said. “I’ve always wanted to see how you do it anyway.”
Sequestered in the shadow of the largest windmill in Elysium, inside a makeshift mud-brick igloo, almost as big as a house, was what I’d come for. The Dowsing Well: the salvation of Elysium. Mother Morevna had divined it herself, and we’d built the walls around it: the holy water that would never run dry. Once a week, I came to the Dowsing Well to trade Lucy a bucketful of water for a week’s worth of rations. That way, I wouldn’t have to see Trixie or her aunt and uncle at all if I didn’t want to.
I hugged my bucket close to me, and we sneaked over to the door.
It was locked, of course, but I pulled a hairpin out of my hair and went to work.
“Jesus,” Lucy said. “You’re a lock picker too?”
“Do you want this water or not?”
It clicked open, and Lucy and I went inside. It was dark without a lamp, so Lucy struck a match from her pocket. There on the cool ground was a circular door. I opened it and looked down into the circle of darkness. Even through my broken nose, I could smell the slightly mineral, sulfuric tang of deep well water.
I seized the nearby rope and pulley and attached my bucket. Then I lowered it down into the darkness until I felt it hit water and sink. Then I pulled up, up, up, until it emerged from the darkness, full of cool water. I heaved it into my arms, and it sloshed against my dusty skin as I handed the bucket to Lucy.
She kept watch as I covered the hatch and locked the door.
“Shoot,” Lucy said. “I left the rations back at my house.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Just bring them tomorrow.”
“It’s just toward the Square. Come with me and I’ll give them to you. Unless you’ve got something important to do.”
“Nah, I can come,” I said.
We weaved back through the houses in the strip where the east and west sides met. We passed the little brick building where Mr. Truman lived and taught piano, then the little wood house where one of the German families (“them Krauts from down Shattuck” as a boy in my class had once said) made homemade schnapps. We passed the dust mask factory, the clothing factory, and, last, the enormous, stinking chicken coop, where the chickens slept fitfully, wondering if tomorrow would be the day they became dinner. All was quiet. All was still.
Suddenly, Lucy stopped.
I followed her gaze. There in the darkness lay a squarish plank-board house. Unlike the other houses, it had not been hung with Mourning Night banners. One window was broken. Bottles and dead weed-flowers sat, dusty and undisturbed, in front of the door.
The Robertson house.
No one talked about what had happened there four years ago, but it didn’t matter. We all remembered. That was when everything had begun to go downhill. It all started when Mrs. Rosales died and left her two girls in the care of their stepfather, James Robertson. He was a nice, smiling guard who was known for things like giving up rations to families with sick children and building houses for people who had never had houses before. And even though it was a shame that the Rosales girls’ mother was dead, we couldn’t imagine a better father for them.
The girls themselves, however, were a different matter.
Both of them were older than I was, fifteen and seventeen when I had been twelve, but I remembered them. Especially Olivia, the younger of the two. After her mother died, she began acting up at school, starting fights, stealing rations. She had often been seen going to and from the church—getting a talking-to from Mr. Jameson or Mother Morevna, probably. As for the older sister, Rosalita, she was rarely seen, even in those days. What was the point of a girl that slow going to school, after all? people said.
There hadn’t been any crime at all in Elysium since the walls went up. Aside from my mother’s death, the first six years of Elysium had seemed almost dreamlike. Everyone, no matter their color or gender, had gotten along. Everyone had believed in Mother Morevna’s new, equal society, and if they hadn’t, no one had dared say anything. But then, one morning four years ago, Mr. Robertson’s corpse was found lying in the dust in the Square outside the church. He was spread-eagled, his throat slit. The words ?Me oyes ahora? had been