against the flagstones. Occasionally she found a bowl or mug that was chipped but otherwise intact, and would bend to retrieve it and set it carefully aside.
“Who are you saving that for?” I said, taking a dented mug from her hands. “They’re not coming back.”
“There will always be more children,” she said, resuming her sweeping.
“You think the Alphas will bring them here, now? It’s a war, Elsa. They’re all going to be tanked, from birth, if we can’t defeat the Council.”
No sound but the crunch of broken pottery and the broom’s scraping.
“You never told me the truth about your husband, because you didn’t want to endanger the children. Look around you.” I gestured at the empty courtyard; the shutters pulled off their hinges. “There are no children. They drowned them all. There’s nobody left to protect.”
She let the broom drop. The handle clattered on the flagstones as she stared at me.
“They took him,” she said. After all the day’s crying, her voice was as rough as the scrape of the broken plates on the floor. “You’ve guessed that much already. They came at night, four years ago. They took Joe, and then they turned the house upside down, ripped the whole place to pieces—slit open every mattress in the kids’ dormitory. Emptied every pot in the kitchen.”
“Did they find what they were looking for?”
“If they did, I didn’t see it,” she said. “They just left. Never said a word to me, even when I was screaming at them to tell me what was going on, where they’d taken him, and why.” She sniffed. “It’s funny what sticks in your mind. What you remember. When I think about that night, I always remember how it was my screaming that scared the children. They were used to seeing soldiers roughing people up—even back then, the kids knew not to expect any different from a red shirt. It was me losing it that frightened them. Nina did her best to keep them calm, but I set them off.” She looked down into her lap, where her hands were rubbing at each other.
“It was the soldiers’ fault, not yours,” I said. “They’d taken your husband and smashed up your home.”
“I know that.” She looked up. “And I knew as soon as they took Joe that they’d kill him. And they did.”
“How do you know?”
“I waited for weeks for news of him. Even went to the tithe collector’s office, to ask after him. The soldiers wouldn’t so much as let me up the steps. Wouldn’t tell me a thing. In the end I left the children with Nina and went to Joe’s twin’s village. It’s down near the coast, a long way west. It took me three weeks of walking. And it’s all Alpha country out that way, so it wasn’t easy. Forget about begging a bed for a night, even in a barn. More than once I had to hightail out of a village with stones coming after me. But you know me.” She laughed. It was hard to tell the noise from a sob. “I don’t give up easily.”
I tried to imagine how it must have been for her, walking into an Alpha village on her crooked legs, demanding answers.
“I’d never met his twin, of course—all I had was her name and the name of the village she and Joe were born in. Didn’t even know if she’d still be there.” She looked out the window. “Well, she was—but six feet under the village green. Flowers planted on the grave; a nice headstone and everything.”
She had never been given her own husband’s body back to bury. I thought of Kip again, his body on the silo floor.
“The people in his village just wanted me gone—but I made a nuisance of myself, hung around the outskirts, trying to get somebody to talk to me. Some were threatening to call the soldiers to get me to clear off, but in the end I guess they figured it was easier just to tell me what I needed to know. She’d died a month before, they said. As close as I could figure it, it was a few days after they took him.” She fell silent. Her lips were pressed tightly together, her chin betraying the slightest quiver.
“It wasn’t quick.” Her voice had dropped low, each word pulled from her mouth like a tooth. “That’s what they said: that she started screaming, and didn’t stop for two days.” She looked up at me. “Joe made a lot