Second Shift: Order (Shift, #2)(21)

“Those boys should come more often,” she told him, her voice a quiver.

“Not everyone gets around like I do,” he said. “I’m sure they’d like to see you more often as well.”

“You tell them,” she said. “Tell them I don’t have much time left—”

Mission laughed and waved off the morbid thought. “You probably told my grandfather the same thing when he was young, and his father before him.”

The Crow smiled as if this were true. “Predict the inevitable,” she said, “and you’re bound to be right one day.”

Mission smiled. He liked that. “Still, I wish you wouldn’t talk about dying. Nobody likes to hear it.”

“They may not like it, but a reminder is good.” She held out her arms, the sleeves of her flowered dress falling away and revealing the bandage once more. “Tell me, what do you see when you look at these hands” She turned them over, back and forth. She studied them as if they belonged to another.

“I see time,” Mission blurted out, not sure where the thought came from. He tore his eyes away, suddenly finding her skin to be grotesque. Like shriveled potatoes found deep in the soil long after harvest time. He hated himself for feeling it.

“Time, sure,” Mrs. Crowe said. “There’s time here aplenty. But there’s remnants, too. I remember things being better, once. You think on the bad to remind yourself of the good.”

She studied her hands a moment longer as if looking for something else. When she lifted her gaze and peered at Mission, her eyes were shining with sadness. Mission could feel his own eyes watering, partly from discomfort, partly due to the somber pall that had been cast like a cold and wet blanket over the conversation. It reminded him that today was his birthday, a thought that tightened his neck and emptied his chest. He was sure the Crow knew what day it was. She just loved him enough not to say.

“I was beautiful, once, you know.” Mrs. Crowe withdrew her hands and folded them in her lap. “Once that’s gone, once it leaves us for good, no one will ever see it again.”

Mission felt a powerful urge to soothe her, to tell Mrs. Crowe that she was still beautiful in plenty of ways. She could still make music. Could paint. Few others remembered how. She could make children feel loved and safe, another bit of magic long forgotten.

“When I was your age,” the Crow said, smiling, “I could have any boy I wanted.”

She laughed, dispelling the tension and casting away the shadows that had fallen over their talk, but Mission believed her. He believed her even though he couldn’t picture it, couldn’t imagine away the wrinkles and the spots and the long strands of hair on her knuckles. Still, he believed her. He always did.

“The world is a lot like me, you know.” She lifted her gaze toward the ceiling and perhaps beyond. “The world was beautiful once, too.”

Mission sensed an Old Time story brewing like a storm of clouds. More lockers were slammed in the hallway, little voices gathering.

“Tell me,” Mission said, remembering the hours that had passed like eyeblinks at her feet, the songs she sang while children slept. “Tell me about the old world.”

The Old Crow’s eyes narrowed and settled on a dark corner of the room. A deep breath rattled in her once-proud chest. Her lips, furrowed with the wrinkles of time, parted, and a story began, a story Mission had heard a thousand times before. But it never got old, visiting this land of the Crow’s imagination. And as the little ones skipped into the room, they too fell silent and gathered around. They slipped into their tiny desks and followed along with the widest of eyes and the most open of unknowing minds these tales of a world, once beautiful, and now fairly forgotten.





11




The stories Mrs. Crowe made up were straight from the children’s books. There were blue skies and lands of green, white clouds and rainbows, animals like dogs and cats but bigger than people. Juvenile stuff. And yet, these fantastic tales of a better place somewhere impossibly distant left Mission feeling angry at the world he was stuck with. He thought this as he left the Up Top behind and wound his way past the farms and the levels of his youth. The promise of an elsewhere highlighted the flaws of the familiar. He had gone off to be a porter, to fly away and be all that he wished, and what he wished was to be further away than this world would allow.

These were dangerous thoughts. They reminded him of his mother and where she had been sent seventeen years ago to the day.

Past the farms, Mission noted something burning further down the silo. The air was hazy, and there was the bitter tinge of smoke on the back of his tongue. A trash pile, maybe. Someone who didn’t want to pay the fee to have it ported to recycling. Or someone who didn’t think the silo would be around long enough to need to recycle.

It could be an accident, of course. It could be a legitimate danger. But that’s not where Mission’s mind went. Nobody thought that way anymore. He could see it on the faces of those on the stairwell. He could see by the way belongings were clutched, children sheltered, that the future of everything was in doubt. There hadn’t been nearly as much new graffiti lately. Even the delinquents had begun to wonder: What’s the point

Mission adjusted his light pack and hurried down to the IT levels. He remembered his father’s talk of restoring the silo after the last outbreak of violence. There were physical things to patch, like the stairwell, but the population, too. Physical explosions led to population explosions. Record numbers of lottery winners followed the fighting. His father spoke of so many bodies to dispose of that the airlock had been employed, the great flames cremating the dead by the score, their ashes set loose to blur the view. It made clear the link between life and death, that each birth was owed to another’s passing. The difference with Mission was that he knew who that other person was.