show you.”
“Tell me how, let me try.”
Lynn shook her head. “Making the first cut is a tricky business. You’ve got to get through the pelt and the muscle but if you cut down into the intestines you’ve got a mess on your hands and hell of a smell. Trust me on that. Let me do the first bit, then I’ll hand it over.”
With a knife in her hand, Lynn relaxed. The methodical work of field dressing restored her spirits, and once she surrendered the knife to Eli the task of instructing him took all her concentration. His inexpert knife-handling skills would’ve cost him a finger if she hadn’t been there, and the look on his face when she instructed him to reach into the rib cavity and pull out the heart was enough to make her glad she was.
She removed her own gloves. “Here, I’ll show you,” she said, and stuck half her arm into the warm depths of the deer, emerging with the dripping organ.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, the color in his cheeks she’d noticed earlier suddenly gone.
“Beats eating grasshoppers,” she shot back, and Eli burst out laughing, catching her by surprise and causing an unguarded smile to spread across her own face. “What?”
“Just you, standing there with blood up to your armpit and a heart in your hand, happy as can be.” Eli stifled another laugh. “And my mom had a musician all picked out for me.”
“Fat lot of good that would do you out here,” Lynn said, turning her attention back to the carcass and trying to ignore the pleasant flush that had crept up her cheeks. “Boost me up into the tree and toss me the rope.”
The two of them had the deer hung in a few minutes. “It’s cold enough now, you can just let it hang for a bit to cure,” she said. “One of us will show you how to butcher.”
Eli wiped the sweat that had beaded on his brow despite the cold weather. “Thank you,” he said, catching her gaze. “For everything.”
Lynn kicked snow over the purple mound of organs and grunted. “You’re welcome. How about in exchange you tell me about these water maps?”
“Stebbs tell you about that, or Lucy?”
“Both,” Lynn said. “But Lucy let it slip first.”
Eli sighed and looked up at the carcass. “Neva’s got this idea in her head that if she treats her like an adult, Lucy will act like one. But I knew she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”
“She needs to learn,” Lynn said. “I’m guessing you didn’t know she can douse?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Witch water,” Lynn tried again, but Eli’s face remained blank. “She can find water good as any of those satellite things. Better even, since the water she finds is underground.”
Eli swallowed once, hard. Lynn was glad to see that city or not, he was smart enough to know what kind of danger that put the little girl in. “It’s genetic,” Lynn explained. “Someone in your family is able to do it, though Stebbs says it can skip generations. I’m guessing whoever it was never even knew, living in Entargo like you do.”
“Did,” Eli corrected. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know about the water maps, but we’re going inside to talk. I can pretend to be tough for two more minutes, but I’m freezing, and I think we’ve got enough conversation to last the afternoon.”
Lynn glanced up at the sun. “I can stay a little,” she said hesitantly. “But I’m not sure how welcome I am inside.”
“Neva’s not in there,” Eli said. “She’s out at the grave.”
“By herself?”
“I couldn’t get her to come away,” he said. “Once the snow stopped, she went right to it and started clearing away the drifts. I’ve been watching the deer upstream, and I knew they came to the same spot every morning, so I needed to be there at the right time. But Neva wouldn’t budge, so I had to leave her behind.”
“She been there all day?”
“Mostly. I got the deer about right after sunrise, dragged it back here, and went to check on her. I took her something to eat, but she refused to move.”
“She dressed well?”
“Well enough,” Eli said, and Lynn didn’t miss the shiver that went through him. She guessed that Neva was dressed better than Eli, and that he’d given the better coat to her. The idea of being in the small shelter alone with Eli caused a different kind of heat to flush through her. She clamped down on it, the need to know more about the satellites outweighing her nerves.
The little house was warm. She put the pack from Stebbs down next to the stove and stripped off her coat, wet with snow and smeared with deer blood. She hung it over the back of one of the mismatched chairs to dry. “Stebbs got you set up nice,” she said as she sat at the little table that was pushed into the corner. She kept her gaze firmly on its top, not allowing her eyes to wander to the loft where Neva and Eli slept together. Not after what Stebbs had told her.
“I got that myself,” Eli said as he sat down across from her. “One afternoon when he was over I went out, found it along with the chairs. Of course, every piece came from a different house, so they don’t match.”
Lynn felt her lips flicker into a smile without meaning to. “You’re used to things like matching furniture?”
“Oh, yes, a coordinated dining room,” Eli said, fake wistfulness creeping into his tone as he ran his fingers over the tabletop. “I miss it more than tap water.”
“Shut it, you do not,” Lynn said, a real smile pushing through. “Now tell me about the satellites before I break one of these ugly chairs over your head. Lucy told me you were aiming for my house?”
“Yeah.” Eli nodded, all traces of teasing gone from his face. “Bradley said it was big enough for us to survive, not big enough for anyone from the city to bother with.”
“Unless the city went south?”
“What’s that?”
“Went south,” Lynn explained. “It’s a country way of saying when something goes bad.”
“That was the idea, yeah,” Eli agreed. “Basically, the people that my brother and some of the other soldiers hired themselves out to for information had the money to get it, and the foresight to know that the water in the city couldn’t last forever. Bradley took their money, then their plan for his own once they knew Neva was pregnant again.”
“It’d be a decent plan if you knew the first thing about surviving.”
“That was supposed to be on Bradley,” Eli said, his eyes not meeting hers anymore. “He knew all kinds of stuff from his training. Berries you could eat, roots even. To eat bugs if you got in a bad enough situation.”
Lynn thought of Lucy chasing grasshoppers, her tiny palms smacking against the dry bodies in desperation. “He taught you what he knew then?”
“He tried, back in the city. But I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. He was supposed to be with us, you know? The whole way. I’m good with my hands, but I always learned better actually doing something, so I figured once we were outside I could learn from him as we went a lot easier than trying to remember everything he told me over a table. We couldn’t keep anything we wrote down, so I had to memorize it all. I focused on remembering the maps, thought there’d be more time for everything else later.”
His voice trailed off, and Lynn thought about how Eli had watched his brother bleed out in the city while people who were able to help had done nothing. Her own desperation beside Mother’s body shot through her memory and she had an unexpected rush of anger at the crowd that had let Eli’s brother die in front of them. She cleared her throat.
“In that case, remind me to show you what poison ivy looks like, come spring.”
Eli glanced up at her, a teasing smile back on his face. “That’s a date.”
Lynn’s brow furrowed. “It’s a season.”
“No, I mean . . .” Eli sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “We’re going to have to find a shared vocabulary before I can flirt.”
“Flirt?”
“Yeah, it’s how a boy shows a girl that he likes her. Or vice versa,” he said pointedly.
“Sounds like a waste of time,” Lynn said carefully, trying to keep the skip in her pulse out of her voice. “Seems like it’d be a lot easier to just say so.”
