Thrust: A Novel

I held in a chuckle. What a creature, to come out with such a thing. The underground economy? “But do you have a name?” I asked. She looked to be somewhere between ten and twelve years of age. Her hair cascaded past her shoulders in black turbulent waves that seemed to argue with one another all the way down her back. Her faded red dress was cut high on her legs, revealing knees that were scuffed and brown with mud and, perhaps, dried blood. She had no coat, no hat, no gloves, just her girlhood and the object in her closed hand.

She did not answer my question with any name.

“I see,” I said. “Well, then, what’s this about something to trade? Are you a thief?” I crossed my arms over my chest to signal that I expected some kind of answer.

“I’m not a thief.” She frowned. “I’m a carrier.”

Even more intriguing. Where do you come from, then?”

“Across time,” she said, looking at me directly. “That’s how I got here. I crossed through time.”

“So you’re a… carrier, and you cross time.”

She nodded.

My night was improving by the minute. “Do time-crossing carriers need to eat or sleep, like regular children? Would you like to step inside and dry off?”

She ignored my questions. “Is this 10 Reverie Road?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“In the water, my mother told me to come to 10 Reverie Road. Here I am.”

What a strange little creature.

“Either that or I’ve drowned, I guess. Either way, I’m here.” Then she held out her hand and opened it, and even under the dim light of the streetlamp, I could see what she held: a locket. “You have an object inside the Room of Reliquaries. I’d like to make a trade.”

That piqued my interest. How did she know about my rooms?

“All right, then,” I said, still thinking. At the very least, I could give her a meal, a bath, maybe some rest. Whether she could join us in our own underground economy — Room 8—I was not yet ready to decide. Her limbs were all intact. As to her wits, I was far less certain.

The girl looked up at my building. She seemed to be counting stories. Then she looked down at the river gurgling in wavelets against the foundation. Then she stared at me so hard, I thought she might bore right through my skull.

“There’s going to be a Raid tonight,” she said. “Later. Someone has revealed your secret and you are all in danger. They’ll take them. They’ll make them child workers. Or worse.”

“Who do you mean?” My throat tightened.

“The children. The whole of them. We don’t have a lot of time.”

An uneasiness spread like a fever in my body, hot and cold at once. My eye twitched. In eight years, we’d never been raided. No one had any idea there was a functioning school for orphaned children behind the door of Room 8. Not even my beloved cousin Frédéric.

“Come inside.” I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it.

On the way into the building, the girl asked me if I had seen any lighthouses in the area. The cans were suddenly nothing to her, compared to lighthouses.

“You know, the lighthouse on Turtle Hill is frozen over just now,” I ventured, which had the peculiar and fascinating effect of detouring and focusing her speech.

“Yes, the light on Turtle Hill! It lives at the end of the long island in your time. I’ve read about this. The very first public works project when the nation was in its infancy. The fourth oldest standing,” she said, as we climbed the first flight of stairs toward the Room of Reliquaries. “The light can be seen for approximately seventeen nautical miles. Designed by Ezra L’Hommedieu. L’Hommedieu means ‘the man of god,’ or just ‘man-god.’ My mother was a linguist. Lighthouses are beacons, you know.”

The girl turned off her monologue, as abruptly as she’d begun it, and looked at me with fiery eyes.

I don’t know why I was so compelled by her stare. Except that sometimes the want of a child is bigger than everything you think you know; their eyes can arrest you midlife and throw your entire purpose into the wind like seeds.

I unlocked the door to the Room of Reliquaries and watched her eyes scan the room; for a moment, I felt I could imagine her traveling through space and time. What she was looking at: hundreds of glass containers of beautiful shapes and sizes, each containing an object someone before her had found astonishing. As she looked around the room, I thought she stopped breathing. Here and there: small octopuses or giant beetles preserved in formaldehyde and water. Whole walls decorated with wet specimens. All varieties of worm, which she took a particular interest in. Feathers and bones and jaws, the organs of fish and fowl, eyes and hearts and lungs from countless creatures, minerals and claws, the wings of bats or birds.

What arrested her, though, was the thing she came for: a bluish-purple umbilical cord — an oddity to be sure — spiraling gracefully inside its fluted glass container.