Story: How to Save the World without Meaning To

Summary: In which there is a wet-behind-the-ears secret agent in the making, a mad scientist bent on taking over the world, and a very endearing cat.

Rating: G

How to Save the World without Meaning To

Or

Think of the Kittens

There was a tradition (disguised as protocol) in which the newest members of the team were charged with the most menial of tasks. There was no guarding important entrances nor rifling through dangerous-looking equipment for the ones barely a year into the job, and heaven forbid if they got so much as within twenty feet of the villain of the hour (apparently, there were devices of the ray-gun variety that could muddle a man’s mind into liberating said villain). Not even guarding the henchmen. Oh no. It was guarding doors to restrooms and keeping a weather eye on the kitchen and lounge, because you never knew what dastardly surprise might be waiting in the oven or surround-sound system.

Still, Dan couldn’t help but wonder if the other lads were having him on, because his job was to guard a cat.

Dan had never considered himself to be a cat person, but even he had to admit it was a pretty cat – one of those snow-white Persians only without the smooshed face, and eyes as blue as the ocean. It was also pampered in a manner that could be counted among the absolutely ridiculous. The villain of the hour – a balding, aging, megalomaniac hell-bent on taking over the world by destroying most of it with a hidden missile or two – had spared no expense in spoiling his little darling. The cat (Annabelle, according to her solid gold name tag on her sapphire collar) had a room twice the size of Dan’s pitiful little flat. There were plush, cat-sized love seats, a little bed fit for a king, a jumbo-sized television currently playing the Aristocats, a fish tank of the same size as the television brimming with bright tropical fish, and two silver dishes against the wall beneath a device that automatically filled them whenever they were empty. There was also a silver platter next to the dishes with the remains of what might have been salmon.

And it boggled Dan’s mind how a man so destruction-happy could take up the hobby of spoiling rotten another living being. The floor was littered with expensive cat toys and high-end catnip balls, and there were pictures on the walls of Annabelle as a fluffy kitten batting at string, another of her older being held by her brightly beaming master, Annabelle at Christmas playing in wrapping paper, Annabelle at the beach, and similar pictures besides.

While just two corridors down was a room full of weapons that could level a city.

“Why the hell would Dr. Zenvoid want to destroy the world? Where’s he going to get cat toys from, or cat food, if he burns everything?” Dan said.

Zenvoid’s plan wasn’t merely to subdue the world, but to “cleanse it” by wiping out humanity then repopulating with a more “superior” species specially chosen from humanity and genetically modified by him.

Bill, who’d been charged with the slightly less demeaning task of searching the room for dangerous weapons (well, perhaps not so demeaning. Dan doubted even a mad man like Zenvoid would hide anything where his precious cat might paw at it and set it off) spat impatiently as he sifted through a basket of toys, “Why the hell are you asking me? The man’s bloody mad, you don’t question the bloody mad. Just… do something with the cat. Captain Franks wants this whole place cleared out.”

Dan looked to Annabelle, sitting primly and unconcerned on one of her many love seats.

Bill’s search had unearthed the luxury limo among cat carriers, with a lambs-wool interior and a little heater and air conditioner on the back. It was also quite spacious, which meant it was going to be a pain to carry.

At the sight of the carrier, Annabelle leaped from her throne and trotted over to begin rubbing up against Dan’s leg, as if thanking him for bringing out her carriage.

Pampered yet polite – it made Dan smile.

“You have any favorite toys you want me to bring?” he asked, but Annabelle had already made herself comfortable in the carrier. Dan looked among the toys anyway, his assault rifle threatening to slide off every time he bent forward and bop him on the head. He picked the toys that looked the most chewed on and tossed them into the carrier.

When anyone on the team said to “deal” with something, what they really meant was “get it out of the bloody way and let someone else eventually deal with it so that we can focus on the more important tasks.” As long as the cat was in the cage and not where she would trip anyone by tangling around their legs, then Dan could have called it a job well done and move on. He knew this – he’d been at it a bloody year, although this was only his third clean-up – and yet he couldn’t help taking it a step further by preparing the cat a travel bag.

A bloody travel bag. Which he found in a closet along with containers for food and water, various cat brushes, and a fat, red pillow. He packed all this, even knowing that it would be discarded once the cat was taken to the nearest animal shelter, or whatever was done with her. She was a pretty cat, so he was sure she would get adopted quickly, although she would never again enjoy this level of pampering.

~oOo~

Dan had been a bit hasty thinking that Annabelle’s story ended with her removal from Zenvoid’s secret base. Zenvoid had a penchant for escape-artistry (this was the second time he’d been taken into custody), and until headquarters could ensure Zenvoid was in a position where he couldn’t make a break for it, they wanted all his possessions in a position where they could be amply guarded. The last thing they needed was Zenvoid targeting whoever wasn’t spoiling his precious Annabelle per her usual level of coddling.

Which didn’t sit well with Dan. Maybe a shelter wouldn’t have pampered her, but being the pretty cat she was, it wouldn’t have been long before someone came along who would pamper her. As it was, she’d been placed in one of the smaller storage spaces (a broom closet) so she would be out of the way, with a cake pan for a litter box and very little space to roam except in a tight circle.

Bill said that she needed to suck it up; it would teach her to be less spoiled. Dan thought, she’s a cat; it’s not her fault she’d been ridiculously mollycoddled by a psychopath. Dan visited her, in part because he felt bad for her, in part because she was a very friendly cat, and in part because he found brushing her to be rather relaxing. But she was listless, wearing the most pathetic look every time Dan had to leave. The only time she perked up was when he arrived, and then she was all over him, rubbing against his legs, bumping her head against his chin, batting at toys as though hoping to get him to play.

She’s the cat of a world-dominating mad man, the other lads would say.

She’s a bloody cat who just wants a bloody brushing, Dan would say.

Meanwhile, Zenvoid wasn’t talking, and there was still a missile or two out their eagerly waiting to destroy the world. Concern over one cat shouldn’t have been a priority, but dangling a bit of string in front of her did seem to take Dan’s mind off the matter of imminent demise, if just for a bit.

Thank goodness for the head secretary, Mrs. Abernash, who was terrifying on a good day, but had a soft spot for cats. She had some of the cat’s things brought up from storage and arranged in the lounge, under the pretense of being sick and tired of hearing the cat whine all day. The lounge was spacious, full of plump couches, a fish tank, and while the TV screen was not jumbo-sized it was still a massive step up from no TV screen at all. It wasn’t long before Annabelle became one of those much appreciated additions that everyone refused to admit to. Annabelle was not a pushy cat, and always seemed to know what it was that was needed, whether it was to curl in one’s lap or sit by their side and simply be there, as if saying “I’m here for you and understand what you’re going through – well, not really because I’m not a secret agent and I’ve never had to kill anyone or disarm a bomb using only a fork and my wits with only ten seconds to go – but I’m still here for you.”

And it continued to hound Dan how a man who probably spent hours brushing their cat and teasing her with bits of string would build a missile (or two) to wipe out the world. The more time Dan spent with Annabelle, and the more he witnessed top agents, hardened former soldiers, and stick-up-their-backside officials unwind as they stroked her fur and teased her with bits of string, the more the question began to drive him mad.

He didn’t really think on it when he made the request to speak to Zenvoid, or whether or not Dan’s request would be granted. Honestly, it shouldn’t have been granted at all, but he’d said he had questions about the cat – which was true; she was having a bit of a diarrhea issue – and while the higher-ups were hesitant about it, overall they didn’t see the harm.

None of it – the request, that the request it had been granted, that Dan, still at the stage of having to guard bathroom doors, was about to talk to the world’s most dangerous mastermind – registered until he walked into the interrogation room to Zenvoid himself.

It didn’t matter that Zenvoid was dressed in maximum-security prison orange, the look on the man’s face was a heartfelt promise of terrible things to come as soon as he managed to escape. It doubled when Dan walked in.

“Oh, lovely, now they’re sending in children. Or are you merely here to escort me on my morning constitutional to a more secure location?” Zenvoid spat. He leaned back in the metal chair and studied his nails. “I do hope they warned you about my rather bad habit of slitting people’s throats even when they’re looking.”

And suddenly Dan wished he had kept his mouth shut.

Until he thought of Annabelle and all those pictures of a happy, smiling, not-insane-at-all Zenvoid cuddling her. Dan seated himself awkwardly and launched into the diarrhea issue.

Zenvoid rolled his eyes. “My word, you people are incompetent. You switched cat food on her without easing her into it. Of course she has the runs! You’re probably giving her that wretched store brand filth. Look, I’ve got a man who supplies me cat food. It’s beyond your pay-grade, I’m sure, but just say my name and he’ll send some over as a personal favor to me.” He then gave the number of this supplier.

Dan frowned thoughtfully at Zenvoid. “Um, if you pardon my saying, Mr. Zenvoid,” he said, “But, um… the thing is.”

“Spit it out,” Zenvoid said flatly.

“Well, it’s just… well… you want to destroy the world and everyone in it and all but that would mean killing your supplier, too, wouldn’t it? Unless you were going to, you know, take him in or something. Except even then, what with the world in shambles, he wouldn’t have what he needed to make this special cat food and all.”

Zenvoid narrowed his eyes. “It’s animal parts cooked up in a lab. If you raided my sanctuary, which I know you have, you’ll have seen I have enough labs to spare.”

“Well, yeah, but, what about cat toys? And getting fresh salmon for her? And, and… what about all the other cats?”

“What about them?” Zenvoid said.

“Well, you destroy the world then you destroy cats, too, right? And you destroy the cat breeders, and the people who make cat toys. And, well, the cats, Mr. Zenvoid. What of the cats? And the kittens? And all the cat videos you had saved on your computers, and the cat screensavers, and the calendars. There wouldn’t be any more of those.”

Zenvoid’s fingers drummed anxiously on the table. “No, I suppose not,” he said slowly, carefully, as if caught in a game of wits and so having to choose his words with caution. “But there would have been, eventually, once the world fell into order.”

“But that’s going to take time. And in the meantime, if all the cats don’t get wiped out, it’ll still mean all these orphaned cats with no home, and kittens without their mothers, wandering around and crying and getting eaten by rats and wild dogs…”

Zenvoid’s fingers stopped drumming.

“And if your missile does wipe out the cats, and Annabelle dies, you wouldn’t be able to get another one. There’d be no more cats.”

Zenvoid said thickly. “You’re point?”

Dan shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry, I’m just trying to understand. I know the world isn’t always the greatest place and there’s a lot about it you despise, but there’s things in it you like, too. I just don’t understand why you’d be willing to destroy everything if it means destroying the things you like. Haven’t you thought about the kittens and the cats and what would happen to them? And who would take care of them while the world rights itself? I just… I don’t get it is all.”

Zenvoid sat there, staring at him with a face as blank as a new piece of paper. He said nothing, and after two minutes of this Dan figured he had annoyed the man enough that he wasn’t going to answer. Dan left, feeling like an idiot.

A day later, Zenvoid gave up the location of the missiles (turned out there were five, not two). The boys and girls upstairs were baffled, and everyone else (having heard about Dan’s interview with Zenvoid) didn’t know whether to laugh or clap him heartily on the back.

Dan was promoted from guarding cat rooms to guarding the villain of the hour, just in case there was anything about said villain that puzzled him and he felt the need to ask about it.

Annabelle maintained her position as spoiled princess of the lounge room, rewarded periodically with fresh salmon, and looking rather smug as though she was well aware of her part in saving all of man (and cat) kind.

The end

The Toymaker

Once you go to the mines, you never return—a rumor that had never concerned ten-year-old Ashima Nayar until the night her village was devastated. Now, with crops destroyed and desperation about to set in, Ashima is suddenly separated from the only life she’s known, while her parents depart to work in the dreaded mines.

But Ashima has no intention of waiting around with only the hope that her parents might return. She’s going to find them.

In her quest, she befriends Ren, a man with a strange but amazing ability. They are drawn into a world full of raging Beasts, tyrannical goblins, and perilous secrets. With the help of Ren and his unusual gift, they set out in search of her parents, and the answer to a mystery that has haunted Ren for years. An answer that just might change the course of the world.

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The Toymaker Ch. 1

The Beasts attacked in the middle of the night.

By noon of the next day, Ashima was herded onto a bus along with several other children. There was no explanation given, only a tear-filled and urgent plea from her mother to just do as she was told, please, as if all their lives depended on it.

Which was all wrong. Ashima’s mother had never – not once – ever ordered Ashima to just do as she was told. There had always been explanations, reassurances, efforts made to help Ashima understand the things her parents asked of her. Not once in Ashima’s life had she ever not received an answer whenever she had asked why.

But both the shock at her mother’s demand and the confusion over what in the world was going on left Ashima speechless, and by the time she realized that neither of her parents had joined her on the bus, the doors had hissed shut. The bus coughed and rattled to life. Ashima stared out the window, gaping at her mother’s tear-stained face and the way her harvest-roughened hands fidgeted with the end of her dark braid, which she only ever did when too distressed to speak. Ashima looked to her father with his messy mop of black hair, waving to her with fingers stained in years of ink from his job as a harvest clerk. Both had aged years overnight.

“Be good, little bird,” her father said above the rumble of the bus. “We’ll…” he stumbled over his words, his voice catching. “We’ll see each other again,” he finally said with the smile he would smile when trying too hard to be reassuring. “But right now you need to go where you’ll be safe.”

Ashima wanted to demand why, to demand where she was going and why they weren’t going with her.

            She finally said, so small and quiet that the bus’ throaty growl swallowed it up, “Mom? Dad?” The bus jolted, and the graveled street crunched beneath its tires as it pulled away.

            Ashima’s mother and father vanished into the crowd watching their children leave.

            Ashima flopped against her seat, refusing to cry in front of everyone even though it made her head and throat ache fiercely. She was ten, far more mature than she had been only a year ago, and being mature meant no crying. This was temporary, it had to be. There were always tales of Beasts attacking villages, and the villages surviving just fine. Theirs was an old, large village with a small electric dam, three oil pumps, a small refinery and more crop fields than anyone could count. This had been the town’s first Beast attack, and everyone knew Beast attacks could happen no matter how big and old the village. Her being sent away most definitely had to be temporary.

            The bus shuddered and rolled toward the edge of the village, past the few buildings that still stood and the ones now just piles of stone, wood and tile. The bus skirted around more piles that hadn’t yet been cleared out of the street. There was the butcher’s shop, mostly intact, but the textile shops were gone, as was the inventory office where her father had worked. Then the bus exited the town on the road between the fields, once green with vegetables or golden with wheat, now trampled into landfills, the soil muddy and pitted, the crops scattered rags of vegetation. Ashima could smell the start of decay – sour, musty and gut-churning – and her eyes widened. She hadn’t seen the Beasts, being in the cellar with her mother at the time, but she had heard the talk. There had been three, and they had been massive; bigger than an elephant and enraged as a bull, people had said. Hundreds of rounds of ammo had been needed to take them down. Had the Beasts kept going, it would have leveled the entire village. 

            But stench or no stench, Ashima wasn’t ready to close the window just yet, no matter how many dirty looks her seat-partner (Kevin, she recalled) kept giving her. Kevin was short and scrawny, and if he tried to fight her on it, she would have no problems taking him. It wouldn’t be the first time she had fought a boy and won, and she was in no mood to be tolerant.

                        “Why we leaving?” asked Kimmy in the seat in front of Ashima. She was six, blond-headed and prone to talking louder than was necessary.

           “Because mom and dad are going someplace we can’t,” her sister replied, sounding cross. She was fifteen, and always seemed to find a reason to be cross.

            “Why can’t we?” Kimmy asked.

            “Because it’s not a good place for kids.”

            “Why can’t we just stay here? With Uncle and Aunt Elmer?”

            “Because they’re going, too.”

            “Why?”

            “Because they are! Now will you be quiet?”

            “They’re going to work the goblin mines,” said Newel Samson, a dark skinned boy who loved any reason to talk. “I heard my parents talking about it last night. The Beasts didn’t just get the fields, they got the storage silos, too. So now there’s not a lot of crops but too many mouths to feed, so people are going to the mines so it won’t be a problem, and so they can send money back to help rebuild everything. And I hear, if anyone takes their kids to the mines, the kids have to crawl through all these really tight holes and sometimes they get stuck and die.”

            “Why can’t mommy and daddy just come with us?” Kimmy asked.

            Newel shrugged. It was odd that Newel didn’t have an answer. He always had an answer for everything.

            “I hear the goblins like to eat kids,” said freckle-faced Diana. “They take ’em when the parents are all busy mining and blame it on the kids getting lost in the mines.”

            Red-headed Seth asked, “What do the goblins have people mine, anyway?”

            Diana shrugged. “Don’t know, but it’s gotta be worth a lot because everyone goes to the mines to work when they can’t work nowhere else.”

            “Why did the stupid Beasts have to go after us?” Seth kicked at the seat in front of him, ignoring the glares he received. “Beasts never hit us before.”

            Beasts hit everywhere, the adults had always said. Sooner or later, they came and they destroyed and if it was bad enough, you went to work at the goblins’ mine because they always needed workers, making it a job you never had to worry about losing.

            But there were stories about the mines. Terrible stories. Like the one Diana had just told, or the one about goblins only hiring humans so that they could eat them later.

            They were just tall tales, of course – rumors scattered like seeds and altered for the sake of a little entertainment, told with smiles and elbows to the side because no one really believed them. So Ashima had never believed them, either.

            She still didn’t believe them, or tried not to. But her parents were going somewhere that Ashima couldn’t go. That they had said nothing about any of it – about why Ashima was leaving but they weren’t – made Ashima more nervous than she already was. When the bus chugged and struggled up the hill, Ashima poked her head back out the window, watching the cluster of stone and tile buildings sitting in the center of a patchwork quilt of ravished fields gradually shrink until they looked like a toy village.

            “Where we going, again?” asked Kimmy.

            “To a town,” said Newel. “The kind with walls, where it’s safe.” The other children chatted excitedly until the supervising adult at the front finally shushed them.

            Ashima continued to watch the village until it vanished from sight on the other side of the hill, taking her parents with it. She tried not to think about if she would ever see them again, or how the stories of the mines also said that once you went in, you never came out.

 

            Bus rides, Ashima decided, were like being told “just do as you’re told.” They were unpleasant and there was nothing you could do about it. The bus also smelled funny, like feet, rubber and a little of unwashed body. It was also ugly. This one was a Frankenstein’s monster of parts, it’s body blue, green and silver, belching plumes of black smoke, and it’s windows ill-fitting and next to impossible to close. Its driver was also bad tempered and snappish, as was the supervising adult who had seated herself at the front to keep a better eye on the kids.

            Ashima, once over the initial shock of having been shuffled onto a bus by her parents without explanation, had now given in to anger and contemplated taking off the first chance she got when the bus stopped.

            But the bus didn’t stop until it had passed through the woods that bordered the valley; woods said to be the playground for all things man-eating and forever hungry. Woods that now stood between Ashima and the village. Stupid woods.  

                       Riding the bus was a waking nightmare, and mine or no mine Ashima would have given her rag doll, Asha, and her granny’s necklace to go with her parents instead. Then again, even if the ride had been pleasant, she still would have wanted to go with them. For two days the bus bounced and bumped until Ashima thought her tailbone would break. The few times the bus did stop it was only long enough to refuel, which meant making every stop count or enduring the humiliation that was the toilet bucket in the very back near the emergency exit. The weather turned cool, the air wetter and the forests thicker until Ashima could see only patches of sky now and then. Solid gray clouds, smooth as slate, soon hid that sky like an immovable wall. Ashima’s annoyance was replaced by melancholy and the endless cycle of wondering why – this time the why being why her parents felt the need to go to the mines and why Ashima couldn’t go with them. Why not just go to another village, or stay and help rebuild? Or, why not just go to a human-run coal mine if mining was something they actually wanted to do?           

            Ashima realized she had started chewing the ends of her long, dark hair – something else she had thought herself too old for. But it made her think of her mother and the way her mother would tug at her own hair when worried, and the memory made Ashima’s chest hurt until she could barely breathe.

            No one comes back from the mines, it was said.

            Just a rumor, that was all.

            Except Ashima didn’t even know if her parents were going to the mines.

            But Newel said that’s why they had all been loaded onto the bus, because only parents going to the mines were sending their children to the town. And, while Newel liked to talk, he was also like a parrot, repeating only what had already been said by someone else. He didn’t lie, at least not on purpose.       

            The bus rolled into a wet, murky slop of a forest so bogged down in plants, ferns and vines it was impossible to see anything. The air, though cool, was thick with the heady smell of moist earth and molding wood.

            “A swamp,” Newel said in awe, and suddenly everyone who could had their noses pressed to the windows. It meant enduring Kevin nearly climbing over her for a look, not that there was really anything to look at (and yet not that it stopped Ashima from looking, either.)

            “Worst place you can be,” Newel went on. “Lots more Beasts out here. Goblins, too.”

            “Goblins don’t like wet, they like caves,” Diana said in her “you’re-so-stupid” tone that always annoyed everyone around her.

            “How would any of you know? Ever actually seen a goblin? Ever talk to one? No, you haven’t, so what would you know?” challenged Seth.

            Everyone fell silent.

            “What’s a goblin look like?” piped Kimmy, and everyone launched into rumors they had heard in which goblins had tails, wings, fur, no fur, scales, no scales, or mouths big enough to swallow a child whole.

            The next morning, Ashima woke relieved to see that they had not only left the swamp but the woodland behind. Tawny prairie now stretched before them with the trees few and far between, and the sweet, dry smell of grass now mingled with the bus’ stinging diesel stench.

            The bus stopped, the squealing of the rusty breaks snapping Ashima from her lethargic thoughts. Two and a half days of near non-stop travel had made her hypersensitive to when they did stop, both the feel and the rhythm of it, and she knew that it was too soon to stop. Looking out the window, she saw what appeared to be a small, run down house a short way off the road in a barren field. Poking her head out the window showed Ashima a shabby wooden booth with a cross-stop arm painted a sloppy yellow and lowered across the road. They had similar (although much nicer) booths at the entrance to the silos where they stored their crops. It kept the delivery trucks from crowding and allowed the guards time to check IDs and make sure the drivers were who they said they were.

            “Toll stop,” someone whispered, as though to speak it any louder would bring trouble. Ashima couldn’t blame them, what with the person manning the stop all buried and mysterious under a thick, ragged and mud-stained gray cloak, like some sort of mimicry of Old Man Death, only clomping about in heavy boots. It even smelled almost like death, filling the bus with a stink both like mold and a body that hadn’t bathed in days. The pay collected at the tolls was supposed to go to providing for those goblins who volunteered to protect the roads and travelers from whatever they might need protection from – Beasts, highway robbers, or washed out bridges. Ashima’s dad begged to differ. Tolls were a goblin creation, made for the purpose of extortion and as yet another reason for humanity to think they depended on goblin kind. Tolls were a joke, he said. But because no one had heard of travelers being attacked or stranded on the road, they assumed the tolls were actually doing something, and so happily kept paying.

            The cloaked person stepped through the open doors of the bus, and even gruff old Mr. Clensfield the driver was wide-eyed and swallowing hard.

            The cloaked person held out an odd hand, rather twisted and clawed, with a metal apparatus glued to its hand like an external skeleton. The rest of its body was hidden away within the heavy folds and deep hood of its cloak. 

            “Got the toll?” it croaked with a voice made of course sandpaper. Mr. Clensfield fumbled frantically through the glove compartment next to the wheel. “Double this year.”

            “Double!” Clensfield yelped. “No one said anything about double. I ain’t got double!”

            “Then compromise.”

            Gulping audibly, sweat shining on his bald head, Mr. Clensfield shifted around in his seat to face his passengers, his already pale face white, turning his gray stubble near black by comparison. “All right, you heard… you heard him. If we want to move on, we need to pay, so cough up what you can or we’re stuck here.”

            “Now,” the cloaked figure rasped, already moving down the aisle, its heavy and muddied boots thumping like the footsteps of a giant. Both Mr. Clensfield and the supervising adult, Mrs. Hendricks, scrambled like spooked animals digging coins from their pockets or jewelry from their fingers, necks or bags. The kids, Ashima included, stared on in confusion.

            “We don’t have nothing,” piped up Newel.

            The cloaked figure didn’t care. It leaned in close to each child it past, studying them, patting them down. Kimmy whimpered when it was her turn.

            It reached Kevin and Ashima’s seat. It completely ignored Kevin, reaching for Ashima instead, and it was at the last second that Ashima remembered her Grandmother’s necklace.

            But it was too late to hide the delicate chain under her knit sweater. The cold, metal-framed and gray-green fingers grabbed the chain and snapped it off. It was without thought, without sensibility when Ashima saw the blue opal pendant framed in glittering gold vanish in the palm of that grotesque hand that she lunged forward, making a grab for it.

            “That’s mine, give it back, that’s mine!”

            Ashima’s first words spoken since leaving the village and they were like a storm, a trigger pressed and erupting into chaos. Kids shouted, the two adults shouted, Kevin pleaded with Ashima to stop it while he tried to hold her back, Kimmy’s sister helping him. And all the while the cloaked man ignored them all, interested only in the necklace.

            Until Ashima looked up into the hood that had parted just enough for Ashima to see through the shadows – a wrinkled, twisted face like a skull that the skin had puckered and sagged around; yellow eyes burning like coals; impossibly thin lips and jagged, broken teeth.

            Ashima fell silent and dropped back into her seat, dumbfounded with awe and terror.

The creature snorted, turned and ambled off the bus, but not before taking the sack of coins the bus driver held out like it was something deadly he was desperate to get rid of.

            “That was a goblin,” Kevin said in a trembling voice. “I – I think that was a goblin.” He stared at Ashima in horror. “You just yelled at a goblin.”

            Ashima kept her mouth shut for the rest of the trip.

The Toymaker Ch. 2

They reached the town at dawn the next day, when the sun broke through the darkness, slow, colorless, and miserable.  

            What Ashima knew about towns she’d gleaned from the passing, acerbic remarks made by the adults of her village. Towns were the places where people too cowardly to live beyond fences and walls went to live, die and accomplish absolutely nothing. It’s where people went to be told what to do and how to live, and where nothing happened because progression didn’t exist when you lived behind walls.

            But, apparently, the town was also the place where people sent whatever it was they needed to keep safe.

            The walls of this town were of solid concrete and much taller than the tallest two-story house of Ashima’s village. The bus came to a pained and squeaking stop before a set of massive metal doors blocking an entrance big enough for two buses. The wait for the doors to open wasn’t a long one. They parted just enough for three men bundled in coats and armed with rifles to slip cautiously through. While two of the men hung back, rifles at the ready, the third man boarded the bus.

                        Ashima tensed, expecting another twisted face full of broken teeth. What she saw stepping through the bus’ door was a man, middle-aged with a gray beard and stony eyes. Those eyes skimmed shrewdly over the passengers, then over the ID badge Mr. Clensfield held out, and with a satisfied nod, the man left. Another minute later and the great metal doors groaned all the way open. The bus rattled inside.

            What the town wasn’t was a maze of houses and shops. There was only a building; a measureless mansion large enough to house Ashima’s entire village and then some. It was made of smoke-colored brick and dark brown tile, with so many windows that Ashima couldn’t even begin to count them. As the bus moved toward it, Ashima saw, on either side of the gravel road, fences, some enclosing gardens being readied for planting, others animals whose stink wandered in through the windows on a chilled breeze. And within those gardens or pens were people like great big lumps of coats and scarves bent over the fields or tossing scraps to the animals. The bus pulled into the circular drive, and it hissed and squeaked to a limping stop.

            “End of the line!” Mr. Clensfield announced flatly in his graveled voice. Everyone stood as one and shuffled down the cramped aisle off the bus, Ashima and Kevin bringing up the end. When everyone was outside, Mrs. Hendricks had the children line up behind her and follow as she led the way inside through heavy oak doors.

            While the outside of the house had impressed and intimidated with its size, the interior sent Ashima’s heart straight to her feet. It was drab, its only decoration a black and white checkered floor faded by years of scuffing, a few landscape paintings in dusty frames, and wooden benches – once green, now chipped – spaced along the walls of the immense hall.

            Why had her parents sent her to this place? This dull, sad place?

            Ashima’s silent questions were interrupted by the approach of an equally dull woman that made Ashima think of pencils and charcoal. The woman was tall, thin verging on skeletal and with brown hair cut almost like a boy’s – very short and a little spiked. She wore a white blouse with a silver skirt and jacket, prim, proper and business-like until you looked down and noticed her mud-caked boots. When she walked, it was with stiff, hurried purpose of a person anxious to get things done and easily irritated if diverted from her course.

            She must have been recently diverted; she was looking particularly sour-faced as she regarded the gaggle of children by the door. Even though there was no chatter, not even so much as someone shuffling their feet, the woman clapped her hands three times the way school teachers would when getting the attention of hyper kids.

            “Children,” she said, her voice echoing in the grand hall and making her seem twice her size.  “Children, pay attention. I am Mrs. Agatha Kline but you will refer to me only as Mrs. Kline. Is that understood?” When no one said anything, she repeated, twice as stern, “I said is that understood? Verbal answer, please.”

            Everyone chorused with an uncertain, “Yes.”

            “Yes, what?” said Mrs. Kline.

            “Yes, Mrs. Kline.”

            “Good. I am glad we now have that established. Please, follow me.” She looked at Mrs. Hendricks. “Thank you, Mrs…?”

            “Mrs. Hendricks,” said Mrs. Hendricks shyly.

            “Yes, thank you Mrs. Hendricks. You may go and unload their trappings. I will ensure the children are registered. Children, follow me, please.”

            So it was from one adult to the next that the children went, glancing back at a retreating Mrs. Hendricks as she vanished out the door.

            As Mrs. Kline proceeded down the hall with the children marching close behind, she said, “Welcome to Bridgetown. As citizens of our establishment you are expected to contribute and aid in the growth of our municipality.”

            “What is a munici–” Kimmy began

            “Don’t interrupt, please,” Mrs. Kline cut in sharply. “As children below adolescence you will be expected to render aid in the gardens, the laundries, the kitchens and in keeping our home spotless.”

            Ashima grimaced at the walls covered in peeling wall paper, apparently once white with gold frilly designs, now spotted in yellow and other dark stains.

            “In return you will be given places to sleep, food to eat and an education. Education begins at seven in the morning and lasts until nine, after which chores begin. Tardiness is not tolerated and will result in extra duties. Disobedience will not be tolerated and will also result in extra duties. As for the rules, they are as follows: to bed at eight, up at six, breakfast at six thirty, lunch at twelve, dinner at six. No yelling, no shouting, no pushing, no injuries to another person. Girls will be housed in one chamber, boys in another and neither is to venture into the other’s dormitory. No speaking out of turn, no arguing, no back talk…” and on and on down one hall after another as they made their way to these chambers. The chambers were marked by two painted wooden signs overhead – boys on the left, girls on the right. Next to each door was a wooden desk, a man at each desk, poised to write in an open ledger. Mrs. Kline had the children line up, boys on the left, girls on the right, giving their names both first and last, before being allowed to enter the rooms.

            It felt wrong, Ashima didn’t know why, them being divided up like this. It wasn’t like any of the boys, let alone even the girls, had been her closest friends. Acquaintances, a few classmates, but no one she had invited to her house for sleep overs or to go climb the trees by the river. Those friends had been left far behind along with her parents, her home, most of her things. Being separated like this shouldn’t be bothering her, but it did, as though the more they separated, the harder it would be to find their way home again.

            The girl’s room was nothing special; in fact it made Ashima’s stomach drop right through the floor. It was a chamber packed with endless rows of beds, too many to count, and next to each bed was a small white wooden dresser with only three small drawers.

            “Find a bed not occupied and take it,” said Mrs. Kline outside the door. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded, having to open drawer after drawer, looking under bed after bed, trying to find one that wasn’t occupied. Kimmy managed to find one, as did her sister, but Diana and Ashima had to go through a second door on the right side of the room leading to another bed chamber per Mrs. Kline’s instructions. They managed to find beds so far apart they would have had to shout to each other had they been inclined to talk. Diana’s was near the front of the room, Ashima’s toward the back along the wall. They claimed their beds by sitting on them until Mrs. Kline came to fetch them.

            Then it was time for the tour and that meant more walking; through more hallways with too many doors to count, up then down wide stairways to more halls, then to a large chamber full of long, wooden tables and countless chairs – the cafeteria, according to the sign, the kitchen to the right through a pair of swinging doors, with a serving window and bars to slide your meal tray along. They were shown the bathroom, one for boys and one for girls, with multiple toilets and shower stalls. Showering was only permitted before bed and in the mornings to conserve water. In the basement was the laundry, a cave full of giant washing tubs and a forest of clothes lines. You wash your own clothes and hang them only on lines not currently occupied by someone else’s laundry, said Mrs. Kline, and get any adult working there to help you. There were chambers for recreation, full of balls and dumbbells and other instruments used for exercising, empty chambers ready to be used for whatever purpose, and a play room – the only highlight of the tour – full of all kinds of toys. Access was gained only on weekends or if you accumulated enough working hours for some scheduled time off. They would each get a time card to map their hours, and an adult would help them. The play room was also supervised, and any trouble would result in lost play time.

                        Outside were the gardens and the animal pens, some of the gardens in great greenhouses as big as a house you would live in, dwarfing the little glass huts people in the village would use for personal gardens. Everything grown in the town was for town use only.

            “You don’t get food from the villages?” Ashima found herself asking.

            “No. Costs too much,” said Mrs. Kline briskly.

            The animal yards doubled as slaughterhouses, which Mrs. Kline didn’t take them into. The only pen without a slaughterhouse was where they kept the horses. Trucks weren’t allowed off the gravel road, so they used horses and wagons to transport food to the building.

            They went back inside the house.

            “Ma’am, what are those?” asked Newel pointing to one of the many metal panels in the wall they had past more than once, some of them small and square, others large and rectangular.

            “Refuse doors,” Mrs. Kline said. She stopped next to one of the larger ones. “For nonperishables only.” Pulling the small handle on the door, it slid open with a hiss, the gap large enough for anyone of them to fit through. “Wood, plastics, metals and cloth only, and only to be used with adult supervision, understood?”

            “Yes, Mrs. Kline.”

            “Good. Now back to the sleeping chambers. Your luggage should be there. Put all clothes in the drawers and what does not fit stays within your luggage beneath the bed. Dinner will be in an hour. Tomorrow you will receive your schedule of chores, making you official citizens of Bridgetown.”

 

            Ashima took her time unpacking. She told herself it was because there was nothing better to do, but she knew that it had more to do with the twist in her gut each time she put a piece of clothing into the drawers. It felt like a defeat, this moving in, setting up, emptying her bags that she would rather keep packed should her parents come to find her. It felt… permanent, and it made her ill, ill and irritable. Placing clothes folded and neat into the drawers became stuffing clothes with angry shoves, yanking them out when they wouldn’t fit and folding them with sharp motions punctuated by huffing and puffing. Shove, pull and fold, over and over. The little blue stone statue of Krishna that her other grandmother had given her she slammed onto the dresser, the little fairy snow globe next to it. Her patchwork doll that her mother had made, Asha, with the black yarn hair and little red dress she threw on her bed, then felt bad about it. Plopping on the bed, she gathered the doll and hugged her to her chest.

            A tear tickled down Ashima’s face, but she scrubbed it away before it could reach her chin. She’d come this far without crying, she wasn’t going to start now. But it was so much harder to hold it back in this place, having traveled so far and losing her grandmother’s necklace in the process. She felt like she was being taken apart to be put back together as something else, and that once she became that something else, her parents would never find her again.

            Well, she just wouldn’t let that happen, that was all. She would find a way to keep this place from changing her. Her father had always said she was good at figuring things out.

            The clocks on the wall struck six o’clock and a bell sounded three times announcing dinner. Ashima and Diana said nothing as they navigated their way to the cafeteria, except to exchange uncertain looks hoping that one of them remembered which way to go. It was a short-lived worry, the halls flooded with men, women and children flowing as methodical as a river, and all Ashima and Diana needed to do was join the flood.

            Even the cafeteria was divided as it turned out: single adults on one side, family-less children on the other and families on the other. Adults stood in line, children were either served by their parents or by the kitchen workers bearing trays, platters or pots of food. There was too much noise and crowds and jostling, giving Ashima a headache and another reason to be irritable. She threw herself down in a plastic blue chair at a fake wooden table, Asha hugged so tight to her chest her breastbone started to ache. Like with the sleeping chambers, the girls had their own table and the boys had theirs. Diana stuck close to Ashima, but unlike Ashima looked more ready to bolt than bite someone’s head off. The other girls ignored them, absorbed in chatting with each other.

            Good. Ashima had no interest in being social or making friends. Her stay here was going to be temporary, her parents had promised, and the less ties she made the better. These girls were also loud and obnoxious, determined to speak over everyone and getting rough with each other when they couldn’t. Somewhere down the table a fight broke out, and it took three adults to pull the two girls apart.

            “You the new bunch?”

            Ashima looked up from her food at the dark-skinned girl with the braided pigtails.

            “Yes,” Ashima said.

            “And your names are…?” prompted a red-haired girl with a jeer that Ashima didn’t like.

            “Ashima,” Ashima said. “Ashima Nayar.”

            “Diana Billingsly,” Diana muttered.

            “I’m Missy,” said the dark-skinned girl. She pointed first at the red-head, then at a girl with a head like a bush of messy brown curls. “That’s Tess, Meagan, and the short one’s Gale.” A small girl whose size said she was six but with a face that told of someone much older waved a grubby hand, then stuffed meatloaf into her mouth. 

            “You meet Miss Prickles, yet?” said Tess, smiling to show the gap in her front teeth where a new tooth would soon grow. “That’s what we call her, Miss Prickles ’cause of her hair. Of course you met her, everyone does. Don’t let her put a bug up your butt, she’s all bleeding bark. She’s kind of the boss ‘cause she’s bossy as all hell. Some of the kids like to say she was born already grown up. It would explain a lot if that were possible. But I know how babies are made, you wanna know?”

            “Cool it, Tess,” said Missy. “Tess knows a lot of things, thinks it makes her smart but she doesn’t know squat.” She elbowed Tess, who elbowed Missy who bumped into Meagan, causing her to spill food on Gale who shoved Meagan in retaliation. The overall result was a lot of pushing, shoving and name calling until one of the servers told them to knock it off or else do the dishes. Order was immediately restored.

            “You’re here alone, then?” Ashima ventured, because asking questions wasn’t the same as making friends, it was just asking questions. “No parents?”

            “Yeah,” said Tess. “I’ve been here two years. The chores stink like butt but you can pretty much do whatever you want if no one sees you. Miss Prickles’ll try to tell us what to do, so do a bunch of other grownups, but they can’t be everywhere and if you know where to go you can have a ton of fun without anyone knowing. There’s the ditch and the horse paddocks and the corn rows… it’s great.”

            “Two years,” Ashima echoed, chest going tight, but voice so small no one heard her.

            “I’ve been here three,” said Missy. She shrugged. “S’not so bad I suppose. Gets dull after a while.”

            The invisible rope around Ashima’s chest pulled until she could barely breathe.

            Three years.

            Three years.

            Whatever else was said was lost to the roaring in Ashima’s ears.

            “They never found you?” her mouth said as though with a brain of its own. “Your parents?”

            “They’ll get us when they’re ready,” said Missy dismissively. After that, Ashima stopped asking and stopped listening. She barely tasted her food, and wouldn’t have noticed the end of dinner bell if Tess hadn’t said something.

            “Are you deaf or something? Dinner’s over. You have to go or they’ll make you do the dishes.”

            Ashima followed the flow of children from the cafeteria where the adults or those kids still with their parents were allowed to continue eating. Without the river of humanity clogging the halls, the going was easy and casual, everyone moving as though with all the time in the world and every intention to waste it. Ashima was right behind Missy and her gang, not for any particular reason, just to have someone to follow so she didn’t get lost. Diana, on the other hand, was making every effort to keep up and listen to everything to the girl’s had to say.

            When they came to one of the garbage chutes, the girls quickly gathered around it giggling and whispering with nervous glee. Meagan opened the chute, not far, just enough for them to stick their ears close.

            “Are you listening for the ocean or something?” Ashima snapped, annoyed. She wanted to be back at the sleeping chamber, doing whatever it was children did after dinner and avoid trouble. She wasn’t in the mood. Not for reprimands; not for conversation; and definitely not for obnoxious games.

            “Be quiet!” Gale hissed, then listened intently.

            Ashima moved closer, turning her head to see if she could catch whatever it might be causing the girls to make all the fuss. All she heard was their controlled breathing and the beat of her own pulse.

            “Nothing,” Missy said, making everyone jump. “Must be asleep.”

            “I’ll pay you a coin to go see,” said Gale.

            Tess scoffed. “You don’t have a coin.”

            “Do to.”

            “Do not.”

            “Do to. Go on down and then I’ll prove it.”

            “Not on your stupid life.”

            “What’s down there?” Diana said excitedly, bouncing on her toes.

            “The troll,” breathed Missy, like a girl on the verge of a ghost story. The other girls tittered like nervous birds.

            “Troll?” Diana gaped.

            Tess nodded. “Yeah. He runs the trash cave underneath. Couple of kids have seen him. Nothing much ’cause they had to leave quick.”

            “If you don’t leave quick then the troll melts you down and eats you,” Gale said.

            “Kids go down there?” Ashima asked skeptically.

            Meagan nodded. “Yeah, it’s real easy. You just slide down and shimmy back up. Brian Wentworth did it just last week, I saw. He brought up a piece of metal and everything.”

            Ashima continued to regard them like the idiots they were being if they expected her to believe that. It was a mistake – Missy had a shine in her eyes that Ashima wasn’t liking.

            “She doesn’t believe us,” Missy said. She folded her arms and regarded Ashima right back, not as though Ashima were nuts, but as though she were a fly whose wings were about to be plucked. “I think Ashima should go down.”

            “No,” Ashima said, taking a step back and shaking her head. “No way, uh-uh.”

            “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad,” Tess said.

            “You think I’m stupid? I’m not going down there, I’ll get in trouble.”

            “No you won’t. No one ever gets caught,” Tess said.

            “Oh stop being such a baby,” said Gale, and before Ashima realized what was going on, Gale surged forward, plucked Asha from Ashima’s arms, and tossed her down the chute.

            “You hag!” Ashima screamed. She launched herself at Gale, swinging and kicking. In that moment all thoughts of punishment were drowned out by a blind red haze and images of twisted hands plucking her grandmother’s necklace from off her neck. She had no idea if any of her blows struck flesh, if Gale was even under her. All she knew, all she felt, was heat and fury and pure, unhindered rage.

           She was barely even aware when she was bodily hauled off Gale and practically tossed aside. An older girl, not an adult, dark skinned like Missy but with long, straight hair pulled Gale to her feet and ushered her off down the hall.

            “The rest of your stay where you are!” she snarled over her shoulder.

            But the moment the girl was out of sight, the younger girls took off at a run with panic contorting their faces. Only Diana hesitated, looking forward, then back at Ashima, then forward. Then, her mind made up, she gave Ashima the benefit of an apologetic expression and joined the others in their escape.

            “Fine. Run. I don’t care,” Ashima said, sniffling. She pushed herself to her feet, achy and tired as if she had been the one beaten. She turned to the chute.

            First her parents, then her necklace, now Asha.

            This place, this world beyond the village, was taking her apart, one piece at a time.

            She couldn’t let that happen. If she did, then her parents would never be able to find her.

            Taking a deeper breath, Ashima opened the chute. She climbed inside, looked down into the tight and bottomless hole, and wondered if this is what people meant when they accused someone of being off their rocker. She must be crazy to have even climbed inside in the first place. It wasn’t like climbing a tree, where you had branches to hold onto, or exploring a cave, which were always shallow with gentle inclines and easy exits. This was the unknown, an unknown where something lived that made children afraid.

            This was dangerous. 

            But Asha was down there, lost like her necklace. A surge of anger rippled through Ashima, stifling enough of the fear to allow room to think. All she had to do was spread her limbs, press her hands to the slick metal sides, and inch her way down. If others had done this and lived, then so could she. If the girls hadn’t been lying.

            Ashima removed her shoes and socks, setting them just outside the chute, and pressed her bare feet against the metal wall. She then inched her backside over the edge, keeping her hands to the wall, and pressed her back against the opposite side. It was uncomfortable, and so painfully slow going it made her skin prickle as if covered in a thousand ants. Sweat popped out across her skin and her breath rang loud in the cramped, hollow space. But inch by inch she lowered herself, near-swallowed by darkness save for a faint light at the bottom. She focused on that light, following it, thinking only of the end and that there was an end, though her heart pounded hard and her breath shuddered loud in the tight space.

            Yet the farther she went, the brighter that light got, the more her skin prickled and buzzed, her muscles quaking, her hands growing slick. She tried to speed up but it made her lose her grip and slide. She yelped, pressing herself into the wall until it really did hurt. Her breaths came in hiccupped gasps. The end wouldn’t come. She would crawl forever and ever until pummeled by garbage that made her fall to her doom.

            Ashima’s clammy hands slipped and she fell, screaming. Then she was sliding, the light speeding toward her. She flew from the chute and landed with an oomph of air shoved from her lungs. As soon as she caught her breath, she realized she was on something soft – soft, ragged and uncomfortably putrid. With a quick glance she saw a pile of rags under her and a great serrated ceiling of rock high above her, lit red and ringing with a sound like the endless exhale of some gigantic monster.

            Ashima coughed from raising so much dust and pushed herself to her elbows for a better look. Her eyes bulged. 

            It was like she had traveled to some underground realm where hills were made from pieces of junk – metal, cloth, plastic and wood, a twisted old bike here, several torn and stained dresses, pants or shirts there, a canoe with a hole in one side balanced precariously on the tip of a metal pile, tires, wires, car doors, car frames, broken toys and bits and bobs Ashima couldn’t put a name to. Some hills were shallow mounds and others miniature mountains rising almost to the ceiling. Ashima’s soft landing was a mountain of clothes giving her a full view of the cavern below. In the midst of it all was a great furnace as big as a house, and feeding it was a conveyor belt transporting those metal bits and pieces to their doom.

            Helping the belt along was a hulking creature buried under coats and rags. It tossed metal bit after metal bit onto the belt, breaths heaving its bundled body.

            Ashima’s heart burrowed into her throat. She cast her gaze around quickly, looking for Asha, and spotted her halfway down the hill of clothes. Ashima dove for her, but fear made her knock Asha away rather than grab her. Asha tumbled down the hill into a small pile of glass. The glass clattered musically, and not even the monstrous breath of the furnace could swallow the sound.

            The creature paused. It turned. Its head was hooded but light flashed off the dark lenses of goggles. The creature moved toward her, slow under so much cloth.

            With a gasp, Ashima turned and scurried like a mouse up the hill, back into the chute. She scrabbled and clawed up the slick incline until she could press her back, hands and feet to the wall and climb. It was strange the things terror could make you do, and Ashima wasn’t aware of how easily she scaled the chute back to the top, wasn’t aware of it until her foot pressed against the door, opening it and nearly costing her balance. She shifted around and climbed awkwardly and painfully through the open door to fall out in a heap.

            Grabbing her shoes, Ashima leaped onto her feet and into a run. She kept running, not knowing where she was going or even caring. But fear did not leave the mind completely empty, and she found herself through a door in the privacy of one of the large bathrooms. She didn’t stop until she was at the very end with nowhere else to go. She gathered herself in the corner of the last shower stall, knees to her chest and shoes and socks gripped in both hands, and she finally let herself cry.

The Toymaker Ch. 3

Ashima had forgotten all about her attack on Gale and that there would be a punishment. She didn’t care, feeling justified for her actions over Gale being a witch and throwing Asha away. Ashima was assigned extra chores to her list of regular chores that she received the next day.

            First it was helping the staff prepare for breakfast by fetching and carrying whatever ingredients they needed. It was a large kitchen, not wide but long, with lots of freezers and refrigerators and stoves all made of tarnished and rust-spotted steel. Lessons followed after breakfast, taken in a chamber not unlike the playroom but with desks instead of toys. Because Ashima was late she had to sit at the front, and was the first that the teacher, Mrs. Odell, had stand up and introduce herself. Missy and her thugs sat in the back and giggled the entire time. Diana sat with them, silent and pitying.

            After class Ashima had to go to one of the greenhouse gardens to turn the soil and plant tomato seeds, then to the outside garden to pick corn, then the laundry room to wash clothes. At lunch, Ashima sat alone. Word had spread fast about her – as one adult had put it while whispering (without success) to another – volatile nature, and if people weren’t gossiping about it loud enough for her to hear they were pointedly ignoring her.

            What made Ashima angry was that no one had asked her why she had attacked Gale. That alone diminished her trust in this place. Ashima’s parents had always made it a point to get the whole story, to understand why, and what; and to know what to say after. These people were like all the other adults Ashima knew. They didn’t want the whys, they just wanted you to “do as you’re told.”

            After lunch, it was to the laundry room for more mopping, wiping and cleaning, ducking beneath the web work of lines and damp clothes smelling unpleasantly flowery, and suffering the sticky humidity that made her clothes cling like wet skin. At dinner, she was ignored and whispered about. In the bathrooms among the women and girls, she was mostly ignored, which was fine by her. It was hard enough bathing among so many strangers of so many different ages.

            That was Ashima’s day, leaving her exhausted and collapsing into her bed, her damp hair making her back itch. Though the other girls fought to stay awake and giggle the night away, Ashima was asleep the moment she closed her eyes.

            When she woke, it was to a repeat of yesterday, minus the kitchen and laundry, but she was still expected to help clean the halls.

            “What do you make, here?” Ashima asked one of the adults she was sweeping with, an elderly woman with iron gray hair piled in a messy bun.

            “What do you mean?” the woman said shortly.

            “What do you make? To sell?”

            “We don’t make anything to sell. We make what we need. What we do here is live free from the goblins. No fuss’n no bother from ’em or the Beasts.”

            “But we can’t go anywhere.”

            “Small price to pay if you ask me. Now stop asking so many questions, I’m not in the mood to hear ’em.”

            Ashima sulked in silence. It didn’t seem right, being all cooped up, having to do chores day in and day out with not much else in between other than meals and lessons. Ashima had chores back at the village but she’d also had time to play, to explore, to hear her mother tell stories and go to the shops with her father when they needed things. There had been so much more than just chores, so much to do and see and learn.

            “People shouldn’t have to be trapped behind walls,” Ashima muttered.

            “Hush it,” the woman snapped.

            Dinner for Ashima was still quiet and boring, and she had the bad feeling it was to become the story of her life. The other kids continued to exclude her – except Gale, but bumping into Ashima on purpose to make her spill her soup couldn’t really be called inclusion, either. It was like this place had decided to hate Ashima the moment she’d arrived, and employed its denizens to make Ashima’s life a misery.

            After bathing time, when it was time to sleep, Ashima shuffled to her bed and knew immediately that something was wrong.

            Her fairy snow globe was missing.

            “Who took my snow globe?” she bellowed, facing the room. It earned her brief, part annoyed and part amused glances before everyone looked away back to their snotty, trivial little conversations. With a growl, Ashima stomped her way up and down the aisles between the beds, checking night stands and under beds and raising short lived protests and more annoyed looks.

            “I know one of you took it,” she said, but she remained ignored.

            Ashima had always been quick to learn a lesson, and as much as she wanted to make a stir – open drawers and root through bags – the thought of that never ending day of chore after chore tamed the desire just enough to keep her from acting on it. This wasn’t over, of course. Tomorrow… no, not tomorrow, she was too busy tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. When she had accumulated enough off time, she would come back to this room while everyone was out and search it piece by piece. This place could try all it wanted to take her apart, she wasn’t having it.

            For now, she conceded to what she promised herself was a temporary defeat and went to bed.

            Exhausted as she felt, Ashima couldn’t sleep. She lay there, listening to the hisses and sniggers of girls who thought they were so bleeding clever. She would show them. One way or another, she wouldn’t let them win. Ashima swiped away the moisture tickling her face.

            The chatter faded away like a dream in the dawn, leaving behind a heavy, stifling silence.  Ashima closed her eyes, begging herself to please, just please let her slip into that moment of oblivion where she could forget where she was and where she wasn’t. She thought of stories from her parents about gods and demons, and walks with her dad, of the river and old mill, and the great oak tree with the thick branches that seemed to reach out to her and invite her to climb. She thought of the smell of baking bread and holiday candies, of flowers, fields and warm spring breezes carrying the scent of new grass.

            Something soft touched her face. Ashima smiled at the thought of her mother’s fingers caressing her cheeks. Except her fingers were usually more calloused than that. Ashima opened her eyes, blinking until they adjusted. She wondered if she was dreaming, because she was looking into Asha’s cloth face, and Asha was looking right back.

            Ashima sat up slowly, brow furrowed.

            Asha was on her bed – kneeling on her bed, the doll’s yarn-covered head tilting up to look at her. A tiny cloth arm lifted and waved.

            Ashima, gaping, waved back, absolutely sure she was dreaming. She had to be, because Asha was gone and… Well… not alive.

            “I wish this weren’t a dream,” Ashima said, relaxing. “I wish you were real.”

            Asha covered her eyes, shook her head, and then poked Ashima hard in the arm through the sleeve of her lavender nightgown.

            Ashima felt it – the rough material, the pressure on her skin. She’d had vivid dreams before but nothing like this, where she could feel and smell; smoke for the most part, like the time Asha had been left too close to the fire place. It had taken weeks for the smell to leave.

            “This isn’t a dream,” Ashima said to herself. Then she repeated with rising alarm and dread, “This isn’t a dream.”

            Asha shook her yarn head.

            “This isn’t a dream?”

            Another, harder shake.

            “How… how… why… but… you’re…”

            Rising to her cloth feet in brown felt shoes, Asha hopped off the bed then walked a ways before turning and waving for Ashima to follow.

            Trepidation told her it was a bad idea. A doll coming to life was unnatural, impossible, wrong, wrong, all wrong. It was a thing of stories, tales of demons and sorcerers with mischief and hurt on their mind. But curiosity – oh that annoying curiosity – wasn’t going to let Ashima rest until she knew the truth. Real or not, normal or not, it was Asha, she was back, she was alive, and that begged far too many questions to ignore. Ashima climbed from her bed, slipped into her lavender satin slippers her mother had made, and followed Asha.

            They didn’t go far, just to one of the garbage chutes. Asha hopped up and down pointing excitedly at the door.

            “You want me to go in there?” Ashima said in disgust. “Are you crazy? There’s a troll down there. Is that what’s going on? Did the troll bring you to life to bring me down there so it can eat me?”

            Asha tossed up her hands, looking heaven-ward as if to ask “why me? Why did I get stuck with such an idiot?” Again she signaled for Ashima to follow, and again Ashima followed, this time deeper into the house all the way to the basement, through the laundry room, through the utility room full of steaming boilers to a warped, wooden and chipped door at the very end. Having never been in this room (and in fact restricted to even enter it) Ashima had no idea the door had been there. It was open a crack, enough for Asha to squeeze through.

            With a hammering heart and sweating palms, Ashima followed. On the other side was a stairwell and a spiraling staircase lit by flickering bulbs behind dirty shades. Asha hopped down each of the steps as though traveling them were a common event. Ashima followed with more care, one foot in front of the other while her ears strained for the slightest sound; heavy breathing, heavy footsteps or a bellowing roar of hungry anticipation.

            So it was quite a surprise to come to the end of the stairs and find a tidy little alcove branching off into smaller caves – the one on the left a sort of living/dining room with a patch-work couch, a table with two chairs, a wood burning stove and a sink. On the right, a bedroom nook with an iron-framed bed, mostly rusty, covered in several ragged blankets. Next to the bed, a dresser covered with knick-knacks, most of them shiny but broken trinkets.

            Asha kept going, out of the alcove and into the massive cavern full of junk hills and mountains and roaring from the furnace. Ashima couldn’t fathom why she kept following the doll and not turn around. Caution screamed at her to run, but the doll’s periodic beckoning urged her on, deeper into the fields of garbage. Ashima kept close to those hills, hunkering low and peering around them before continuing on, but the troll was nowhere to be seen.

            Then Ashima saw the creature at its post by the conveyor belt, tossing bits of metal for the belt to feed the furnace. Ashima sucked in a breath and ducked back around the hill. Asha, however, had kept going, right toward the troll – stupid, stupid doll.

            Ashima had every intention of turning around and going back. She did just that, huddling close but not too close to the junk hill.

            An avalanche of junk skittered down the hill, bringing with it a furry shape about her height that blocked her way. Suddenly, a dog’s skull was in her face, its eyes covered by grimy goggles.

            “What’s this? What’s this!” it shrilled. “Stranger! Stranger, we gotta stranger, boss! A stranger!”

           Ashima shrieked, staggered back and tripped, landing hard on her backside, and tried to crab-scuttle away. She clamored to her feet, turning to go the other way. A doll blocked her way, a foot bigger than Asha with a body of sackcloth, a head covered by a gas mask and little wooden feet and fingers clutching a grubby blue blanket. Turning the other way, it was a cat with an angular metal head and black fur wrapped around its metal body. The other way, it was a bird of wood, a mess of multi-colored feathers and a head covered in pieces of colored cloth sewn together. It stared at her with shiny mica-button eyes.

            Ashima continued to scream, turning this way and that in desperation for a way out. She started climbing the junk hill but the junk dislodged when she was halfway up, pulling her down in another avalanche of garbage. Then something grabbed her, lifting her bodily and carrying her away from the junk. She kicked, punch and screamed.

            “Oi, oi! Easy on, girl, easy on! I’m not hurting you!”

            The troll set her down where she was surrounded and trapped by the living dolls, Asha included. And standing in the midst of them, the troll in its heavy coat and trousers. The troll pulled off its heavy gloves, revealing pale, bony fingers. It then pulled back its hood and lowered its goggles. It removed its coat, tossing it to the side, and what was once a hulking beast was now a man – a tall, reed-thin man, his sharp-faced skull topped by a short mess of brown hair and his brown eyes large and bewildered.

            It was such a contrast that for a moment Ashima forgot her fear in favor of confusion. She marveled how someone so skinny could wear such a heavy coat and not topple. The breeches – obviously not really his pants – were held up by two straps over his shoulders. He removed them, stepping out of them rather awkwardly and nearly tripping, completing the picture. Beneath all those layers were denim jeans and a gray T-shirt, a normal human being and nothing more.

            But the things surrounding the man were not human, and Ashima remembered her fear. She shrank back against the pile, her eyes darting fast still searching for that way out.

            “See boss?” said the dog-faced doll proudly. “A stranger.” The dog-face had limbs of metal wrapped in cloth, its body wrapped in black fur that looked fake, and the fur wrapped in a tatty brown vest. It kept pointing at her with a metal finger. “You said to tell when there’s strangers and there’s a stranger.”

            Tall man waved dog-doll impatiently off while staring at Ashima like a puzzle he couldn’t begin to figure out, and it was troubling him. “Yes, Stevie, I know, well done and all that. Now back off. You’re scaring her and it’s not helping.”

            The creatures did as told, save for Asha who moved forward to stand next to Ashima.

            The man shifted with pent up agitation, lips pressed and his hand to his head scratching obsessively. He then tilted his chin at Asha. “She’s yours I take it? That explains a lot. You hurt?”

            Ashima shook her head.

            “Good. Now get out. Kids aren’t supposed to be down here and, frankly, I’m getting a little tired of dealing with you lot. Do you know I could get in trouble for it, you kids coming down here? And, really, what’s the fascination, it’s a blasted pile of crap? Who cares about blasted piles of crap? So, go. Take a piece of whatever it is that you came for and just leave, okay?”

            With that, the man gathered his heavy coat and pants, donning them to get back to his business of feeding the furnace. Ashima watch in slack-jawed wonder as the dolls helped him, first to get into the clothes then to toss metal bits onto the belt.

            A tug on the hem of her night gown drew her attention to Asha. The doll tilted its head like a dog waiting for praise from its master, which Ashima couldn’t figure out why. Then she remembered that she had asked how it was possible for a doll to come to life, and here she was, facing that answer.

            Standing, Ashima dusted herself off, straightened her gown, and said, “No.”

            The man froze halfway through adjusting his goggles. He lowered them, giving her a raised eyebrow and a frown.

            “Did you just say no?”

            Ashima took a nervous step back. “Yes. I mean… yes, I said no. I’m… I’m not leaving until you tell me… tell me why my doll can move.” She nodded once, satisfied with her words, and then lifted her chin in defiance. The effect was somewhat ruined by the way it quivered.

            “Oh,” the man said, looking, for a moment, almost contrite. “I didn’t think it belonged to anyone, sorry. But no worries, she won’t hurt you or anything. She is your doll and everything.” He then adjusted the goggles back around his face and turned to the conveyor belt.

            “That’s not an answer!” Ashima said. The man whirled on her and she flinched. Swallowing, she ventured on. “What did you do? I’m not leaving until you tell me.”

            “Is it really important?” the man said with an almost-whine to his voice, like it would make his day if he didn’t have to explain anything.             

            “Yes,” Ashima said. “Yes it is. I want to know what you did.”

            “Nothing harmful, I swear. If you want I could undo it but, really, I’d rather not, it always makes me feel terrible about it afterwards. But I suppose there’s no choice in it if you want your doll back.” But when the man took a step forward, Asha retreated, hiding behind Ashima’s gown and shaking her yarn head emphatically. The man’s shoulders sagged and he sighed, defeated.

            “You see? She can’t even do expressions and I still feel terrible about it. I knew I shouldn’t have done it but she was the first doll to come down here not ripped to pieces and… I have no bleeding willpower, I really don’t. Look, if you must know, it’s a spell, something my grandfather taught me. That’s all. I’m the only one working down here ’cause no one else will and I need the help, so I make things and bring them to life, all right? Satisfied? Good, now bugger off.”

            Ashima wasn’t satisfied, because what kind of an answer was that? A spell?

            Moisture filled Ashima’s eyes until she could barely see, then fell dripping from her face. She had no idea why she was crying, but neither could she stop, like a cracking dam finally bursting in a never ending rain of sorrow, frustration and confusion.

            “Boss, the stranger’s crying,” said Stevie unhelpfully.

            When the man turned back, he seemed to collapse in on himself as if Ashima weren’t the only one that had been buried by the weight of this place.

            “Oh, no, don’t do that, please?” he said, removing the coat, breeches and goggles. “I’ll undo the spell if you’d really like, it’s no big deal.”

            “No!” Ashima yelped, grabbing Asha and holding her tight. This made the man flinch and pat the air with his hands.

            “Alright, alright, I’ll leave her.” When it was apparent that this assurance wouldn’t be enough to stop the flood of tears, the man gripped the back of his neck with both hands and huffed a short breath. “Would you… I don’t know, like some tea or something? What am I saying, you can’t be here, I’m sorry, but you really need to go. It’ll be both our heads if you don’t.”

            Ashima, all out of whatever courage had allowed her to demand answers from the man, did as told and started moving back the way she had come. The man went with her, walking next to her but not too close.

            “And, er… if you could, maybe, not tell anyone what you saw? Not that they would believe you but they might. Not the first time I was found out but it was different, then, so maybe… but, no, can’t, need to play it safe. So if you could not tell anyone, I’d… I’d… I’d…” another sigh – the man did sigh quite a lot – and he finished lamely, “appreciate it?”

            Ashima looked at the man, truly scrutinized him, and realized that he looked about as afraid as she felt – afraid and a little defeated, wishing his secret to be kept while knowing that it probably wouldn’t happen. It made him seem so much smaller than the lumbering thing in the heavy coat of only moments ago, smaller and even a little frail, as though it were possible for Ashima to hurt him more than he could hurt her.

            It made her feel sad for him, she wasn’t sure why.

            “I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”

            The man seemed to perk up at this, but with suspicion rather than joy.

            “Really?” he asked.

            Ashima nodded. “I keep my promises. It’s not right to promise something and not keep it. That’s what my dad says. Makes it so people don’t trust you, and you want people to trust you so you can trust them.”

            “Wise man, your dad,” said the man thoughtfully.

            Ashima wiped away the last of the tears.

            When they reached the stairs, the man waved her on. “Up you go, then. And you can keep the doll just… just don’t let anyone see her, okay? Make it part of the promise?”

            “Okay,” Ashima said. But before going up the stairs, she turned to him. “Could you – you maybe tell me how the spell works? How you bring them to life?”

            The man’s little group of living dolls had gathered behind him, watching anxiously.

            “Another time, maybe,” he said, and left, back to his work, before Ashima could ask any more questions.

            Ashima made the long journey up the stairs, through the utility room and laundry room, then back up more stairs to the girl’s room. She climbed into bed, finally tired enough to sleep, with Asha cuddled against her chest.

The Toymaker Ch. 4

Another time, as far as Ashima was concerned, was the very next night.

            It could almost be called torture having to wade through all the chores and the droning lessons on geography, math and things Ashima had known since she was five – such as don’t trust the naked birds with skin for wings instead of feathers, don’t trust the Giant Toads that could grow to the size of a pony and swallow a small child whole, and don’t trust anything with skin the color of gray sludge.      Chores dragged on as though there were twice as many to do, and Ashima could not eat fast enough at meal time, nor bathe fast enough. When it was time to sleep, Ashima lay there feeling knotted and tight, her body humming with irritation over having to lay so impossibly still. She had come to dislike most of the girls of the town on the principal of them being stuck-up cows who thought they were all so bloody smart.

            Tonight, Ashima despised them, their tittering little laughs, their gossip on gossip that had no truth to it, such as Mrs. Carlyle’s wart being another eye secretly spying on everyone, or the troll in the junk cave who wore a coat made of human skin.

            Waiting for absolute silence was like what Ashima imagined being in a small cage must feel like; tight and itchy and wanting nothing more than to move. When silence finally came and Ashima moved, it was like a cool drink of water after being thirsty for too long.

            “Asha,” she whispered. The doll emerged out from under the bed, looking as disgruntled as a doll could with stomping steps and bowed shoulders.

            “At least you didn’t have to dig in the dirt all day,” Ashima said, sitting upright and sliding into her slippers. The doll stood with cloth hands on hips as if to say digging in dirt was far superior to sitting around under a bed doing nothing.

            Ashima ignored the stance, gathered Asha up and hurried with soft, controlled footsteps out of the sleeping chamber and toward the basement – terribly easy what with any guards the place had stationed along the town wall, not inside the building.

            Down in the cave, Ashima found the man where she had first found him the other night, standing at the conveyor belt, dressed in his giant coat and tossing metal bits for the furnace to devour.

            “Stranger!” Stevie cried from the peak of a small junk hill. It skittered down with the ease of a tree rodent hopping through the branches, landing neatly on his metal feet. It – he, since it had a boy’s name – hopped up and down jabbing a pointy metal finger at Ashima. “Stranger, stranger, stranger, boss, stranger!”

            “I’m not that much a stranger,” Ashima protested even as she took a nervous step back. Having seen the living dolls once, it seemed, wasn’t enough to become used to them.

            “Stranger,” Stevie harrumphed, arms folded and with a nod of finality.

            “And you’re rude,” Ashima tried lamely.

            “You again!” said the man. He shed his hood and coat as he approached them. He must have been working for some time, his hair damp and even spikier, and parts of his shirt sweat-stained. The expression on his face bordered on being humorous, part anger but mostly complete and utter bewilderment, as though anyone coming back to this place was so unheard of that it was to laugh. Except when it actually happened.

            “Are you trying to get me sacked!” the man nearly shrieked, and it would have had effect if his voice hadn’t squeaked. “What the blazes are you doing back here? Are you mad?”

            “I want you to tell me about the spell,” Ashima said, resolute while holding Asha tight to her chest as if the doll could shield her. Instead, Asha squirmed until she dropped from Ashima’s arms and darted off into the maze of junk – traitor. Without Asha, Ashima felt horribly vulnerable. She took a step back away from the towering twig of a man and cleared her throat.

            “You said some other time. It’s some other time.”

            The man gaped. “Some other– I just said that to get rid of you! Did you not hear me the first time, hm? About the amount of decidedly terrible trouble we’d get into – I’d get into – if you were caught down here?”

            Ashima perked up at this. “Oh, we don’t have to worry. I came at night so everyone’s asleep. No one should be coming down here for anything.”

            “That doesn’t matter!” the man squeaked, arms tossed high over his head. “That doesn’t bleeding matter, it never does! And… Wait, it’s night?”

            Ashima nodded.

            “Oh,” the man said, checking a grimy watch strapped to his bony wrist. “Oh, bleed it, I did it again. That’s the problem with watches, they never give you the AMs or PMs, and you just have to guess. Oh, this is going to mess up my internal clock all over again.”

            “You can’t just look outside to see the real time?” Ashima asked.

            “If I have the chance, which I mostly don’t,” said the man, stripping out of the heavy breeches. Today he was in a red T-shirt, but the jeans were darker.

            “Why?” Ashima asked, following him to the alcoves where he lived. “Don’t you get time off or anything?”

            “A little hard when you don’t even know what time it is. And if I don’t keep up with the melting then the piles get too big.” He rummaged through the chest of drawers in his bed alcove, pulling out a pair of dark blue sweat pants and yet another T-shirt, this one green with a tear in the shoulder.

            “You don’t even go up for meal times?” Ashima asked, appalled.

            “They send me food and I cook it myself.” He paused. “Except pie. Or cake. Not since my granddad left. I miss pie. Now stay here, and I mean it,” he said with a very stern and very pointed look. He turned, then turned back to her. “Better yet, leave.” Then he went through a door in the bedroom alcove, set just right that it was easy to miss unless you were standing in the alcove itself. Ashima heard the hiss and rain-like patter of water running in a shower. It wasn’t a long shower – they never were since you had a time limit – and soon the man emerged dressed and toweling off his three-times as spiky hair. One look at Ashima and his upper body went limp with defeat.

             “What is wrong with you?” he whined. “Do you not get it? Do you not get the severity of our current situation? Is the thought of having so many chores you’ll never see a day off in your life not enough to send you scurrying back up to the dorms? Or are you that daft?”

            Ashima glared. “I’m not daft.” Despite the fact that she had no idea what “daft” meant. “I want to know how you brought the dolls to life and I’m not leaving until I do.”

            “I could make you leave,” said the man, slipping his bare feet into a ratty pair of white tennis shoes. “I could carry you up myself and report you. I’d be in less trouble for it if I did.”

            “And I’ll tell them about the dolls.”

            “And if you do, they’ll make me undo them. Kill them.” he gestured at Asha now hiding behind the hem of Ashima’s pink night gown. “Yours included.”

            With a growl of frustration, Ashima stomped her foot. “Why don’t you just tell me? Then I can leave and we won’t get in trouble.”

            “Why is it so important?”

            “I…” Ashima growled again, wracking her brain for an answer – any answer that would put an end to this verbal tug of war and finally get the man to tell her everything. Problem was, there was no answer. There wasn’t even a justification for why she needed to know. There was only the need, a feeling that it mattered even if she didn’t know why, and there would be no peace until that feeling was satisfied.

            “Because it is,” Ashima said, putting her hands on her hips the way grownups did when wanting to look serious and imposing.

            The man crossed his arms in front of his chest, and for some reason it came off as far more imposing than Ashima’s stance.

            The little cat doll ambled between them, agile and smug as a true cat. It jumped on the little bed where it curled up to watch, the bird doll joining it by gliding into the alcove and perching on the iron bed frame.

            The bird doll could fly; honest to goodness fly.

            Ashima’s hands dropped to her sides. She said, more to herself than anyone else, “It’s not possible.”

            “Well, it is. You’re seeing it first hand,” said the man.

            “It shouldn’t be possible.”

            “But it is.”

            “Why? Things like that aren’t real, they’re just stories.”

            “Funny things, stories,” said the man, arms uncrossed and clasped behind his back as he rocked heel to toe. “They have to come from somewhere.” He stopped rocking, regarded his living dolls for a moment, and then heaved a somewhat tired sigh. “Fine, I’ll tell you. But you have to promise that you won’t tell anyone else, especially all the grown-ups upstairs. Not if you want your little doll to stay alive.” He tilted his head toward the kitchen. “Come on.”

            Ashima hurried after him, heart soaring higher than it ever had since coming to the town, and a smile fixed to her face.

            “What’s your name?” she asked the man.

            “Renatus.”

            Ashima wrinkled her nose. “Never heard of a name like that.”

            “Oh, heard of every possible name ever thought up, have we?” Renatus said snidely. “It means reborn. Bit pompous, I know. It’s why I prefer Ren.”

            “Okay, Mr. Ren.”

            “Just Ren.”

            “Okay, Ren.”

            “And Ashima, right?”

            Ashima nodded. “Ashima Nayar.”

            Ren made tea using a dented kettle and warmed biscuits on the top of the iron wood stove. While doing this he introduced the dolls.

            “The big one with the dog’s head is Stevie.” Stevie gave her a jaunty little wave and an open mouth smile. “It’s not often I get animal bones but sometimes they pop up. I’m thinking the skull was one of the guard dogs before it croaked of old age. The little one with the blanket I call Gemmy – he likes cloth. Then there’s Timothy the cat and Sonya the bird. It’s good to have a bird around, they’re good at getting things at the top of the piles, but bleeding hard to make, let me tell you. Took me ages to get all the right feathers.”

            “What are they?” Ashima asked, giddy with wonder. The dolls had gathered in the kitchen; where ever their creator went, they went. Stevie manned the tea, Gemmy the biscuits by standing on a step ladder, Sonya was perched on a drying rack covered with shirts and Timothy was prowling around for the sake of prowling. Ren, meanwhile, was getting out a jar of jam and a tin of butter from the rusty little refrigerator next to the water-stained ceramic sink.

            “Golems,” Ren said. “That’s what my granddad called them. He’s the one who taught me the spell. He used to be in charge of this place, back when it wasn’t just me and him. I was just a child, then, younger than you.”

            “Did your mom and dad go to the mines, too?” Ashima asked.

            Ren, transferring the tea and biscuits to the small square kitchen table, shrugged. “Don’t know, can’t remember. I remember,” he said, eyes cast upward as he thought. “I remember being sick. Felt like I was sick all the time, actually. Resting a lot, getting tired easy, never hungry. Seems like I was sick forever, but I got better. Anyway, my grandfather was in charge of this place but no one liked working down here. They never said it but you could tell; they were always messing up on purpose when not long before they were doing just fine. Finally my grandfather had enough, kicked everyone out, then he made the golems.”

            “With a spell,” said Ashima, skeptical despite the proof right in front of her.

            “That’s what he called it, not me,” said Ren, pouring the tea. He then sat back, hands tucked behind his head. Even a minor stretch as it was, Ashima could see the faint outline of his ribs pressed against his shirt.

            “I guess he got it from a story,” Ren continued. “About this Jewish chap. He writes this word on a bit of paper and puts the paper in the mouth of this man made of clay. So this clay man comes to life and does his bidding – mostly protecting people, I think. But then the clay man rebels, goes after the Jewish chap instead.”

            Ashima cast a nervous sideways glance at the golems still puttering around the kitchen. “It did?”

            But Ren waved her unease aside with his hand. “Oh, don’t worry about them, they’re harmless. My grandfather… or his grandfather, or an ancestor, I don’t know… had this theory that golems are more than just puppets. They’re alive, or they become alive. It’s like… they’re puppets at first, but then they absorb life, become their own beings with their own thoughts and ideas. But they also become what you make them. Or as my granddad put it they become whatever you intend for them. Intent is everything, he said. And when you make them with the intent to be violent, they become violent. So don’t make ’em violent, and you’ll be fine.”

            “How do you do that?” Ashima asked, and sipped her tea.

            Ren shrugged as though it were obvious. “Care about what you create, make sure your intent is good, I suppose. Treat them like you would a person… or whatever you make them to look like. They are smarter than they seem. Stevie, here–”

            “Yo!” Stevie piped up from where he was wiping down the sink.

            “Well, as you can see, he can talk. I’d given him a tongue of sorts, made out of a sock, and one day he up and started talking. Mind you half the time he doesn’t make a lick of sense but it comes in handy when someone who shouldn’t be here pops up.” He looked straight at Ashima.

            Ashima ignored him. “So you write a word on a piece of paper, and they come to life?”

            “Obviously. There’s probably more too it. Maybe absolute belief that it’ll work, or a wish, or faith, I don’t know. I write the word, I stick the paper in, and there they are.”

            “Weird.”

            “I know. But it’s like my granddad always said – you can’t explain everything in this world, and that’s okay or life would be boring otherwise.”

            “Where is your granddad?”

            Ren’s eyes drifted away to the side, looking at nothing in particular. “Gone.”

            “Where?”

            “Don’t know. Said he had something important he needed to find, then he left, about ten years back, give or take.”

            “He just left you?” Ashima asked, annoyed that anyone could leave anyone so easily.

            “Well, I was twenty at the time,” Ren defended petulantly. “It’s not like I couldn’t take care of myself. Besides, I thought we were talking about golems? And speaking of which you really, really, really cannot tell anyone about mine. After granddad kicked everyone out he made golems to help with the work but it went pear shaped. The council that maintains this town didn’t trust them and ordered my grandfather to destroy them. The golems… they tried to get out, to escape – got rather violent about it, too – and had to be destroyed. My grandfather was forbidden to make any more. If they find out I made some, they’ll tear them apart and I’ll be sacked and banished from the town. So you can’t tell anyone, please.”

            Ashima nodded rigidly, feeling suddenly overwhelmed by what amounted to such an effortless task. “I won’t tell a soul,” she promised.

            “And keep your doll hidden.”

            “Doing that already,” she said proudly.

            “And don’t make any golems of your own.”

            “I don’t even know how.”

           “Keep it that way. So, now you know. Hope it satisfied your daft curiosity. Now saunter off. I need to sleep, see if I can’t keep to a normal schedule.”

            Ren didn’t give her a chance to protest, or ask any more questions, or do much of anything except watch him hop from his seat, move to the alcove with his bed, kick off his shoes and crawl beneath the covers.

            “You heard the boss,” said Stevie, poking Ashima’s shoulder. “Saunter off.”

            Ashima gave him a withering look, but she complied. Satisfied with the answer, she finally felt tired enough to actually sleep.

 

            It was all Asha’s fault. The doll was a menace when bored; obedient but the kind of obedient that liked to cross the obedience line when she could.

            “It’s a bloody rat, I’m telling you,” whined Tessa at lunch. “I saw it just as it ran under the beds. It was a really weird color.”

            “You’re mad, Tess,” said Missy with a dismissive wave of her fork, but it was clear her opinion didn’t matter. The rest of the gang had decided to be nervous about it, anyway, and spread the word. That word spread to the adults, and come dinner time there were little rat traps dotting every shadowy nook and corner the place had. With it, an increased number of cats and small dogs, normally kept outside but allowed this one reprieve for the soul purpose of keeping the building rodent free.

            But with more sightings of the “strange colored rodent” and not a single trap activated nor cat looking smug with a belly full of mice, people were getting restless.

            “Might be something else,” was the new rumor. “Might be something smart, like a Beast. There’s small Beasts, too. Young Beasts no bigger than rats but that grow to the size of horses.”

            For the next school lesson, the children were taken to a room – a science room, they called it, where people of an intellectual nature went to do what intellectual people did. The room was a museum of stuffed creatures: the naked birds, the giant frogs with their tusks and spiked tails, the giant birds of the mountains and highlands that people could tame and ride, and Beasts, lots and lots of Beasts – some small as cats, others as large as elephants, some with beaks and wings and claws, some with gills and flippers, some with long legs and some with no legs at all. And all of them hairless and the color of gray sludge.

            “Why’s that one different?” Ashima asked, pointing to the dirt brown creature in the long glass case. It was like a caterpillar, with a triangle skull tapered to a needle point at the snout and eyes sockets large ovals inset with midnight blue opals. It had no appendages, only tubular growths arrayed like a fan along its sides, long at the front then shrinking to nothing at the back and covered in tiny hairs.

            “Those are diggers, stupid,” said one of the boys. “It says so on the plaque.”

            Ashima glared at him. “I wasn’t close enough to read the plaque, idiot.” Ashima knew of diggers but up until now had never seen one. It was a rather pathetic creature, dried out and dull-skinned, no bigger than a pony. But that probably had a lot to do with it being just an adolescent according to the plaque, and dead.

            Ashima’s focus returned to the Beasts, especially the saber-toothed thing towering high above her, wolf-headed and solid with muscle. Its claws were blunt but thick, its feet heavy and armored like its head and back.

            Something like this could have done it, she thought. Something like this could have attacked the village. She found herself hating the thing, culprit or not.

            Another day came and went with still no rat or mouse to show for it – but plenty of sightings to keep everyone on edge – and Ashima had enough.

            “Oh, bleeding hell, you again?” Ren whined, throwing his work gloves to the ground. “Really? Do you hate me, is that it? Do you want me to get sacked?”

            “I want you to take Asha,” Ashima said, holding the squirming doll out to him. “She’s bored and it’s making her go all over the place. Everyone keeps thinking she’s a rat and if she keeps it up we’re all in big trouble. I thought you’d be happy that I’m making sure that doesn’t happen.”

            “What, giving her a little discipline not easy enough for you?” Ren said, struggling out of his coat. “She’s a bleeding golem. Give her an order and she’ll carry it out, simple as that… usually. Watch – Asha, still.”

            Asha went still. Ashima, blinking, pulled the doll back to her.

            “Oh.”

            Arms folded, Ren stared at Ashima cock-eyed. “You didn’t even try, did you?”

            “Didn’t think she’d listen,” Ashima muttered, both abashed and irritated about it because, yes, she hadn’t tried, hadn’t even considered it. Mostly she had growled at Asha, lecturing her on the trouble they would get into, but without ever giving the doll a single order to stay put.

            Ren continued to eye Ashima the way those scientists in the menagerie had eyed the stuffed Beasts, as though working out secret codes only they could see. It made Ashima feel like glass. Worse than glass, it made her feel like the reading books of the younger children, full of big, easy words anyone could read.

            Because if she were honest with herself, she had wanted this – a reason to come down into the junk pit again and again. She couldn’t explain why, only that she liked it down here, despite all the junk, heat and funny smells. It was something different, and the last time she had come down here, seeking answers, she had left not only satisfied but content. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be content.

            “Right,” Ren grumbled, stalking past her to his kitchen alcove. “Just tell her what she needs to do and she’ll listen,” he said. “You can go, now.”

            Ashima trotted after him instead. “Have Beasts ever tried to attack the town?”

            “Possibly,” said Ren, putting the kettle on. Gemmy fetched the jam and butter, while Stevie happily folded laundry while humming a very off-tune song. “Don’t know since I was never top side to see it. But granddad’s seen a few attacks.”

            “What about goblins? Do they ever come here?”

            “Possibly. They don’t come in, though. I know that. Goblins aren’t allowed in.” Ren paused when filling the kettle in order to look up thoughtfully. “Technically I guess that would mean they don’t come here at all, then. But then Granddad says that goblins don’t come this far. They have their territory, we have ours.”

            “A goblin collected tolls on the road to town,” said Ashima.

            “They must be expanding. Granddad said they’re good at that – expanding. They push folk back and back – don’t ask me how – and spread their kind out.”

            Ashima didn’t wait to be invited to sit at the table. She sat, making herself comfortable. It felt like forever since so many of her questions had been answered. The teacher answered some, being a teacher and paid to do so and all, but once off the clock she was just like every other adult, full of “I said so” and “don’t ask so many questions.”

            But Ashima was learning even when it seemed she wasn’t, and she said, so as not to annoy Ren with her inquiries, “Your grandfather knows a lot.” Sometimes a statement was as good as a question.

            “He did love his books, I’ll grant you that,” Ren said. As though to prove it, he went through another hidden door in the kitchen alcove like the one in the bedroom alcove, only this one some sort of pantry – a pantry and library, from what Ashima could see as she leaned forward; rows of books among piles of potatoes, and stacks of books next to jars of spices. When Ren emerged, it was with an armload of four books, the biggest as thick as Ashima’s little finger was long.

            “These in particular he would spend hours studying,” Ren said, dumping the pile onto the small table and making it rattle. One was a geography book, the rest history books on the goblin/human conflicts that had divided the land. There had been many conflicts according to history, little skirmishes here and there. But ask anyone how it all started, where the goblins came from, and the answer would always be the same – I’d have to research it. And either the research wasn’t getting done or there was nothing to research, because Ashima had yet to get an answer. 

            “Oh, he was obsessed with them – the goblins,” Ren said, opening each of the books as though intending to read but unable to choose which to start with. He would pick up one, look at it, put it down only to pick up another and do it again, all with a pained look of concentration on his face. “And he was odd about his research into them, like there was something he didn’t like about what the books were telling him, like he wasn’t getting the answers he wanted. He didn’t like that goblins live so long, or that we’re so dependant on them. But he was useless at explanations so don’t ask me to make it all clear.”

            Then Ren’s features softened, his gaze going wistful and sad. “I think it may be why he left. Whatever it was he didn’t like, it made him go find something, something he couldn’t explain, he said, until he found it.”

            Opening the geography book, he turned it to face Ashima. The page he had opened it to was of a map, one Ashima had seen before when learning geography at school. It was a map of the territory with a  crooked line running diagonal down the middle, the east belonging to humanity, the west occupied by the goblins – the west looking bigger than the east. A piece of paper had been covering it until Ren removed it.

            “He said he was going west,” Ren said. “I never saw him again after he left. But he left me this.” He held up the paper – another map but this one hand drawn on brittle, yellow parchment with messy writing scribbled all along the edges. It had been folded so many times a breeze could have torn it down its many creases. “In case I wanted to ever find him, I suppose. He invited me to find him if he never came back.”

            “Why haven’t you?”

            Ren shrugged. “Dangerous out there, I suppose. And I’d get sacked.”

            “So?”

            Ren looked at her in horror. “So! So this is all I have! I may not go up often but I hear what it’s like. Beast attacks and people going jobless and going to the mines. If you can avoid the mines then good, that’s what I hear. Granddad was terrified of the mines. He said, and I quote, I don’t care how desperate things get you damn well better not go to the mines or I’ll disown you. If that doesn’t say serious, I don’t know what does.”

            “My parents went to the mines,” Ashima said flatly.

            Ren flinched. “Oh. Could be just rumors, then. Might be a spectacular place for all we know.”

            “I doubt it,” Ashima said, sulking. “Anyplace that makes you leave your family can’t be good.

            They fell silent, Ashima brooding over things she had thought she was growing used to but wasn’t, and Ren looking uncomfortable and a little sad. The tea kettle whistled, but was mostly ignored until Stevie finally took it off the stove.

The Toymaker Ch. 5

The bus came in the early morning when Ashima was out doing her gardening chores – the potato field near the mansion. It wasn’t “the” bus – the one that had brought her here – but bigger, with rust spots and diesel smoke rolling from the tail pipe.

“We getting more people?” Ashima asked no one in particular.

“Nope. Losing some,” said gruff old Mr. Clandes, attacking the soil with hard strokes of the hoe. “You come of age, you get a permanent chore. We don’t find you a permanent chore, you find employment elsewhere. Keeps the population from getting too big.” He slammed the hoe into the dirt with a crunch of soil and pebbles. “We got too many mouths to feed as is.”

“But… you took us in?”

“And got some goods for it, too, no doubt. That’s how it goes. You want in you have to pay for it, and it ain’t cheap, let me tell you. We had this one fellow sell us his entire herd of cattle just to get his family in and half of ‘em still ended up getting kicked out. Paying your way in ain’t no guarantee that you’ll get to stay. Not if we’ve got too many folks as is.”

“Are they going to another town?” Ashima asked.

“Nope, they’re going to the mines. Now quit yapping and get back to work.”

Ashima did but the work was so monotonous that it was easy to keep one eye on the bus and the people coming out. Most of them were young, twenties and teens.

Kimmy’s sister was among them.

Visiting Ren an hour each night had become routine – at least to Ashima it had, even though it had only been twice more since the night she tried to make Ren take Asha. He had become someone to talk to, someone who wasn’t another adult that hated questions. Ren seemed to develop his own routine as well, actively trying to get Ashima back up the winding stairs one minute, making tea, pulling out history books and talking animatedly on the goblin-human conflict the next.

“No one knows why they wear those metal frames on their bodies,” Ren had said. “Or what they mine. I don’t even think anyone knows where the mine is.” Which wasn’t exactly a concrete answer to what the goblins were, but a far cry from the usual mantra of “goblins are something to be avoided” that even her parents would use.

It was at night that Ashima visited in order to play it safe, skipping a day so as not to tire herself out with all this staying up an hour late.

Today, after seeing the bus, she made an exception. She went to the employment office on the first floor, east wing, signed the ledger that kept record of days off, and made straight for the junk cave. It was surprisingly easy, the laundry room so filled with steam and clothes, everyone so focused on their folding or sorting, that the room might as well have been empty. It was so simple to slip by without notice, and the boiler room never had an occupant unless something was broken.

But half-way down the stairs and Ashima heard voices – voices that were neither Ren nor Stevie. Ashima slowed, taking the steps one light foot at a time until she was able to peer around the bend into the alcove.

Ren was on the other side, dressed in his protective breeches but not the heavy coat, and tense as a cornered dog.

The three men were doing the cornering. They were big men, at least they looked big in their heavy coats and work boots, and they surrounded Ren in a way that allowed him no place to run. The golems were nowhere to be seen.

“Look, Ren, you’re rippin’ admirable working down here all by your lonesome but the output of slag isn’t what it used to be when your granddad was around,” said the tallest man, sharp-faced and young but grizzled before his time, and regarding Ren, Ashima thought, almost sympathetically. “We need that metal if we’re going to keep the goblins off our arse.”

“Well,” Ren said, trying to straighten, but his shoulders refusing to commit. “It’s like you said – I’m down here by my lonesome. You honestly expect a higher yield when it’s just me?”

“Maybe if you’d put on some damn muscle,” growled man number two, older than man one, his face near-buried under a red beard.

Man number one patted the air in man number two’s direction. “Jed, lay off. Ren, you don’t need the man power, you just need to pick up the pace, toss more pieces onto the belt, and get those big pieces on. We don’t get a higher yield then we replace you and you’re off to the mines, simple as that.”

“Look, lads,” Ren said, trying not to sound desperate, and as a result sounding very desperate. “I know I’m not my grandfather but any yield is a good yield, right? I mean, how often to the goblins really harass us, eh? Can’t be that often if they want the metal that badly and it’s not like they can get in, right?”

“How would you know, you’re barely ever top side,” Jed challenged.

“But–” Ren began.

Man one cut him off with a rather stern, impatient and loud, “Just do it, Ren. Gah, stop being so damn thick about it.”

The men brushed by Ren, man three clipping Ren’s shoulder with his own and making Ren stagger. Ashima hurried up the stairs, crouching within the shadow of a boiler until the men had gone leaving a trail of anti-Ren sentiments in their wake. Ashima hurried back downstairs.

Ren was just getting back into his coat when she arrived. On seeing her, he rolled his eyes.

“Oh, like visiting at night isn’t bad enough, now you have to do it when everyone’s bleeding awake?”

Ashima ignored the statement. “Why were those men mad at you?”

“Because they think it actually accomplishes something.” Zipping up his coat, Ren ambled toward the belt jutting like a tongue from the furnace. The golems emerged from where they were hiding and quickly resumed the process of tossing on metal bits. Ashima joined them in order to keep talking to Ren. But even far from the furnace as she was, at the very head of the belt, sweat quickly slicked her face.

“They always do it every now and then,” said Ren over the roar of the flames, heaving a small tricycle without a seat onto the belt. “Same threats, same promises, like it’s supposed to make me work faster. But I see through ’em. If they meant it, I’d of been sacked by now and I’m not. As long as there’s slag to make metal sheets, they’re happy.”

Ren tried, he really did, to put large items on the belt – a bike, doors that had once been part of a truck, doors that had once been part of refrigerators or stoves, a typewriter, another bike – but soon he was out of breath and staggering, and had to go back to the smaller bits. He had explained it to her the day before yesterday, about how when the metal was melted in the furnace the liquid was shoved continuously through heated pipes up to this little warehouse where the metals were separated and cooled into sheets. Ashima had seen the warehouse from afar, so off-limits she couldn’t even get within twenty feet of it, but it had been close enough for her to hear the hiss and see the sparks of cooling metal.

“I thought you said goblins don’t come this far,” said Ashima.

“They don’t, but they have humans working for them that do. At least that’s what I’ve always been told, but how much you want to bet it’s just humans making a cheap deal by pretending to work for the goblins? But like I would know, I hardly go top side,” he said bitterly.

“I don’t know why you keep working here,” Ashima said, setting a metal plate onto the belt and watching it drift away to the fire. “I don’t know why anyone works here.”

“To avoid the mines?” Ren said.

“But you end up there, anyway, if there’s too many people. Why not go to a village? They always need people. Fishing villages, farming villages, the places where they make stuff in a factory; they always need people, but everyone goes to the mine. That’s not right, not when there’s so many places you could go. And it’s not right that they make you go. How is that fair? Making you go just because there’s no room. What if I want to go to a village instead? Would they let me or tell me they’re too crowded and send me to the mines?”

She threw another piece of metal onto the belt, and another after that, and another after that. “And why does the mine need so many people? Don’t they have enough?”

When there was no answer, she looked over at Ren. Having stopped what he was doing, he looked at her. But with his hood up and goggles on, it was hard to know why.

“My granddad asked that, too,” he said.

“They’re good questions,” Ashima said.

“Yeah,” Ren said wryly, almost bitingly. “So good he wandered off to find the stupid answer and never came back.” Now he was the one throwing things onto the belt.

“You should go find him,” Ashima said, earning her a sharp look from Ren. But she shrugged, standing firmly by her suggestion. “It’d be better than staying here, getting yelled at all the time. You could always find work in the villages.”

“The villages, yes,” Ren stated flatly. “Like the village you came from, right? That your parents left to go to the mines?”

Ashima scowled at him. “It was attacked by a Beast. They didn’t have a choice.” Except that they did, she was sure of it, because people went from village to village all the time, where ever their skills took them. “And there are other villages. Lots of them. Plenty to choose from. You just don’t want to go because you’re scared.”

“I don’t have a right to be?” Ren said. “Look, Ashima, it’s not that easy. Granddad had all the time in the world to return and he didn’t, which can only mean one thing.” But whatever that one thing was, Ren didn’t elaborate. “And never you mind the danger involved, how would I even prepare for a journey like that? What would I need to take? Where would I begin? I don’t even know what I’m looking for!”

“What about that piece of paper your granddad left you?”

Ren snorted. “Just a bunch of directions.”

“Then you know where to begin.”

“Still not that easy.”

Ashima sighed. “I’d do it.”

“Yeah? So why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t have a piece of paper with directions on it, that’s why!” Ashima said with a stamp of her foot. “I don’t know where the stupid mines are. But if I did, I’d go there. I’d go there this second. But I can’t because I’d just get lost.”

Ren was doing it again, that long silent staring, his hand up mid-toss with the chunky metal bit clutched tight in his thickly gloved fist.

Ashima shifted uncomfortably, then finally looked away. “Why does it have to be the mine or the towns? Why can’t there be,” she shrugged. “I don’t know, something else? And maybe your granddad died of old age before he could find the answers. Or maybe he’s found them and he’s waiting for you, and that’s why he gave you directions before he left.”

She felt suddenly ill inside. Her parents hadn’t given her directions, or told her where they were going. They had told her to wait for them while acting like people did when they knew they would never see someone ever again – sad and without hope. As much as Ashima tried not to think about it, she did, and it took everything she had not to cry.

Ren continued to stare at her, then broke from it and tossed the metal bit onto the belt.

Ren was gone the next morning.

When the town council needed to make an announcement it did so during meal times when everyone was in one place. Breakfast and dinner were the preferred times, and the only announcements during lunch were only those of an emergency nature.

Ashima was halfway through breakfast when the old intercom crackled to life. Mrs. Kline’s voice carried dry as a desert twig through the chamber, droning off a list of recently available chores.

“…two in the laundries during the evenings, and at least two for the junk pit.”

Ashima froze mid-chew of her eggs. Everyone else groaned. Somewhere in the cafeteria, someone said loud enough to be heard, “That stupid, skinny git!”

Ashima stopped listening.

Ren was gone, left in the night, maybe the morning, but either way he was gone. Ashima once again felt sick, sick and angry and struggling so hard not to let her tears go that her throat tightened until she could barely breathe. Stupid, skinny git, talking and talking about staying, about the junk pit being all he had, about getting potentially sacked, not wanting to get sacked and trying to make Ashima leave so that he didn’t get sacked…

And he left. Gone, just like her village, just like her parents.

Appetite dead, Ashima left her tray for the cleaners to deal with and hurried from the meal room. Once clear of all those eyes, she broke into a run, bursting into the dormitory and dropping to her knees by her bed. She pulled out her bag and packed. Asha climbed onto the bed to watch her, head tilted like a curious dog.

“I’m not waiting around, Asha,” Ashima said, voice surprisingly steady even as the tears broke free and raced down her face. “They’ll send me to the mines, anyway, once I’m old enough and there’s too many people.” She scraped away her tears with the back of her hand. “And if I’m gonna go anywhere, I’m going because I want to, not because anybody told me to.”

But as easy as it seemed on the outside, the moment she zipped her bag shut and hefted the strap onto her shoulder, the weight of the bag bent her and it hit her then why Ren had been so reluctant to go.

Leaving wasn’t something you could do at the snap of a finger. There was no way she would be able to lug such a full bag around, and never mind needing clothes, she would also need food, water, something to carry the water in. The thought of all that preparation nearly drove her back to tears. As much as the facility didn’t seem to care what people did and didn’t do, the truth was they did care where lessons and chores were concerned. Ashima knew, she’d seen kids dragged by the ear to their chores, chastised along the way for attempting to play hooky.

Ashima pulled her newest time chart from her pocket and checked her chore hours. She still had exactly twenty minutes of free time left.

“Twenty minutes is good,” she said, stuffing the chart back into her pocket with a shaking hand. “E-enough time to get what I need, right?”

Asha lifted her stubby cloth hands helplessly.

Ashima didn’t waste a second. She went to the offices, logged in her off time then went back to the dorms and lightened her load. Being cold out, she would need heavy clothes, long sleeves and a blanket; the latter she took from her bed. Food wasn’t quite as easy as packing, however, what with the kitchen staff in the chaos of cleaning up. But it was a chaos Ashima took advantage of, ducking in and out carrying trays and bowls, in part helping and in part slipping food into the pockets of her dress and coat when she was sure no one was looking – a few apples, a quarter loaf of bread, the granola bars wrapped in paper that some of the outdoor workers liked to take with them, and some left-over chicken she wrapped in wax paper. Getting water was nothing. There were several small metal canteens hanging on hooks in one of the pantries, a sign saying to take one if your chore took you too far from a water fountain or hose. Ashima grabbed one and filled it from a water fountain just outside the kitchen. She was ready.

Except there was still the obnoxious matter of leaving the compound. Sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed in her dark denims, red and gold wool sweater, her work boots and wrapped in her blue-gray coat, Ashima stared broodingly at the floor.

“He didn’t go out the door, that’s for sure,” Ashima said to Asha sitting next to her. “I heard the kitchen people talking. They said someone had gone missing and that people were looking for him. That’s got to be Ren, but how did he get out if not through the gates?”

Asha jumped up and swept her arms in a broad circle. Ashima looked at the doll like she had lost her mind. Then it clicked.

“Oh! A hole. In the wall, maybe,” Ashima stated, jumping from the bed. Asha jumped after her landing easily on her little cloth feet, then climbing onto the bag as Ashima slung it onto her shoulder. Ashima took one excited step forward, stopped, and sagged.

“But if everyone’s looking for Ren, they might have found the hole or whatever he used and got rid of it. Besides, if people are looking, we’re more likely to get caught.”

But the longer she stayed, the harder it would be to catch up with Ren.

One step forward and two steps back her father used to say when it seemed life wanted to go in nothing but the wrong direction. But he also liked to say that when there were few choices and you had nothing left to lose, then there was no harm in at least trying. Yes, maybe the hole was gone. Yes, maybe she might get caught, get in trouble and find herself with more chores. But to concede defeat and not try would leave her forever wondering what-if. Chores were temporary. What-ifs could plague you for bleeding ever.

Ashima gave a curt nod and set off.

Back in her village, at the start of every harvest season, the children would play a game – Ghost in the Graveyard. A hybrid of tag and hide and seek, the object was to evade whoever was the “ghost” and make it back to whatever was designated as the safety or “base.” You ducked and you dodged and you ran for all you were worth, and the first one back got first pick out of the tub of homemade candies.

The game had been a lot more fun when the only thing at stake was your favorite candy.

Ashima slipped through the facility, she hoped, as silent and hard to spot as a real ghost, her heart a hammer in her chest and sweat cold on her neck. Her mouth was dry, her palms were wet, and the anticipation of possibly being caught hurt – actually hurt, every joint aching from tension and every nerve sensitive as though exposed. She wanted to see this as a game, settle herself with the illusion of something she knew, something she could control, but it wasn’t helping. Games were fun. This was torture.

Footsteps echoed down the hall straight toward Ashima, and in her panic she dashed into the nearest room without reading the sign above the door.

“Are you lost, girl?” said the woman on the other side kindly. It was one of the apartment rooms reserved only for families. The woman was pacing in a cozy little living room with floral furniture, bouncing a fussy baby on her hip.

“Uh…” Ashima said. “Wrong room, sorry.” The footfalls had passed by then, the way ahead clear for now. She moved as swiftly and silently as possible to the nearest back entrance leading to the greenhouse compound. The compound offered perfect places to duck behind – trucks, shrubs, piles of tools, the greenhouses themselves and, best of all, everyone was mostly inside. She darted from a greenhouse to a truck, from the truck to a metal shed, and from the shed to the little orchard of apple trees already picked clean and empty of people.

“If I were a hole in the wall,” she whispered to herself, “where would I be?” It was an utterly stupid question, but made her feel in charge and on the right path. The wall was just on the other side of the orchard, a great heap of flagstones and cement. Looking up at it, Ashima felt less in charge and more hopeless. There was no possible way something that big and thick could have a hole in it.

“Maybe he climbed it,” she said quietly.

Asha shook her head no.

“Yeah, probably not.” Ashima followed the wall while keeping to the orchard and out of sight of anyone who might be nearby.

There was a saying – don’t judge a book by its cover, a golden rule they had liked to teach in school. It meant that one shouldn’t judge a person at first glance because they would always surprise you. The same went for walls, it seemed, because not fifteen steps in and Ashima found an opening. It wasn’t much, just a crack and some pulled-away dirt the work of some small animal, but it was kindling to the flickering candle of Ashima’s motivation. She broke into a trot, fast enough to cover more ground, not so fast that she missed more holes. The apple trees ended, the pear trees began, and then Ashima found it: a hole big enough for her to squeeze through.

Maybe it was the one Ren had taken, maybe not, but like it mattered. Getting to her hands and knees, Ashima peered through it, seeing light immediately on the other side. She shoved her bag through first then crawled, squirmed and shimmied after until both bag and girl popped free dirt stained and triumphant.

“We did it, Asha!” Ashima squeaked.

Asha put one hand to her stitched mouth, pointing with the other up at the wall. Ashima clapped her hands over her mouth in panic and looked up, but the wall was too high to see anything.

Asha pointed to the ground – stay here – then darted off into the long, dry, tawny grass. Seconds later she was jumping up and down in a frenzy of waving. Bag hefted onto her shoulder, Ashima ducked as low as possible and dashed for it.

Ashima had always been what her mother called average height, neither too tall nor too small, but right now just the right enough size for the long grass to reach past her head as long as she stayed in a crouch and moved slowly. Asha had crawled onto her back and was keeping watch behind. Whenever Asha jumped once on Ashima’s spine, Ashima dropped flat. When Asha jumped twice, Ashima pushed herself back to her hands and knees and crawled forward. Dampness bled through her jeans and dried grass and prickles poked her hands. There was something about the grass that made her nose itch until she sneezed. She was wrong: skulking through the compound hadn’t been torture, this was. Why was it all the things that had once been fun were now a misery? She used to love crawling through the grass.

Because this wasn’t the village, that’s why, and it bolstered her resolve that leaving this place was the right idea.

Asha jumped on her back three times. Ashima turned to look at her, confused. The doll was pointing with great enthusiasm ahead and a little to the right. Poking her head above the grass, Ashima smiled. Only a few more crawls away was a copse of trees, their limbs bare but close together and the interior of the wood shadowy. Ashima scuttled quickly forward, ignoring the pricks and damp. She rose to a crouch, scuttled two more steps then broke into a run deep into the cover of the little wood.

“Now we did it!” Ashima squealed, jumping up and down, Asha jumping up and down with her. “Let’s go find Ren!”

Ashima couldn’t recall all the directions on the paper Ren had showed her, but she did remember the first direction, and that was to head west. She used a mental image of the compound as a sort of compass, closing her eyes to do so.

“We went out the back, that would put the west wing on the left, so we go left,” Ashima said happily. She skipped left, and continued skipping, high on success, hope and the certainty that she was doing the right thing.

Then she thought about how much more time Ren had had to cover more ground, how far forward he might have gone before turning west, and the vastness of the land around them. She stopped skipping.

“But it’s open land,” she told herself. “Really flat, too. Not a lot of little forests like this, and he’s really tall so he should be easy to spot if we can catch up to him, right? Oh, and obviously he has to stop now and then. It should be possible to find him.” She looked imploringly down at Asha now on the ground. “Right?”

Asha shrugged.

Ashima sighed. “He’s probably miles away, isn’t he?”

“What the bleeding pits of hell are you doing here!?”

Ashima looked up and squealed in more high-pitched delight.

Standing only ten feet away on the other side of a wall of shrubs was Ren. He looked horrified.