~

Chapter Forty-seven

~

“We can’t just leave her there,” Jam said. His eyes scrawled left and right, at all the humans we walked past sittin’ on stoops, glarin’ at us. As though I didn’t notice. The anger and dread was palpable even to me. For a normal sort, maybe it was sendin’ up fireworks.

I continued walkin’. Nuel had blamed this on my clan. She excused the Northerners as though they had nothin’ to do with it. “She worries about her humans so much she can stay here and comfort ’em all she wants.”

“That wasn’t exactly her point,” he said. He shook his head at a punk that looked like he wanted to throw a rock at us. I didn’t slow down to see if his scowl made the impact Jam hoped.

“None of yall disagreed that sittin’ there for now was the safest,” I said. “Us leavin’, they’ll have more food, last ’em longer. If thin’s don’t improve soon.”

“Ya think Ike would agree with ya?” Jam asked.

“Ike ain’t here. And I’m fed up with that I’m-superior-than-ya hen. Can’t reach the dais she sits on peerin’ down at us unkempt folk.”

“She ain’t that bad,” Jam muttered.

“Two hour walk ya said?”

He muttered an uh huh. And then some other odds and ends under his breath. “This don’t feel right.”

“Pick it up, ya slouch,” I told him. “I wanna get there in time for lunch.”

He snorted a laugh. Only thin’ I could consider he’d find funny, is if the only thin’ I’d find to eat there is crickets, centipedes, and scorpions. I asked him if there were many scorpions in the North. He said there weren’t—that’s why there were tons of folks farm raisin’ ’em. Great.

He asked if I wasn’t gonna call Ike.

“He’s made it clear he has his own problems and priorities,” I said. “I’m not a priority.”

We passed several mobs in the next five minutes that maybe kept Jam’s thoughts to himself. Unvoiced was better than the opposite. We had a couple close calls. Jam pickin’ up that one scrawny kid and throwin’ him into his friends was funnier than intimidatin’.

“Hearin’ more sirens than I expected,” I said.

He explained the larger centers had there own power generators. I’m smart enough to figger out that meant they could pump gas. So who else could pump gas? I pictured those Southern warbirds, actually, more the support team they had on the ground with ’em on the East Plain. They had their own tankers to fuel the helicopters. And airfields have trucks that can pump gas. So everythin’ shouldn’t be goin’ to dragon pooh.

“There be pockets of folk that ought to be gettin’ along fine, huh?” I asked.

I had to wait. Jam stared down a group of men cursin’ at us. Considerin’ the upscale neighborhood we still strode through, seemed a bit inconsistent.

“What’s yar point?” he asked.

Wasn’t sure if I had one. But somethin’ tickled a synapse somewhere deep down.

We turned a corner, and I studied somethin’ off in the distance. Couldn’t place what it might be. I asked Jam what I was lookin’ at and he said how would he know what I was lookin’ at. Smart guy. Gettin’ as bad as Nuel.

Maybe I draw it out of people. Ma always said I was tough to be around. She never said I necessarily created evil thoughts in folk.

“Am I lookin’ at a mirage?” I tried again.

“Mirage? Like in the desert?” Jam asked.

“No. Like an ice cream dessert. Yeah. Of course I mean a desert mirage.”

“No deserts in—oh. That’s the city wall.”

We were still maybe two miles away, and that wall looked enormous.

~

Nuel

~

“I don’t think they’re comin’ back,” I told Papa. The sun was only a fist above the western horizon.

“Would’ve been polite to say so long,” Pa said. “But everythin’ will be okay. Safe here. As long as we don’t have to go out and about.”

He left me behind? Really? Pa had called me dull. Maybe he was bein’ kind. I imagine parents curb their true thoughts to save their youngling’s feelin’s. Pa had never been very demandin’ of me.

I guess that’s one way of sayin’ I was spoiled. He’d give me an eye now and then, and ask me what I thought was right. He didn’t tell me what was right. Figgered it would come to me eventually, I guess.

I needed to change my mental path or I’d cry again. Thinkin’ about the past before today hadn’t been painful. Why’s it now? Papa had always insulated me from a lot. He’d mentioned Elzrr the other day.

“I was just thinkin’ about Elzrr,” I told him.

He smiled. But it was a sad smile. “She married.”

“Oh.” To someone else. Shut that stream of joy short.

“When this is all over,” he said. “Ya oughta work yar heritage into a conversation with Ike.”

“Ya told me where I come from is no one’s business but mine,” I said.

“Hard to believe I was that naive, huh? Sweetie, it’s really important in the clan.”

That rocked me a little. My papa is perfect. Always has been. Always will be. But we’d lived outside of the clans. Outside the ogre world. But that isn’t the only reason he struggled to find the right hen to make him happy, that he could make happy.

I had been a big part of that. Even after I’d moved out on my own, his courtin’ possibilities didn’t improve. Reflected maybe on our close relationship. Always was a little odd, Papa talkin’ to me as openly as a sorority sister. If I could read minds, I’d suspect his mind was goin’ somewhere in the direction that he didn’t want me to be where he is, in fifty years.

“I’ve told ya millions of times, right—?” he said.

I waited. He isn’t one to exaggerate.

“Adopin’ ya was the greatest gift that life ever presented me.”

He was sayin’ that preemptively. The scandal of an abandoned ogre baby that no one else would take, didn’t stain his life. But it had. Was the reason he had no ogre friends. Not long-time friends, from the days I pitter-patted around the house. And no true friends still.

He had already been on the far side of the age to woo a hen—stayin’ in school forever for a doctorate will do that—when he took me on. But back then, there wasn’t gonna be a hen in the North willin’ to take on the baggage we represented.

I couldn’t imagine the pain when his own parents fled—at least moved away. I have no idea where they went. Did he? He’d never, ever mentioned grandfolk. Thin’s are so different, down South.