“Okay,” says Penny, his eyes sparkling. “My turn.”
It’s been around a week since I’ve talked to Haywood. Sloan has gone out and come back, reporting to us that there is snow on the ground now. She sits with us by the fire some nights, with her dog Chloe, and sometimes Penny and Nua and Ava get into a conversation about some book that they’ve all read. I just listen because I haven’t. During one of these times she tells me quietly without anyone listening that Haywood is reaching out, through his information women, to contacts he has in the government. I ask for more information, but she just shrugs; that’s not what she does and she doesn’t really know anything. But apparently Haywood can reach people that not even Ava could’ve, at least not without a lot of work, so I don’t know what they’ll find.
“For what?” says Ava, her voice snarky. She’s curled up in the dirty old armchair, her feet under her, and she’s running her fingers up and down the bandage on her chest. I can see it sticking out from underneath her clothes, and I move my chair a little closer to her. “You good?”
She ignores me, and so does Penny. “I wanna do another protest.”
“Another?” I ask in surprise, turning away from Ava, and something flashes through my mind. “You’ve done them before?”
“I saw him.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Penny. Nano is walking around the fire forum, and finally settles in next to him on the ground, putting her head on her paws. “I’ve been part of them. But Sigrid and Haywood want me to organize one this time, so that’s where you all come in.”
“You don’t even know what he looks like, how do you know you saw him?”
“Been part of them how?” asks Ava, sitting up a little straighter. “You’ve gone up to the surface?”
“Because he looks exactly like you. He’s your-”
“A few times,” says Penny with a shrug. He holds up his hands. “Don’t be mad. I’ve worn a mask, no one saw my face, I’ve never been part of the main action, really. Haywood wouldn’t let me.”
“Don’t talk about him.”
I look at Ava. I don’t think that she knows I overheard her and Keol talking the night that we came home from going into town, when we were caught in the middle of a protest ourselves, when people, who must have been Sigrid and Haywood’s people, threw paint from the roofs of buildings. Nua and I got covered in pink, and Ava whisked us away back home before anything dangerous happened. And Keol swore to her that he saw Penny there. And she would not believe him.
I can tell she’s thinking the same thing right now, but she just leans her head back, rubbing the stitches on her left side. “You’re stupid. You shouldn’t do that.”
“Do you want him to be dead?”
“I can’t in good faith send people up to the surface to risk their lives if I’m not willing to go myself,” says Penny, and Ava scoffs. “You’re risking a lot more than they are. Not all of them have Lilly LeGatte for a mother.”
“So why are you refusing to accept that he isn’t?”
“Valid point,” murmurs Nua, and Penny glares at him. He raises his hands. “Hey, I’m just saying, she’s my mother-in-law, too.”
“I’m not. I’m refusing to accept false hope.”
“Yeah, we all know she has an obsessive need to control the people around her,” says Penny, rolling his eyes. “That’s why I’ve been making an effort to not be around her anymore.”
“Oh, so can I come up with you this time?” asks Ava, and Penny shakes his head. “Nah.”
She stares at him, and he shrugs. “You’re the one she wants, Ava.”
“She wouldn’t hesitate to snatch you up too,” grumbles Ava. “And send you back to your wife.”
“Anyway,” I say loudly, and they all look at me. I just look at Penny. “Tell us about your protest.”
“The last one was paint,” says Penny, and Nua and I look at each other. Ava is also looking at us, but Penny doesn’t seem to notice. “We splattered it on the ground, all across the city. This time, I want to do something that’s a little harder to clean up.”
“Trust me,” says Nua, “the paint was hard enough.”
Penny looks at him, confused, and Ava snorts, looking at her nails. “You threw pink paint all over the boys.”
“You were there?” asks Penny in delight, a smile lighting up his face, and I can’t help but laugh. “Ava took us to the library.”
“The library, the library on nineteenth?” asks Penny, furrowing his eyebrows, and Ava makes a face. “Yes. And Nua’s right, they each had to take like four showers before it all came off. So what’s your new brilliant plan?”
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“Um,” says Penny, distracted. He looks at Bayan, who just shakes his head slightly. Ava seems not to notice, still looking at her fingers, twisting Keol’s ring around, and Penny blinks, and then says, “The trains.”
“What about the trains?” I ask, and Penny shakes his head to clear it, and jumps back into focus. “We stop the trains.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” says Nua after a moment, and Penny grins, picking up a pack of small cards, about six inches by four. “That’s where the plan comes in.”
“Right,” mutters Nua as Penny hands him a card. And then he passes one to me, and I turn it over in my hands. It just has three numbers and three words on it, 7 42 91, south midtown theater. Penny says, “For Bayan, and here.” He gives a fourth to Ava, and she takes it, but takes a deep, sharp breath.
“You okay?” I ask again, and her eyebrows knit together. She sounds irritated when she says, “Be quiet.”
“Ava,” says Penny in slight surprise. She’s staring at the words on her card, and suddenly I see her eyes are filled with tears.
Her hand goes over her heart like it does now when she’s upset, over Keol’s heart, Keol, her favorite, because she knew that he knew how to manipulate her. The clever one, even if he wasn’t educated like she was. I’m starting to understand.
“Ava,” I say quietly, “can you read?”
Nua looks at me in shock, and Penny scoffs. “Can she read? Of course she can read.”
“Hold on,” says Nua, and Penny pauses, looking at his sister. Her hands are trembling, tears are running down her cheeks now, and he says uneasily, “Ava?”
“No,” she whispers, throwing it down to the ground, and then she stands and runs from the fire forum.
Penny gapes after her, then looks at me. “What…”
“The transplant restarted her brain,” says Nua quietly. “She might not…have gotten everything back.”
“She remembers me,” says Penny quietly, sinking into his chair, and I nod slowly. “She remembers people, but maybe not information. And she has his heart.”
Nua looks at me, and I glance at him, then look to the fire. “Keol couldn’t read.”
He blinks. “Wait, really?”
I shake my head. Penny sighs. “Great, just another reminder of her dead husband.”
He says the word so bitterly that I’m slightly offended before I come to my senses, and then he stands up slowly. “I’m gonna go talk to her.”
Nua nods, leaning back in his chair, and then once we’re alone he says, “He couldn’t-?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Even Ava didn’t know, she heard him telling me. Well, threatening me not to laugh at him for it.”
Nua smiles slightly, no doubt picturing our wife’s husband caught in what she called a sore spot, and then leans back again. “So is this a memory issue because of the transplant or a her-getting-pieces-of-Keol issue because of the transplant?”
“I dunno,” I say quietly, looking at the door of the tent where the twins disappeared. “But hopefully she can learn again.”
Bayan sighs, and I jump, almost having forgotten he was in the room. “She’s been under a lot of pressure lately.”
“Haven’t we all,” murmurs Nua, running his eyes over the information on his card. Bayan smiles slightly, looking at his as well, and says, “Penny has been talking to Alis and Haywood recently. They’ll tell us about the plan soon enough. He just was excited.”
I smile a little. Penny’s emotions flow out of him like a river, while Ava has had to build a dam her whole life, to keep everyone and everything she loves from being used against her by their mother. And now something has happened to her that she never could have imagined, and she has no idea how to react.
“I don’t know exactly what happened in the hospital,” Bayan continues after a moment, “what they did to her. But it was something rare, something that doesn’t always work. And even thought it was her lungs and her heart…she was dead. That’s got to do something to a person’s brain, being dead.”
I exhale slowly, leaning my head back. We’ve been here for a month, underground, with hardly any light and no sun. Ava should be up above the surface in a hospital, on the beach. Her brain needs it, her body needs it, her spirit needs it. But of course, so many people down here need it just as much, if not more. There are no doctors down here, there’s nowhere to go and just relax, there’s no one to talk to except for Haywood, and not everyone knows Haywood. All we can do around here is sit and wait and think, and close our eyes against the darkness, breathe in the dirty air. This is no way to live, and yet people have chosen to be here, for years on end, decades, because it’s better than what they’ve left behind.
“What time is it?” asks Nua after a moment of silence, save for the fire crackling in front of us. Bayan looks at his wrist, but he isn’t wearing a watch. “I don’t know.”
“Hungry?” asks Nua, looking at me, and I shrug. “I guess.”
“I haven’t seen snow in a while,” he says as we go down towards Shan. There’s a line down the western track, which means that Alis’ people are handing out food, and we stand behind Nerev, the pregnant woman’s husband. He turns to us when we approach. I’ve only talked to him a few times, but he seems to know Bayan well, because they smile at each other, and Nua says, “How’s Marissa?”
“Good,” answers Nerev. “As good as she can be, we think.”
“Must be weird,” I say softly, and he grins again. “For her or me?”
“Both,” I admit with a smile of my own, and he sighs, nodding. “Yeah. It’s weird. Did you know it moves in there?”
“The baby?” says Nua, making a face, and Nerev nods again. “Yeah, you can feel it kicking in her belly.”
I touch my own belly, making a face too, and Nerev laughs a little. The line moves forward, and Bayan says softly, “Miss Ava would not like that.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if Marissa likes it so much either,” says Nerev with a smile. “But there is something…”
He trails off, and then says, “There is something remarkable about it. That she and I made something, and she’s taking care of it for us, and I’m taking care of her, and soon it’ll take care of us.”
Nua smiles a little, his fingers brushing against mine. I wonder if he’s ever wanted children. I never did, not in this world, I even said as much to Ava, albeit only after I slept with her. But I don’t actually know if she wants children. She would not have had to carry it like Marissa is in her body, at least not if we were still living in the beach house, but she’d still have to raise it, and we’d have to deal with her mother. She’s still so young, and so am I. I think of the box of pregnancy tests Nua and I found; eighteen negatives, exactly a year and a half of trying and failing every month, and I wonder if Keol wanted children, either, or if he just wanted Ava.
When Nua and I find her again, it’s in her tent. We bring her back a carton of food from Alis, and she picks at it, avoiding our eyes. Bayan and Penny go back to their own tent next door, and when Nua and Ava and I finish eating, Nua takes her hand. “Hey.”
She looks at him, biting her lip, and he smiles a little. “You alright?”
“I feel useless,” she says softly, glancing at me. “I should be going up, helping Haywood’s people. I should be doing something, and I can’t even read.”
“You don’t have to do everything,” says Nua softly, rubbing his thumb over hers, over Keol’s ring. “You’re still healing from heart surgery, Ava.”
She smiles a little, touching the bandage on her chest, and Nua pulls his hand out of hers and picks up the book of fairy tales. Ava looks at it, and Nua opens it, flipping to the one he was reading to Keol, the day that he died. “‘Dear boys,’ said a poor man to his four sons one day. ‘I have nothing to give you; you must go out into the world and find your own way.’”
Tears fill Ava’s eyes, but she just takes a deep breath and leans over for me. After a moment we lie down, her head on my chest, and Nua reads to us. She closes her eyes, listening to his soft voice in the darkness as he tells us a story about four brothers and a princess and a dragon who steals her away, and she twists Keol’s ring on her finger until she falls asleep.