Free The Night Market by Zachary Rawlins Page A

ditch in the shadow of a largely
intact wall of pitted and scarred marble. She sat down gratefully on the ground
next to Jenny’s dusty sleeping bag and the ashes of a previous fire and tried
not to be sick. Jenny flopped down on the bag next to her. Fenrir sniffed the
air disdainfully then wandered off.
    “Will he be okay by himself?” Yael asked, waiting for
her mask’s scanner to make a determination on the local air. “I think those
jerks were serious about eating him.”
    “Huh? Oh, Fenrir? I wouldn’t worry. He’s a total
bastard.”
    According to the superimposed readout in the mask’s
lens, the air in the ditch was free of the bio-war toxins that abounded in the
Waste. Yael peeled her mask off reluctantly, and Jenny leaned forward to look
at her face.
    “Couldn’t really tell before,” Jenny said, pushing
Yael’s hair aside and roughly lifting her chin. “I didn’t take you for a kid.
How old are you, anyway?”
    “I’m sixteen,” Yael said, exaggerating by a year and a
half.
    “Really? Because you look twelve...”
    “Stop that,” Yael commanded, pushing Jenny’s hand away
from her face. “I’m sixteen.”
    “I heard you the first time,” Jenny acknowledged,
running her hand along the arm of Yael’s windbreaker. “Hey, what’s your jacket
made out of? It feels weird...”
    “It’s called Weave,” Yael said softly. “The Visitors
make it, I don’t know what from. It’s waterproof, fireproof, and it won’t tear.”
    Jenny crouched over a patch of ground indistinguishable
from the sand that surrounded them. She seemed, for a moment, to be pulling the
ground away with a flourish, like a set from a movie. Then Yael made sense of
the scene – Jenny had put a blanket over her gear and covered it in sand to conceal
it.
    “ Who made it?” Jenny said, taking a few dry
sticks from a small pile of wood, and then stacking it crisscrossed over the
ash of the previous night’s fire. “Visitors? Like foreigners?”
    “No,” Yael said, unzipping her duffel and searching
for her comb. “The Visitors. You know. The others.”
    “The hell? I have no idea what you are talking about.”
    “Maybe there are no Visitors where you came from,”
Yael said, dragging the comb through her damp, tangled hair. “That must be
nice. Where is that, Miss Frost?”
    “Lost Creek, and it sure ain’t nice. But yeah,
whatever your Visitors are, I don’t think we have them. More like rednecks,
illegals, and tweakers.”
    When Yael let her hair out of the ponytail it was so
compressed that it continued to hold its original shape.
    “What’s a tweaker?”
    “Long story. What about you? Where are you from,
Princess?”
    “Don’t call me that,” Yael said resentfully, drawing
closer to the small fire Jenny built and warming her hands over it. “My name
is...”
    “I know. I just don’t care,” Jenny explained cheerfully,
opening a tin can with a small, hooked opener. “You like beef stew? ‘Cause
that’s all I got besides those soups we found...”
    “No, Miss Frost. I already told you,” Yael said icily.
“I am a vegetarian. Beef is not vegetarian.”
    “Hope you grabbed some of those candy bars, then.”
    Yael realized with a rush of shame that she hadn’t even
considered it. Jenny cackled like an animatronic witch on Halloween.
    “Is dirt vegetarian?”
    “That is enough, Miss Frost,” Yael said icily. “I will
be fine. I have gone without dinner before.”
    That was true. Yael had fallen victim to many of her stepmother’s
fad diets, including one that consisted of a banana for breakfast, raw spinach
for lunch and lukewarm lemon water for dinner.
    “Then it should be easy for you.” Jenny put a
makeshift metal cooking rack over the fire that appeared to be made of
straightened coat hangers, then placed the can of stew on top of that. “Hey,
how big is the Waste? How long will it take us to cross it?”
    “It’s huge, but fortunately we don’t have to cross it
on foot. There is