The One Safe Place (4 page)

Kit stared at him, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Do you really not know anything or are you just pretending?”

Devin didn’t know what to say

“The Meadows is where the rich live,” Kit explained.

“Where do they get the water?”

“They own the water, idiot! How do you think they got rich in the first place?”

Devin thought of the sky dark with rain and the way the stream at the farm ran too fast to hold. “You can’t own water,” he protested.

Kit rolled her eyes. “Well, they do. They own it. They own control of it. Along with just about everything else.”

“But how? How did they get everything?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess they just grabbed it. And everyone else needs what the rich have, so they just go on getting richer. It’s the way it is. The rich have a lot, most other people have a little, and then there’s us. We don’t have anything at all.

“Lots of kids in our group,” she added.

“But don’t they have homes?”

“Used to. Some of them had good homes before their parents died or weren’t able to feed them anymore. Lots are runaways.”

“What about you?” Devin asked. “Are you a runaway?”

Kit shrugged again. “My parents ran away from
me.
I came back one day and they’d left. Best day of my life.”

“My granddad used to live here when he was young,” Devin began. “He said it was different then. It changed when it started to get hot. People stopped looking out for each other and lots of things that used to be organized just turned into a big mess.”

“Yeah?” Kit said without much interest. “Well, it’s like this now. And it’s not going to change. Some of the kids talk about getting out, how they heard about a kid who got adopted by rich people and went to live in luxury forever. Or that there’s a home somewhere where they feed you and you can play all day and have everything you want. But it’s just fairy tales.” Kit’s mouth set in a fierce line.

“Fact is,” she said, “we’re on our own.”

They spent the rest of the day on the roof. Along with the oranges, Kit had found a loaf of bread—completely stale, but whole. She fetched water from an old bathtub on the roof. It had been collected during the last rainstorm, and there was very little left. “You have to boil it,” she told Devin. She showed him how to soak the stale bread in the water until it grew soft and could be eaten with a spoon. When the meal was finished, they sat under the canopy and talked. Kit wanted to know about the farm.

“My granddad used to say there was nowhere else like it. He said it was a place where all you had to worry about were ordinary things. Like whether the chickens were laying or how to mend a fence,” Devin said. “I didn’t know what he meant.”

He paused. “Then I left and came here.”

Kit made a face. “And now you know exactly what he meant . . .”

“I thought I’d get help with it,” Devin said. “But there doesn’t seem to be anybody to ask. I don’t know who to go to.”

“You’re right,” Kit said. “You can’t trust anybody in this place.”

“It will be getting so overgrown, and I don’t know how the animals are doing. ”

Kit looked away. “Don’t think about it, Devin.”

“I nearly went into that place that says Police,” he said. “I thought —”

“You don’t want to go there! They’re not good people. They’re criminals, some of them. They’re supposed to keep law and order, but they only do things if you pay them. Like I said, we’re on our own.”

“I . . . guess so . . .”

To cheer Devin up, Kit started telling him about the time she’d been inside one of the houses of the rich. Her father had landed a temporary job doing the gardening there. While he was busy, she’d wandered inside. The first thing she noticed was how cool it was. There was a pad on the wall where you placed your hand and the temperature in the room immediately adjusted to your exact comfort. Everything adjusted, she said. The lights, the pillows on the chairs; even the windows automatically shuttered when the sun came in at a certain angle. The rich never had to lift a finger. In the bedroom, the closets were full of clothes arranged by color, all perfectly pressed, and there was a box with sliding drawers full of jewelry. Kit’s eyes grew wide with longing at the memory. She’d pushed her hand right into the box and run her fingers through the treasures. In the kitchen, all you had to do was reach for the fridge—not even touch it—and the door swung open, and inside, it was the size of a small room, full of food that didn’t even look real because there wasn’t a mark or blemish on anything.

There wasn’t a single thing inside or outside that house that was ugly or untidy.

“The rich don’t like looking at anything messy,” Kit explained. “It’s like their cars. Ever notice how the windows are always dark? My dad said they’re programmed to darken automatically so the people inside don’t have to see anything that might upset them.”

She paused. “I could have stayed in that house forever. But I had to leave. When I came out, my dad was waiting for me with a stick.”

“He beat you just for going in there?” Devin was incredulous.

“Oh, no. He would have beaten me anyway. He beat me just for being alive.”

The next morning, Kit said she needed to go and get more food. Devin wanted to go with her, but Kit said he would only slow her down.

“You don’t know anything,” she said. “And you don’t even have shoes. Anyone looking at you would think you’re crazy.” Kit shook her head. “No, there’s an art to stealing. There’s rules to it. Like stealing big and stealing small. Whenever I take something I always take something else that’s much less valuable. That way, if I’m caught, I can hand back the small thing and they’ll think it’s all I took . . . You’re not ready for any of that. I bet you can’t even pick a lock, can you?”

He shook his head.

Kit led him to a box containing dozens of padlocks of different sizes and showed him how to insert a wire and fiddle with it until the lock came free.

“Practice on these while I’m gone,” she told him. “I’ll bring back something good.”

But when she came back, three hours later, her hands were empty and her face was white. There was a large red welt on her forehead and the flesh around one eye was bruised.

“What happened?” Devin cried. Kit said nothing. She walked furiously across the roof, her fists clenched and her head down.

“Are you all right?” He reached out and, before she could stop him, gently touched the bruise on her face.

“Oh,” he said, in distress. “Why does it taste like honey? It shouldn’t taste of something nice.”

She flung away from him in sudden fury. “Are you trying to be funny? Talking crazy like that! You did it before. I thought you were just tired. Are you nuts or something?”

Devin didn’t know what she meant. She was just upset, he thought. It would be best if he didn’t argue.

Kit went to the mattress and sat down with her knees pulled up to her chin, the shards of disc overhead casting patterns on her face. She sat there for a long time, staring at her boxes of treasures. Devin waited until he saw her shoulders relax before speaking again.

“I’m going with you next time,” he said. “I don’t want you to be hit again.”

She lifted her head. “It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“We’ll both have to leave for a while anyway,” Kit said, getting to her feet. “Look at the sky.”

In the far distance Devin saw storm clouds, watery brown with blackened edges, like something singed. The breeze had completely gone and the city was held in a breathless, dusty hush.

“I think we’ve got till the evening,” Kit said.

“No, the rain will be here sooner than that.” Devin studied the sky with a farmer’s eye. “Two hours, maybe less.”

Kit was already busy, folding up the canopy and stowing it away. He helped her place lids on her boxes and stack the plates and camp stove. Together they dragged the mattress to one side of the roof and covered it with an old tarp, then arranged the bathtub and other containers in a long row to catch the rain.

“There’s a place I go, where lots of the kids go, when it storms.” She pointed across the city. “Over there. I think it was a school once. You’ll have to follow me and be sure not to get lost because you’ll never find it by yourself.”

“ ’Course I will,” Devin said. “Look at the streets in front of it. They almost join up in an X shape only not exactly, so the humming crackles a little around the edges. Plus the building itself is way more red than anything else for miles around.”

This time Kit came right up to him, her eyes serious, almost frightened.

“What are you talking about? It’s concrete and brick like all the other buildings. Dirty gray concrete.”

“But it’s different from the other buildings. They’re all different. That’s how you remember them, right? Once you’ve seen something, you can always remember where it is.”

She searched his face. “You’re not kidding, are you?” she said slowly. “I don’t think you’re crazy. Maybe you’re just a fool.”

But they were running out of time to talk about it. The sky had darkened to a dull yellow and the storm clouds were almost overhead. As they stood there, the first drops fell, huge and warm and very wet. For a moment or two they did nothing but enjoy the feeling of wetness on their skin, their faces raised to the sky, their arms stretched out. Then, as the rain fell harder, they ran to the edge of the roof and began climbing down the scaffolding as quickly as they could.

Four

BY THE TIME THEY
got to the bottom of the scaffolding, the rain was falling in earnest. The streets were dark and full of frantic movement. Children, some half naked, whooped and danced in the spray, their skinny limbs gleaming wet, their mouths gaping. Shopkeepers were hurrying to lock up and bar their shabby storefronts, and tubs and troughs and barrels were being dragged out to catch water. It hadn’t rained in a long time, and there was no knowing when it would rain again.

Within minutes the downpour had become a single, massive sheet of water pounding the ground so hard that the earth blurred and the streets turned into streams thick with dust and debris. People gasped and fled, struggling to breathe in the deluge. Even the mangy dogs had taken cover, scrambling for higher ground as best they could.

Kit and Devin ran, slipping and sliding, half blinded, calling out to each other although nothing could be heard above the massive roar of the falling water.

The abandoned school was already full of kids when they arrived. Everyone was crowded into the old gym, sitting on the floor alone or in groups. Two older boys were bouncing a ball and running up to dunk it through an empty hoop that hung crooked on the farther wall. Kit made her way through the crowd without talking to anyone and sat down in an empty corner, her bag clutched tight to her chest and her eyes wary. Devin sat down beside her, wringing out the sleeves of his shirt and trying to catch his breath. He looked around.

He recognized a few of the kids from his wanderings through the city. One boy in particular was familiar. He was taller than the others, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, with dark, curly hair cut very short and a long, straight nose that gave him a haughty appearance. He was leaning casually against the wall, one hand in his pocket, the other playing with a plastic object that made a scraping noise and then produced a flame. Each time Devin heard the scrape, a tiny lavender star shimmered into his view.