Brendan swiftly allayed their curiosity. “Fellow bandits: Please welcome back to the camp our friend and ally, Prue McKeel. We’ve been asked to give her asylum; her life is in great danger.”
There followed a murmur of consent. Prue heard someone mumble something about another mouth to feed, but the voice was quickly shushed. One voice rang out above the rest: “What’s the danger?”
Brendan addressed the assembled bandits, telling them everything he’d been told; he explained in detail their desperate flight from North Wood, the skirmish on the street in the Outside. After the story, a hush fell over the crowd; more bandits had arrived, and Prue could see the dirty faces of young children peering at her from behind their parents’ legs. Finally, one bandit stepped forward. He was a younger man, dressed in a kind of ratty sashed coat; Prue didn’t recognize him. She guessed that they’d needed to recruit a whole host of new bandits since the war with the Governess.
“But Brendan,” he asked haltingly, “what if it comes for us?”
Another voice chimed in, a woman’s voice. “Yeah,” she said. “We’ve only just got settled here. Will we have to move again?”
“It ain’t going to come for us,” said Brendan. “It won’t even come close. This is the best-hidden camp we’ve had in a generation. I don’t expect to leave it till the babies born here are old. But if it makes everyone more at ease, we’ll post extra watches—tighten security. Even if a Kitsune does get in here, it won’t survive the fight. Clear?”
A litany of “ayes.”
The Bandit King continued, “To many of you, this may be just another body to feed and clothe. That’s a reasonable concern. I know the stores are thin. I know the robbing ain’t bringin’ in what it should. But we’re a strong band, and we’ve weathered worse. My great-grandfather, Ben, survived the Bandit Wars with his people eatin’ naught but grass and moss tufts and still came out the victor. We’re made of that stock. We can weather this.”
The crowd talked among themselves; after a time, consensus was reached: Prue could stay. She smiled warmly at the crowd. “Thanks, everyone,” she managed, though her voice was hoarse with exhaustion; it’d been a very long day. Curtis guessed as much and nudged his friend with his elbow. “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll take you to the trainee barracks.”
The two friends bid their good nights. They followed a wooden walkway that snaked along the cliff wall away from the common area; Curtis carried a red lantern, lighting the way. Prue studied him as they walked, a dusty halo from the lit wick revealing a Curtis she didn’t think she recognized from before. His face looked longer, older. It seemed to her that his shoulders filled out the raggedy uniform he was wearing in a way she hadn’t remembered. The left lens of his wire-framed glasses had a hairline crack in it, just at the nose. The eyes behind them seemed somehow more worldly.
He noticed her looking. “What’s up?” he asked, smiling embarrassedly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Prue. “You look changed, is all.”
“Well, I am a Greenhorn Bandit, first class.”
She laughed at the terminology. “Oh, Curtis. Who knew this was how you’d end up?”
“It’s where I belong, Prue. This is my life now.”
A rope bridge split off from the walkway, leading across the gap. They followed it.
“What about your parents? Your sisters?”
“They’re fine. I convinced a migrating crane to do a flyby recently, just to see how things are. He sent word that he saw them packing bags for what looked like a vacation or something. So I think they’re getting along just fine without me.”
Prue nodded, placated, though she sensed that her friend was not entirely convinced of his own story. “Think you’ll ever tell them?”
“I dunno,” replied Curtis. “Maybe someday. It’s complicated. I wouldn’t want them to try coming in here to find me; they’d get lost in the Periphery.”
“Though you’re a half-breed,” suggested Prue as she stepped off the rope bridge and followed Curtis down another wood-plank staircase. “Like me. Wouldn’t that mean that your parents can cross over?”
“Who knows where that blood comes from?” said Curtis. “Maybe one has it, not the other.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose my sisters are probably half-breeds, huh?”
They arrived at the end of the staircase. Another wooden promontory stretched out into the chasm. A wire, looped around the top of a tall post, disappeared into the blankness before them; a flickering campfire could be seen in the distan
ce. Curtis put his fingers to his lips and gave a shrill whistle. Within moments, a noise could be heard, the sound of something sliding along metal. A wooden cross, fixed with copper wire to a pulley assembly, came down the zip line and loudly thunked against the pole. Curtis grabbed it. “You want to go first?” he asked.
“Okay,” Prue said, with some trepidation. She positioned her hands along the wooden handle.
“Just hold tight,” instructed Curtis.
“You think?” said Prue, laughing. “Listen, I’m a natural-born bandit. Maybe I can teach you a thing or two.” And with that, she lifted her feet from the ground and was carried at a breathtaking pace across the Long Gap. The wide rift’s cool wind whisked up and bit at her face and hands; she could feel her face flush from the cold. Once the initial fear had fallen away, she found herself smiling so widely that her cheeks hurt.
It seemed to Elsie that she’d barely closed her eyes, barely drifted into a half sleep, when an alarm bell rang loudly in the dormitory, followed by a renewed round of distorted barking from the loudspeaker: “MORNING BELL! AEROBIC REGIMEN, COMMENCE!” Immediately, the room was filled with the complaining voices of sleepy girls and the cumulative rustle of thirty woolen blankets being thrown aside. Elsie followed suit; she noticed that not only had Rachel managed to ignore the command from the loudspeaker, but she also seemed to have slept through it. Elsie whispered loudly to her sister, “Rachel! Wake up!” There was no response.
A short, aged woman in a gray housedress entered through the double doors. Using a long wooden dowel, the woman pulled down a white screen that hung on the east wall. She then walked to the far side of the room and removed a shroud from a short pedestal, revealing an ancient-looking Super 8 projector. She turned it on, and a shivering ray of light fell on the screen, showing grainy black-and-white footage of a woman in a leotard. The film looked very, very old. As the figure in the film began to move, so did the girls in the dormitory, imitating the woman’s every action. Elsie did likewise: The woman touched her toes, so did Elsie. The woman executed a series of jumping jacks, so did Elsie. This routine lasted about ten minutes, with the wooden floor of the dormitory vibrating with every shift and jump of the roomful of girls. Rachel managed to stay sleeping. Between activities, Elsie tried to wake her by kicking one of the legs of her sister’s bed frame, to no avail. Finally, the program came to an end and the projector shut off with a series of noisy clacks. The loudspeaker sparked afresh: “BED TWENTY-THREE.”
No response. Elsie shuffled over to the bed and discreetly kicked the frame again. “Rachel!” she whispered.