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She doesn’t answer and I can feel a question floating in the weighted air. A motorcycle engine backfires in the distance. “I’m good with plants.”
“Hm.” She considers.
I lean forward onto the tips of my toes. I hand over the jars and watch her open one then the other. She nods and pockets both.
“Lemme see the rabbits.” I hand the meat over. “You got the skins?”
Fuck. “I’ve got one skin.” I traded one and used the other already.
“Good stuff, but that’s not enough,” the woman says. “If you’re good with plants, you could work here for a month as payment. Otherwise, no dice.” She snorts as she reads the expression on my face. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Anyway, good luck. Thanks for the oil.” She takes a step back and starts to close the door.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be this bold, but this is a desperate day. I shove my hand against the door, blocking it from slapping shut. The cardboard scrap against my hand is dry this time, making me think mad thoughts about lotion.Six weeks without lotion is a death sentence. If I don’t survive today, please send me to a heaven where there’s tubs of lotion big enough to bathe in.
“You can have my boots.”
She jerks back, recoiling like I punched her in the chin. “Your boots?”
“Yes.”
She pokes her head outside and glances around, like this is a trap. And it is. But I don’t tell her that.
Outside where the harsh, fluorescent blue light can’t quite reach, I can see her a little more clearly. She’s bundled in rags, most of which are black. A mask shields the bottom half of her face and she’s got on goggles — likely for the blue light — that stick out of her head like bulbous eyeballs. Tufts of short, ragged white-blonde hair shoot out of her headband that looks almost…clean? But most surprising? She’s got a gun slung across her chest and she points it around at me and at the trash surrounding me.
I flinch and don’t manage to stifle my gasp. I’ve seen two guns in my whole life and both were in the hands of Alphas. I’ve never seen a Beta scavenger with a gun before and immediately, my mind fires with questions. No, just one question… Where’d she get it? It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask, but at the last moment, I manage to restrain myself. It won’t get me anywhere, asking her about that gun and, more likely than not, I don’t want to know the answer.
She lifts her goggles. Under her dirt-streaked face, she’s white. She has green eyes and right now, they’re ringed in red prints from her goggles. They make her look funny, but I don’t laugh. “What are you?”
“Just a Beta on my own.”
“The fuck you are.” She reaches out and grabs me by the jaw, pulling my facemask down. She tilts my chin up to the blue light and inspects me for the longest moments of my life because, in the background, I can hear sounds…new sounds…sounds that I know aren’t a motorcycle backfiring, even though I tell myself again and again that’s all they are…gunshots. The Alphas have converged. The fight to find me has begun…
“Shit. You reek,” she hisses.
I rip my chin out of her grip. “I’ve been scavenging.”
The woman looks at me more closely, leans in and sniffs. “You’ve been doing more than that.” She pushes me back and takes a step away from me, pointing the tip of her gun at my chest. “Can’t get a good scent on you underneath all thatperfumeyou’re wearing, but you’re pretty underneath all them rags. Too pretty. And not damn near skinny enough to be a scavenger.”
“I’m a good hunter.” I am. It’s how I’ve survived at all. “And a better gatherer. I know what plants to eat and what not to eat. I could teach…”
“That don’t explain the way you look. Brown skin, dark freckles like you’ve been lying out in the sun.”
“What sun?” I sneer. Everyone knows there’s only sunshine in the cities and sometimes, not even then. Never in Dark City, which is the closest one.
She ignores me. “And that red hair? Nah.” She shakes her head. “If you were serious about convincing me you were a scavenger, you’d have cut it off. You stand out like a damn tulip in all this trash.”
I clench, but try not to show it. I keep breathing in and out through my mouth, itching to pull my mask back into place — both because I don’t like the way she’s looking at me and also because of the smell. I’ve never smelled so horrible. And she’s right. Ishouldhave cut off my hair. Should have tried to darken it somehow. The startling red color is a weird combination with my light brown skin tone — at least that’s what November and other folks at the compound used to say. But I never had much, and I like my hair, as red and as puffy and matted and tangled as it is. It’smine…and if she takes my trade, it’ll be one of the only things I have left.
The woman grunts and shoves me back. “You should get outta here. They might mistake you for…”
“I’m not,” I tell her, but my voice catches.
When she smirks, my heart performs a circus inside my chest to an audience of organs. They all feel too small, shrunken and desiccated, like the rest of me. But they keep working. They keep fighting.
She shakes her head. “Clever, but not clever enough.”
She cocks her chin to dismiss me just as a violent roar fills the air. Her hand flinches on her gun, startling me, and that’s when it comes to me. A final act of desperation, so much bolder than I knew myself capable of.
“I’m not leaving. You’re going to have to shoot me.”
