Of Dreams and Rust

by Sarah Fine

  A tear slips down my cheek and hits the floor, but I dry it with my sleeve. “And you,” I say to the Ghost. “I don’t want you to be angry. I want you to forgive me for leaving. I want you to know that even though I did, I loved you, too.” I don’t think he knew it. It grew slow and delicate, like frost crystals spreading across a windowpane. It wasn’t all he wanted, but it was real. It is real. Now I will never watch him work again. I will never again see the intent in his eyes, the pleased smile on his lips, the glow of pride on his face as he created something the world had never before seen. He wasn’t a machine in those moments. He was the boy he should have been, brilliant and sweet, vulnerable but strong. And I will never get to tell him how beautiful he was to me, how I needed him as badly as he needed me. The knowledge crushes my heart.

  I sniffle and draw my fingers across my face, smearing tears across my cheeks. “One last thing, Bo. The most important thing. Please hold on to the parts of you that I loved. Please do not kill them. You’ll want to. You’ll want to cut them away and burn them. But if you do, I’ll be gone forever. It is in those parts of you that I’ll live. And if you keep them safe, I’ll always be with you. I’ll never leave again. As long as you hold on to them. Please.”

  I cover my face with my hands. I have babbled on for long enough. “That is all the wishes I had left. I hope my offering is enough.”

  The lights in the corridor flicker. I peek through my fingers. “Bo?” I whisper.

  The hallway goes dark. Heavy footsteps clomp by my cell, probably one of the guards. He calls out in Noor a moment later, a question that goes unanswered. Somewhere outside, a man shouts, but the sound is cut off. Trembling, I crawl toward the bars, groping in the inky murk until my fingers close over metal. “Hello?”

  “Turn the lights on!” one of my fellow prisoners yells.

  “What’s happening?” shouts another.

  Down the corridor a door opens and slams shut. Keys jangle. Somewhere two Noor are yelling, their harsh voices muffled by walls.

  An explosion rips through the quiet, shaking the floor and raining dust and debris on my head. Shouts and cries grow loud and piercing, and I cover my head as another explosion deafens me. Able to neither hear nor see, I scrabble back against the far wall of my cell and curl into a ball, wondering if the Itanyai army has arrived, wondering if it is about to blow this complex into the sky. The smell of smoke creeps along the corridor. Something is on fire. I huddle ever tighter, my arms clamped over my head and my knees tucked beneath my chin.

  Large hands close around my arms and pull me from the ground. I open my eyes but am blinded by darkness. I feel a huff of air against my face and smell sweet, strong mint tea. Someone is shouting in my face, though I hear nothing but a roar. The person yanks me toward him—for it is surely a him, with a firm, flat chest and a hard grip and steely arms that wrap around me and drag me across the floor. Flailing and coughing as the acrid smoke floods my lungs, I struggle feebly while my captor lugs me away. We must be out of the cell, because we have covered too much distance to be inside it still. I blink, but all I see is dense blackness. My ears are ringing, but a few sounds begin to reach me. Screaming and shouting, hard pounding, fearsome hissing of broken water pipes.

  “Let me go!” I shriek as my feet lose the ground and begin to kick in midair. The man lifts me high and throws me over his shoulder, then begins to run up a flight of steps. I bump against his body, fighting to draw breath, until he bursts through a door and sprints into the open air. My fists bunched in his shirt, his arm wrapped over the backs of my knees, I lift my head to see the municipal jail, flames shooting from the roof on its far side, and a swarm of men clustered around it. Chaos.

  My captor is running away from all that. I let go of his back and put my hands on his arms. His two human arms. This is not Bo. He is too tall to be Bo anyway. “Melik?”

  He clutches me tighter and takes a sharp turn and then another, running past a pile of rubble and along a stone wall until he stops abruptly and lowers me to the ground. Melik’s rust-colored hair glints with gold. He is huffing with exertion as he puts his hands on either side of my face. “Are you all right?”

  I gape at him. “What are you doing?”

  His eyebrows rise. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “I thought—”

  His mouth curves, a bitter twist of his lips. “I don’t want to know.” He looks over the top of my head and nods at someone behind me, then reaches out to accept the reins of a horse. I look over my shoulder to see Baris heave himself up into the saddle of a second horse. Both animals are wild eyed and restless, stamping the ground and snorting. I cower as Melik draws his horse near and strokes its nose. And then, before I can protest, he lifts me up and sets me in the saddle, then swings himself up behind me. He coils his arm around my waist and looks at Baris. “Simte bazkozie, eh?”

  Baris gives us a grim smile. “Sokhizlie.”

  Melik kicks at the horse’s flanks, spurring it into action. I yelp and grab the smooth leather edges of the saddle, glancing around to see that Melik is sitting behind the saddle, using his legs and balance to hold himself on the creature as it breaks into a gallop and leaps through the hole in the compound wall, its hooves landing with a clatter on the stone-paved street. Melik leans forward, pressing me to the horse’s neck as he urges the animal on. The air is filled with thick smoke that rolls from the burning building.

  “Where are we going?” I huff, staring down at the horse’s hooves pounding the street. The wind created by the animal’s speed blows my hair around my face. My fingers are clenched over the saddle and clinging to the horse’s mane, and Melik is nearly suffocating me with his grip on my waist. His weight is pressed firmly against my back, and his breath is in my ear.

  “More of my friends are waiting near the sports complex. We didn’t want to call attention to ourselves.”

  “But you blew up the jail,” I yelp as the horse veers down a narrow road.

  “I asked Baris to create a distraction,” he says, reining the horse to a halt. “Apparently, he took that very seriously.”

  He leaps off its back, then pulls me down and steadies me as my feet touch the earth. Then we are running again, toward dozens of Noor voices, quiet and urgent. I hear Dagchocuk mentioned several times in the flurry of their conversation. A bouncing, guttering lantern rounds a corner, carried by a tall, gaunt Noor who leaps into a carriage to our left. By the lantern’s erratic light I see two more steam-powered carriages near the sports complex’s pockmarked walls, heavy and low, like farm machines. Onto these, Noor rebels are loading wooden boxes and other supplies. The men, with faces I recognize from their time at Gochan One, leap aboard, squatting and holding on to the low wooden walls around the edges of the carts, their rifles at the ready. Melik leads me to one of the carriages and helps me onto it, and the men move to make room. As I squat near the front, one of his friends asks him a question, and by the sharp stab of Melik’s words as he settles himself beside me I can tell he is alarmed. He gestures fiercely at the men and shouts something, and our carriage jerks into motion.

  He folds his arms over my chest and pulls me against him, his legs on either side of mine. The carriage turns onto a wide thoroughfare, followed by the other two, their yellow lights illuminating our path along the road that leads east, out of Kegu and toward the Line. In the far distance the Western Hills loom, inky black with purple sky above them. Dawn is approaching.

  From behind us several shots ring out, and Melik flattens me against the wooden panels of the floor. “Is it snipers?” I ask as Melik bows his head over mine.

  He shakes his head. The other men in the carriage have ducked low, but their hands are curled over the wooden slats surrounding the back. They shout among themselves, and Melik goes still. “They said something is chasing us.”

  “Something?” The army? The rebels? Another carriage? A pack of wolves?

  “It’s . . . fast.” He calls out something in Noor as the
carriage accelerates. I crane my neck and see the driver, a man with his cap pulled low and his shoulders hiked to his ears, as if expecting to be shot out of the seat at any moment. Buildings race by in a blur as gunfire punctures every second. I close my eyes and feel Melik’s panting, desperate breaths against my back. He is holding me so tightly that my own breaths are shallow and inadequate. I push back against him and he sits back, keeping his arms around me. We streak by a few shacks on the outskirts of Kegu, and then we are rolling down the rutted dirt road that leads to the Line.

  The rifles fall silent. The Noor at the back of our carriage crane their necks, peering at the empty road behind the third carriage. “Whatever was chasing us seems to have given up,” I say.

  Melik shrugs. “Perhaps there never was anything? We are all a bit jumpy.”

  One of the men shoves a thick, coarse blanket into Melik’s arms. All around us the men are lying feet to shoulder, pulling coverings over themselves, tarps and blankets and jackets.

  “We have a few hours’ ride to Dagchocuk, and we take rest whenever it is offered,” Melik says, scooting me against the front edge of the cart, where I sit with my back against a hard, unforgiving side panel. It’s better than being dead, though, and the boy next to me is the reason why I still breathe.

  “You defied the general.”

  Melik glances around at his men, his brothers, his friends. “We all did.”

  “You could have left without me.”

  He looks down at me. “But I never would have.”

  We stare at each other. It is a moment so filled with puzzlement and wonder that none of my thoughts make sense. About Melik, about myself, about what I feel for him, about what I know. My blood rushes through my veins, fizzing and sparking, and I let out a shaky breath. I can’t . . . I can’t sort out any of this, so I look away, back to the city, at the orange glow above the municipal complex.

  Melik chuckles and says something to Baris. The stout Noor rocks back and shakes his head, his eyes wide with shock. After a few more exchanges Melik is silent for a moment before touching my arm. “I asked Baris what he used to cause the explosions and set the fire.”

  “And?”

  His face is lit by the distant holocaust. His eyes are crinkled with concern, a deep kind of worry. “He said his distraction was to flood the barracks on the other side of the main building. He had nothing to do with the explosions at all.”

  Chapter

  Eleven

  THE CARRIAGE GROWLS and jitters along the road as the sky lightens, though dawn is at least an hour away. The other Noor are sleeping, snoring beneath their blankets. Melik spreads ours over our legs. He is wedged close to me in this crowded carriage bed, and my other side is squished against the rumbling front wall right behind the driver. Melik lowers himself onto his elbow and arches his eyebrow. “You’ll be more comfortable if you lie down.”

  I sink back because I do not have the energy to hold myself up, but I face the wall, creating distance between Melik and me. I can’t think when he is close. He fogs all my thoughts.

  He pulls the blanket over us, cocooning us in a dark, tiny world of our own. I close my eyes and lay my forehead against the wall of the carriage.

  “Too many things between us are unsaid,” he says to my back. “I want them to be said.”

  It is a very Noor thing to want. “What needs to be said?” I murmur, my heart thrumming with fear, but also with something startlingly close to hope.

  “I will begin with this: I have thought about you every day. No matter where I was, no matter what I saw or did in all these months, I did not forget you. And you did not forget me. That is not nothing.”

  “But it isn’t everything, either.” My palms press flat to the wood. Not everything, but still, so much.

  “Wen, I never expected to find you like that. I always pictured something different.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. “So did I, Melik. It never involved that many guns.”

  “My fantasies never involved any guns at all,” he says, low and rough.

  “You said you wished you’d never met me.” And I remember the look on his face, the anger.

  “Because I realized how much it was going to hurt when we were parted again.” His hand closes over my shoulder. “Wen, why won’t you look at me? Do I repulse you so much?” His voice is hushed. Vulnerable.

  “No.” I shift onto my back. “But parts of you terrify me,” I say, more honest than I should be.

  He is propped on his elbow. The dark shadow of his face hovers close. “And the other parts?”

  “They make it impossible to let go.”

  He smooths my hair off my forehead. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  I pull his hand away from me. “I don’t know how to think about what you did. I am trying to hate you.”

  “Is it working?”

  “I might have to try harder.”

  He is so close that the ends of his hair tickle my cheeks. “We’ve been through this before.”

  When I believed he’d gone to a whore, he means. “This is far more serious.”

  He groans. “It is. So let’s go over what happened, yes? Think back to that first night, when the soldiers escaped.” His fingers capture mine and intertwine, locking our hands together. “When I gave Bajram the heavy drink from my canteen, did you not consider that I did that on purpose?”

  I blink up at the outline of his features, lit only by speckles of early daylight filtering in through tiny holes in the blanket. I cannot read his expression, but I can hear the frustration in his voice, the release of secrets held close for too long.

  “And when I slipped my own rations into the bag of food I gave the prisoners,” he continues, “you did not notice. You did not wonder.”

  My heart skips a beat. “I did not look closely. I was too busy working against you. Or so I thought.”

  “When I spoke loudly and told all my stories, you did not think that perhaps I was keeping their attention to give you time to free the soldiers? Which I knew you would do.” His voice is tight and bitter. “And when I gave you my coat and hat to keep you warm on your journey east . . .”

  “Melik,” I whisper, my fingers bunching in his tunic.

  “I did everything I could, Wen. Everything. And still you believed the worst of me.”

  My fear is melting. My resistance is melting. But . . . “You hunted those boys down.”

  He lets out a hard bark of laughter. “Absolutely I did. With every bit of cunning and skill and speed that I have. Commander Kudret threatened to drag you behind a horse if the prisoners were not retrieved. He wanted to make you suffer.” His breath fans over my face, and I am suddenly very aware of his body against mine. “But ask me what really happened. Now I can tell you.”

  I touch his face, the long whiskers of his beard coiling coarse over my fingertips. Why did I not consider anything apart from my greatest fears? He did not bring back a single body. And he did not bring back heads. Or hands. Or feet. He brought back pinkie fingers. “You did not kill them.”

  He shakes his head. “But I did demand a price in exchange for this mercy. One they were all willing to pay if it meant the girl who saved them might live even one more day.”

  “Baris supported your story to the commander.”

  “Baris loves me like a brother. And he knows what I feel for you.”

  “But you couldn’t tell me that you had left them alive?”

  “If you’d known, you might have given it away. Your true despair was enough to convince the commander that I had completed my mission.” He places a scratchy kiss on my forehead. “I hoped that once you knew that your anguish had made you and them safer, you might decide it had been worth it.”

  I duck my head against his shoulder. “It was. Of course it was. Will you forgive me for not having faith in you?” Again. Again. “You must think I am so stupid and ungrateful.”

  “I think nothing of the kind. Despite your belief that I was a cold-
blooded killer, you delivered the news about the war machines,” he says, merely a trickle of sound in my ear. “You were willing to help me save my village and my people, not because of your feelings for me, but because . . . well, I don’t know why you did it.”

  “You don’t doubt? Your general made a very good case. It makes more sense for me to be a spy than to think I traveled all this way by myself, through the territory of the enemy, to deliver information that would make me a traitor to my people, that guarantees I have no future at all.” My voice breaks as those thoughts spill from my mouth.

  He cups my cheek with his palm and tilts my face to his. “I have faith in you.” His chest trembles with silent laughter. “Even though you are still the most confusing girl I have ever met.” I count the beats of his heart, feeling the silent acceleration before he speaks again. “And I do not blame you, really, for not feeling the same,” he whispers. “I have done bad things. I want you, of all people, to believe that I am good, but I am . . . not. These past few months—”

  My fingertips slide over his mouth. “Not one of us is good all the time.” I think of Bo, and how I care for him despite knowing that he has killed over and over again. I understand that he has taken lives, and that he is not always sorry. I am always aware of his nature. But, still, I do not hate him. There are pieces of him I would protect with my life. And Melik . . . he deserves at least as much from me.

  He deserves for me to see him as a man, not as the perfect hero who has inhabited my dreams. “Melik, why were you willing to risk so much? Why free prisoners you wanted to kill?” I saw it, that look in his eyes. That was not an act. “Those soldiers may be in the Ring right now, telling their commanders about the rebel force.”

  Melik’s arm tightens over my back, pressing me against his warm, hard lines. “This war has a big appetite. It devours everything. But I will not let it eat my soul.” He tilts my face to his and touches the tip of his nose to mine. “It had sunk its teeth into my heart, but when you appeared, you reminded me that there are parts of me I am not willing to surrender.”