Page 5 of The Quiet
Baker glanced back to see Death sitting on a cot with a look of defeat on his face. She could see him better now, with dark brown hair that dusted his shoulders. He had a bag with him, full of black vials, and she knew what that meant. She’d heard stories of traveling doctors.
It seems he wasn’t Death after all, but perhaps not far off.
She focused her attention back on Valentine.
He was sitting alone on a stump, his chin sunk to his chest, the others gesturing with their hands as if reasoning with him. They offered him something to drink. He stared at the flask for a long time and then, with a trembling hand, drank it.
Baker looked back as the doctor gathered his things to leave. He glanced over at her on his way out, and said, “What about this one?”
“She’s mute and dumb,” a woman said behind her, “hasn’t said or written a single word since she showed up here a couple years ago and doesn’t seem to understand most things anyway. It would be a waste of Amnesia. Almost a waste of rations.”
The doctor didn’t question it, and neither did Baker as he moved on. She craned her head down the street to see him galloping between the houses, out of sight into a setting sun.
He was the first person she knew to travel to the village since she’d arrived. He became the first person to leave it just as fast. The doctor’s visit lingered like an obvious black crack through the sensible monotony they all lived in.
She glanced down the streets. People hustled to dinner meals and final errands.
The stranger’s visit had disrupted the flow of their world.
Baker spotted a boy chasing a dog between two carts. She heard someone laughing. Nothing seemed as different as she felt.
Had no one else just seen what she had?
Baker curled up against the door frame of the cottage with one of the untrampled flowers between her fingers, her other hand clutching the muddled brown clothes she wore day in and day out.
One by one, the men and women filtered back through the door, some knees bumping her as they entered.
Valentine was the last to come back from the field, a picture of exhaustion from his gait to his face. He waved her over with a gesture of his finger and sat down on the cot near the entrance. She rested the flower on his knee, stepping back across the threshold to give him space to accept her gift. Picking it up mechanically, he twirled it between his calloused fingers.
She waited in the silence they often shared, waited for the real man to come back from sitting out there on that tree stump. He was still holding the flask they’d given him in his other hand.
She lifted a hand and grabbed his knee, an invitation for him to speak. Valentine’s eyes emptied for a second, and she knew that instead of urging some form of action, she’d sent him into his old life again. When he blinked back into this one, it always seemed like he came back with less of himself. Baker caught a familiar smell on his breath as she remembered the doctor’s black vials. She knew now what he drank. Her heart twisted.
They called it Amnesia, a tonic blended from a type of native root that had been mutated by Madness. It was a tonic that made people forget.
Baker must have had it once before because her past before Fort Kit was nothing more than flashing images of her parents and a birthday or two. She didn’t know how she’d ended up inthis fort, far away from the rest of the world, but here, they all drank Amnesia. Most people no longer remembered where they’d come from or how long they’d been here.
Valentine whispered hoarsely. “Is this the only way?” he asked, resting his hands back on his lap. The flower slipped from his fingers, but he made no move to retrieve it.
For a moment, she reached into that near-empty box of her past, pulling out her fragmented memories like moth-eaten fabric.
She imagined she was like him and that she remembered what lay behind the mountains. No one seemed to know anymore. She wondered why he’d come to the village in the first place if he’d wanted to be so free.
Valentine watched the floor, stroking his wooden leg as if it were sore, “The Strike. We try to forget them, and then we forget who they murdered. They see everything with their eyes, Baker,” he said as if trying to preserve information he felt he would soon forget. “They can mutate anything they touch, break the laws of nature, pull the soul right out of your body.” He clutched a trembling hand to his chest. “They took little pieces of my heart,” he moaned softly, “little pieces of my heart.”
Baker waited under the door frame, looking out into the quiet, unspoken world. The moon was clear on the horizon, a silver coin against a murky blue and purple sky. She yearned for the freedom of it, wanting to linger under the open sky as if the cottage doorway were a guillotine.
Valentine was an outcast like her, for while most people drank Amnesia to forget, Valentine preferred alcohol. If he faded away, she’d be the only outsider left.
“Come,” Valentine said, urging her inside.
Baker remained where she was, knowing that if today ended, it would not repeat tomorrow. Things would change forever if Valentine did, and the island on which she danced would grow that much smaller. If he didn’t see her, she was convinced she would vanish entirely.
She felt Valentine’s eyes beckoning her inward, but she rebelled against them, knees locked. As she looked out there into those fields, she thought of the stranger, riding over the hills. He wouldn’t come back like the sun. He had gone somewhere, someplace beyond that horizon.
“Baker.”
She shook her head, and he had to know why. In accepting Amnesia, he was betraying their alliance. He had always confided in her about the past and his hatred of Amnesia, perhaps with the comfort that the words wouldn’t go anywhere else, but she’d felt a certain bond in that. He’d once been a soldier, a traveler, an adventurer and had filled her head with those stories.
