Shifting Fates (3 page)

“I will, I will!” The boisterous eight-year old shifts back into fox form and bounds forward into the darkness, jumping off the sides of the wall. I’ve never seen anyone who can shift as quickly and easily as she can. It must be because both her parents were shifters. It’s a shame they didn’t get to see their little girl grow up.

“What is it like over there?” Lily asks me. “Did you see a lot of survivors?”

“Lots,” I say. “Hundreds and hundreds. It was like in the old days, when you couldn’t even move on the sidewalk without bumping into people.”

“Wow,” Lily says softly, and I know she’s trying to picture a street full of people. But she never knew what it was like in the old days, before the war. She was too young when it happened to really remember.

“Lots of soldiers, too?” Logan asks. “Kit, quit it!” Kit is jumping between Logan’s legs, trying to get him to trip over her. She darts away and rolls, ears over tail, somersaulting and then jumping up at Lily. Lily catches the little fox easily in her arms and Kit cuddles against her chest.

“Too many soldiers.”

“How many do you think there are? Like, total?” He’s frowning, and in front of me I see Lily’s jaw tighten. She looks ahead pointedly.

“Too many,” I say again. I know why he’s curious, but I don’t want to encourage him. No answer I give him will bring his parents back.

Darkness clouds my mind. There is too much death here in the Laz, in the cold and radioactive city that used to be the center of the world. The topsiders still call it New York, but that city died years ago with the bomb. Along with my family. Along with everybody else’s families. There aren’t a lot of kids left anymore, topside or elsewhere. Nobody to protect them. Nobody left to care.

All that remains is the radioactive skeleton of a city: the Lazaretto Containment Zone.

“What did you guys do today?” I ask instead, hoping to change the subject.

“We made you something. You’re going to love it,” Lily says, her face brightening.

“Don’t tell her,” Logan says.

“I’m not telling her,” Lily says. “I’m just saying she’ll like it.”

“It’s a surprise,” Logan explains.

“I can’t wait to see it,” I say. I really can’t, especially now that I see how excited they are about showing me. I want to give them their presents right now, but it’s not Christmas morning yet. Kit’s ears perk up when Lily mentions their surprise, and now the small fox wriggles happily up to her shoulder and perches there, looking ahead to where our tunnel begins. I see a faint glow of light from the tunnel underneath the locked door.

Kit can’t wait any longer. She jumps off of Lily’s shoulder and races ahead to where the dark subway bends out and the entryway to our tunnel begins.

“Ow, Kit!” Lily says. “Wait for me!”

Lily shifts back into bobcat form, and Logan follows suit. They bound ahead and I follow slowly, the rations packages feeling light as air now that I am close to home. Lily is already tapping out the secret knock, and the door opens from inside where Nim must be waiting for us.

When I walk through the door and see what they’ve done, I gasp.

“Do you like it?” Kit says, skipping back and pulling me by the hand. I swear, the only reason she shifts into human form is because she can’t drag me around any other way.

“I love it,” I say, letting her tug me forward. Tears well in my eyes and I have to struggle to keep from crying. I let the rations packages fall to the ground. “I love it, Kit. I really do.”

The entrance to our den, once you get past the door, is a circular grate that used to let excess drainage flow through the subway system. The kids have strung lights all through the iron grating, from the floor to the ceiling, and covered them so that they shine in different colors. It’s
glowing
through the entire tunnel. It looks beautiful. It looks…

“It looks like Christmas,” I whisper.

I walk forward to get a better look. The bulbs are an eclectic collection of lights, some big, some small. There is a double set of lights that I see came from one of Logan’s old toys, an electric truck. He must have taken the headlights off.

Some of the bulbs have been covered with old wrappers - a pink Pepto-Bismol plastic bag, a green bottle. All of the colors twinkle and shine in the darkness of the abandoned drain tunnel. The lights themselves are strung together with copper wire wrapped in straws, hooked up to the generator.

“You wired all this, Logan?”

The bobcat twin is already getting dressed, pulling on his jeans quickly over his underwear.

“Yep,” he says sheepishly. “I know it’s kind of not the best present to make you go out to get the wires, but…”

“It’s beautiful. Who decorated the lights?”

“Me! Me!” Kit squeals, tugging an oversized sweater over her bare limbs. “Me and Lily watched to make sure I did it all right! And Nim went out to find more light bulbs that work!”

“Oh?” I arch one eyebrow over at Nim. “That so?”

Nimrah is leaning against the wall in a leather jacket he found down on one of the subway platforms, too cool for his own good.

He remembers the war. He was young, but he remembers. I can never keep him underground, even though we’re not safe to roam the streets here. The soldiers could always be just around the corner.

We try to be quiet when the soldiers are above us. Patrols come overhead all the time, but Logan has set us up a little lamp and a system of grocery store sensors so that whenever anyone ventures near either entrance - the tunnel or the ladder - the lamp flashes. It’s ingenious. I wonder, not for the first time, if Logan might have been a scientist or an engineer in this lifetime were it not for the disease that has made us all monsters. His future after the bomb struck was circumscribed by the arc surrounding the whole of New York City.

Strange. I always thought of New York City as a big place, but now that it’s emptied out it seems so small.

“You like it, right?” Nim says, pushing off of the brick wall. His hair is black, his eyes black. Unlike the rest of us, he seems meant to live in darkness. I have to remind myself that he’s a child still. Just a teenager.

“I love it.”

“I thought it would remind you of Christmas, maybe.” He affects nonchalance, but I can tell that under his practiced words there’s a current of nervousness. He wants to please me. All the kids do, but he’s older than the rest, and he’s beginning to get more familiar than familial when I’m around. I don’t know what to do about his crush on me, whether to squelch it or let it run its course. Or to wait.

“It’s wonderful,” I say. “Very Christmassy.”

I give him a hug. A motherly hug. His arms squeeze around mine, holding on for a split second too long. The warm pressure wakes something up in me, and I drive it back down. Not Nim. I can’t. I won’t.

“Let’s start dinner,” I say cheerily. I won’t think about it.

I walk under the grate and follow the others down to the den. The drainage tunnel we’ve set up as our home is in the shape of a long, lower-case T. The door and the grate lead into the tunnel, and at the end there are three little nooks we’ve curtained off for bedrooms. Lily and Kit share a room, as do Logan and Nim. I’m by myself in the middle, where the escape ladder is, and where the storm drain leads out to the sewer. It gets a bit wet, but only in the winter.

In the middle of all our bedrooms is a clearing big enough for us to live – a living room and kitchen all in one. It’s strange to think how this much space would’ve been a luxury apartment before the war.

Lily and Logan work side by side over the small electric cooktop that I helped Logan rig up last year. Lily watches the pan, searing the side of pork carefully. The pot of small white potatoes and carrots steams white and hot, and the Christmas lights color the steam, tinting it pastel shades of green and red. Logan stirs.

Kit is playing with her paper dolls. I kneel down beside her on the carpet, laying one hand on the back of her head, smoothing down her red curls.

“What are you playing at?” I ask.

“Princes and princesses,” she mutters, intent on the dolls and their journey.

The piece of leftover carpet stretches across half of the den, but right now Kit has decided that the shredded edge of the carpet is the forest in her paper figures’ kingdom.

“Still at princes and princesses,” Nim says. “When are you going to grow out of playing with dolls, Kit?”

“When you shut your butt,
Nimrod
.”

“Hush, both of you,” I say. “What’s their names? Your princesses?”

“This one is me,” Kit says. “Princess Kit.” The piece of paper is only slightly torn, but smaller than the others. I nod.

“And this one is Princess Lily. And Lily is married to Nim, and I’m married to Logan.”

“What?!” Lily and Logan both look up from the stove at the same time.

“What?” Kit asks.

“I am
not
marrying Nim!” Lily cries. Her face is flushed red, though Nim’s not even looking at her.

“Do you really want to kiss me, Kit?” Logan asks.

“
Eww
! Gross! No!” Kit says, throwing Logan’s paper doll at him. It flutters to the ground a foot away, and she picks it back up. “No
kissing
! We’re just
married
!”

“Oh, well, as long as there’s no kissing,” Logan says, and winks at us both. Kit sticks out her tongue at him and gives him a raspberry. I reach over and, with my fingers, go to pinch her tongue. She snaps it back in her mouth lickety-spit, as my dad used to say.

“What about me?” I ask her. “Who am I marrying?”

“No, silly, you don’t marry anyone,” Kit says, bringing out another doll that I suppose is meant to represent me, long black streaks of hair drawn down the paper. “You’re the queen.”

“So I rule the kingdom?”

My mouth still has a smile on it, but Kit’s answer has pierced me deeper than I thought such a small barb could pierce.
She didn’t mean it
, I say to myself. Of course she didn’t mean it. It still hurts.

“Yes. You rule everything. You’re the queen.”

“Well, if I rule the kingdom, I decree that we are eating Christmas dinner right NOW!”

Kit squeals and runs to the table to set out the cloth napkins and scavenged silverware. She places the settings carefully around the wooden circle. Nim sets out the water glasses while Lily and Logan spoon out portions of the ham and vegetables, and in ten seconds we’re all sitting around the low table, ready to eat.

I take Kit’s hand on one side and Lily’s on the other, and then we’re holding hands around the meal that smells better than anything we’ve eaten in the past year.

“Thank you, Lily and Logan, for preparing this wonderful dinner for us,” I say. “Thank you to Nimrah for getting the gas for the stove. Thank you to Kit for the beautiful lights.”

“Thank you to YOU for getting us food,” Kit says.

“Thank you all for another year together,” I finish. “I love you all.”

“Love you all,” Kit says.

“Love you all,” Lily and Logan say together.

“Love you all,” Nim says, and he’s looking straight into my eyes when he says it.

His black eyes are too dark for me to understand. Pensive, desirous maybe. I picture his body, strong and naked, the way it is after he shifts. Something catches in my throat and I cough to get rid of it. I know what he wants me to think, and I don’t want to think it.

The others fall to, digging into the hearty dinner, but Nim waits a moment before picking up his fork. My eyes move to my plate and I begin to eat.

“Delicious ham,” I say, after the first bite. “Perfect!”

“I want ham every dinner,” Kit says, shoving a fork of steaming meat into her cheek and talking all the while. “I want a ham as big as my whole plate!”

“I could eat a ham as big as this table,” Logan says.

“Remember how we got this table?” Lily said. “Nimrah was the one who found it.” She is cutting her ham delicately into little pieces with her knife. I don’t think she’s had a bite yet.