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Sedges hold the edges of the dune down; the little sun-blanched tufts of stem and pointed, hard leaves conceal a mass of of subterranean roots, a vast, hair-thin network that wraps around tubers that taste like - according to her grandmother - almonds. At home they diced them and steeped them in clear water for two nights, to seep out the poison, said her grandmother. Her grandmother had been a biologist, in the old world. Her grandmother was very old, and very sick, but her bones were bones from the old world, strong and free of the elements that made a geiger counter rattle. She kept going while younger people from outside the settlement sickened and died. She only let her granddaughter eat seeds that had been washed and hulled and washed again. The young boys rolled their eyes when they helped her rebuild the layers of woven-reed walls that kept the dust out of the spring, but the young boys who listened lived.
Sometimes they were hungry, there - very hungry - but better to wait, her grandmother said, than to eat the radioactive lizards on the sands, the creatures that had been eating other creatures that lived down in the geiger-rattling dust that coated the desert. And the people that didn’t listen got sick, and they died first, and the people who lived were the kind who paid attention to an old lady.
She tried to remember it, all of it. She tried to remember the rules. Some foods were pure. Some foods were impure. Water purified, but water from open creeks or from rain - not that there was much of either of those - was impure, as was water from uncovered springs. Best to bring it to grandmother. Best to get it tested with the rattling counter. It depended on there being a counter, and a grandmother, though.
If you couldn’t test it, though, water from under the ground, in a covered spring, might be pure, and water made from a still suspended over that spring, and passed through four layers of clean clay from the shrine, was purer. The seeds of sedge grass were pure when they had been washed, she whispered to herself. Washed, and hulled, and rinsed again. Creatures that crawled on the ground, in the poison dust, were never pure, but if you were caught out and must eat them best to pinch them dead, and collect them in a pouch at your waist until you had a handful, and rinse them under a little of your water. If you were caught out without water, you were God’s own fool, and deserved whatever came to you. Her grandmother had very little patience for the foolish. There was no one without sickness in the world, no one at all, but the people that paid attention to the rules might live a little longer, if chance let them. There were healthy children born, in the village. There were children who grew into adolescence without tumors or the night fevers. That was the kind of thing that attracted attention. There was no wealth in the village - they lit their fires with flint and their huts with braids of dry grass, their spring was a little trickle under a rock that required careful collection - but healthy children were a kind of wealth.
Maybe her grandmother would, herself, have lived a little longer if she had been willing to let some of the children get sick. If she had taught fewer people how to keep pure, and how to wash in the way that took the dust off, and how to avoid contamination. The last thing The Dag had seen when she was taken was her grandmother shot down on the dune.
She had not seen an old woman again, except for Miss Giddy, until the Vuvalini. She’d halfway believed that there were none left in the world, not old old women. Everything around the Citadel would have made the counter rattle, you could see that in how sick the boys got, those that were out in the open air, and Joe poured the clean water out into the poisonous dirt and made the peasants scramble for it. That’s why the boys - those that were born, not bought or stolen - had cancer in their bones, even when they were young. Because their mothers had been out there, scrambling for water in the poisonous dust. Women down in the Pit lived three, four decades, that’s what she would have guessed to look at them, until there was such a collection of poison in them that they died. The women up in the Citadel died of other things. Loss of hope, partially. And heart attacks.
The Dag had refused food at first, for a long time. Better to wait it out than eat unclean, her grandmother had always said. It was Angharad, always Splendid Angharad, that understood and persuaded Joe to show her the farms, to show her an old counter that rattled by the window but was silent when it was passed over the plants. Rictus had taken them through, and the Dag had been stunned into silence by the green walls of living things. Her grandmother’s plants had been low, brown things, scrubby and twisted. Most of their life was underground and hidden in the sand.
There were codes in the tattoos on her fingers that told her how to keep safe, how to clean the poison dust from her hair. She had a few, when she was taken. She added more after, as she started to forget. She marked down the path back to where the village had been. She wrote down on her fingers how sedges held the edges of the dunes down.
Cheedo cried for six days and six nights, after her father sold her to Joe. They tried to be kind to her and comfort her, at first, and then they got irritated, because it was only three rooms and there was nowhere to get away from that constant, low wail, like a sandstorm whistling outside. The Dag woke up in the night to the sound - Cheedo was laying on the ground beside the spring, moaning, and she probably would have managed to cry herself into unconsciousness days ago if Miss Giddy hadn’t come by every few hours, clucking, unmercifully merciful, and persuaded a little thin soup into her mouth. It seemed like such an egregious waste of fluids, all round. Toast was not-so-quietly in favor of just letting her cry herself into a coma - “What are we saving her for?” she asked, not bothering to keep her voice quiet. “She knows full well what’s happening.”
And Angharad, whose wrists were roped with years of attempted to escape the Citadel, looked at Toast and then looked at Cheedo and took the soup from Miss Giddy, and persuaded Cheedo’s head onto her knee, and persuaded a few more spoonfuls of broth into her mouth.
The Dag woke in the night to that low wailing - not even a sound with sense anymore, just the sound a human mouth made when the person behind it couldn’t stop. Toast was snoring beside her - Toast even slept aggressively, one knee flung halfway off the bed, a hand trailing to the ground like she still thought her rifle was tucked away safe there. The Dag woke up quietly, and took the lamp, and went out to the atrium.
Cheedo’s face was dirty again - the tears made water which made mud, and the Dag thought again about solar stills, about how her grandmother had taught her that the radiation was too heavy to pass into steam, all but the iodine, which only clay can put a stop to. She wondered if Cheedo’s tears condensed on the windows, and slid down onto the houseplants they kept under the windows. She wondered if the girl had cried all her poisons out yet.
She sat down, a little ways from Cheedo’s slumped form, and washed her hands carefully in the overflow pipe from the spring, and then again, and then wiped them down with Miss Giddy’s disinfectant. She passed a needle through the flame of the lamp, once, twice, and uncapped a new vial of ink.
The arc that the Dag pricked into the back of her own left knuckle was the solar still; the droplets beneath it were the layers of clay. Her grandmother had shown her this, and the memory was foggy and fadey now. And one day she would need to know, again, she was sure of that. One day she would need to find a geiger counter, and a patch of safe clay, and start over.
She was intent on her work, and it took her a long time to register the silence in the room. She looked up, and sidelong, startled, and realized that Cheedo was watching her.
The bruises Cheedo had received on the way to them were almost faded, yellowing along her jawline. Her eyes were swollen almost shut. Joe had come to look her over, a few times, so they had tried to sponge her down occasionally, but she’d wailed and fought them and so they’d stopped trying - at least the dirt in here was clean dirt - and let her lay there.
Still, under the smears of mud, she had a pretty, pretty face. The Dag looked at it, and felt her heart clench at how dangerous it was, to have such a pretty face.
“What are you doing?” Cheedo whispered, her voice hoarse. The Dag had never heard her speak before, not like a person, not in something other than a wail.
The Dag looked down at the ink blooming along her stinging hand, and looked back up. “Writing,” she whispered, low.
Cheedo was watching her, but the ink would go bad in the open vial, so she finished the last wavering line of clay filter below the arc of the stillcloth. When she looked up, Cheedo had pushed herself up to sitting. Her body was thin - wasted, a little - under the rough cloth she wore wrapped around her. There were bruises on her knees and shins. The Dag looked away from the metal of the chastity belt. It wasn’t a thing you wanted to see, if you could help it.
“Let me look?” Cheedo asked, finally, in that hoarse whisper.
The Dag considered, and nodded, and Cheedo crept closer. She turned over the Dag’s right hand, the one where she’d done a bit of a sloppy job, working with her left. She ran a thumb over her knuckle, where she’d written three dots, for her grandmother, for the roots and the three changes of water. “What’s this?” Cheedo asked, low, at the series of angles that marked the turns they’d taken, when the convoy brought her here.
The Dag’s fresh tattoo stung, but she didn’t mind, she used that finger to point with anyway. “The hills,” she whispered, low, “and four days on the flats.” She brushed past the line that marked the dry riverbed. “The way back home,” she said, her hand brushing against Cheedo’s, and Cheedo flinched back.
Then she looked the Dag full in the face and shoved the sleeves of her sackcloth back and said, “Give me one.” She paused, and added, “will you get in trouble?”
“He doesn’t care what our hands look like,” the Dag said, low and factual. She took Cheedo’s hand and wiped the antiseptic over it. “Where?”
“Here,” Cheedo said, pointing.
“What do you want?” the Dag said, passing the needle through the flame again. She didn’t bother to get new ink. As soon as Joe got at her, they’d all have any diseases Cheedo had, and he’d probably had the Mechanic look her over. And anyway, what did it matter? They’d live as long as they’d live, in here. It would only matter once they went outside.
“The two hills,” Cheedo said. “Where the town is. Due west.”
“The sun sets over them,” the Dag said, and Cheedo nodded, and hissed when the needle broke her skin. Her palm was warm and real in the Dag’s hand, like a person, not like the howling thing that had laid on their atrium floor for six days. Her bones were very evident, under her skin.
“I’m never going back,” Cheedo said, suddenly.
“You might,” the Dag said, noncommittally. They might die in here, or up in the milking room, but then again, they might not. Joe was old. They might be turned out, to die in the Pit. They might be turned out, and start walking until the desert or the radiation took them. She glanced again at the still marked on her knuckle.
“I don’t want to,” Cheedo said, unexpectedly. Fiercely.
The Dag paused, caught in the act of marking her, and then said “Then this is you.” She pointed to one of the dots that was the sun setting over the cliffs. “And this is me, yeah?” She pointed to the other, the two of them standing straight beside each other. “The two of us standing tall. Somewhere safe.”
---
Sometimes, later, when Joe sent for the Dag, she tangled her hand up with Cheedo’s and tapped against those dots, not looking her in the eyes. She thought about it, sometimes, when she needed to. The two of them, out in the wild, standing tall. Somewhere safe.
The sedges held the edges of the dunes down, but most of their life was down in the sand, and the Dag looked at her hands, when she couldn’t look at anything else, and thought about how much you could still keep hidden until you needed it.