The Final Trade Read Free Page B

“There’s nothing—”
    “After dinner,” Ian interrupts, standing to retrieve the dripping birds from over the fire. “First we eat.”

    The grouse is perfectly done and Zoey has to restrain herself from eating more than her share. After ten days of subsisting on cold meals out of cans, dried jerky, and water, the warm dinner is luxurious. When they’re finished, the rest of the group begins to clean up while Zoey leads Sherell and Rita into the addition that consists of four new rooms, three of which are theirs. The bedrooms are simple and not entirely finished. There is still insulating to do, locks to be installed, more camouflage to be added, but each is a space of their own that reflects their personas: Sherell’s walls plastered with her drawings, Rita’s table stacked with books, her appetite for reading almost as voracious as Zoey’s. But her own room is less adorned than those of the other women, a little bleaker, and she realizes that it mirrors her better than she thought. Regardless, the rooms are so much different than the cold, impersonal quarters they lived in at the ARC.
    Prison cells ,Zoey thinks as they enter her room. Call them what they were. Sherell and Rita take positions on the modest bed that Ian constructed out of scrap lumber while Zoey sits on a chair in the corner of the room.
    For a second they are silent, merely looking at one another before Zoey says, “I know I don’t have to ask either of you what you want to do because you feel the same as I do. But there’s something to think about before we make a decision. This really is no longer their fight. They’ve taken us in, fed us, protected us, and now we’re asking them to put themselves in danger again. It isn’t fair, especially to Tia and Chelsea. They’d be hunted the same as us the moment someone saw them.”
    The other women seem to digest this before Sherell says, “I don’t want them to have to go, but we need them if we’re going to get there.” She adjusts her dark hair behind her ear. “It’s funny. I shouldn’t care about people I’ve never really known before. I don’t remember my parents at all. Can’t bring up their faces or the sound of their voices, nothing. By all rights they’re probably dead, but . . .” She shrugs. “I can’t get away from that feeling. That need to know. It’s there every day like a bruise that doesn’t heal.”
    The room grows quiet again except for the slight hiss of wind that sneaks into and out of the rooms through the cracks in the walls. There is so much work to do here. There is life in this place. Potential. They could stay here, forget the past completely and forge ahead. Always remember you already have a family you’ll never have to go looking for .
    But Sherell’s words are still there, hovering in Zoey’s mind like a fog.
    “My mother has a scar over her right eyebrow,” Rita says, jolting Zoey from her thoughts. Rita stares at the floor between her feet. “I remember touching it once, tracing the line. It was like an L laid on its side. I asked her where she’d gotten it and she told me to be quiet. I think maybe my father had hit her. She wasn’t pretty. She had big hands and a wide forehead like mine. But I thought she was beautiful and that the scar only added to it.” Rita looks up and Zoey is surprised to see a shine to her eyes. “I think that’s maybe why I was so angry all the time before. Because I envied everyone who couldn’t remember anything. If you’ve never had it, how can you miss it, right?” She looks down at her hands. “Halie and Grace were like that. No memories of where they came from, so they were in no hurry for their induction. I’m not sure if they even minded being at the ARC. Halie asked me to walk around the promenade with her one day, a year before her ceremony, and I spit on her. She was just trying to be nice, but I was so angry at everyone because each day that passed was a day I couldn’t get back to the