“Spiders, you know, they can bite,” she explained. Sefi and Espin brought two battered old coats and half a tablecloth over for padding, and Nell spread her blanket over the pile. The five of them took their spots on it, sagged between the lumps, and sweated as night fell.
Yali stretched out on the other side of Susan.
“I won’t touch your face in the night,” she assured her. “I just like to look at it. You don’t mind, do you?”
Susan flushed, but she shook her head and tried to find something to look at besides the girl’s wide eyes, inches from her face.
Above her, the long windows deepened from blue to black. Outside, the sounds of steam engines and people in the streets dwindled.
“Sefi, will you sing?” It was the little boy who’d hidden in the stove; Susan tried to remember his name and couldn’t. “Like you did last rally day?”
Beside Espin, Sefi yawned. “I’m tired.”
“Just one. I don’t like to sleep after slashers. Please, Sefi?”
A long pause, and finally Sefi sighed. “Just one. You choose.”
The little boy thought a minute. Then Susan heard him say, “I don’t know. A rally song, how ’bout?”
“Yes,” someone else said. “Those are always the best.”
Sefi cleared her throat and sang:
“The useless brought the change and still
They suck you dry — they always will.
No better than a plague are these
So treat them as you would disease.”
Susan gave a start. The song went on, ending with the words she had heard from Liyla:
“Give them a gift, they’ll pay you double,
In the only coin they know — that’s trouble.”
“How could you sing that?” Nell asked in the darkness. “That’s awful!”
An uncomfortable silence followed.
“It’s just a song.” There was an edge to Sefi’s voice when she said it. “And they’re all like that, aren’t they?”
Omet’s voice came from across the room.
“It’s a nice tune, Sefi,” she said soothingly. “No harm in it.”
But Nell wouldn’t let it go. “But there is!” she said, propping herself up on her elbow. “How could you say there isn’t?”
For another long moment, the silence stretched. Susan rolled over and tried to see Omet, but the room was only full of dark mounds.
“I don’t know,” the girl said after a while. “It’s just a story they tell, like all the others. Discards brought the change, sleepers turn to slashers, you know. I couldn’t tell you what’s true. Once heard a story that it was dark magics brought the change, and wicked magicians with books of evil. It’s all just village tales.”
Espin laughed softly in the dark. “Wicked magics,” he said. “I heard that one. But my ma told me that’s just what the useless say. She said that before she was useless herself, of course.”
Susan thought of the woman she’d seen in the shed. She wondered if that was Espin’s mother.
Modo, who’d bedded down near Omet, laughed at this. “What books, anyway? Where are they, then?”
“Maybe in the ruins,” Yali said from beside Susan. “I heard they were burned to ash there in the first wars.”
“Village tales,” Omet said again. “Only way books bring the change is by being useless, and the only books I ever saw were the red cloak law book and the farming rules given out by the Purity. Those aren’t dark magics.”
“I had one of those!” someone else said delightedly. “I almost made the patrol, too, before my da went sleepy. Always wanted to.”
“I was in it,” Modo said. “And it was nice. I liked the fruit picking. Weekly harvest. It helped at home. But then, you know, my sister came, and they pushed me out. Still love the songs, though.”
Omet laughed again, softer this time. “See that, Sefi? Modo loves the songs, too.”
But Sefi was already asleep, snoring softly on her pile of rags.
Outside, the moon had risen, and through the windows, the dark shimmered with the ghost of it, strands of silky light that caught the dust. It was too quiet for a city, Susan decided. There was no hum of machinery, no distant honking cars, only the occasional shout or bark of a dog far away.
Red cloaks, she reminded herself. Patrolling. Her mind began to play tricks on her, and though she knew it couldn’t be, the city stretched out all around her, swallowing the world, swallowing even her own home, everything familiar and normal and known. It was impossibly big, so big she wanted to fold herself into a small space and hide from it. It’s not that big, she told herself. It’s not even as big as a city back home. I bet it’s not.
And yet the world suddenly did feel bigger. Too big. Not in miles or meters or acres or any of the other familiar measurements, but in strangeness. She knew that even her own world was bigger in that way than she typically liked to believe. She reflected now that the place she called home was really very small. It was comforting that way. The bigness of it existed only in books, where the ugliness could be put away when you were done. She looked around at the sleeping children: dirty, bruised, hungry. Their world was so big, it had eaten them up. So big, they couldn’t put it away, ever. Susan thought about what it would be like to be them, to be trapped here forever. She shuddered.
Across in the dark, Jean stirred. “Max,” she whispered, “write me a letter about going home.”
Max groaned sleepily, and there was such a long pause that Susan thought he must be dozing, but after another second, he murmured, “Dear Jean, We’re going home in the morning. Now, try to sleep. Your brother, Max.”
Jean exhaled softly, satisfied, and Susan thought, We’re going home in the morning, and the world will be right sized again.
In the morning Omet pressed a sack on them before they went. Susan peered into it and found a bit of the
