Strikers by Ann Christy

a little shake of his head and says, “We can’t risk you seeing her, Karas. I hope you understand.”
    I nod, because he’s right even though he doesn’t understand what it's really like at home with her. But that isn’t why I need to go home. “My garden has stuff we can take, plus I have water carriers. There’s plenty of early spring stuff like carrots, beets…” I let the sentence trail off.
    The dry lands stand between us and the border and water may be hard to find. Food will be even scarcer. And I saw him come out of the break room with just three small canteens, the kind the soldiers carry on their belts. Those won’t last us half a day.
    It startles me to see him chew the inside of his cheek because it is exactly what I do when I’m indecisive or in a bind. It’s a terrible habit but one I’ve never been able to break entirely. For some reason, seeing him do the same makes me smile. It’s like a link between us, even though we are strangers.
    “Water’s not that hard to find. You’d be surprised how quickly the dry lands end once we head east. But food, that can be hard when you can’t stop to hunt.” He looks at me with a measuring gaze and asks, “How quickly can you get what you need?”
    “Fast enough,” I say. “Faster if I take Connor.”
    He sighs again, but not in a way that signals impatience or anything. It’s more like the sigh of someone who has to deal with an inevitable delay, so I know what he’s about to say.
    Connor comes back for another load by the time I’ve extricated myself and helped Jovan to his feet. Jovan sways for a moment, but quickly steadies and offers me a smile to let me know he’s fine. He takes Connor’s place at the pile of bags and says nothing as he loads himself up with all the remaining bags. For good or ill, he’s with us.

Chapter Twelve
    The streets are dark and quiet. It feels like days instead of a scant hour since I set out with Connor for a final visit with my father. Everything has changed since then and it shows in how I see the dark buildings around us.
    I see them through eyes that are saying goodbye. Now the buildings seem shabbier, their fading paint gray in the darkness, the windows old, dusty and dark. As we jog the few blocks between the Courthouse and my home, the sounds of water in the canal across the street accompany us.
    The houses are all the same here, varying only in their color. Like everything else, the paint is old and faded to lackluster versions of the original shade. Pale blue that’s nearing gray, lilac where it was once purple and even a faded yellow so pale it glows white in the faint moonlight.
    At my house, we dip around to the back. Connor doesn’t need me to tell him what we need. We head straight for my garden shed and he heaves up the pile of sacks on my workbench, lifting a cloud of dust along with the rough burlap. I grab the snips and a small trowel for the garden.
    “I need some light,” I whisper. No one will hear us out here, but I find it difficult to speak normally while we’re being so stealthy.
    My only flashlight is in the house, but Connor pulls his out of one of his voluminous pockets and starts to wind it while we’re in the slight protection of the shed. It whines terribly and the sound makes me wince.
    “Let’s go,” he says when he’s done winding.
    “Wait,” I say and start pulling old containers and general junk off a pile in the back corner. When I get to my buckets, I fill up a couple of small bags with the best of my tumbled stones. Connor and I have spent days on end turning the handle on my tumbler to create each batch. These buckets represent years of intermittent labor. I’ve been hiding them here in the shed as a sort of savings account, meaning to sell them when I finally reached my eighteenth birthday and can get away from this house.
    I hand one bag to Connor and tuck the other into my coat pocket along with my handful of steel balls and my slingshot. It’s a weak