“What time did you get back?” I asked.
The day before, Einar went to see Kevin to have the latter explain boat sailing and navigation to him for when the time came for us to leave. To avoid arousing suspicion of Santini’s spies, he left after nightfall, sneaking away to the jeep he kept concealed in the nearby forest.
“Ah, far too late.” Einar yawned as if in reply to my question, removing his hand from my hip to cover his mouth.
“I tried waiting up for you ...” I said, my tone teasing rather than reproachful, pushing my body closer yet against his and biting into his earlobe gently.
He emitted a pained groan. His hand was back on my hip, holding me firmer this time, with a purposeful ferocity.
“I was sorry enough not to have been here. No need to make it worse,” he complained with a predatory gleam in his eyes, his voice husky.
“Care to make up for the lost time, hm?” Propping myself on an elbow, I gently bit into the side of his neck.
“If only I could. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to leave again very soon.”
He closed his eyes with an expression fit for a martyr.
“Oh no, why?”
“I’ve been summoned to Bastia.”
Now it was my turn to groan.
“What does he want from you?” I asked, a little outraged. “A statement on shooting ten random, isolated roamers in a month?”
“No, it’s not that. Though let’s be glad there are still some roamers left here and there, hey? You don’t want us to become useless in his eyes. But no, Paoli has returned. All department leaders are invited to hear his report.”
“Oooh.”
Jean Paoli and his minions, all Santini’s men, lead bi-monthly expeditions to mainland Europe to scavenge, toexchange supplies with survivors over there, and most importantly, to ascertain the state of affairs on the continent. Einar would never miss a chance to hear directly from them upon their return. Nor would I want him to.
“Still, I wish you could stay.” I pouted.
“I know, I know.” His apologetic voice pulled me back to the present. “Tonight, my girl, I promise. We’ll go up the mountain.”
Excitement jolted through me so strongly that it made my blood boil. Themountainwas, in fact, the first even platform encountered when hiking up the nearby Mount Oro. More specifically, the outcrop shielded by an alder alcove we had discovered the first time we went up there, after poor Lucas had died. We didn’t frequent it just for the romance of doing it under the skies. Nor to feel the bite of the cool mountain air on our bare flesh. No. We went there not to be overheard. Which meant that Einar’s simple sentence promised an encounter of agonising intensity, heavenly but maddening. So was knowing that it was coming but having to wait for it the whole day, as Einar knew well and was intentionally making me do anyway.
A tease for a tease, darling, his eyes seemed to say with a gleam,if you play with fire, you will get burned.
After Einar had left, I lingered in the cottage for a while. I washed my face and made my coffee on the stove using the moka pot, all thanks to Santini’s most welcome contributions to the country’s restoration: running water and electricity.
I drank my coffee while cleaning the fireplace. As I threw the last dusting pan’s worth of ashes into the bin, I noticed my bow, standing abandoned by the cottage door, next to a coat rack. I looked at it a little wistfully, like I would on a postcard from a friend I had not seen for a long time. The black metal shone formidably like it always had. Missing its powerful presence inmy hands, I promised myself to go to the practice shooting range once I was done with all my chores.
That finally got me out the door. The sooner I finished, the sooner I would be free to let my attention be consumed by concentration on a target. Time would pass quickly until Einar’s return, then. I stepped outside and took an invigorating breath, my gaze landing on the pale pink train station, just barely visible through a narrow space between the closer buildings.
Once the sixth and final swarm on Corsica was defeated, most of us moved back to the mountains to be closer to the convenient water sources provided by natural springs, filtered through rocks, scree, and sand. Russell stayed in charge of Bonifacio, keeping the place in shape with about fifteen others, some of them Santini’s men, and with his now pregnant girlfriend, Julia. Constant sunshine aside, I wondered what it was like for them, living with just a handful of people in a place built to house thousands.
Sighing, I grabbed the little burlap sack containing chicken feed and walked over to our back garden, which I had converted into a little farm, with success foreseen by none, least of all by me. I threw the feed on the straw-covered ground in front of the coop, which I then proceeded to clean and collect eggs from while the chickens were occupied with their breakfast.
My mouth watered momentarily at the thought of an omelette. I made a mental note to myself not to forget to eat, which I often did when Einar was not around, much to his displeasure.
“Hey, Renny,” a rich voice like an orchestra of bells, distinctive by its Hispanic accent, pulled me out of my thoughts.
I raised my head to see Maya and her friend Lola peeking at me over our wooden fence, just past the withering tomato plant, whose summer reign had come to an end.
“Hello,” I replied with forced cheerfulness. “How are you two?”
Well, for one thing, they were both heavily pregnant, the fabric of their clothes stretching tightly across their bulging bellies. A condition that appeared infectious in our settlements ever since CanLys had more or less disappeared from the island. According to a census Santini had carried out, the population of the newly post-pandemic Corsica was roughly five thousand people, which was about one and a half percent of what it had been before the Outbreak. As if fuelled by the magnitude of the plague when put to scale like that, young women everywhere seemed determined to double the head count of the island in as short a time as humanly possible.
