The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

Remembering

LATER THAT NIGHT, I DUCKED ACROSS THE SQUARE, DOWN TO A house that backed up to the thickest parts of the forest. Its faded red paint was peeling heavily, exposing the thick horizontal wood planks beneath. I ran my hand over small cracks around the thin doorframe. This house, Lizzie’s house, was the home in which I’d lived most my life.

It was sort of an amalgamation of the time the elder Survivors had spent here in our city. The roof was thatched with a thick wheat-like substance I’d never learned the name of, but I knew was common in homes that predated the ones in which they lived in Salem. The planks, too, were original to the building of the place in the late 17th century. But on the doorframe were tarnished brass hinges you could buy in any hardware store, attached to a solid carved wood door Lizzie had bought in Kalispell maybe 20 or 30 years ago. I’d helped her install it.

Until the Winters built their house here, I had never stayed another night in any house in the Survivors’ City. The house unofficially became Lizzie’s and mine together, functioning like what I knew in the human world of roommates. As the other three girls in my generation I grew up with — two of whom mated — moved out to their own houses, I stayed with Lizzie. It lessened the pressure of being alone. There were years over the past century and a half when Lizzie and I would live alone, as of yet not responsible for any of the youngest generation, but as the decades would pass, a new generation came around and we’d invite two or three more into her — our — home. Lizzie became my friend and closest confidante, but I kept so much from even her. There were so many things I’d want to say but feared saying because she was an elder and I knew her primary loyalty would always be to that role.

I knocked on the door, and Lizzie quickly opened it. “Sadie?” she asked. I could hear the surprise in her voice.

“Hi, Lizzie,” I said. “May I come in?”

“It’s your home, Daughter. Always has been,” she said, stepping aside. Lizzie’s house was modest like all in our town were. It was a main room much the kind that I’m sure they had in Salem with dusty wood floors and low ceilings, a laddered loft overhead where a few of us slept, if we slept. In Salem, that space would have been used to hold supplies and the like, but what supplies did we really need?

Lizzie was sitting on the dusty floor of her home, poking at her fire pit. I suppose that was unlike the original Salem homes. The Survivors’ homes had fire pits in the middle of them with an opening at the top to let out the smoke, much more like a tepee than a New England home. From what I knew of colonial homes in both their primitive and advanced stages, fireplaces were built into walls and were very deep. Great for space, awful for circulating heat. And in a winter that could reach 40 below, immortal or not, heat was the priority.

I looked around the small room and glanced up into the loft only inches from my head. “It seems empty,” I said.

“That’s because it’s just me,” she said.

“But you’ve never lived alone,” I said. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed this in the months I’d been living back in the City.

“Because I had you,” she said. “You’re too hard to replace.” She smiled, but her thoughts told a darker story. I tuned out of them.

I noticed a cast-iron pot hovering over the flame and changed the subject. “Are you working on apothecary-like things?” I asked.

She smiled. “Surely it isn’t a foreign sight to see a pot over this fire.” “Hanging over it? No. Hovering? Yes,” I said.

“You know all those years I had to fight with that stupid iron pot hanger...I could do this. I just couldn’t let you see it. Isn’t that something?” she laughed.