A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(111)

I’m trying to think of a distraction—for both of them—when Dalton slows, his gaze fixed on the ruins of a very old shack.

“You remember that?” Jacob says. “It was your hideout when we wintered around here.”

When Dalton doesn’t respond, Jacob falters, and I cut in with, “Eric had a hideout?” and Jacob turns to me.

“He did. See the right side there, where it’s a little higher? There’s enough of the roof left that Eric was able to hollow out a room for himself. He didn’t think I knew about it. It was his secret spot for when I drove him crazy. Which I could.”

“That’s what younger siblings do,” I say. “Or so my sister always claimed.”

He nods. “When he’d had enough of me, he’d hang out here. And I’d sit over there.” He points to a thicket. “I’d sit, and I’d wait. Then, when he came out, I’d go in myself. I’d try to figure out what he’d been doing, play with his stuff, pretend I was him. Then I’d put it all back so he wouldn’t notice.”

Others would say this wryly, maybe roll their eyes, embarrassed to admit how much they’d idolized their older sibling. Jacob’s smile is genuine. He has no sense that such a thing is worthy of embarrassment. That’s what it means to live out here all his life. He never experienced those adolescent years when peers change how you see the world, leaving you rolling your eyes at anything that is simple and innocent and childlike.

Jacob’s watching Dalton and grinning, waiting for a reaction. Waiting for his brother to roll his eyes, make some comment about what a pain in the ass he’d been and how he was lucky he never caught him in his secret spot. That’s the guy we know. But Dalton’s eyes fill with panic, as if he knows Jacob is sharing something meaningful and he wants to reciprocate. But he can’t. He’s spent too long locking down those memories, and maybe he isn’t even sure why they’re locked down, why this makes him so uncomfortable, but he can’t get past it.

“And he never caught you?” I address Jacob, shielding Dalton from a reply. Jacob answers, and I engage him in that, asking what kind of things Dalton kept in there, how old he’d been when he found it. Innocuous questions. Just a girlfriend trying to get a better sense of her lover as a child, interested in his past but not digging too deeply into the personal.

The diversion works, and Jacob doesn’t seem to notice Dalton isn’t participating in the conversation. He’s happy to talk about his brother, maybe tease him a little, livelier than I’ve ever seen him. And I’m grateful for that. I just wish it was under other circumstances.

“We wintered over there,” Dalton blurts out, cutting Jacob off midsentence, as if he didn’t realize his brother had been talking. We turn to him, and there’s silence. Long silence, and I can see him ready to withdraw again.

There. I commented. That’s enough.

He takes an audible breath and then points. “See that line of trees? That’s where we wintered. It’s a sheltered spot. We’d build a simple cabin. But our parents always dismantled it in the spring, before we left, so no one else would move in.”

“You spent summers someplace else?” I ask carefully, uncertainly, and I direct it to Jacob, but it’s Dalton who answers, saying, “Spring, summer, and fall, yeah. Once the weather cleared, we were on the move. Winter’s easier if you stay one place. Easier, too, if you’re near others. But this was as ‘near others’ as they dared get.”

“As close to the settlement, you mean.”

“It wasn’t ours,” Jacob says.

Dalton’s voice changes, the strain dissipating as another note takes its place. A note I know well. Switching to lecture mode, the easy comfort of a teacher who knows his subject well enough to recite lessons in his sleep. “What we’re coming up to is the First Settlement, the one founded by the original group who left Rockton. There are others, each built by a distinct group that left at the same time. Our parents weren’t with any of those groups.”

“It was just the two of them,” Jacob says. “Our mother’s time in Rockton was up, and our father hadn’t put in his two years. She couldn’t stay; he couldn’t leave. So they took off together.”

“It was a lark, I think, in the beginning,” Dalton says. “They were younger than most people we take these days.”

“So it was like running away together,” I say. “Except into the Yukon wilderness rather than eloping in Vegas.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if they just decided to stay after a while or if they weren’t allowed back. Anyway, they weren’t from a settlement, which doesn’t mean you can’t join one. They just never did.”

“It isn’t easy to join,” Jacob says. “You start at the bottom doing the crappy jobs, and if you’ve been living on your own, that’s going backwards. Sometimes when we’d go in to trade, there’d be problems. There aren’t a lot of women, and our mom was younger than most and…” He shrugs. “There were problems.”

“The kind that end in black eyes and bloody noses and the elders telling our parents they can’t come back until they learn some manners. And by manners, they meant learn to put up with guys grabbing our mother and offering our father trade for a night with her—right in front of me and Jacob. Our parents stayed close to this settlement in the winter. But that was it.” The path crests and rises, and Dalton peers down it and says, “And there it is.”