“There’s more,” he says, stepping aside to reveal two wrapped bundles on the table. “Borrowed your keys.” He gestures at the set. “Figured you didn’t want me to leave you sleeping with the door unlocked.”
“Thanks,” I say as I unwrap the paper from my breakfast. It’s a sandwich, eggs and sausage and melted cheese on homemade bread. It smells glorious. Too good to be true. I glance up at him, let my eyes skip over his, trying to get a read. “You didn’t have to buy me this.”
A corner of his mouth quirks up. “Didn’t.”
I want to frown, give him some speech on the wrongs of stealing, but for him it’s a matter of survival. I take the first bite and every condemnation abandons me. I force myself to set the food down. Ploy’s stayed at my apartment twice a week or so for the last two months. I’ve woken up to him doing dishes, contributing little things. Never anything this elaborate. “All right, spill it,” I say, gesturing to the sandwich, the coffee pot.
His arms cross over his chest. He maneuvers toward the table as I go for the two mugs in the drying rack, the tiny kitchen only offering space for one person.
“It wouldn’t be for long,” he says suddenly. The tone of his voice catches me enough that I turn to him. “Just a week, maybe. Until I can find someplace else.”
“What are you asking?”
Ploy taps the edge of the countertop, a nervous habit of his I’d picked up on the first night he stayed here. “I can’t go back to the boxcars. A friend of mine, in the camp.” A frown creases his mouth, his brow furrowed. “He uh… He died.”
Paranoia bubbles up before I can stop it. He’s going to ask me to save his friend. He knows what I do. I can’t. Even if he’d asked in time, I can’t. I swallow hard and push the idea away. Ploy’s upset. He came here because he needed a friend.
I don’t have much practice in comforting others. I’m searching for something to say when he quietly adds, “I found him.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. He shrugs a shoulder, as if not sure what to do with the sympathy. Maybe we both suck at this.
“He was in the boxcar when I went there last night.” Ploy stares at the kitchen wall. With each word, his voice deadens. “I didn’t see him at first. He was tucked against the wall. Right where I lay my sleeping bag.”
“Ploy,” I whisper. Hesitating, I reach a hand to touch his shoulder.
Just before I make contact he breaks out of the trance. “I can’t sleep there, okay?” he snaps. Nudging me aside, he grabs the mugs off the counter. “Do you have sugar?”
The words are a snarl. We’ve grown accustom to shoulder shrugs and subject changes. Neither of us are an open book. Still, the edge to his voice stings. I swing the cabinet door wide and dump a dozen sugar packets on the counter beside him as he fills our coffee mugs.
He gives his head a little shake. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s…Someone cut him.”
The camps have their share of violence. Most days the papers don’t even report on the stabbings and fights there anymore. It’s bad press for the tourism. From the scars I’ve glimpsed on Ploy’s shirtless torso, he’s seen his share. I wonder if he knows how to handle a knife. I’m going through my arsenal in my head, choosing one I can spare when it occurs to me that the dead kid probably had a knife, too. It hadn’t helped him.
It could have been Ploy.
The thought splits through me in a way I’m not entirely comfortable with. You’re just covering your own ass, I remind myself. Otherwise you wouldn’t be okay with leaving him on the couch as some sort of human tripwire. “Was it a fight, then?”
He sits down in one of the chairs and picks at his sandwich. “He was laid open.”
“Did he have defensive wounds?” I ask and then realize how callous the question is. I’m used to bodies, death, clinical descriptions.
“No, you don’t understand,” he says as I hand him his cup of coffee and lean against the counter with my own, blowing over the steam. “Laid open. Like how frogs get dissected.” He’s fiddling, not paying me any attention. “And his insides were gone.”
My mug slides through my hand. I catch it, my reflexes kicking in before it even leaves my fingers. Hot coffee sloshes over the rim. Trembling, I set it on the counter. “What?” I manage, wondering if the shake in my voice is pronounced enough for him to hear.
“They were gone, Allie. Stomach, intestines, liver, all that stuff. Scraped clean. Gone.”
My body numbs except for a tingle of nerves, anticipation, fight or flight. “How long had you known him?” I ask, trying to mask the panic in my voice, make it comforting, but this time it doesn’t work. Maybe he picks up something in the tone or maybe it’s the wrong question to ask after a bombshell like that. Either way, he looks up at me. I force a sad smile and hope he’ll think I’m just uncomfortable. Luckily, he seems to take the bait.
“Couple months. He came from up North.” Up North is code for not from here. Everywhere is North from Fissure’s Whipp.
“Was he on the run?” I swallow hard. I shouldn’t ask, but I have to know. Have to be sure. “From the police…or something?”
The last two words hang in the air between us. I watch him weighing the pause I hadn’t meant to include, my awkward silence. But the missing organs, they can only mean one thing. He was like me. My head spins. He was a resurrectionist like me. Someone killed him. Someone had known his own blood would heal his organs, even damaged. Someone had known the body can’t heal what isn’t there.
Someone is hunting us.
“Allie?”
I want to tell Ploy that it’s okay. Not to panic. That this isn’t like my parents. That it must be a mistake. Flashes come to me. Going in the door. Two bodies on the floor. And I’d left them there. Just left them and taken off running, not stopping until I’d gotten to my aunt’s house the next town over, my sneakers bloody and my parents dead and…
“Allie?”
I can’t catch my breath to answer him.
He’s off the chair and at my side in the space of a blink. “I don’t know why I told you that. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking and it freaked me out so bad to find him like that and—”
“Stay,” I say suddenly, cutting him off. His concern turns to confusion. “That’s what you’re asking, right? If you can?” I grip his wrist. His eyes meet mine, shoot down to the hold I have on him and back up. I swallow hard and unwind my fingers. “You can stay with me,” I say.
Allie
He doesn’t tell me where he plans on hanging out and I don’t ask. From my month of scheduled run-ins, I know Ploy’s patterns well enough to find him if the need arises.
I’m not crazy about him sticking to his normal routine, begging change and whatever else his crew gets up to but if Ploy doesn’t know what the organ removal means then he’s not a resurrectionist. Not a target. He’s a million times safer when he’s not around me.
“You know how to use that?” I ask as he tucks a closed knife into his pocket.