Mobbs and Logan smirk at me as I emerge.
“Music?” Mobbs says as I set a snow-filled pot on the fire.
“I’m trying to build a rapport,” I answer. “It’s standard interrogation procedure.”
“Maybe you just like hanging around with her,” Logan says with a smirk. “They do say chicks put out for musicians. Is that what you’re trying for?”
“You’re disgusting.”
Logan leans back on his pack, lighting another cigarette as though that makes him look cool.
“I’m not the one making friends with a Nahx.”
“I’m not making friends with her.” I stare down at the pot, wishing it would just boil so I could have my tea and get away from these creeps. “I’m interrogating her, like I’ve been ordered to.”
“For an interrogator you don’t seem to be getting many answers,” Mobbs says.
“Maybe you’d like to have a go.” I regret it as soon as I’ve said it. Mobbs wriggles out of his sleeping bag eagerly, goading me.
“Maybe I will. Maybe she’ll warm up to me better than you. You’re a bit weedy.”
Logan hoots with laughter at this, but Mobbs isn’t done messing with me. He clambers right over the fire, nearly spilling the pot of boiling water, and heads for the cave entrance.
“Hey! Don’t!” I leap after him, pulling him back by the arm.
“I just want to talk to her.”
I grab the collar of his coat, and with a quick forward kick, sending both his legs flying out from under him. He lands on his ass with a satisfying grunt of shock.
“Whoa,” Logan says. “Xander, calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm.”
But I miscalculated, because Mobbs still has his rifle and he wrenches it around, smashing the butt into my forearm, not quite hard enough to break a bone but hard enough for me to feel it in my balls and make me let go of his coat. He jumps up and shoves me backward, and I contort myself to not fall right into the fire. I end up smacking my forehead on the icy rock. By the time I shake the stars from my eyes, Mobbs is disappearing into the cave.
I stagger after him, pushing Logan out of my way. When I get into the cave Mobbs has taken position over the Nahx girl, the barrel of his rifle pressed into her neck. She kneels, hunched over with her hands up.
“Not so tough, are you, Nahx bitch?” Mobbs says, jabbing her with his rifle. “I got the badass bullets in here too. Take your head clean off if I pulled the trigger.”
Logan lurches in, flicking on his flashlight.
“Mobbs, Garvin said…”
“I’m just playing, bro. Chill.”
In the light of the flashlight I can see what the Nahx girl is doing, extending her free leg behind her, straightening it out.
“Mobbs, you need to move back,” I tell him evenly. “Now.”
“You don’t give orders, kid.”
This time, because I know what she’s going to do, it’s like I’m seeing it in slow motion. The Nahx girl rears up, swinging her good leg around while somehow also catching the rifle barrel between her chin and her shoulder. Mobbs goes down as her leg sweeps his feet out from under him. His rifle is wrenched from his hand and goes clattering to the stone.
Logan swears, arcing his flashlight around wildly so it’s like watching through strobe lights. I vaguely see him raise his own rifle, and I frantically reach for the pistol under my coat.
“Let him go! LET HIM GO!” Logan screams.
I spin back to see the Nahx with her leg wrapped around Mobbs’s neck. His eyes are rolling back in his head as he writhes beneath her.
“No! Stop!” I shout.
But it’s too late. There’s a sickening crack, and Mobbs goes limp.
Logan fires his rifle, sending chunks of rock flying everywhere, and the next thing I know I have my pistol in his face, safety pulled back, finger on the trigger, barely able to see anything but the pulsing red of my blood boiling in my eyeballs. His flashlight has rolled away and stopped, wedged against the wall, emitting a weak light.
An eternity goes past.
“Drop it,” I say. I don’t even know where his weapon is pointed. Not in my face, so I guess that puts me at an advantage.
“I always knew you were shit,” Logan says. I feel the barrel of his rifle press into my thigh. “Femoral artery,” he says calmly. “You’ll bleed out before you even get out of this cave.”
“Cerebellum,” I say, pressing the pistol’s muzzle right on his forehead. “You’ll die before you hit the ground.”
I don’t know where the Nahx girl is or whether she’s even alive, but when there’s a small noise behind me, Logan moves fast, lunging into me with his whole body until I tumble backward. All I can see is him raise his rifle. All I can hear is the Nahx girl’s hiss and the explosion of the rifle and the ringing of chains against the rock. All I can feel is the pistol still in my hand, still pointed right at Logan’s head.
God help me, I pull the trigger.
I shoot him.
When my ears stop ringing, the Nahx girl is growling, not in a threatening way, more as though she’s trying to soothe me.
“I killed him.”
Her growl is like the purring of a cat, vibrating on both the inhale and exhale as she breathes. Something happened to the flashlight. My lantern dies and it’s now pitch-dark in here, the only faint illumination from the narrow exit to the twilight outside. I think Mobbs is a dead shape near the overhang where the Nahx cowered all this time. Logan is a dead shape on the dirt floor. The Nahx girl is a trembling shadow under the low rock ceiling.
My mouth is so dry, I have to peel my tongue from my teeth to talk. “Did you get shot?”
If she moves, I can’t see it. I get down onto my hands and knees, searching the dirt and rock, feeling around for the flashlight or the lantern. There’s a loud snap and a spark of light flares up, glowing for a moment in the air before it snuffs out in the dirt. She snaps her fingers again. This time the spark illuminates her corner well enough for me to see she is kneeling favoring her left side; her arm hangs limp.
She snaps her fingers again and again, sending a dozen sparks into the space between us, each one reminding me of August setting himself on fire. At last my eyes fall on the lantern overturned near Mobbs’s body. I snatch it away from him as though he might try to take it from me in his condition. As I click the light on, the rest of my senses come back with my vision. The metallic smell of blood, so familiar to me after that terrible day on the mountain when Raven and Liam died. The cold of the cave fractured by the intense heat radiating off the Nahx girl’s body. The silence but for her soft purring and my gasping, trying to catch my breath, and the chattering of my teeth. A bitter taste in my mouth.
I set the lantern down in the center of the cave and take two shaky breaths before reaching over to gingerly close Mobbs’s staring dead eyes. I have to resist the urge to correct the unnatural angle of his head and neck.
Promise, the Nahx girl says. Promise you.
“How do I know you’re not going to kill me, too?”
She just shakes her head, turning her palms to face me.
I could conceivably get out of this. I could shove things around a bit, make it look like she grabbed Mobbs’s gun after throttling him and shot Logan before I could stop her. No one is going to do ballistics tests or anything. I could leave the Nahx girl chained up and run back down to the mill, throw the pistol into a crevasse, and rehearse my story. Omigod omigod she got Mobbs she got his rifle and shot Logan I don’t know how it happened I only left the cave for a few minutes to take a piss omigod they’re dead she killed them both omigod…
I mean, that’s what I should do. But instead I shuffle over to Logan’s slumped shape and check him for life signs. There are none. His blood spray has left a shadow on the cave wall behind him, like graffiti: Logan died here. I drag myself away from him, digging in my pockets for the paper clips.
“Can you break your chains?”
She
shakes her head. Getting closer to her, I can see her posture is contorted; she’s curled to the left, and blood drips from her wrist and elbow. Maybe if she wasn’t injured and weakened she could break these chains. I saw August break chains nearly this heavy once. That seems like years ago now.
“I’m going to try to pick this lock, okay? It will help if you hold very still.”
She’s a master at that, kneeling like a statue but for the shallow movement of her breathing.
The bar through her right wrist is bolted at one end with a heavy padlock attached to the length of chain, which is in turn bolted to the stone wall. How they managed to rig this up without power tools is beyond imagining, but I suppose if you want to hurt someone badly enough, you find a way. Pushing that thought aside, I concentrate on the padlock, bending the paper clips into the required shapes. Tucker and I looked up lock picking on YouTube years ago because we wanted to use the warming hut when we played night hockey on the lake. All well and good until we got caught smoking weed in there.
My hands are trembling so bad, I wish I had some weed. I focus on time instead, start a clock in my head, counting down the seconds, the minutes, the hours until the relief shift turns up here around noon tomorrow. I want to be long gone by then. The bent paper clip wedges into the padlock nice and tight as I fumble for the other one, the straight one with the end shaped into a shallow W.
The Nahx watches me silently, while I’m hyperaware of all the ways she could kill me right now. A sharp downward head butt would crack my skull or break my neck. There’s enough give in her chains that if she got me in the crook of her elbow she could strangle me. Hell, she could crush my throat with one hand. Or she could wipe me out with her leg the way she did to Mobbs, and then, I don’t know, stomp on me, crushing my ribs?
I close my eyes for a second, feeling the pins in the lock slide up one by one until the sixth pin grinds into place. I twist the bent paper clip and hear the bolt click up. The lock falls to the floor with a clang.
I consider the metal bar skewering the Nahx girl’s wrist. There’s a congealed film of gray gunk surrounding the hole in her armor—blood or something. Her body has been trying to reject the spike, building up a layer of tissue and pus just like a human would with any foreign object.
“Do you want me to pull the bar out?”
Please. Yes.
“I think it might hurt.” Understatement of the century.
Please.
I grip her arm just under the elbow and wrench the bar upward. It comes out, dripping thick blood and slime.
The girl yanks her arm back, and when I turn, she is tearing at the other lock. Before I can even offer to help, she has crushed it, flinging it down with the chain and yanking the bar out with a spray of gray blood. The last lock, on the spike through her knee, won’t need my help either. She hooks her fingers through the shackle and tears it apart with a violent growl. She wrenches the last spike out and throws it away so forcefully that it ricochets off the cave wall and I have to duck to avoid it smacking into my face.
Now that she’s free, the Nahx girl’s demeanor changes from helpless to furious in a millisecond. Growling and hissing, she lunges for me, her hands dripping oily blood like some creature from a nightmare. Standing, she’s at least a foot taller than me. I turn and try to scramble for the cave exit, but she grabs hold of my coat and I go crashing down, twisting away as she releases me. I spin in the dirt, pressed up against the rock with the pistol somehow miraculously in my hand and pointing in the right direction, at her neck. She stops there, poised, hands raised like great claws, back curved like a frightened cat. Shiny metal blades flick out from her mask like fangs; I’m sure if I could see her face, her teeth would be bared too. But then something happens as we wait there, both frozen in place by the impossibility of any kind of resolution between us. She softens; first her fingers unbend until her palms are flat, facing me in a gesture of appeasement. Then she slowly lowers herself to her knees. Her right hand, still dripping blood, moves to press side-on into her abdomen. The blades on her face retract with a hiss.
Sorry. Broken. Sorry. Repeat.
I witnessed August lose himself like this once, when he thought Raven was threatened; he was also probably mad with pain at the time. There’s a lesson twice learned that I’m not likely to forget. The Nahx are dangerous and unpredictable if they’re threatened or injured. Why should this surprise me? Humans are no different.
“You understand what is happening, right?”
She nods, sitting back on her feet. Her breathing is improving. Unbelievably, I think she’s already healing.
“I can’t go back to… the other humans now. They’ll kill me or… something.” I struggle to keep my voice even as I go on. “I want to get back through the web. Do you know a way?”
She lets a few seconds go by before she nods.
“I want to look for someone. Another human I left behind. If you could help me get through the web, I can find him.”
Help, she signs. It’s one of the ones I learned from August. Help you promise.
“Okay, good. We have a much better chance if we stay together.”
I shove everything that’s not soaked with blood back into my pack and drag the whole thing out into the basin. She emerges after me, stretching her long arms up before bending to gather a handful of snow, which she rubs on her head and face. Another handful she presses on her wounded wrists and knee as I scavenge the camp for anything useful. There’s a rifle, some ammunition, a bit of food, a hatchet. I pack and tie them all tightly into Logan’s pack along with his sleeping bag and the tarp they were using as a windbreak. The Nahx girl takes this pack from me and slings it over her back.
She limps slightly as we cross the basin. The night is moonlit, but I still need the flashlight to find the slash through the rocks.
“You go through,” I say. “You’ll have to squeeze and take off your pack. I’ll be right behind you. I just need to do one thing.”
When she’s out of sight in the rock-and-ice crevasse, I turn back to the campsite, bend over, and let myself vomit up everything in my stomach, taking care not to get any of it on my boots. Then I follow her into the dark.
PART THREE AIR
“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”
—MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN
RAVEN
The transport, limping along on apparently only reserve power, keeps us in the air for just under twenty-four hours before Tenth has to set it down on a frozen lake outside a small town.
“Grande Prairie?” The snow-dusted welcome sign on the highway seems to mock us. “We’re barely halfway to the base. We could have driven faster.”
“Except there’s no road from where we were,” Mandy snaps at me.
We’re all a little tense after a day and night in a cramped and rattling Nahx transport, wondering whether at any moment engine failure might send us careening into the ground.
These transports are made for short trips, Tenth says. Sorry.
“It’s not your fault.”
Tucker is still clinging to me; though seemingly unbothered to be walking barefoot through the snow in freezing temperatures, he is silent, almost dazed. He hasn’t said more than a few words since we escaped. I’m worried that however Blue managed to zap his human mind back has damaged him in some way.
I tried asking Blue, but of course all I got was bobs up and down and the occasional circle. Not the easiest way to get medical detail.
The town looks deserted, so we risk taking the highway down onto the main business street, in the hopes that we might find a working vehicle. But after trying a dozen as we trail along the road and finding them all dead, we give up, resigned to the fact that we’ll have to walk the rest of the way. Turning east, we discover the town is indeed as empty as it looks. Tucker slows as we pass a sports supply store and, without saying a word, lets go of my hand and runs across
the parking lot, kicking up snow with his bare feet.
We chase him and find him inside, stripping and redressing in proper winter clothes and boots.
“Were you cold?”
He doesn’t answer.
Though none of us needs to sleep, we decide to spend the night in the store, spreading out sleeping bags, with puffy winter coats for pillows. Blue floats by the door as Tenth stands guard. His wheezing had improved a bit on the transport, but now it’s gotten worse and I’m worried about him. But mainly I’m worried about Tucker, whose stunned silence has hardly changed since we escaped the Nahx ship. He scooches his sleeping bag up next to mine, pressing against me.
“Say something,” I try for the hundredth time.
“Topher is alive, right?” This is the same thing he’s repeated periodically since we rescued him. The only thing.
“He was last time I saw him,” I say. “We’re going to go look for him.” I reach up and stroke his face, and when he pulls me into his arms and closes his eyes, a fraction of the tension seems to leave him at last.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer for several long seconds, but finally he speaks.
“Camp,” he says. One word. But I’ve become an expert at waiting, and a few minutes later he speaks again.
“Something is wrong with my brain,” he says. I hold my breath. He’s whispering now. “It’s like there’s a wall in my head, or like one of those toxic waste silos, but it’s been smashed to pieces and everything is coming out. Everything before… I got darted, didn’t I?”
“Yes. Last September.”
He nods, frowning, and I can almost see the chaos behind his eyes as I wait for him to say more. But that’s all I get. A few minutes later his breathing changes, and it’s clear he’s fallen asleep. I can only hope his dreams aren’t the terrifying ordeal that mine have been.
So the last thing Tucker remembers is being with me at the camp, with Topher and Xander and the rest of our crew, most of whom are now either dead or darted. He wouldn’t know anything of what we learned about the Nahx since then. He certainly wouldn’t know what happened after he got darted and we buried him. And he doesn’t seem to remember what has happened since we woke up on the dunes, as though that little pocket of memory has been exchanged for the much more complete set of the rest of his life. Now he remembers us together, a doomed couple in love at the end of the world. I feel like I finally have what I wanted, what I dreamed of after August’s dart snatched Tucker away from me so abruptly—I have him back, alive, next to me. We’re together again at last.
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