This is my last non-NaNo chapter!

Chapter 4

She was not aware she was asleep until the mattress jostled. Groggily, she squinted open her eyes and light blinded them; she'd left her lamp on, fallen asleep on top of the science lesson she was supposed to teach tomorrow. She had no idea why she'd been awakened until she heard Patch's voice.

"Ren, this is serious." The mattress bounced again and she pushed her head into her pillow, willing it all away. "I've lost my inspiration. Permanently."

"What are you talking about," she asked flatly into the pillow.

He puffed out an exaggerated breath and flopped onto his back. "I can't think of anything to draw. I can't think of anything to write. Even reading is boring. I've gotten all old and dried-out."

"Patch, you're just having a bad night. Go to sleep," Ren grumbled, rubbing her face.

"No, not a bad night. This has been happening forever." He jerked into a sitting position and Ren's new bedframe rattled. Why couldn't kids just be still? "Well, not forever. But for like weeks and weeks and weeks, it's been getting worse." His voice was so desperate, Ren couldn't help but look at him. "Maybe I'm past my prime."

"You're ten. You're not even at your prime."

He slapped his forehead with both hands. "I just feel so empty. Like someone took out the right hemisphere of my brain. And I don't think I have the left hemisphere."

"But you're talking about the left hemisphere, which is science. And the left hemisphere is science," said Ren, who was getting more out of school the second time around.

Patch said nothing. He cuddled up to Ren, something he only did now in the cover of darkness, and she snuggled him back. The attic was quiet. The chickens, grown and gone now, were outside in a coop. Pepper breathed lightly.

"Maybe it's meant to be," Patch said.

"What?"

Patch sighed sleepily and pushed in even closer, almost as though he wanted to hide from his own question. "Do you ever think maybe you'll die young? Like him?"

Ren answered automatically. "Who?"

"You know. Gabriel. Brim said he finished everything he was meant to do. Do you ever worry you'll finish what you were meant to do too soon?"

Nausea started in Ren's stomach and swept up in waves. She held Patch so tight he wriggled and kicked free.

"Don't say that." It came out harsher than she intended. "Don't ever say that."

"I wasn't being mean," Patch grumbled, rolling over.

"You're going to live so long, Patch. You can have babies to make the house loud and wild if you want them. You'll have all the books you've written sitting in libraries. We'll have libraries again by the time you're grown up."

"I won't have books in them if I don't get inspiration back."

"Do you understand me?" Her voice caught and it made Patch look at her. "Never say that."

"All right, sorry," he said, and suddenly he looked like his tiny self, in the long-ago days when they lived in a tree, with the worried crease between his eyes. After a moment he said, "I'm going to bed now."

"Stay." Ren caught his wrist. "Please."

Patch slid one arm beneath his head as a pillow. His free hand curled around Ren's fingers, and he stayed. "I miss him too, you know. Even when I almost forget."

Ren pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. She timed his breaths with his, focusing on it. He pulled in a deep breath and she prepared for something heavy to drop out of his mouth, something oddly wise.

"Did you see the string lights at the market?" he asked. "I want some for my room. I wish my birthday was soon."

"We'll see about getting you some, anyway," Ren said.

***

Most of the world was still wild.

In front of the Dravens' house lay the town but behind it stretched nothing and Ren knew all of it, the water and wind and snap of the same branches that had shaped her into being but it was a different wild now. Silent. Empty. It hurt her eyes, how empty it was; they had to stretch all the way to the horizon. The ground soft and chalky and the color of rain. The leaves didn't change colors anymore. The buds sprouted crinkly and brown already and then fell.

But still she breathed it all in, and ran, and hunted, and prowled, and existed invisibly, and she felt like a child again, even though she was tall and maybe was a woman instead. She had never, in her life, particularly felt like either of those things. But in the woods she felt like herself, whatever that self was.

The morning after she crawled over Patch to get out of bed, she caught two tarp in her fish trap and carried them home, but she wouldn't be able to cook them yet, not until the forest rangers tested the pollution level of the water and aired the result on the radio. Everything was complicated now. The family settled for a breakfast of wheat buns, chewy and hard to swallow, with the last of the market honey. The chickens in the yard, grown but not laying yet, raised a constant racket, one sneaking through the screened door when Dale brought the newspaper in. Peanut chased the hen around the table before Clover rescued her, snapping her hands around her middle and dropping her into a shrieking, squawking, feathered heap on the porch.

"Have you seen the West March?" asked Dale, shaking out the newspaper as Peanut yowled in protest of his lost prey, and Ren looked up to see a photograph of fire and broken glass, PROTESTS ERUPT AS HUNDREDS OF JOBS CUT running across the top in black letters.

"Remember when I talked about going there for work? Thank Brim I got my senses together," said Dale, slapping the paper onto the table.

Following his desperate job search last month, Dale was rewarded with a security position at a canning factory in the next village over, relying on a community carpool vehicle to get him there each day. He had to pay a transportation fee, and with electricity always on the brink, there were the mornings the car ran out of charge, but he was lighter now, smiling at Anna, calling Ren renegade again. It was such steady work, Darius decided to tack on some evening hours at the same factory.

"I better go," said Ren, her mind and body sluggish at the table, longing for the solitude of the wilderness. But it was Saturday, market day. She didn't want to go. Dead leaves fluttered past the window, blown in the October breeze, a good day to stay home.

Ren hated autumn, hated the dry air that made Clover, exposed to so much dust and bombing as a baby, hack her lungs out, desperate for breath. And maybe, selfishly, she hated the season for what it once held—hers and Gabriel's almost-shared birthdays, the boar hunt, the harvest fest, all the things she would never get back. And the war. The war started at the dawn of winter.

She wished summer never ended.

Nobody whispered about Ren at the market anymore, nobody ever, the way they did when she was a child, and truthfully most of those people were gone now. They were the bones that washed up when it rained. New people thought Ren's scar came from the war, and they understood she did not want to talk, and they knew she sold more than anyone else and had done this longer than anyone else, and there was a certain respect. Ren wanted the respect. There was a fist tightening around her heart, a hate towards herself for wanting it, but she also did not try to stop wanting it.

There was a coolness in the wind today but temperatures would not truly drop until nearly Yuletide. Southern Glennerdells had never paid much attention to the concept of fall. Ren purchased a flat bread, the grain brown and coarse, and ate her second breakfast at her stall, selling six blackbirds and two rabbits before she had even put her sign up.

Today she parked her wares next to Fiona, Calum's mother. Fiona, it turned out, apprenticed in medicine back in Bellica, or Talmarain as it was called again, when she was younger than Ren, and she had taken to selling medicinal herbs, somehow coaxing them out of a ground that choked everything it was given.

On the other side of Ren stood Rose, a bent and serious old woman with a West March accent who sold knickknacks of varying degrees of usefulness, somewhat in competition with Ren, though mudlarking was less fruitful these days.  She and Fiona chattered over Ren's head. "Did you see the Taylors' boy not half an hour ago? I swear they're starving the thing."

"Aren't we all starving," said Fiona, accidentally making eye contact with Ren, and she smiled and Ren felt the weight. Not a bad weight. Just the weight of having known each other for awhile, having survived the same things.

"All the same...."

Ren kept tearing off and chewing. She should not be eating. She should have bought food for the younger ones instead. She also needed to lift her voice above the others, to sell the rest of the meat before it spoiled under the sun, but she couldn't find the will. If she wasn't careful, this would turn into an off day.

"Hi there, Ren." It was Anna, curly hair pulled back but sticking to her forehead with glistening sweat. She held her daughters' hands, one on each side. "We've got to find Clover some shoes. Thought we'd say hi."

"Is that a cinnamon one?" asked Lark, staring up at the flatbread.

Ren held it out. "No. It's not very good. But you finish it. Half it with Clover," she added quickly as the littler girl sank her teeth in.

"There are the Flanders," said Rose, and this distracted Ren. She lifted her head.

There was skinny Topper, glasses crooked, carrying a girl on his back the way Ren used to carry Patch. Seven or eight children of assorted sizes crowded around as his apparent mother, gray-haired and in a yellow shawl, counted coins and a fruit vendor tapped his counter impatiently.

"Who are all those kids?" asked Ren. "I've never seen them."

"Their mother learns them at home. Did before the war, as well. Now she's widowed and gets by on other folk's laundry." Dale called Rose an encyclopedia on worthless information. "'Course, Topper supports the family." She squinted one eye at Ren. "You should know him. Don't you work at the school?"

Ren did not answer because the Flanders family drew closer and she saw the little girl on Topper's back. It looked as though the flesh on the left side of her face had melted, then hardened back together rock-hard and bumpy. It was black, harshly obvious on her pale skin, and the eye only opened halfway. Topper shifted her weight and spoke to her over his shoulder, smiling, and she laughed.

"What happened to her?" asked Fiona softly.

"I don't know," said Rose, for once.

All over the market, people stopped their business and stared as the Flanders passed, staring not at the sheer number of children, but one child in particular, the one deformed in their eyes. Looking with no shame. Whispering. Topper was coming this way and Ren dropped her eyes fast, but Rose delivered a swift punch to her shoulder. "Give the girl one of your jewelry pieces."

Ren watched them pass. She felt Topper's eyes find hers, but he looked away first, embarrassed it seemed, and moved away. Someone stepped up to Fiona's stall and blocked Ren's view.

"Why did you give it to her?" came Rose's sharp question. "Doesn't her little happiness matter more than your money?" Ren said nothing and Rose turned around, muttering.

"Enough, Rose," Anna snapped. She put a spool of yarn back and tugged on Clover. "Come on, girls. Take care, Fiona."

"Bye, Ren!" called Lark with a happy wave.

Fiona chattered with a potential customer. Ren could not take her eyes off the empty space where the little girl had clung to her brother's back. The place where Ren once stood, messy-haired, motherless, her own face a mess of recent wound. So hating the whispers and stares, hating the sad smiles and sympathetic gifts even more.

***

At home, later in the afternoon, Patch led the girls in some expedition along the riverside while Hollis lurked on his own, and Ren set out looking for the familiar old willow.

It was gone. It had burned years ago, and the ground beneath it burned, melting her little sister's heart and bones, melting the remains of her mother, dissolving them into one. But Ren never stopped looking. Couldn't believe that she would never again stand in the waving grass under the gently sweeping tree and convince herself that the wind on the earth was the breath of her sister, and the warmth of the sun her hand.

For a long time she sat on the broken ground to which may have once clung the water-seeking roots and watched the river, sick and rushing, sweep away ashes over and over.

***

In the morning, before she opened her eyes, she knew it was an off day.

Most days were on days now. After the War, right at first, every day was an off day. Then they came with less frequency, as she learned how to survive, and then how to live, and somehow, so slowly she didn't realize it, they almost stopped coming at all.

Except sometimes.

In the woods she did not notice the day passing until it was gone, the moon slipping out, and she had accomplished nothing. Her family would be holding dinner, waiting, understanding she needed time, but as the sky darkened and creatures howled in the woods they would begin to worry. Ren told herself this. She smothered the voice inside that told her they were better off with her gone. She got to her feet. She did not remember sitting down.

From the house voices spilled through the screened door, laughter of the little girls, but on the steps huddled a dark shape. Hollis, watching the town with the breeze in his hair.

"Ren?" he said, and his voice sounded small in the darkness, like when he was a child. "Why do you think Brim hasn't come back like he said?"

"I don't think he ever meant to," said Ren, speaking for the first time all day, and went inside.