Chapter 1

"Momma look! I fixed it."

Micah ran from the base of the stairs the moment he spotted Rachel across the room. He scrambled to is knees and gently lowered a contraption made of metal and stone to the floor. The moment his small hands moved away from it, the device propelled itself forward. The stone wheels, motor made of tightly wound metal and wire chassis cruised smoothly across the well worn wood until it came to rest against the base of a counter.

Rachel's eyes brightened and she beamed at the car, then at its creator. She knelt beside Micah and hugged him tightly, pressing her cheek down hard against his head.

"How wonderful. Just wonderful, Micah."

The boy grinned and threw his arms around her briefly before he excitedly broke from her grasp. He charged across the floor, picked up the small vehicle and quickly wound it again before setting it loose. Though the room was void of other people there were plenty of obstacles, chairs and tables and stools that stood in the car's path. Since he had not yet developed a way to remotely steer the small car Micah had to closely follow behind his contraption righting and winding it.

Rachel smiled after him as she stood. He was a smart boy. Had always been. She bent to the bucket full of lye soap and hot water. Broken skin stung as she retrieved the cloth she had been using before, wrung out the excess and wiped it over the nearest table top.

"Have you discovered a way to steer it?" She asked.

"No...I would have to re do the whole front...um..."

"Axle?"

Micah nodded after a moment of thought, the vehicle in his hands, his fingers wrapped around the part whose name he could never remember. "Right, I would have to redo the joints on the front axle for that."

"Is that all?"

Micah took in a breath and turned his car upside down while he weaved through the maze of tables and chairs finally plopping down on the corner of a chair near where his mother worked.

He was silent longer than Rachel expected and she glanced up to see him bent slightly, carefully focusing on the front wheels as he pushed the car back and forth on the table.

"I don't know." He said finally, but Rachel could hear not defeat, but future planning in his voice. They had been working lately on not giving up on a problem when it first presented itself.

"You'll have to work on it then..." She said, finishing the tables and moving to the long polished wooden bar. "But...after you've done your chores."

Micah groaned softly, his chin resting on the table, the car still moving back and forth a few inches.

"And you have your writing lessons."

There was another groan and Rachel smiled softly then strengthened her voice. "Come on, Micah. We only have an hour until the workers come in."

Large brown eyes rolled in her direction and the tousled head of hair rose with exaggerated slowness that seemed at odds with the energy she'd seen only a moment before.

"Cookie's waiting for you."

Micah trudged behind the bar and into the large kitchen looking more like the seven year old boy that he was, than he had moments before. He looked very much like any seven year old boy would look when given undesirable chores to do. It was so normal, so nostalgic, it gave Rachel pause.

Her hand went automatically to the handle of the mop, discarding the wet cleaning cloth, and she sunk the bundle of rags at the end into the bucket of water, and paused.

The room around her was quiet, which was rare. Twenty-two round tables, ten cracked and mended booths, a bar with ten stools, none of which managed to make order out of the mess of humanity that would fill the place in less than forty minutes. The windows were always covered with sand and dust on both sides no matter how many times she tried to clean them. Sweeping only passed the dust around, she had long ago given up on hoping to keep things clean that way.

But she thought, pulling at the heavy mop handle and slopping the lye water over the floor boards,  wetting it down seemed to help. It kept the air cleaner when the mob of sand covered, sweat soaked men and women stormed in and out through the course of an evening.

"He's done so much to that car in the past three days..."

Rachel jumped, and a hand flew to her breast over the place where her heart seemed to try beating out of her chest. "Oh...Cookie, " she sighed.

The older woman's eyes widened a bit, her mouth quirked the tiniest bit in the corner, the only sign of humor before she finished her statement. "He'll be making tiny people next..."

Rachel shook her head, letting her heart calm as she forced the mop back and forth over a large area of open floor. When she moved back to the bucket she could feel Cookie's presence still in the room.

"Lost?" Cookie asked, poised with a stack of clean glasses in her arms.

"In thought...yes." Rachel moved the bucket to a drier part of the floor and slopped water out again. "Every once in a while I forget how long we've been stuck in this place." The wet rags moved back and forth smoothly over the boards, deftly guided around well known snags.

Cookie straightened from her task of putting glasses under the bar and pressed her fingers into the aching muscles in her lower back. Chronic pain, part of getting old. She wondered sometimes if it made a difference that things were the way they were now.

"That's the problem with dreamers..." She said, and her face slipped into a wizened repose when Rachel looked up. "You're able to escape. The rest of us never forget because we never leave."

Cookie took the empty tray into the kitchen with her leaving the younger woman in silence. After a moment Rachel broke it with a miffed laugh. Cookie was an enigma, even before the end, but now...

Rachel attacked the floor more vigorously. She would have time to think later. Outside the shadows were getting longer. There would be wind that night without a doubt and the angrier the wind, the angrier the workers. She would have to send Micah up to bed early, and tuck him in before the late shift arrived or he would be up listening to it all night.

That meant she had to prepare a story for him and she set her mind to that while she finished the floor. By the time she reached the door and dumped what little water remained in the bucket, the place where she had begun her task was already bone dry. Nothing ever stayed wet in the desert.

Micah ran past her as she carried the bucket behind the bar and into the dimly lit kitchen. She just barely caught a glimpse of the car he held in his hands as he ran.  She sighed, dropping her arms in exasperation as she looked at Cookie.

The woman was turned slightly away and Rachel could sense the conspiracy already.

"I asked him to help you."

"And he did." Cookie said.

"For five minutes." Rachel protested and put her cleaning tools away. She slipped into an apron and sat at the central counter where Cookie was running a sharpened blade over the skins of thin, emaciated onions. The last of the shipment for the month, and they were only halfway through.

"He needn't peel the onions and there was nothing else left for him. He wanted to do his lessons so that he would have light left to work on his car."

Rachel pursed her lips, took a peeled onion from the basket and started chopping it. The process was smooth and fast and practiced and she had diced two more before she responded.

"He's smart, Cookie. Too smart. And the more I let him learn, the greater the risk that knowledge is to him."

Cookie said nothing, concentrating on a green spot that might turn into a chute, carefully cutting it away and setting it aside.

"And he likes to show it off." Rachel said, jabbing the point of her knife into the air before attacking another onion. "I've encouraged that in him too. It's dangerous. Far too dangerous."

She shook her head, moving to the stove and casting the diced onions into the large cook pot, scraping the cutting board clean with the dulled side of the blade before she stirred the boiling, murky water. She could feel a familiar lump forming in her throat and she knew the tears that might follow would have nothing to do with the onions.

Beside the pot she pulled a cloth away from a wooden bowl containing rising dough. This she carried back to the counter where Cookie worked, preparing a surface for the kneading.

"It won't be long before Rex or one of the others sees him. Sees what he can do. They'll take him before his tenth birthday and turn him into something-"

"Rachel..."

"I know...I know, Cookie. We've been over this. We've been through this far too many times. It's just..." There was flour everywhere. On her hands, on the dough, on the surface of the counter, on the floor.  Rachel sat back on a work stool and let the back of her hands rest against her knees. She took a deep breath, feeling it catch in her. She wiped the cleanest part of her arm across her forehead and sighed.

"Every time he accomplishes something...I feel so proud. So happy for him. I want to encourage him." Tears threatened to spill from her eyes and she finally let them. She'd blame the damned onions if anyone asked. "He deserves to be encouraged. He is such a smart boy."

"But..."  Cookie said, finishing with the last of the onions and moving them to the pot before she focused her eyes on Rachel.

"But...it makes me feel as if I'm training a gladiator...giving him skills that will ultimately destroy him.  Or worse...someone else." With effort Rachel was able to stuff the rest of her emotions back into the tight mental box where she kept them. She swallowed once or twice to get past the taste of bile that always rose when she made the mistake of thinking of Micah's future.

Cookie said nothing, only turning toward the next task. Had she gone to Rachel, comforted her, said meaningless things that changed nothing, Rachel might have slapped her. But that wasn't Cookie's way, and Rachel pulled herself back from the edge, her hands sinking into the dough and working it into loaves that were soon baking in the brick, sun-heated oven.

There were other things to be done. Tea leaves to boil, salt and seasonings to be added to the thin soup. They would have to tap between five and seven kegs of what amounted to moonshine for the evening and they had to be moved from the cool cellar where they aged to the bar top.

The women worked together quietly until the first of the workers started tapping at the glass of the windows.

"Do we ever open early?" Cookie asked, exasperation fueling the famous anger that she exhibited only when the bar was open.

Rachel smirked wryly. "It's Walter...he doesn't know when we open because he doesn't know when the workers are released."

"Because he doesn't work, the souse."

Rachel retrieved her loaves and put more dough into the oven, pleased with the way this batch had browned. It was never a good night when the bread was burned.

"Are we ready then?" She asked, pulling off the flour covered apron and draping it over the back of a chair.

Cookie pressed withered hands against graying hair, pulling it up and back into a bun that she tied with a bit of wire. "Give me a moment to spit in the soup."

Rachel cackled wickedly, took the keys and moved to the door to open the flood gates.