“What’s this, Mam?” said Feral, holding up something or other.
“I don’t know.”
The children were running through the aisles, climbing up the racks and shelves, making fools of themselves and her, and so be it. Callum and Bruno would’ve never behaved so unruly, and she hated the imaginary children for that, the way the world had already made them still.
It was time to leave. Vern lifted Howling and then Feral into the cart they’d been filling. They were birds in a nest of cheap clothing.
“Help.”
Vern twisted around toward the voice. Clutched in the arms of an adult was a child with fear-struck eyes reaching out a bandaged hand toward Vern. “Hey!” Vern called, turning her cart to chase after them.
Vern gave chase, but when she rounded the corner on the verge of catching them, there was nothing there but an aisle empty of people, dead-ending into a shelf of rubber rain boots. The pair had been a haunting.
Vern gripped the handle of the cart. “Do that again, Mam. Make us fly!” said Feral, but Vern inched back cautiously toward the main aisle to observe her fellow Emporium Max shoppers.
There was a man there and a woman there and a teenager over there, only not. There was a child jumping rope by a large display of yoga balls, only not. A husband and a wife quarreled in the corner, only not. These people dotted the Emporium Max like figures in a painting, their details distressingly vibrant. Vern noted the colors of their irises and the textures of their hair. The faces of her fellow customers were as distinct to her as they would have been had they been standing right in front of her, a foot or less away. She wouldn’t be able to see them so well if they were really there, but they were hauntings, not subject to the limitations of her visual acuity.
Vern pushed the cart down the aisle, toward the café at the front of the shop, to the doors. “Ma’am? Miss!” someone snapped. “Miss!”
Vern kept walking. The automatic door swooshed open, as if just for her, nature bending to her will. “Miss!”
Vern sped up. “Run, Mam!” said Feral. “Push us fast!” Vern obliged, leaning into the pain in her back and lower joints. The wind in her face, the gleeful squeals of her babes—running away always felt so good.
12
THE WIND slapped Howling icy and mean. His lips, crusty and white with cold, were like fish scales. He peeled them bit by bit like petals from a flower or tines from a pine cone.
Winter suited him. Howling, for all his love of sun, wore an air of godlessness during the cold months. Cheeky abandon turned him preternaturally beautiful, like a girl from one of Mam’s stories, daring strangers to hurt her, biting back.
“Aoooooooo!” Feral called as Mam pushed them in the cart. Howling joined in, earning his name.
There was no river in this world to bathe in. No ground to build a fire to heat water for a soak. So Mam took him and Feral to a shelter next to a smelly gasoline place where water came out the mouth of a glinting silver rock. She wet leaf-thin cloths with the water and rubbed herself all over.
“Mam,” said Feral, eyes split open wide like a cracked nut. “Your back.”
“What?”
“Pretty.”
The sides of Mam’s back were covered in a white hide of what looked like brain-tanned leather, soft but tough. And there it was down the center. Bone. Like Mam got flipped inside out.
“What is it?” Howling asked.
Mam twisted to see herself. She reached her hand behind her to touch. “Oh, that? That’s my—that’s my little passenger.”
“Huh?” said Howling.
“Like when you get sick.”
Howling lit up, remembering. Tiny bugs sometimes took people for rides. That was why people got sick. Mam called the sick bugs passengers. “Is that the bug?” He lifted his hand to touch her shoulder blade. Feral ran his fingers down her spine. Her back did look like that of a striped bark scorpion, and that was a bug.
“In a fashion,” she said.
After she cleaned herself and dressed, Feral and Howling were next. She squeezed pink goop from a machine all over them. Called it soap but it wasn’t nothing like the soap she made in the woods. She dunked their heads into a pool she’d made in a hole—a basin, Mam had called it. Please stop acting foolish and put your head in the basin.
Next, Mam slicked tallow in their hair and plaited Howling’s hair then Feral’s into two braids.
“That’s me?” asked Howling, looking in the silver box Mam called a mirror.
He’d seen inklings of his reflection before, caught in bright pools of water, in glass from a jar, but never so clear, as if he had another twin, dark as him, staring right back, about to take him over, start a war.