“My father always trusted you, Jeremiah. He considered you a good friend. I hope you will be the same for me.”

Jeremiah nodded enthusiastically. He caught himself and seemed to think twice about his expression. He schooled his face and nodded more slowly. Ashken caught his choices and emotions. Outside of his family, Ashken had always been able to read people’s faces. His father and Moses were a blank slate to him, but other people were obvious. He knew what Jeremiah was thinking. Jeremiah was a good friend to his father. But he was also a rival in the enclave governing counsel. Ashken did not think Jeremiah had anything to do with his father’s death. It would have been unlikely that Tenos should ride home because of Ashken, only to return the same day. There was a chance that he was involved on the periphery, perhaps informing Hiro and his gang of Tenos’s whereabouts. Everyone was suspect. He would only trust Moses.

Ashken looked over to Jessica. She leaned against the sink basin. Three large wooden pails of different sizes sat on the counter. Ashken doubted that the Friar’s had installed plumbing in their new house. Ashken could not imagine giving up plumbing to move into a poorly constructed wooden house. But he was not the Friar’s. He had grown up knowing of the Modern’s machines and accepting that they were a better way of life. Already Ashken felt himself falling into the mold his father had set for him. He was not like Jeremiah or the rest of the enclave. He was more like his father.

“We thanked the spirits that you were safe,” Jeremiah said. “When Moses told us about your father—you know I was a good friend to your father. It could not have happened to a better man, Ashken. He was feared in the counsel because of his ideas. He was a brilliant man—but you know that. I never looked up to another man like I looked up to your father.” When he spoke to Ashken he stepped in close, almost leaning over Ashken. Ashken continued to warm his hands on his mug of tea. He did not drink, however. Tea was a precious in the enclave, and he doubted that the tea Samantha brewed was fresh. It was likely the tea leaves were old. He had heard of people reusing dried tea leaves for more than a year. Ashken did not understand why they bothered. After a while, they should give up on the tea and serve hot water, perhaps improved by a bit of citrus. Even the citrus was becoming rare in the enclave. The traders grew less interested in the crops the people of the enclave were producing. Even without the Moderns’ machines breaking down, Ashken was not sure how the people of the enclave were to survive. His father had been an optimist. He had believed that they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find a way to survive. Ashken was not so sure. He thought they were the last of a breed. Deidre Diamond had not gained popularity by speaking of things people did not believe. She spoke of only things that the people were thinking, beliefs that the people held closely, so closely that not even Tenos Liebowitz’s oratory skills could crack.

Ashken missed the end of Jeremiah’s statement. He had much to think about. He looked over to Joseph. Joseph held a mug of tea in his hand. The mug looked tiny in his fist. He seemed to share Ashken’s distaste of old tea. He sniffed the tea occasionally and a made a face. The more Ashken studied Joseph, the more he wondered about what when through his head. He seemed disinterested in most things. He sniffed the tea, but did not seem to care how it smelled. He did not drink it, however. Joseph reminded Ashken a lot of Moses. The similarities were even more striking when they sat next to each other. They were certainly of different sizes. Even in his thick robes, Moses was a small man. Not thin like Tenos, but thin like an old weathered piece of leather. He appeared pulled apart, his arms and torso stretch and pulled and then squished back together until only sinews and muscles remained.

Joseph, now that Ashken had a chance to study him, was certainly not a small or thin man. He was large in all the way fat men were not. Ashken and Moses had both been wrong about him. He was not large in the way of a fat man. His largeness seemed an afterthought. It was almost as if a fat suit was placed on a giant, muscular man. His large body and oversized hands and thighs did not look out of place. They looked as part of him as Moses’s muscled neck and braided wrists. Instead, Joseph’s bulging parts sat on him as if metal had been punched out to form bulges. The bulges did not sag or take away from the metal’s strength, they just shaped it into an usual shape. But the shape was as strong if not stronger than a thinned piece of metal.

It was not their sizes that made them look similar but their coloring. Both Joseph and Moses had the same light color to their skin. Ashken and his father, and even the Friar’s, had darker skin, almost stained-wood colored, which darkened considerably in the sun. But Joseph and Moses had much lighter skin, the color of coconut milk. Their skin reddened in the sun but never truly darkened. And it was not only their skin color. The shapes of their eyes were also different. They were narrower than Ashken and the rest of the enclave’s people. Ashken had his suspicions. Perhaps Joseph came from the same place as Moses and his family. Ashken still had his hopes that Moses had a family outside of the enclave, a successor he trained that would continue to protect the Liebowitz family. For the first time Ashken thought about his responsibility to the family. With his father dead, he now carried the name, the last of his family. If he did have a son, he hoped Moses’s progeny would protect him as Moses had protected his father, and as Moses would protect him.

Jessica offered to refill Ashken’s mug, but he covered it and smiled up at her. Of all the people Ashken had met in the enclave, it was only Jessica that he felt a certain interest in. She shared Tenos’s interest in the Moderns’ machines, probably more so than Ashken had cared. “Jessica, would you mind showing me to where I will sleep. This has been a long day, and I would like to take my leave.”

“By all means,” Jeremiah said. “Jessica, show Ashken Liebowitz to your room. You’ll sleep with us tonight. Make sure you come right back down and tend to Moses and his friend.” Jeremiah smiled at Moses. His smile changed a bit when he looked at Joseph. The smile lost its sincerity. The ends of his mouth stayed up, but he saw that the muscles were forced. The rest of his face looked worried, almost as if the corners of his mouth were held up by a marionette’s strings. Ashken knew exactly how Jeremiah felt when he looked at Moses. There was something almost not human about him. For such a large man, he seemed to have no desires, no will of his own. His actions seemed forced, as if he had to convince himself each moment to do something in the next. It had been different when he was fighting Moses. Ashken remembered him laughing and almost enjoying himself as he swung his pole arm and ran after Moses. Ashken still did not understand why Moses trusted Joseph. But as Moses had said earlier, if he trusted Moses, he needs to trust Moses’s decisions as well. While Ashken trusted Moses implicitly, he was not sure he could ever trust Joseph. He was not sure he would ever want to trust Joseph.

Ashken rose from the table. He grabbed a biscuit from the table and waited for Jessica to lead him from the room. She did not walk far. The house, which had looked large from the outside, was relatively small. There were only four rooms: the foyer they had entered, the kitchen he had eaten in, Jessica’s room, and her parents room. Jessica gave Ashken the brief tour. Ashken recognized most of the furniture from the Friar’s old house. The rooms were too small to hold all the furniture, and there were only small walkways in the middle of the rooms. Jessica looked almost embarrassed as she gave the tour.

“I’m almost embarrassed to show you around this house,” Jessica said. She had a slight lisp when she spoke. Ashken believed that she spoke very softly because of the lisp. She was embarrassed by it, and told him in great details of all her attempts to break her lisp. Her father was very conscious of it, and always seemed to come up with excuses for Jessica not to speak during the dinner events. Whenever Ashken and his father had previously visited for dinners and enclave gatherings, Jeremiah would dominate the conversation, so much so that he provided few opportunities for the guests to speak to Jessica. Whenever Jeremiah saw a guest walking over to Jessica, he would engage them in conversation, deftly moving between guests to work almost like a living shield to protect her from having to speak. Only with Ashken was he less protective. Ashken always figured it was because he was younger that he worried less. Over the past two years, however, as Ashken started to grown into his adulthood, he had noticed that Jeremiah had begun treating him like the other adult guests that visited his house. He would engage Ashken in conversation instead of allowing him to speak to Jessica. The rule at least for tonight had been softened. He had seen Samantha exchange a meaningful look with Jeremiah before directing her to allow Jessica to guide Ashken to her room.

“At least the furniture is top notch,” Ashken offered. The Friar’s had had a beautiful house, second only to the Liebowitz’s house in size and Moderns’ furnishings the enclave. The last time Ashken had visited, the house had been in decent condition. He could not believe how fast it must have deteriorated for the Friar’s to have moved out so quickly, and the house to have broken down already. He thought back and realized that he had not visited the Friar’s in over a year. He really looked at Jessica for the first time, trying to see if she’d had changed as much as the house.

Jessica stared right back at Ashken. While she spoke softly, she was not shy, never shy. If given the chance, she would have spoken to everyone at her father’s parties. But she respected her father too much, probably too much for her own good, Ashken believed. She led him into her room. Like the rest of the house, her room was crowded with furniture. Filling all the empty spaces in her room, and piled on top and under all the furniture in her room, were piles of Moderns’ machines in different states of deconstruction. The room looked more like a storage house than a bedroom. Jessica was not only interested in what the Moderns’ machines did, she was also interested in how they did it. After figuring what a Moderns’ machine would do, she would dissect it, breaking it down into its components. Most of her deconstructions did not amount to much. The Moderns’ machines did not contain much inside of them. They were mostly solid, and once she broke them, they usually deconstructed rather quickly as Ashken’s door had done earlier in the day.

But Jessica had found the secret to stopping the deconstruction. She had showed it to Ashken the last time he had visited. The secret was water. If you soaked the machine when it first broke for a few days, when it dried, it would not break down. Most of the broken machines scattered around her room had been ripped in half, soaked, and dried.

“There’s something I have to show you,” Jessica said quietly. She walked passed Ashken and into her room. She opened the drawer in her nightstand, a beautifully worked wooden box with drawers that pulled all the way out and seemed to hover unattached from the rest of the nightstand. She removed a thin plastic sheet and sat on her bed. She beckoned Ashken over with her hands.

“I’ve been wanting to show you this ever since I found it.” Jessica looked up at Ashken and her face turned a slight gray. She swallowed hard and began speaking very quickly, her voice growing louder as she went on. “I’m so sorry, Ashken. I’m prattling on about this stupid finding, and I’m sure this is the last thing you want to think about after your—you know, your father. It is so terrible. My father is heartbroken over it. I couldn’t believe it when Moses told us. We knew he was sick, but we thought he would be around for a long time. Moses did not go into details about what happened. Was he in a lot of pain? It seemed like it happened so suddenly. And your carriage, what happened to it? Moses did not go into many details, and if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”

Ashken could not help but smile at Jessica. She was the first happy thought he had had since the beginning of the day. He found it strange that Moses had not told the Friar’s what had happened. Perhaps that was one of the reasons they did not treat Joseph strangely—well, more strangely than people should treat an eight foot giant. Ashken moved a few of the Moderns’ machines from her bed and made space to sit next to her. He wondered often how she slept in her bed. It always seemed covered by Moderns’ machines. He also wondered how it would feel to sleep with her in this bed. If he ever did, he did not think he would worry much about the Moderns’ machines that covered the bed. He put that thought away. He did not think it appropriate to think that way.

The sheet he held on his hand was covered in black markings. He had seen many Moderns’ machines, but had never seen one so thin. It was thinner than the bark of a tree. “Is this the lid of something?” he asked.

“No, this is it,” Jessica said with a frown. “I traded it with Charles DeViro a few months back. It’s getting harder and harder to get my hands on any new machines. The people are destroying the machines. There are piles of abandoned machines piling up everywhere. And the militias were guarding the piles, so I can’t slip in and take the machines before they deteriorate. Can you believe the waste? What I could have learned from those machines. No, I think this is the entire machine. I’ve just never seen one so thin or with such funny symbols. At first I thought it was a design, like some of the Moderns’ machines have on them.” Jessica pointed over to her nightstand, the drawer of which had slowly closed after she had removed the sheet. Along the edges and corners of the nightstand were intricately carved shapes, some of which seemed to move if watched carefully, almost as if it was responding to the mood in the room.

“But the more I look at it,” Jessica continued. “The less like a design it looks. I don’t know what these markings are.”

Ashken looked closer at the page. The markings were circles and squares, shapes he had seen embodied in architectural designs, but never brought down to such a scale or on such a narrow dimensions. He could not fathom the purpose of such designs on the sheet.

Ashken shook his head and gave the sheet back to Jessica. “That is the most interesting thing you’ve found, Jessica. Have you figured out what it does?”

“The funny thing about this machine is it doesn’t do anything. No matter what I do, it doesn’t activate. It just stays there with these funny shapes. I’ve even thought to dissect it, but I didn’t know where to start. I was hoping you’d have some ideas.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Ashken felt the exhaustion hit him like a rock. He had not realized how tired he had felt until he arrived somewhere he felt safe. He reached out his hand and grabbed Jessica’s hand. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “You’re the only person I wanted to see after, well, after what happened. But I need to rest now. I need to gather my thoughts and figure out what happens next. We will talk in the morning. I want to hear more about this sheet and your other discoveries. And I’ll need to talk to your father. My father left much of his work undone, and I need to figure out what I can do to continue his work.”

Jessica nodded knowingly. She looked like she wanted to say more, to begin to discuss Tenos and begin planning with Ashken the next steps, but she remained quiet. It was one of her most endearing skills, and probably something that she learned because of her father’s inappropriate behavior. However she learned it, Ashken appreciated her concern and her understanding. She stood up, reluctantly slipping her hand away from Ashken’s hand. She carefully walked to the window, avoiding the mess of Moderns’ Machines that covered the floor leading to the window, and pulled down a black shade, which Ashken remembered from the Friar’s old house. The room darkened and Jessica walked to the door. She closed the door and Ashken was alone in the room. He cleared a larger space for himself on the bed. Before he could think to remove his shoes or crawl underneath the blanket, he fell asleep, the day dragging him into the oblivion he had longed for since early morning.

Word count: 3,059

Words remaining: 29,572 (words so far: 20,428)

Thoughts: Today was easier. The story is no better, but the words were not painful (at least on the way out—no idea how they’ll feel on the way in). I guess I should be thankful for little things.