Chapter 50

“What did they look like?”

“How many?”

“What did they take?”

“Which way did they go?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” Ray says to almost every question the adults throw at her.

Now that they know she’s safe, the adults feel like turkey vultures picking at a piece of roadkill. Ray almost wishes she had a different story to tell. One of more danger and less mystery.

“I could only see their feet and I lost count.” Ray looks at the ceiling, fighting back tears. “They want Daddy-Long-Legs. That’s the one thing I know. And they’re looking for me and Marla.”

“So no one mentioned me?” Trumble’s eyebrows caterpillar indepenant from each other, his palm cradles his chin. “I could meet with them.” His eyes search first Marla and then Taedan.

“It’s not safe,” says Marla.

“No one is looking for me.”

“Still, Ray said they were desperate,” says Marla.

Ray’s first inclination is to correct Marla. They said that Taedan could make sense of desperate data, she thinks.

“I’m hungry,” Ray says instead choosing to avoid another barrage of questions.

Her words seem to go unnoticed, except for a tight-lipped nod from Marla and her shrug toward the cupboard and the ever-present bean curd supply.

“Why don’t we go to Trumble’s?” Ray says, thinking more about the hydroponic garden and the fish and, of course, the birds than the people on the platform.

Marla, Taedan, and Trumble bend their heads together and murmur. Hands gesture as their voices ebb and crash with changing emotion, like imaginary waves against a rocky shore.

Ray rolls her eyes at no one because no one takes notice of her.

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