Station Eleven

Station Eleven Page 85

“It just came out of a vent?” Alexandra asked.

“I believe so,” Kirsten said. “I’m too tired to think.”

They’d walked for all but five of the eighteen hours since they’d left St. Deborah by the Water, through the night and morning and deep into the afternoon, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the prophet. Some of them took turns trying to sleep in the moving caravans, others walking and walking until their thoughts burned out one by one like dying stars and they fell into a fugue state wherein all that mattered or had ever existed were these trees, this road, the counterpoint rhythms of human footsteps and horses’ hooves, moonlight turning to darkness and then the summer morning, caravans rippling like apparitions in the heat, and now the Symphony was scattered here and there by the roadside in a state of semi-collapse while they waited for dinner to be ready. Half the Symphony had set off in pairs to hunt rabbits. The cook fire sent a plume of white smoke like a marker into the sky.

“Air-conditioning came out of a vent,” August confirmed. “You’d press a button, and whoosh! Cold air. I had one in my bedroom.”

Kirsten and August were setting up tents, and Alexandra, whose tent had been set up already, was lying on her back staring up at the sky.

“Oh,” Alexandra said. “So it was electricity, or gas?”

August looked at the tuba, who was sitting nearby with his daughter half-asleep in his arms. Olivia had announced that she was too tired to wait for dinner, so he’d been telling her a bedtime story about a mermaid while Lin set up their tent.

“Electricity,” the tuba said. “Air conditioners were electric.” He craned his neck to see his daughter’s face. “Is she asleep?”

“I think so,” Kirsten said. This was when she heard the exclamation from the third caravan—“What the fuck,” someone said, “goddamnit, what is this?”—and she stood up in time to see the first cello haul a girl out of the caravan by the arm. Olivia sat up, blinking.

“A stowaway.” August was grinning. He’d been a stowaway himself once. “We haven’t had a stowaway in years.”

The stowaway was the girl who’d followed Kirsten in St. Deborah by the Water. She was crying and sweaty, her skirt soaked with urine. The first cello lifted her to the ground.

“She was under the costumes,” the first cello said. “I went in looking for my tent.”

“Get her some water,” Gil said.

The conductor swore under her breath and looked off down the road behind them while the Symphony gathered. The first flute gave the girl one of her water bottles.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I’m so sorry, please don’t make me go back—”

“We can’t take children,” the conductor said. “This isn’t like running away and joining the circus.” The girl looked confused. She didn’t know what a circus was. “Incidentally,” the conductor said to the assembled company, “this is why we check the caravans before we depart.”

“We left St. Deborah in kind of a hurry,” someone muttered.

“I had to leave,” the girl said. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything, just—”

“Why did you have to leave?”

“I’m promised to the prophet,” the girl said.

“You’re what?”

The girl was crying now. “I didn’t have any choice,” she said. “I was going to be his next wife.”

“Jesus,” Dieter said. “This goddamn world.” Olivia was standing by her father, rubbing her eyes. The tuba lifted her into his arms.

“He has more than one?” asked Alexandra, still blissfully ignorant.

“He has four,” the girl said, sniffling. “They live in the gas station.”

The conductor gave the girl a clean handkerchief from her pocket. “What’s your name?”

“Eleanor.”

“How old are you, Eleanor?”

“Twelve.”

“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?”

“He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.”

“Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?”

“Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said. “Hell, if I were a prophet—”

“Your parents allowed this?” the conductor asked, simultaneously making a Shut up motion in the direction of the clarinet and Sayid.