Why, then, do I feel so sick? When I close my eyes I see those rows and rows of dormant Nahx, frosted with ice, slumped and staring. What if August was one of them? What if he heard me calling out to him but he couldn’t move? What if he watched me run off and leave him?
Suddenly being so close to Tucker seems wrong. I untangle myself from his arms.
“He’s in shock,” Mandy whispers when I sit up. “Sleep will do him good.”
I carefully slide out of my sleeping bag, trying not to disturb him.
“Be honest,” I say to Mandy. “How bad does my hair look?”
She stifles a laugh.
“There’s a drugstore right next door. I’m going to see if they have anything to fix it.”
“Want me to come?”
I shake my head. “Keep an eye on Tucker.” I lower my voice. “And Tenth.” We both look over to where he’s guarding the door like a faithful sergeant at arms. “I don’t like the way he’s breathing. We need to get him up to higher ground.”
“A couple of hours,” Mandy says. “Or we’ll all lose our minds and be of no use to anyone.”
“I don’t know what use we’ll be anyway.” I look around the empty store as I stand. Dimly lit with some travel lanterns we propped on the top of displays, it’s like a museum exhibit now—a relic of all the strange things humans used to do. There are fiberglass canoes strung up above us, and snowboards lining the walls. There’s a locked rack of hunting rifles and knives, an aisle of hockey sticks and skates. Are we fighting to get this back? For whom? Everyone is gone.
Mandy smiles grimly, as though she knows what I’m thinking. “Let’s concentrate on getting back to the base. See if we can rescue anyone there. We can worry about what to do next later.”
She’s right. And it helps me to have a direction, a plan, at least for the next few days.
Tenth greets me with a nod as I approach him by the door.
“Are you feeling okay?” I notice he is leaning on the wall with his left hand.
Don’t worry, he signs.
I am worried. His wheezing breath now sounds wet and tubercular. But when I stare at him a little too long, he waves me away, and ducks backward as Blue tries to inspect him.
I’m good, he insists. Strong Take the Firefly with you?
“No, it’s okay. They can stay here.”
Tenth huffs a bit but doesn’t argue. I don’t think he likes Blue much, but the truth is, I want to be alone.
The drugstore looks like it’s already been looted. The door is smashed in, the aisle strewn with tumbled products. I find a grim scene in the center aisle—the remains of a Mountie. There’s not enough of him left to see how he died, but the desiccated bones of his fingers still cling to his sidearm. I extract it delicately and pocket it, leaving the Mountie and his bony stare.
I find what I need in the hair aisle and spend nearly an hour in front of a small mirror trying to brush out my matted curls and tug them into six tight braids, which I smooth with cocoa butter cream and argan oil. I smell like a tropical cocktail when I’m done, but anything is better than stale lake water and dirty sand.
Feeling a bit more at peace, I wash my face with some wipes and try a very expensive moisturizing sunscreen I’ve always coveted. In the low light of a pair of flashlights, I examine my skin. My color hasn’t changed much; it’s still a light golden brown, but it’s glossier, as though I’ve gone a bit overboard with the highlighter. There is also a dark spiderweb of bronze lines starting from my neck just under my ear, where August stuck the dart into me. It spreads down one shoulder and just peeks out into the décolletage revealed by the low-cut green dress. It’s not ugly, exactly—in fact it’s almost like avant-garde jewelry, sort of delicate and lacy. But looking at it, I realize I’ve been marked for something, branded against my will. I’m tempted to look for a good concealer to cover it up, but that seems… well, pointless. I smear on some frosty lip gloss instead, and pocket it.
A noise coming from the back of the store distracts me from further theft.
“Hello?” I say stupidly. “Mandy?”
There’s no answer.
If there are humans hiding back there, how will they react to me? And how will I react to them? I feel the shape of the Mountie’s pistol in my pocket. It’s unlikely that humans are a real threat to my life, but they could hurt me enough to slow me down, to slow us all down, and that’s the last thing I need.
But maybe I could help them. If there are humans, maybe I could help them get out of here, to safety.
The impulse that drove me from the moment the Nahx attacked, more than a year ago now, to head west, to get away from them and their ships and their soldiers, to get as many humans away from them as possible, flickers for a moment in the dark expanse of my mind; flickers and dies. That’s not my mission anymore. I try to drag it back from the abyss, try to commit the shape of that last dying light in my memory, but it’s gone, leaving something hard in its place, like stone.
I don’t know why yet, but this is bigger than human life, bigger than me and my friends and my family. In karate, we sometimes talked about eastern spirituality and the idea of being connected to everything. It made me feel small then, but now it’s as though I’ve zoomed back and can see the full picture, and that’s all that matters. The fine details aren’t as important. I almost walk away from the possibility that there are humans nearby, but curiosity gets the better of me.
Hearing the noise in the back of the store again, I move without thinking, running the length of the aisle, past the dead Mountie and toward the staff-only doors next to the pharmacy.
Three raccoons dash away as I enter, leaving behind their scene of destruction. Torn-open boxes of food are scattered across the storeroom, shelves are overturned, and in the center of it all is a dark shape splayed out on the floor. I focus my flashlight on it and take a step toward the shape before realizing.
It’s a Nahx. The Mountie’s pistol is in my other hand, aimed and cocked without my even needing to think about it.
But there’s no need; the Nahx is obviously dead. Nahx never lie down in their armor, or even sit. They rarely kneel. This one is spread-eagled, arms and legs wide, his head slumped to the side, with detritus strewn all around him, even on top of him, like the raccoons have been using him as a dinner table.
I crouch down to brush some crumbs off his chest, just to make sure. There’s no star-shaped scar there or on his shoulder. Sitting back on my heels, I exhale heavily, scanning the dark corners of the storeroom, letting my brain record and collate everything I see. I’m starting to get used to it now.
The Nahx’s armor is icy cold. Bending down over his face, I notice silvery gray fluid dripping through the grill in the front of his mask and dab my fingers in it, taking a tentative sniff.
It smells like ordinary death, oddly—ordinary human death, rancid and sour. I’m strangely comforted by this. At least in death this Nahx returned to his human form, mortal, fragile, and impermanent. I have a sudden impulse to drag him out into the field behind the store and leave him to finish decomposing there, returning to the earth as all humans should. Thinking back to the dead woman Tenth and I found on the dunes, an altered human like me, a Snowflake, who decayed into a fine metallic sand, I wonder if this is something else stolen from me—a messy, organic death with all the rot and ruin that entails. Maybe I’ll return to the molten metal at the planet’s core when I die, rather than to the loamy earth itself.
Maybe that’s what awaits all of us—Mandy, Tucker, and the rest. The longer I live with my upgraded body, the less fragile I feel. Death used to frighten and nauseate me; now I just find it a little sad.
I fill two shopping bags with antibiotics from the pharmacy, thinking that if anyone is still alive at the base, they will be able to use them, but that makes me feel weird too, as though the weakness of human disease is another relic, almost quaint.
When I get back to the sports store, all hell has suddenly broken loose. Tucker
is sitting tangled in a pile of hiking boots, screaming his lungs out.
“What is it?! WHAT IS IT?!”
Mandy and Tenth circle him, trying to get him to calm down. Tucker launches a boot at Tenth’s head.
“Whoa, Tuck.” I pull Tenth away, stepping in front of him as Tucker scrambles backward. “What’s going on?”
“He saw the rift,” Mandy says behind me. “He saw it in his sleep, like we did.”
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!” Tucker’s face is streaked with gray tears and twisted with terror.
“Nothing, Tuck.” I hold my hands up, palms out. “It’s okay. It was just a dream. Calm down.”
“Raven?”
“Yes, it’s me. Everything is okay.” I kneel down and crawl through the tumbled boxes. He must have run into a display stack as he tried to escape. He reaches for me as I get close, pulling me into his arms again.
“Rave, Rave,” he says into my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Everything’s fine. It was a dream.” I can feel his heart pounding even through his layers of sweater and coat. Glancing back, I see Mandy giving me a puzzled look.
“Can you tell me what you saw, Tucker?” I ask. “What was in your dream?”
He takes a couple of shuddering breaths before answering.
“It wasn’t the Nahx. It was something else. Like a… black hole or something. It split everything open.”
Mandy nods at me knowingly.
Tucker presses his lips into the side of my face. “It split you open, Rave. It killed you. It killed Topher.” Then he clings to me tightly, as though he’s trying to meld us into one or crawl inside me. “It was so real. It wasn’t like a dream.”
I sense more than see Mandy and Tenth drift away. Blue floats up by the ceiling as if they too want to give us some space and privacy. Pulling back, I take Tuck’s face in my hands, holding him, trying to still the chattering of his teeth.
“We’ve had the dream too,” I say. “Mandy and I. It’s something to do with the Nahx dart’s toxin.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. They’ve made us into…” I pause here. If he’s completely ignorant of what little Mandy and I know, do I want to share it with him? Maybe it would be better to keep him in the dark. But then I think about how my brain has been churning since I woke up, recording every new piece of information and putting it together, trying to construct a final picture of what is going on. I can’t deny him that.
“They made us a kind of army. Blue’s people, those tiny Firefly creatures.” I look up at Blue swirling around the light fittings. “They call us sentinels or Snowflakes. And we’re supposed to be guarding what they call fissures.”
“And that’s what I saw in the dream? A fissure?”
“I think so.”
“Where is it?”
“Back where we woke up, on the dunes, I think. Not far from the ship.”
He appears to think about this for a few seconds.
“And we’re supposed be there? To go back there?”
“I don’t think we were supposed to leave in the first place,” I say. “Do you want to go back?”
“Fuck no. I want to find Topher and get him as far away from it as I can.”
Something about the way he says this fills me with relief so palpable it’s almost euphoric. This is the real Tucker. Not the insensible automaton who woke with me on the dunes, and not the crazed and terrified boy we rescued from the ship, but Tucker, stubborn, reckless, foul-mouthed, and determined. Like the force of nature who blew my life apart within months of meeting me. I can’t help but smile. I know we were always a disaster. But at least we were our disaster. Tucker made me feel like an insider for the first time in my life, a founding member of a two-person club of destruction and chaos. I’ve missed that. A bit of the sickness I felt earlier subsides.
I can do this if I’m not alone, if we’re in it together. Once we reunite Tucker and Topher, I can decide what to do next. It’s better if I try not to think of August, and I’m used to that anyway, after all those months of trying to forget him.
“We should go,” I say, standing up.
Mandy and Tenth don’t argue. They pack up a few items while Tucker smashes and raids the gun cabinet, loading two rifles and slinging them across his back, stuffing the pockets of his coat with ammunition. The last thing he takes is a crossbow and a quiver of arrows. He grins as he slings that over his shoulder. As he strides past me, bending to tuck a hunting knife into the top of his boot, I’m suddenly reminded of the last time Tucker strode off with a crossbow and arrows, and what happened. And why he did it.
Who he did it for.
Ah well, I had a good minute of feeling okay about things. I should be grateful for that, I suppose.
“What’s wrong?” Mandy says when I join her and Tenth, following Tucker out into the snow.
“Nothing.”
Blue drifts down and settles on my shoulder like a microscopic parrot.
Having a firm and settled goal makes the walk through a dark and nearly featureless landscape a little less soul destroying. At least none of us seems to tire. I’d like to take a nap just so I can get away from the superprocessor in my head. It’s still churning away, filing things, pulling things out and reclassifying them. I can’t seem to stop it, so instead I try to pull something out of my thoughts that will entertain me, at least. I start with music and find I can play whole songs as clearly as if I have headphones in. That’s kind of neat. I switch to episodes of TV shows but keep getting distracted and losing my place. Music seems to be able to play in the background while the rest of the thinking continues.
I try something new. Selecting a song like a DJ, I set it playing in my mind while I dig up scenes from various karate tournaments I competed in. I used to like doing this before everything changed; I would redo fights in my head, especially ones that I lost, and try to figure out how I could win next time. My coaches encouraged it. But this time it’s so vivid that at one point I actually veer back, trying to dodge an imagined straight jab.
“Are you okay?” Mandy asks, alarmed.
“Fine.” I can’t help smiling. It must have looked pretty funny. “I don’t know about you, but now when I remember things they’re supervivid, like a 3-D movie. I was remembering a fight I lost.”
“I heard that didn’t happen very often.”
“Who did you hear that from?” I expect her to say Tucker or maybe Topher.
“Xander,” she says instead. “He was in awe of you.”
“Are you sure it was awe and not fear?”
Mandy shakes her head, squinting ahead to where Tucker trudges determinedly, with Blue floating behind him.
“I was a little scared of you at first,” Mandy says. “But Xander told me you never threw the first punch.”
I’m about to laugh and argue, but my analytical brain has to confirm that detail, and when it does I discover she’s right. I even check my data twice, and it’s true—every fight I got into, outside of a legal spar in a karate competition, I was just defending myself. They line up in my head like one of those surveillance systems with multiple screens showing different events.
Every time I got into trouble for fighting it was because someone else started it, took a swing at me or shoved me or, on at least a couple of memorable occasions, tried to grab my ass or boob. And yeah, all of them ended up either bloodied or on the floor, sometimes both. And I always ended up the one in trouble, because…
I shake my head, my good mood dissipating like mist. I want to ask why Mandy was scared of me before she even knew me, but I’m afraid the answer will make me dislike her, and I need a friend right now. And I’m not sure that with my new superpowers, my old superpower of being able to forgive people of pretty egregious infractions still works.
I look at Tucker and think of him fooling around with Emily in the woods while I was oblivious. Without being too obvious about it, I slow down until I’m walking side by s
ide with Tenth, taking up the rear of our little band of travelers.
All good? he asks.
“Yes. What about you?” I ask.
He points forward. Mountains, he says. I will feel better in the mountains.
“Do you think we’ll find any other humans there? I mean… real humans? Do you think many people survived? Not darted like me and not… killed in other ways? Survived? Got away?”
He hangs his head, giving it a little shake.
No.
“What about farther west? Did many humans survive? Do you know?”
Past the sky prison light, yes.
“Sky prison light? What’s that? You mean the drone web? The border web west of the mountains?”
He nods again.
So the web is real. Kim talked about it when we got to the base. That was her excuse for not trying to lead us all out of there. Privately I’d had some doubts that it even existed. I thought she was lying to us for her own purposes. Maybe that was unfair, in retrospect.
I let my thoughts drift back into their game, but before I can continue my review of my sporting accomplishments, I find my mind focusing on August instead, maybe because the conversation with Tenth reminded me of him. I suppose I could redirect my brain onto something else, but the memories of the weeks I spent with August are so vivid that I just let them play behind my eyes like a movie. It’s a sad movie, I discover, and by the end of it, by the time I get to my death scene on the side of the mountain, I have to look down at my feet so I can be miserable in private.
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