Hawk found himself wondering what River was doing down here. This was where Sparrow had found her nearly four years ago, an orphan rummaging through the buildings in search of food.
Cheney padded along, then turned toward one of the larger piers and nosed his way over to the crumbling building. He stopped at the door and waited, not looking at Hawk, barely lifting his head as Hawk came up beside him.
River was inside, he was saying.
Hawk hesitated, and then moved in front of Cheney. He held the prod in front of him as he stepped through the door. Inside, light streamed through broken windows and collapsed sections of the upper flooring and metal roof to chase back the shadows. There were two floors and dozens of rooms, and the building was deep and high. Again Hawk hesitated, wary of entering a largely unfamiliar place. He had been in this building once or maybe even twice, but not for long and only to look for useful supplies. It had been several years since he had last entered it.
There was nothing he could do but continue, so he did. He sent Cheney on ahead, hoping he would find a trail. It wasn't all that easy given the amount of trash and the confluence of smells that permeated every surface. The building smelled of the bay, but also of dead things, mildew, and defecation. There didn't seem to be anything living in it, but you never knew. Shadows rippled in the corners of the rooms he passed, disturbed by the sunlight. Hawk kept the prod in front of him. He couldn't imagine what River was doing here.
They wound their way to the back of the building and finally outside again. Now Hawk really was confused. But Cheney kept moving forward, heading for a large storage shed set back against the edge of the dock inside a barrier of heavy metal fencing. It was a structure that seemed somewhat sturdier than the building they had just left, although its metal surfaces were badly worn and rusted.
Cheney stopped before the fencing and growled.
Instantly River appeared in the doorway of the shed. "Cheney!" she exclaimed, shock mirrored on her child's face. Then she saw Hawk and gave an audible gasp. "No, Hawk! You can't come in here!"
She said it with such force that for a moment Hawk felt as if she might be right, that he had somehow trespassed and would have to turn around and leave.
Her words sounded dangerous, and she had gone into a defensive crouch that suggested she was ready to fight.
"Tell me what's wrong, River," he answered.
She shook her head fiercely, then broke into tears and stood shaking in front of him. "You told me … the rules," she sobbed. "I know … what I've done. But I … had to!"
He had no idea what she was talking about. "River," he said quietly, "let me come in. What's going on in there?"
"Just … go away, Hawk," she managed. "I won't come … back home … or anything. Just go away."
Leaving Cheney where he was, Hawk walked the perimeter of the fence, found the hidden section that swung open, and stepped inside. River rushed to stop him, but he was through before she reached him. She brought up her fists as if to knock him back through the opening, then simply collapsed in a heap on the heavy planking, crying harder than ever. Hawk had never seen her like this. He knelt beside her, stroked her dark hair gently, then put his arm around her shoulders and sat next to her.
"Shhhh," he soothed. "Don't cry. There isn't anything we can't work out between us; you know that. Nothing we can't solve."
She cried some more, and then said suddenly, almost angrily, "You don't understand!"
He nodded into her hair. "I know."
She didn't say anything more and didn't move; she just sat there as the sobs died away. They she stood and without a word started for the shed. He rose and followed. It was dark and cool inside, but there were brightly colored hangings on the wall and stacks of packaged goods and blankets. Ropes hung from hooks, and books were stacked to one side on makeshift shelves. Someone had lived here recently.
A low moan from the shed's deepest recesses caught his attention, and he peered into the gloom.
The Weatherman lay on a mattress suspended atop a low wooden bed frame, his ancient face twisted with pain, his hands moving under the blankets tucked about him. Hawk took a quick look at the blotches on his face and backed quickly away. "He has the plague," he said. "You can't stay here, River." She replied in a whisper so soft he could barely hear her. "You don't understand. I have to."
"He's an old man," Hawk objected. "I like him, but it's — " "No," she interrupted quickly. "He isn't just an old man." She paused, struggling to get the words out. "He's my grandfather."
SHE TOLD HIM her story then, of her family and of how her grandfather had brought her to Seattle.
Even before there were only the two of them, she was always his favorite.
A quiet, introverted girl with a waif's big eyes and a skinny, gawky body that she found embarrassing, she followed him everywhere. For his part, he seemed to enjoy her company and never told her to go away like her brothers always did. He enjoyed talking to her and told her things about herself that made her feel better.
"You are a special little girl," he would say, "because you know how to listen. Not many little girls know how to do that."
When she cried, he would say, "There is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who you are. They tell you what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them."
He was tall and strong back then, even though he was already old, and she had heard that he had once been a professional athlete back before they stopped having teams. She imagined that must have been a long time ago, years before she was born, but he never talked about it. He mostly talked about her, and he was the only one who did so. No one else ever even paid attention to her except when they needed something. Her brothers ignored her. Her mother was a strange, distant presence, physically there, but mentally off in a place only she could visit. She barely acknowledged the rest of the family, lost in distant stares and words spoken so softly that no else could hear. River's grandfather said it was because her father had broken her mother's heart.
River didn't know if this was so, but she supposed it was. She remembered very little about her father. She remembered that he was a big, noisy man who took up a lot of space and made her feel even smaller than she was. She was only three when he left. No one ever knew what caused him to go, but one day he simply walked out the door and never came back. For a long time, she thought he would. She would stand in the yard and look for him in the trees, believing he might be hiding there and daring them to find him. Her brothers laughed at her when she told them what she was doing, and eventually she tired of the game and gave up looking for him.
They lived in a small woodlands community north of the big Washington
State cities, out on the Olympic Peninsula where it was still heavily forested and mountainous and empty of people and their problems. Their isolation protected them, they believed, and so they stayed in their small community, a group of about thirty families, waiting for things to change back for the better, keeping hidden and secret as the rest of the world slowly receded into a distant madness they knew about only from listening to radio and from infrequent encounters with travelers. But her grandfather was wary.
"You must never go out alone," he would tell her, even though the others said it was safe and nothing would happen to her.
He didn't explain, and she didn't ask. She believed what he told her, and so she was careful not to go anywhere by herself. She was reminded of the disappearance of her father, even though she did not believe anything bad had happened to him. But when her youngest brother vanished one sunny afternoon without even the smallest trace, she knew that it was because he had ignored her grandfather's warning. The others laughed, but she knew.