After the Flood. Kassandra montag

was so crowded, Row could be here and the shopkeeper could have never seen her. Pearl and I walked hand in hand, pulling away from the merchants as they reached out to us from their stalls, their voices trailing behind us, “Fresh lemons! Chicken eggs! Plywood half off!”

      Up ahead of me, I saw a girl with long dark hair, wearing a blue dress.

      I stopped in my tracks and stared. The blue dress was Row’s: it had the same paisley pattern, a ruffle at the hem, and bell sleeves. The world flattened, the air gone suddenly thin. A man at my elbow was nagging me to buy his bread, but his voice came as though from a distance. A giddy lightness filled me as I watched the girl.

      I rushed toward her, running down the path, knocking over a cart of fruit, pulling Pearl behind me. The ocean at the bottom of the harbor looked crystal blue, suddenly clean-looking and fresh.

      I grabbed the girl’s shoulder and spun her around. “Row!” I said, ready to see her face again and pull her into my arms.

      A different face glared at me.

      “Don’t touch me,” the girl muttered, jerking her shoulder from my grasp.

      “I’m so sorry,” I said, stepping back.

      The girl scurried away from me, glancing over her shoulder at me anxiously.

      I stood in the bustling road, dust swirling around me. Pearl turned her head toward my hip and coughed.

      It’s someone else, I told myself, trying to adjust to this new reality. Disappointment crowded me but I pushed it back. You’ll still find her. It’s okay, you’ll find her, I chanted to myself.

      Someone shoved me hard, ripping my satchel from my shoulder. Pearl fell to the ground and I stumbled to the side, catching myself against a stall with scavenged tires.

      “Hey!” I yelled at the woman, now darting down the main road and behind a booth with bolts of fabric. I ran after her, leaping over a small cart filled with baby chicks, dodging an elderly man with a cane.

      I ran and spun in circles, looking for the woman. People moved past me as though nothing had happened, the swirl of bodies and voices making me nauseous. I kept looking for what felt like ages, the sunlight dimming around me, casting long shadows on the ground. I ran and spun until I nearly collapsed, stopping close to where it had happened. I looked up the road at Pearl, who stood where she’d fallen, next to the stall with tires.

      She didn’t see me between the people and stalls, and her eyes moved anxiously over the crowd, her chin quivering, holding her arm like it’d been hurt in the fall. This whole time she’d been waiting, looking abandoned, hoping I’d return. The fruit in my satchel that I’d gotten for her had been the one thing I was proud of that day. The one thing I could cling to as evidence that I was doing okay by her.

      Watching her, I felt gutted and finished. If I’d been more alert, not so distracted, the thief never would have ripped it from my shoulder so easily. I used to be so guarded and aware. Now I was worn down with grief, my hope for finding Row more madness than optimism.

      Slowly it dawned on me: the reason the blue dress was so familiar, the reason it had grabbed my gut like a hook. Yes, Row had that same dress, but it wasn’t one Jacob had packed and taken with them when he took her from me. Because I found that dress in her bedroom dresser after she was gone and I slept with it for days afterward, burying my face in her smell, worrying the fabric between my fingers. It had stayed in my memory because it had been left behind, not because she could be somewhere out there wearing it. Besides, I realized, she would be much older now, too large for that dress. She had grown. I knew this, but she remained frozen in my mind as a five-year-old with large eyes and a high-pitched giggle. Even if I ran across her, would I recognize her immediately as my own?

      It was too much, I decided. The constant drain of disappointment every time I reached a trading post and found no answers, no signs of her. If Pearl and I were going to make it in this world, I needed to focus on only us. To shut everything and everyone else out.

      So we’d stopped looking for Row and Jacob. Pearl sometimes asked me why we’d stopped and I told her the truth: I couldn’t anymore. I felt they were somehow still alive, yet I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been able to hear about them in the small communities that were left, tucked high in the mountainsides, surrounded by water.

      Now we were drifting, spending our days with no destination. Each day was the same, spooling into the next like a river running into the ocean. Every night I lay awake, listening to Pearl breathe, the steady rhythm of her body. I knew she was my anchor. Every day I feared a raider ship would target us, or fish wouldn’t fill our nets and we’d starve. Nightmares engulfed me and my hand would shoot out for Pearl in the night, rattling both of us awake. All these fears lined up with a little hope wedged in the cracks in between.

      I closed the crab pots and dropped them over the side, letting them sink sixty feet. As I surveyed the coast, an odd, fearful feeling, a tiny bubble of alarm, rose in me. The shore was marshland, filled with dark grass and shrubs, and trees grew a little farther back from the shore, crowding up the mountainside. Trees now grew above the old tree line, mostly saplings of poplar, willow, and maple. A small bay lay around the shore’s bend, where traders sometimes anchored or raiders lay in wait. I should have taken the time to scope out the bay and make sure the island was deserted. There was never any quick escape on land the way there was on water. I steeled myself to it; we needed to look for water on land. We wouldn’t last another day otherwise.

      Pearl followed my eyes as I gazed at the coast.

      “This looks like the same coast with those people,” Pearl said, needling me.

      She’d been going on for days about raiders we saw robbing a boat in the distance. We’d sailed away, and I was weary, heart heavy, as the wind pulled us out of sight. Pearl was upset we hadn’t tried to help them, and I tried to remind her it was important we keep to ourselves. But under my rationalizations, I feared that my heart had shrunk as the water rose around me—panic filling me as water covered the earth—panic pushing out anything else, whittling my heart to a hard, small shape I couldn’t recognize.

      “How were we going to attack an entire raider ship?” I asked. “No one survives that.”

      “You didn’t even try. You don’t even care!”

      I shook my head at her. “I care more than you know. There isn’t always room to care more.” I’ve been all used up, I wanted to say. Maybe it was good I hadn’t found Row. Maybe I didn’t want to know what I’d do to be with her again.

      Pearl didn’t respond, so I said, “Everyone is on their own now.”

      “I don’t like you,” she said, sitting down with her back to me.

      “You don’t have to,” I snapped. I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bone between my eyebrows.

      I sat down next to her, but she kept her face turned from me.

      “Did you have your dreams again last night?” I tried to keep my voice kind and soft, but an edge still crept in.

      She nodded, squeezing the blood from the snake’s tail down to the hole where its head had been.

      “I’m not going to let that happen to us. We’re staying together. Always,” I said. I stroked her hair back from her face and a shadow of a smile crossed her lips.

      I stood up and checked the cistern. Almost empty. Water all around but none to drink. My head ached from dehydration and the edges of my vision were beginning to blur. Most days, it was humid; it rained almost every other day, but we were in a dry spell. We’d need to find mountain streams and boil water. I filled Pearl’s water skin with the last of the fresh water and handed it to her.

      She stopped playing with her headless snake and weighed the water in her hand. “You gave me all the water,” she said.

      “I already drank some,” I lied.

      Pearl stared at me, seeing right through me. There was never any hiding from