Page 24
Maven’s place is less a hut than a disassembled greenhouse, every panel scavenged from other, less lucky structures. Plastic sheeting hangs loose from the frame, giving the impression that it could collapse at the first sign of wind. Inside, the walls are lined with glass jars: some filled with seeds, some with powders, some with things that move when you’re not looking. The air is heavy with a fermenting, rooty funk, like a compost heap in midsummer.
Maven’s silhouette moves in the dim, packing small bags and talking to themselves in a muttered rhythm. I’m early, but they don’t seem surprised. “Good timing,” Maven says, shoving a satchel across the table. “You’ll need these.”
I peer inside: half a loaf of ration bread, two water canisters, a roll of thick mesh. “Planning on us getting lost?”
“Planning on us getting home,” Maven says, then zips the satchel shut and hands it over. “We go on foot. Quietly.”
We leave through a service gap in the perimeter wall, ducking under a fence patched with strips of old seatbelt. The air outside is cold and thin, the sky above blank but for the distant shimmer of aurora—only, here, the color is sickly, oscillating between blue and yellow with an undercurrent of something deeper.
The walk is short. The “old woman” lives on the edge of the far sector, in a shack that started life as a shipping container and has since accreted a skin of scavenged insulation, tarps, and welded steel mesh. The approach is silent but for the crunch of our boots. When we’re close, Maven slows, then halts.
“You should know,” Maven whispers, “she’s not right in the head.”
“I guessed,” I whisper back.
They glance at me. “No, I mean—she’ll see you. The real you. Don’t say anything you can’t unsay.”
We step forward, and I hear the voices before I see the speakers. In the strip of weeds outside the shack, two men in Authority vests are smoking and watching the perimeter. They see us and immediately look away, as if ashamed to be standing guard over a legend.
I catch a snippet as we pass:
“—crazy old witch—”
“—makes up so much shit—”
“—says she’s the only one who remembers—”
Maven shoots me a look, half warning, half apology, and we knock twice on the container door.
Inside, the light is a chaos of candles and scavenged LEDs, every surface layered with clutter: stacks of handwritten notes, jars of cloudy fluid, bones and feathers and old radio components. At the far end, perched on a makeshift throne of crates, is the old woman.
Elara looks like she’s been half-mummified by spite and the other half by nicotine. Her hair is brittle and white, the ends sharp as needles. Her eyes are whited out by cataracts, the pupils barely visible. But when she turns her head, the effect is like a sonar ping—she locks onto you with a precision that makes you wonder if she can see more than she lets on.
She speaks before I can introduce myself. “So you’re the one who fixed the water.”
I don’t bother to deny it. “Yes.”
She licks her lips, and I see that her teeth are mostly gone. “Maven says you have the hands of a surgeon and the mind of a bomb.”
Maven flushes at the compliment, then stands off to the side, leaving me in the line of fire.
Elara gestures at a bucket. “Sit, then. Let me look at you.”
I sit. The bucket’s rim digs into the backs of my thighs, but I keep my posture rigid. She leans in close, so close I can smell her breath—a fetid mix of tobacco, yeast, and something like menthol.
She brings up a hand, bony and veined, and traces the line of my jaw with one finger. Her touch is gentle, almost reverent. She finds the RadShield pendant and flicks it with a fingernail. The blue pulse shifts, then resumes its steady rhythm.
“Touched by the Protocol,” she whispers, almost to herself.
I draw back. “What does that mean?”
Elara laughs, a sound like old paper tearing. “Means they got to you. Or you got to them. You still see the patterns, even after the rest is gone.”
I try not to react, but she doesn’t miss a thing.
“Why do you think you’re here?” she asks, settling back on her crate. “You think it’s luck, or fate, or just the random churn of bodies in the Zone?”
I don’t answer. She waves the silence away. “It’s the First Forgetting,” she says, as if that explains everything. “They ran the pilot years before the Zone was even built. A little test, a little mind-wipe, just to see what would stick.” She looks at me, or through me. “What stuck in you?”
