his hat and bent at the waist to receive her kiss.
“God, you stink already,” she laughed, wrinkling her nose. “That’s your last one for the day, I’m afraid.” Then: “So, should I tell you to be careful?”
It was what they always said. “If you want.”
“Well, then. Be careful.”
Nit and Siri had wandered into the tent. Bits of grass were caught in their hair and the weave of their jumpers. Like puppies who’d been rolling around in the dirt.
“Hug your father, girls.”
Vorhees knelt and took them into his arms as a warm bundle. “Be good for Mommy, all right? I’ll be back for lunch.”
“We’re each other’s buddies,” Siri proclaimed.
He brushed the grass from their sweat-dampened hair. Sometimes just the sight of them moved him to a rush of love that actually brought tears to his eyes. “Of course you are. Just remember what your uncle Cruk told you. Stay where Mommy can see you.”
“Carson says there are monsters in the field,” Siri said. “Monsters who drink blood.”
Vorhees darted his eyes to Dee, who shrugged. It wasn’t the first time the subject had come up.
“Well, he’s wrong,” he told them. “He’s trying to scare you, playing a joke.”
“Then why do we have to stay out of the field?”
“Because those are the rules.”
“Do you promise?”
He did his best to smile. Vorhees and Dee had agreed to keep this matter vague as long as they could; and yet they both understood that they could not keep the girls in the dark forever.
“I promise.”
He hugged them again, each in turn and then together, and went to join his crew at the edge of the field. A wall of green six feet tall: the corn rows, a series of long hallways, receded to the windbreak. The sun had crossed an invisible border toward midday; nobody was talking. Vorhees checked his watch one last time. Watch the clock. Know the location of the nearest hardbox. When in doubt, run.
“All right, everybody,” he said, drawing on his gloves. “Let’s get this done.”
And with these words, together, they stepped into the field.
In a sense, they had all become who they were because of a single night—the last night of their childhood. Cruk, Vorhees, Boz, Dee: they ran together in a pack, their daily orbits circumscribed only by the walls of the city and the watchful eyes of the sisters, who ran the school, and the DS, who ran everything else. A time of gossip, of rumor, of stories traded in the dust. Dirty faces, dirty hands, the four of them lingering in the alley behind their quarters on the way home from school. What was the world? Where was the world, and when would they see it? Where did their fathers go, and sometimes their mothers as well, returning to them smelling of work and duty and mysterious concerns? The outside, yes, but how was it different from the city? What did it feel like, taste like, sound like? Why, from time to time, did someone, a mother or a father, leave, never to return, as if the unseen realm beyond the walls had the power to swallow them whole? Dopeys, dracs, vampires, jumps: they knew the names but did not feel the full weight of their meanings. There were dracs, which were the meanest, which were the same thing as jumps or vampires (a word only old people used); and there were dopeys, which were similar but not the same. Dangerous, yes, but not as much, more like a nuisance on the order of scorpions or snakes. Some said that dopeys were dracs that had lived too long, others that they were a different sort of creature altogether. That they had never been human at all.
Which was another thing. If the virals had once been people like them, how had they become what they were?
But the greatest story of all was the great Niles Coffee: Colonel Coffee, founder of the Expeditionary, fearless men who crossed the world to fight and die. Coffee’s origins, like everything about him, were cloaked in myth. He was a thirdling, raised by the sisters; he was an orphan of the Easter Incursion of 38 who had watched his parents die; he was a straggler who had appeared at the gate one day, a boy warrior dressed in skins, carrying a severed viral head on a pike. He had killed a hundred virals singlehandedly, a thousand, ten thousand; the number always grew. He never set foot inside the city; he walked among them dressed