heaven keep us apart.

[lanterncast]

It's the middle of summer, and Judith is thirteen and grown out of all her old clothes; a spurt, Ms. Whalen said, shaking her head at the swelling curves beneath her t-shirt and straining at the sides of her faded blue cut-off shorts. She'll need hand-me-downs no one else will take, so that means the things that are stained, wrecked, too ugly, the things that never fit right in the first place. Like these articles of clothing, Judith is excluded from the annual sept picnic they have in the park a reasonable walk away.

This is one of the only times of year when Judith is all alone in the sept, even the grandmothers and grandfathers (and great-grandmothers, and great-grandfathers) on the back porch taken away with walkers or wheelchairs, and secretly she looks forward to it every year.

The first thing she does is borrow lipstick from a forgotten purse and apply it carefully to her mouth, perfect red and faintly glossy; for lack of blush, she rubs a little on her fingertips and then onto her cheeks, and judges it to be good in the big bathroom mirror on the second floor. There's no mascara, but that's all right, her eyelashes are heavy and dark on their own. Still, if she had that this would be better.

When that's done, she changes into her best denim shorts and a white tank top that at least isn't stained too clearly after having been through the wash a dozen times, turns the radio on in the kitchen, and borrows paper and pencils from the study. She pours herself a big glass of soda, with ice, and adds whiskey to it from three different bottles she tops up with the tiniest amount of water she dares. She has a taste for it acquired when she was small and they'd get her drunk to keep her quiet, but now she never drinks too much, and never in company, because it goes to her head too fast and makes her slow and clumsy. She can't be these things. All of this laid in order, she settles down at the kitchen table in a patch of sunlight and begins to sketch.

She can draw in the basement, but the light's never good, and doing it up here feels like the quietest of transgressions. Judith can't say what rule her drawing breaks, because she's never asked, and never shown these to anyone; she's sure that someone would stop her if they knew, that's the important thing, because she doesn't want to give this up.

Judith found a book in the Dumpster next to the door from her basement into the alley next to the sept called "Learn to Draw and Paint", and she's been learning for six months now, and she's getting better, and she can't say why she's doing this at all except that there are things in her head that want to scream, but she can't give them a voice. Screaming is not an option, around here, so instead she renders the gap in a wall in carefully recalled detail, the silhouette of something pressed in graphite on graphite behind it. Her perspective could be better, her straight lines are crooked--

The door bell rings, and she breaks the pencil in her hand, head jerking up to the clock. It's too early, though, and family wouldn't ring, they'd just walk in, so she chooses to ignore it. It rings again, and she switches pencils. It rings like someone is leaning on it and she tells herself that they'd prefer she obey the rules than see if there's anything important going on; Judith understands that the presence of a girl who looks like no one in the family, a girl with no last name and no legal identification, could be a people if the wrong people heard. It never occurs to her that the problem might be with anything but her; the consequences will be hers, either way.

When the knocking starts she gives up, because it's too light to be the Authorities, who visit the sept too often for Ms. Whalen's taste. She turns her sketches over and heads to the front door in her bare feet. She has to walk through the darkened front room, first, and there her pace slows despite herself, because she is not allowed in many places, but especially not this one, with its soft carpet and cream colored couches. There is a piano that Ms. Whalen plays, ivory colored and oddly delicate, and Judith thinks of touching it, and doesn't.

The person at the door will be someone wanting to borrow something, she decides, and opens it a slit with her head tilted slightly up ready to tell them to leave. But there's no one up there, and she looks down to see a little boy with brown hair and a pair of badly skinned knees, his face wet and shining.

"Is my mom here?" He asks, and she can figure out without a lot of particular mental effort the he must be a kid from some part of the family. She doesn't know many of them, and less of those by name, because there are always a dozen kids in here at least and no one is exactly falling over themselves to have her babysit, but this one doesn't even look that familiar beyond a resemblance she can't place with sureness. And none of that matters, because the picnic is half an hour's walk away and she doesn't know what she's supposed to do.

"No," she says, staring, still lost, but when he bursts into quiet and exhausted tears she knows she can't just tell him to walk back. And he's so small. Whatever irritation she felt at being interrupted fades, and she crouches, letting the door swing open.

"Now--hey, it's all right, don't worry, she's going to come find you soon," she says, hoping it's true since she has no idea, none, what she's supposed to do with some lost little kid, "I'll just--you should come inside, um. What's your name?"

"Tommy," he sniffs, rubbing his big blue eyes.

"I'm Judith, now come here--fuck, you're heavier than you look, you know that?" She knocks the door closed with her hip as he wraps his arms around her neck, and she can feel how hot he is, sweaty and trembling. She doesn't know if that's normal or not, but she'd be willing to bet not, and if so she hopes he doesn't do anything like faint on her. He has tiny little bones, and he's not as heavy as she made him sound; it's just what she hears people say when they pick up kids like this, and this is what she occupies herself with until she sets him down on the edge of the kitchen table and runs a washcloth under cold water before wringing it damp. First aid she can handle.

"This is going to hurt a little, so don't--just don't yell, okay?" Her hand hovers just above his knee and he nods his assent, biting his lip and holding onto the edge of the table; he doesn't yell, and she notes it in his favor. The scrapes aren't as bad as she thought, but there's a jagged sliver of glass in his left knee she gives up on picking out and sucks out instead, wiping the lipstick ring from the skin around it before she spits the glass out in the sink.

"When's my mom going to get here?" He asks, quietly, and she shrugs like it's not a big deal.

"Soon, I don't know. So, bandaids, we've got--" She climbs up to the cupboard, her own bare knees chilled by the countertop, and retrieves three boxes. "--Batman, Scooby Doo, and boring as fuck. What happened to you, anyway? Why aren't you at the picnic?" It's not important, but maybe it'll keep him from asking about his mother again; Judith secretly wills her to show up five minutes ago. As soon as little kids start asking about their parents she knows crying follows soon after, for all kinds of reasons.

"You shouldn't say that word. That's a bad word." Judith glances over her shoulder, surprised, to see him significantly calmer as he wipes his nose on the back of his hand. "My mom says. I fell down. I was walking with Liam and we went to get some gum but then Rory was there and Liam told me to go back but I--I got lost and I fell down and my mom said that Grandma Mary lived in this big house but she's not here and I really want my--"

"How about some of all of them, huh? The big ones can go on underneath." She crosses the distance between them quickly, brushing his slightly damp hair back and biting her own lip. "Which Liam? There are a lot of Liams." And everyone under ten calls Ms. Whalen Grandma Mary, real grandmother or not, but she guesses Ms. Whalen might be his blood grandmother too, since now that his chin isn't so crumpled she can see the tiny cleft in it. (The idea that this would make her his aunt is born and dies in the same crushed second. This family doesn't have her in it. She just is, like a mushroom that swells in the dark from nothing.)

"McEvoy. Kieran's brother Liam." She nods, peeling the backing off two pinkish bandages, large enough to cover both his knees completely. They're flesh colored, apparently, but it's the color of a flesh that isn't hers. It suits him, though, as do the little cartoon adorned bandaids she layers on top of both of them once they're firmly applied.

"I know Kieran," she says, and it's a place to start in the complex mingling of branches that forms the relationships of everyone in the sept. "And I've seen Liam around. Are you related? Close, I mean, like cousins."

"No." Tommy wrinkles his nose slightly, reminding her of a rabbit, and looks down at his knees. "Are you going to kiss them better? My mom always does and--they hurt."

Judith opens her mouth to protest, but what would be the point? She's already in whatever this is too deep to back out, no one will know, and if it's contamination she's worrying about she already got her spit in his blood. So she bends and presses her mouth against each knee in turn, lightly, wondering if this is how kisses actually work, hoping he won't notice if she's doing something wrong. Her mouth leaves red smears, still, and she looks at those instead of him when she straightens up.

"And what does your dad think about that, huh?" She rubs the pads of her thumbs over the calluses on her palms, and she's just filling the air when she speaks. She should have expected his answer, but it still snaps her head up like a punch in the jaw.

"He's not here." Tommy is staring at a point on the floor, and Judith wishes she knew what to say to make his eyes clear for him; it's not the first time she'd wished she was better, it won't be the last, but her eyes drift over the dimple in his chin and her hand brushes over his soft, soft hair again, softer than hers ever was.

"I'm sorry. You know--" All that comes to mind are platitudes, hideous and wrong, but she keeps talking. "--he's looking out for you, wherever he is, I bet he made you...unlost."

Tommy looks up, startled. "From Australia?"

"--what?"

"My dad's in Australia. You think he did that?" He seems skeptical, and then the resemblance she noted hits her hard below the navel and she breathes out, boneless but somehow still standing.

"Is your dad's name Shannon?"

"Shannon O'Connell," Tommy confirms, his five-year-old back straightening as he looks very serious, and of course she knew as soon as he said 'Australia', but she still leans forward against the table's edge and thinks about the world's fucked up sense of humor. She never knew his name, Angela (his mother's name is Angela, she remembers), never brought him around here, and Judith had never thought about him until just now, while he's looking at her with growing comprehension of his own.

"Do you know my dad?" There is so much hope in his voice that she can't lie, but she wishes she could, she wishes she was so good at it no one could ever tell what she was really thinking.

"Yeah. I knew your dad." She reaches for her soda and knocks almost half of it back in two swallows, her eyes burning behind their lids. "Back when he was around, um--we don't talk or anything, I didn't know him that well. So your mom--"

"Did he hate me?"

"What?" The second time in less than that many minutes he's caught her off guard with nothing but his voice, but how can she protect herself from something like that? She stares back at him and his eyes shining overbright again, his fiercely bitten lip. "Why would you ask me that?"

"Rory said he hated me and that's why he's gone. He says that's what his brother said and his brother was my dad's best friend and he'd know and--that's why I ran away, they didn't leave me, I was mad. But did he hate me? 'Cause if he did then--maybe I could be better and he wouldn't hate me anymore and he'd come back and see me for real and we could do stuff and I'm really good at my alphabet, I can even read, and--"

"Rory," Judith says, every syllable as hard and clean as a razor over her tongue, "Is a liar, and the next time I see him I'm going to knock his fucking teeth in--your dad doesn't hate you, don't you ever say that--no, look at me, Tommy, he doesn't hate you, I promise." She cups his chin in her hand and turns him towards her, and his crying now tears at her underbelly, treacherously, the kind of crying that begs you to join it. It doesn't make a sound; she can just see his heart breaking and know she can't fix it, and it's her heart, because she knows what it's like to think that your father doesn't love you.

He's not her father. She has to remember that. He's not her father except for when he is, and he hates her, and that's how things are supposed to be for her. But Tommy is a little boy and he should never have to feel like this, and she knows this despite years of burying this kind of softness in herself below sharp edges and hard silences, a wall with razor wire wrapped through it and over it, so she has to bleed to get over and say: "I'm going to show you something that I've ever shown anybody before, so you have to keep it a secret, and--don't go anywhere, I'm just going downstairs for a minute."

It's less than a minute, even with prying it out of her hiding place, and she takes the stairs fast coming up to find him just where she left him, this shoulders shaking.

"Come here," she says, when she picks him up and carries him around to another stool she sets them both down on, turning him around to sit in her lap as she delicately unfolds and spreads the map on the sunwarmed wood in front of them. His head brushes against her chin, and she breathes in warm air, unable to tell what he smells like except she imagines it must be as soft as his hair.

"I'm going to prove to you, straight out prove, that your dad doesn't hate you, all right? So you had better pay attention." She takes his small hands in hers and presses one to the spot marked Boston, circled in red pen. "You see that? That's where we are, right now. You know we live in Boston, don't you?"

"I'm not dumb," he answers, slightly annoyed even when his voice quivering, and she smiles almost reflexively.

"I never said you were--hey, you can read, that's wicked smart. Okay. So this is Australia." She presses his other hand to the biggest island on the map and lets go, settling back slightly and briefly unnerved by the strange weight in her lap. She's never held a kid like this before, and it keeps surprising her. "You see how close they are? That's nothing. That's inches, look, I can't even fit both my hands in there, it's too close. He's not far away at all."

"Then why doesn't he come see me?" He's almost done crying, she thinks, and she lets her mouth skim the top of his head when she answers, caught up in the story and her own shadow memories. (Shannon's hand on its own could almost cover the whole distance, on this little map, and she could feel every hitch in his chest when he talked about blue skies that never stopped going.)

"Because your dad has a job to do, and I know it's hard that he's not here, and you miss him all the time, but he didn't leave because he hated you--he stayed on this map, so he could be close, I mean--look at how much space there is off the map. If I hated somebody I wouldn't want to be two hands away, I'd go all the way to the end of the table, maybe even out the door. He's only away because he has to be, and we--you should be proud of him, because he's doing something important for Gaia, and for all of us, because that's the kind of person your dad is." She straightens up, putting her hands on either side of Tommy's. "I know Shannon, and he's a good person, and you're a good boy, Tommy, I know he loves you. Of course he loves you, I don't think there's anybody who wouldn't love you, so--when you see Rory you can tell him that he's a lying cunt and Shannon thought his brother was actually a shitheaded bastard, all right?"

Tommy is quiet, the back of his head turning one way and then the other as he looks at his hands, and then he brings them together and leans back against her chest to look up at her instead. She smiles, praying that all of this worked, somehow, that he could believe it--and believe it longer than she did.

"Are you related to us?" He smiles back, warm and guileless, and drives a spike of ice right through her chest.

"Why would you say that?" She asks, tensely, and he reaches up to touch her chin; her hand covers his instantly and pulls it away, holding it out in front of him as his nose wrinkles again in a way she realizes must be a habit, and it's the tiniest of things that still somehow hurt her.

"You have the thing, in your chin, and you know my dad, and you're here, but--why haven't I ever seen you around before, Judith? Are you my cousin? Grandma Mary says I have a lot of cousins."

"I'm not--Tommy, listen to me, you can't say things like that. It's not allowed." She lets go of his wrist and makes her emphasis felt with her tone instead, afraid of the fragility she felt turning slightly against her palm.

"Why?" Fucking kids.

"Because, just--if you tell people I said we're related I'd get into a lot of trouble, do you understand? Wicked bad trouble, so please, Tommy, you can't say that to anyone, you can't say I told you any of this about your dad, they'd fucking maim me--"

The front door bangs open, and someone (afraid, human, young, female) calls: "Tommy!"

"Mom!" Tommy forgets everything and tries to squirm off her lap, and Judith catches him instinctively before he can tumble down and hurt himself. She barely set him down, she hasn't even started to disentangle herself or hide what she now must think of as evidence, before Angela bursts into the kitchen, Kieran right behind her. She's prettier than Judith remembers.

"Oh, Tommy, baby, there you are--I was worried sick, come here!" Tommy runs towards her and she scoops him up with practiced ease, cradling him to her chest, and Judith straightens in silence and moves back around the edge of the kitchen table, putting it between her and everyone else. Kieran looks at her. She looks back, then away, at the map still open on the table, the half-full glass next to it, the broken pencil, the whole ones, her paper, the radio still quietly playing. Now it's a commercial break. She wants to cut to one in real life, right now, but that never happens.

"Kieran--" Angela turns and embraces him, Judith can see it out of the corner of her eye, and she hears her voice fine even if it's muffled against his chest. "--you were right, thank you, Gaia, thank you so much, I don't know what I would have done--"

"Easy, easy," he says. His hands are wide on her back as he soothes her. "It's all right, Ange. And you, Tommy, you gave us a scare there, didn't you? What were you up to, huh? You weren't chasing after girls again, were you, you see what a mess that makes out of your mother."

Angela laughs, weakly, and pulls away to smack his shoulder before she rubs her eyes, still beautiful and blue in her smudged mascara. Judith has lifted her head, now, and she sees all of this because no one is thinking about her yet. Sometimes not being in a room can be for the best, and she slides her fingers towards the map which is the one thing she wants to save.

"This isn't funny," Angela chides, Tommy and Kieran together, who are both smiling, and both worried beneath it as Tommy touches her face and Kieran's hand stays on her shoulder. "Tommy, where were you? Liam said he just turned around for a minute--no one took you, did they? Oh, God, Kieran, what if--baby, what happened to your knees?"

"I fell down, and I just got lost, don't be sad. Please don't be sad? Judith looked after me, we talked about my d--oh." He looks back at her, stricken, and Judith smiles faintly and draws her hands back to her sides as the two adults in the room turn heavy, edged stares on her. Angela moves first.

"What the fuck were you doing with my son?" The slap is harder than Judith was expecting, and her head is turned sharply back towards the table while her cheek burns in a hard, clear-edged swath. She keeps the heat on her skin and doesn't let her teeth itch, doesn't let the feeling settle in as pain. "You tell me right now, or I swear, I'll--"

"Mom!" Tommy sounds horrified, on her behalf, and Judith closes her eyes and waits for the fade to black or the to be continued, the power to go out, anything to make this stop playing before it goes where she knows it will. "Mom, she was nice to me, she gave me bandaids and she knows my dad--"

"What did you say to him?" Angela demands, and Judith braces herself for a hand in her hair, another slap, whatever she has in store.

"Ange." Kieran's voice is close enough he must be right behind her, and it's soft in a way she's never heard before. "Stop it--no, don't argue with me, stop it, you're scaring Tommy. I know you were scared, fuck, I was fucking scared, but don't work it out like this. All right? I'll talk to her. Why don't you and Tommy go sit in the car until I get out there?"

"I--" Judith watches, again sideways and now through the dark curtain of her hair, as Angela touches her forehead, and then cups Tommy's face as he stares at her, before finally looking back at Kieran, who has his arms looped around them both from behind. "I'm sorry. You're right. That sounds like a good idea--stop swearing in front of the five-year-old, will you?"

"Everyone swears in front of him, he's used to it--aren't you, buddy? Yeah, look at that grin, you're a fucking Fiann, it's in the blood."

"He looks up to you, though--Tommy, don't listen to your uncle Kieran, he's trying to corrupt you just to give me a heart attack." Tommy settles his head on her shoulder, and Kieran's ruffles his hair before letting them both go. "Don't be too long," Angela says, as she walks out the door, and while Kieran is watching her go Judith lowers herself carefully to the ground and sits there, her knees tucked up to her chest and held in place by her crossed arms.

Kieran sighs heavily when the front door closes, and his shadow falls over her when he leans on the table. "So can you tell me what the fuck you were playing at, Judith? Why didn't you bring him to the fucking park, or just--for fuck's sake, we thought the bastards from across the way took him, didn't you think about that?"

"He just got here," she answers, quietly, "He showed up at the door and I didn't know what I was supposed to do with him, I figured somebody would show up looking for him. I'm not allowed at the park. I'm not allowed out of the fucking sept unless somebody's with me, I just--all I did was clean up his scrapes. I didn't hurt him."

This is what they think she'd do with any fragile, small, helpless thing; everyone knows metis are vicious, everyone knows they'll do that, everyone knows everything about her, like always. He's already decided she did something wrong.

She thinks about the way he held them both, though, and maybe this time she's not the only one who did something they shouldn't have.

"Why'd you have to bring up fucking Shannon, of all people?"

"I didn't know who he was. Tommy, I mean, I didn't--he asked me about him and how was I supposed to know he's not allowed to ask about his own father?" Suspicion is curling at the base of her throat, bitter and twisted, and if she could watch her own mouth better she wouldn't get into all the trouble she always fucking does. "Uncle Kieran."

"Excuse me." Kieran says, in a way that isn't asking for anything, and she tilts her head back enough to look up at him.

"She's not yours. You know she's not and you've already got one."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about--" He moves away from the table, like he's going to leave, and she flashes her teeth for the briefest of moments he doesn't even see.

"Yeah, you fucking do, I'm not fucking blind--what, is that why you won't let Tommy talk about him? Is that why he ended up here having to ask fucking me about him, of all the fucking people? 'Cause you're not Shannon and it's always driven you up the wall, everybody fucking knows, but they're not yours and if you don't--"

Kieran punches the refrigerator hard enough to knock a hard, bright rain of magnets off of it, and Judith is silenced as effectively as if he aimed it at her throat instead.

He could kill her, and no one would really care. This knowledge hangs between them like it does between her and everyone else; her death and everything up to it is always there telling her to be quiet, to behave, that she can't afford to say these kinds of things, and usually she wouldn't even care enough to think about it--but they're Shannon's, and in her is the budding desire to protect them. Tommy's crying is Kieran's fault, like Angela's faithlessness, and it's all so clear to her why she never sees them at the sept anymore: he must keep them away, so Angela won't remember her responsibilities, or who she belongs to. Her thirteen-year-old intuition is direct and emphatic, and the dim shape of the new thing in her born the first time she realized her teeth could spill blood like anyone else's shifts restlessly in her heart, crouches, and waits. She won't let this go.

Kieran holds his right hand by the wrist and closes his eyes, breathing deep, and when he speaks it's quietly, without looking at her. "I know I'm not Shannon, I didn't spontaneously let it slip my fucking mind."

"But," he continues, crouching on the floor to put himself on her level, and meeting her eyes flatly, "First thing, her fucking name is Angela, and she's a human being. Shannon wouldn't talk about her like that, and neither--fucking especially you won't, you understand me? Nobody fucking owns her. What the hell do you think we are, Fenrir?"

"Whalen picked her--"

"Mary can take a flying fuck into the harbor," Kieran says, impatiently, and this blasphemy shocks her speechless. "But--listen to me, you aren't going to say a word about what you think you saw, or I swear to Gaia, I'll--I don't know what I'll fucking do. Something. Just--Judith, for fuck's sake, I'm married, and Shannon's my best friend, there's nothing going on with us."

"Then why does it matter if I say anything? Nobody will believe me, if it's not true."

"It doesn't matter if they believe you, they'll hear it, they'll talk about it, and it won't do a thing to hurt me, honestly, so if that's what you think you'll get out of this you're stupider than anyone fucking thought. But it'll hurt them, all right--I don't know if you understand what it's like for them already, people always fucking gossip around this place--worse than fucking fishwives, and that's the men, you can't--they don't deserve that and I won't let you do that to them. So keep your fucking mouth shut."

"I--" Her faith in her judgment wavers; she almost believes him, because that's what Kieran's best at, seeming like someone she could trust before he reminds her that he is only this way for people who are people and not objects in a room. "--I won't. I won't say anything." And now if they get caught, it's going to be as much her fault as theirs, but this is a decision she's had to make before and she'll end up having to make it again, she's sure. She sees too many of the secrets around here. If anyone knew how many she knows they'd find a way to make her silence lasting and absolute.

"I'll hold you to that." He stands up, and she drops her chin to her knees, watching the sun bleach his blue jeans right before her eyes.

"Tommy says Rory Brennan told him that Shannon didn't want him," she says, very quietly. "Unless your brother's hanging around with some other Rory, these days."

Kieran waits a beat before he answers, and his voice is as flat and edged as hers was: "Did he, now?"

"As far as I know. It's not--he asked me if Shannon fucking hated him and what was I supposed to fucking say, that I didn't know? That maybe he fucking does? I mean, fuck, I'd hate him, everyone knows Shannon didn't fucking want him in the first place, he didn't want anything from around this fucking place, I just--"

"Don't talk about him like you fucking know him!" Kieran doesn't hit anything, this time, but she can hear that he wants to (hit her) and she flinches back underneath the table, like it can save her. "Shannon loves that kid and he loves this sept and you don't know the first fucking thing about him, you mouthy little mule bitch--he left because he had something to do and you have no fucking idea how important that is to him, to everyone, and if he was just running? Shannon O'Connell wouldn't fucking get found, so don't--I don't even know when you started giving a shit. Why the sudden fucking interest?" He never calls her mule, not to her face, and Gaia knows it's almost polite compared to most things she gets called, but it tells her that for the first time she has crossed some line with him she never knew existed.

"I'm not." All her bravado is gone, and she feels every inch of how small she is next to him, curled practically at his feet, unarmed, helpless, stupid; she's scared and she knows he can smell it, but she doesn't know if he's the kind who's satisfied by that or if he'll want more. She plans exit strategies. If he only breaks a few bones it won't be so bad. She'd be fine by tomorrow. If anything in here breaks they'll blame her, and that'll be more to deal with. She shouldn't have answered the door. "I'm not, I'm sorry. I'm very sorry."

He leans on the table again, right in front of her, and she stares at his thick workboots, the sturdy muscles of his calves and the width of his thighs. They come wiry, around here, but those wires are steel, or so the saying almost goes.

"No," he says, with barely a ripple to his voice, "No, I shouldn't have gone off on you--" There's another pause, one she can't understand or give meaning to right away. "Where did you get this?"

The first secret she ever knew she had to keep was don't tell anyone I come see you, please, and she kept it even before she knew what the consequences would be. Not for her, but for Shannon. Skulking around in the dark with a monster isn't damning, not on its own, but it's questionable, and he doesn't deserve to get dragged down like that over her.

But that map is hers (it's the map, she knows it is, folded over and over and looked at a thousand times, his name written on the top right corner that she used to touch often before her fingers started to erode the ink) and if she lies he'll take it away--but he'll take it if she tells the truth, too, because it's not really hers just like Shannon's not really her brother, so what's the point in fighting for it? It's already gone.

"I stole it," she says, like a thin knife slitting her from throat to navel, "He left it in his coat before he left and I was looking for food in his pockets, and I stole it, I didn't know what it was."

"Then why did you keep it, why--what were you doing with it up here?" She hears the paper crinkling and she wants to scream, to lunge forward and tear at the arteries barely hidden below his jeans, but she stays very still instead.

"I liked the picture, and...I don't know, when Tommy asked me about Shannon I just wanted to show him, you know, he's not that far away."

Kieran shifts his weight with a quick breath in that he lets out, a held moment later, as the quietest, most shaken laughter she's ever heard out of him, rustling like a fistful of new, pale green leaves.

"That fucking song," he says, disbelieving--something, and she wonders how far she'd get if she ran.

"Hey." He crouches, and extends a hand towards her, making her flinch hard before she realizes what he's offering her, and she stares at him blankly. "Come on, take it, it's yours."

Judith takes the folded square from his hand without touching his fingers and holds it flat to her chest, where her shirt is sticking to her breastbone with nervous sweat, and she still doesn't understand what is happening. Her heart is tripping beneath her fingers and her breathing is shallow as skinned knees.

"Clean all this up and I'll talk to Angela--we're going to have to tell them who we found Tommy with, but we won't say anything about the rest of it." A beat. "And wash your face, you look like more of a tramp than my fucking sister."

And then he's gone, his footsteps clear, then muffled, then gone when the front door closes behind him, and Judith leans over her knees and thanks--something, whatever Thing it is that looks out for things like her. She unfolds the map with fingers that shake until she bites them, an old habit she can't seem to lose, and looks at it without seeing it at all.

She imagines all the ocean between her and anywhere but here. Maybe it was only one hand away for Shannon, this thing he could reach out and take and run away with, but to her the distance is so vast it's meaningless, it's like imagining herself on the surface of the moon, on a star, except even those are closer and more real to her. She can understand the cold and the black; she thinks could live there just fine, but this little green place she can cover with one spread hand, that's the alien planet. Shannon the space explorer. Shannon, who is not her brother, who sends communication back in short bursts directed to people who aren't her.

(Houston, we have a problem; she hasn't seen many movies, but she listens, her head cocked next to the heating vents. But Houston is the problem, and everyone in it.)

It's such a stupid little thing, and she's too old for this, she was born too old for this, but she folds the map back up with all the love dying slow in her before she hugs her knees to her aching breasts and doesn't even consider crying.

*

When she breaks Rory Brennan's arm (he is thirteen, and much bigger than she is, but he cries like a girl when she holds a broken bottle beneath his chin anyway) they lock her in a closet for a week, with water once a day and her teeth knocked into the palm of her hand, but it was worth it.