The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

“Now do you see it? It’s just like we told you,” Jess of Bonavista said, gesturing to the ruined house with his hand flattened, angry.

“Yeah,” she said calmly. “We’ve had a chance to look things over.”

“Erik’s crazy to think he can save this!”

Anna of Semperfi, Erik’s partner, put her hands on her hips and jerked her head toward the investigators. “Let them decide, it’s what they’re here for!”

Another man, big, with a brimmed hat pulled low over a pale, flushed face, stepped forward. Avery from Pine Grove. “They need to hear all of it. It’s not just the house that’s the problem, it’s the assumption that we should be helping,” he countered.

Enid tried again. “Once we’ve had a chance to talk to everyone, we’ll—”

Erik marched forward before Enid or Teeg could stop him and jabbed a finger at Avery. “You’re just too lazy to put in the work! Can’t face a little challenge, can you?” Lazy. Almost as bad an insult as unproductive or wasteful.

“That’s not it and you know it!”

Everyone started talking at once, then. Yelling, really. They even managed to drown out the racket from the circling flock of gulls. Erik somehow made himself heard over it all.

“You’re not listening! If you just listen, I can convince you, I can make you see, we can save the house! We can, I just need a little help—”

“A little? All the help on the Coast Road won’t save it!” Jess countered.

The two men yelled at each other with just an arm’s-length distance between them, flinging angry gestures that could easily turn into punches. They seemed to forget the investigators entirely.

Erik might have given this speech a dozen times, it seemed so well practiced. “After everything we’ve done for all the rest of you, for you to . . . to turn on us like this!” Erik pointed at each of the households in turn. Pine Grove, Bonavista, all of them. “You know we’re the best builders, so you ask us to help with all your work. We help keep the bridge up. Every time it rains we help pull your dumb goats out of the river. And we’ve been doing it for years. Decades! From the very start, we were here before any of you. And you”—he pointed at Juni and Jess—“back when Bridge House folded, we took in half your people, even though it blew all our quotas and we didn’t have the resources—”

“You were a child then—you don?

??t know what you’re talking about!” Juni bared her teeth, her face flushed. A strange-looking fury rose up in her. She’d been good tempered so far, in Enid’s interactions with her. Jess touched Juni’s arm to hold her back, but she wasn’t deterred. “Your father didn’t have a problem with it!”

“Not that he ever told you! He was too nice to say what he was thinking, but we sure heard about it at home! About what Neeve did and you all trying to cover it up!”

“We didn’t! We reported it right off!”

Enid should have known someone would bring up the old case, from twenty years ago. The Estuary took care of itself, mostly. But twenty years ago, one of them had cut out her implant, presumably to try to have a baby without a banner. She’d been caught. Eventually, her household had disbanded over the incident. Juni had started the new household, Bonavista, in its place. It should have all been left behind. But something like that was never really forgotten.

A banner. What it all came down to, in the end. A household came together, worked hard, proved that the members could take care of one another, manage themselves, not waste resources, and then the regional committee would award them a banner. The right to have a child. Households, quotas, trade, investigations, all of it went toward proving you could successfully bring a new human being into the world.

Dig down far enough, it wasn’t about houses at all.

Enid turned to Teeg and smirked. “See? This is why we don’t start with group meetings. The shouting. All of them at once.”

“Yeah, I guess so. We had enough?”

“I think so.”

Teeg put fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. The whole group fell quiet; a couple of them even jumped back, as if the sound had been a clap of thunder. Enough quiet now so that the soft whining from the scrappy dog was audible. The animal clung to Erik, close to his feet, and seemed worried. Enid sympathized with his sense of confusion.

She looked over the gathering, a dozen people from households up and down this part of the road, come to gawk. Most folk looked away rather than let her catch their gaze. This wasn’t comfortable. Ideally, they’d be having this conversation alone with Semperfi’s folk in their kitchen. Someplace where Erik and his folk would feel comfortable. Or at least, where he wasn’t being attacked. Then again, this way, no one could invent gossip about what the investigators told him. So they stood in the open, with the rotting structure lending undeniable evidence to back up the decision. The sun beat down on them, insects buzzed, and everyone felt annoyed.

In that quiet, another sound carried up the hill from the marshland at the mouth of the river. A desperate, panicked voice, shouting over and over, coming closer until the repeated word became clear: “Help! Help me! Help!”

Across the marsh a figure ran toward the main road at the base of the hill, slipping, recovering, momentum carrying him on. A man in work clothes, holding on to his wide-brimmed hat to keep it from flying off. His other hand was waving. The dog barked and charged out; Erik called Bear back.

“Is that Kellan?” Jess asked.

“Who’s Kellan?” Teeg said.

“One of Last House’s. He’s usually down on the beach, scavenging.”