Too Many Requests

It hadn't taken this world a day to work out what I was for. Same as every place before it: a spare pair of hands, and a yes that came too easy.

We carried the haul back up towards camp with the light going long and copper across the dunes, the heat of the day finally lifting off the ground, which it had never done back home. The tablecloths were over my shoulder; a fistful of stainless tongs and turners sat cold against my chest; the camp stools knocked Charles in the shins every other step, and he never once shifted his grip to fix it, because to fix it he'd have had to stop talking, and Charles stopping talking was not a thing this day had on offer. My arms had gone past aching into that loose, emptied feeling they get when you've been hauling for too long. I let them have it.

The plan was the simplest thing we'd had all day, and we both held it without a word passing: dump the lot by the fire, and get straight back down to the Portals before Beatrix came through with the chairs. Drop and go. That was the whole of it. After a day where the ground had shifted under everything I thought was fixed — a wall that turned out to be a door, a family walked through it into nowhere, stolen money sitting warm and unspent against my hip — I'd let myself want one small thing to go the plain way I'd set it.

Dad stopped a few yards short of the fire pit and frowned down at the load in his arms. Something he'd left half-done had caught him up; I saw it land, the small backward pull of remembering, an open line on a list he kept whether anyone asked him to or not. He'd been the same all day.

"I never checked the Drop Zone for more camping gear," he said. "Stoves. Lamps. We'll want lamps once it's properly dark." He said it looking at the sky. He wasn't wrong about the lamps. None of us knew yet what this particular night was going to be.

Charles went still beside me, and I felt my own stomach drop to meet his. The meeting with Beatrix was ours. It wasn't much, but in a day that had belonged to everyone else, it was the one hour that was going to belong to us. And I stood there with my arms full of tablecloths and watched it grow a chaperone in real time.

"We'll head down and meet Beatrix," I said, careful with it, setting my armful down by the fire so my hands had something to do that wasn't betraying me. "We can look for the lamps while we're there. Save you the walk." I kept my voice in the flat, useful register that had got me through twenty-one years of not being looked at too closely. It usually held.

"I'll come with you." No room in it at all.

I swallowed the groan. Charles didn't bother swallowing his; it came out of him loud and wounded and theatrical, the full performance, the one he'd been giving since before he could properly talk. Dad looked between the two of us. I couldn't tell from his face whether he was halfway to giving in or halfway to digging in — with Dad the two come wearing the same stillness, the held quiet of a sum that won't fall out clean. I'd have put even money on either. And then the world settled it for him.

A voice came across the camp.

"Noah."

A man came towards us through the tents, unhurried, his eyes on Dad with the plain certainty of someone making for a face he knows. I didn't know him — which here still meant nearly everyone — but I had him half-sized before I'd meant to. I do that with anything that moves into range; people are no exception. The brown was worked deep into his forearms, the dust gone pale in the creases of them. He carried himself easy in his own weight, nothing to prove to the dirt or to us, and his eyes went over the camp in a slow unhurried sweep as he came — reading it, I thought, much the same as I'd been reading him. Outdoors his whole life, by the look. A man the sun had stopped being weather to a long time back. Whatever else he was, he hadn't come to make work. He'd come because there was work, and it didn't trouble him.

"That's Chris," Charles said, low, at my shoulder.

The name meant nothing to me. "Who?"

"Karen's husband."

"How do you know that?" Charles had been in this world less time than me, and somehow he already had names hung on people I'd not so much as nodded to.

He only shrugged, pleased with himself, and didn't tell me. That was Charles all over. He gathers people up without trying and without noticing he's done it, then turns round one day with every name in the room already filed away — while I'm still in the doorway working out the lie of the land. Same blood, the pair of us, and not one instinct in common.

Dad's whole face opened. "Chris." He had the man's hand in both of his and shook it with a warmth that ran a good mile past the acquaintance — they'd met that morning, if that, and you'd never have known it to look at them. I understood it well enough. A familiar-enough face was worth holding with both hands out here; Dad had lost a whole world of them before lunch, and was making the new ones count double to fill the gap. And I understood, too, what Chris had come for. Somewhere in the long afternoon Karen had said she'd send him across — that he was good on a fire — and here he was, making good on it before the light went. Whatever the two of them had to trade about meat and coals was Dad's to have, not ours. It bought us the gap, and I took it.

Charles caught my eye and tipped his head towards the camp's gate. We went — quiet, quick, careful of where we put our feet, two boys backing out of an enclosure they'd no business inside.

We got about four steps.

"Jerome! Charles!"

Mum. Of course it was Mum. We stopped dead where we stood, and the old guilt went through me head to foot — face gone hot, the back of my neck with it, caught clean at the one thing I'd been trying hardest not to be caught at. There was no playing deaf; she'd watched us hear her. So we turned round and put the faces on, the innocent ones we'd been fitting on since we were small, and they fooled nobody, least of all the woman who'd made the both of us.

"Hey, Mum." Near enough together, a shade too bright.

She came across the open ground towards us, wiping her hands down a borrowed apron, and her eyes did the narrow thing they do when she's already three steps along a road you haven't started walking yet. "Are you two going down to the Drop Zone?"

"Yep." I kept it flat, weightless, nothing hung on it. Eagerness only ever cost us with Mum; it was the surest way in the world to have a thing lifted off you the moment she clocked how much you wanted it. Charles had learned that the hard way more times than I had, and somehow still hadn't.

She dug in the apron pocket and came out with a scrap of paper torn off something larger and pressed it into my hand, and she closed my fingers over it — an old reflex of hers, out of boyhood, out of lunch money and notes for teachers. A list. Close-written the whole length of it, top to bottom, ingredients and small odd wants set down in the same upright hand she used for everything: shopping lists and scripture references and the labels on her seed packets alike.

"What's this?"

"See what you can find of it in the food stores. Whatever's come through."

I felt the weight of it land — not the paper, weightless in my fist, but the errand riding on it. Another job pinned on in the gap between us and Beatrix, another stretch of the evening handed over to doing instead of getting to the one thing I actually wanted done. The refusal was half-built in my mouth — we're already carrying half the camp, Mum, we've a person to meet — when I looked up at her properly, and it came apart before it could reach my teeth.

She had the smile on. The one she keeps stocked for us, the one that's meant to say everything's in hand. But it sat over the top of something it couldn't quite reach down to. She was tired in a way the smile didn't touch — frayed clean round the edges, the long day and the borrowed clothes all settled on her at once, and underneath the lot of it the thing none of us were saying out loud: that she'd woken this morning in her own bed in Adelaide and would lie down tonight under stars in no arrangement she recognised. She'd come through a hole in the air into the end of everything she knew. The list in my hand had never really been about flour. It was about holding the shape of one thing she understood, in a place that had stripped every other familiar thing off her in an afternoon. I wasn't going to be one more thing she had to manage.

"Sure," I said, and folded the list down small and pushed it into my pocket, in beside the cash — the two of them settled there together against my hip, the errand I could say out loud and the one I couldn't say to a soul.

Charles, who can read a room when it serves him to, came in warm over the top of it. "And anything that's not down there, Beatrix can bring through for you," he said. "She's helping us out. Whatever you're short, she'll fetch it."

Mum's face eased a notch, the smile getting an inch nearer the rest of her. "Thank you, Charles. That's a help." She didn't thank me. She never has had to; she knows I'll do it. That's its own kind of being seen, I suppose — though I've never quite worked out whether I'd trade it, given the chance, for the louder kind.

A small quiet came after, the sort where you've been let off but not quite let go. I shifted my feet, and the dust puffed up pale around my boots, foreign even in that — too fine, too red, nothing like home.

"Can we go now?"

She looked at the two of us a moment longer than the question wanted — holding us there, I think, only to keep us inside arm's reach a breath more. It was the look she'd worn all day, surfacing every time one of us drifted past arm's length: a mother running a headcount she couldn't make herself stop running, in a world that had already opened a door in a wall that very morning and pulled her whole family through it without asking. I couldn't begrudge her the count. I'd been keeping a quieter version of it myself since we arrived.

"Go on, then."

We went, before she could turn up one more thing to need from us — quick down through the camp towards the Drop Zone and the dead screens and Beatrix waiting somewhere on the far side of one of them, walking fast and keeping our eyes to the front, the day's next request already at our heels and the two of us, for once, a half-step out ahead of it.