Migration

Jennifer

After they had dropped their haul and emptied their packs, Zoe disappeared to take her shower and Max went to grab an hour's sleep. Jennifer could never sleep again once she was awake, so she went to get some tea and stopped by at her bunk to change her clothes, which were muddy and thorned from yesterday's foraging.

As she shuffled out of the cave with a thermal blanket tossed around her shoulders, she was surprised to see Matthew already up. He was the only other figure moving about in the oyster shell dawn light, pacing about agitatedly along the tree line at the edge of the clearing. She had seen him like this before, often when food stocks were running low or another Lifer had been taken by the hunters. She knew better than to interrupt him. He was always friendly and courteous, but not when he needed to work things out. He wouldn't shout, but would freeze you out with the shortest of sentences and a dead calm face, making the moment as uncomfortable as possible until you backed away voluntarily.

Jennifer busied herself tidying up cups and discarded clothes from the night before. She straightened the tables and rolled away the stray logs that had clustered in small circles, the place markers of conversations and relationships that had bloomed and dispersed during the course of the long night.

They still had yesterday's haul to finish processing and packing, so she would need to get all of these cleared and straightened before they brought the containers back out. It was always amazing how much random stuff disappeared, inadvertently stored away for months at a time if it just happened to be too close to a pile of waiting winter supplies in the busy few weeks when summer drifted away into the autumn mists.

As she tidied, she glanced regularly in the direction of Matthew's lonely, back and forth thinking. She couldn't help it, her physical body reached out towards him before her will had any chance to block it. It caught her by surprise every time and on each occasion she would admonish herself for her stupid gazing. Folding blankets, piling cups near the kitchen store, kicking ashes back into the epicentre of last night's fire, she would glance over after every task, making a metronome of moments that counted up the growing buffer of time between the potential life they had together and the lonely reality of her inaction.

She hadn't felt like this when they had first met. She had arrived with her boyfriend Richard and had treated Matthew the same as every other member of the group. She admired him, she recognised his achievements and was perhaps even a little in awe of him, but that was as far as it went. Slowly though, after she and Richard separated and Matthew began to include her more and more in the affairs of the group, something had changed. Perhaps it was because he trusted her, the first person in power to ever give her that, perhaps it was because she had been invited to delve the tiniest fraction deeper into his confidence than the rest of the group, perhaps it was simply that here, deep in these woods, she had changed in every way and had shared that journey with him. It didn't really matter, she knew she loved him deeply and spent every moment either bathing contentedly in his company or agonising in the too shallow moments he offered back.

In the five years that she had been with the group, Jennifer had given over every bit of herself to its demands. She had given up her relationships, her time, her independence, every bit of herself she had willingly subjugated for the good of the group. She had even killed for the group, just like yesterday. When the hunters came to take them, to take him, she never hesitated with her bow and her blade. The Lifers had made her a willing killer and her first victim was the girl she used to be.

Not that she missed her old self for one second. The Jennifer she knew before she had made her run to the Lifers was a lonely, tragic girl. Hopelessly underwhelmed with the choices she was offered, dreading the purgatory of migration and exhausted by her own lack of authenticity. She endured ordinary and undemanding apprenticeships, smiled absently through mundane friendships and wandered despairingly around the plastic streets of the Metropolis, all the while daydreaming along the pathways and escape routes of her own internal fantasies. That the girl would die by her own actions was inevitable, turning to the Lifers just gave her a more social and heroic way to do it.