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It is midsummer. Sloane is fourteen, and Marcus has organised an Outing.
She can’t remember it ever being so hot. Not since she arrived at the airport, anyway. The sun streams in through the wide glass windows overlooking the old runways, and heats the terminals up like greenhouses. Sweat prickles the back of Sloane’s neck as she piles sandwiches into an old plastic bag, the Target logo on it faded to a pastel pink from years of reuse.
A walk to the creek and a picnic, Marcus said. It is an absurd level of whimsy for him to indulge in, on its face, but Sloane knows he really just wants to swim laps in the creek, and the lure of food is the only way to convince his flock of younger siblings to traipse through the woods with him because everybody else has refused to babysit.
“Besides,” he’d said the evening before, “We could all use the exercise.” This was what made Dad agree, giving a side look at Alphonso.
They all grumbled about it less than they usually would. The airport is stuffy, and the idea of helping out in the greenhouse or cleaning the toilets is roundly unappealing.
At eleven-thirty sharp, Marcus leads them out across the runways and towards the distant treeline. He strides in front of the group, just a hair in front of Ben, who sports dark sunglasses he must have traded for recently, as Sloane has never seen them.
She keeps her eyes fixed on Ben’s back as they traipse across the tarmac, which shimmers with a low heat-haze. Grounded planes loom around them. Back in the first few months of year zero, some of the families who didn’t speak English had set up little communities in them. Dad had put a fast stop to that. He liked people where he could see them.
Sloane had asked Pogo once if he thought the planes would still be able to fly, if someone got in who knew what buttons to push. He had used to work in that kind of thing. Her mom had been a little scared of flying, but heights had never bothered Sloane. She was never happier than when she had her nose pressed against a window, watching everything get smaller and smaller underneath her.
The old man had stroked his beard thoughtfully, looking out at a gutted Airbus. People had torn it apart for the luggage long ago, and it was rusting and surrounded by tattered suitcases nobody wanted to clear. “I don’t expect so,” he concluded, after a few moments. “Aside from the obvious damage, the fuel will have degraded by now. And the navigation wouldn’t work, even if one could get it off the ground.”
Sloane still idly dreams of discovering a lost pilots’ manual under a chair somewhere, and taking off to China or Canada or Egypt. In her fantasy, people there have their shit together.
As the siblings leave the tarmac and enter the overgrown field that stretches to the woods, Soane takes Fei by the arm to lead her across the uneven ground. What was once a curated lawn is now an overgrown meadow that buzzes with cicada-song.
“It’s too hot. This sucks .” Jayme announces. She’s eleven, the youngest of them.
“She’s right.” Alphonso has no excuse; he’s an adult. He is wheezing slightly, though. Reginald made him ration his inhaler use when when he first arrived at the airport, but after seven years, it is long dead. “Fuck this.”
“We’re almost there,” Marcus says. “And knock off swearing in front of Jayme, Grace doesn’t like it.”
“Jayme’s heard worse.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard worse,” says Jayme.
Marcus just gives a long-suffering sigh, and keeps walking.
They reach the creek at half noon, a wide body of water with a gentle current, and Marcus and Ben waste no time in ridding themselves of their shirts and beginning to swim, strong laps back and forth as though they’re at a gym and have something to prove.
Sloane supposes they do – that each is a stronger swimmer and better leader than the other. It’s exhausting to watch, so she spreads the threadbare travel blanket from her Target bag over the pebbled bank and hands out the sandwiches. It’s cooler here, with the stones and the shade from the trees arching over them. She closes her eyes for a second, tilting her head back into the dappled sunlight.
The bread is stale, but Grace made the jelly herself. She even cut the crusts off each one, as though they are still children.
“Dad would hate the food waste,” Fei sniffs as she finishes a bite. And Sloane feels both a surge of love for Grace and her tiny rebellions, and annoyance, because this is something Reginald is right about. They’re all big enough to eat crusts.
Jayme wanders the riverbank as she eats, kicking pebbles into the water in Ben’s vague direction, and occasionally bending to pick up some shiny piece of litter. Alphonso searches for flat rocks to skip from the comfort of the blanket. Somewhere upriver, an animal rustles in a hedge. Sloane turns, but can’t see what it is.
“I wonder if you could fish here,” Fei muses. “It could be a decent food source for the summer.”
“Don’t you need equipment?” Sloane asks. She can remember her father, her real one, taking her fishing once. He fished a lot, or at least she remembers it that way. She remembers the Pacific, and his boxes of lures and rods for different fish and times of day and places.
“Nah,” Alphonso says. “I thought you just tied a worm to a stick and a string. Like in Minecraft. You guys remember Minecraft? ”
Sloane decides that pretending not to is the likeliest way to get herself out of a conversation about pre-pan video games, and shakes her head.
They fall silent. Sloane has never had a great deal to say to most of her siblings, but it’s getting worse as they grow older.
Jayme returns with her scavenged treasures, which she piles on the blanket. A small plastic toy, an old vape pen, an eggshell, and a bemused-looking snail. She and Alphonso agree that the toy is the best find – they have eggs and snails at home. Alphonso pockets the toy and the vape, although it has most likely been in the creek for at least seven years. Whoever he trades it with won’t know that right away.
Ben and Marcus leave the water, both panting and high on their own testosterone. “If you’d let me help you with your form-” Marcus begins, but Ben cuts him off with a snarl, shaking the water from his hair.
“I don’t need your help.”
Marcus takes a sandwich, frowning at some trees upriver.
“What?” Ben snorts. “No ‘You’ll never develop delts like this, Ben, I read a Mens’ Fitness about it’?”
Marcus lifts a hand to cut him off, staring at the bushes behind Sloane now. “I think someone’s here.”
That gets everyone’s attention. Suddenly, they are silent, fixed on the same point. Sloane sees Fei tilt her head slightly, listening intently.
“Show yourself.” Marcus calls. “Show yourself and nobody gets hurt.” His voice is loud and confident, but Sloane knows they are all unarmed. Marcus and Ben are strong, sure, but if they’re being stared down by a bandit with a weapon, they’re fucked.
Slowly, her fingers find Fei’s arm, and she squeezes, preparing to run if they have to. Her heartbeat feels thready, the warmth of the day intense.
The bushes rustle again, then small, light footsteps begin to sound, rushing away from them.
Ben doesn’t even pause before he’s running, still barefoot and dripping, towards this unknown person.
Sloane finds herself counting as she listens for anything. She makes it to six before there’s a slight scuffling sound, and Ben reappears with the limp form of a child under his arm.
Horror fills Sloane’s throat, but she realises after a second that the kid is conscious, just utterly still. “It’s a kid,” she says to Fei, and she can hear the confusion in her own voice.
“Put him down. ” Marcus is looking at Ben as though he’s returned with twin unicorns and not a small child.
Ben places the kid on his feet, but keeps a grip on the back of his faded blue sweater. The child looks to be about five or six, with bruised knees and painfully pronounced cheekbones. He trembles despite the heat, barely able to keep upright. Ben’s hand moves from his collar to his shoulder in a display of what might be gentleness.
This child is not from the airport. They have never seen him before.
Marcus crouches to the child’s level. “Hey, there. I’m Marcus. These are my brothers and sisters. Are your parents around?”
The child doesn’t react. Marcus tries again. “Are you out here by yourself?” He glances between his siblings. “Did any of you see anyone?”
“Of course not,” Ben snaps.
“Stay here,” Marcus says, as though anyone had a different plan. “I’m going to scout the area.”
Ben snorts, but they let Marcus jog around the woods, calling out for somebody to hear.
Sloane can sense it, though. Nobody else is around.
“Do you want some food?” She asks the boy, holding out a sandwich. He stays resolutely silent. In fact, he does not move until Marcus returns.
“We’re taking him to Dad,” he announces, as though anyone was considering another option. “Pack up, we’re going now.”
Sloane helps Fei to her feet, then scoops the blanket into her bag and tosses it over her shoulder. She reaches her spare hand out to the child. “Come on,” she says gently. “We’re taking you somewhere safe. It’s okay. We have food, and toys, and…” She tries to find something else appealing about the airport. “There’s a lot of books.” Something is sinking inside her, breaking at the thought of collecting another little sparrow for dad, and caging him up. But how would he survive in the woods otherwise?
Ben says, “You walk with us or I carry you.”
Slowly, the boy reaches up his hand and grasps Ben’s thumb. Ben scoffs, but doesn’t shake the child off. He simply begins to walk.
-
Christopher is the name cleanly embroidered onto the label of the boy’s sweater, and Reginald deems him suitable for raising as his own. Some cynical part of Sloane thinks it’s the label that did it – concrete proof that somebody cared about him enough to do this little loving thing, somebody found him to be worth something.
That night, the seven of them lie around the empty seats of the former departures lounge. Christopher presses himself up against the window, fixated on a rubiks cube Jayme has jealously guarded for weeks but never actually played with. Ben sits on his other side, and Christopher’s small socked foot taps against his knee.
Sloane is near enough Fei to whisper right in her ear. “What do you think happened to him?”
Fei simply shakes her head, and Sloane understands. There are worlds of unimaginable horrors out there, and they could spend all night imagining them.
Instead, she watches the child move and entirely lean against Ben, tilting his cube in this new light, and hopes that the six of them will love him enough to make up for a life here.