Zero Repeat Forever

by G. S. Prendergast

  “I just heard,” he says, sitting on my chair. “We’re going to get together a search party tomorrow. See if we can find your friend, this August. Why didn’t he come all the way to the base with you?”

  I don’t answer. Of course I don’t answer.

  “Liam says there’s probably another group of refugees somewhere. Is that right? Why didn’t you say anything? Do you know where they are? Liam says you stopped answering his questions.”

  I press my hand over my mouth because if I open it, I’m afraid of what will come out. Topher rolls the chair forward and touches me, his fingers gentle on my cheek. “He might not be dead. He might have dropped the book or . . .” But he doesn’t believe this. He gets out of the chair and kneels by the bed, curling his arms around me. “We’ll find him, Raven. If that’s what you want.”

  I know what he’s thinking. That this human boy, August, is the obstacle between us and the thing neither of us really wants. And maybe that Topher’s willingness to search for this imaginary boy is enough of a demonstration that I might finally begin to thaw toward the absurd idea of us. But it’s so insincere it is almost nauseating. Because Topher knows as well as I do that if there ever was a human boy called August, he’s dead. Their “search party” is not a rescue mission. It’s a recovery. Topher expects to find him with a dart in his chest and learn a new thing about the Nahx—that they sometimes take trophies from their victims.

  “Can you tell me about him?” Topher says. “Tell me what happened. Where you were all those weeks.”

  I turn my face to the wall.

  “It’s not going to hurt my feelings or anything, if you had something with him. I just want to know why he didn’t come back here with you. Unless he had somewhere else to go. That’s what Liam is thinking. That he was part of a group of refugees that were heading west, but that you wanted to come back here for . . .”

  I know what Liam would think of this. That romantic sentimentality will get us all killed. I didn’t go with August because I’m in love with Topher. August came back for me because he’s in love with me. A Nahx trailed him, killed him, and maybe transmitted our location to his command. We’ve all been fucked over by love.

  If only they knew that love might be the one thing to save us.

  “Do you want to bug out?” I say to the wall. “Head west, I mean. Use Xander’s map and get the hell out of here?”

  Topher doesn’t answer quickly enough for me. In his hesitation I see all the hours he and the other boys and men have spent training, adapting the weapons, planning assaults. It all comes down to fight or run again. I have no fight left in me. And sometimes I think Topher is nothing but fight.

  “I want to get you out,” he says finally, and I guess I have to be satisfied with that.

  “What are they going to do with the Nahx they captured?”

  Topher sits back in the chair, his hands on his knees. I’m struck by his appearance, taking a moment to really look at him for the first time in months. He looks much older than seventeen, and the last vestiges of the warmth that made him look like Tucker are fading. For all his lies about love, Topher is hard as the icy mountains that separate us from the rest of the human world.

  “They’re going to try to interrogate it, I guess.”

  “Interrogate? You mean, like torture?”

  “I guess that depends on how much it’s willing to tell us.”

  An urge from my past, long since forgotten, to punch Topher in his pretty face, crashes over me. “The Nahx don’t speak,” I say before I can stop myself.

  Topher leans back, studying me. “They don’t speak to us. When have they had an opportunity before this? As far as the NKVs go, this is only the second time one has been captured. They’ve never even managed to bring one in dead.”

  “They don’t . . .” But how can I explain what I know? How can I make Topher understand? His hate for them is like a living thing, as ugly and consuming as it was that day by Tucker’s grave. I backtrack, trying to get us onto a safer topic. “I know a way we can get to the coast. Safely, I mean.”

  “Xander’s map?”

  “Yes. But that’s not all.” I press my eyes shut. “An escort. Someone who knows the way. Who knows everything about the Nahx. Knows where they are and how to evade them.”

  Unexpectedly, Topher slides out of his chair and kneels in front of me again. “Raven . . . he’s . . . August is dead. I shouldn’t have said what I did before. There’s no way that Nahx would have left him alive. That’s never happened. Never. I know what you think happened back in the trailer park, but that was some kind of hallucination. There’s no such thing as a Nahx that leaves people alive. That Nahx they caught? It killed August.”

  I search his eyes. Search for the spark of joy that I once loved so much in Tucker. But there’s nothing left. My own eyes fill with tears. For Tucker. For the world. For the fact that Topher is the human left that I trust the most, and I can’t trust him with the truth. But I have no choice.

  “Topher,” I say, my hands on either side of his face. “The Nahx they caught is August.”

  A gust of wind in the quadrangle rattles my window suddenly. Topher glances at it and looks back at me, his face inscrutable. He looks like someone trying to figure out the punch line of a particularly complex joke. Then realization dawns on him like a new day. Slowly. And colorfully. But it’s a new day broken by winter, like everything else around here. He stands abruptly and steps out the door.

  “Call a security team!” he yells down the hallway. “Right now!” There’s a muffled reply, and the sound of a door opening and closing.

  “Topher,” I try.

  “You shut up!”

  He remains in the doorway, silhouetted by the bright hallway lights. Finally, he turns back to me, and I see that truly, Tucker is gone. Topher is gone. All that remains now is a vengeful soldier. I’m neither surprised nor disappointed. Resignation is what I feel, like the Nahx girl in the video, just before she lost her head.

  “Stand up,” he says. “Turn around.”

  I turn to the window, my mind naturally traveling back to that first night on the base when Topher pressed himself into my back, his drunkenness, his heartbreak, his disdain for me so potent I wanted to kill him with my bare hands. Maybe everything that I thought had changed was an illusion. I don’t even think we were ever really friends. And he was never going to be Tucker. Even Tucker wasn’t who I thought he was. Neither of them was. I feel like I just keep taking their masks off but never get to the real person underneath.

  “Put your hands behind your back.”

  “Topher, please.” Like all the senior officers, he carries around cable ties, to truss up anyone who gets out of hand. It’s been happening more and more, with the younger men especially. Cabin fever and homemade alcohol. I’ve never seen Topher restrain a girl before though. “Come on. Where am I going to go?”

  “Hands. Behind. Your back.”

  I do it. And flinch when he pulls the cable tie much too tight.

  “You brought a Nahx here.” His voice is choked with fury. “You brought a Nahx to the one safe place left on Earth.”

  “I had no other way of getting back. I couldn’t have done it without him. He saved my life.”

  “Are you that stupid? It was a trick. It tricked you into leading it here.”

  Outside, the wind turns to rain, fat drops clicking against the small window like distant gunfire. Topher yanks me back and pushes me into the chair, my hands crumpling uncomfortably behind me.

  “You have about sixty seconds until security gets here. It’s time to tell me everything you know.”

  “About what?” I ask stupidly.

  “Did this Nahx have any others with him?”

  “No. He killed the only other one we encountered.”

  That makes Topher frown. “What about communications? A radio? A transmitter?”

  “None that I saw. He was lost. Like separated from his . . . whatever . . . platoon. I think he
was basically AWOL.”

  “Or a spy.”

  I almost laugh at that. August seemed so confused most of the time; I can’t imagine him stringing together that kind of deception.

  “I saw the one he killed. If he was a spy, why would he kill one of his own people?”

  “Did you see him actually kill it? This other one?”

  “No. But I know he did. There were two of them. A male and a female. I killed the female and August killed the male.”

  “How do you know he killed it?”

  It occurs to me that Topher has started referring to August as “he” and not “it.” Perhaps I should file that away as a minor victory. “He told me. Why would he lie?”

  “To gain your trust, of course. You haven’t been watching the videos. Most of the time when you think one of them is dead, they get up and walk away a few hours later. So he pretended to kill it, to prove he was on your side so you would lead him right here. Jesus, Raven.”

  He begins to pace.

  “That’s not what happened. He abandoned his people. He saved my life.”

  “Saved your life? All I saw was a Nahx beating the crap out of you. I thought you were dead when he picked you up.”

  My blood turns to ice. “That wasn’t him,” I say. “He picked me up after the other one knocked me out. He killed that one too, I think.” Out in the hallway, I hear the door burst open and the sound of boots on the concrete floor. “Topher, there were two Nahx there with me in the stadium, right? You saw him. You saw him save me.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You must remember! A dead Nahx with my knife in its throat would have been right there! August killed him to save me.”

  “Raven, I was out of my mind. I thought you were dead. This Nahx was running off with you. I was firing arrows at him and chasing you. I didn’t stop to check out the scenery.”

  Before I can convince him, the security team arrives. Xander and Emily.

  “What’s going on?” Xander says.

  “Take her down to a detention cell,” Topher says.

  Xander, bless him, scratches his head, looking down at me. “Toph?”

  “You heard me. Take her. I’m right behind you.”

  Xander thinks about it for a few seconds until Emily steps forward and hoists me up. I bite back a whimper of pain.

  Faces turn to me as we travel through the base, toward the long stairway down to the detention cells. And we pass people I know. People I recognize. They don’t seem very surprised to see me being hauled away in restraints. But I suppose nothing much surprises anyone anymore. Faces turn away from me just as quickly.

  While the command deck is about two hundred feet above the residence decks, the detention cells are deep beneath, tucked among the storerooms, the generator, and water heaters that feed off an underground river and hot springs. Under many feet of rock and ice. Uncomfortably claustrophobic for me, a cell will be a nightmare for August.

  “Let me speak to him,” I say, twisting my neck back to look at Topher. “Let me see the Nahx. He can help us get out of the occupied territory. I know he can.”

  “I thought you said they can’t speak,” Topher says.

  “They don’t. Not with voices. They have signs. I learned a lot of them. And he can read. Maybe he can write.”

  Topher walks in silence behind us as I watch him, my neck cramping from the effort of twisting it back.

  “Put her in an empty cell,” he says, then turns to me. “Liam is on his way down. You need to speak to him.”

  I stumble as Emily shoves me into a cell, and I fall painfully to my knees. Topher stares down at me from the doorway as I roll awkwardly into a sitting position.

  “Can you untie me now?”

  “A black belt in karate? Would that be wise?”

  “You’re a black belt too.”

  “You know I can’t take you, Raven. I’ve never been able to.” I guess the irony of the truncheon and pistol holstered at his hip is lost on him. But then he shrugs and cuts the bindings with a pocketknife. I hear voices out in the corridor, as Topher steps back through the door, clicking it shut behind him.

  The walls seem to close around me. After a few minutes I hear Liam’s voice outside. He is yelling. He is not happy.

  “Go back up to command!” he bellows “Make sure the sentry patrols are doubled. You take an attack team to the north entrance.”

  “Yes, sir,” I hear Topher say. It gives me chills.

  The lock on the door clicks open and Liam stands there staring down at me, with Xander and Emily behind him as guards. I twitch involuntarily, my shoulders aching. Liam steps forward. He looks as though he might say something. But then in the blink of an eye, before I can react, he pulls his fist back and punches me so hard in the face I feel my brain jangle against my skull.

  “What the fuck did you do?” he says as I struggle back up onto my knees, my face throbbing. “That piece of shit in the next cell is your doing. When its army arrives and kills us all, it will be your fault.”

  “No army is arriving,” I say. “August is on our side. He left his platoon. He saved my life. He can help us get out of here. He could help us get to the coast. He wants to help us.”

  “Why would he want to help us? He’s part of their army!”

  “Army? Do you think he volunteered for this?” I edge backward, not sure he’s done inflicting violence on me. I could take him, no doubt, but what would that accomplish? I’m in a prison cell, at long last.

  I feel something warm dripping down from my nose. Blood. For some reason the taste of it helps me to focus. Of all the times I have tried to convince Liam that the thing to do is to get the hell out of here, this is the most critical. This is the moment where he can choose to fight, to kill the Nahx he has in captivity already. Or to use his enemy to help us get to safety.

  Of all the persuasion I’ve tried, all the arguments, all the begging, this is the most important. I need to appeal to Liam’s sense of reason, his survival instinct, if he has one. But maybe, like Topher, he is nothing but fight.

  “You need to listen to me,” I say. “This is our last and only chance. August will not bring the Nahx here. But they will come eventually. I don’t really understand what their project is, what their goal is. What this is all about. But I’m pretty sure that their main idea is that no humans are left alive. Not in the high lands anyway. Maybe eventually they will take every human on Earth. But for the time being we’re pretty sure it’s safe on the coast. If we can get there, we can live. All these people in the base. All the people that your mother swore to protect. They can live.”

  Liam stares at me. He does look as though he’s considering what I’ve said. But then his lips turn into a smirk and I know I’ve lost him. Or that maybe I never had him. Maybe he never had the well-being of all people on the base as his priority. Maybe watching his father get killed, watching his sister die, watching his mother’s body being brought back from a raid destroyed him in the same way that Tucker’s death destroyed Topher.

  I suppose because we grew up so safe, deceptively safe, without war, with little crime, with everything we needed to survive, we never learned what this kind of life would do to you. I wonder how many people there are left at the base who have any desire to escape, who haven’t had their spirits turned to anger and revenge. I think of my stepfather’s stories of the badass hunters and trappers he knew up north, and the darker stories he had. There must be people in the base who have stared down despair, hunger, and cold before too. I’ll make them my allies if I ever get out of here.

  But that doesn’t seem likely. Liam leans over and spits on me, his saliva mixing with the blood on my lips. “Bring her into the Nahx’s cell,” he says. This time Xander reaches down and gently lifts me to my feet.

  AUGUST

  Blood. My face mask reflects back up at me from the pool of blood on the floor.

  Blood. When you break a dandelion stem, it bleeds white. Like the milk the humans drink
. I drank milk once. Sixth said I could. It made me sick too. Dandelion blood. Her smell is overpowering, intoxicating. My mind swims back through the thick mist of syrupy memory to those days in the sky, those days she died slowly, skin on fire, bloody and blue with bruises. She didn’t die.

  She didn’t die.

  “Wake up!”

  Have I been sleeping? That’s not normal.

  I lift my head up and blink the past from my eyes.

  Blood. Blood on her face.

  The guards stumble back as I hiss and pull at the chains.

  “Settle down, Nahx, unless you want another arrow in you.”

  It’s the pale, thin one again, the one who gives the orders. The one I tried to surrender to. I tried to show him Dandelion’s book. He put the first arrow through my knee.

  Blood. He smells of her blood.

  Rage surges through me. I’m more awake now than I’ve been in days. Weeks. As awake as I was the day I left her. That took all my strength, to not carry her away with me and keep her.

  Blood. Blood. Her blood on him. Blood on her face.

  My right shoulder pulses with pain as I pull my arm forward. There’s a creak; and the humans recoil as the chain bursts from the wall. As I yank down the other chain, someone fires an arrow into the wall behind me. My own blood sprays the room as I pull the arrow from my shoulder. One fist connects with the boy’s head while the other lashes out with the arrow at a girl with a crossbow. She falls in a heap.

  Then Dandelion is screaming. Screaming. The other girl has an arrow in her eye—an arrow dripping with my oily, gray blood. The thin boy lies crumpled on the floor. I pull his pistol out of his hand and point it at the black-haired one.

  “August! NO!”

  The black-haired one drops his crossbow and raises his hands over his head.

  I count time with her breaths. One, two, three, four.

  Blood. Ah no. What have I done?

  “Xander? Are there more guards outside the door?” she says, not taking her eyes off me. Her eyes. “Xander?” Her voice is like the rushing river. But tight. Like the rushing river pushed through a crack in the ice. The black-haired one was in the river with her. I remember him now. I remember her bravery in pulling him down, saving him.