piper lemon, wanderer - finished

Exhaustion was an old familiar rival. Piper would often pay it a visit, if only to learn new ways in which it could be beaten.

It always hit her from the crown of her head down: the slight headache when she hadn’t drank enough water, the drying of the throat, then the slumping of the shoulders as gravity fought against her spine. Lungs, crying out for air, filling and emptying like stretched rubber balloons. Then the quadriceps and hamstrings, burned dry, like the venison her mother used to cook until it mimicked the consistency of metal plates. Knees, creaking in protest, then calves tightening, ankles wobbling. Her feet were last, and they were what mattered; the feet and the mind. As long as the mind could power the feet along without stopping, she would get where she needed to go.

Underfoot, twigs crackled beneath her long strides. Back home—if she could call it that anymore—when running she would’ve kept her head up, watching where she was heading rather than staring down at her feet, but here she had to watch. So many things in the forest could sabotage—roots, branches, holes, animals. Traps too, as there were a few people who hunted beyond the fence even in Seven as they had in Twelve.

When she was little, she never could have run this way. Mom said the air in Twelve was filthy, poisonous, and that was why when she ran Piper’s throat would reject it, constricting, wheezing traces of oxygen in and out. Sometimes it would wake her up in the night and she’d hack into the threadbare blankets, trying not to wake the sisters sleeping beside her. Now she was stronger, and the asthma had long ago been added to the things she’d outgrown.

Reaching out her thin, muscled arms, decorated by constellations of scars and bug bites, she grabbed onto a tree branch and pulled herself up. Though her legs felt like jelly when she stopped running, she used them to hoist herself through the branches, concealing her body in the thick foliage overhead. Minutes passed, footsteps pattered into range, she commanded her unruly breaths to be shallow. Below her, two Peacekeepers came into view, white suits looking sterile and grotesque against the backdrop of the forest floor. Piper drew into herself, became small, became part of the branch that she clung to. If you run away to the wilderness when you’re twelve, you have to get good at hiding, or you die. Or worse; someone finds you.

Not her family, though. If they saw her now, after six years, would they even recognize her? There were times when Piper went so long without looking in a mirror that she didn’t even recognize herself. She didn’t have the ascending pencil marks on the kitchen doorway to compare her height to, but she knew that she was tall enough climb a tree like this easier than she could two or three years ago. When she was small her white-blonde hair was worn in a chin-length bob, bangs cut jaggedly across her forehead—mother wasn’t the best hairdresser, perpetually in a hurry. Now those locks had grown down past the small of her back, and there were no bangs to cover the large shining bowl of her forehead. Not that anyone was looking. Her appearance was an abstraction, and so was her name, Piper Lemon, something that she never thought about anymore and only needed sometimes.

The Peacekeepers’ footsteps faded into the distance from whence they had come. Piper had watched with relief, sighing in unison with the wind, as they stopped underneath her, baffled—robots from this angle with their faces obscured by white helmets—before turning and leaving. When they were completely gone, she would keep moving. Maybe they could hear her better if they didn’t have those ugly helmets on, or maybe she was just that quiet. She prided herself on her invisibility.

But she wasn’t self-taught; she couldn’t take all the credit. Rhonan would have been proud. She hadn’t been this good at hiding when the 43-year-old wanderer found her, sleeping against a rocky overhang under a crooked yellow umbrella trying to keep the rain off. Didn’t she know how easy that would be to spot? The two of them burned it in the fire that night after the storm, its bright vinyl decaying into black smoke. Rho never let her wear bright colors even though back then she thought black and grey made her look paler than a puffball mushroom. He said colors were too loud. Everything about the man had been a whisper; his soft voice, his thinning hair, even his name, so easy to say like a breath, “Rho.” Everything except his strong, sure grip, and the way that he could sing when they were in a place where they didn’t need to hide. He was the father she’d never had. Was, was, was, whined the sorrowful past.

Piper reached the outcropping of rock where she’d been hiding, shielded by some pine trees. She’d used the white pine tufts to make a somewhat bearable bed, covering them in a muslin cloth. Simple things made it less like a shelter, more like a home. Sometimes she and Rhonan used to come across abandoned structures, left over from before the war, and they’d pretend they had their own house for a while. They could never stay in one place for long; it was too risky. But the closest to home she’d ever got was within the districts, when folks would take her in for a while, maybe pretend she was some distant cousin visiting from the other side of the District. That was what she missed most, the people.

Loneliness was another kind of exhaustion; one that sunk in not when she was moving, but when she’d lie awake at night, wishing there was someone pressed up against her for warmth. She and Rhonan always slept back to back, not like mother who would wrap her up like sandwich filling in her body. Rhonan didn’t like sleeping like that; Piper thought maybe it reminded him of his own daughter. He had two kids, but something happened to them. Piper still didn’t know, because he never liked to talk about it.

She lit a fire.

Something happened to Rho, too, a rattlesnake bite. She could almost see its scaly shape in the flames as they twisted and licked at the open air. Piper jabbed one of the logs with a long stick, the way he’d killed it with the pointed staff he used to carry. The serpent had the last laugh, though; its venom puffed his calf up into a purple balloon, and they were too far away from town to find someone to stop it. Piper had been too far away to find a shovel to dig his grave, too. It had been a year since she’d thrown handfuls of dirt on his body, left him in the wilderness to feed the raccoons. What else could she do?

She didn’t like to think about it.

Death had made her bitter. Recently she executed every snake she saw with the hatchet she kept at her hip, watching it writhe even after it was decapitated. Her pain, too, lingered even though the original cause was long gone; it steeped in her heart and made the tissues tough, like leather. Getting past that hard shell was close to impossible for most people. Trust left her open for more heartbreak; for snake bites, too. Besides, it wouldn’t do to get attached when she was always moving.

In the morning, she would be ready to move again; find some new place, new people, maybe do some odd jobs. Of everything she’d experienced, this was one of the few things that made her heart start to swell with anticipation again. Tomorrow, where would she be? Who would she be? Still Piper, but she felt like there had been a million different Pipers throughout her lifetime. Maybe this next one wouldn’t be lost the way the others had been. The world got bigger with every step that she took; surely there was some place for her in it.

When the fire burned low, Piper extinguished the last glowing cinders with her boot. The full moon commanded the sky; with the wolves in the distance she howled in her mind a silent eulogy to every day she had ever lived. Tomorrow, she would move, be moved, again.