, looking down at the ring on my own finger. Nua still wears his too, I don’t know if he’s even thought about it, and of course Ava has Keol’s around her thumb. “Why did you run away?”
“We just couldn’t take it anymore, one day,” says Haywood. “We had to, we had to leave, we had to get out of there, all four of us. That was years ago. You probably weren’t even born yet.”
“I’m eighteen,” I say, and he nods. “Yeah.”
“You’ve been down here for more than eighteen years?” I say in shock, and he laughs. “Well, when you say it like that.”
Someone walks by and waves to Haywood, and he waves back. I see the wedding ring glinting on his finger, and then he continues. “Marriage is supposed to be a celebration of love between people. But for so long now, it’s just been a way of choosing who has children with who. And sometimes love grows out of that, it’s true.”
I look at Ava again. She told you that she loves you. Haywood says, “She loved her first husband, didn’t she?”
“Her second,” I say softly, and then clear my throat. “Well, yeah. Her first husband was Owen, her and Penny’s friend when they were kids. But it was Keol who she loved, who she was in love with. And of course they’re the ones that had to die.”
“Love isn’t something that just happens,” says Haywood softly. “It’s something that grows, in an environment where it’s nourished, and fed, and taken care of. Most marriages nowadays are…not that. But they should be. And I think that because Ava loved Keol, she created an environment where love was possible, at the very least. Even if it wasn’t specifically between you and her, or you and Nua, you still knew it could happen, and it wouldn’t be painful. It didn’t have to be, at least.”
“She told me she loves me,” I whisper, feeling tears in my eyes suddenly. I don’t know why, I’m not exactly sad, but I’m sad because of Keol, and I feel so much inside of my stomach and my heart and I don’t know what it all means, it just twists inside of me like lava in a volcano. “But I don’t know if that’s because…”
“It doesn’t have to be because anything,” says Haywood gently. “Look, I don’t know you that well, but I have gotten to know Ava over the past month or two. And the way that she talked about you, you specifically, I would’ve thought that you were her prominent if I didn’t know otherwise.”
I smile, feeling a tear on my cheek. “Nua said I would’ve been. If she didn’t leave us so soon after Keol died, if she had to pick again.”
“Maybe,” murmurs Haywood. “Love isn’t the answer, Aber. It’s the question. The three of you, you’re the only ones who can figure it out for yourselves.”
I look down at my finger, where the wedding ring that Ava gave me the day that I met her glistens in the dim light. She had a cigarette in her mouth when she slid it on my finger, and her cat was lying on the couch nearby, watching us. She showed me hers that day, too, the four diamonds set carefully into the gold. The one that represented me was already there, presumably before she had even met me; she knew she was going to have to take a fourth husband no matter how she or he, whoever he was, felt about it. There were two when she got it, I assume, for Keol and Owen; one more added when Nua came, and then one more for me. And now it’s just two of us again, but Penny’s back, and Bayan’s here, and Ava laughs on her picnic blanket in the middle of Shan, a mile underground in the dirt and dust of the abandoned tunnels. And Abigala is somewhere up above us, but I cannot get to her, and I don’t even know if I want to get to her, and everything is upside down, the whole world, and I don’t know what to do. I just stand up and leave Haywood sitting there, and go to Ava and Nua. She looks up at me as I approach. “Hey, where’d you go?”
I just shrug, sitting down next to her, and Nua grins at me, sliding a box of crackers towards me. I take one, turning it over in my fingers, and listen. Ava’s in the middle of describing something to Penny, and after a few moments I realize I recognize it. “Dominic was having an affair with Vanessa, the scullery maid.”
“I saw that part,” says Penny, and Ava grins. “Ah, but did you get to when he killed her?”
Penny’s eyes widen. This is the plot to one of the TV shows that Ava used to watch with Keol, lounging on the couch in the second floor living room. Apparently she used to watch it with Penny, too, but he must have stopped being able to keep up when he got married, because Ava’s trying to catch him up. “Yeah. It was kind of an accident, but not really, and he managed to hide her body and get away with it. But later on, in season, like, eight, I think, someone else broke into the crown jewels room and stole the queen’s scepter or something.”
“It was her royal ring,” says Bayan quietly, and Ava snaps her fingers. “Right, but they had to unscrew it from the scepter, right?”
“Something like that,” says Bayan, and Nua laughs. Ava holds up her hands. “And they blamed it on Dominic. So now he’s getting investigated, and he isn’t even the one who stole the jewels, but now they might find out that he actually killed Vanessa.”
“Would that be worse?” muses Penny, and Ava shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Wait, what about Donovan?”
“I’m getting there,” says Ava, waving her hands. “My turn, I’m talking now.”
And Penny just smiles, and so does Ava, and so do I. I don’t care about seeing the sunlight again. I’ll stay down here, as long as she wants.