After the End

I have to turn toward the harbor to remember which direction to go in. The buildings are confusing me. If I were standing in the middle of a mountain field, I could find my way. But with glass buildings reflecting one another every way I turn, I have to concentrate. I glance at the sun and then the water, and head north-northwest.

In ten minutes we are there. CA$H FOR GOLD, the sign reads. The window display holds a treasure trove of fragile-looking rings and necklaces. I swallow my fear and stare at the door for a moment. There is no handle. But there is a small sign on one side that reads PUSH. I push, and with a whoosh of warm air, the dogs and I are inside the building and blinking in the artificial light.

“How can you help me?” comes a voice from the far side of the room. I blink again, and then focus on a small man standing behind a cupboard made of glass. His eyebrows are gray, but his hair is raven black and looks strangely crooked. He is wearing a pelt on his head, I realize, and try not to stare. He rubs his hands together and plasters on a large smile.

I walk forward and force myself to speak to this stranger. “I saw the sign. Cash for gold.”

“That’s right, young lady,” he says, looking me up and down.

My buckskin trousers and fur-lined parka are very different from his clothing, which is made of shiny woven material. I push my hood back and sweep my long hair out of the back of my coat to fall around my face, using it as a curtain between us.

He stares oddly at my eyes and clears his throat. “What can I do you for?” he asks, with a joking smile.

I am having a hard time understanding him—both from his strange expressions and the fact that he speaks through his nose—so instead of talking, I lay my pack on the floor and crouch to dig inside. My fingers find the bag holding my brigand insurance. The objects I was told to use if I needed to negotiate with them.

I pull it out and, after opening the drawstrings, choose carefully and set a stone on the glass in front of the man. I watch his face attentively as he flinches in surprise and then draws a blank expression over his features. A term my father used when we played cards pops into my mind: he is using a “poker face.”

“Well, now, what do we have here?” the man asks. He picks up the stone and fits a black spyglass type of lens to one eye. “A gold nugget”—he pulls a measuring stick out from beneath the counter—“measuring almost two inches.” He weighs it in his hand and then places it on a metal contraption, squinting as he reads numbers off a little screen. “Weighs a hundred twenty-five grams.” He peers at it again through the lens. “Low to medium quality, I would say. Well, little missy, today’s your lucky day, because I have just the buyer for this sort of nugget, and I can offer you the top-notch price of five hundred dollars.”

There is something wrong with his face. I lay a hand across Neruda’s head, my thumb pressing one of his temples and my middle finger the other. I grasp my opal as I crouch down to whisper into his ear, “How do you feel about this man?”

The man chuckles nervously. “Do you always consult your dog for your business decisions?” he jibes, and a bead of sweat forms on his brow just below the black pelt.

I stare at him and feel the tingle as I co

I stand and hold my palm out. “My nugget,” I insist, and wait.

The man’s hand trembles slightly. “Let’s not be hasty, girlie. I’ll check my charts and see if I can do any better on that offer.”

I pluck my nugget from his fingers before he has a chance to pull his arm away, and turn his scales around toward me. Placing the gold atop the scales as I saw him do, I read aloud from a shiny strip near the base. “Two hundred grams, not a hundred twenty-five.”

I nod toward a sign I saw when I entered the store. “That says you pay forty dollars per gram of gold. According to your chart, you should be offering me eight thousand dollars for this nugget.” I slip the stone back into its bag.

“Now just wait a minute here, missy. You have no idea what standards the pricing is based on. A gold nugget is not as valuable as gold dust, which is what is melted down to make this high-quality jewelry.” He waves his hand to display the ugly jewelry inside the case.

His eyes tell me that he is lying. That my nugget is rare, and that he desperately wants it. I think of Whit’s satisfaction whenever one of us finds a nugget in the Denali riverbeds. “That may serve us well someday,” he says before ordering us to take it to the shelter and stash it with the rest. Unlike plentiful opals and semiprecious stones, the gold nuggets are hard to come by, and this man’s excitement confirms their value.

“I saw another ‘cash for gold’ sign by the waterfront,” I say, and nestle the bag into my rucksack.

“Stop!” he shrieks. Sweat courses down the sides of his face. “Okay, I’ll give you seven thousand,” he says, pain audible in his tone, “as well as some valuable information.”

I hesitate. “What kind of information?”

“Someone is looking for you,” he responds.

We stare at each other in silence for a minute before I fish the bag back out of my rucksack. He ogles it and licks his lips.

“Talk,” I say.

He walks back to where a red plastic apparatus is attached to a wall. Telephone, I think, as I recall the picture of a similar one in the EB.

The man pulls a card off a board stuck full of scraps of paper and slaps it down on the counter in front of me. On it is printed a ten-digit number, and scribbled in pencil in one corner is “Girl w/star.”

“They were big guys. Dressed in camo,” the man says. “Came in here yesterday saying they would pay top dollar for information on your whereabouts.”

My chest clenches painfully. The man’s description sounds like Whit’s captors, the big men I saw in the fire holding his arms. Why are they looking for me? “What does this mean?” I ask, pointing to the scribbled words.

“They described you as a teenage girl, long black hair, probably accompanied by two huskies.” He hesitates and studies my face suspiciously. “And what looks like a gold starburst in one eye.”

My starburst. The same as the rest of the clan children. The sign that we are in close union with nature. Yara-Readers. Our parents tell us it is something to be proud of—an inheritance from the earth. But now it marks me as someone to pursue.

And how do these men know what I look like anyway? I could ask the same about how they found my clan. Or how they knew I wasn’t with the rest of the group. But the knowledge that they may actually recognize me chills me to the bone.

I slip the card into my rucksack, pull the nugget back out of the bag, and place it on the counter. The man makes a grabbing motion, but I keep my hand on it. “Count the money out for me first,” I command, and he darts to the back of the room, disappearing through a doorway and then emerging with a handful of paper money.

He begins counting it, and I watch the numbers on each bill as he does, totaling them in my head until he reaches seven thousand. He pushes the stack across the counter toward me, not even looking at my face. His eyes are only for the nugget.

I withdraw my hand, and he plucks up the gold and pushes it under the counter. I have no doubt that the value of my piece is much more than what he has given me. I only hope that it is enough to obtain a boat ticket to wherever it is I am supposed to go.

I turn to leave, and the dogs leap to their feet, rushing before me to the door. They are as uncomfortable as I am in this artificial space with this artificial man.