The Final Trade Read Online Free

only person I knew who truly loved me.” She wipes at her nose and blinks rapidly. “I’m going no matter what.”
    Zoey feels the ghostly slide of soft hair through her fingers, the only memory she has, and the ache is there.
    The bruise that never heals.
    “We’ll leave in two days,” she says.

3
    I am a comet ,Wen thinks.
    She sits up in her cot, early morning air creeping in through the broken zipper of the tent. More than cool, it is cold. Always moving, never stopping. She hears the sounds of the trade breaking down. The rev of an engine, tent poles rattling, men cussing at one another, at everything, at nothing. She’s never gotten used to how early they leave. It isn’t yet dawn.
    She rises and pulls on her dusty cargo pants and stained blouse, fingering the tear near the collar. A man grabbed her as she was moving between two of the game stands last night, even though it’s expressly forbidden to touch her. Before she could stick the sharpened crochet hook she typically carries into his stomach, he’d torn her only decent blouse. She’d left him lying and moaning in a spreading pool of blood while the fluting calliope music played obscenely on the midway. And she hadn’t cried this time after closing her tent for the night.
    She undoes the tent’s flaps and peers outside.
    The flatness of the Nevada desert is still startling to her even after seeing it dozens of times on the trade’s routes. The scrub that stretches for miles is a muted purple, glimmering with frost, in the predawn light. The dry, packed dirt, cracked and veined beneath the low brush, fades into obscurity outside the borders of the town they camped near. To the west is the smudge of the Sierra Nevadas, their grandeur struck down by distance.
    She sees this all past the jutting outlines of the carnival tents and fifteen-foot chain-link fence that acts as the trade’s border. Even now the fence sags as it’s deconstructed, poles being pulled by the dark shapes of men, a hauling truck trundling before them.
    Wen breathes the air, the cold burning her lungs. They’ll want their food soon. There isn’t much time.
    She dons her heaviest coat and heads toward one of the few buildings that is solid wood, instead of fraying canvas, keeping the image of a comet in her mind. The trade only pauses, never stops for good, and she is no different. What was the book she read in school? The one with the two boys who go to the carnival that arrives in the middle of the night? She can’t recall the name but it was eerie and haunting, as were the forces that ran the carnival itself. That parallel isn’t lost on her.
    She passes a dozen men, all armed and huddled around a pot of coffee steaming over a fire. They give her looks but don’t say anything. They’ve learned how far they can go and where exactly the lines are. It’s the only thing she’s grateful for in this place.
    The mess building sits in the northern part of the camp near the fence line. To the right is the coliseum, a construction of wooden bleachers that circles what most of the men refer to as “the dance floor.” The smell of blood is strong even outside the structure, but her gorge has ceased to react to the scent. Desensitization , she thinks the word is. Too much of anything causes it to lose its meaning.
    Beyond the coliseum is the square shape of the nest, two stories, its upper windows lit no matter what time of day or night. A generator hums beside the building and a dozen guards stand near its base, talking quietly, several embers of hand-rolled cigarettes flaring in the gloom.
    Wen walks through the open front of the mess area, its rows of seating empty at this hour. In the back she passes through a flimsy door and leaves the serving window’s awning shut.
    Two fluorescent tubes buzz to life in the ceiling when she flips a switch, and by their glow she begins to work.
    She loses herself in the preparation of food. Lighting the stove, pans warming, oil out on the