I met her once.
People assume I knew her well, because of the book, because of the notes in her hand and the way I write about her. I didn't. I met her once, for half an hour, at four in the morning at a farm in the grey zone south of the city, in the last days before she went in, and then I never saw her again.
I was heading south on the ZAC route, out of the zone. She was heading north into it. Alone. No guides, no scouts, no one who knew she was coming.
The grey zone then was a stretch of country maybe sixty kilometres deep between Warsaw and Lublin where neither side held anything and so both sides left it. On the maps it was nothing, white space, a few road numbers. On the ground it was farmland going back to itself. Wheat that no one had cut standing dead and silver in the fields. Whole villages with the power long gone, the houses dark, the occasional dog that had learned to live without people and watched you from a doorway without barking. You moved through it at night and lay up in the day, because the day was when the drones flew and the open ground between one treeline and the next was a thing you crossed quickly or not at all. The farms along the route were the daylight shelters. You held up in them until the light made the fields too dangerous, and you slept if you could, and you went on when the dark came back.
This one was a low brick farmhouse off the road behind a windbreak of poplars, the yard grown up with nettles, a collapsed tractor shed at the back. I had been there since before first light. There were four or five others I half knew, runners mostly, and we had taken the inner rooms where you could not be seen from outside and put someone on the window in shifts. I had been asleep maybe an hour when she came in.
I heard her before I saw her. The door, and then a voice, low, telling whoever was on the window who she was and why she was alone, and something in the voice made me sit up. It was too steady. People came through the grey zone frightened or they came through it numb, and she was neither.
She looked young. Younger than she was, I think now, though it was hard to tell by the one shielded lamp we allowed ourselves. A backpack half her size, set down against the wall with a care that told you what was in it mattered. When she opened it to find something I saw camera batteries, a great brick of them wrapped in cloth, more than seemed sensible, more than seemed survivable. Energy drinks. Those gels you slurp from a sachet, and she ate one while we talked and then another, one after the next, the way a child eats sweets. Fresh-faced. She looked like she had wandered in from a different decade, one that still had university campuses and deadlines and somewhere warm to go home to.
She looked innocent.
She wasn't.
We talked for half an hour, in the low voice you learn to use in those rooms, sitting against the wall with the grey coming up slow in the one window we hadn't blacked. I told her what was up there, or what I knew of it, which by then was already weeks out of date. The outposts that had gone quiet. The crossings that were watched now and the ones that weren't yet. I told her the rumours about the Dendron, the things people said about the water and what it did to a person who spent too long near it. The flatness that came into them. The way they stopped minding.
She didn't dismiss them. That is the thing I remember most clearly. She didn't laugh them off and she didn't go pale either. She just took them in, the way you take in a weather report for a place you have already decided to travel to. If it's there, I'll find it and I'll document it and I'll tell the truth. Not a boast. She said it the way you'd say you were going to the shop. Closer to a shrug.
I asked her, I think, who she was filing for. She told me. I asked if they knew she was coming in without anyone. She said something I don't remember exactly, but the sense of it was that people who waited for permission didn't get the story.
I thought at the time, ironically, if anyone's going to get the story, it'll be her.
Then the light was up and there was nothing to do but wait out the day, and at some point I slept again, properly this time, the way you sleep when you've decided a place is as safe as it is going to get.
When I woke to head south she was already gone.
She must have left at dusk, north, while I was still under. The corner where she had slept was immaculate. The blanket she'd been given was folded square and set on the sill. No wrapper, no print in the dust, no sign that anyone had been there at all, and I remember standing over that empty corner with the strange feeling that I had dreamed her, that there had been no girl with the batteries and the gels and the steady voice, only the cold coming up through the brick floor.
On the floor, where I would be sure to see it, she had left a note. A scrap torn from a notebook, folded once.
Just my name. And a number.
