Midnight takes Riley to a dim shed a short distance away where meat hangs from hooks. She points at a pile of rabbits, soft and grey on the table.
‘Skin them,’ she says, holding out a knife. She wants Riley to be upset.
‘Sure,’ Riley takes the knife.
Midnight shrugs and goes.
‘Good talk,’ Riley calls at her retreating back. She doesn’t need to be liked. She needs to be indispensable.
Riley makes cuts along the back legs to leave the belly fur intact, then pulls the hide off the bodies. The rabbits slip out of their skins, buttery smooth. She guts the carcasses and puts the skins to one side, ready to be scraped and cured. Soon the twelve rabbits lie side by side on the trestle table, naked red things, like a neat row of just-born babies.
She hasn’t seen anyone at Nowhere wearing fur; she guesses that no one here knows how to treat a hide. Riley can help with that. She touches the soft grey fur with a finger then turns the hide over and starts to scrape it free of fibres. The activity soothes her.
‘I came to see if you need help.’
A girl stands in the doorway, a large cooking pot held to her left hip. She is younger than Riley. Twelve maybe. She’s so thin all over, it seems like if she turns sideways, she’ll disappear. A large overbite gives the impression that her mouth is pursed in thought.
‘Thanks.’
‘I think Midnight wanted you to mess that up,’ the girl said, putting the rabbits neatly in the pot. ‘But you’re really good. I’m Dawn.’
‘Riley.’
‘If you’re all done, come to the kitchen.’
They walk through the long grass, cicadas singing. The sharp peaks rear up, all around.
‘How did people used to get in and out of here?’ Riley asks. ‘Before.’
‘The main gate,’ Dawn says, kicking a rock ahead of her. ‘But Noon welded it shut. No one can come get us, now. The fly is the only way in or out.’
In the trees to the left, there’s a large empty pit carpeted with rotting leaves. There’s something naked and bad about the big hole yawning in the ground. Riley thinks,plague pit, bodies, elephant trap.
Dawn sees and she laughs. ‘It’s a swimming pool.’
‘Oh.’ Riley can see glimpses of shattered blue tile, now, beneath the leaves.
‘And it’s the prison,’ Dawn says. ‘If you mess up, Noon throws you in there and puts snakes in with you.’
Riley freezes for a second and Dawn hits her on the arm.
‘Not really. We did keep Samson in there for a while.’ She smiles. ‘Samson was a piglet. He was delicious.’
The kitchen is an old shed with a hole in the roof. It’s warm. In the centre of the earth floor is a pit filled with glowing embers. An intricate rigging of ironwork sits above it. There are pulleys and spits and hooks. Dawn rubs the rabbits with salt, wild garlic and herbs, and pours something into the bottom of the pot that smells like beer. Then she puts the lid on and shoves the pot out onto the rigging, over the heat. ‘Four hours,’ she says happily. ‘Then the meat will just fall off the bone. What?’ she added, seeing Riley’s look. ‘I like to cook.’
‘Great. I like to eat.’
‘I hope you like carrying trash to the compost too.’
They labour across the meadow in the sun, the bag of food waste heavy and warm between them. The compost lies at a distance in a shallow pit in the shadow of two tall crags. It reeks, healthy and humid.
Riley and Dawn work through the morning and early afternoon. There’s always something to be done when you live in the wild. Riley’s least favourite activity is shovelling soil into the earth toilet.Prove your worth, she thinks, wrinkling her nose. Despite herself, Riley is unspooling like wire. It’s been so long since she did anything normal like talk to another girl. After they went to Cousin, Riley kept herself to herself at school. Cousin didn’t approve of friends.
Dawn whistles really well, the sound reaching hard and high into the air and Riley scrubs and sweeps to the tune of half-remembered country songs. It feels like those Saturday mornings with Mom when Riley was younger. They would clean the house, talking all the while, Blondie pouring from the old record player in the living room. Other Saturday mornings they went to the woods together. Riley still feels her mother’s hand on her back sometimes, feels her quiet whisper in her ear – showing her how to train the rifle, their hands wrapped around the stock, holding in the mist of their breath in the cold air. That was before all the mornings went bad.
‘How did you get here?’ Riley asks Dawn.
‘My parents,’ Dawn says, cheerful. ‘They took me up to the pass one day. Told me to get in the car, we were going for a picnic. I should have known – they never took me out anywhere. A picnic? Plus it was winter. Anyway my dad stopped the car at the top of the pass and my mom got out and opened the back door and pulled me out onto the road. Then she got back in the car and they drove away. That was two years ago. They liked drugs. I think they couldn’t afford to feed me anymore. Midnight found me.’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t miss them. They’re probably dead now.’
