“What’s on your mind, Willa?” Beau asks.
Crinkling her face, she looks his way. “How do you do that?”
He chuckles softly, then says, “You’re twitchy when you think too hard.”
“I am not!”
“Oh, you are. You absolutely are.” The smile fades and he gazes at her more seriously. “What is it?”
She can’t look at him. It’s too embarrassing. Entirely too embarrassing. Instead, she looks at her hands, picking at the dirt that’s become embedded in the seams and crevices. Their rainwater shower doesn’t really do much for their hands.
How to start? Get it over with? Just blurt it out? What?
Clearing her throat, she says, “We had a meeting after you left on the run.”
“About the food situation, of course.”
She does look at him now and what she sees is kindness and interest. Patience. Beau is a genuinely good person.
“Yes, but also about you.” His brow furrows, but he says nothing, only nodding once to show that he’s listening. “Well, uh…here’s the thing. They, uh…” She trails off, swallowing hard enough that her throat clicks.
“It’s okay Willa. Just tell me.”
This is making it worse. She should just get it over with. Rapidly, almost without breathing between words, she says, “I wanted to talk about finding you a better place to winter because of your joints and they all agreed with that, but then they said they wanted babies and that was that and they told me I had to ask you.”
It came out as one long, semi-coherent sentence, so it takes Beau a minute to catch up. The moment he does, his eyebrows rise almost to his hairline. “Babies? What?”
Her cheeks flaming, Willa points to Ellie on the other side of the fire. The young woman is dozing, her back against a log and a pile of half-finished mending in her lap. “Some of them want babies. In case this keeps on, we’ll need more people in the world.”
Beau sits up straight, his breath coming out in a huff. He’s confused. Willa can see that like it’s written on his face. Eventually, he gives a little shake of his head and says, “I’m an old man!”
Shrugging, Willa says, “I guess some of them are afraid that whatever is causing the Dying could come from men, but they’ve been around you and are fine. They think that means you’re safe. It’s silly, but there you have it.”
Waving a hand at the camp around them, he says, “This is no place to try and have a baby. No place at all.”
“Well, I wouldn’t do it, for sure,” she says, then adds, “but this is exactly the kind of place that most of human history was born. Millions of years of babies. And we have the advantage of understanding the perils, which means we can stop most of those perils from happening.”
He snorts, but Willa can see he’s thinking. She can also see his reluctance. She waits.
Eventually, he shifts on the log to face her. “I understand and sympathize, but let me be honest with you. I think of all of you as family. I couldn’t…you know…”
She grins, her teeth a flash of white in the firelight. “Oh, don’t worry about that. They have a list of things they need from out there to do the deeds. It might be unconventional, but it will get the job done.”
The face Beau makes is priceless, but he doesn’t object. That’s something.
Miranda
As the snow falls in a heavy blanket over London, she watches the house-to-house searches below. The attic is cold, and her breath steams into the air. Her layers of blankets trap just enough warmth for her to tolerate this hiding place.
The authorities have finally gotten their acts together enough to conduct this search. She’s lucky that her house is registered to the company where she’s employed. Otherwise, she’d be in real trouble. Tom has done his best to make the house appear as if ready for the next company guest and has vacated back to his own home for the time being.
Because this house isn’t registered to a woman, their search is perfunctory. They’re looking for any missed bodies, of course, but also for living women in hiding. They didn’t come to the attic. The access is in a closet, one now piled high with boxes of linens, comforters, and other things for winter. It gives the impression that this house wasn’t prepared for the change in seasons, that no one has been in residence since the summer.
They’re also lucky that Tom is able to make his way around the city as much as anyone can now. He heard about the searches long before they reached this area. Carefully, they removed all the window coverings, tossed sheets over the furniture, and emptied the kitchen. Tom has been bringing her food when he can, but she’s been up here for days. She can’t risk moving about downstairs and leaving evidence of someone in residence. It must be allowed to get dusty downstairs.
He brought food that was already prepared and because it’s so cold, nothing spoils. Some of it even has a crunchy covering of icy crystals when she eats. She was even forced to drink a little water from each of the bottles stashed up here. They had started freezing and one of them burst before she realized the problem. It’s that cold. It hasn’t been a fun three days.
It’s been worth it though. Finally, the day is here and she remains unfound, her house searched and marked like all the other empty houses on the street.
They did find one woman, one that Miranda and Tom knew was there. Like Miranda, she looks out of the windows only at night, her shadow daintier than her husband’s. There was no dragging her
