Huntress

crumpling steel. Naked branches were budding with green spring, and redbud blossoms floated in the undergrowth.

Maggie had heard about the forests that had grown wild around the cities, but she never imagined what one of them would look like. The trees had a reputation that preceded them, told by the government men who rattled into town once or twice a year on their large gas-powered trucks, hauling clothwares and steelwares, and bringing news from three different coasts.

No more cities, the men had said years ago. The trees have swallowed all the dead cities.

But no one, as far as Maggie knew, had devoted much energy or thought into finding out why. Better things to do, after all. Like, survive. As far as most people were concerned, nature reclaiming places of so much horror, even with impossible speed, seemed preferable to the alternative: that the cities be accessible, and remembered. No one wanted to remember anything from the Big Death.

The crow landed on the road and pecked at a dried leaf. Maggie glanced down at him. “This growth looks older than twenty years. Are all the cities like this?”

All that I have flown over, he replied. And there have been many.

“Doesn’t make sense,” she muttered. “Did the hanta-bola pox cause this? Did it … infect plants?”

The crow jumped into the air and flew to the low-hanging branch of a squat, fat oak that looked as though it had grown in that spot for more than a hundred years. It was an unnatural disease. Even among my kind, we do not understand the how or why of it. But we do think it caused … this. There is no other explanation, and the disease was localized in the cities, even though it spread elsewhere.

“Were you alive then? Did you witness the Big Death?”

I lost family to it, he said, which surprised her. We were not immune, though we suffered less since we lived apart from humans.

Maggie forced herself to breathe. “Anything else?”

You could still turn back.

She stared at him and thought about Trace. She touched the shark teeth hanging cold around her neck, and her other hand traced the head of the sledgehammer dragging on her waist. Messages floated through her mind; Irdu’s voice behind them all.

A test of truth. Don’t give up if you want to find your teeth.

I’ve got plenty of bite, she told him silently, and said, “I don’t see an easy way in. Not for motorcycles.”

The crow launched himself off the oak branch and flew around Maggie toward her right. He landed more than thirty feet away on the ground, and hopped lightly ahead of her. She pushed her bicycle over and saw a narrow trail leading into the woods, and a long streak of lines as though tires had rolled through the leaves.

Maggie hesitated, exposed to sunlight and miles of endless concrete, cars, and corpses at her back. The crow dove from the tree to the handlebars of her bicycle. He perched there, wings flared, staring into her eyes with familiar intensity.

Fear knotted up her throat. “Well, you don’t have to come along, if you don’t want.”

The crow said nothing, simply settling his wings against his back. Maggie brushed his chest with her knuckles and whispered, “I’m scared. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Trace, she told herself. If it were you, she would never turn back. Even if she thought you might be dead.

Heart thundering, Maggie rolled her bike forward, using her feet to push herself along. The crow rode on the handlebars. When she was inches from the edge of the forest, she stopped again, staring into the lengthening shadows and the endless supple variations of the trees. Sweat rolled down her back.

“You and me,” she said to the crow; and then, feeling a bit pathetic, added: “Don’t leave me, right?”

The crow leaned toward her, and when she held out her hand, he rubbed his beak against her fingers. Warmth tingled. Maggie smiled grimly. Not alone. She was crazy, but she was not alone.

The golden light of sunset warmed her back. Maggie pedaled slowly into the forest, imagining robbers, and the dead; and other stolen hearts. Hunting hearts, she thought. She was hunting. A hunter.

An hour later, Maggie found another barricade.

SIX

The barricade was lost in the woods. Maggie followed vainly the tracks and scuffs of motorcycle tires, and was finally forced to dismount and walk her bicycle. The forest swallowed everything within it, but as dusk spread into silver, the world seemed to sharpen, as though night allowed a deeper vision than day.

Or perhaps her eyes were changing. She had noticed that. Shadows hid nothing from her anymore. Every day since leaving her junkyard in Olo, she had found herself able to do more, feel more, hear more. And all of it was familiar. She had been able to do these things before, she realized, but had made herself forget. Maggie simply could not understand why.

She walked along the barricade, and found it almost exactly like the one on the interstate: tall, thick, and made of concrete. Sharp, rusted barbed wire coiled on top, and bullet holes had fractured the smooth, dark surface, along with the fading remnants of painted messages that were too obscured by vines for her to read.

A piece of the barricade had been pulled aside and was bordered by the trunk of a towering maple tree. Maggie imagined voices whispering in the shadows of the undergrowth, but that did not frighten her. She had heard those ageless murmurs back home, in her dreams; in the other forest beyond the city, beneath the redbuds. She felt as though she had heard them always.

Maggie lingered outside the barrier, staring through the break into another world. She saw more road and rusted cars, along with distant buildings half-eaten by trees. A ghost land, empty and quiet, the silence rimming her skin with ice.

She took a deep breath. This was the city.

Maggie pushed her bicycle through the gap in the barricade. She had imagined she might feel differently on the other side, but the air tasted the same, and the darkness was no deeper in the underbrush. The crow flew ahead. Maggie followed, and after several minutes of quick travel, found that many roads split from this one, tributaries and concrete veins. The interstate suddenly seemed elevated above the ground, and she peered over the edge of a bent steel railing. More forest spread out below her, shrouding the outlines of rows of decaying box homes. All she could see were rooftops and the hint of dark windows through the branches.

Her heart hurt, as she looked at those abandoned homes. Their emptiness made her feel small, and the silence hurt her ears, frightening in its finality.

Maggie followed the road and found another barricade, and another, as she passed deeper into the forest. She walked for a long time. Color was bleached from the world. All she saw were etched buildings, gray and black; monoliths, hunched and molding with disuse.

And the bones. She finally saw the bones, everywhere: in the road, off the road, on the front steps of buildings, and on sidewalks. Tangled, sprawling skeletons begging free of moss and brown leaves. Countless men and women who had simply dropped dead, on top of one another.

Maggie did not want to contemplate what it had been like when flesh still covered those bones and people had lain there, passing away in their own blood, their own sloughing skin. Her own parents might have died like this, exposed and helpless, watching each other fade, listening to the screams of a dying city.

She could hear those screams, echoing through her brain. She shut her eyes, pressing her knuckles to her brow. Maggie forced a deep breath, and then another. Trying not to see, she fumbled for the shark teeth, gripping them tightly, and it was suddenly easier to focus.

Be strong, she told herself fiercely, but it was difficult. She had thought she was strong all these years, but her strength had been built upon routine, and the familiar. Her junkyard. Her tools. The occasional stranger to mix things up. A false sense that this world was normal, no matter how much she had imagined otherwise from her books and daydreams.

Dead leaves crackled behind her. Maggie spun around, heart pounding, and glimpsed a coyote peering at her from behind the remains of a large truck. She met its gaze, startled.

The crow swept low, cawing loudly. His wings buffeted the animal’s head, and the coyote flinched but did not attack, or retreat. It just gave the crow a long look, and then flicked its gaze back to Maggie. Until, quite abruptly, it turned and loped away into the forest shadows.

“A friend of yours?” Maggie asked the crow, who settled on a branch above her head.

The crow flipped his wings, a gesture that looked distinctly like a shrug. He was too curious.

Maggie raised her brow. “That’s no crime. I’m curious about you.”

She heard a small harrumphing sound in her mind, and for the first time in a long while felt like smiling. But she thought of the old woman, and touched the heavy necklace.

“Do you know if Trace is close? Could you find her? And those men?”

Before now, it had not occurred to her that she could ask him to do such a thing. He had been a bird. He had been a creature she did not understand; perhaps a man, perhaps not. She still did not understand him, but she felt freer to ask small favors.

The crow tilted his head, looking away down the road, which was white with bones. I can do that.

But there was uncertainty in his voice. Maggie said, “Is there something wrong with that?”

He hesitated, still not looking at her. I will have to leave you alone.

Maggie looked down at her hands, which were scarred from steelwork and hard with muscle. Slender hands but strong.

Be strong, she told herself again, and sighed. “I’ve been alone a long time. I can take care of myself.”

You know this is different, he said softly, finally settling his gaze on her. You know you are more than food to those men who hunt.

No one had ever said anything about food, but Maggie understood what he meant. She had interested Irdu. He had seen something in her that was different. She knew it was the only reason he had not taken her life. She thought he might very well change his mind about that, the next time they met.

“I need to know,” she said.

Then follow me, he replied heavily, and flew from the branch. Maggie hurried after him, her skin crawling as bones crunched beneath her boots and tires. It was impossible not to step on the remains. She wondered if the bones still held traces of the hanta-bola pox. Maybe she was breathing in the disease, becoming infected, her cells already breaking down.

The crow led her down a narrow path crowded with cars parked closely together in tight, neat rows. Oak trees had grown between and through the vehicles, roots curling around the remains of rubber tires. Ahead of them she saw a vast low-lying building, the dirty glass windows revealing nothing. Vines obscured large blue letters embedded in brick. Maggie could not read them.

The crow swept down to the leafy ground, hopping to a slow stop. In there. Wait for me.

Maggie gave the building a dubious look. “What is that place?”

A relic, he said, and hopped closer, peering into her eyes. If there should be trouble—

“Don’t,” Maggie interrupted, crouching in front of him. “Won’t do much good, will it?”

The crow lowered his head. She briefly stroked his chest with the back of her fingers, touching him tenderly, her heart in her throat. He quivered, and she whispered, “What are you, Mister Crow?”

He said nothing, and pressed the side of his sleek head against her hand. For a moment, Maggie’s vision blurred, and she felt his life pulsing white hot, as though she could taste each beat of his heart, and the blood coursing through his veins. It was not her imagination, but instead felt as real as the leaves underfoot and the trees wrapped tight around the city.