Mated to the Beast of the Wasteland novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Wall

The whole square was looking at me.

Wasteland and Haven, the walls, the fire, Gran in her chair with a twin asleep on each knee.

I didn't climb up on the drum. I didn't need to.

"You took your time," I said.

Somebody on the wall laughed.

"I was busy," Brand said. "There was a storm."

"Ask me again."

He got down off the drum and stood in front of me.

He didn't kneel. He just bent his head so his face was close to mine, the way he had on the Gate line.

"Marry me," he said quietly. "Because I want you. Only that."

They were my words, from the first night. He'd kept them.

"Yes," I said.

The square came apart.

We married on the wall a week later, at noon, in the sun.

Not at a gate. On the catwalk over it, by the gun tower, where everybody in both towns could see.

The crew had swept the catwalk and hung every flag they owned off the cable lines. Most of them were tarps.

The Haven people had pooled what they'd carried out and found me a dress.

It was white and a size too big, and Sable pinned it with welding clips.

"You look like a bride," she said. "A bride who could fix your truck."

"That's the only kind there is out here."

The Gate officer married us. He said it was the first wedding he'd done that he'd liked.

He read the words off a card again, but not in a bored voice this time.

"Ember. You take this man into your household, under your roof, of your own will?"

"Yes."

"Brand. You take this woman, and give her your..." He stopped and looked at my wrist. "Well. You already did that."

The crowd laughed.

"Yes," Brand said anyway.

"Does anyone here object?"

"No," said our daughter, very loudly, from Gran's lap.

The whole wall roared.

Our son was supposed to carry the ring up to us.

He toddled forward, dropped it, and sat down to look at it.

Brand scooped him up, ring and all, and held him on one hip.

The ring was plain steel, made by Sable in her shop.

She'd made it from his father's tag. The one from under the third pallet.

Brand had given it to her after the reactor.

"He'd have liked you," she'd told me, when she showed me. "He'd have said you talk too much."

Brand took my left hand.

He turned my wrist up to the sun, slowly, the way he had under the Gate floodlight.

The ring of pale bite scars was still there. It would always be there.

He kissed it once.

Then he slid the steel ring onto my finger, just above it.

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