Virginia's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Virginia had been walking for three days when she saw the fortress, and her water was almost gone. She was an older Black woman in tattered clothes, glasses smudged with dust, boots split at the seam. She fixed things for a living, or for a bowl of stew, or for a night by someone's fire. She was looking for a place with good people. She had not found one yet, and her jaw still ached from the last time she spoke up for a hungry stranger and got hit for it. The wall rose out of the flat ground like a bad tooth. Scrap wood and sheet metal, two lookout towers, an open archway in the center. No one stood in the towers. The gate hung crooked. Black scorch marks climbed the boards, and one side of the wall sagged where something had punched through it. Virginia stopped at the edge of the shadow and listened. Wind. A loose strip of metal tapping. Nothing else. She walked through the archway. Inside, the yard was a mess of spent shell casings and broken crates. A cook fire lay cold, ringed by stones. Three tents stood at the far end. Two were collapsed. The third, a patchwork tent stitched from mismatched fabric, still stood, its flap tied shut from the inside. Virginia crossed the yard slow, hands loose at her sides. She was not armed. She had never been armed. She stopped outside the tent and cleared her throat. "I'm not here to take anything," she said. "I saw the gate open. I thought this place was empty." The flap tore back. A man came out first, dark beard, pistol raised, eyes still swollen with sleep. Behind him a young blonde woman crouched with a rifle braced on her hip. Virginia lifted both hands and held them there. "Mendez," the young woman said, low. "She's alone." Mendez did not lower the gun. He looked at Virginia's glasses, her split boot, the pack sagging off her shoulder. "Who sent you?" he said. "Nobody," Virginia said. "I've been walking. Your gate's broken. I can fix a gate." The young woman, Riley, snorted once, and something in her face let go. Mendez lowered the pistol halfway. Virginia dug in her pack and set a canteen on the ground between them. "Half full," she said. "You look like you slept in your boots." Mendez stared at the canteen a long moment. Then he crouched, picked it up, and passed it back to Riley without drinking. Riley took a small sip and passed it to him. He drank and handed it back to Virginia, still with water in it. "We got attacked four nights ago," he said. "There were nine of us." Virginia looked at the two collapsed tents and did not ask. She sat down in the dust across from them and set her pack aside. For the first time in a long time, no one had told her to keep moving.