Nua joins us sometime in the night, or whenever it is we fall asleep.  And for the next few days, or whenever it is in the time in between our sleeps, Ava and I sit in the tent, and I read Ali Baba and other fairy tales to her.  She refuses to read them herself, even after both Nua and I offer to help her practice.  She still knows, I think, somewhere in her mind.  It just got scrambled up when they woke her up again, however that happened.  But she doesn’t want to.  She just closes her eyes, listening, twisting Keol’s ring around on her thumb, and I wish that her and Keol and I all had more time.

It’s December now.  It isn’t cold underground, but Sloan tells us that the snow is piling up above us.  She meets with Shan and with Ava and Bayan, who is sharing a tent with Penny and sits next to him in the fire forum every night.  Penny rests his head on his shoulder; his skin and eyes and hair look pale compared to Bayan’s, who likes to run his fingers through Penny’s long blond hair.  Ava’s is getting longer, too, longer than I’ve ever seen it, and one day I come across her in the fire forum with a pair of scissors, twisting her lips.  She looks over at me, and says, “I wanna cut it.”

I raise my eyebrows, and she fingers the tips of her hair.  It’s only an inch or two past her shoulders, but it doesn’t look right.  I shrug.  “Okay.”

“But if I cut it,” she says, “then Marissa’s gonna ask me for a haircut too.”

I laugh a little.  “Really?”

She nods, grinning.  “She wants to chop all her hair off before she has to give birth.  She’s got two or three months left, we think, but I don’t know if I could do it.” 

“Cutting her hair?”

“What if I mess up?” she asks, looking up at me, and I laugh again.  “That’s what you’re worried about right now?  Messing up a haircut?”

And she smiles a little too, looking into the fire.  “Yeah.”

She opens the scissors, combing her fingers through her hair, and cuts off a piece of a lock, right by her shoulder.

“Well, there you go,” I say, sitting down across from her.  “Now you have to do the rest.”

She laughs, and it’s in her eyes, and it’s good to see her smile.  I watch as she fingers another lock of hair, and then she says, “I don’t know if I can do this myself.”

“I can’t do it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not really,” she says, looking through the fire at me.  “Now I don’t know what to do.”

I don’t have time to answer, because Penny and Bayan come into the fire forum just them.  Penny’s hair is so long, much longer than Ava’s, and he has it tied back with a rubber band.  He grins when he sees Ava and her scissors, and says, “Chopping it off?”

“Trying,” she says, holding up the chunk that she already cut between two fingers, and Bayan raises his eyebrows.

“Shan wants to see you,” says Penny to me, and I look up at him in slight surprise.  “Really?”

And then I notice that his hand is wrapped around Bayan’s, and I almost don’t hear his answer because I’m taken aback by everything that’s happening.  Penny doesn’t have a wedding ring still, like Nua and Ava and I do, and I don’t think Bayan has ever had one.  Penny is oblivious to me being distracted, though, and just says, “Yeah, they’re in the room with the table and the maps, by the pantry.”

“Okay,” I say after a moment, and rise to my feet.  Ava cuts off another lock of her hair, and Bayan sits down next to her and gently takes the scissors from her.  I hear Penny start to say something as I leave, but I don’t hear it, and I remember the first day I got to Ava’s house, when Bayan pulled out my eyebrows and combed my hair.  God, he does everything for us, doesn’t he, and he never says a word.  

“Aberworth Ahman,” says Haywood when I hit my fingers against the wall of the map house, kind of by accident.  It’s him and Alis, Sigrid and Nova, the four leaders of the underground Tent City.  Nova gestures me in, and says, “Sit.”

So I do.  There are papers on the table, and a few manilla folders like the ones that Ava and Bayan gave me and Penny, with information about Abigala and their father.  Alis is murmuring something to Haywood, who looks at me, and after Alis finishes he smiles a little.  “You look terrified.”

“I am terrified,” I say, and Sigrid laughs.  “Of us?”

“A little.”

“Don’t be,” says Nova with a soft smile.  “We just wanted to talk to you, figure out exactly what we know about your family.”

“Okay,” I say slowly, and Sigrid pulls a chair too, falling into it.  “Your sister is Abigala Ahman, who we know.  We’ve heard of her, just because we’ve been keeping track on your mother-in-law, so when she got a new assistant, whoever it was told us that, and we shelved it.”

“We didn’t think it would be important,” says Haywood quietly.  “But it turns out that it is.”

“But I don’t get it,” I say.  “Why, how could she just get a job with Miss Lilly, it’s only been, like, six months.”

“Yeah,” says Sigrid with a sigh, running her hands through her hair.  “That, we don’t know.  There’s something going on there, probably.  I don’t know if we can figure it all out from down here.”

I glance at Haywood, still over by the table, and he shrugs.  “Sorry.”

“No,” I say softly, and then swallow.  “What about her husbands?”

“She has four husbands,” says Haywood slowly, when no one else answers.  “That, that’s all public records.”

“Ava showed me,” I say quietly.  “She has two children.”

“Six,” corrects Alis, and I look at him, my jaw dropping.  “What?”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Six,” confirms Haywood, looking down at a paper in front of him.  “Now.”

And I stand, and go to him, and he spins it to me.  It’s been what, six months since our parents got taken, since I married Ava, and apparently since Abigala married, too.  And in all that time, Ava has not gotten pregnant, Ava tried for over a year and a half with Keol and she even tried with me and yet eighteen times she had to go to her mother and tell her that she was not pregnant, and risk me and Keol and Nua.  But in just six months Abigala has gotten married and gotten pregnant six times.  There are six embryos under the name Ahman in a lab somewhere.  None under LeGatte.  

I look up from the paper, feeling a strange calm settle in my belly.  I knew this.  Since the day that Ava told me that Abigala had gotten married, I knew this somehow.  Since a little while ago, when I found out that Abigala was working with Miss Lilly for some reason, I knew this somehow.  I look at Sigrid, she’s the first person I make eye contact with when I look up, and I ask, “Why?”

Sigrid just glances at Nova, rubbing her lips together, and shrugs.

“What about my parents?”

“Addis and Ane Ahman,” says Haywood, and I look at him again, feeling my heart jump.  “Yeah.  That’s my dad and mom.”

“Pretty much nothing,” says Sigrid, and my face falls.  Nova looks at her disapprovingly, and her eyes are soft when she looks back to me.  She says, “It’s hard.  There’s so much secrecy about things like agencies and shelters, especially if your mother-in-law has something to do with it.  She probably personally buried all the information that could link people she sees as criminals to her daughter.”

“I’ll tell you exactly what we have,” says Haywood quietly, coming to sit by me in a chair nearby.  He leans his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands together, and the light glints off of the ring on his left hand.  I look at Alis’ hand, he has the matching one.  Nova’s the only one without a ring here, because she gave hers to Sigrid.  “There’s a report from about six months ago, in the Agencies Department files, that mention your parents.  But we can’t see the full report without official government access, so we only really know that your parents’ names are mentioned in the report.”

“Could Abigala look at it?” I ask, and Haywood nods.  “She could, yes.  I don’t know if she has, but she could, because she has access to pretty much all the agency files as Lilly LeGatte’s assistant.  And in order to work in the government, you have to have all your records public.  So that’s how we know about her husbands, and about the six children she’s registered.  All of that came from people who Alicia and Sloan and my other information people know, on the surface, who are able to look into these things.”

“And you’ve been keeping track of Miss Lilly for a while now,” I say softly, and Sigrid smiles slightly, and nods.  “Yes.  The person who held her position before her, and then her, when she got it.  The whole agencies department, really.  And also her daughter.  But to be honest we didn’t even know she had a son until he showed up here, with Sloan.”

“Why me?” I murmur, and Nova leans forward, not having heard.  “What?”

I just shake my head, and Haywood says, “So you probably want to know what we’re gonna do now, that we know.”

“Yeah,” I say, looking up at him, and Alis comes to sit next to him, putting his hand on his shoulder.  “We’re not entirely sure yet.”

I just look at him, and Sigrid smiles a little.  “We’re trying to find your parents.  So there’s that.”

Haywood nods.  “They were arrested, Aber, which means that they’re being held somewhere, and that there’s going to be a trial sometime, and then someone is going to make a permanent decision about what to do with them.  But for cases like these, if someone wants to, they can keep it all private, covered up, behind the scenes of the process, so the public doesn’t really know what’s happening.  And your mother-in-law has most likely been doing so for your parents.”

“We think,” says Alis, taking his hand back, and then he pauses, looking at Nova.  But she nods, and he looks back to me.  “We think she might be doing it for Abigala’s sake.”

“Abigala’s?”

“And yours,” says Nova with a slight smile.  “To keep you in the dark.  But it’s likely that your sister doesn’t really know what happened to your parents.  Just, maybe, that Lilly’s taking care of it.  And maybe she thinks that Lilly’s trying to help.”

“She’s not,” I say.

“We know,” says Nova, nodding.  “We’re just trying to figure out what Abigala’s role in all of this is, too.”

“That’s what we wanted to tell you,” says Haywood, and I look back at him.  “We just wanted to let you know.  We’re looking into your parents, and to Abigala.  We’re gonna make sure they’re all safe, and then we’re gonna see how we can help them.  Sloan’s gonna work with us, and some of my other people, and we’ll keep you updated.”

I take a deep breath, leaning my head back, and then I nod.  “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.  “Yeah.”

Yeah.  So they let me go, and I go back down the western track towards the tent, looking for Nua and Ava.  They’re both inside, and look up when I come in.  Ava watches me sit down and says, “What did they want?”

“They’re looking into my parents,” I say quietly, “and they think that Miss Lilly is hiding the process from the public, from me, and from Abigala.”

Nua raises his eyebrows.  “Why Abigala?”

“Maybe she doesn’t know,” I whisper.  “Maybe she doesn’t know how bad it all is.”

Ava and Nua glance at each other, I don’t miss it, and Ava rubs her lips together.  “Maybe.”

She lies back with a sigh, her sweater falling off her shoulder a little bit, and I can see the tops of the cuts on her chest with the thread in her skin.  I think she had a bandage before, Bayan must have taken it off, and Nua reaches over and touches it gently.  She lets him, but when his nail pulls on the thread she winces a little.  He pulls away, then runs his finger over her ribs, tracing the rectangle showing through her clothes.  “What was it like?”

“What was what like?” she asks, and he shrugs, leaning down to rest on his elbow looking down at her.  Then he glances at me; neither of us are sure how to ask the question that has been pressing on our minds for a while.  “Being dead.”

Surprisingly, she laughs slightly, then thinks for a moment before saying, “I don’t remember.”

“Really,” says Nua, and she nods.  I lie down next to her too, on the other side, and she takes one of my hands and rests her other on Nua’s.  “I remember before and after, but not…during.”

“So what do you know?” asks Nua quietly.  Shadows move over us as people wander by outside the tent.  Ava sighs.  “I remember…”

She pauses, then nods.  “I remember being angry.  Because Keol died.  And then I remember you coming in to see me, and then I started feeling worse.”

“You got sick,” he murmurs.  “You were sick, but in just those few days…you got worse, worse than you had ever been, and faster.”

She nods slightly.  “And I remember falling asleep next to you.”

The hand that’s on Nua’s raises to gently stroke my cheek, and then goes back down to him.  “And then I remember waking up.”

“That’s it?” asks Nua, and she laughs slightly.  “Dying didn’t hurt.  You said I died in my sleep.”

“Yes.”

“Waking up did.”

“Really?” I ask, and she grins a little, nodding, and then exhales.  Her breath still smells faintly like smoke, or maybe I’m just imagining it.  “It was like…ice bath and burned alive, but at the same time.  I think they shocked me awake, to get his heart going again.  I was hooked up to some machine that kept my pulse and my blood pressure and things like that so I couldn’t really move.”

She still thinks of it as Keol’s heart, not her own.  The ache for the husband she lost is mixed with the beats of his own body inside of her.  

“And, you know, they had cut me open to take stuff out and put stuff in, and so that hurt for a really long time and right after I woke up they knocked me out again so I could just sleep, and my brain hurt, inside my head.  The next time I woke up Bayan was rubbing ice over the stitches.”

“Bayan,” says Nua in surprise, and she grins a little.  “Yes, since he’s been with us so long they let him when he insisted on being able to take care of me at least a few times a day.  That’s how I talked to him.”

“He helped you escape,” I say quietly, and she closes her eyes, smiling slightly.  “Yes.  I’m glad we got him out of there, too.”

“He wanted to help you,” says Nua softly, his eyes blinking sleepily, and I smile at Ava before she closes her eyes, too.  “Yes.  And he missed Penny, I’m glad he gets to see him, too.”

“I think they’re sharing a tent,” I murmur, letting my eyelids close too, and I hear Ava laugh softly.  Her hand squeezes mine, and soft footsteps pass by outside once again.  But then they’re gone, and in the darkness I can almost imagine that we’re home again, in her bed, just the three of us, and the cat down by our feet.  Bayan will wake us up the next morning with yogurt and blueberries, because that seems to be the only thing Ava used to eat in the morning.  But then she sighs, and I open my eyes to look at her, and I see light only coming from a lantern in the corner, and the ground next to us as we lie on a mat in the dirt.  But Ava’s still here, and Nua.  Keol should be here, that’s the only problem, and I know that Ava knows it too.  But his heart beats inside of her, and his ring is around her finger, and Ava is still here.  That is all he wanted, wasn’t it, that she could lie here, filling her lungs without pain in every breath.  He would think it’s worth it, but Ava does not, I don’t think.  Even for Nua and I, even for Bayan or Penny, she did not want to live without Keol.  

Nevertheless, here she is.