“Crying is not going to help you,” he says, blinking. How could I have not seen how damaged he was? All that time I was lost in the chaos in my head, but he was beyond lost. He was dying inside.
“Don’t, Toph,” I try. “We… we’re friends.”
“I… I thought you were dead,” he says. “You never came back. I thought that Nahx killed you. Raven’s Nahx.”
“He didn’t. He helped me. This one, Aurora, is helping me too. You have to believe—”
We both hear it, a sound that makes the blood drain out of my head—the distinctive whine of a Nahx dart rifle charging.
There’s a loud crack and a flash of red, and suddenly all hell breaks loose and I’m falling with Topher on top of me and a mouthful of snow and being crushed by something hot. We crack down onto the creek and slide, and then we’re flying, hard cliffs and a frozen waterfall rushing past us.
Every breath in my body is expelled by force when we hit, as Aurora lands on her back in the deep snow, both Topher and me cradled protectively in her arms. Before either of us can catch our breath, she has wrenched away Topher’s rifle and sent it sailing into the distance. Topher moans, stunned, and rolls over onto his face as Aurora leaps up, aiming her rifle precisely into the mountain above us.
My head spins, but I have the presence of mind at least to drag Topher across the ice and under cover of the looming rocks. The snow is hip deep in the shade, and I have to dig around us to keep Topher’s head aboveground. His eyes are rolling around, his mouth working like a dying fish’s. I hold his chin, shaking him gently. As he regains consciousness he starts to squirm away from me, which I take as a good sign. At least nothing seems broken. Aurora broke our fall over a fifty-foot waterfall with her own body.
I look up to see Aurora with her rifle still raised, scanning the cliff.
“Do you see them?”
She lowers her rifle with a huff. No.
“We should move. Hide somewhere.”
Topher suddenly gasps behind me, launching himself upward only to fall face-first into the snow.
“Easy, Toph,” I say, helping him to sit.
He glares at me before turning his head to spit blood onto the snow. Aurora sucks in her breath.
“Are you hurt?” I ask. He pulls away from me.
“I bit my tongue!” He scoops a handful of snow into his mouth and tries to stand again. I tug him down, but he shoves me roughly away.
Aurora drops to one knee, slinging the rifle over her back. She looks around uneasily as she hauls me upright by the back of the coat. Walk yes?
I test my limbs. They all seem to be working.
Good, she signs, before turning to Topher. Good-bye, mud head.
“We can’t leave him here!” She shoves me, pinching my shoulder hard enough to hurt. I push her hand away. “No! This is the friend I’ve been looking for! I’m not going to leave him now.”
She replies with a stream of signs I don’t understand, apart from the acute clarity of her fury and impatience. Before I can ask for further explanation, she pulls the rifle from behind her back and aims it at Topher. He raises his hands above his head with a sigh of resignation. He lost one of his gloves somewhere in the tussle. I notice two of his fingertips are blistered and peeling from frostbite.
Walk, Aurora signs with one hand.
Topher stands slowly, steadying himself on the rocks, but before we can move, Aurora leaps on us, pushing us back with the barrel of her rifle.
Quiet!
I clamp my hand over Topher’s mouth as Aurora spins, rifle raised. I can’t see anything or hear anything, but something spooked her. I press us both back into the rocks, sliding down into the deep snow.
Suddenly dark shapes are falling from the sky. But rather than crashing to their deaths, they land gracefully around us, one after another, until we’re surrounded.
Nahx. But not like any Nahx I’ve seen before. Their armor is mottled as though it’s been painted or broken, and some of them seem to be wearing scraps of human clothes. One of them is festooned with strands of metal chain; another wears what looks like a wolf skin as a stole. In addition to Nahx rifles they have an array of human weapons—guns, bows and arrows, knives. I glance at Topher, whose eyes are wide with horrified fascination.
Aurora kneels in front of us, growling protectively, her rifle raised, but we’re hopelessly outnumbered. There must be twenty of these strange Nahx now circling us, pinning us against the cliff face. Finally one of them steps forward, signing. I catch only a few words.
Lost. Broken. Together?
Aurora nods, and there’s a collective sigh of relief like a gust of wind over the ice. She steps away from the cliff face, signing too fast for me to see. Four of the Nahx descend on us, hauling Topher and me up over Topher’s protests. I strain my head around as we’re dragged off, trying to see where Aurora is in the crowd of Nahx that surrounds us as we begin a slow ascent back up the cliff.
When I finally catch sight of her, she signs at me, short and sharp but distinctive.
Promise.
RAVEN
Our journey to Calgary is endless. Even the normally windswept highways are deep with snow in places, and our passage is punctuated with frequent breaks to dig out drifts enough to drive through. After four thousand years of this, stuck in the Humvee either staring at the back of Tucker’s head or listening to him tunelessly humming behind me, I’m ready to kill someone. Finally, about an hour outside the city, Mandy, who has taken over driving for the day, slows. My eyes, which have been drowsily gazing at the mountains to the west, are drawn back to the road.
“What the…”
I open the passenger door and leap out before Mandy has even fully come to a stop.
“Raven, wait!”
Ahead of us, blocking the road, are a pair of Nahx, kneeling, motionless. One of them has dropped their rifle beside them, the other still has theirs slung over their back. Neither of them moves or reacts as I approach.
“Hey!”
I don’t turn as I hear Mandy and Tucker get out of the Humvee behind me. The sun beats down on the road and the snow around us, creating a harsh glare that turns the two Nahx into dark gaps in the blinding light. Are they even breathing? As I get closer I see that their only movement is a slight sway in the strong wind.
“What happened?” Tucker asks as he joins me. “Are they dead?”
“Where’s Blue?” I shield my eyes, trying to see Blue’s light against the glare. “Blue!”
The Nahx are dusted with snow and ice, as though they’ve been here for days or weeks. I brush some away from the taller one’s chest, the male. His armor is pristine, almost polished-looking. The female is a bit more scuffed, and she has a dent in the armor of her mask, over her jaw, that makes her face look lopsided. The male has his hand on her shoulder.
Blue appears in front of me, dimly visible with the bright snow behind them.
“Are they dead? Can you tell?”
They hover in front of the male’s face for a moment before circling around to the back of his head. Moments later, they do the same to the female. The slow death circle they do this time is large, encompassing both the motionless Nahx.
The cold wind stings my eyes as I turn, surveying the featureless landscape. There is nothing to indicate any kind of battle, no evidence of a Nahx transport landing here, and the Nahx don’t appear injured, apart from the female’s jaw. I bend down to dig at the snow that has drifted up around their knees.
There’s a frozen black puddle under each of them, as though their blood dripped down their bodies inside their armor and drained out their knees.
“What caused this?”
Mandy takes her hat off and scratches her head. “I mean, it looks a little like what happened to Tenth, but… I don’t know anything about Nahx physiology.”
“Maybe they’re just dying,” Tucker says. I had forgotten he was even there.
“What?”
“Maybe they’re programmed
to die or something. Since those glowing bugs made us, they don’t need the Nahx anymore. Maybe they’re all going to die soon.”
Mandy glances at me before turning on him.
“Shut up, Tucker,” she snaps.
“What? Tenth just dropped dead, and—”
“Shut up about the Nahx. You don’t know anything either.”
In the uncomfortable silence that follows, Blue drifts down into my pocket.
“Raven.” Mandy nudges me, and I tear my eyes away from the dead Nahx. “We should go. It will be dark soon.”
I don’t answer, instead turning and striding back to the Humvee, wishing I could express one or two of the millions of thoughts in my head into words, just so I could get them out, even for an instant.
Mandy lets me drive, which gives me something to focus on at least.
We enter Calgary from the north and too quickly can eliminate one possible place Topher might be hiding. Tucker’s suburb—the one I bused to from our rambling character house in the cool downtown neighborhood so I could attend “the good high school”—has been razed to the ground, the wide boulevards scorched and the cookie-cutter houses burned to cinders. We manage to navigate to Tucker’s exclusive street, but there’s nothing left of his house save a black splotch on the flat white lot. I park the Humvee and we tramp up through the snowdrifts to see if there is anything recognizable left. Blue floats over the charred remains of Tucker’s house as we examine it.
“Do you think there are bodies under there?” I ask them in a whisper, while Tucker walks farther away, into the backyard.
Blue makes another slow, sad circle in the air before coming back to perch on my shoulder.
Tucker’s house could be anyone’s ruined history. The demolished street spreads out on either side, telling the same cataclysmic story over and over. Behind the ruins, the pleasant suburban lake shines white and pristine, as though inviting us to tramp across it. If we had skates and sticks, we might clear a neat square and play a quick game of hockey. As it is, we trudge back to the Humvee in silence.
“Maybe he would go to the school,” Tucker says tightly. It’s so strange to see Tucker keeping himself contained; that’s normally more Topher’s style. But I know his mind is buzzing like mine. I recognize the way his eyes flick around, observing everything, analyzing it. Mandy does it too. It’s as though we’re all compiling giant databases, for what I don’t know. The devastation around us, the ruined houses, the burned-out cars, should be horrifying, evidence that everyone we ever knew or loved here is gone. But instead of mourning, I simply record it, estimating, inferring from the ruins how many of my friends and neighbors were not outright killed but darted and turned into Snowflakes like us.
The large number I come up with is almost satisfying to me. The more of us there are, the more likely we are to win whatever battle is coming.
I take the driver’s seat again and slowly drive the Humvee through the winding streets to our high school. Unlike the surrounding houses, it’s miraculously intact, as though the passing tornado of doom took pity and spared it. When we get out, we find the doors drifted with snow and as firmly locked as they were on the last day of school—two days before Tucker, Topher, Xander, and I got on the bus to camp, the bus that saved our lives.
Tucker kicks the front door open easily. The school is deserted and quiet, and even with the changes in my life of the past year and a half, I still get that weird sensation you get visiting a school after hours. It’s almost like being able to walk through another dimension, as though the school and its students might be buzzing with activity somewhere just out of your view. It’s like being dead, I suppose, but we are the living ones now. Everyone else is a ghost.
On the lower level we find a broken window in the staff room, and the couches and tables dusted with a fine layer of snow. There’s a human-shaped dent in the snow by the window, almost as though someone made a snow angel. But I know that’s not what happened. Someone was darted here—maybe the security guard who patrolled the school once a day in the summer. He might have been darted during the first siege and lay there as though asleep for all these months, waiting to be revived with the rest of us, to shake the snow off his uniform and join our zombie army. I wonder if he was there on the dunes or at the giant ship.
We trail down the hall, away from the staff room, trying the gym, the boys’ locker rooms, the science lab where Tucker liked to set things on fire, the music room where we met, when I found him inexpertly plucking out a Pink Floyd song on a badly tuned guitar and thought he was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.
But no one is here.
Mandy walks ahead of us into one of the social studies classrooms. When Tucker and I join her, she’s staring at a large globe. Blue floats off my shoulder, drifting curiously around the globe as we study it.
“Remember that globe back at the ship?” I ask. “What do you think the bright white spots were?”
“No idea,” Mandy says. “But I’m pretty sure this is where the dunes were. And there was a bright spot there, remember?” She points to a spot in far-north Saskatchewan.
“Lake Athabasca?” Tucker says. “There are sand dunes there?”
“A huge dune sea, nearly the whole length of the lake.”
The three of us stare at the globe in silence for a few seconds. Behind the superprocessor humming away in my head, something else is growing. It’s almost as though the rift I saw in my dream is now in my waking mind too, like a new kind of gravity pulling my thoughts toward a vortex to the northeast. I should say something, but I don’t want to be the one to bring it up. I don’t want to be the one to push us into confronting whatever it is we need to confront. I definitely don’t want to look at this globe anymore and remember all the other bright lights. Are all of them fissures like the ones we dreamed of, or vortexes pulling the sentinels, locking them into place for their battles? There were dozens.
“Let’s go,” I say. “Maybe we could try downtown. The dojo maybe? Downtown wasn’t bombed.”
The day has cleared when we get outside and a bright blue sky shines around us, outlining the gray silhouette of the distant foothills and the downtown high-rises to the west and south.
We head back down to the Humvee and I drive us into town, relishing the lack of traffic on the freeway. When I was learning to drive I dreaded getting on and off the freeways, which were usually packed with traffic at all hours of the day and night. Now, of course, we are the only moving vehicle as far as we can see, though there are quite a few abandoned cars and trucks, some of them with the telltale dart holes in their windows.
Tucker sits in the back of the Humvee, silent and impassive, staring out the window as if we are taking a scenic drive on a summer day. I pull up outside the dojo and Mandy and I wait while Tucker breaks in. He reappears a few minutes later.
“Anything?”
He shakes his head. “Darts,” he says. “In the walls of the changing room. I think some people might have been hiding there. But they’re gone.”
I feel something like grief. I knew those people. We were all close at the dojo. If it was them hiding, our teachers and classmates, all of them were darted. All of them got up and walked away with the rest of the zombies. Most of them don’t know who they are.
Yeah. I feel that. It makes me angry.
This whole exercise is starting to seem like a giant waste of time, but I suppose we just needed some kind of destination when we busted out of the ship. We can’t head west—likely the drone web would stop us, and anyway, if the reaction of the Métis girl by the lake is anything to go on, I don’t think we’ll be very welcome among humans. So where can we go?
Looking out the Humvee’s front window, I can see the concrete skyscraper condos rising on either side of the freeway like towering monuments. There won’t be answers inside, but there will be beds, clothes. We might be able to clean up a bit, or even find something to eat—if we even need to eat. And in one of them…
“W
hat?” Mandy says.
“What, what?”
“You gasped,” she says. “What are you thinking?”
I put the Humvee in gear and pull away from the curb.
“When you lose something, how do you look for it?” I ask.
“You retrace your steps. But we’ve done that already, kind of.” She lowers her voice, glancing back at Tucker, who has returned to staring out the window. “The chances of finding Topher were always practically nil.”
“Not him,” I say. “Someone else.”
The high-rise looks much the same as when I left it that night all those months ago with August. And there is a dead body there on the concrete entry courtyard, partially concealed in snow, but it’s a Nahx, the one I pushed off the balcony—it must be a year ago now. I kick some of the snow away and bend to inspect her. There’s a pool of congealed black sludge spreading out under her body.
Definitely dead.
She deserved it—she was trying to dart me—but I can’t help feeling a pang of guilt. Her bloodthirst was probably not her fault, and I suppose in that moment it was her or me.
“What are we doing here?” Mandy asks. The sun is setting, and though we haven’t seen anyone, there could be humans around, if they’re good at hiding. I have no desire to encounter them.
“This is where I stayed when I was injured,” I explain. “I left a whole bunch of useful stuff behind.” I stare up at the top of the building, forty stories above us. “I mean, what else do we have to do? It’s not like we have to be anywhere.”
As one, the three of us flick our eyes to the northeastern sky, as though tugged by invisible puppet strings. But whatever it is, it’s not quite enough to pull us back in that direction yet. It’s more like a dull ache, or an itch that can’t quite be scratched.
I unholster my weapons as we enter the lobby, and Mandy and Tucker wordlessly do the same. The lobby and the entry to the stairwell are just as deserted as the last time I was here, but the clarity of my memory ensures that I recall the dead Nahx August and I passed on the stairs. We tiptoe up the first three flights, the only light coming from the thin strip of windows that runs the full height of the building and Blue drifting ahead of us, their light dancing on the walls.
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