When I look back up, Blue is hovering there, buzzing inquisitively.
“I’m fine. I’m just thinking.” They buzz away, placated by my gormless lie.
Why did August leave me? That’s what haunts me. He must have known I was going to be revived. Why did he shackle me to Tucker’s body? The only thing I can think of is that he thought that’s what I wanted—to be with Tucker?
You’d think my last moments as a human might be lost to me, given how my brain was shutting down from blood loss, but no, I remember everything clearly. I said “Tucker.” That was my last word. August must have thought… after everything he did for me, that I wanted Tucker. And not him.
Not August. Who I would give anything to see again.
XANDER
We arrive at the web just before dawn, and I have a backward déjà vu moment on top of being half frozen. The web rises above us, as glowing and foreboding as it was when I was trying to get through it the other way. If I’d known then the stupid choices I was going to make, I might not have bothered.
The Nahx girl turns north, clambering easily over the steep and rocky terrain as I slow down, joints locking up, face numb. I can’t feel anything below my knees. She turns back every few minutes, urging me on. I suppose there’s a reason why the Nahx are so loyal once they’ve settled on a traveling partner. It’s part of their programming or something. I’m grateful for it, anyway. If she gives up on me, I really am dead this time. Dead for good in the remote mountains of British Columbia. No one will ever find me.
We reach a frozen pond as the sky begins to turn pink, the blue glow of the web competing with the rising sun, turning the snow around us into a rainbow of pastel colors. The tendrils of light seem to pierce into the ice crust of the pond, though there’s no evidence of melting. The drones that infest the web like vigilant spiders hum above us, watchful but for now uninterested. All my obsessive journeys to the web outside Prince George taught me enough to know that if you stay out of the narrow expanse of light tendrils, the drones ignore you.
If not, they try to kill you. Not likely to forget that.
“H-h-how do we get across?” Now that we’re not moving, the cold becomes even more dire. I wrapped Logan’s sleeping bag around me, and over that the tarp, tying them with bungee cords. I must look like a creature from Mars, but I suppose next to the Nahx girl that’s not saying much.
Under, she signs. I remember this sign from August.
“Under the ice? I don’t… I’m not sure I can do that.”
I’ll help you. Promise.
I jump on the spot to stay warm as she steps carefully onto the ice, lowering herself to one knee, and draws her fist back.
BANG!
She punches the ice with such force that the ground shakes. Whatever pain was troubling her a few hours ago has clearly abated. She draws back and pounds the ice again and again, until cracks begin to form beneath her. Edging back, she motions to me, miming a knife. I creep forward gingerly and hand her mine.
She leans down and picks at the cracks in the ice until a nice-size hole has formed. Flipping the knife over, she hands it back to me.
In, she signs.
I would be insane to go along with this. I stare through the web to the other side, about thirty meters along the pond. The surface is black there, which could mean that it’s not frozen, or it could mean that it is frozen but not frosted. Door number one, I live. Door number two, I die.
“Are you sure we can get out on the other side?”
I’ll break it. When I hesitate, she signs again. Break it. Repeat past. Repeat today.
“You’ve done it before?”
She nods and seems to be satisfied that she’s got my agreement. I strip off the tarp and sleeping bag and try to wrap them together in a way that will keep the bag dry. Making a loop with a bungee cord, I attach them to my foot so I can drag them along like a trailer.
The Nahx girl slips off the pack and lays it on the ice next to the hole. Then she beckons me.
Me one. You two.
“Okay…”
She slides into the hole as naturally as a seal, disappearing for a moment before popping back up to wind one hand around the strap of the pack. She holds her other hand out to me.
I get down onto my knees, lowering myself until I’m crawling across the ice. I take a deep breath and grab on to her. With a firm tug we both slither into the dark water.
The cold knocks me so close to unconsciousness that the journey across the pond seems to take forever and no time at all. Before I even know what’s happening, she’s pushing me through a narrow opening in the ice and shoving me toward the shore as I gasp for air. I can’t move, instead lying there like a fish until she clambers after me and drags me up into the trees. I turn back, focus returning to my eyes.
And there it is: the web, with freedom and the human race on the other side.
We did it.
I need to get out of these wet clothes or I’ll die. Fast rather than slow, which is how I’ll die once I get them off. The Nahx girl disappears from my field of vision for a moment while I struggle to tug off my gloves. They’re already starting to freeze. My brain is frozen. I try to form my lips to call out to the girl, but I can’t think of how to address her. She doesn’t have a name.
It’s darker than it should be, and I realize that I’m starting to lose consciousness. My fingers are too numb to work the zipper of my coat or the laces of my boots.
“H-h-hey…,” I manage. “C-c-can you…?”
There’s a flash of light and a wisp of smoke drifts across my face. When I cough, a splash of cold water comes out. With intense effort I turn and see the Nahx girl crouching by a pile of pine boughs and twigs, snapping her fingers, sending sparks into the tinder as it begins to glow. The thought of a fire enlivens me, and I finally get my frozen fingers around the zipper of my coat, drawing it down. I peel it off painfully.
The girl leaps over the fire, landing next to me.
“I n-n-need t-t-to get undressed.”
She nods solemnly, tugging my arms out of my sleeves. I go limp as she pulls two soaked sweaters over my head. Behind her the fire blazes up.
I’m not going to die. Not here, anyway.
When she has me stripped down to boxers and an only slightly damp T-shirt, she helps me shuffle forward until I’m practically sitting in the fire. I untangle the bundle of tarp and sleeping bag, finding the bag to be nearly dry when I sling it over my shoulders. Then I lie down, facing the fire, my back covered with the sleeping bag. Vaguely I feel her tucking the tarp around my back too. After a few seconds, she lays her hand over my ear and I feel the heat of her armor—warm at first, then hot. She moves her hand to the top of my head as my eyes drift shut.
When I open my eyes again I’m so warm that I get confused for a second. Maybe this was all a dream. But I blink a few times and the roaring fire comes into focus, along with an array of branches over which my clothes are festooned like festival decorations. And sitting a few feet away is a human girl.
I sit up so fast, I nearly launch myself into the fire.
“Who…”
The girl turns to me, her irises reflective metal, her skin practically glowing white. She hisses and flicks her head back a few times, revealing a tangle of metal implants on her throat and chin. When she lowers her head I see that her eyelashes are as pale and opalescent as cobwebs, and her hair, slicked back and hanging limp down her shoulders, is silver.
“Oh… it’s you.” I turn my eyes away instinctively, slightly worried her unearthly beauty might burn my corneas. Instead of her armor she’s wearing a dark gray body-hugging suit that looks a bit like motorcycle leathers, with panels and intricate-looking seams, and some of the weapons we took from the transmitter camp strapped over it. The whole effect is disconcertingly badass. I feel like I’m camping out with Lara Croft.
Cold? she signs. She is taking deep gulps of the mountain air.
“I’m fine, actually.” I snake one
hand out of the sleeping back and rub some feeling back into my nose. “Are you okay? Can you breath here?”
Yes. You understand?
“I know you prefer higher elevations, yes. A… friend explained it to me. How high are we?”
Five. Zero. Zero. Zero.
5,000 feet. A comfortable elevation for Nahx. I look around uneasily as my brain continues to thaw out. The freezing swim shook a few things loose. Now I can’t for the life of me think of what I had in mind coming back through the web, leaving a relatively comfortable and safe situation with Garvin and his crew. Would it have been so hard to do what Garvin asked?
The Nahx girl squats by the fire, poking at the flames with a long stick. Behind her, her armor is carefully laid out, glistening a bit, reflecting the gold and orange flames and glowing coals. Has she been polishing it? For some reason this gives me a chill, as though I caught a glimpse inside her head for a moment. She must have been dirty and uncomfortable in that cave for all that time. Another surreptitious glance at her tells me she has probably washed her face too, and her hands. Her skin has that freshly scrubbed look, and her hair is damp around her ears.
Ignoring me, she unfastens something on her jacket and unzips it, revealing a sleeveless silver garment, like a tank top. Shrugging the jacket off, she slides it underneath herself and lowers down to sit cross-legged on it. Her muscular bare arms are as pale as the rest of her, but the scars from the bolts in her forearms are conspicuous, and though they appear to be healing, they are surrounded by a fine spiderweb of pewter lines. I can feel my stare turning into a gape. She’s both beautiful and frightening, and there’s something else. Wounded? Sad? August was like that too; even without taking his armor off he exuded heartbreak, well beyond his obvious grief for Raven.
She hisses suddenly, swiping at me with the smoldering stick still in her hand. I roll away from her, wrapping the tarp and sleeping bag around me protectively.
Stop staring! she signs, baring her teeth with a low growl. At least that’s how I interpret it. Maybe that’s optimistic, because what it actually looked like was dead eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I splutter. “I haven’t seen one of you without armor before. I’m just curious. I’ll stop.” I roll over, my back to the fire, and kind of burrow into the sleeping bag.
Moments later she makes another noise, a kind of snuffle. I ignore it at first, because she probably just wants privacy, but after a few minutes when the snuffling intensifies, I turn, peeking out from under the tarp.
She’s crying.
Not just a few tears either, but hunched, the back of one hand pressed over her mouth, the other holding the top of her head, clutching a handful of her silver hair. And shaking with deep, body-racking sobs made even more devastating by their voicelessness. If she had a voice, I’m sure she would be wailing, but as it is, it’s as though she’s gasping for breath, each almost silent sob releasing a cloud of mist around her head. Her contorted face is stained with dark tears and snot.
“Hey,” I try. “Hey… what’s wrong?” Instinctively I reach for her.
Her response is swift and brutal. She bares her teeth and lunges at me, snarling. I scuttle backward, tumbling into one of the sticks where my clothes are hanging. My damp sweater and jeans fall over me as she signs, her hands sharp, her words punctuated by angry hisses. I don’t know all the signs, but the meaning is clear enough.
You don’t look at me! You don’t touch me! I’ll kill you!
“I’m not. I won’t!” I pile the sleeping bag, tarp, and my damp clothes over me as though I could just burrow down and hide like a spider. “I wouldn’t dare touch you,” I say, keeping my eyes on the ground by the fire. “I’m sorry. I won’t look at you.”
Her anger seems to melt away then and she slumps, practically prostrate, sobbing. It’s so visceral I have to clench my fists, stomach, and brain to not start crying with her, because I think I know where it’s coming from and it’s sickening. The replay of me shooting Logan stops playing back in my head for a brief instant and changes to her shooting him. I know that’s not right, but it feels right.
Out of the corner of my eye I can see her repeating a very familiar sign.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
“You don’t need to apologize.” I speak into the sleeping bag, which forms a cave around me. “None of those creeps will ever touch you again.”
Now I can’t get that thought out of my head.
As quietly as I can, I pull on my clothes—they’ll dry faster on me now anyway—and stand up, tiptoeing to the other side of the fire to collect my boots, socks, and mittens. I leave my coat. It’s still pretty wet, so I turn it inside out and move the makeshift clothes hanger a bit closer to the fire. Finding some dry branches and logs piled nearby, I add a few to the flames and watch it blaze up; the snaps and pops, the smell of smoke, the warm glow fill my mind and calm it, infusing me with comfort and nostalgia. For the first time in months I feel free, like I can breathe.
I discover my backpack propped against another set of branches, its contents carefully laid out to dry. Grabbing my steel camping cup, I fill it with snow and set it on the coals at the edge of the fire. In seconds it’s steaming, and soon it’s filled with simmering water. With my mittens on I fish it out of the embers and approach the Nahx girl, setting it down within her reach.
“Are you thirsty?” I ask. I don’t even know if they need to drink. August never did in the time we spent together. “I have tea bags too, somewhere, if you prefer tea. But this is just water. It might make you feel better. It’s hot, though, so be careful.”
I step back, out of her personal space, as she looks up. She frowns at me until I lower my eyes to the cup. But she picks it up delicately, the heat of the metal not seeming to bother her, and sniffs the water suspiciously.
“You can add some snow if it’s too hot.”
She sips a few times before gulping the whole cup practically in one deep draft.
Repeat, she says with a sniff, handing the cup back to me.
We do this five times, and though she’s still crying when we start, by the fifth cup her tears have stopped. I search through my things for the small amount of food I was able to sneak out of Garvin’s stores. She rejects everything but some moose jerky, which she devours while I reclaim the metal cup and brew myself some tea. When she’s finished eating, she washes her face again, wiping away the gray streaks of tears.
I sip my tea and eat some dried peaches, along with a boiled egg I snuck out of breakfast. The tea bag and eggshells hiss on the fire when I discard them.
As the morning mist dissipates, the sky clears, shining blue above us with the crown of craggy snow-tipped mountains all around, and the day warms enough for me to emerge from the sleeping bag and spread it out to dry fully, along with my coat and snow pants. While I’m busy with this, I hear the Nahx girl drag her armor over the rocks until she’s partly concealed behind some scrub. I keep my eyes averted. I saw August remove his mask once, and that was disturbing enough. Nahx armor is organic somehow and integrated into their bodies via tentacle-like tubes that penetrate through their mouth, nose, valves in their neck, and God knows where else. I don’t care to watch her put hers back on, and I doubt she wants me to see. It feels private, intimate, like a bodily function. The noises alone make me blush.
By the time she’s done, I’ve determined my coat and snow pants are dry enough to put on, which I do while she stokes the fire.
“We’ll have to put the fire out before it gets dark, right?”
Yes.
“Are there still Nahx around here? Your people?”
She shrugs.
“I suppose we should talk about where we’re going. Now that we’re here in Nahx territory.”
Find your friend.
“It’s a long way. Where I left him.”
She signs quickly, and all I catch are broken and think.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.…”
She sighs impatiently. Prom
ise, she signs. Trust.
I suppose she has reasons to trust me, since I killed one of my own people right in front of her. But me? Would I be a fool to trust her?
Maybe she let me see her cry on purpose. She didn’t need to take her armor off. And she didn’t need to drag me out of that pond or build a fire or help me get out of those wet clothes. She could have killed me in the cave for that matter, as soon as she was free of the chains.
Apparently satisfied with the fire, she sets down her stick and reaches for me as I sit, touching my shoulder. Even through my coat I can feel how hot her hand is.
I am with you, she signs.
I just shake my head because none of this makes sense. But she’s right. I have to trust her. What choice do I have now? I watch the fire for a moment, feeling that freedom bubble up in me again, my mind leaping around, into the flames, into the sky, over the snowy mountains. It’s almost intoxicating.
“I should know what your name is,” I say, and it occurs to me as the words leave my mouth that maybe this is a really personal question to the Nahx. “Unless you don’t want to tell me, of course.”
She seems to think about it for a moment, her head slowly tilting to the side.
Six repeat, she signs, before doing another sign I don’t understand.
“I’m sorry, I…”
She mimes firing a rifle and marching.
“Soldier? Soldier twelve? Oh! Rank? That’s your rank? Twelve? Twelfth?”
She nods.
“Is that what you want me to call you?”
She sighs again and appends this one with a growl no bigger than a kitten’s purr. Then she shakes her head, lowering herself to her knees and resting back on her heels. The fire crackles, and we both watch it for a few seconds.
She points at the sky, then at me, making a Z with her finger before repeating herself.
“Xander. That’s right. Your name is Sky?”
No. Sky. Fire. Night. She does a waving motion and repeats those three signs, blending them together.
“Fire wave in the night sky? Oh! Northern lights? Like the colored lights in the sky at night?” I try mimicking the way she signed it, but all that accomplishes is to make her laugh until she nearly loses her balance.
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