Ves Karrow
Day Twelve
The first thing that came back was the taste.
Plaster and pennies: dry chalk on her tongue, and under it the thin sweetness of her own blood, which she swallowed before she understood what it was.
Ana Ferro lay on her side in a darkness with no edges.
She could not tell whether her eyes were open.
She tested it.
The dark did not change.
Then she blinked, and grit dragged across her eyeballs like sand under a lid, and that was how she knew.
She could hear nothing.
It was not the muffled nothing of cotton in the ears but a solid pressure, a palm cupped over each side of her head, and inside the pressure a single high note, thin as wire, that neither rose nor fell.
Her own breathing reached her only as a movement in her ribs.
Something heavy lay across her legs.
It did not hurt yet.
It was weight, and cold where the weight met her skin.
She made a list.
Her father had taught her to make a list when a calf went down in the ditch: before you touched it, before you shouted, what moves, what doesn’t, what’s wet.
Fingers: ten.
Left arm: pinned under her own hip, but it answered.
Right arm: free.
Neck: it turned.
Above her right ear a hot line ran across her scalp, and when she touched it her fingers came away slick and the warmth crept down into her collar.
Legs.
She pushed with her left and the weight shifted and slid off with a rushing sound she felt in her back teeth.
Her right knee bent.
That was the list.
She was alive, and the list was short.
Then the rest of it arrived, not as a story but in pieces.
The generator had died at ten.
Iven was up in the loft under both blankets, fourteen years old and sulking about it.
She had gone down to the cellar for lamp oil and the last of the coal.
She had been standing at the bottom of the steps with the scuttle in one hand and the lamp in the other when the cellar door above her blew inward with light.
All the light there was.
White, and solid, and it had a sound inside it that she felt in her spine before she heard it.
There had been no whistle.
She would learn later that there never was.
The rockets flew faster than the noise they made, so that the first anyone knew of them was the ground jumping, and only after that the roar that should have come first, arriving late, like a man who has already done what he came to do.
The floor had come up and struck her.
The ceiling had come down.
The coal had gone everywhere, into her hair, her mouth.
After that, nothing until the taste.
She rolled onto her hands and knees.
Her palms found broken brick, a slick of something that might have been lamp oil, a splintered stair tread.
The stairs were gone.
Where they had been there was a slope of rubble running up into a wedge of grey, and the grey had an orange stain in it that moved.
She climbed toward it on hands and knees, testing each hold before she trusted it, and every brick she moved sent a small avalanche behind her that she saw and did not hear.
The smell reached her before the sound did.
Burning paint.
Burning wood.
Under those, a hot metallic sourness like a stove lid left empty on the flame.
And under that, something faintly sweet that she declined to name.
She pushed her head through a gap between a fallen beam and a door panel and came up into the night.
What was left of her kitchen had no roof.
The table lay on its back with its legs in the air like something poisoned.
Beyond it, where the back wall and the loft had been, there was a hill.
Above the hill the sky was a dirty, glowing orange, and through the smoke she could see stars.
Sound came in then, all at once, as if a door had been kicked open.
Fire, first: a wet, ripping roar from the direction of Miller Row.
Then voices, dozens of them, high and formless.
Then a sound she had never heard from a human throat and would hear for the rest of her life without ever finding a word for it, a long rising note that someone was making without breath to make it.
She stood up.
Her knees held.
She looked down and saw she was wearing one boot.
From the ridge road above the town, in daylight, you could have counted the damage in a minute and a half.
Ves Karrow had six thousand people, a rail halt with one siding, a water tower, a textile mill that had been half-idle since the Accord bought the cotton contracts, and a church whose spire the whole valley used to navigate by.
It sat in a bend of the Ossel at the foot of two hills, and on the night of the twelfth day of the war a rocket battery, or several, on a hillside eleven kilometers to the northeast put forty rounds into it in twenty-one seconds.
They fell in a pattern that a surveyor would have recognized: a broad oblong, eleven hundred meters by four hundred, laid over the town like a ruler across a map.
Everything inside the oblong was hit or was near enough to be hit.
The mill, the rail halt, the church, the Corn Exchange, the school.
Two hundred houses.
Most of the rockets carried high-explosive fragmentation warheads that threw a cloud of jagged steel sleeves at chest height in every direction.
Some carried incendiary payloads.
The fires that lit Ana Ferro’s kitchen came from those.
The battery that fired them was never identified.
Three governments claimed it had been someone else’s.
There was a militia depot on the east side of Ves Karrow, in the old customs house, and people who wished to prove that the town had been a military target would later point to it.
It held eleven rifles and a case of flares.
It was two streets from the school.
Nor was that the end of it.
A second salvo would come from a different hillside at intervals of twenty or forty minutes, timed for the hour when the rescuers had gathered.
The crews packed and moved after each one.
Shooters like that never stayed, and anyone digging in the ruins between salvos was working on borrowed time.
She found the street by walking into it.
The house next door had folded outward instead of in, and the whole front wall lay across the road like a felled tree, and she climbed over it with her hands, and on the other side there were people.
Odalys Brenn, the baker’s widow, was on her knees in the middle of Miller Row with a child in her lap.
The child’s head was bare and the back of it was wrong.
Odalys was rocking.
Her lips moved.
Ana looked at the child’s boots, which were new, and then she looked away and did not look at anything else in that direction again.
Piet and Joska Marek were digging out their father’s shop with a garden fork and a plank.
A woman ran past holding her own forearm in the crook of the other.
Someone was calling Lenka, Lenka, Lenka in the same voice, at the same pitch, a chant, a small useless engine keeping itself running.
“Ana.” Piet Marek had turned and seen her.
His face was black to the eyes.
“Your house. Is Iven. . .”
“Loft,” she said.
Her voice came from far away and sounded like it belonged to a much older woman.
“He was in the loft.”
Piet’s mouth moved.
He stood.
He didn’t say I’m sorry and she was grateful, later, for that.
He said, “Joska. Get the other fork.”
They went.
Her house had been a narrow two-story on a stone footing, and all of it was lying in the back yard.
The loft roof had come down through the loft floor, and the loft floor through the ceiling of the back room, and the ceiling of the back room onto the bed frame and the table and the stove, so that a house that had held four rooms and a ladder was now a ramp of splintered joists and broken tile about four meters high.
Ana went up it on all fours.
She began to dig.
She dug the way people dig when they have no plan, with her hands, throwing tile behind her, then bricks, then a length of guttering, then a whole window frame with its glass still intact in one corner.
Her fingernails tore.
She did not notice until she saw the rubble was dark under her hands.
She found a boot and her stomach lurched, but it was Iven’s, empty, the laces still tied, and she held it against her chest for the length of one breath before she set it aside.
She found her father’s coat.
She found the calendar from the feed store, with the month still on it.
“Iven.” She shouted it and felt it in her throat and heard almost nothing.
“Iven.”
Piet and Joska arrived and began to lift beams.
Others came, two, four, six, until a chain of people stood on the rubble heaving out bricks hand to hand.
No one spoke.
They worked like a machine that had only one setting.
Then the ground jumped.
She did not hear the salvo.
She felt it arrive through her knees and her palms: a hard flat slap under the earth, and then another, and a third, walking toward them along Weaver Street two blocks over, each one closer, each one heavier.
The whole chain of people dropped flat as one.
Ana pressed her face into a mat of dust and lath and felt a fine rain of grit come down on the back of her neck.
Something struck the wall behind her with a sound like a dropped sack.
A slab of the ridge-tile came sliding down and stopped a hand’s breadth from her head.
Then quiet.
A voice, very high, from somewhere behind her, said, “That’s the second one. They’re walking it.”
Nobody stood.
For a long moment, nobody breathed.
On Weaver Street a wall settled with a long dry sigh and a woman began, quietly and thoroughly, to scream.
“Up,” said Piet Marek.
“Up. Up. Up.”
They got up.
They dug.
She found the joist that had held his bed.
She knew it by the scorch mark where he had once left a candle.
It lay at an angle across the rubble with a slab of ceiling plaster resting on it, and the plaster made a low tent, a black triangle a forearm high.
Ana lay flat on her stomach and put her head into it.
Dust.
Darkness.
The smell of a damp cellar, and under it wool, and under that the warm animal smell of a boy who had been sleeping.
“Iven,” she said.
Her voice cracked in the tight space.
“Iven, it’s Ana. Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
She put her ear against the plaster and shut her eyes, and the high thin note in her head rose and rose, and then, under it, so faint that she thought at first it was the blood in her own ears, there came a small sound.
Knock.
A pause.
Knock.
Knock.
Three.
It was the signal they had used since he was five and afraid of the dark and slept in the cot beside her, one for I’m here, two for I’m frightened, three for come.
Ana said something.
She did not know what.
She heard herself laughing, or something like it.
She put her palm flat on the plaster and answered, three times, and the answer came back at once, weaker, but steady, a fist against wood.
“Piet!” she screamed.
“Piet! He’s alive! He’s under the joist!”
They came.
Six of them, hauling, bracing, feeding a length of timber under the slab for a lever.
The plaster groaned.
A crack ran across it, black and thin as a hair.
Then headlights swept the ruined street.
They came from the north road, three sets, low and bouncing, and behind them the ragged growl of diesel engines.
Every head on the rubble turned.
In the glare the smoke went white and the shadows of the standing chimneys leaped out across the street and fell over the people digging.
Trucks.
Three of them, unmarked.
They pulled up in a line along Miller Row and men climbed down from the backs, thirty or forty, in a jumble of uniforms that belonged to no army: green field jackets, grey trousers, a leather coat, a boy in a football shirt.
Each of them had a rifle.
Two carried a machine gun between them on a strap.
A big man with a shaved head walked out ahead of the rest, looked once at the wreckage, and said, in a carrying voice that was almost gentle:
“Everyone stand back from the rubble. We’ve got equipment coming. Everyone step back.”
Nobody moved.
Ana lay with her hand flat on the plaster and looked at the rifles, and looked at the faces above the rifles, and could not tell what they wanted.
Under her palm, the slab knocked again.
Three times.
Come.