by C.L. Bevill
Chapter 24
Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet…
I stopped and slept for a few hours just after I found a trail that headed for the coastline. The sign was marked as the Coast Trail – 3.5 miles. The glow of the firefly pixies illuminated the words for me, and I found a spot where I could put a sleeping bag under a rhododendron bush. My eyes were burning with exhaustion. The day had been long. I had been digging trenches for the latrines before going up the Bluff Trail with Zach. Although I had time for a bath before we went for our evening stroll, I wasn’t exactly prepared to go on a multi-mile, rushed hike in order to save someone’s life. However I thought my day was going to end up, this wasn’t it. The ground was cold. The air was damp. My stomach was tied in knots. The pixies were unhappy with me. Zach was probably thinking only God knew what about what had happened with Lulu.
And I dreamed of Zach. He wouldn’t sleep. Frantic with worry, he thought of Kara and of Lulu and of the small photograph I had looked upon in Lulu’s hand. Mostly, he was thinking about me. “How can I make her understand, Kara?” he asked anxiously. They were dressed, packs on their backs, on the highway, searching, searching, searching. Kara said, “Either she will or she won’t. She’s not unreasonable. But Zach, couldn’t you have picked a lesser secret to hide from her?” “She doesn’t talk about her parents,” he retorted angrily. “You don’t talk about your partner. You think I want to talk about them? If I talk about them, all I want to do is cry. So I chose not to talk about them because it hurts so deeply. I didn’t think it would really matter.”
I wanted to reach out to him in my sleep to say I understood about secrets. I understood that there were things that no man or woman ever wanted to talk about. How could we? We had all faced one of the worse events our kind could endure. The end of our world, yet we were also facing something that was very exciting – the beginning of a new civilization, the establishment of a new humanity.
Was I not a living example of what the new existence was going to be like? A partner of the pixies, one of the sisters, sworn to protect them, and to protect the people who wanted the change to continue with goodness and decency. (I was going to write promos for the firefly pixies, I swear.)
Because I felt that way so strongly, I hadn’t waited for Gideon and the others to discuss options about Elan in excruciatingly slow details. Elan’s providence wouldn’t wait for people to make long-winded decisions, no matter if they were right or wrong.
Despite Zach’s need to keep the information about his family undisclosed, he was not a bad person. Every moment I had spent with him had convinced me of that integral facet of his personality. He felt the agonized hurt as much as any of us did, and somehow he had found something to care about. He was afraid to lose it just as I was afraid to take chances.
“Zach,” I called, and my voice was as sincere as I felt. “I’ll come back.”
And I swear, in the dream, the conscious Zach with his tormented expression heard me.