Walking the Ruins

Anna 1

Anna studied the pitted surface of the table in front of her. It was marked with traces left by her generation and those before her. This table was her eating place, and the place she had spent all her schooling, so she knew all the marks, scratches and dents by heart. She moved her hand affectionately over the rich surface.

She heard someone enter the mess room and looked up. Jan. He smiled as he saw her. The smile sent a shiver down her spine—Jan smiling was hardly ever good news.

He approached her table, sat down beside her and laid an arm over her shoulders. "Hey, Anna, I've been looking for you."

She felt her muscles tense under his touch, as if trying to build a shield between her soft self and the possessiveness of his gesture. It was a habit of his, touching the women like that. She hated it. Fortunately, that was all he did—he never went any further.

"I'm still waiting for an answer, you know," he said.

If anything, the words made her even tenser. She knew what he was talking about. She longed to shrink, to dwindle and to disappear into one of the cracks of the table. But she nodded.

"Well, it's not me who's waiting for an answer, you know. It's Adam who's waiting for it," he continued. "Your sixteenth birthday was months ago, so it is time for you to get a man. And Adam's a fine one."

Adam. Jan's big, taciturn friend. His wife died some years ago, and he was looking for a new spouse now. And it was Jan's idea that the two of them would make a good match.

Adam. He reminded her of one of the raw rock walls in the lower parts of the Reduit. Immutable, impassive. impenetrable, inscrutable.

Adam. Thinking of him intimately gave her the shivers. He was an old man. She still felt like a child.

"I've told you," she said, taking a tense breath and trying to cringe away from the growing warmth of his arm on her shoulders, "I'm ... not ready yet."

"You're sixteen, that's as ready as you will get," he replied. "Adam turns 35 in a month. I want to announce your wedding then."

Her desperate search for an answer to this statement was cut short by the noise of yet more people entering the mess room. Jan moved his arm off her shoulders and got up. Anna uncoiled somewhat, but the knots in her stomach remained.

"We'll talk later," he said quietly.

"You're ready?" asked Emma, who had entered with Frankie in tow.

"I am," Anna answered. "My brother is probably still in our quarters."

"Twenty minutes, don't stay out there any longer," Jan said, fixing first his daughter, then Frankie.

"Yes, of course", Emma answered. "And I'll have that one with me." She patted the pistol in its holster.

Jan nodded. "Good. I'll go to the village now to get our food. When I come back, you can go and get your exercise."

The outside never ceased to amaze and to startle Anna. It was so bright, so vast. It was cold or hot. The sky was so far away, she felt afraid to fall into it—she knew this to be nonsense, but she had to suppress a feeling of vertigo.

And there were the smells. Always surprising, always varying. Today, there was a rich fragrance of something herbal, plant-like in the air. She thought it came from the trees. They were firs. The Holy Wiki had images of them—Jan had allowed her to look them up. She drew air through her nostrils, closing her eyes for a moment.

"You love that smell, don't you?" Carl asked. She smiled at her brother and nodded. The effort of smiling a strain for the knots still lurking in her belly. "Yes ... it's wonderful." Her words were tenser than she wanted them to be.