I can use a phone.
We’re going to need your help first.
Li focused on this woman she knew the same way everyone in makecamp had known her, through trade. Safia had given her credit on ready meals when she and Matti first got to makecamp. She said, I need to use the phone.
Not yet.
They’d got her out alive, treated her with medicine they could have traded. Drugs that had stopped her seeing what was obvious. She kept her eyes on Safia.
Phone doesn’t work, does it?
Safia didn’t flinch. Adam found it on a salvage run. We think it’s patchable.
Li had done a few patches for her in the first weeks in makecamp, mostly phones and radios, to clear her debt. Then three men had come to her tent. One of them took Matti outside while the others explained that patching was already staked out and she was interfering with trade.
Who would I call?
There were some older kids in makecamp who had a phone.
Safia must have seen in Li’s face how unlikely this sounded.
They kept it quiet. Mostly rented storage in the shop, but they had it when XB Force came in. We saw them get put on the buses to holding. I can give you the number.
If I patch.
If you patch.
Li’s head was clearing and the whole deal felt thin, stitched together. They needed her till she patched the phone. How did she know anything on the other side of that was true? What if holding was bullshit and Matti was still waiting right where she was supposed to, back at the Kids’ Tent?
I want to see makecamp first.
Safia shook her head. She’s not there, Li. Nobody’s there.
Rich said, Camp’s finished, you understand? They demolished it. Bulldozers, the whole thing.
I understand. Did you see my daughter get on a bus?
Rich sighed.
Then I’ll start at the camp, Li said.
She remembered the early dark. The two of them zipped in together, Li’s body cupping Matti’s, the sleeping bag tangled around them. Smell of mould and her own sour breath.
She listened to makecamp waking – tent zips tugging down, quiet prayers, radios, someone pissing in the dirt close by, footsteps and low voices in multiple languages as people joined the food queue.
Matti said, I miss Dad. He always woke us up.
It felt like a slap. Matti hadn’t talked about Frank since the night they left Valiant, huddled together in the crush on the deck of the fishing boat. Almost two months.
Ask me what else do I miss.
What else do you miss?
Matti breathed, thinking. His voice. And the fun stuff we used to do, like when he swang me round and round and threw me on the couch. And when we played the Best Place, like if I rolled a five or a three or something, he always gave me chances.
Harder not to remember in the dark. Matti scrambling up off the couch and launching herself onto Frank. We’re gunna wrestle and there’s no Stop It!
Li rolled away and tugged down the zipper, letting the cold in. Come on. Breakfast.
They waited in the queue while it got light and then they kept waiting. The kitchen van was relief-run on donations, but there was no movement from inside yet. There wasn’t always food. She was worried about Matti’s toes and fingers, the raw spots on her skin, about the small bones she could trace in her back. You couldn’t see them under the oversized jacket but she’d felt them in the dark. The cold season had barely started and already it was hard to stand for this long. How bad would it be here in a month? Li saw how Matti leaned forward slightly, leading from her nose. Their place in the line was okay – they should get millet, maybe beans too – but there was the queue and then there was everyone around the queue. She was tense all the time watching them, especially the younger men, trying to gauge who she could face down. She held her body stiff, elbows ready, and tried to cover all the angles.
Do you know how seconds work? Matti asked, looking up at her. So, you count to sixty and when you get to sixty it’s not seconds anymore, it’s one minute! And then you keep counting and it’s seconds again! And when you count to however many minutes are in an hour, it’s hours!
Eight years and two weeks old. When you taught your kid at home, around everything else, it was easy for things to slip. Matti had learned time here in makecamp, where the days kept passing and passing and nothing happened.
Makecamp was an unsanctioned waiting room between unshelter and shelter. It came and went – set up, got cleared out, resurrected itself as close to the XB as possible, on the unused scraps of land that floated between Port Howell’s jurisdiction and Sumud’s. It was somewhere people could get to.
This makecamp had lasted fourteen months. It had its own newspaper in five languages. There were communal cooking areas and portable toilets, three food shacks and a bakery, the ready shop for basic supplies, places to rent tools, get a haircut or a translation or a bucket shower. There were prayer tents, koffee shops, a library van. All the usual Trade services at inflated prices but there were relief groups that came and went too, blurring the line between what you had to pay for and what you could get for free.
The camp hugged Sumud’s perimeter fence, always in sight of the highway where trucks carried goods to and from the unsheltered regions, through a checkpoint about fifty k south of Port Howell. The checkpoint was the only official break in the fence and it was guarded twenty-four hours by XB Force. Come too close on foot and you risked getting detained or shot. Every truck was searched. Driver IDs and customs paperwork vetted, cargo checked, undercarriage swept for jumpers.
From the checkpoint the highway ran inland through the No Go, straight to the XB’s southern gate.
Li
