Amara Sinclair's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Amara slept in the loft with the keys under her pillow. At first light she climbed down, locked the door, and walked back into Needlefall on foot. A trailer without wheels under it was a box. A box in the wrong place was worse than no box at all. She needed to know where the people she wanted actually stood at noon, at dusk, at the hour the guards pushed through. She had three weeks of wrong guesses behind her. She did not have another three. She tried the market first. The stalls had moved two streets over since yesterday. She asked a woman selling onions where the sleepers went now. The woman shrugged and looked at her hands. She asked a boy stacking crates. He walked away. By midday she had asked eleven people and learned nothing she could use. Her thermos was empty. Her feet hurt. The city was answering her the same way it had answered her all month. She was crossing a lot behind a shuttered garage when a grey truck pulled in and stopped. The hood was dented. The tires were caked. A tall man swung down from the cab, locs tied back, sleeves pushed to the elbow. He had a stack of folded blankets in the truck bed and a cardboard flat of bread rolls beside them. He did not look at her. He looked at the corners of the lot, the way a person checks a room before speaking in it. "You lost?" he said. "I'm looking for where people sleep," Amara said. "The ones nobody's counting." He considered her skirt, her empty thermos, the ring finger with no ring. "You a church?" "No. I bought a trailer. I want to park it where it's useful." He laughed once, short. "A trailer." He pulled a blanket from the stack and folded it tighter. "I'm Marcus. I run this route three days a week. Bread, blankets, whatever I can carry." He nodded at the truck. "She pulls anything with a hitch." Amara's throat tightened. She kept her face still. "Show me the route." He drove her through the afternoon. He pointed without slowing. Behind the tannery wall, twenty people by dark. The drainage yard past the rail cut, families, mostly women. The old feed lot when the guards swept the market. He named times. He named which corners emptied when the wind turned. He did not write anything down because he did not need to. By dusk Amara had a map in her head that three weeks on foot had not given her. Marcus stopped the truck at the lot where her trailer sat. He looked at it a long time. "That's a lot of door," he said. "You planning to open it tomorrow?" "Yes." "Then we should talk about what you're going to say when the first ten people don't trust you." She climbed down. The truck idled behind her, waiting for her answer.