and cold, the sky looks much like those warm, safe nights of my childhood with my brother. It’s a million miles away in every sense, but it doesn’t matter. The feeling of my lips, splitting wide open again, tells me I’m smiling.
I don’t feel the cold anymore, and at first I think it’s the memories warming my skin and bones, but then something clicks in my mind. It’s hypothermia. If I fall asleep now, I won’t wake. And because I know Nikko must have fought until his last breath, I roll onto my side and try to get to my feet. That’s when I see it, the thing I tripped over. A desert fox lies on its side. Its black eyes stare right into mine. Its tongue hangs from its crooked mouth. At first I think it’s dead, but then I see its stomach rising and falling. A large hunting knife sticks out of the ground by the fox. I grab the knife and pull myself up. There’s a word carved into the ground.
Drink.
I’ve heard travelers tell stories about the desert thirst, the horses and dogs whose blood they drank to walk just a few more miles, to make it just one more day. Heaving, I pull the knife free from the ground. I tumble onto my back. When I hold up the blade, the polished steel catches all the light of the moon and stars.
I crawl toward the fox. It doesn’t move. Its breath quickens. The angle of its neck tells me it’s broken. I run my hand through its fur as if it were a dog and its breathing slows. It looks at me with knowing eyes. Then, tracing the line of its neck, I find the artery and make the cut. The blood slashes across my face. When I press my lips to the fox’s neck and drink, the blood is thick and warm and thaws me from the inside out. It’s gamy, like bad meat, but it’s good all the same, and I drink until the nausea is too much and my stomach lurches. When I look again, the fox stares through me, its eyes empty. I’m sorry and grateful.
I sink to the ground. The blood doesn’t quench thirst like water. After drinking it I feel inches closer to death, but resolved to live. I’m the vampire girl. I crawl close to the fox and press myself against it. It’s still warm. That’s how sleep takes me: blood on my face, holding close to the fading warmth.
• • •
I wake to the sight of vultures overhead, flying in tight circles that I think are meant for me. But I’m not ready—I’ll fight them off with my knife, I’ll tear at their feathers, and I’ll keep one to eat. I’ll eat it raw; I don’t need a fire.
The foul black birds with their burned faces land a few feet away. They hop and skulk toward the fox. It has begun to stink. They start to peck and tear at the flesh, oblivious to me.
When I get to my feet, my legs are stronger than I thought they’d be. The desert stretches behind me. Before me, the mountains loom close enough that I can make out trees, basking in the shade of the high peaks, just below a steep snowline. I’m so close to the mountain that promises animals to hunt, wood to make a fire, shelter, and, of course, the bullet catcher. I can’t believe I ever thought of giving him up.
It’s early, but the desert is already blindingly bright. It’s difficult to tell the earth from the sky, and at first I mistake the figure as a shadow, before realizing that there’s nothing there to cast it. It’s a free-floating shadow, a nightshade, a ghost. It’s the bullet catcher. He stands in the distance, watching me. Then he turns and heads off again.
He knows I’m following him, and for whatever reason, he’s helping me. I kick away the vultures and cut a few pieces of drying flesh from the fox. I stuff the raw meat into my pack. The knife I tuck into my belt. And then I follow the bullet catcher to the very end of the desert.
• • •
That afternoon, the sky is sharp blue and piercing. I take a strip of the raw fox meat from my pack. I eat the whole strip and suck the congealing blood from my fingers.
As I eat, I think of Nikko. He was tough and ingenious. He could be mean as hell too, but never to me. That’s why I looked up to him. While I was busy making myself small so I could fit into any shadow or hiding place, Nikko puffed out his chest and made a name for himself: troublemaker, dirt kicker, sinner. That’s what the Brothers and Sisters called him.
Nikko once made me a music box. It played just three notes, but it was the only music I’d heard since before the orphanage. He showed it to me in theology class, cupping his hands around it so the Sister couldn’t see. But before he could give it to me, the Sister came over and rapped his knuckles with a switch. He smiled up at her like nothing she could do could hurt him. She pulled him from the lesson by his hair, dragging his heels along the floorboards of the schoolhouse. I watched through the wavy glass of the windows as they hauled him into the yard, tied him to a post, and whipped him until his shirt hung in ribbons—yellow from dust, red from blood. I think Nikko had smiled at the Sister so she would forget the music box. I hid it in my desk where no one would see it.
That night was the first time he ran away. He didn’t tell me he was going to do it. I don’t think he’d planned it. He just ran. When I discovered he was missing, I told one of the Sisters I couldn’t find him.
“One less mouth to feed,” the Sister said, and gave me the back of her hand for speaking out of turn. I went back to the dormitory, took the music box from where I’d hidden it under my pillow, wound it up, and cried as it played. I was certain he was dead. But the next day he came back, starving, panting from thirst.
When Nikko ran away for good he had a plan: He was going to join the bullet catchers. But the bullet catchers didn’t just agree to train any skinny kid with a sob story. You had to be special. And Nikko was special. The music box was just one thing he made. He was always taking apart anything he could get his hands on. Clocks, small engines, the orphanage’s boiler and water recycler, they all met with the sharp end of Nikko’s screwdriver, and they all revealed their secrets to him. He would make me little clockwork toys out of scrap: little marching soldiers, or a dog that opened and closed its mouth like it was yapping, a bird that would raise and lower its wings. He made his own sun-powered engine. It didn’t do much; it only lit a light bulb. But to see his eyes shine! He was a genius at gizmos and mechanics.
The thing was, no one but the bullet catchers knew the secret to catching bullets. Some said it was to do with the planet’s magnetic poles or black magic. Some of the more snakebitten drunks said that it was all done with mirrors. Others speculated that even the bullet catchers didn’t know how they did it, that each one of them carried a slip of paper with one piece of the secret written on it—maybe no more than a word or letter—that to learn the whole thing you had to find every bullet catcher and put the secret together.
But Nikko didn’t care about the secret.
Instead, he made a glove that he said could catch bullets. He only showed it to me once—he was afraid of the Brothers and Sisters finding it. Late one night, we went out behind the schoolhouse, one of his hands around my wrist, the other clutching a canvas bag. We crouched in the shadow made by the steeple, rising up between the moon and us, and he produced his invention. It was made from an old glove, the kind wranglers use to grip their lassos. Across the back, brass barbs arched like jumping spider legs. Thin coils of brass were molded in tight spirals around the fingertips.
“With this,” he said in a whisper, “I’ll be able to catch bullets as well as any bullet catcher. When I show the bullet catchers this, they’ll have to let me in.”
He flipped a switch and the glove hummed, low and full of power, like the quiet sound the planet makes if you put your ear to the ground in the middle of a desert night with no one around, when there are no animals howling or plants growing spindly roots through the dirt.
• • •
The
