Page 20

Claire

F or all the time they spent together over the next couple weeks, the animosity between Asha and John hadn’t ebbed even a little.

However, with me, she finally began to thaw.

It began in small bits of conversation here and there, when she’d let me share a joke between her and Kimmy or ask me how I was feeling.

She even offered me the rest of her food one evening, claiming she wasn’t hungry and wanted me to have it.

Hungry as I was all the time now with food rationing, I couldn’t refuse. John had managed to shoot a goose that day, and the fatty, smoky meat practically melted in my mouth. I polished off the rest of her dinner, and for the first time in days, I felt full.

Asha and I were on first watch that night, so John and Kimmy shared the tent. John came over to kiss me goodnight.

“Get some rest,” I murmured to him, and he kissed my forehead.

“I will. Just—” He glanced at Asha. “Be careful, alright?”

Asha rolled her eyes. “Unclench, Wastelander. She’s my friend, remember? ”

“Don’t fucking call me that,” he retorted, then turned back to me. “Like I said…if you need me—”

“I’ll be fine,” I soothed, smoothing his hair.

He kissed me goodnight, then headed toward the tent. Soon, the only sound was the crackling of the campfire and the distant hooting of owls.

“Thank you,” I said, breaking the silence. “For the food. I needed that.”

To my surprise, she smiled. “I know. I had to look at your bony ass for most of the day.”

“It’s not bony!” I said with a giggle. “Besides, you look like you could use it more than I do.”

She shrugged. “Honestly, going from what we had at home to mostly gamey-ass meat and gruel, I don’t have much an appetite these days.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Did you…I mean, did they feed you much in the gang?”

To my dismay, she visibly retreated into herself at the mention of the past, her arms tucking into her sides.

“I can’t talk about it.”

I blew out a breath. “I knew that. I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have asked.”

She shook her head but didn’t reply, and the awkward silence that followed was painful. I decided to distract myself with my nightly grooming routine, also known as my feeble attempts to maintain a basic standard of hygiene in the middle of nowhere after long days of travel.

I wet my washcloth with a small dab of water from my bottle and gave myself a quick wipe down under my clothes.

It wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing.

I fetched my hairbrush from my pack and began to unwind my long braid.

While I’d frequently worn my hair down when we lived at the camp, I’d been braiding it more often than not on the road.

“How do you do that?” Asha asked, and when I gave her a questioning look, she nodded at my braid. “I’ve never been able to do the more elaborate braids. I never saw you wear them before.”

“Kimmy taught me,” I replied as I brushed out the bends it’d left in my hair. “She’s good with hair. This one’s called a fishtail braid.”

“It’s pretty,” Asha said in an almost wistful tone. “Like something someone would wear at home. Back when pretty things mattered.”

The yearning in her voice for something familiar hit me hard. I knew that longing for a place where art and music and culture could thrive. They were a fundamental piece of our humanity that’d been lost.

“Pretty things still matter,” I said gently. “If only to us.”

I fished in my pack for my sketchbook, then held it out to her.

“I still draw,” I said. “Often things I see, but sometimes from my own imagination, too.”

She took the sketchbook with a trembling hand and flipped through it.

She looked at my drawings of the forest around our old camp, and stopped at a drawing of a unicorn, tracing her finger over its horn.

I smiled at the memory of John asking me if they had ever existed in the Old World.

I’d giggled at his adorably confused expression and pulled him into a kiss.

Asha had stopped on a sketch of John’s face, an eyebrow raised, then flipped to the next, which was a full-body portrait looking over his shoulder, and then to the next, which was a profile of his silhouette.

She made a noise of amusement, and I blushed as she skipped through the next five or so pages, which were all of John—his smile, his gaze, his hands.

“We don’t have photographs anymore,” I said sheepishly. “I don’t want to forget.”

Asha bit her lip to contain her laughter, which made me happy, even if it was at my expense.

She flipped through the rest of the drawings until she reached the last one, my current work-in-progress.

It was a half-finished portrait of Asha herself, as I remembered her: her sleek black hair, radiant brown skin, and big, pretty eyes.

She was a joy to draw—she’d always been beautiful, and far more put-together than I was.

She traced her finger over her drawing’s features for a long time in silence, making me nervous.

“It’s fine if you don’t like it,” I said. “I just…I missed you, and—”

“You’re too good for this world, Claire,” she cut across me, her voice tight. “It’s why I was shocked that you were still alive after all this time. The Wasteland doesn’t deserve you. You were meant for better than this. ”

I couldn’t help but bristle a little. “I found more freedom out here than I ever had back home. And I’m no angel—I’ve done ugly things, too. I think we all have.”

She shook her head. “No, you haven’t. Nothing anyone would condemn you for. If you had, you would’ve changed more. Like me. Like your Wastelander, even.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

She sighed, but didn’t answer. We sat in silence for a long time, and I was afraid that she’d shut me out again. I tried to find something to latch onto, to keep her here with me. She’d only just started acting more like her old self.

“Want me to braid your hair?” I asked quietly.

To my surprise, she nodded and moved over to me, her back facing me. I hesitated, then ran my fingers through her hair, which had grown down her back. It was dry and a bit unruly from a lack of care, but still beautiful. She flinched at my touch but nodded at me to continue.

“You never had it this long before,” I commented as I started to brush it out as gently as I could.

“I wasn’t allowed to cut it,” she replied. “Angel liked it longer.”

I tackled the knots at the bottom with as much care as I could.

“Well, as John would say, fuck that guy.”

To my surprise, she laughed—a real, deep, belly laugh—and it touched my soul. I wanted so badly to help her heal from whatever had happened to her. I just didn’t know how. For now, I focused on taking care of her hair, twisting it into a lovely fishtail braid that Kimmy would’ve approved of.

“This is how Kimmy bonded with me at first,” I said with a smile. “She’d do my hair for me. Without her, I don’t know that I ever would’ve adapted to life out here…or felt safe enough to open up to John.”

Asha didn’t reply, but she’d relaxed a little under my touch, which was something at least.

“Kimmy really is something special,” I said after a moment. “Don’t you think?”

Asha snorted. “You’re awful at subtlety, you know that?”

I giggled. “Well, I know you two have been getting along really well. ”

Another pause, but then Asha said, “She’s not what I expected. Never met someone who could provide life-saving medicine just as easily as she could stab a guy in the throat.”

I laughed again. “Yeah, that’s her. I’m glad you hit it off.”

“I don’t know,” she said as I fished in my bag for a ribbon to tie off the braid. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen when we get to this place. The Valley. From what Kimmy’s told me, it’s not going to be good.”

“John seems to think it’ll be okay.”

Asha made a sound of derision. “Not sure how he could possibly think that, with all that stuff about the Jamesons and the whole mess around them leaving.”

Jameson . That name Kimmy had let slip weeks ago, around the campfire.

I frowned. “What?”

She turned to face me, eyebrows raised. “You don’t know what I’m talking about?”

She clearly inferred my answer from the confusion in my expression.

“He hasn’t told you,” she said, a frown creasing her brow, and I made an impatient noise. “Fuck, he really hasn’t told you?”

“Told me what, exactly?” I snapped. “What has Kimmy been telling you?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “Just what we’re up against. But I guess he didn’t think that was worth sharing with you. He’d rather you be grasping around in the dark. Asshole.”

I took a deep breath to calm myself against the rising tide of dread that swelled in my chest. Why wouldn’t John have told me something important?

“Tell me,” I commanded. “Everything you know.”

Asha stared at me and pursed her lips, like she was assessing my readiness.

“You sure you want to hear it?” she asked. “It doesn’t paint your boyfriend in a particularly flattering light.”

“I don’t care.”

It wasn’t true and we both knew it, but she shrugged again .

“Nobody’s going to want us there when we get to the Valley,” she said. “But Kim told me about who’s going to be leading the charge to take us out ASAP. The Jamesons.”

John had shut down the conversation about them before and wouldn’t budge even when I asked him later in private. You don’t need to worry about it, he’d said firmly. Just focus on what’s in front of us right now.

I’d taken him at his word and put it out of my mind. But if these people were going to cause trouble for me, didn’t I have the right to know it?

“They’re one of the oldest families there, apparently,” Asha continued.

“They have a lot of influence on this council that runs things. There’s six of them—father, five sons, and a daughter.

See, Kim’s grandfather used to be council chairman before he died.

He and the elder Jameson never got along.

Seems like it was common knowledge that they hated one another for decades. ”