Orleans (29 page)

We ride upstream in silence, passing the ruins of rotted houses and empty patches with trees that be showing where driveways used to be. The air be cool today, but humid still, and it stick to my skin like a wet shirt. I look down at Baby Girl, glad she got Mr. Go’s new clothes on her. She stare back at me like she waiting for me to say something, so I do.

“Once upon a time, there was a magical place called New Orleans. There was magic in the water, magic in the trees, and magic in the people. But most magical of all was a woman named Jeanne Marie,” I say. The story Lydia used to tell me when I first came to her. It make me glad I can give it to Enola now. “Jeanne Marie was clever as a clock and pretty as a sunset. She was smart as a whip and pretty as a new moon,” I say.

Daniel sit behind me and I know he be listening. He be making my back itch, like a spider crawling by. So I try not to think about it. Instead, I tell Baby Girl stories her mama used to be telling me, the same stories I be telling Lydia while she giving birth. This one about the time Jeanne Marie tricked the Devil into giving her back the moon. Enola seem to like the sound of my voice and be waving her little legs as I talk. It make me glad Jeanne Marie part of her name. I think Lydia woulda liked it.

By the time the story done, Enola be asleep again. Babies don’t be doing much more than that, it seem. We drift awhile in silence, pushing along with an oar every so often.

“What was that?” Daniel ask. His voice sound like crunching leaves in the soft air. This boy ain’t never gonna win no staring contests. He can’t stay still long enough. “The story you just told?”

I shrug. “Just a story. Enola’s mama used to tell them to me.”

“I liked it,” he say. For some reason, that make me feel good.

“It gonna be strange not traveling with you and all your fool questions,” I say.

I look over my shoulder at him. He crazy dumb, but he been there for me since the blood farm, and on St. Charles Avenue. I ain’t gonna forget that.

It take a minute, but he almost smile through that mask of his. “It’s been . . . fun,” he say.

I snort and shake my head. “Don’t know about that, but it been interesting.”

We quiet for a little while, then Daniel speak up again. “I’m sorry,” he say. “You were right about what you said last night. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, Fen. I’d never want to hurt you, or . . . Enola.” He say her name for the first time and it sound right to me.

“Well. You ain’t been all bad,” I tell him.

Suddenly, I sit up straighter and tell him we here. The boat be pulling back downstream. We pole our way to the side of the canal and climb out on shore. Daniel hold us in place with the oars while I climb out with Enola and my pack. Dropping the oars into the boat, we watch it drift back the way we came, returning to Mr. Go.

• • • 

SHE BELONGED HERE.

Daniel watched Fen as she swung the baby into her sling and tossed her pack onto her back. Her posture changed the moment they were on dry land. She didn’t stand, but moved in a crouch, wary, listening for things he couldn’t hear. Looking for signs he couldn’t read.

This way,
she mouthed.

Daniel itched to log into his datalink, missing it like an amputated limb, but it couldn’t help him anymore. He had taken it off last night after a final attempt to get it working. He felt for it now in his pocket, like a security blanket that could no longer keep him warm.

“Daniel,” Fen whispered. She pointed to the edge of the trees, where the crumbled hulks of buildings could be seen. “These be old housing projects, according to Mr. Go,” she said.

She pointed at a fluorescent orange
X
graffitied on the wall, with numbers and symbols in the crooks of the crossed lines.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Directions,” she replied. “Used to be they marked the houses like this after a storm, tell you how many in the house, alive and dead. Now it be a way to tell whose land this be and, if it your own tribe, it tell you where they next camp be. O-Negs must’ve made these.”

Daniel studied the marking, but it made no sense to him. “Do you know the code?”

Fen shook her head. “Nope, I ain’t an O-Neg. But I know they been this way and . . .” She moved past the markings on the wall to look at the far side of the building. “If they only be putting it on this side, it be the direction they headed. So we go the other way and steer clear of them. Or they find us, and I can’t say what happen next.”

Daniel nodded and followed her in silence as they set out across the broken courtyard of what once might have been low brick apartment buildings.

Fen scowled. “Shh. Something in the trees,” she whispered. She waved him behind a section of tumbled wall. “Get down. Stay still.”

Where?
Daniel mouthed, dropping down beside her and the baby. Fen pointed with her chin to the north, back the way they had come. Did something flicker in the trees? It looked like a man. But just as quickly, the shape was gone.

Fen reached into her waistband and pulled out a small knife.

“Take this,” she whispered, and shoved it into his hands. “You got to get out of here. I’ma go out there, you wait and head the other way. Follow that map now, make it to the Wall.”

She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were serious. “Be safe, tourist. I ain’t got your back after this.”

Daniel nodded, fumbling the knife into an outer pocket where it couldn’t harm his encounter suit. Fen would be all right, he told himself. She still had a blade of her own, the hilt sticking out of her boot. He wanted to say something, anything to tell her how grateful he was to have known her.

Suddenly, a piercing cry shattered the hushed ruins. It bounced around the old buildings, coming from everywhere at once.

“Shit,” Fen swore. “Stay down, then go,” she said again, and then she was up and walking out into the clearing. Daniel crouched low, peering through a crack in the wall.

Fen stood in the tumbledown courtyard, her hands up in the air, a little smile on her face.

“My name is Fen de la Guerre. I am an O-Positive. I come for counsel. This child is Enola. She is an O-Positive, too. Her daddy be one of you.”

Daniel listened to the ritualized words as he looked around, trying not to make a sound. And then he saw, in the hollowed-out buildings, shadows pulling away from shadows. Fen was surrounded. Lithe, tall men and women appeared in the openings, peering through the crumbled mortar. Daniel’s heart beat faster, the sweat from his palms making the encounter suit sticky and unbearably hot, as he realized the O-Negatives were armed. Small, flexible bows with brightly fletched arrows were aimed at her from all sides. Yet Fen seemed unafraid.

As one, the bows lifted into the air. There was a shuffling sound, and then a man stepped forward from behind a freestanding doorway, little more than an arch connecting two sections of wall. His eyes were the green of agates. His braids twisted around his head, giving him the look of a lion.

“
Comment ça va,
Fen? We feared you were dead.”

Fen shrugged, at ease. “Not yet, Brother Davis,” she said.

Brother Davis. Daniel exhaled in silent relief. Fen knew this man. With that assurance, and Fen’s knife in his pocket, Daniel turned to face the woods. He wormed his way out of the ruins from a crouch, to a crawl, to a run into the woods, leaving Fen and Enola behind.

Heart and legs pumping, Daniel headed away from the ruins. When they were no longer in sight, he stopped to catch his breath and reorient himself. He pulled out the map Mr. Go had drawn him and read it by the early afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees. The woods were ghostly here, young trees like overgrown weeds pushing up through the foundations of what once were wooden houses and carefully tended yards. If he squinted, Daniel imagined he could see the old New Orleans, what it looked like before the storms.

He peered down at the map in his hands and chose his direction. The Wall lay to the west, but he had amends to make. He turned and headed south, back toward Rooftops.

35

“YOU HAVE MUCH TO ANSWER FOR,” DAVIS TELL
me as we follow an unmarked path past a jumble of fallen houses. He got his arm around my shoulder, but not in a friendly way.

“Do I?” I ask. I feel sick seeing him again, and the lump in my belly be growing bigger. “Seem to me we in the same boat. Only it look like most of your tribe got out alive.”

Davis smile like an alligator. “Now, Fen.” He look around the ring of folks surrounding us, and I see what going on here. He ain’t got Natasha to back him, but he still in charge. And now he got to show it. Davis spread his arms wide. “My people had no weapons—we turned them over to your tribe to honor the parley. Under those rules, Lydia was sworn to protect us. She did not.”

My face go hard. Lydia ain’t one to dodge responsibility. “Romulus gave you back your arrows. I saw him.”

“Be that as it may, blood was lost. O-Neg blood. It must be repaid. Where is Lydia?”

I shake my head and laugh. “She dead, you fool. Like the rest of them. She died giving birth to this baby during the raid. She done paid the only blood price she gonna pay.”

Davis’s face go ashen. “This child is hers?”

“She mine, now,” I say, hugging Enola to me. How a baby can smell so sweet in the middle of all this mess, I don’t know, but for half a second, it give me some peace.

We in a deeper part of the woods now, full of shadows and broken buildings. I hear water and guess it be the lower stream where Mr. Go sent us up. We pass through a line of trees, and then we suddenly in the O-Neg camp.

The camp look like a tent city, a row of teepees in a half-moon-shape clearing, backed up against trees so dense, they be hard to squeeze between without getting scraped bloody. The teepees face a grassy lawn with that stream running through, so they got fresh water, and the trees be tall enough to hide smoke for miles. It look like they been here awhile. The grass be wearing thin and show where folks be going into the trees to relieve theyselves, and in and out of the food and hospital tents.

Davis’s people peel away from whatever they be doing to form a circle around us. A group of women down by the stream soaking reeds for baskets come up out the water. A couple of boys net-fishing in the stream pull they nets. It peaceful. And too easy to find, once you know about the stream.

“You been here too long,” I tell him. “La Bête’s people gonna come for you.”

Davis nod. “We won’t be here long enough for it to matter. At least, not to you.”

He stand in the center of the ring his people make and face me. “As I said, Lydia owes us a blood price. Give me the child, and it will be paid.”

My face go cold as stone. “She ain’t for sale.”

Davis smile, like he being reasonable. “She is Lydia’s child; this is Lydia’s debt. Natasha is dead. And half a dozen of our men and women while in her protection. This is owed to us.”

“Like hell,” I spit. “You gonna sell her to blood hunters? Exchange her for weapons? You think they gonna take this baby’s little cup of blood when they got a full-grown O-Neg in front of them with ten pints for the taking?”

Davis’s smile turn into an angry scowl. “Child, don’t speak to me as if we are equals. You were nothing but Lydia’s pet. I do not hear you.”

I can’t help but laugh now. It stupid, me in the middle of this ring, this man calling for blood, when all hell about to break loose. I ain’t never been good with fools, and while everything else be changing, that still be the same.

“Davis, listen to me. Them ABs that attacked us? They coming, you know. This be the start of another war.” I speak loud so everyone hear me. Davis may be they chieftain, but he ain’t all that without Natasha telling him what to do. Maybe someone else here can make him listen to truth.

“They be coming for you, and soon,” I warn him. “This time, it won’t just be clubs and nets. They got guns.”

Davis laugh, but it mostly for show. His people laugh with him. “Guns? That’s ridiculous. Everybody knows guns don’t last in the Delta. The air will eat them up.”

“Guns don’t got to last long to be deadly. They just got to last for today. And they been here since this morning.”