Last Train to Jubilee Bay by Kali Wallace Page A

her round face and limp hair, she had poisoned three would-be usurpers in five days and handed their corpses off to the collectors without a word.
    Esther’s herbs and Lucy’s knife now did the work Olaf’s fists and reputation used to. The people of Morningtown didn’t like change. They lived high above the ground and raised chickens and sickly crops on rooftops. They poled rafts down the avenues when the floods came and collected rainwater in barrels. They traded moldy books for firewood when the peddlers from Lily City passed through. Morningtown liked to know where its serum was coming from.
    There were eighty-seven scraps of paper in Esther’s tin box. Esther had counted the night before, tapped them into a stack, and tied them up with a string. “Most of these are no good,” she had said, her spine rod straight as they sat at the table. “Nonsense and waste.”
    When the traders had first crawled out of the sea, a dozen years ago, every memory had been vivid and strong, every page crammed edge to edge with smudged bold urgency. The traders had accepted the memories reverently, grasping the pages with their clumsy fronds twisted into a parody of human fingers, ink running and paper disintegrating to a wet mash in orifices that were not mouths, sending quivers of ecstasy through limbs that were not arms or legs. Lucy remembered the hours her father had spent hunched over stolen ledgers and notebooks, recording every year of his life with painstaking care. He had been one of Olaf’s enforcers, but after the serum stole his mind away and a few hours of bliss each day became a fugue from which he never woke, Olaf had looked to Lucy and said, “He’s as good as dead, girl, but we’ll keep you around if you make yourself useful.”
    The pages formed a fat, heavy lump in Lucy’s coat pocket. She never read them. She didn’t care to know what people traded away for their hours of peace.
    â€œYou watch yourself,” Olaf said as Lucy opened the door to leave. “Don’t let the mud rats get what’s ours.”
    Lucy let the door bang shut behind her. The hallway smelled of spiced meat and smoke, damp wood and mold. Voices echoed in the stairwell: Esther, several floors above, haggling with a woman who lived upstairs over the price of a chicken. The woman kept a garden on the roof, and her husband was a picker who spent his days scouring the mud plains between the city and the sea for fish and crabs stranded by the tides.
    At ground level the neighborhood was dark already. From Morningtown to Lily City, east at the sinkhole that had once been a park and onto the Avenue, Lucy walked quickly and quietly as the fog grew thicker, the darkness heavier, obscuring the sky and the buildings above their third or fourth floors. Throughout Lily City and the Avenue the buildings had high paths connecting them, hanging bridges draped with laundry and swaying, lit by torches that glowed yellow through the fog.
    The Avenue ended at the concrete trough of the river, then it was twelve blocks to the first quarantine fence, now no more than a trampled, twisted remnant of chain-link and barbed wire tangled with garbage. Lucy felt eyes watching her, saw drifters lurking in shattered shop fronts, but they sunk into the shadows as she passed.
    There was a church seven blocks east of Quarantine Lane. The bells chimed as Lucy approached, as they did every night after twilight. Some nights, if she had time, Lucy stopped to say hello to the priest who cared for orphans and addicts in the church’s echoing nave. Father Antonio had been a young man when the epidemic began, and healthy, and he could have left before the quarantine, found a place on one of the trains heading to the bay and the waiting ships. Lucy had asked him once why he had stayed, and he had said, “What lies across the land and over the sea is no different from what we have here.” Since that day Lucy