Scarlett Hopper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 33

By noon the ash wind would come, and Scarlett Hopper had one bed of soil left to turn before it drove her out. She worked the shovel fast. Her red braid swung against her shoulder with each throw. The old garden district stretched around her in gray rows, empty of the vendors and children it used to hold. She had been hauling this same dirt the day the district collapsed. She had not stopped since. A dog watched her from the cracked path. He was big, black and white with tan legs, one blue eye and one brown. His curled tail swept sideways when she looked at him. He had followed her for three days without begging or leaving. She had started calling him Duke because he acted like he owned the place. "You going to help," she said, "or just supervise." Duke's ears flicked. A picture pushed into her head that was not hers: her own hands in dirt, seen from low down. She stopped shoveling. She had felt it yesterday too and pretended she hadn't. "Okay," she said slowly. "Okay. That's new." The wind came early. It rolled down the empty rows as a gray wall, dry and stinging, and the first grit hit her teeth before she could close her mouth. Her eyes burned. She dropped the shovel and ran. Duke ran with her, low and fast. Every afternoon this same wind had chased her out of the district before her work was done. Every afternoon the roots she had started to heal went another day without her. She could not keep losing the afternoons. At the edge of the district stood a house nobody had come back for. Front window gone. Door hanging open. She had passed it a hundred times. She climbed the porch, Duke at her heel, and shoved inside as the ash thickened behind them. She pulled the mask from her bag. Black shell, pink filters, straps she had tightened weeks ago and never used. She fit it over her face. The air went clean. Her lungs opened. She breathed in until her ribs stopped shaking. Duke sneezed once and shook out his coat. Ash fell from him in a small gray cloud onto the floorboards. Scarlett looked around. A stove. A sink. A back window that faced the garden rows. From here she could see the bed she had not finished. From here she could sleep the nights her healing knocked her flat and still be near the work. From here she could go back out into the wind instead of away from it. She set her bag on the counter. She unhooked one filter and checked it. Still good. "We live here now," she told the dog. Duke's tail swept left. In her head, clear as speech, came the word yes.