Saturn County

Two | The Inventory

June 2nd

"and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones"

As far as Aria Delos was concerned, Daisy Quinn was reckless. Daisy wouldn't say so, she would say that she was clever, smart and sneaky, but Aria knew which she was lacking. Clever and sneaky did not require smarts and that was what would get them all killed. This was real life, not a video game or a storybook or a heroic fantasy she used to spin in her head when she was a decade younger and could not fall asleep. Here the stakes were real.

They'd been at the Grove Shopping Mall for a month now. It wasn't safe but the numbers were. The other long-term vagabonds weren't the biggest threat: there were the Greens—Lucas and Clara—who were friends with her sister and were willing to cooperate, a few stoners who kept mainly to themselves, and then some freshman band kids she couldn't help but pity. In terms of the mall, the Deloses and Daisy held the greatest stake. Everyone else there was timid enough to be scared by Daisy's glare; these were not their rivals. The rivals were the ones where Daisy got reckless, the gamblers at the water tower whom she had a habit of cheating. There was a reason Aria never volunteered herself or her siblings to go—nobody knew who Daisy ran with.

"How much longer do you think the water tower will last?" Sebastian asked. He sat in one of the lawn chairs they'd gone back to their parents' house to retrieve after they'd settled in the mall. The house smelled like ghosts and memories. They'd long since ran out of food and Aria had no desire ever to return.

"Can't be much longer," Aria sighed. "Still Daisy's gonna run our chances down before the tower's empty." Eventually Hank Coldwater would catch on that a pretty girl was fooling his cronies, playing his own game better than him. When they reached that inevitable fate it all was bound to change.

"We shouldn't keep sending her on her own." She was Sebastian's closest friend, had been ever since grade school.

Aria never felt good when she left, but both girls knew it was for the best; Daisy had never asked one of the siblings to come. "We should start scouting for a new water source soon." There was a filter in the fridge at home, one they could remove and use themselves. She knew it was the smartest option but the thought made her sick to her stomach.

"That might mean leaving the mall." Sebastian was right—he often was—but still it was precisely not what Aria wanted to hear. The mall was only ever a temporary fix, a bandaid over a wound that was bound to continue to spread, but the last thing she wanted was to look at the blood below. In the end she wasn't a doctor; she was nineteen years old.

She didn't want to think about it. "Is Emma with Clara still?" Sebastian nodded. She was thankful for her sister's relationship with the Greens. Emma and Clara weren't exactly friends in high school—Aria had never even heard of her before the plague—but ran in the same circle enough to grab hold when they both found each other at the mall. Aria only trusted Lucas Green as far as she could throw him, but their sisters held the alliance together.

She knew the boredom had hit her sister early, the lack of motion once they'd grown stationary at the mall had translated to a lack of meaning. She and Clara had taken it upon themselves to inventory every last item in the shopping center, a list of every article of clothing, every rotting piece of meat in a food court kiosk that closed with no warning, every board game in the old toy store, every bag of chips in the vending machines. From there they watched, kept track of what was taken by travellers, collected what remnants they left behind. Other than the food Aria wasn't quite sure of the practical benefit of the list—they'd already taken what proved useful. But the list gave Emma a purpose, she wasn't going to stop her for that.