Have You Eaten? (The Full Series)

The complete serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey, in which a fractured group of undesirables work together to nurture and nourish each other while navigating a dangerous world that would just as soon see them dead. Still—inch by inch, meal by meal—they build their own future. Have you eaten?

Author’s note: This story contains fictional depictions of intimate partner violence.

Have You Eaten? Part 1: Daneka’s Birthday

Fen’s Mom’s Chicken Pot Pie

Crust (2 batches)
2½ cups flour
Pinch of salt
1 cup butter
6 tablespoons water

Filling
3 stalks celery, chopped
1 onion, diced; or 1 can pearl onions, drained and rinsed
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
4 cups chicken broth
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 tsp chopped fresh sage
Pepper
1 bag mixed frozen peas & carrots
2 chicken breasts, roasted and shredded
Salt

Instructions

Make the Crust

1. Combine the flour and the salt. Add the butter and mix with your hands until small crumbs are formed.  

2. Add in water 1 tablespoon at a time, mixing with your hands to form dough. 

3. Chill for 1 hour. 

4. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. While it’s heating, divide the dough in half. Roll out each half separately. Set one aside, and place the other in a floured and buttered pie pan. Poke the bottom several times with a fork to release steam during cooking.

5. Bake blind for 15 minutes.  


Make the Filling

1. In a nonstick skillet over medium heat, sauté the celery and chopped onion if using. Salt to taste. When vegetables have just begun to soften, set aside.

2. In the same skillet, heat the butter over medium heat until it stops bubbling. Add the flour and whisk thoroughly until there are no lumps. Stir until golden brown.

3. Add the chicken broth to the pan. Whisk thoroughly until well-combined. Add the onion powder, garlic powder, sage, and plenty of black pepper. *Do not salt at this stage; since the broth will be thickened into gravy, the risk of oversalting is high.
4. Add the cooked vegetables, the frozen vegetables, and the pearl onions if using. Stir to combine.
5. Simmer until the sauce thickens into a gravy.
6. Remove from the heat and stir in the shredded chicken.

7. Pour the filling into the blind-baked crust. Top with the rolled-out unbaked crust. Cut slits in the top to vent steam. Bake until golden and flaky on top, 35–45 minutes.


Optional: Instead of pie crust, bake under a layer of biscuits. Double the filling recipe to fill a 9×13-inch pan.

It’s Daneka’s birthday, so everyone in the squat is being quiet and trying not to make eye contact with each other. The problem is that everyone’s known for weeks that Fen is worried about Daneka. At first they all rolled their eyes at Fen—people go missing all the time, and worrying over that is as useless as paper money. Then they tried to get her to snap out of it, because Fen’s the one who makes decisions and plans, and her anxiety over Daneka has been occupying her mind so thoroughly that she hasn’t been deciding or planning anything.

Now, after weeks with no Daneka and no word from her either, everyone in the squat privately shares Fen’s suspicion that something bad has probably happened to their friend. Nobody wants to be the first to say something, though, so they’re all finding reasons to be on their palmsets, reasons to look out the window, reasons to attend to their least-favorite chores.

Fen isn’t making it easy for anyone to speak up, anyway. She’s not talking about her feelings. Four months ago, she overheard Quan calling her a “neurotic clinger.” Quan didn’t know she could hear him—she had just walked into the room and was standing right behind him, like in that movie everyone in the squat makes fun of but hasn’t seen. He said it in a mean way, even though he’s not a mean person, except when he sort of is. And she wasn’t supposed to hear, but she did.

She sort of melted off into her bedroom after that. When Morrow checked in on Fen later she made all the right noises about understanding that she needs to manage her anxiety and Quan’s mastery of incisive languagebut still, damn, it must have stung to hear. Since then, Fen’s been “managing her anxiety” by quietly vibrating, crying when she thinks nobody can hear her, and saying nothing about her feelings to anyone, ever.

Her silence isn’t keeping her secret, though. The housemates know each other even better than they know hunger, and they all recognize the signs of Fen’s worry. Her lips are ragged from chewing. She keeps asking thinly anonymized questions like, Do you think people have responsibility to each other? and, How would you handle it if a friend suddenly grew really distant? Every time anyone catches a glimpse of her palmset, she’s looking at Daneka’s profile, refreshing over and over again, her eyes locked on the location status that hasn’t updated in a month.

At first, Harper told her that some people thrive on independence in relationships. At first, Morrow told her that it probably had nothing to do with her. At first, Quan told her that she could talk to him if she was freaking out about something, but she responded with a patently forced smile and said that she was fine, and then Quan spent the rest of the day asking Harper and Morrow if he’d done anything to upset her because he still didn’t know she’d heard the thing he’d said about her in the first place.

And now it’s Daneka’s birthday, and Daneka still hasn’t come home or answered anyone’s private messages, and everyone is just as worried as Fen’s been for weeks but nobody wants to say so because that would mean admitting that Fen was right all along, and then they’d have to try to figure out what to do.

Fen is usually the one who figures out what to do.

Around noon, a patrol car passes the squat. Quan watches it through a gap in the boards that cover the windows. Once the car has passed out of sight, he lets out a short sharp sigh, slaps his thighs with both palms, and shoots to his feet. His square jaw is set, his thick brows furrowed, his slim fingers balled into fists. “Okay,” he says. “Where the fuck’s Fen?”

“Kitchen,” Harper answers from the floor, where they’re using their fingers to fill a gouge in the laminate with a mixture of sawdust and wood glue. Their dark scalp-stubble grows in continent-like patches around old burn scars on their scalp. The scars are from their life in Old Chicago, which no one in the squat makes the mistake of asking about. Harper isn’t a leader in the same way Fen is, but they could be if they were less irritable about other people needing things and making noises about it. “Step careful. Glue’s drying.”

Quan obeys, tiptoeing past the collection of cushions and camp chairs that Harper’s stacked against the wall to make room for this needlessly intense project. He makes his way to the kitchen and finds that Harper was right: there’s Fen, red-eyed and purse-mouthed, clutching a potato and staring into the nearly bare cupboard.

“You freaking out or what?” Quan asks, looking into the cupboard too so Fen won’t feel like her tears are being noticed.

“No,” she answers, her voice too wobbly to stick the landing. She twists her neck to wipe her nose on the shoulder of her cardigan. The movement makes one tight-coiled curl fall across her forehead. “A little worried that they might finally turn off the electricity this month.”

“Any reason to think that might happen, or are you getting upset over nothing?”

“Probably the second one,” Fen answers, not too defensively. “It’s just. You know. At some point the developers that own this block are gonna remember that this house exists, and we should have a plan for what to do when that happens.” She closes her eyes, takes a long slow breath. “But we’ll deal with it when we get there. What about you? How’s your day so far?”

Quan lets out a dry laugh. “Not great. I’m worried about Daneka.”

Those last four words strike Fen like a match. She explodes with relief. “Oh my god, me too. Where the hell is she? Wait, I mean—no,” she stammers, her face crumpling as she tries and fails to reel her words back, to reconfigure herself into whatever well-managed anxiety is supposed to look like. “It’s fine that she’s gone. I’ve just been wondering why she hasn’t come home, I guess? But it’s fine that she hasn’t.”

Quan opens the refrigerator and pulls out a celery bunch that’s as limp as yarn. “No, like, I’m worried too. She’s been gone for a month, that’s not normal. And she hasn’t messaged you at all?”

“Not at all,” Fen replies. “I haven’t been messaging her that much or anything, just a couple of ‘thinking of you’ taps. She did a thumbs-up react but I don’t know what that means, and—”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Quan whacks the listless celery against the quartz counter, which is still marked at the edges with wax crayon where the flippers who abandoned this house had planned to cut it. “I think we should call a house meeting.”

Morrow comes thudding down the hall, their heavy boots loud on the gray laminate. Morrow’s body takes up space—they’re built like a fridge, if a fridge could work out—but their voice hides in the back of their throat. “Are, um. Are you guys talking about Daneka?”

“Shoes, asshole,” Harper yells from the living room.

Morrow sits down on the floor immediately and starts undoing their laces. “Sorry. Did someone hear from her?”

“I can’t hear you,” Quan says. “Nobody can fuckin’ hear you.”

“Quan’s worried,” Fen adds. “About Daneka.”

Morrow exchanges a significant glance with Quan. “Okay, well, I mean. It’s just that. You know. I think Quan’s right to be worried. It’s weird that we haven’t heard from Daneka, and—”

“I’ve heard from her,” Harper calls, looking up from their work on the floor. “Thumbs-up react on my last message.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Fen says, earning raised eyebrows from Harper. “You know what? I’m just gonna call her.” She pulls her palmset out of her back pocket and unfolds it, hesitates briefly, looks up, realizes everyone is watching her and she can’t change her mind now—and dials.

The tritone sound of the call going through cycles twelve times before the call drops.

“That’s fine,” Fen says weakly. “I’ll message. She’s probably away from her palmset, she’ll see when she gets back to it.” She swipes out a message, saying the words as she traces them across one quadrant of the screen. “Should . . . we . . . expect . . . you . . . for . . . dinner. There.” She folds her palmset back up before tossing it onto the counter and turning to her housemates. “I’m making chicken pot pie. It’s her favorite. If she shows up, we can have a birthday party. If not, we’ll just eat it without her.”

Morrow grabs the counter and uses it to pull themself upright. They stare at Fen, their dark eyes wide with disbelief. “Wait, for real? You know how to make chicken pot pie?”

“No she doesn’t,” Quan snaps. “When’s the last time you think Fen got her hands on meat? Be serious.”

Fen ignores him, pulling a scratched wooden box off the top of the fridge and answering Morrow without acknowledging Quan at all. “I stole my mom’s recipe box when my folks kicked me out. I know how to make all her recipes.”

“Nice,” Harper says. They jog to the kitchen and dip a rag into the washwater basin, then start scrubbing gluey sawdust off their thumb. “Where d’you think Daneka is?”

“That’s not any of our business,” Fen answers, reaching deeper into the cupboard than she probably needs to.

“Is too,” Harper replies, scowling.

Fen goes still, her head between the shelves. “Really?”

“Course.” Harper runs a hand over their scalp. They sigh. “She’s part of our family. Fuck’s sake, she lives here. And yeah, she drops off the map from time to time. But that’s a few days at a stretch. She’s usually sending videos and posting stuff. And messaging us. Anyone gotten any actual messages?” They wait for everyone else’s headshakes to confirm before continuing. “So.”

And then Morrow whispers the thing nobody’s wanted to say, the thing Fen’s been thinking for twenty-eight days. “What if . . . she got picked up?”

“We’d know,” Quan says immediately.

“How?” Harper’s bony shoulders snap up around their ears. “How would we know, Quan? You think they still let people make phone calls?”

“What about the thumbs-up reacts?”

“Those don’t mean anything,” Harper snaps. “When’s the last time you saw Daneka go quiet on socials?”

Everyone stops to think. “Last time she got picked up,” Quan finally admits. “She was waiting at a drop-off point for a delivery for the three of us—me and her and Fen, I mean.” He nods to Fen, who finally extracts herself from the cupboard, her face drawn. Back before Fen and Quan and Daneka met Harper and Morrow, the three of them had been their own little trio. Moving from place to place, following rumors about reliable, affordable hormones and welcoming communities. “The seller was an undercover. He snatched Daneka for like a week. She didn’t post or message the whole time.”

“Did she send reacts?”

“Hearts,” Fen whispers, remembering. “She told us later that the cop took her palmset so he could go through her messages and contacts and stuff.”

“So. Thumbs-up reacts don’t mean shit,” Harper confirms.

Morrow steps on the loose toe of one sock, his eyes fixed on the floor. “Okay, but also, she came home after she got picked up that time, right? So she’ll probably come home this time, too.”

It’s Fen and Quan’s turn to exchange a loaded glance. “That was in Santa Cruz,” Quan says slowly.

Morrow, who lived their whole life just up the freeway in Redding, hoists themself up to sit on the counter. The quartz creaks under their weight. “Is it bad there?”

“Nah,” Quan says. “They’ll pick you up for indecency or gender impersonation or whatever, but they don’t process you most of the time. They just take your money if you have any. It’s . . . it’s not like here,” he finishes, his eyes on his hands, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

Everyone startles when Fen drops the entire potato bin onto the counter. Her eyes are dry, her scar-notched brows set. “Daneka will be here,” she announces.

This is the Fen they’ve all been missing. This is her determined face, the one she wears when she’s deciding to create reality from scratch. It’s the face she wore when she and Quan and Daneka first met Morrow—Fen decided they’d all live together, even though Morrow had just tried to mug them. It’s the face she wore when they broke into this squat through the front door and found Harper breaking into it through the back door. And it’s the face she wears as she informs the other three housemates present that she will be making a birthday dinner, that Daneka will show up to eat it, and that they’re all going to help in the meantime.

“You,” she says, pointing at a startled Morrow. “Sort these potatoes.”

Morrow eyes the potato bin dubiously. “By . . . size?”

“By sprouts. We can probably eat all of these since none of them are green, but the ones with really long sprouts might not be good. Look into my eyes, Morrow,” she says, and she waits for their big dark eyes to meet hers. “We aren’t risking it with any rotten food today. Okay? I mean it. Not for Daneka’s birthday.”

Morrow nods and picks up a potato with one huge, gentle hand.

“And you,” Fen says, wheeling on Quan and brandishing the sagging celery stalks he’d idly removed from the refrigerator a few minutes before. “Figure this out.”

Harper stands on the other side of the kitchen counter, their arms folded. “Guess the boss is back.”

Fen regards them with bristling determination. “You’re coming shopping with me.”

The two of them go out through the back door and cross the crunchy brown grass of the back lawn. Harper boosts Fen over the gate in the back fence, which is white vinyl stamped to look like wood and doesn’t open from the inside. Once Fen is on the other side, she thumbs the code into the keypad and eases the gate open.

“Should fix that thing,” Harper says as they pass through the gate onto the community path, their eyes flicking down to the busted keypad on the inside of the fence. It looks like someone took a hammer to it.

“Good luck,” Fen replies. “Sorry, that sounded bitchy. I really mean it. You’re good with electronics.”

Harper snorts. “Sure. Hey, do you think—”

“I don’t want to talk about Daneka,” Fen interrupts.

“I wasn’t going to ask about Daneka. I was going to ask if you think that’s fennel or dill,” Harper says, pointing at a frondy green that’s growing a couple of feet off the path. This trail was a jackpot find they discovered a couple of weeks after settling into the squat: a poorly maintained ribbon of asphalt that stretches behind two miles of houses, terrible for jogging or riding a bicycle but perfect for foraging, especially when it comes to plants that like to jump fences from hobby gardens out into the world.

Fen rubs a frond, then lifts her fingers to her nose. “Fennel,” she says, grinning. “What do you think, take the bulb or just cut a couple stalks?”

“Stalks,” Harper answers, pulling a box cutter out of their back pocket. They trim off a couple of stalks of fennel. The licorice smell perfumes the air around them. “And you’re lying.”

“What?”

“You’re lying. You want to talk about Daneka.” Harper waits while Fen pulls a crumpled plastic grocery bag out of one pocket, then drops the fennel stalks into it.

Fen starts walking. Her strides are long, her pace quick—Harper has to move fast to keep up. “I’m just worried about her, is all.”

“Pissed at her, more like. Hang on. Mint.” They stoop to rip up a few fistfuls of the mint that grows in patches all along the trail, then use the blade of their box cutter to dig out a hank of it with the roots intact. “I read that if you plant this stuff in your yard, it’ll grow everywhere. We can replace that crusty lawn.”

“You think we’re going to stay in the squat long enough for it to matter?”

“Been six months already,” Harper says. “Might stay.”

“Sure,” Fen says, her eyes darting to either end of the trail. “The thing is, okay, I’m not pissed at Daneka. I’m just—if she’s not missing, then yeah, I’d feel some kind of way about it. But I’m not pissed yet, because we don’t know if she’s missing or just being an inconsiderate asshole. If she’s missing, I don’t want to be pissed at her, I want to be worried. But I’d rather be pissed.”

Harper shrugs. “Could be both. Missing and an asshole.”

“Don’t. Don’t joke like that.” Fen stalks ahead for a few minutes, until they reach a spot where they’d found wild onions once. She tucks her pants into her socks before stepping off the trail to slowly pace in a circle through the grass, looking for the tall green stalks of an allium. “I don’t know what we do if she doesn’t come home. Do we go try to find her? Get her out?”

“No,” Harper says immediately. “Too dangerous.”

Fen stoops and tears out a fistful of grass, runs her hand along the dirt. “Maybe just me and Quan,” she mutters. “If you and Morrow don’t give a shit.”

“We give a shit. But you two getting yourselves snatched won’t help Daneka. There,” they say suddenly, pointing to a spot just behind Fen.

The onions are puny, their tops scraggly, but Fen still beams with triumph. “See?” she says, brandishing the onions. “It’s gonna be great. We’re already most of the way there.”

They visit the overgrown rosemary hedge, waving away half-drunk bees to snap off a few stems. They harvest a couple of handfuls of pealike seed pods from a thatch of bolted arugula, stepping over the papery white flowers that litter the path around it. Fen crows at the sight of what looks like garlic or maybe a shallot and digs it up, only to find a snotty hunk of black rot where the papery bulb should be. As she’s swearing and wiping her hands on her jeans, though, Harper spots another, and this one turns out to only be half-rotted.

“Yes yes yes,” Fen whispers, slicing the rot away with Harper’s box cutter.

Harper eyes the rot that’s falling away. “That gonna be good?”

“Not even a risky one,” Fen confirms. “We’ve eaten way worse.”

“What else do you need?”

“Um.” Fen pauses, closes her eyes. “Carrots. Flour. Butter. We have salt, right?”

Harper thinks. “Yeah, Morrow grabbed a bunch of packets last time we got burgers. How much flour? Would cornstarch work instead?”

“Maybe? Oh, and we need chicken.”

They both laugh. “I’ll grab the first one I see,” Harper says.

They walk the rest of the path and they don’t find carrots, just a lot more mint, some marjoram, and a stray cat that puffs up his tail at them. As they head home, Fen slows her pace. “Harp, are you mad at me?”

“Nah. But I should be.”

Fen nods. She trusts Harper because of answers like this one. “How come?”

Harper stops walking, waits for Fen to turn and face them. They take a deep breath and fold their arms across their chest. The sun falls in gold dapples across their freckled shoulders. They regard Fen irritably, the way they always do when they’re figuring out how to say a thing that they think should go without saying. “Because,” they say at last, “you dropped us.”

“I—what?”

“You dropped us. You’re the one in charge. You make the decisions, you boss everyone around, you decide what the day’s gonna look like. But you got worried about Daneka, so you stopped. Where do you think Morrow went today?”

Fen shrugs. “Out?”

“They went to the coffee shop,” Harper snaps, jutting their head forward. “To see that barista they keep flirting with. Because you weren’t paying attention enough to notice that Morrow hasn’t clocked how the coffee shop is a cop joint, so you didn’t tell them not to go.”

“You could have told them not to go,” Fen mutters.

Harper narrows their eyes. “I did. But Morrow doesn’t listen to me the way they listen to you. Which you know. But you’ve been in your feelings, so you decided someone else could handle the shit you usually handle, and now we gotta figure out if Morrow got followed home by a uniform.”

 Fen shook her head. “I’m not in charge of—”

“The fuck you’re not. Take responsibility for your vibe, Fen. Either we can count on you or we can’t. Which is it?”

The two of them glare at each other. A cricket starts to sing the late afternoon down into dusk. Fen breaks first, huffing out a sigh as she looks away.

“I’ll think about it,” she says at last.

Harper nods. “I know.”

When they get back to the house, the potatoes are lined up on the counter, in order from one with no sprouts to one with four-inch-long ones. The celery is floating in a bowl of water, looking significantly sturdier than it had just an hour before. Morrow and Quan are hovering over the sink.

“Hey kids,” Harper says, dropping the now-full bag of produce onto the counter. “Whaddaya got there?”

Morrow turns around, grinning and holding up what looks like a wad of white gum. “Butter!”

Fen’s jaw drops. “You’re joking. Where did you get butter?!”

“They made it,” Quan says. He sounds like he doesn’t believe the words he’s saying.

“I learned how when I was a kid,” Morrow explains, dropping their tiny palmful of butter onto a plate on the counter. “It’s easy. You, um.” Their ears are going red from the combined attention of the other three. “You just put some cream in a jar and shake it a thousand times, then pull out the solid stuff and wash it in cold water. Is this gonna be enough?”

Harper picks up an old peanut butter jar that has a couple of inches of cloudy liquid in it. “Ew.”

“That’s buttermilk, save it,” Fen says quickly. “Morrow, where the fuck did you get cream?”

“The guy at the coffee shop down the road. Me and Quan ran over there after I finished sorting the potatoes. Dude only charged us a dollar for a pretty decent pour. I thought, maybe we could invite coffee shop guy over sometime and—”

“We won’t be doing that,” Quan says frankly, “but hey. How do you like that, Fen? Butter?”

Everyone turns to Fen. She’s holding the plate of butter, her eyes welling with tears. “I like it,” she whispers. “Thank you, Morrow.”

“I helped,” Quan mutters.

Fen’s palmset, still sitting where she left it on the counter an hour and a half earlier, chimes.

Everyone freezes. Morrow reaches for the palmset but Harper slaps their hand away.

Quan puts a hand on Fen’s shoulder. “Do you want to look at it?”

Fen shakes her head, then nods, then shakes her head again. “Do you still have the cornstarch in the bathroom? From when you were doing liberty spikes in your hair?”

“Uh, yeah.” Quan blinks a few times. “Do you need it?”

Fen picks up a potato, not looking at Quan at all. “Yeah. Can you grab it?”

“I guess.” He heads down the long hall to the bathroom on the other end of the house, looking over his shoulder at her every few steps.

Once he’s out of sight, she pounces on the palmset. There’s a message from Daneka.

I’ll do my best!

“What does that mean?” Fen whispers to herself.

Harper leans closer. “What’s it say?”

“Nothing.” Fen folds the palmset shut.

“Well. What do you mean, though? What’s nothing? Was it from Daneka?” Morrow wipes their buttery hands on their jeans and reaches one long arm across the counter for the palmset again.

“Yes.” Fen jams the handset into her pocket. Her eyes flick up toward the hall, where Quan is returning with a crumpled bag of cornstarch. “But it wasn’t anything. Who wants to wash all this marjoram?”

For the next hour, Fen steers the four of them through a recipe. Quan and Morrow work together to clean all the vegetables. By the time that’s done, Fen’s got water boiling on the hotplate. She boils all the usable potatoes, then uses the potato water to reconstitute some chicken powder into a cloudy broth. Harper pulls the celery out of its bowl of water to discover that it’s more or less revitalized; they chop that and the fennel stalks while Fen dices the wild onion and garlic they found.

Quan is playing lo-fi beats on his palmset, and Morrow is mumbling lyrics to go with the beats, and they’re all laughing hard enough that they almost don’t hear it when Fen’s palmset chimes again. She tosses the garlic and wild onion into a skillet on the hotplate before pulling it out of her pocket and unfolding it.

Remind me where we’re meeting?

Harper looks over her shoulder. “Fuck,” they whisper.

“What’s up?” Quan looks up from the playlist he’s curating. “Fen? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Fen says. Her voice is perfectly flat. She folds the palmset back into her pocket, then takes up the wooden spoon next to the skillet and gives the onion a stir. “Harper, can you throw the celery in here for me? Quan, Morrow, go pack your stuff and charge your palmsets. Use the rapid charger in the living room.”

Morrow furrows their brow. “Didn’t you say the rapid charger is a fire hazard? Or is it—”

“She’s right. We gotta go. Hurry,” Harper says. “We should pack too,” they add in an urgent whisper after Quan and Morrow have gone.

“In a minute,” Fen replies. “I want to finish this.”

“Fen—”

“In a minute,” she says again, her voice steady and certain the way it was before Daneka went missing. The way it’s always been. “Carrots?”

“We didn’t find carrots,” Harper reminds her softly. “You want the fennel, though?”

Fen closes her eyes tight, bows her head. Lets out a teakettle hiss of curses. When she looks back up and meets Harper’s eyes, her gaze is flat. “Will we stay together? Do you want to stay with us, I mean? You don’t have to.”

Harper draws her into a tight hug. “I don’t know. Let’s figure that out in the morning, yeah? Right now, I’m gonna go pack up my stuff and charge my palmset. Want me to get yours too?”

Fen nods. “I want to finish cooking this for Daneka. Just in case.”

Harper taps the recipe box on the counter as they leave the kitchen. “Don’t forget this.”

After Harper disappears into the living room with both their palmsets, Fen lets herself cry. Just for a few seconds. A couple of sobs, a spill of hot tears, that’s all.

Then she adds the chopped fennel stalks to the skillet. When the fennel is bright green, she pours the chicken broth into the pan and lets it boil for a few minutes. It’s already thickening a little thanks to the potato starch in the water, but she adds some of Quan’s cornstarch too, stirring fast until it makes a thick gravy. She adds marjoram and rosemary since she doesn’t have any sage. She smashes the potatoes, stirs in chicken powder and Morrow’s butter, adds a few salt-and-pepper combo packets from Morrow’s stash.

“Okay,” she whispers to herself as she lets the potatoes heat just a little longer, to get any last water out. “Finish it. Move on. Work to do.”

She can hear Quan and Harper trying to figure out how to fit her sweaters into her backpack. They won’t figure it out on their own, she knows, because they don’t know how to roll sweaters up tiny. She’ll go help them in a minute, but first, she scoops mashed potatoes into a paper bowl and uses the back of a spoon to spread them in an even layer. She pours vegetables and thick gravy on top, then covers those with another even layer of mashed potatoes. With the back of the spoon, she smooths the top down, then carves lines into the center of the layer to look like the slits in the top of a piecrust.

Quan comes into the kitchen, his backpack rising up over his shoulders like a turtle’s shell, and eyes the steaming bowl on the counter. “It’s smaller than I thought it’d be,” he says. “Good thing there’s only three of us. Are there clean spoons?”

Fen’s eyes snap up to him. Her face is blazing with barely restrained fury. “Don’t fucking touch it,” she says in a low, dangerous voice. “This is for Daneka.”

He frowns at her. “Chill. Daneka’s not here. Are you telling me we’re not going to eat this just because she got—”

“She’s going to be here,” Fen says. “And she’s going to be hungry when she gets home. We’ll eat on the road. Get moving.”

Quan looks like he’s about to protest, but then Morrow comes into the kitchen and smiles down at the bowl on the counter. “Daneka’s gonna love it,” they murmur. “Good job, Fen.”

“Are you serious?” Quan snaps. “You don’t want to eat it either?”

Morrow looks at him with open bewilderment. “It’s Daneka’s birthday. We’ll figure something else out.”

The four of them are out of the house five minutes later.Harper turns the lights off and locks the back door. Morrow boosts Quan over the back fence to let them out through the gate.

Fen is about to ease the back gate shut, but she hesitates, her eyes locked on the dark house. She tells herself that she’s trying to remember if she left anything behind, even as she mentally runs through the list of items that she already knows she’s carrying on her back.

“Fen?” Quan whisper-yells from the darkness down the path.

The edge of the pressed vinyl creaks in her grip. She rises up on her toes, trying to see inside.

“Hey,” Harper hisses. “We gotta move.”

A light goes on inside the house.

Fen closes the gate. “Coming.”

Fen’s “Chicken” Pot Pie

Crust (2 batches)
6 potatoes
3 tablespoons butter
Chicken bouillon powder
Salt and pepper packets

Filling
2 handfuls arugula seed pods, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
2 fennel stalks, chopped
3 wild onions, diced
2 tablespoons cornstarch mixed w/ ⅓ cup water to form a slurry
4 cups chicken broth
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon chopped fresh marjoram/rosemary
Pepper

Instructions

Make the “Crust”

1. Boil the potatoes. Drain, reserving the potato water.
2. Smash the cooked potatoes until smooth.
3. Add butter, chicken bouillon powder, salt, and pepper to taste.

Make the filling

1. Add chicken powder to the potato water to make broth
2. In a nonstick skillet over medium heat, sauté the celery, onion, and garlic. Add the fennel and sauté until bright green.
3. Add the chicken broth to the pan. Add herbs. Simmer 3–5 minutes.
4. Add cornstarch slurry and whisk thoroughly to thicken.

Assemble

5. Line a bowl with a thick layer of mashed potatoes. Add filling, then top with mashed potatoes and sculpt into a crust shape. Optional, if there’s time (there’s not): toast the mashed potatoes on top with a hand torch.

Have You Eaten? Part 2: Dinner with Peter

Fen’s Dad’s Soup

2 bay leaves
6–8 peppercorns
3–5 allspice berries
10 cups water; or 10 cups beef broth & omit bouillon
4 tablespoons beef base or 2 bouillon cubes 
½ head cabbage, shredded
1 cup celery, chopped
2 onions, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 pound sliced sausage
2 chicken breasts, cubed
1 cup ham, cubed
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 cup dry white wine
3 large dill pickles, chopped
2 tablespoons capers
¾ cup black olives, sliced
2 cans stewed tomatoes
Salt
Pepper
Optional: Dill and sour cream.

Instructions

1. Tie the bay leaves, peppercorns, and allspice berries up in a square of cheesecloth to form a sachet. Alternatively, put them into a tea infuser. In a very large pot, combine the water, spice sachet, beef base, cabbage, and celery. Boil for 30 minutes.  
2. While the water boils, in a very large skillet, sauté the onions and carrots.
3. When the onions start to brown, add the sausage, chicken, and ham to the pan. The sausage will release some fat, which will fry the chicken and ham. If omitting sausage, add oil or butter to the pan and cook until the chicken and ham are brown on all sides.
4. Add the contents of the skillet to the cooking pot. Add tomato paste to the skillet and stir until it starts to brown; then, add the white wine and dill pickles to the skillet. Stir to loosen all fond from the bottom of the pan, then transfer contents of the skillet to the cooking pot.
5. Add capers, olives, and stewed tomatoes to the cooking pot. Simmer 5–10 minutes until heated through.
6. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with dill and sour cream. 

Iowa is quiet at night, not that anyone in the back of the pickup would know. The engine is so loud that they can barely hear their own thoughts. But that’s fine, because none of them particularly want to tune in to that frequency anyway. The noise is a mercy, in its way.

All four of them—Fen, Quan, Harper, and Morrow—are wedged into the space next to the strapped-tight ATV in the truck bed. They’ve been rattling around back there like coins in a can since the middle of Colorado, where they managed to get picked up for the clearance price of all the pills in Morrow’s pockets. The guy driving the truck didn’t even look at their faces before opening the tailgate and ushering them in. He didn’t look when he slammed the tailgate shut either. Fen was lucky not to lose a finger.

That unlooking was its own kind of courtesy—the gift of anonymity, generously granted to four nobodies in exchange for a palmful of loose capsules.

“Quan. Hey. Hey, Quan.” Morrow is folded nearly in half to fit in their corner of the truck bed, closest to the cab. They’re nudging a zoned-out Quan with one sharp elbow.

“Wha?” Quan sounds disoriented, like he’s just woken up.

Morrow bends down to lean close to Quan’s ear. “What did I give that guy?”

“What did you—do you mean the pills?”

“Yeah, I didn’t check. Did you see what I handed him?”

Quan leans away, gives Morrow an incredulous look. “No. How do you not know what pills were in your pocket?”

Morrow shrugs, leans around Quan to try to get Harper’s attention. “Harp?”

Harper shakes their head, points to their ear. Even if they were open to conversation, which they usually aren’t, the thunder of the truck’s engine is loud enough to wash out any possibility of conversation.

Morrow doesn’t bother trying to get Fen’s attention. She’s crammed tight into the opposite corner from them. Her back is against the tailgate, and a scarf is up over her face to filter the worst of the exhaust coming from the tailpipe beneath her seat. Her eyes are closed and her skin is a worrying shade of green.

Just as Quan’s eyes start glazing over again, the truck slows. The stink of exhaust thickens without the wind of movement to whisk it away. Harper and Morrow pull their shirts up over their noses and mouths; Quan just coughs.

There’s nothing here to stop for, but the truck pulls onto the shoulder anyway. The semiautomatic bleat of the rumble strip jolts them all alert. They glance at each other, worry passing between them as fast as an extreme heat warning pinging every palmset in a hundred-mile area. None of them know why the driver would choose to stop in this lonely place.

The engine cuts off. Wildflowers grow next to the highway, bottle caps scattered in the dirt they’re growing out of. The golden pre-dusk light makes the broken glass on the highway shoulder glow. A fallow field stretches as far as any of them can see; on the other side of the highway, a blanket of soybeans extends all the way to the horizon. A door opens, then slams shut again. A lone cicada whines nearby; other than that, there’s no sound louder than footsteps on gravel as the driver makes his way around the side of the truck.

The tailgate drops open. Fen nearly falls out but catches herself just in time. She drops her head into her hands and sits there, catching her breath.

The driver’s hat, a faded blue ballcap with a dark rectangle on the front where a patch has been ripped off, shades his face so his eyes aren’t visible. He clears his throat and spits into the wildflowers. “You’ll want to get out and walk from here,” he says. “State line’s in a couple miles, and the State Border Patrol in Illinois started doing agricultural inspections on all vehicles entering the state last year. Depending who’s running the booth, could mean trouble for some kinds of people.”

“We’re trying to get to Chicago,” Harper says as they scramble past Fen and out of the truck bed. It’s a five-foot drop to the ground. The driver doesn’t help them down.

Morrow nudges Quan again. “That’s in Illinois, right?” they whisper.

Quan doesn’t answer. He pauses at the edge of the tailgate, looking at the driver, who has his face turned toward the soybeans. “Do you know how we can get there without running into State BP?”

The driver responds with silence. He waits while Morrow helps ease a gray-faced Fen to the edge of the dropped tailgate. Once the two of them drop to the asphalt, he slams the tailgate shut again. He hesitates for just a moment before turning his back on all four of them.

“Go through Wisconsin. There’s just one guy working the inspection station up there, name of Bouchard. He never gives anyone trouble.”

By the time Harper reaches the “you” in “thank you,” the driver’s-side door is already slamming shut again.

Fen stumbles into the fallow field as the truck vanishes down the long, straight stretch of road toward Illinois.

“Fen. You okay?” Harper stoops to pick up their bag and Fen’s.

Fen holds up a hand, then crouches, spasms, heaves. She stays hunched over for a long minute before straightening. “I’m fine,” she calls hoarsely. “Just carsick. Anyone have a charge on their palmset? I’m down to two percent.”

“I didn’t find a charging pad in the back of the truck, no,” Quan says in a tone that could be a joke or could be a rebuke.

Harper gives him a gentle shove on the shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. We can figure out where to plug in tomorrow. Right now, we need a place to sleep. Storm’s coming.”

 “Not for a while, though, right?” Morrow looks up at the thick bank of clouds on the horizon, doubtful.

Harper doesn’t answer him. “Fen, you ready?”

Fen nods and half straightens. Together, the four of them start across the field. They pick their way across the grass, pants tucked into socks, bones jellified from the hours of travel. It doesn’t take long for the road to vanish behind them. After a couple of minutes of walking, Fen looks better enough that Harper stops shooting worried glances at her.

Quan spots an abandoned-looking shack in the middle of a bald patch in the field. The windows are missing and there are holes in the roof that you can see right through, but the night is warm and a roof’s a roof, holes or none.

Harper starts by knocking on the front door. Loud, firm knocks. Cop knocks. They try three times before deciding nobody’s home. The front door isn’t locked, and there’s a palpable emptiness to the house when the four of them walk inside.

They make a lot of noise as they enter, pitching their voices loud like they’re warning off bears. They split into pairs and sweep quickly through the house. There’s not much territory to cover—one main room the size of the truck they rode here in, with a bed pushed into the far corner; a simple kitchen along one wall with a woodburning stove and a pump sink; a water closet that doesn’t merit more than a quick peek to confirm that nobody’s hiding inside.

Fen and Harper confer. “We should check outside too, but I don’t think anyone’s been in this place for a long time,” Fen says, sweeping a layer of sandy dust off the single skinny, buckled shelf above the sink.

“Gotta plug some of the holes in the walls. Wind’s already picking up,” Harper says, nodding to a gap between the boards where the pink light of the sunset peeks through. “Who wants which job?”

Fen volunteers to check outside. Her face visibly falls when Quan volunteers to walk the perimeter with her. He has his palmset and charging cable in his hand, like he’s hoping there might be a power outlet on the outside of the house. Morrow and Harper stay inside, using an old broom handle to tug a pile of rags out from under the bed to plug the gaps in the walls.

 Quan starts in on Fen the second they’re outside. “Why don’t you want to talk to me? Did I do something?” He steps around a haphazard stack of logs, pauses, turns around, and cups his hands around his mouth. “Hey, there’s a woodpile!”

“Thanks,” Harper yells from inside.

Fen pretends not to hear him. “Did you notice the updates on Daneka’s Fotoset?” She pulls out her palmset. The screen is dim and grayscale to save power. She rotates the palmset in her hand until it opens the photo-sharing app. Daneka’s latest update is right there: a picture of a butterfly, captioned

Just livin’ life to the fullest!

Quan glances at it, then looks quickly away. “Daneka didn’t post that.”

“No shit.” Fen nudges an old aluminum bucket with one foot. It tips over with a hollow thunk. “It’s been stuff like that every day. I just can’t figure out if it’s a bot takeover or if someone’s running the account.”

“The bots and the Feds train on the same material. Impossible to tell them apart based on voice, but I guess we’ll know which one it is if Daneka starts messaging you links to ‘investment opportunities.’” He rounds the corner of the house, then stops, tilts his head. “Hey, when we were inside, did you see a back door into the house?”

Fen follows his gaze. He’s looking at a narrow door set into the eastern wall of the house. She thinks for a moment, then answers firmly. “No. Definitely not.”

They approach warily. Fen raps on the door hard—it’s not as loud as Harper’s knock, but it’s loud enough that they hear Morrow yell “What was that?”from inside the house. After a few seconds pass without any other response, Fen glances at Quan. He nods and reaches past her for the doorknob.

The door sticks the first two times Quan pulls on it. On the third tug, he yanks it hard, and it opens with a sick, paint-stuck pop.

“It’s a canning pantry,” Fen says, peering inside at the spiderwebbed shelves that line the walls. A single broken bulb hangs from the ceiling; glass crunches underfoot as the two of them squeeze inside.

They both jump at a pounding on the wall. Morrow’s soft voice follows, barely muffled.  “Hey, who the fuck is in the walls?”

Quan sticks an arm through some cobwebs to smack a fist into the wall. “It’s just us,” he yells back. “We found a pantry!”

Morrow pauses. When they speak again, it sounds like they’re pressed right up against the other side of the wall. “Anything good in there?”

“Electricity,” Quan says, pointing to the broken bulb overhead. “Might be an outlet in here. Fen, can we use your palmset’s flashlight mode?”

“No,” she snaps. “It’ll kill the battery.”

“Which you’ll be able to recharge if we find an outlet,” Quan drawls with exaggerated patience. When Fen doesn’t immediately pull out her palmset, he snaps his fingers at her a few times. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Fen opens her mouth like she’s about to protest, but then she closes it again, shakes her head, pulls out her palmset. “Fuck you,” she mutters as she thumbs it into flashlight mode.

“You’re saying that because you know I’m right,” Quan replies. He drops into a low squat, then gets on his hands and knees to look under the shelves. “I think I see something back here.”

“An outlet?”

“You know what would help me figure that out is if you pointed that flashlight somewhere useful.”

Fen stoops to direct the light under the shelf. It lands on a tiny can, half buried in dust. “Don’t think you can plug into that,” she says.

Quan shoves his arm under the shelf. “There’s more back there,” he grunts. “I can feel something else. I can almost reach—if I just . . .” He strains for a moment, then pulls his hand out from the darkness, holding the tiny can and a small glass jar.

The light from Fen’s palmset starts to dim. “Shit,” she says, “let’s check the rest of this place out, quick. I’m almost out of charge.”

In the sixty seconds before Fen’s palmset dies, they find a few more dust-covered jars, and a wall outlet that’s so blackened with scorch marks that even Quan isn’t willing to risk plugging into it. They gather everything they’ve found and bring it inside, where most of the gaps in the walls are plugged with rags and a fire is already burning in the woodstove.

“Huh. Well. This is . . . I don’t want to say useless,” Harper says, looking over what they’ve found. “But I would have hoped for more actual food.”

Morrow squats down in front of the row of jars. “I don’t know. I love pickles. I haven’t had them in so long.” They examine a second, smaller jar, full of dark liquid. “I think this is olives? And that’s gotta be sauerkraut,” they add, nodding to a jar packed with dense white shreds.

“And this tiny one is tomato paste,” Fen finishes, prodding the tiny dusty can Quan rescued from beneath the shelves. “Plus, of course, we always have our beloved ewed tomat.” The “ewed tomat” can with the half-ripped-off label has been in Quan’s backpack for a little more than a year. It’s a little dented, but not enough to worry about—Fen has explained to Morrow a hundred times that unless her index finger can fit into the dent, it’s not dangerous.

Quan stands at the pump sink, working the foot lever until the faucet spits out brown water. He lets it run until the water is clear, then washes his hands. “I say we open all the jars, toss everything together, and call it a salad.”

“I can add these,” Morrow says suddenly, rummaging through their bag and coming up with a paper package. “A lady outside that scary gas station in Wyoming was selling them. I think they’re like homemade Slim Jims.” They open the package to reveal a row of wrinkled, finger-length sausages.

Fen stares at the sausages, lets out a sigh. “Harp, wanna go forage with me? Maybe there’s something we can add to all this.”

“I saw a shit-ton of wild dill out there,” Morrow chimes in.

“And I have pepper,” a new voice adds.

The four of them jump, wheel around to face the hole in the wall where a rag has been pulled free. A pair of pale eyes stares in at them. “What the fuck,” Quan snaps, just as Harper says, “Who are you?” and Fen lets out a startled “Who?!”

Morrow doesn’t speak. They simply straighten out of their perpetual slouch and square their shoulders, filling the little space and reminding the other three of what Morrow is like when they’re not working to stay small and quiet and gentle.

The stranger outside doesn’t move an inch, which is smart. “I don’t want any trouble,” he says in an easy voice. “I just thought maybe we could share a roof for the night? A storm’s coming in, and it isn’t going to be pretty out here in an hour or so.”

Everyone looks at Fen, because Fen’s a soft touch. She’s chewing on her lip. Then everyone looks at Harper, because Harper’s a tough row. They’re frowning. Just then, a gust of wind rattles the shack hard enough to knock dust loose from the rafters. “We gotta,” Harper whispers.

“Come on in,” Fen says to the stranger, “but if you fuck around, you’ll find out. Clear?”

“As a bell,” the stranger says. He comes around to the front door and opens it slow, peeking around the doorframe and glancing around before stepping in and dropping a heavy-looking duffel onto the floor. His eyes pause on Morrow, and he gives a slight nod. “Thanks for the hospitality. I’m glad you’ve got that woodstove going, it’s getting cold outside. Like I said, I’ve got peppercorns. Couple other things too, if you’re in need or looking to trade.”

He has a soft accent, something that sounds like it comes from miles and miles of cornfields. He’s scrawny, short, and thin as a whistle, with hair the color of nothing. He crosses the room right away, pulling a rag out of his pocket and shoving it into the gap he’d pulled it out of in the first place.

When he lifts his hand to shove the rag into that hole in the wall, Quan lets out a soft gasp. Fen’s the only one to hear it. She follows his gaze to the stranger’s hands and gives Harper a nudge. Harper sees it too, and kicks Morrow’s ankle, signaling with her eyes.

The stranger has a bracelet of runes tattooed on his wrist.

“My name’s Peter,” the stranger says. “Like I said, I’ve got peppercorns, and bouillon, and some juniper berries too. All dried. And a few bay leaves, and—you won’t believe me, but I’ll show you—a can of SPAM.” He says this last part with a little laugh.

“I haven’t had SPAM since I was a kid,” Quan murmurs.

Harper cuts him a sharp glance, then returns their attention to Peter. “Sure, show us. What are you doing with all those spices?”

“I collect ’em on the road,” he answers, unzipping his duffel. The runes are still on clear display. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Makes it easier to get folks on board for a little temporary cohabitation,” he adds, aiming a wink over his shoulder.

“I’m gonna grab some of that dill outside before the storm lands on us,” Harper says. “Morrow, come with?”

Morrow nods. The two of them step outside, walk a few paces, and begin a whispered conference.

“Okay, which runes mean what?” Harper hisses. “You’re into all that spooky shit, right?”

Morrow’s eyes go wide with didn’t-study panic. “I mean, I’m into some spooky shit, but I don’t know anything about runes. I don’t touch that stuff on account of. You know.” They nod back toward the shack.

“Right. That’s the problem. How can we tell?”

They stop and stare at each other, glancing back at the shack, both trying to figure out how they can determine what Peter’s tattoo means to him. It could be that he believes in magic—or it could be that he believes in the inherent superiority of an imaginary master race. There’s no safe way to ask Are you a pagan or are you a white supremacist? but for everyone’s sake, they need to find out, and they need to find out fast.

By the time they get back to the shack, each clutching a fistful of dill, Fen is already cooking. She’s squatting on the floor over the pried-loose shelf from the wall, dicing pickles with an unfamiliar hunting knife while Quan unwraps the foil from a bouillon cube. A collapsible pot of water is steaming on top of the woodstove.

“What are we making?” Harper asks, her eyes fixed on the hunting knife.

Fen glances up, her eyes darting to Peter before returning to the pickles she’s chopping. “I remembered a recipe from the box that should work okay, now that we have Peter’s help. It’s a soup my dad used to make when any of us were sick. I’m making a half-recipe because his recipe makes enough to feed, like, ten people. He called it pickle soup,” she adds. Her voice stretches a little tighter as she stares down at the knife in her hand. “But it has another name I can’t remember right now. A Russian name. Peter, do you know anything about Russian food?”

“’Fraid not,” Peter says mildly, popping the lid off the can of tomato paste. “But I’m sure it’ll be delicious, whatever it is.”

Morrow shows Fen the dill they collected. “Will this help?”

“It’s perfect,” Fen says with a tense smile. “Give it a rinse, will you?”

“I’ll get it,” Peter says, rising to his feet and holding out his hands. He passes close to Quan on his way to the sink. “Scuse me.”

Quan shifts his weight forward, dropping the bouillon cube into the pot. “No worries. Can I grab those spices out of your bag?”

“Help yourself. Oh, and if anyone needs to charge a palmset, I’ve got a crank charger in there too,” Peter replies, not looking back. He keeps his eyes trained on the dill in the sink as he rinses it. It’s a clear signal: You can look through my shit, I won’t stop you.

Quan darts to the duffel and unzips it. “Are the spices in jars or what?” he calls over his shoulder, already searching through Peter’s things.

“Ziptop bags. Can’t miss them, they’re all the way at the bottom,” Peter says, still washing the dill, even though it has to be clean by now. “Just pull them all out and we can see what’s useful.”

Fen holds up the ripped, water-rippled recipe card up to the firelight from the woodstove. “Looks like we need peppercorns, allspice berries, and bay leaves. They can go right into the pot. Oh, and is there celery salt?”

“Yeah,” Quan says. “He has all that stuff. Plus this thing,” he adds, lifting out a small, matte-black cube with a folding hand crank on one side and two power outlets on top.

As Quan stands, Peter slowly turns around with the dill. His gaze is perfectly steady. “Did you find anything else that could be of use?”

Quan shakes his head once. “Nope. This is all we need, right, Fen?”

Fen stares hard at Quan. “You read the recipe card. You know as well as I do.”

“Then we’re good to go,” Quan says briskly. He crosses the room and drops the spices next to Fen’s makeshift cutting board, then grabs his palmset and charger and plugs in to the black cube.

“I’ll take the first shift,” Morrow says, dropping to the ground beside Quan. They have Fen’s palmset and plug it in next to Quan’s. Then they unfold the hand crank and start turning it hard and fast, waiting for the charging symbol to appear on the two palmsets.

“I was going to—” Quan starts, but then he catches a glimpse of Morrow’s dark, determined expression and changes his mind. “Thanks,” he says instead.

Everything moves briskly from there. Morrow charges the palmsets. Harper watches the pot on the stove as the bouillon cube dissolves and the spices simmer it into a fragrant broth. Fen inspects the wrinkly black olives by the firelight, making sure they’re not growing any fuzz before she slices them up. Peter shows them all how to use his hunting knife to cube the Spam without taking it out of its metal tin, while Quan discovers a flat length of cast iron under the woodstove.

“Is this a griddle?” he asks, holding it up and prodding at the lip around the edge. “It looks like—”

“That’s perfect!” Fen cries out when she sees it.

Quan looks startled, but hands over the griddle with a slow smile. “Does this mean you forgive me for whatever I did that made you stop talking to me?”

Fen pulls away, puts the griddle on top of the woodstove beside the pot. “No.”

“Wait, why not? Fen, c’mon. Quit being so—”

“So what?” Fen whips around on him, her voice taut.

Harper raises an eyebrow at Quan. “I wouldn’t,” they warn.

Across the room, Peter sits on the edge of the narrow bed, watching the four of them. The little shack is too small for him to pretend not to hear the exchange, but he has the good grace not to try to intervene.

Quan throws his hands into the air. “I’m sick of this,” he says. “Fen keeps acting like I took a shit in her backpack, and all I’ve done this whole time is—”

“Is be a huge asshole,” Morrow murmurs.

Quan freezes. If Fen or Harper had said this, it would be Quan’s cue to get into the thick of a fight. But Morrow—gentle, kind Morrow, with their cauliflower ears and scar-hatched knuckles—never says fighting words.

“What did I do?” Quan asks. The question has an edge on it, but not much of one.

Morrow shifts their shoulders. They don’t break their rhythm on the hand crank. “You just get mean for no reason sometimes. Like earlier today, when you called me a gorilla. That was mean.”

“I just meant—you know, you’re tall and strong and stuff,” Quan says, his voice faltering as he looks to Harper and Fen for backup and doesn’t find any. “That’s all.”

Morrow huffs out a barely there laugh. “Okay,” they say. “If that’s who you wanna be.”

Quan swallows hard. Harper and Fen look at each other, then at the floor. Morrow keeps cranking the charger until Quan’s phone lets out a chime.

“I want to charge mine next,” Harper says. They go to their backpack, and Morrow unplugs Quan’s palmset and hands it over, and the movement breaks the surface tension on the bubble of their fight just enough for the meal they’re preparing to come back into focus.

Peter clears his throat from the corner. “That griddle should be hot by now.”

The cubed Spam goes onto the griddle. Peter slices the sausage into rounds right over it, each tiny coin dropping onto the hot iron with an immediate sizzle.

“This would be better if we had onions.” Fen sighs.

“Be better if we had a big leather sofa,” Peter replies with a grin. “But here we are.”

The tomato paste slides out of its tiny dusty can onto the griddle, and Fen uses a spoon to stir it until it starts to stick to the metal. Then she calls to Harper, who’s deep in quiet conversation with Quan near the bed. “Harp, can you bring me those pickles?”

Harper looks up sharply. “Morrow, can you get it?”

Fen’s palmset chimes. “Perfect timing. Fen, you’re all charged up.” Morrow steps away from the charger and brings Fen the shelf-turned-cutting board with the chopped pickles and olives on it.

Fen slides the pickles onto the skillet, leaving the olives. She splashes some broth from the pot onto the hot metal, too. The moisture loosens the caramelizing tomato paste just enough for Fen to scrape up all the bits that are sticking to the cast iron.

“Shit,” Fen says, looking from the griddle to the cooking pot.

“What’s the matter?” Morrow asks.

“I need to put all this stuff,” she says, gesturing to the rapidly drying mixture of meat and tomato paste and pickles, “into there.” She points to the pot. “But if I pick up the griddle, it’ll burn the fuck out of my hands.”

Peter steps forward. “I’ve got it,” he says. He strips off his denim jacket.

Fen’s eyes are on the food, but Harper, Morrow, and Quan’s eyes all lock onto Peter’s bare arms as he uses his jacket to shield his hands and picks up the hot griddle, tipping the contents into the pot. The only tattoos visible on Peter are the bracelet of runes and a generic compass rose on one bicep. There’s nothing obvious there, nothing that speaks to what danger he might represent.

“What’s next?” Peter asks.

Fen consults the recipe card. “Gotta let this simmer for a few minutes, then rinse off some of that sauerkraut and add it in. We could probably get away with not rinsing it,” she adds, “but . . . it might be real funky.”

Peter opens the sauerkraut and gives it a whiff. “Could go either way. Your palmset’s going off,” he adds, looking to the lit-up screen on the floor.

Fen has the cutting board in her hands again, is about to slide the chopped olives into the pot. “Morrow, can you grab it?”

“Oh fuck,” Morrow whispers when they’ve got the screen in front of them.

“What?” Fen asks, dropping the olives into the pot.

“It’s a voice message from Daneka.”

The room freezes. Peter doesn’t seem to notice. He lifts the sauerkraut jar. “What do y’all think? Should I rinse this?” When nobody answers, he looks up and his face drops. His eyes flick to his duffel bag. “What happened?”

“It’s nothing,” Quan says quickly. He crosses the room to look at the screen in Morrow’s hand.

Fen wipes olive brine onto her jeans. “We got a message from a friend.”

Peter glances at his bag again, even less subtly this time. He takes a few steps back from the sink, looks ready to bolt. “A local friend?”

“A friend from back home,” Harper says. “Fen, do you want to listen to it?”

Fen shakes her head. “I’m almost done cooking.” She sounds tense.

“Fen,” Quan says, reaching for her arm.

She jerks away from his touch. “Don’t. Fine. We can listen to it.” She looks down at her palmset, swallows hard, and presses the notification.

Hey, it’s me! Just wanted to know if you’re still up for a birthday dinner. Let me know what the plan is and how everyone’s doing. Love you!

It’s Daneka’s voice – her unmistakable chainsmoker rasp — but something sounds wrong. They can all hear it.

Fen slips her palmset into her pocket. She turns and uses a fork to add some sauerkraut into the pot. “This would be better with onions,” she says again. Her voice has all the color squeezed out of it.

“That wasn’t her.” Quan strides briskly across the room, headed nowhere at all, then turns on his heel to stare hard at his friends. “Right? That definitely wasn’t her.”

Harper sits on the edge of the bed. “We can’t know.”

Quan lets out a short, sharp laugh. “That sounded like a robot. It was definitely a fake! C’mon, Harp—”

“It was real,” Peter interrupts. “I used to code artificial-speech software. They don’t transition between similar sounds that smoothly. You heard when she said ‘wanted to know’? The ‘d’ in ‘wanted’ flowed right into the ‘t’ in ‘to.’ That’s a human-speech thing. Really hard to smooth out virtually.”

Morrow wheels around to face him. “Who did you write code for?”

His shoulders are tight, his face blank. “The company’s closed now. They got bought out during the last big market crash.”

“What company?” Harper demands.

He swallows hard. Takes a few slow steps toward his bag, then uses a foot to flip it over. There’s a faded logo on the side, barely visible in the flickering light from the fire in the woodstove. The twisting double-S logo of the multimedia conglomerate that used to dominate the digital newsletter marketplace. “We developed an integrated voice-to-text service.”

“You mean proprietary,” Harper says. “So you worked for the company everyone worked for. Why were you so squirrely about it just now? What, are you not a ‘champion of free speech’?” All the venom in her voice pools at the end of the sentence.

“I don’t agree with everything they—”

“Dinner’s ready,” Fen interrupts. “Peter, can I use your jacket again?”

He brings his jacket to the woodstove and uses it to pull the cooking pot off the heat. The soup is still bubbling as he carries it to the middle of the room. Harper sets down a couple of rags, and Peter sets the pot on top of them. Morrow passes out spoons.

The five of them sit on the floor around the pot. Fen’s eyes are dull as she stares into the soup she’s made them. Harper is staring at Peter’s wrist.

“What did you say this soup is called?” Peter asks.

“That part of the recipe card is stained,” Fen replies. “I couldn’t read it.”

Quan coughs. “I remember. You mentioned it once, back when we first met. You called it solyanka.” He says it slow, his lips working to fit a memory of Fen’s mouth.

Fen looks up at him, surprised. “You remember stuff from all the way back then?”

A small smile ghosts across Quan’s face, but he doesn’t meet Fen’s eyes. “I remember everything you say.”

Fen hesitates. “Quan, I—”

“I’m sorry for being a dick,” Quan interrupts. “I’m gonna try to do that less. Might take me a little trying, though. But I am gonna try. I love you guys.”

Harper sniffs loudly. “Love you too. Dick.”

Morrow tastes the soup, burns their mouth. “Ow. Fuck. Ow. Where’s the dill?” they ask, their voice distorted by pain.

Fen glances behind her. “I forgot—”

“I’ll grab it.” Peter pushes himself to his feet, walks to the sink. Harper’s eyes track him. The hunting knife and cutting board are still in the sink. He reaches past them, grabs the very clean dill, brings it back, and hands it to Morrow.

“Thanks.” Morrow tears off a fistful of feathery green fronds, drops them into the pot.

“It’d be better with onions,” Fen says, blowing on a spoonful of soup straight from the pot. “But it’s not bad. That company you worked for—they’re based in Chicago, right?”

“Yeah, that’s where I’m coming from,” Peter says. He leans forward to dip his spoon into the pot. “How come?”

Fen looks up at him, pins him with her eyes. “That’s where we’re going. Do you still know anyone there?”

He thinks for a moment. “Depends who you want to meet. Why Chicago? There’s not much left of it.”

“Always wanted to go. Bright lights,” Fen says. “Big city.”

Peter nods. “I don’t know anyone there. But I know people on the way. Got a buddy who can get us across the state border to Wisconsin and put us up for a night or two, if that’s the route you want to take.”

Harper raises their eyebrows at Fen. Fen nods, then frowns at Morrow. Morrow nods, then nudges Quan. Quan takes a long sip of soup, clears his throat, and nods.

“Sounds good,” Fen says to Peter. “We’ll make our plan in the morning.”

The five of them eat the rest of their dinner in silence. Outside, the wind howls across the fallow field, yanking at the rags in the walls, whipping the petals off the wildflowers that grow on the side of the road.

Fen’s Solyanka  

2 bay leaves
6–8 peppercorns
3–5 allspice berries
1 shake celery salt
5 cups water
1 bouillon cube
2 cups sauerkraut, drained but not rinsed
1 pound sliced sausage
1 can Spam, cubed
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
3 large dill pickles, chopped
¾ cup black olives, sliced
1 can ewed tomat
Salt
Pepper
Optional: dill, chopped

Instructions

1. In a very large pot, combine the water, spices, and beef base. Boil for 30 minutes.  
2. Add the sausage and Spam to the pan. The sausage will release some fat, which will fry the Spam.
3. Add tomato paste to the skillet and stir until it starts to brown; then, add the dill pickles and a little broth to the skillet. Stir to loosen all fond from the bottom of the pan, then transfer contents of the skillet to the cooking pot.
4. Add olives and ewed tomat to the cooking pot. Simmer 5–10 minutes until heated through. 
5. Serve with dill. 

Have You Eaten? Part 3: Morrow’s Comfort

Fen’s Sister’s Gnocchi

350 g butternut squash
1 egg
2–3 cups flour
Salt
Pepper

1. Cut the squash in half. Rub it all over with oil. Place it face down on a baking sheet and roast at 425 degrees for 25 minutes.
2. Remove the squash from the oven and let it cool completely, about 1 hour.
3. Remove the peel and mash the squash into a smooth paste. Form the paste into a mound and form a well in the center.
4. Crack 1 egg into the well. Stir with fingers to combine.
5. Add flour in batches, working the flour in until a sticky, firm dough forms. Add a big pinch of salt and a healthy amount of pepper with the first batch of flour.
6. Knead for 1–2 minutes.
7. Form into a ball and rest for 20 minutes.
8. Cut the ball into eight equal parts. Roll each part out into a snake the width of your thumb. Cut each snake into 1-inch sections using a knife or pasta cutter.
9. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Add the gnocchi in batches, stirring gently once to prevent sticking. Once the gnocchi bob to the top of the water, remove/drain and serve.
10. Optional: Fry after boiling to get a crisp exterior.

Suggested lemon ricotta sauce: Combine the zest of 1 lemon, 1 cup ricotta, lots of black pepper, and about 1 ladleful of pasta water. Stir to combine. Consistency should be thick and smooth.

The old farmhouse has thin walls, so everyone in the kitchen knows it when Peter and Morrow go from fucking to fighting. The soft thumps and creaks from upstairs are interrupted by the sound of Morrow asking a question over and over, at increasing volume, and then there’s a crash that is unmistakably the sound of a body hitting a wall. And then another crash, that is unmistakably the sound of the same body hitting the wall again.

Quan is the first one to move. He and Harper and Fen have been processing oranges all morning for Missus Bouchard. They’ve been seated at the kitchen table—Quan slicing off thin curls of peel, Harper pulling off the white pith, Fen smashing the oranges through a wide-mesh strainer and into a huge pot in her lap. Quan still has the paring knife in his hand as he gets to his feet and heads for the stairs at the sound of the second impact.

Fen is next. She sets the pot on the table, careful even in her haste—that pot of pulp is their days’ rent—and by the third time they hear the body hit the wall, she and Quan are halfway up the stairs.

Harper doesn’t follow right away, because Fen is already on the way, and they don’t want to move until they know there’s a real problem. They finish pulling pith off the orange in their hand, adding it to the pile of foamy white discard on the scarred wooden kitchen table. They listen as, upstairs, Quan and Fen burst into Peter and Morrow’s bedroom. They don’t stand up until they hear Fen’s voice shouting a clear, high “What the fuck?!”

At the sound of that, Harper sets down their orange and makes for the stairs. They take their time. With each step they ascend, they hear the voices upstairs rise. Everyone is talking over each other. Harper can make out “explain” and “are you really” and “don’t fucking move” and “Daneka.”

They stand in the bedroom doorway and take in the scene. Morrow is in their underwear, breathing like a street-loose bull. Peter is curled at Morrow’s feet, naked, head tucked, hands clasped protectively over the back of his neck. Quan and Fen are standing near the bed, peering down at an unfamiliar white palmset.

Harper leans against the doorframe. “S’goin’ on?”

Morrow looks up. Their face is alight with rage. “He’s not who he says he is.”

“I never said I didn’t know her,” Peter says. The words come out muffled, thick with pain. “Babe, please. If you’ll just let me explain—”

Morrow’s body twists with liquid speed. They drive their heel hard into the back of Peter’s thigh, and the bone-deep thump of the impact shakes the air in the room. “We’ve been here for a fucking month,” Morrow says. They usually keep their voice small. It is not small now. “And you never thought to mention that you know Daneka? Never occurred to you?”

Harper straightens, their brows drawing together. “Wait. He knows Daneka?”

Fen is still staring down at the palmset. “Seems like.”

They kick out again, but Peter has curled himself up tighter, and the blow doesn’t land as hard this time. “You didn’t think you should tell us? Not once when we’ve been sitting around talking about how worried we are? Not once when you were inside of me?”

“Morrow, maybe you don’t want to—” Quan says, but Fen puts a hand on his shoulder and he falls silent.

Morrow squats down and grasps a fistful of Peter’s hair, wrenching his head back. “You remember what Fen said when we first met you?”

Peter looks up at Morrow the way a broke-neck deer on the side of the road looks at the receding taillights of the truck that put it there. Blood coats his lips and chin. “Wh—?”

“She said that if you fuck around,” Morrow growls, “you’ll find out.”

The hand that isn’t clenched around Peter’s hair forms a fist. The fist is the size of a brick. The fist is the weight of a brick. The fist is as hard as a brick. Peter closes his eyes, tries to twist out of Morrow’s grip as they draw the fist back, but there’s nowhere to go.

The blow lands with killing force. Fen and Quan and Harper feel it in their teeth and all of them wonder at the same time whether they’ve just watched a man die. But then Morrow pulls the fist back again, and Peter sucks in a breath of whistling pain, and they know that—at least for now—he’s alive.

 Before Morrow can strike Peter again, Harper is out of the doorway and in the room. They step in close enough to press the front of their thigh against the bloody plane of Morrow’s knuckles. “Don’t,” they say. So Morrow doesn’t.

Harper and Quan grab Peter by the underarms and haul him to his feet. “Fen, you got Morrow?”

“On it.”

“We’ll be right back.” Harper says. They and Quan drag Peter down the stairs without stopping to let him get his feet under him. After a minute, the front door of the old farmhouse slams.

Fen looks at Morrow, trying to decide what kind of help they might need. She’d said “on it” when what she’d really meant was “you go ahead and handle what you’re handling, you can trust that I’ll handle things up here.” But she doesn’t know what handling things up here actually means.

“Is all his stuff in his bag?” Fen finally asks. Morrow shakes their head, points to a pile of clothes in one corner. Fen shoves the clothes into the now-familiar duffel, then opens the window and peers down at the naked, bleeding man in the front yard. “Catch,” she calls, and then she drops the bag out the window. She doesn’t wait to see if it falls on top of him.

As she turns around, Morrow is pulling on a shirt. “Sorry you had to see that,” they say softly.

Fen doesn’t say that it’s okay, because she knows Morrow’s not okay. And she doesn’t say that she’s surprised Morrow let Peter live, because that would only make them feel worse about letting out the violence they work so hard to contain. She doesn’t say that she can’t believe what she saw on Peter’s palmset, because she doesn’t want to remind Morrow of the thing that made them let their fury loose in the first place.

So she shoves her hands into her pockets and asks, “You hungry?”

Morrow looks up at her and their face is raw and their eyes are shining and she can see all the way down the deep dark tunnel that shame has drilled through them. “Yeah,” they say. They’re obviously lying, but that doesn’t matter. As long as they’re answering at all. As long as they’re still here.

“It’s almost time for lunch. Come downstairs. I’m gonna make something cool.”

Quan and Harper are waiting for them in the kitchen. They’re back to peeling oranges, and the bright fog of citrus oil is overwhelming. It smells like a day in the sun. Morrow flinches a little, then breathes in deep through their nose. They linger in the kitchen door, filling the frame, watching Quan strip curls off an orange with that tiny paring knife. “How’d Missus Bouchard get oranges all the way up here this time of year?” they ask at last.

“I guess her husband seized them at the border crossing,” Quan answers. He doesn’t add a barb—gentleness is something he’s been trying on lately, with mixed success, but it’s a relief that he’s managing it right now.

“Yeah, he pulled the truck out of line right before he got sick,” Fen adds. “Missus Bouchard told me this morning. She said State BP was so tied up with trying to deny his sick leave that they didn’t notice the seized oranges never ended up anywhere.”

Harper snorts. “I believe her exact words were, ‘If they want the fucking oranges they can come try me.’”

Morrow’s face twitches in the same place a smile would go.

They take over for Fen at the strainer, smashing the peeled oranges with a wooden spoon. Their movements are methodical, rhythmic. The work needs doing, and they need to do it until they’re back in their own body, their own mind. Their own promises to themself.

This is how the four of them—five, including Peter—have been earning their keep at the Bouchard farm for the past month. They’ve doing odd jobs in exchange for permission to sleep in the old farmhouse on the Bouchard property, biding their time while they wait for Bouchard himself to recover from the SARS-15 that’s currently keeping him bedbound. Once he’s well enough to get back to work at the border crossing, they’ll be able to get into Illinois safely.

To Chicago. Maybe, if everything goes right, to Daneka.

Fen and Quan are thinking about Daneka right now. About her face in that video on Peter’s palmset. Harper didn’t see it, and they’re waiting to hear about it so they can understand what happened upstairs. Morrow isn’t thinking about anything. They can’t, not after what just happened upstairs. Their skull is filled with soft white static, like the pith that cushions the wet flesh of an orange.

Fen consults a recipe card from her family recipe box. She cleans the counter thoroughly, scrubbing it down with soap and hot water twice over. Then, when she’s satisfied that the counter is ready, she pulls a pan out of the oven. It has the leftover half of a roasted butternut squash on it. The other half was dinner the night before, shared between the five of them along with a few eggs from Missus Bouchard’s chickens. This half has been sitting in the oven waiting to get used for something.

Fen knows what she wants to do with it now. She uses a spoon to scrape the peel away from the flesh of the roasted squash, then crushes it into paste with her hands. She scoops the paste right onto the clean kitchen counter, shapes it into a hill, and makes a divot in the center of the pile.

“Morrow, can you give me a hand?” She holds up her palms, which are coated in sticky orange squash. “I’m all gross.”

Morrow looks up at her with empty eyes. “Sure. What do you need?”

At Fen’s instruction, Morrow pulls out the last of Missus Bouchard’s eggs and cracks it into the well in the middle of the crushed squash. She mixes the egg and the squash with her hands. The mixture makes a shockingly awful wet noise that draws a cackle out of Quan and a skeptical frown out of Harper.

Then Fen asks Morrow to grab the flour. Missus Bouchard gave a full sack of good white flour to Harper as payment for a full day of fence repair, and they’ve got half the sack left. It looks to be made from an old version of the Wisconsin state flag, from back before the state took the e pluribus unum seal off and replaced it with a second, larger badger.

Morrow stares down at the deep blue fabric blankly until Fen says their name. She has them add a fistful of flour to the heap of goo in front of her. Just a fistful. Then another, and then another, slowly. At first Fen uses her fingers to gently stir, mixing the flour in; then her hands begin to knead as the combination forms a thick dough that pulls away from the surface beneath it. Soon enough, the dough in front of Fen has turned into a smooth orange ball.

Morrow is watching her hands, the dough, the nearly clean counter. Some of the blankness is melting away from their face. “That was cool,” they murmur.

Fen smacks the taut surface of the dough with her palm. “Gotta let it sit for twenty minutes. Then I’ll need your help again.”

“Twenty minutes,” Harper says, not looking up from the half-cleaned orange in their hands, “seems like exactly the right amount of time to talk about what happened upstairs.”

Fen draws a slow breath. Quan puts down his paring knife. Morrow’s shoulders slump. Harper looks to each of them with hard, patient eyes.

Morrow speaks first. “I don’t know how to explain the video.”

“How did you even see the video?” Quan asks. “Weren’t you two right in the middle of—”

“His palmset was on the nightstand. I saw Daneka’s name come up on a notification,” Morrow says. They’re speaking like there’s a candle in front of their lips that mustn’t go out. The others lean forward to hear. “I grabbed it and looked. He tried to stop me, but he— that was a mistake. You know?”

Harper nods. They understand mistakes like this one better than anyone. “Did you see the whole thing?”

Morrow shrugs. “It was a video. I saw it, but he was trying to explain and get the palmset away, so I didn’t really get to watch all the way through. Quan and Fen did, though, I think.”

“Sort of,” Quan says. “But I didn’t understand what I was seeing.”

Fen’s got her arms folded tight across her chest. She’s chewing on the inside of her cheek. She drops her chin to her chest and her dark curls, longish now and dry from travel, fall over her eyes. Her deliberation lasts long enough to fill the kitchen with a low hum of tension.

Quan snaps first. “For fuck’s sake. What?”

Fen looks up at him, eyes narrowed. “I’m thinking.”

“Obviously.”

“I’m thinking about whether the thing I wanna say is a bad idea. For Morrow.”

Morrow’s brow tightens. “For me?”

“I don’t want this to make things harder for you.”

Harper cracks a knuckle against the table. “I think,” they say, “Morrow can handle themself.”

“I know that,” Fen says. “We all know that. I’m more worried about—” And then she stops herself, because she doesn’t know how to say what she’s worried about. It’s the tight coil of violence that lives in the center of Morrow, it’s the whipcrack of their fist, it’s the way they stop feeling pain when it’s someone else’s turn.

Morrow’s shoulders draw down toward their sternum and their eyes find a spot on the floor. “I promise I won’t hurt any of you,” they whisper. “No matter what you saw on that palmset. I wouldn’t. I won’t.”

Quan rubs his forehead with the heel of one hand. His eyes have gone glossy. “Fen’s not afraid of you. Nobody here is afraid of you. It’s just—”

“I don’t want to make it harder,” Fen says again. “But. Okay.” She untucks one arm from across her chest and reaches into her back pocket. When her hand reappears, she’s got the white palmset between her index and middle fingers. “I kept this.”

Harper rises and crosses the kitchen. Their movements are slow, their knees soft, their footfalls quiet. They slowly put their body between Morrow and Fen before taking the palmset out of Fen’s hand. Their back is still toward Morrow when they say, “I don’t know if Morrow wants to see this.”

“I do,” Morrow says quickly. “I want to see her.”

Quan drums his fingers on the table. “Morrow is fine. You two need to calm down.”

The way Harper turns to face Quan has just as much danger in it as the fist Morrow made an hour before. “You want me more calm than I am now?”

“I’m not fine,” Morrow cuts in. “But that’s okay. I want to see the video. The video isn’t the thing that made me—um.” They swallow hard. “That made me upset. I don’t think it’ll make me upset again now.”

Harper approaches the table and stands next to Quan. Morrow moves to stand next to them. They rest their palms flat on the surface of the table. Their knuckles are swelling; a deep red bruise is forming on the biggest knuckle of their right hand. Fen winds up behind Quan’s chair. She tugs on his hair and he swats her hand away.

The video is one of many in a long series of messages from Daneka to Peter. There are no responses from Peter in the chat. All of Daneka’s messages are videos, going back about a month.

“What was the date when we met Peter?” Fen asks softly.

“Not sure,” Quan replies.

Morrow sniffs. “It was about a month ago. But I’m not sure if it was before or after that first message from Daneka.”

They play through the videos, and it quickly becomes clear that they’re all the same video. Kind of. In each one, Daneka stands in a field, squinting into bright sunlight, shading her eyes with the flat of her hand. Her auburn curls toss wildly in a strong wind. There are flowers behind her, yellow and white ones, and some trees in the middle distance. She turns slowly to reveal a massive, shining lake that stretches to the horizon. As she’s turning, she speaks, her voice cigarette-raspy and wind distorted but still as musical as always. “You guys wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is here! I found the most amazing queer community. We have our own little farm and a communal kitchen that Fen’s gonna love! Come soon? I miss you!”

Then she blows a kiss into the camera, and the video is over.

The four of them watch each video. The first one doesn’t have the kiss—it just cuts off after “I miss you.” In the second one, Daneka just says “amazing community,” but in the third one, the word queer comes back in. Sometimes the flowers change color. Sometimes it seems to be later in the day, sometimes earlier. The second-to-last video is where the line about the communal kitchen appears.

Harper blows out a slow breath. “So.”

“We’re fucked,” Quan says. “Should have let Morrow kill him.”

Fen scrubs her hands across her upper arms. “We’re not fucked yet.”

Quan twists in his chair to look at her. “Explain how. That guy is clearly working with someone who wants to fuck us over somehow, and who has the ability to make this quality of deepfake. Peter knows who we are, and he knows where we are, and he knows where we’re going. Show me a gap we can slip out of. Tell me what I’m missing here.”

“Right,” Fen says. “That dough’s been resting long enough. Morrow, want to help me get lunch going?”

Quan throws his hands into the air. “Great. Yeah, go cook. I’ll just sit here and wait for sirens.”

Fen walks into the kitchen. Her lips are tight. She grabs the big kitchen knife and uses it to cut the ball of dough into eight sections, never letting the blade come into contact with the countertop. “I just need to think.”

“What’s there to think about? We need to leave. I’m going to go pack. Harp, want me to pack up your stuff too?”

“Not yet,” Harper replies, their eyes fixed on Fen. “I want us to have a plan first.”

“I need a minute to think,” Fen says again.

Harper’s reply is low. “I heard you the first time. I’m not rushing you. Don’t let Quan get in your head.”

“He’s not in my head.”

Harper doesn’t say anything to that. They don’t need to.

Fen gives Morrow an are you helping or not look, and Morrow comes to the kitchen. Fen sprinkles flour across the countertop, then demonstrates how to roll each section of dough into a long snake. The width of the snake is halfway between Morrow’s massive thumb and Fen’s slender one. “Gentle hands,” Fen says. “The squash makes the dough break easier.”

Morrow’s hands are gentle. They’re as gentle as a kid holding an egg, as gentle as a cat pawing at a cobweb. They don’t break the dough. Fen leaves them to the work of rolling out the sections while she fills a tall pot with water.

“I think we do need to leave,” she says slowly. “But I don’t think it’s an emergency.”

At the kitchen table, Harper has taken up Quan’s paring knife and is methodically peeling oranges. “Why not?”

“Because whoever Peter was working with—if they’re after us, they already know where we are, right? It’s not like he can go bring them any new information.”

“But now they know that we know that they know.” Harper pauses, mouthing the sentence to themself again to make sure they’ve gotten it right. “They aren’t spying on us in secret anymore.”

“So there’s no reason not to just come scoop us up directly,” Morrow murmurs. “I’m done with these, Fen.”

Fen looks over the lengths of dough and smiles. “These are perfect.” She hands Morrow the big knife, handle-first, and shows them how to cut the dough into inch-long sections. “It’s good for them to be kind of pinched down at the edges like that. I don’t think they’re going to come scoop us up from here. They wouldn’t raid this place.” She doesn’t pause between these two sentences, and it takes both Harper and Morrow a moment to realize that they’re not connected.

“Because Bouchard’s a statie?” Harper considers this. “I don’t know.”

Morrow frowns down at the dough as they cut it. “He’s a state border cop. Border cops and regular cops don’t protect each other the same way they protect themselves.”

“We don’t know that Peter’s working with state cops. Could be feds,” Harper offers.

Fen leans her elbows on the kitchen counter and buries her face in her hands. “We can’t know. And if we don’t know what’s coming, then we can’t stay here. But if we run—if we don’t get to Chicago . . . Fuck. That’s where I told Daneka we’d be. We’ll miss her if we don’t find a way into the state and this is our best bet.”

“I’m done with these,” Morrow says again, gesturing to the neat piles of miniature pillows on the counter.

Harper drops the last peeled orange into the pile on the table. “Perfect timing. Morrow, you come pull pith off these things. I gotta go.”

Fen lifts her head out of her hands. “You’re leaving?”

Harper grabs their jacket off the back of a kitchen chair. “Not leaving-leaving. Just heading over to the New House to talk to Missus Bouchard.”

“About what?”

They pull the jacket on. “To tell her we’re almost done prepping her fruit for marmalade. And to ask after her husband. Maybe he’s ready to go back to work. Maybe he’s picking up a shift tomorrow.”

“There’s no way,” Fen says warily. “She’d have said something if he was better.”

Harper shrugs. “S’polite to ask. Morrow, finish off these oranges so I can bring Missus Bouchard over to pick up her pot of goo. And Fen?”

Fen waits.

“Don’t worry,” Harper says. It’s almost soft, the way they say it. “I’m not leaving you alone. Not yet.”

And then they’re gone.

Morrow sits at the dining table and starts picking pith off the oranges with quick, careful fingers. Behind Fen, the water on the stove starts to boil. She heaves a hard, sharp sigh. 

“I’m sorry,” Morrow says after a few minutes.

Fen drops two handfuls of gnocchi into the boiling water. “For what?”

“For being scary. Don’t say I wasn’t, I know I was.”

Fen nods down into the pot as she gives the water a gentle stir. “You were. But it’s okay. You were keeping us safe.”

They’re quiet for a long time. Then, so softly Fen almost doesn’t hear it at all, they murmur, “I don’t want to be a guard dog.”

Quan comes stomping down the stairs before Fen can reply. “There’s blood all over the floor in that bedroom. We got time for me to clean it up before we go?”

“Plenty of time,” Fen says. She and Quan negotiate around each other in the kitchen—the sink is too close to the stove, and there’s not quite room for her to watch the pot while Quan rummages for cleaning supplies. When Quan straightens, a rag in one hand and an unlabeled spray bottle in the other, he and Fen are only a couple of inches apart.

 He studies her face for a moment. “Are we fighting?”

“No,” Fen says firmly. Then she lets herself smile. “We’re just figuring things out. All of us. Me and Harper are working on a plan. It’s gonna be okay.”

“You’re sure?” Quan studies Fen’s eyes, her forehead, her mouth. “Is Harper leaving?”

“They said they’re not. I believe them.”

“If they leave . . . will you go with them?”

Fen blinks rapidly. “If Harper leaves, I don’t think they’d want anyone to come with them. But they’re not leaving, so it doesn’t matter, right?”

“Sure. And we’re not fighting?”

It pulls a little smile out of Fen, finally, Quan asking this again. “We’re not fighting.”

“Good.” Quan kisses Fen on the forehead once, quickly and lightly, and then he’s gone, long strides carrying him out of the kitchen.

Fen blinks at the space where Quan was standing a moment before. She turns wide eyes toward Morrow. “Did you—?”

Morrow stares back, their brows nearly touching their hairline. “I saw. Are you two . . . ?”

“No,” Fen replies. “Not that I know of. Maybe—no. Right?”

Morrow doesn’t have an answer for her. 

In the pot, the gnocchi are starting to bob to the surface. Fen thinks of Daneka’s hair in the video, the way it tossed in the wind. She heats a pan on the other burner, drops a knob of butter from Missus Bouchard’s huge ornery cow onto the heat, and waits for it to melt and sizzle. She thinks of Daneka’s eyes in the video. Once the butter starts turning golden, she scoops the cooked gnocchi out of the pot with a slotted spoon and drops them into the butter to fry. She thinks of the shine of that vast lake. She puts more gnocchi into the pot, and works in batches to boil and fry them.

She thinks of Quan’s lips on her forehead, and she smiles down into the sizzling pan.

As the house fills with the smell of browning butter, Morrow pulls the pith off oranges, and Quan scrubs the floorboards, and Harper charms an answer out of Missus Bouchard. The sun outside is high and bright. It shines on the old farmhouse, and the big new one on the other side of the property, and the milking shed and the chicken coop and the feed shed, and somewhere out there, it shines on Peter, too.

Fen sprinkles salt a pile of toasted, butter-glossy gnocchi.  “Come get a plate,” she calls. She knows the only people who can hear her are Morrow and Quan, but part of her is calling out to Daneka, wherever she is. Part of her is making a plate for Daneka. Part of her is cooking for Daneka, every time she cooks. Every meal.

She doesn’t wait for anyone to come running before she grabs a fork. The bite she takes is too hot.

She closes her eyes and lets it burn her tongue.

Fen and Morrow’s Gnocchi

Half of a butternut squash
1 egg
2–3 cups flour
Salt
Pepper

1. Place the half-squash face down on a baking sheet. Rub it all over with butter. Roast at 425 degrees for 25 minutes.
2. Remove the squash from the oven and let it cool completely.
3. Remove the peel and mash the squash into a smooth paste. Form the paste into a mound and form a well in the center.
4. Crack 1 egg into the well. Stir with fingers to combine.
5. Add flour in batches, working the flour in until a sticky, firm dough forms.
6. Knead for 1–2 minutes.
7. Form into a ball and rest for 20 minutes. *This is the perfect amount of time for a hard conversation.
8. Cut the ball into eight equal parts. Roll each part out into a snake the width of someone’s thumb. Cut each snake into 1-inch sections using a knife or pasta cutter.
9. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Add the gnocchi in batches, stirring gently once to prevent sticking. Once the gnocchi bob to the top of the water, remove.
10. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Once the butter starts to brown, fry gnocchi in batches.
11. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and eat piping hot.

Have You Eaten? Part 4: Harper’s Homecoming

The Abbott’s Risotto

Oil—enough
½ onion, chopped, for every 3 people eating
1 clove garlic for every 3 people eating
1 handful of rice for every person eating *rinse once
1 splash wine or juice of 1 lemon
1½ cups broth for every handful of rice

Add in: Meat, vegetables, mushrooms

1. Heat oil. Soften & brown onions and garlic.
2. Add oil. Add rice, stir until edges go clear.
3. Add wine, stir until liquid is gone.
4. Add a little broth. Stir until liquid is gone. Repeat until all broth is gone.
5. Add whatever you like.

Harper walks behind everyone else as they make their way down East Wacker Drive in what used to be the Loop. The four of them are in the center of the street, not trying to hide their approach. Not looking to make anyone nervous, Morrow had said when they entered the city. Not looking to make anyone pissed, Quan had replied.

Harper hadn’t said anything. They don’t say anything now either. They just hang back, half a block behind everyone else, hood up, raising a hand in acknowledgment whenever Fen glances nervously over her shoulder at them. Fen’s still worried that Harper’s going to disappear, leave the group, strike off on their own. It’s an understandable worry, but Harper wishes Fen would just sit with that worry for half a day instead of constantly bleeding it out onto every surface she touches.

The blacktop is still cracked from the time a tank rolled through the neighborhood. Harper looks down at the zagging splits in the street, remembers the sound of treads. The road here wasn’t made to support that kind of weight, but nobody cared then and nobody’s left here to care now. Harper didn’t even care, not at the time, even though they loved these roads. It was hard to care about anything but the ten minutes that had just happened and the ten minutes that were on the way. Still, that tank should have fallen through the asphalt, through Lower Wacker, down onto the now-submerged Riverwalk. Should have cracked the pavement straight through.

The other three are loud up ahead. Loud on purpose—that’s what they all agreed on. No sneaking, no surprises. Treat the Rosemary Patch like a bear den, that’s the smart approach so it’s what they’re doing. Quan and Fen are bickering, an are-we-there-yet back-and-forth that has a smile in it on both sides. Morrow’s got their hands deep in their pockets, just listening, but their bigness is loud and for once they’re not trying to hide it.

The buildings that line one side of the street get a little taller. They’re almost to Stetson Avenue now. Harper looks up into the empty eye sockets where rows of glass windows used to be. The piercing whistles of lookouts echo up the block, twee-twee-twee-twee. Fen’s chin snaps up at the sound.

Harper sighs and runs a palm across the patchwork stubble on their scalp. “Here we go.”

The group’s strategy of being obvious pays dividends. As they approach the remains of Columbus Plaza, four figures melt out of the shadowy mouth of one of the buildings. Nobody Harper recognizes—they’re kids, practically, all wearing red rags around their biceps, all making faces to make it clear that they know how to kick ass. They’re skinny but in a growing-too-fast way, not in a starving way, and they all have all their hair. Harper figures there’s probably a good number of adults standing just out of sight, letting these cubs get some experience. It’s a promising sign.

“Stop there,” one of the kids yells, a scrawny Black kid with a tight fade and a missing front tooth. The kid’s got a scowl that would stop a tank in its tracks.

“No problem,” Fen calls. She holds her hands out at her sides. Quan and Morrow do the same. Harper’s instructions echo through everyone’s mind: Everyone stay relaxed. Don’t look tense. If you’re calm, they’re calm.

One of the other kids—tall, white, weedy, blonde hair that’s falling into her eyes—has a big stick that she bonks against the blacktop. It’s genuinely a little menacing. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re looking for the Rosemary Patch,” Morrow says. They’re doing the worst job of looking calm. They’re thinking about what’ll happen if these kids decide they want a fight. Dreading the possibility of combat with children. The tension radiates off them in sick shivers.

The scrawny kid with the fade looks behind him, back into the building he came out of. The blonde shoves him and hisses something that sounds like “Don’t look, dipshit.”

“It ain’t here.” This from the smallest of the kids, who wears a ball cap that’s too big for his head. “You’re in the wrong place. Turn around.”

Fen takes a slow step forward, her hands still out at her sides. “I think it is here, actually. We’re here to see, um.” She hesitates long enough that Harper takes half a step forward, but then she sticks the landing. “We’re here to see The Abbott.”

The kids lose their composure immediately. They’re grabbing each other and talking over each other, gesturing at the same building the one kid had looked into. After a few seconds of this, an adult figure strides out of the shadows with the loping impatience of a chaperone who needs to impose order.

Harper’s eyes track the well-muscled neck, the broad bony shoulders, the long swinging arms. They tug their hood down over their eyes just a little further.

“Fuck’s sake. Everyone downstairs, we’re going over security protocols again in the morning. And Devon? Don’t let me hear you calling anyone else a dipshit.”

The blonde kid crosses her arms. “What if he’s being a dipshit?”

Fen interrupts. “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“You can call me PJ. Because that’s my name.”

Harper bites their lips to keep from smiling, mutters to themself, “That stupid fucking joke.”

Fen holds out a hand to shake. “PJ, I’m Fen.” The wind is catching on the hollowed-out buildings, making the street loud. The two of them talk, trading introductions and explanations and code words. PJ leans around Fen to get a look at Harper but doesn’t seem to recognize them.

“Alright,” PJ says in a voice loud enough to carry up the block. “Come on down.”

She leads their group across the old six-lane street, toward the river. Fen hangs back, waiting for Harper to catch up.

“Looks like we’re in business,” she says. Her eyes are sparking with anxiety.

“Looks like. You scared of heights?”

Fen cocks her head. “Not really. Why?”

Harper lifts their chin toward the railing on the edge of the street. Fen watches as PJ, the four kids, Quan and Morrow approach. PJ crouches down and adjusts something at Devon’s waist.

And then Devon dives over the edge of the overpass.

Fen doesn’t make a sound. Her eyes go hard and sharp. She looks from PJ to Morrow to Quan to Harper, her nostrils flaring, her breath still.

Harper holds up a hand like they’re trying to steady a spooking horse. “It’s okay. Nothing’s happening. That’s just how we get to where we’re going.”

Fen gives a little shiver, rolls her shoulders. “I don’t like this.”

“You just don’t like surprises,” Harper says. “But you’re gonna like this. I promise. Unless you’re scared of heights, and then you might never speak to me again.”

When Fen peers over the edge of the overpass, she isn’t scared by the drop from Wacker to Lower Wacker. “And you’re sure it’s safe?”

“When have I ever lied to you?”

“Never. But . . . you also haven’t said that it’s safe, so I don’t think you’d count it as a lie, would you?”

Harper grins. “Well. You won’t die, anyway.” While PJ is clipping the rest of the kids to their lines and sending them down, Harper tells her about the hidden street beneath Lower Wacker where the Rosemary Patch used to be located. “You’re not going that far, though. There’s an old service tunnel that goes from Lower Wacker into the old auto pound. You’ll be walking a few blocks to get there. Don’t worry. PJ will get you there.”

Fen leans far over the railing to look down at the street below. “How come we didn’t just go straight there? Why do we have to go underneath everything?”

“Chicago used to be monitored by drones. One hundred percent of the time,” Harper says. “These days, who knows. Better not to risk leading anyone to home base.”

Morrow gives a joyful shout as they slip over the edge of the railing, a loose length of cord in their hands. Quan goes soon after, silent and trembling with nerves. Fen gives Harper a small, loose salute, then turns toward PJ.

“My turn?”

PJ gives her a warm smile. “You’ll do great.”

“Where do I clip in?”

“You don’t,” PJ replies. “The kids wear harnesses. We don’t have enough for adults.”

“Is it safe?”

“If you don’t want to take the line down, you can walk”—she points into the distance—“that way, until you come to the part of Wacker that collapsed onto Lower. It makes a kind of ramp down. It looks dangerous, but the kids play on it all the time, so you’ll probably be safe to scramble down.”

Fen frowns. “What made it collapse?”

“Tank. This street’s not made to support that kind of weight.”

Harper jolts. “When did they come through again?”

They’re still far enough away, their face still shadowed enough by their hood, that when PJ gives them a curious glance, she doesn’t recognize them. Still, Harper is thankful when Fen recovers PJ’s full attention by asking about how to hold the line without tearing up her palms. Harper stays quiet after that, waiting for Fen to drop over the edge before stepping forward.

PJ peers at them, her eyes searching. “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name. Fen said you were with her group, but— Hang on.” Her face hardens and before Harper can dodge, PJ’s hand has darted out to snatch their hood away. “You,” she breathes.

Harper gives her a wary smile. “Hey babe.”

PJ’s arm twitches like she wants to slap Harper across the mouth, but no blow comes, which is how Harper knows she hasn’t forgiven them yet. “The fuck are you doing here?” She bites out the words like a cold wind.

“I’m with Fen and them. Traveling together. We’re looking for—”

“For Daneka, right. Fen said. So. You and Fen are together.”

“Not—” Harper sighs. They’d somehow forgotten PJ’s weapons-grade jealousy. “Just traveling together. Nothing else. Will you let me go down so we can see The Abbott? The others are waiting for me down there.”

PJ shakes her head. “Fuck no. Nobody down there wants to see you.”

Harper rocks back on their heels. “Hey now,” they murmur.

After a moment, PJ twists her neck, rolls her eyes, drops the anger from between her molars. “Sorry. That was mean and it’s not true. But, Harp—you can’t just come rolling back in after what you did. You left without saying goodbye to anyone. You hurt a lot of people. You have to know that.”

“I know. And I’m prepared to talk to The Abbott about it.” Harper reaches out and touches PJ’s upper arm, lets their fingers drift down to her elbow. They don’t acknowledge the fact that the “lot of people” they hurt included PJ. Was probably mostly PJ. “Trust me. I can handle myself on this one.”

“You can handle yourself on anything,” PJ grumbles. And then she gives a sharp tug on the line that’s knotted around the handrail. When it holds strong, she gives it to Harper. “You better not leave without saying goodbye this time. I mean it. I’ll kick your ass.”

Harper loops the end of the line around each of their thighs, then grip the slack in both hands. They swing one leg over the rail, then lean back to kiss PJ on the cheek. “Thanks, babe.”

Before they can so much as grin at her, PJ plants her palms on their shoulders and gives them a hard shove. Harper tumbles off the edge of the overpass with a long-buried whoop of freedom.

When their feet touch the asphalt of Lower Wacker, the others are already standing in a cluster nearby, talking softly. Harper approaches, grinning, ready to rib Quan for his nerves—but when they get close, the group parts, and Harper’s grin falls away.

The Abbott is here. She’s as short as the scrawny kids who’d been standing guard, as broad as a barrel, and as old as the city itself. She aims her dark, creased face up at Harper and measures them with a cool, steady gaze.

“So. You’re back.”

Quan looks up at Morrow, openly perplexed. “Back? Harper’s from—”

“Here,” Harper interrupts. “I’m from here. And yeah, Abbott, I’m back. Me and some friends, who I see you’ve already met.”

PJ drops to the pavement behind Harper. “We gotta move,” she says. “We’ve all been here too long already. Abbott, I thought you were going to wait for us at the Patch?”

“A little mouse told me I’d want to come see the visitors for myself,” The Abbott says. She reaches out a hand and, without looking, rests it on the head of the kid in the too-large baseball cap. “He never met you while you were here, Harper, but he still knew you on sight. You’re something of a scary story among the children.”

PJ steps forward, pinching the bridge of her nose with one hand. “Please. We seriously have to go. Can you and Harper talk on the way there?”

Harper flinches—when they lived here, that would have earned anyone a sharp rebuke from The Abbott, but it doesn’t come. The Abbott simply nods. “Thank you for keeping us on time. Lead the way. Harper, you’ll keep me company in the back of the group. I walk slower these days anyway.”

The Abbott waits while PJ herds the group toward the service tunnel. She stands still until Harper sighs and holds out an arm. “You need someone to lean on?”

“I don’t need it, but I’ll take it anyway,” The Abbott says. She loops her arm through Harper’s and pats them on the forearm like they’re a sturdy horse. “I’ve missed you.”

“You haven’t.”

“I have!” The Abbott lets out a raspy laugh. “Now, tell me why you’re back. I heard it from your friends, but I want to hear it from you.”

Harper explains. They tell her about Daneka, about her disappearance and the messages they’ve been getting from someone who seems to be Daneka but isn’t. They fill her in about Peter, then about Peter and Morrow getting together and falling apart, then about their little group’s journey across the border from Wisconsin into Illinois. They tell her about Fen, who relies on them almost as much as they rely on her.

“This Bouchard,” The Abbott says thoughtfully. “Who you stayed with in Wisconsin. Is he part of our family?”

Harper thinks for a moment. “Don’t know. But his wife—I think you’d like her. I convinced her to convince him to get back to work by telling her how much the state cops would hate it if a bunch of queers made it into Illinois. She laughed so hard I thought she was gonna choke.”

“So you’re hoping to see Daneka here.”

“Fen is. Personally, I think it’s too much of a long shot. But—”

The Abbott clicks her tongue. “You’re a pessimist. I don’t know why. You were raised better than that.” Then she purses her lips and whistles once, high and sharp. The group ahead stops and waits until Harper and The Abbott have caught up to them. “Alright, children,” she says, addressing the new arrivals more than the actual kids. “In a minute, we’re going to arrive at the Patch. Our visitors are going to earn the right to stay with us by making dinner. Enough for all ten of us.”

Fen glances at Harper with obvious surprise. Harper shakes their head and shrugs. Neither of them offered this to The Abbott—she’s simply setting her terms.

“Excuse me,” Quan asks, his voice as careful as it gets. “How long can we stay?”

The Abbott grins. “That’ll depend on how much I like dinner, won’t it?”

She leads them into the Rosemary Patch, and Quan, Fen, and Morrow gawk at the sheer scale of the underground community that sprawls throughout the old impound garage. Sturdy little houses line the walls, built out of the shed skin of the city: old street signs, sheets of corrugated metal, tiles pried up from the lobbies of abandoned skyscrapers. Clusters of adults sit out in the common area, processing food or studying playing cards or watching the children who chase each other across the building. The air is a little sharp with the smell of old motor oil and too-close bodies, but overpowering those smells is the smoke of cookfires and the unmistakable aroma of baking bread.

PJ jogs forward and leans close to Harper, murmuring in their ear. “You haven’t been here since the bakery started up. The new moms run it. Fresh babies and fresh loaves. Bet you wish you never left.”

Fen hears and interrupts, and Harper can’t decide whether to be irritated or relieved. “Harper, you used to live here?”

“We talked about this already,” Quan says. Fen gives him an irritated frown and he spreads his palms. “It’s not my fault you were too busy flirting with PJ to listen. Harper’s from here.”

“I don’t want to get into it,” Harper says. “Peej, can you show us where we’re cooking tonight?”

PJ leads them to a small communal kitchen between two of the makeshift houses. It’s open, looking out into the common area, covered by a low overhang. Plywood is propped up on cinderblocks to form a U-shaped countertop, and bins below that counter hold plates and dented pots. Along the back wall, staples fill bins made of thick plastic with heavy screw-on lids: flour, rice, onions, cassava. 

PJ points to a corner with a hotplate. Underneath it is a row of water jugs and a basin of assorted cooking implements. “This is the only spot that’s available. Everywhere else is reserved for the night. You should have gotten here earlier if you wanted a better setup.”

Morrow peers into the basin. “These are all broken. Look,” they add, holding up a wooden cooking spoon that’s held together in the center with duct tape. “What happened here?”

“Probably Jaan, practicing their drumming,” she says. Then she adds, “That’s my kid. They love music.” She doesn’t look at Harper when she says it, and the not-looking is as loud as the words themselves.

“It’s fine. We can cook with broken stuff,” Harper says. “Thanks for showing us.”

PJ nods. “No problem. Just hand me your packs and I’ll get out of your hair.”

Quan balks. “Our packs?”

“I’m going to search your shit,” PJ replies lightly. “Don’t worry. You’ll get everything back.”

Quan grips the straps of his backpack with white knuckles. “I don’t want—”

“You don’t want to argue on this one,” Harper murmurs to him.

“The fuck I don’t,” Quan insists. “What’s she looking for?”

PJ gives Quan a carnivorous grin. “I don’t know, Quan. Trackers. Guns. Palmsets with fake videos of my friends, maybe.”

Quan’s mouth opens, then snaps shut as he looks at Morrow. “You told her?”

“I told the Abbott,” Harper interjects.

“There hasn’t been time for The Abbott to—”

Harper laughs. “Never assume she hasn’t done whatever she might take a mind to do, Quan. Trust me on that one.”

“Okay, but we aren’t the ones who made the videos of Daneka,” Morrow points out.

PJ raises her eyebrows. “Then you shouldn’t need to worry about what I’ll find in your bags. I’ll plug your palmsets in, too. You must be carrying a bunch of dead batteries by now.”

The four of them hand over their packs—Quan reluctant, Morrow and Fen resigned, Harper almost relieved. PJ thumbs the empty carabiner that hangs from Harper’s backpack strap. “No keys?”

“Nowhere to save keys for,” Harper says. “You have a kid?”

PJ can’t restrain a small, soft smile. “Yeah. They kick ass. Too smart for their own good, and they’re a little thief too. They remind me a lot of you. You’ll like them. If you want to meet them, I mean.”

It takes Harper a moment to find breath, and then another moment to find words. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.”

And then PJ is gone, and The Abbott is gone, and the kids who’d been standing guard are gone, and it’s just the four of them, alone again in a strange kitchen.

Fen steps in close to Harper. “Do you want me to handle making dinner? I don’t mind.”

Harper shakes their head. “You don’t know how to do this.”

Quan looks up from where he’s rummaging through the broken cooking implements. “What? Of course she does. And she has the recipe box.”

Harper turns to Fen. They take a deep breath and fold their arms across their chest, and in that moment, it’s as if no time at all has passed since they left the squat. The light that falls through the street-level grate above dapples Harper’s shoulders, and the muggy river air hangs around the two of them like the falling wings of dusk, and Harper is just as irritated with Fen as they were on the path behind the houses in the neighborhood where they became family to each other.

“You’re gonna make me say this?”

Fen visibly braces herself. “Yes. Unless there’s something you think you can’t say to me.”

“Fine. You don’t have a recipe in your box that can handle this situation, Fen. You aren’t prepared here. Every recipe you know how to cook calls for eggs or butter or meat.”

Morrow speaks up. “Not the—”

“Don’t say not the vegan ones. Those are worse. You think we’re getting handed chia seeds down here? Applesauce? Corn? The point is, we’re not cooking with the kind of resources you’re used to.”

“But if everyone works together, we can figure out—”

“Everyone’s not going to work together, Morrow,” Harper cuts in. “Not with us.”

Fen looks around at the vast expanse of the underground garage. It’s filled with the hum of life. “They seriously don’t have any of that stuff down here? Eggs, I mean? For all these people?”

Harper laughs. “I’m not saying they don’t have it. They probably do. But they’re not going to give us any of it to cook with. Do you understand? They’re not going to give us the things that make it easy to make something tasty. We’re being tested right now. And that’s why you’re not cut out to make this dinner.”

Fen bristles. “Because, what, I can’t cook when it’s tough? I didn’t see you complaining when—”

“No,” Harper interrupts. “Stop. You’re not hearing me.” They step close and put their hands on Fen’s shoulders, try to make their face kind and their voice kinder. “You can’t do this because you’ve only ever cooked for people who like you, Fen. People who will work with you to help you do a good job for them. And this isn’t that situation. You’ll hate how it feels to make dinner for people who are hoping you’ll fuck it up. It’ll hurt your heart. So let me do it this time, okay? I’m good at this.”

Fen blinks hard. “I didn’t know you knew how to cook,” she says softly.

Harper pulls her into a tight, brief hug. “You never asked.”

Fen joins Morrow and Quan beneath the lip of the overhang, and the three watch as Harper takes stock of what’s in the kitchen. It’s not much—the staples that are available to everyone in the community are foundational. “How the hell am I gonna turn this into dinner?” they mutter to themself.

Fen clears her throat. “Can we help?”

Harper shakes their head. “I know what I want to make. I just have to figure out how to make it into something worth eating. The Abbott’s probably told everyone not to help us, even if we can trade for ingredients.”

They turn to see a knot of young children, none of them older than eight, staring at Morrow. One of them breaks bravely loose from his friends and approaches the communal kitchen. He stands a couple of feet away and waits for Morrow to notice him. Finally, he just starts talking. “Hey excuse me I’m sorry but are you a giant?”

Morrow turns, laughing. It’s a freer noise than they’ve made in a long time. “Yes,” they reply, “I am a giant! A giant monster!” On the last word, Morrow holds their hands high overhead, growls, and trots toward the kids, who run away shrieking in open delight.

A game crystallizes effortlessly, the way games so often do with children that age. The children retreat and then, once Morrow’s back is turned, they race forward again. Morrow lets them get a little closer each time before turning around and letting out a roar, giving the kids an opportunity to flee. Fen is half collapsed with laughter; Quan rolls his eyes, but he can’t hide a small smile.

Harper smiles too, because they’ve found the solution to their problem. “Hey, Morrow.”

“I think you mean hey monster,” Morrow replies, grinning so hugely that they’re almost unrecognizable.

“Sure. Monster. Can you send the kids on a mission?”

Morrow flips the game effortlessly. The kids are thrilled to be given jobs—by a giant, no less—and vanish into the Rosemary Patch with absolute determination. While they’re gone, Harper rummages around in the bins. They pull out three good onions and a wrinkled half-head of garlic, and take mercy on Fen by asking her to dice them up. They measure out rice with their hands—ten big handfuls for ten people, plus an extra two handfuls just in case. They use a jug of water to give the rice a single rinse, dumping the starchy rinsewater into a big jar, which they’ll give to The Abbott since she likes using rice water to wash her face. She’ll think they forgot, and they’ll show her they didn’t, and the fact of their remembering will be a better gift than the rice water, they think. They hope.

Then they fill a huge pot with clean water and set it on the hotplate, bringing it to a boil, hoping something will appear that they can put into it.

By the time the water is bubbling, two of the kids are back. One of them—an Asian kid with two stubby pigtails—has bulging trouser pockets. “I got it,” they gasp.

“What’d you get?” Morrow asks, squatting down low to look the kid in the eyes.

They pull out two fistfuls of what looks like shards of tree bark. “Mushrooms!”

Morrow cups their hands for the kid to dump their prize into. “. . . Are you sure these are mushrooms?”

“Yeah! My mom dries ’em. They smell.” The kid points, wrinkling his nose.

Morrow sniffs the dark brown pile of mushrooms before mirroring the kid’s expression. “Those sure are mushrooms,” they agree. “Harp, can you use these?”

“These are perfect,” Harper says, leaning across the plywood counter to take the mushrooms. As they drop them into the boiling water, they call over their shoulder. “Thanks, kid. What’s your name?”

“Jaan!”

Harper doesn’t turn around until they hear the sound of small feet running away. Then, hoping Jaan is gone, they cautiously glance over their shoulder to see Morrow deep in serious conversation with the other child who’d come with Jaan. He looks like a miniature version of the kid with the fade who’d stopped them up on the street, and he’s got something small cupped in his palm.

“You’re sure it’s okay with your dad if we use this?” Morrow asks softly.

The kid shakes his head. “But he won’t know I took it. He has a big jar and this is only a few of them.”

Morrow nods and points the kid toward Harper. The kid approaches and reveals his offering: five, fragrant, salt-crusted preserved anchovies.

“Holy shit,” Harper breathes. “Thank you. This is—wow.”

The kid looks up at Harper with wide, shy eyes. “Can I see your head? I heard it got burned off when you left.”

Harper crouches down to take the fish, and bends their neck to show the kid the scars that map their scalp. “It was the year before I left, actually. When the old Rosemary Patch got raided and burned down.”

The kid reaches up to touch the scars without asking, and Harper flinches, both at the sudden touch and at the knowledge that their head is going to smell like fish for days. But they don’t move away. They let the kid feel the history of the Rosemary Patch that’s etched into their skin.

“Did it hurt?” the kid asks.

“Like hell. But it was worth it to help people. It usually is. You know, the way you helped us today,” Harper says.

The kid snatches his hand back. “I gotta go.” He runs off.

“You overplayed it,” Quan drawls. “Too didactic.”

“Where’d you learn didactic?” Harper retorts.

Fen pushes a sheet pan of chopped onions and garlic across the plywood. “Anything else I can help with?”

Harper shakes their head and drops the salted anchovies into the steaming water along with the mushrooms. They stir, waiting for the flesh of the fish to melt. “Unless you can find some oil.”

“I thought nobody here was going to give us anything,” Fen says, more than a bit tartly.

“They’re not giving us anything. Not voluntarily,” Harper replies. “The kids are stealing for us.”

Fen balks. “What? We can’t steal from these people, we’re their guests—”

“See? This is why I said you wouldn’t be able to make this dinner. You’re their guest, so you can’t steal from them. It’s different for me. I’m from here. I can be awful.” Harper gives her a look that they know makes them look like The Abbott. “Morrow, any other little thieves coming back to us?”

Morrow lifts their chin at a tiny figure that’s weaving through the common area, clutching a jar. “Looks like one more.”

The kid is as small and round as an apricot. She races up and nearly smacks into Morrow headlong before pressing the jar into their hands. “If anyone asks, I didn’t do it,” she says breathlessly before disappearing, her tiny head bobbing with every step she takes as she races away into the depths of the garage.

Morrow holds the jar up to their eyes and squints. “I . . . don’t know what this is,” they say slowly.

Quan bends to peer into the jar. “Nope. No clue.”

Fen plucks it from Morrow’s hand and holds it up to the thin light that streams through the holes in the garage roof. “The label just says ‘candle.’”

“No fucking way.” Harper snatches the jar away from Fen. “Fen, I’m so sorry. I was an asshole to you earlier and I was wrong.”

“What?”

Harper opens the jar and takes a deep sniff of the contents. “This is beef tallow. It’s fat. I can cook with this. I shouldn’t have yelled at you about needing butter because the relief I feel in this moment is enormous.”

Quan puts his hands on his hips and cocks his head to one side. “This is the most I’ve ever heard Harper talk.”

Harper gives Quan the finger and turns to the hotplate. They move the steaming cooking pot, which smells fishy and pungent from the anchovies and the mushrooms, to the side, and replace it with a different, wider-mouthed pot. They use a cracked wooden spoon to scoop a little beef tallow into the pot and wait for it to melt down. When it’s hot, they drop in the onions and garlic. After a few minutes the kitchen area is alive with the smell of ingredients becoming food.

The Abbott comes by to look in on Harper’s progress. Her eyes move from the jar to the steaming pot of broth. “Mmmm. I see.”

“Not taking notes at this time,” Harper says. “If you want to criticize, you’ll have to pick up a spoon and start cooking.”

The Abbott purses her lips in what might be either a reproach or a smile. Before she moves off, she presses a hand to Morrow’s arm and leans in close to them. “You and I should talk more. I’ve been hearing a lot about you from the children. Have you ever considered . . .”

Her voice fades out of hearing as she tugs Morrow off a ways giving them her pitch for whatever it is she wants them to do. Harper stirs the onions and garlic. They’re soft now, and just starting to brown, and Harper whispers the next steps to themself. “More fat, then the rice, stir until it changes.” They drop another scoop of beef tallow into the pot, let it melt, pour in the rice. They stir the rice over the heat, watching for the moment it becomes translucent at the edges. “Hey, Fen? Can you find me a ladle that will actually hold water?”

Fen ducks under the plywood and starts rummaging through the bin of kitchen implements. She holds up three different ladles, one of which is inexplicably slotted. The other two are badly cracked. Desperate, she pulls other bins out from under the counter and opens them. She clangs pots and pans together in her haste as she digs beneath them, hoping to find a dropped ladle.

“What the hell? Hey—hey, Harper!” She jolts up behind Harper with a bottle in her hand. “I found booze. Do you want some?”

Harper rounds on her with the piping hot irritation they reserve for moments when they’re interrupted mid-task. “Do I want? Some booze? Are you fucking—”

Fen raises an eyebrow. “For your recipe,” she says coolly. “Thought it might come in handy. But what do I know about cooking?”

Harper drops their cracked wooden spoon into the pot and clasp Fen by the shoulders. They press their forehead against hers briefly, then kiss her on the cheek. “I’m awful. Thank you, yes, I want this.” They take the bottle from her and open it, give it a smell, and grimace. “Not booze. Vinegar. Still useful, though. Thank you, I love you, go find me a ladle.”

Fen continues searching as Harper eyes the rice. It’s turning translucent at the edges. “Wine,” they whisper to themself, “then broth.” They eye the vinegar. It’s a deep golden color—it was wine once, they figure. They splash a little into the pot, then a little more, and that’s when Fen pops up next to them with a ladle.

They grab it with the hand that isn’t stirring. It has a perfectly intact bowl—but only two inches of handle remain. “This is basically a mug,” they mutter, but it’ll have to do, and they use it to scoop some broth into the rice just in time.

“So,” Fen says as Harper stirs. “Seems like this place is really home for you.”

“Mm.”

Quan leans almost all the way across the plywood. “Seems like you’re. You know. From here.”

“Mmm.”

Morrow comes walking back up, their arms spread wide, children dangling from each one. The Abbott is nowhere in sight. “Yeah, hey, so, you used to live at the Patch. Seems like you might want to tell us some stuff about that?”

“No,” Harper replies. “I want to finish making dinner.”

Fen touches the back of Harper’s heel with the toe of her boot. “What still needs doing? Can I help?”

Steam rises up from the pot, billowing around their face. “No. I’m just going to add broth and then stir until the rice soaks it up, then do that same thing again. And again, and again. And again. Until it’s done.” They let out a laugh that isn’t a laugh, not really. It’s more like a sigh with a stutter in it. “Suits this place.”

Morrow shakes off one of the children. The kid falls with a thump and a bright laugh. “Why?”

“Because that’s what it’s like living here. You just do the thing that needs doing, over and over, until you die.”

The Abbott approaches again, from across the common space. Her steps are slow and stately, perhaps a little stiff. Her eyes are locked on Harper, but she stops next to Fen. “I’ve made a decision,” she says. “I’m not going to wait until after dinner to discuss Daneka with you.”

“What? You never change your mind,” Harper says distractedly, ladling more broth into the pot.

The Abbott nods. “I’m changing it this time. Because I think you all will want make your plans tonight, rather than tomorrow.”

This catches Harper’s full attention. “Tonight? No, we need a place to sleep, please—Grand-Mère, you can’t—”

“Stop. And listen,” The Abbott says, in the voice of someone who is used to teaching children and adults how to behave. “I said you will want to make your plans tonight. You’re making me dinner, Harper, I’m not putting you out before dawn.”

Quan snorts. “Might want to taste the dinner before you decide.”

“Come over here and say that,” Harper offers.

“PJ went through your bags and didn’t find anything unexpected,” The Abbott says. “So I’m going to give you what Daneka gave me, so you can go and find her tomorrow.”

The air inside the Rosemary Patch goes still and silent. Harper drops the ladle and it strikes the floor with the clang of some enormous, dark bell. Morrow lifts their hands to the back of their neck and laces their fingers together, looking at the ground in an unconscious echo of the way Peter had tried to protect himself from their fists. Quan looks at Fen with wide, worried eyes. Fen covers her mouth with both hands, then says, “What?”

From an inside pocket of her coat, The Abbott produces two envelopes. “She was here two weeks ago,” she says. “She said you left her a note on a recipe card, saying to come here. I don’t know how she found us, but she did.”

“We talked about it for years,” Fen whispers. “We thought you were a myth, but—but we talked about coming here, trying to find you.”

“She did. But she said she was being followed. That’s why I didn’t send you all away when you told me about Peter—he’s already on his way. Bounty hunter, supposedly. Probably started tracking you all the way back at that house you were squatting in. PJ will handle him when he arrives. Thank you for doing him a bad turn, Morrow. I know you wish you hadn’t, but I’m glad someone did.”

Morrow doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Behind Harper, the rice is beginning to sizzle.

Fen sways on her feet. “So Daneka’s not here. I— She’s not here? But she’s alive?”

The Abbott nods. “As of the time I last saw her, she’s alive, yes. She moved on three days after she got here. But she left these in my care.” She holds up one envelope, then lowers it to the countertop. “That one is for all of you. And this one,” she says, holding up the second envelope, “is just for you, Fen. She said you’d come. She thought everyone would probably come with you, but she said that if they didn’t, you still would. She cares for you a great deal, you know?”

Fen swallows hard, glances at Quan briefly before taking the envelope. “Thank you,” she whispers.

Harper takes a halting step toward the first envelope. Then they stop, turn around, swear down at the pot on the stove. They grab the ladle off the floor, add two quick scoops of broth to the pot, and stir hard and fast, scraping up the rice that’s browned on the bottom of the pot. “Fuck fuck fuck,” they whisper.

“Don’t worry about it so much,” The Abbott says. “All you have to do is keep going, and you’ll get there.”

Harper doesn’t acknowledge her. They just keep stirring. They know she was talking about the risotto, which she taught Harper to make when they were as young as the little thieves they’d employed to gather ingredients. They also know that she was talking about Daneka. And about coming home, and about growing up, and about everything else they’ve ever done and will ever do.

“This shit is why I left,” they growl. “Advice. Envelopes. Burnt fucking rice.”

Fen comes back around the counter and looks over their shoulder. “It’s not burnt. It’s just fond.”

“What?” Harper snaps.

“It’s just fond. The stuff that sticks to the bottom of the pot and turns brown. It’s fond. That’s where all the flavor is.”

Harper keeps stirring. “We’d better hope it’s a good flavor.”

“It will be,” Fen says, walking away, wanting to give Harper the space she knows they need to go through whatever it is they’re going through. Fen’s never come home to anywhere before. She doesn’t know what it’s like. But it looks like it hurts, and she knows Harper doesn’t like to be seen when they’re hurting.

Still. She pauses, touches the envelope that’s meant for the whole group. “You don’t have to come with me and Quan when we go find her. I don’t expect you to, I mean. I don’t think Morrow is coming,” she adds, looking over her shoulder at the place where Morrow and The Abbott are deep into another quiet, serious conversation. “I think they’re going to stay, probably. It’s okay if you want to stay too.”

Harper pauses in their stirring, which has become too frenetic anyway, too intense. They wipe their forehead on their wrist and look at Fen, really look at her, and their face is an open wound. They’re a cracked ladle, and all the love and pain and exhaustion in them is leaking out, and they can’t stand for it to splash onto Fen but there’s no way to keep that from happening right now so they let it happen. “You don’t sound scared.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean. Normally, when you ask me if I’m staying or going, you sound scared.”

Fen nods. She’s looking down at the risotto, which is nearly done, so that she doesn’t have to look at Harper. “The thing is. I figure it’s probably okay either way. You left this place, and then you came back, and it’s obvious that it’s still home for you. Even if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I don’t mind talking about it with you. If you want to know, I’ll tell you.” They tip the big pot over the smaller one, pouring the last of the broth into the risotto along with the plump, rehydrated mushrooms.

“Either way,” Fen says firmly. “If you and Morrow decide to stay here, and I go off with Quan to find Daneka, that doesn’t mean we’ll never see you two again. It doesn’t mean you’ll forget about us. About me,” she amends. “I trust you not to forget about me.”

“And you’ve figured out that you don’t need me. Right? No, don’t—it’s not a bad thing,” they say before Fen can protest. “I just mean that for a long time, back at the squat, you didn’t trust yourself. You thought you needed me for backup. Right? And now,” they continue, not waiting for her to agree, “you know that you can do things on your own. So you’re not as scared of what’ll happen if I’m not there.” They turn off the heat and give the risotto a final stir.

Fen has her arms folded tight across her chest. “I don’t just want you around because I’m scared. Is that what you think?”

Harper taps the spoon against the edge of the pot. “I don’t think that’s the only reason you’ve wanted me around in the past. But I think it was in the mix. And now, I think you want me around because you want me around.”

Fen nods. “You really haven’t made your decision, have you? I’ve never seen you take this long to figure out what you want.”

Harper lets out a low, dry laugh. It’s a laugh that Fen’s never heard before. She thinks it might be their realest laugh. “Fen. You’ve been watching me try to figure out what I want since the day we met. You just didn’t know until now what I was trying to decide on.”

A group of children are gathering on the other side of the common area. The four guards, and the three thieves, and a handful of others. Fen points to them. “I think your risotto is going to have to feed more mouths than we thought.”

“You still don’t know? What choice I’ve been making?”

Fen shakes her head.

Harper eyes the growing mass of children. Jaan is near the front. “The way I see it, I’ve been looking at two options. There’s eating dinner with you and Quan and Morrow and Daneka, or there’s everything else in the world.”

“And you picked us?”

“Every time.”

The two of them stand side by side. Fen watches the children. Harper watches the risotto. They don’t look at each other, and they don’t touch each other, and they don’t speak. Their hearts beat at the same speed. They feel it together—the pain and fear and hunger of the months they’ve shared, the emptiness of the years that came before they knew each other, the echoing expanse of the future and all the hell that might be in it. Harper inhales, and a moment later Fen exhales, and neither of them has ever been so unalone.

Harper breaks the silence first. “This risotto’s gonna get cold fast. Not that the kids’ll care, but still. It deserves to be eaten hot.”

Fen nods. “Sounds good. I’ll go find bowls.”

Harper’s Risotto

Serves 10

18 cups water
4 tbsp beef tallow, divided into two parts
3 onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic
12 handfuls of rice *rinse once
2 splashes vinegar
1 cup dried mushrooms
5 salt-cured anchovies

Add mushrooms, anchovies, and water into the big pot. Boil until mushrooms are reconstituted and anchovies have more or less melted away.

1. Heat tallow. Soften & brown onions and garlic.
2. Add oil. Add rice, stir until edges go clear.
3. Add vinegar, stir until liquid is gone.
4. Add a little broth. Stir until liquid is gone. Repeat until all broth is gone.
5. Add whatever you like.

“Have You Eaten?” copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey
Art copyright © 2024 by Shing Yin Khor
Photography copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey

Buy the Book

Have You Eaten?

Sarah Gailey

The complete serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey, in which a fractured group of undesirables work together to…

Buy Book

Have You Eaten?

Sarah Gailey

The complete serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey, in which a fractured group of undesirables work together to…

The complete serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey, in which a fractured group of undesirables work together to…

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