He told her about water supplies and where relief was most likely to be set up. It all sounded plausibly first-hand.
She said, Did you come down that way?
I been all over.
You ever see Agency using barracks like that?
He rolled his shoulders back, wincing at some twinge. I couldn’t tell you, Li. I don’t go visiting bases for the happy memories.
Safia came over. Good luck, Li, she said, I hope you find her.
Li nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak and after a minute Safia went back to the group and the gear she was sorting and distributing. Li wondered if she’d find a way to take a percentage. In makecamp Safia had always found a way to set herself in the middle of things and get people to work the angles for her.
You know she’s most of the reason you’re walking around now, Rich said. Condition you were in, you wouldn’t have been any use to your kid.
She couldn’t deny what he was saying. And maybe there was something wrong with her that she didn’t see it like he did. But she wondered if he saw the other possibility: that Safia had protected Li, protected her hands, because she needed a phone. And while Safia was waiting to get her phone, Matti had been processed and put on a bus.
He hauled up the shutter. You should get out of here before Adam gets back. He’ll wrestle that pistol off you and then he’ll pistol-whip me for giving it away.
The punchline was in his body this time, in the ease that said he could kill Adam bare-handed without breaking a sweat. Nearly made her smile.
Walking out of the factory, she thought that it wasn’t Safia she’d been lucky with, it was Rich. And that probably she should have said it. Then a wind from the north-east carried the bitter burnt smell of makecamp, and she forgot him.
In the Nerredin hotel, three nights after the fire, people had talked quietly in corners or listened to the radio, or slept. Some of them had had time to take their own bedding from their own houses. Beer was on tap but no one was drinking much. Stitch, the Janovich’s dog, moved among them, pausing to be greeted.
The Janovich twins, Toby and Jay, were playing pool. No one had told them to go to bed and Matti had sat up late watching, hovering in case they let her have a turn. Now she was asleep on a mattress at their feet and they stepped around her, maintaining the irregular thock and clunk of their game.
Li and Frank sat near them at the bar. Li was drinking whiskey for the first time in years, but not enough to dull the clean lines of movement in her head – the route she was mapping, the things they needed and how to get them. Frank was carving something out of an olive branch he’d brought back from their grove that afternoon, walking among the charred trees until he found one the fire had only licked over. Already a shape was emerging under the borrowed knife.
He looked up at her, the drink in her hand, at the half-full bar. Huge Wednesday night, eh?
You keep saying how I never take you anywhere.
He grinned, went back to it. Last Saturday’s paper lay unopened on the bar beside her. Government promises ‘robust discussion’ with XB precincts over quotas. She sketched the highway south over the sports section, the distance between towns, the bores she remembered. Three hundred k to Valiant, give or take. She’d never been there – it hadn’t been on the circuit. Didn’t know Frank’s sister either. Teresa had moved down to the city before Li met him. They’d have to walk in the cooler hours, build in rest days for Matti. She figured two weeks, two and a half.
They news came on the radio. Kit went behind the bar and turned it up. The situation was still unpredictable, fireballs to the north and east. Most people with vehicles had already gone. The rest were staying put for now, waiting for the DES to give the all-clear. At least here there was nothing left to burn.
He said, She’s going to be cranky as shit in the morning.
Maybe she’ll just wake up and start playing pool again. What are we going to feed her?
More kelp? I think those three already ate all the crackers. He held the wood away, considering. Did you see when she tried to sink one and she whacked Toby in the nuts with the other end?
Nerredin’s finished, Li said. Nobody’s coming to fix it, nobody’s coming back.
He looked at her like she was incomprehensible. Don’t make it sound like nothing. This is our home. Hers and mine anyway.
Li looked away, focused on Matti, sleeping bag thrown off, limbs starfished. One hand gripped the balled-up tea towel Frank had put there to stop her reaching for Goldie in her sleep. When she looked back at him she could see that he was sorry but what he said was, Why is it so easy for you? He meant, to uproot, to walk away. He was asking if she’d ever really been attached. And she didn’t know. Because now that there was nothing to hold onto, it didn’t feel that different. Maybe she felt relieved that he had to carry this with her now, instead of her carrying it alone in preparation.
Blunt fucken knife, he said.
She looked at the gouge in the wood, watched him start, patiently, to fix it. Matti’s room had been full of Frank’s small, strange animals. The accumulation of all her seven years.
Kit Janovich came down the bar to check their drinks, a burn dressing on her bare arm.
