After the Flood by Kassandra Montag

Author:Kassandra Montag
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

I avoided Abran after that evening and we didn’t speak again about the epidemic in the Valley. Two days later we celebrated Sedna’s fourth birthday. Marjan was preparing a menu of smoked cod, potatoes, collard greens, peaches, and beans. Everyone kept finding excuses to walk through the cabin to get a smell of the food cooking in the kitchen. We’d been on a strict diet of salted fish and sauerkraut and we all were ready to taste something different.

Marjan stepped out of the kitchen to look at the canned goods in the storage room in the hull, leaving Pearl and me with a bucket of potatoes to peel.

“What does Row look like?” Pearl asked, soon as Marjan left the kitchen. Normally she asked me questions about Row when we lingered in the quarters in the morning, after everyone had gotten started on the morning chores.

“A bit like me,” I said. “Dark hair, eyes like the sea.”

“And does she like snakes?” Pearl asked.

Marjan walked in and smiled at us in her absent, kind way. “Forgot the towels for laundry. Stinking up this whole kitchen with mold.”

I didn’t respond to Pearl’s question so she nudged me with a potato and said, “Well, does she?”

“Honey, just one second,” I told her, pretending to be carefully cutting rot out of a potato.

Marjan bustled out of the kitchen with a stack of wet, moldy towels.

“Pearl, we need to keep Row just to ourselves,” I said. “She’s our secret.”

When Pearl looked at me I expected to find surprise or curiosity in her look, to ask why in a high voice, but instead I found a certain, sure expression that said, I already know she’s supposed to be a secret. She wore a slight teasing grin, like she’d been needling me and enjoying my anxiety.

“Do you know why she’s a secret, Pearl?”

“We’re going to get her. And it’s dangerous there, so no one can know.”

I stared at her. She’d always known we were traveling to rescue Row, ever since that day on the cliff. But at what point did she realize we were deceiving the crew? Had my anxiety about the crossing let her know how dangerous it was? Had she heard me talking with Daniel in the mangroves after I’d found out about the epidemic?

She returned to peeling her potato with sure, swift strokes of her knife, a pleased look still curling her lips in a slight smile. Sometimes, when I saw the woman in her, I was frightened. She’d be stronger, more willful than I. I was teaching her to deceive, and she was learning my lessons well. I was teaching her how to make it in this world.

Marjan came back into the kitchen with a few cans in hand and shooed us out of the kitchen, telling us she wanted to finish up by herself.

The evening cooled, and by the time we reentered the cabin the kerosene lanterns had already been lit. The smell of fresh-baked bread felt warm and enveloping as we stepped out of the wind.

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