Page 14 of Trade (After the End #7)

Chapter Seven

I wake up to the smell of coffee. Every bone in my body aches, my joints are locked, and I have to pee desperately, but no part of me wants to leave the cocoon I’ve made out of the blanket in my sleep.

Coffee is the only thing that would lure me out of my warm pocket into the morning chill.

I still spend a few minutes gazing at the Outside.

The sky is low and gray, the grass is wet, and the air is damp.

I understood the concept of dew—that the Earth’s surface cools at night and at some point, the air can’t hold all the moisture, so the excess water vapor becomes droplets—but I had no idea that it smells like beginnings, that it stirs up a feeling of anticipation in your belly.

I could have died without ever knowing. I rub my eyes, stretch my legs, and point my toes. It’s too early for deep thoughts. Not before coffee.

Dalton has a small metal carafe sitting on a trivet made of rocks in the coals. He hears me stirring and glances over. He looks rough, but even with wild hair and red eyes, he’s still supernaturally pretty.

“Want some?” he asks. If it were Bennett, the offer would come with a smirk, but Dalton is just asking.

“Oh, yeah.” I grit my teeth, throw back the blanket, and stand.

I shove my icy feet into my boots and stomp to warm them up and shake my coveralls back into shape.

While I slept, the waist twisted and a pant leg got stuck above my knee.

Once I’ve got things adjusted, I start for the woods to find some privacy.

Dalton leaps to his feet. “Where are you going?”

I pause mid-stride. “There.” I hike my thumb toward the trees.

We size each other up. I guess we’re still at daggers drawn. I widen my eyes, silently daring him to ask me why or tell me I can’t.

He slowly sits back down.

I lift my chin and sail into the trees, feeling like I’ve won a round until I find a nice thick oak trunk and confront the indignity of peeing in the woods again.

I’ve discovered that on real terrain, I have very little balance and coordination.

There is no way around it if I don’t want to accidentally hose down the only clothes I have.

I have to step all the way out of my coveralls and set them aside, which means I have to take off my boots and squat basically naked in the Outside.

It doesn’t help the process that the world is alive with new sounds this morning, different birds and strange new chirrups and unidentifiable crunches and snaps. I have to squeeze my eyes shut and focus hard to get things going while my thighs burn and my knees complain.

When I return, Dalton is pouring coffee into a small metal cup. “I only have one,” he says, taking a big gulp, wincing, then offering it to me.

I sit next to him by the fire.

“Careful. Hot,” he says. I take the cup by its tiny handle. It’s almost too hot to hold. He wasn’t kidding.

I blow on it and breathe it in while Dalton digs another parchment packet from his bag. This time it’s a mix of dried fruit and nuts. The nuts are the same from yesterday, but I don’t recognize the fruit.

“What is this?” I ask as I pop a piece in my mouth.

“Apricot,” he says. I recognize the name. It’s a stone fruit we don’t have in the collection.

The first head of AP selected a cherry tree to preserve from the Rosaceae family, probably because of its size.

The first gen didn’t always pick the smallest trees, but the cherry tree had historical significance, as well—a story about a founder of the nation that provided for the bunker.

It’s a shame. Cherries are too tart to me. Apricots are delicious.

I take two more from the packet Dalton is holding and sip the coffee. A bird begins to sing nearby, cheerful and light like in the cartoon movies with princesses. I scan the trees until I see a flash of blue.

“There!” I grab Dalton’s thigh and point.

His hand goes to the machete at his side until he sees the bird.

“What’s that one called?” I ask.

“Bluebird.”

“Yeah. The blue one. What’s it called?”

“Bluebird,” he says, his lips curving.

“Seriously?”

“That’s what my dad called it.” He gently pries the coffee cup from my hand.

“So maybe not seriously. He called crappies ‘crappers’ and saugers ‘shitters.’ I didn’t know their real names until I took some to the Mill to trade, and they laughed in my face.

” He takes a big sip and then refills the cup and passes it back to me.

“He’s not around anymore?”

“No.”

He doesn’t seem to want to say more about it, so I drink my coffee and eat the apricots. He leaves them all for me, eating the nuts and a few strips of jerky. How much does he have? A new worry occurs to me.

“Do you have enough food to get us to the lake and back?” I ask.

His mouth tenses. “I can feed you,” he says.

“I don’t want to eat all your food,” I press.

What he’s already shared would have cost me at least ten credits in the bunker.

I’ve been on half rations before when—for whatever reason and always at the worst possible time, when people were already upset over some other issue—the Outsiders didn’t come for a while. It quickly saps your strength.

Dalton puts the apricot packet in my lap and stands, busying himself with straining the last water from the coffee grounds in the carafe and emptying them into a glass jar with a rusty screw top.

“Dalton?” I have never been one to drop an argument. I’m sure that was another strike against me in Bennett’s book.

“Glory,” he says back, pausing his packing to arch an eyebrow.

“We’re in this together, you know.”

His playful orneriness falls away, and for a second, before the hardness returns, a look flashes across his face that I can’t quite identify. Grief, maybe. Or longing.

“I can feed us both,” he says gruffly, and tightens the straps of his backpack a little more vigorously than he probably has to. “It’s only a few days.”

I drop it, finish the last apricot, fold the parchment, and return it to Dalton. He grunts and tucks it away.

Bennett would be astonished that I gave up so easy, and frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever let anything go so quickly, but I feel different Outside.

There’s so much more space. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like a rat in a hole, scrabbling with the other rats.

I could run in a straight line and keep running until my legs give out.

I don’t want to—my feet ache like a sumbitch, as Dad would say—but I could.

I want to help Dalton clean up camp, but he beats me to folding the blanket, and I don’t know what to do with the fire.

I do standing stretches while I watch him use a trowel to shovel dirt on the fire.

He stomps on it a few times to make sure it’s out, wraps the trowel in a rag and stows it, and jerks his head toward the lake. “Ready?”

“Yes.” I aim for enthusiasm and fail. Despite the stretches, my body feels like I went twelve rounds in the ring. My feet, calves, and thighs are the worst, but there is an ache between my legs, too, that I try not to think about.

Dalton leads the way. I have significantly less get-up-and-go than yesterday.

He shortens his stride, but it’s clear he’s walking much slower than he’s comfortable with.

He can’t help but pull ahead. Eventually, he gives up trying to match my pace and starts waiting for me when I fall too far behind.

The valley is a dreamscape. The sun is out today—the yellow ball we were taught to draw in nursery school—and the mist quickly burns off, leaving the air crystal clear.

My vision and brain have adjusted, sharpening my ability to see things in the distance.

When Dalton walks ahead, I’m almost alone in the world, my fingers brushing the tips of grasses and blossoms of flowers I’ve only seen in books.

In the bunker, you’re never alone, except for sometimes in your quarters, and even then, you can hear people in the corridors and your neighbors through the vents.

It never drove me crazy. I’m not the type who spends their credits on an hour in one of the soundproofed white rooms, but I think I get it now.

I feel small out here, but not like I’m insignificant, more like I’m a part of a living thing, like the vein of a tree, the xylem or phloem, traveling through the macrocosm I belong to, separate but not.

I feel new. Every breath hasn’t cycled through thousands of lungs before mine, every step I take hasn’t been trod every day for centuries.

I disrupt tiny insects. I snap stems. I knock pollen from stalks.

As I pass through, there is evidence I was here.

I’ve shed Gloria Smith—wife of Bennett Smith and Assistant Head of Agricultural Preservation—like an old, dusty skin.

I feel young, but in a way I never was when I was a kid and the lottery hung over my head like the sword of Damocles.

This is a different young, brimming with possibility and novelty and light.

Dalton stops a few yards ahead and turns to watch me.

A rush of energy fills me. I run toward him, ignoring my throbbing feet and the ache in my lungs as I draw in more pure oxygen than I’ve ever inhaled before in my life.

The tangly grass, loose stones, and random dips slow me down, and I could probably speed walk faster, but I love it.

When I get to Dalton, I’m grinning and gasping for air. His eyes are almost black, and his chest is heaving like he was running, too, not standing and waiting for me with a brown pod in one hand and a big, flat rock in the other.

“What’s that?” I ask when I’m finally able, nodding at the pod.

“Seed pod. Left over from fall.” He gestures at a nearby black locust. We don’t have one in the collection. Mesquite is our representative from the Fabaceae family, probably picked for its drought tolerance. It’s one of the few trees not showing signs of stress yet.