by Shay Savage
We both lean against the pillows, still in a sitting position, and I look at the wall straight ahead of me. Despite the relaxing, warm water of the shower, every muscle in my body feels tense. Aerin holds her book in her hands, but I’m pretty sure she’s no longer reading, just staring blankly at the pages. I wonder if we look as awkward as I feel.
“Can you put this on the dresser?” Aerin asks as she closes her book and holds it out to me.
“Sure.” I take the book and give it a gentle toss. It lands right in the center of the dresser top with a soft thud.
“Nice throw.”
“I have a few skills,” I say with a shrug.
For some reason, her face turns red, and she looks toward the wall for a moment. I consider asking her about it but decide against it. I go with a more benign question instead.
“Do you read a lot?”
“Yes,” Aerin says. “Well, I used to anyway. I don’t get much of a chance anymore.”
“It’s not like you can hang out on the street with a book in your hand.”
“No, I can’t do that.” She smiles and shakes her head a bit, tossing her slightly damp hair around so it falls against her shoulders.
“People would talk.”
“I’m not sure what they would do.”
“You haven’t really spent much time with Naughts, have you?” I turn my head and study her closely, trying to resist the urge to reach out and feel her hair. It looks so soft.
“I try to keep my distance,” she says.
“Why?”
“A variety of reasons.” She looks over at me. “You touched on the main one; I can’t pass as one of them.”
“Yeah, your accent is noticeable, and you don’t know what not to say.”
“I don’t think others would pick up on my book and movie references.”
“Probably not, but they would still think it sounds strange. The valley people don’t trust outsiders in general, and it sets you even farther apart.”
“Why don’t they trust outsiders?”
“Because they’re uneducated,” I say, “not stupid. Thaves periodically try to infiltrate the community, looking to expand into the valley and push us out of our land. Naughts know about the East and what’s available there, but they also know people who try to move east never make it. At best, they get turned away at the gates of the capital.”
“Most of them never make it that far.”
“No, they don’t. They die along the way, or they disappear after they arrive.”
“How long have you lived among them?” Aerin asks.
“I guess it’s been five or six years.” I glance over at her. “When was I reported dead?”
“2110 or 2111. Not sure exactly.”
“I was still in Washington then.” I laugh humorlessly.
“What happened to you?” she asks quietly.
“My mouth got too big for my father’s tastes.”
I don’t say any more on the subject, and she doesn’t press for information. I’m grateful for that, but I need a quick change of topic before she starts thinking about it too much. I’m trying to come up with a new subject, but Aerin speaks first.
“So, uh, what’s with the tattoos?”
“Oh!” I look down at my own chest as if I’d forgotten they were there. Other than Ava, very few people ever see me without a shirt in the cool climate, and I’m not used to anyone noticing my tats. “Rebellious teen years, I guess.”
“I like the music notes,” Aerin says. “Do they mean anything special?”
I pause for a long moment, trying to choose the right words.
“Each note represents someone in my early life,” I finally say. “The music scale is an infinity symbol because I always thought music and family were forever. I’ve always loved music. I thought when I first got here that I’d become a minstrel or something like that, you know? Music lifts the soul and all, and the Naughts could use a little soul lifting.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because the body has to eat,” I tell her, “and there were other, more important things they needed. Finding items and food became more important than stealing a guitar to play them a tune.”
“Six notes,” Aerin says as she looks a little closer. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“One older sister, yes.” I point to each of the notes in turn. “Me, my mother, father, and sister. The connected notes are for my grandparents”
“And the roses?”
“The roses are for my mom.” I shrug as I offer her a half smile. “She had a garden when I was a kid and loved to grow roses. When they were in bloom, she always brought one in the house to put on the table, but she was afraid I’d get hurt by the thorns, so she’d cut them off before she brought a rose inside. That’s why the roses don’t have any thorns.”
“Where are your mom and sister now?”
“The virus killed my sister when I was five.” I take in a slow breath, centering myself. “That was before Dad was president.”
“So, he couldn’t get her help.”
“No, he couldn’t. I’m sure he blamed himself for her death, which is why he became so obsessed with the general order of the capital. He was always into politics, but he went a little off the deep end after that. Then my mother died from the virus just two years later.”
I clench my teeth and close my eyes for a moment. If I say anything else, it will open up the floodgates, and who knows what I might end up saying to her. If I talk about how it all started, I’ll eventually get to how it ended, and I don’t want to go there.
“I’m sorry”—Aerin touches my arm briefly, electrifying my skin—“about your mom, I mean.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.” I look over at her and wait to see if she will offer any information about her father, but she says nothing of the sort.
“We really should get some sleep.” She turns away and slides down, covering herself up with the blanket. “I want to make as much progress tomorrow as possible.”
“Yeah, sure.” I lie down as well and try to ignore the warmth radiating from her body. Without the sound of our talking, my other senses are heightened. The smell of her hair engulfs me, and I decide it’s best to roll over with my back to her.
Instead of helping, rolling over untucks the blanket from around me and makes her warmth far more noticeable. I close my eyes and try to clear my mind, but I still see images of her in her tank top and shorts, lying so close to me and looking all soft and warm and utterly desirable.
I lie perfectly still and contemplate why she is having such an effect on me. It’s not her looks; I’ve been around plenty of beautiful women. Maybe it’s because I’m not hiding from her. She already knows who I really am, and her knowledge isn’t a threat like it was when Keller started his verbal assault on me from his soapbox. She can’t tell anyone without exposing herself, which leaves me to speak freely with her.
She’s a reminder of the good moments of the culture I left behind when I fled the capital, and the nostalgic feeling increases my desire and willingness to talk to her about long forgotten pastimes. Movies, books, and music have been stripped from my life, and I miss those things.
Her presence and this little adventure into the mountainside have also pushed my dispatching of Mack into the back of my mind. I’m grateful for the reprieve though I wonder how long it will last. I’ve killed before, and the deed always comes back to haunt my mind and disturb my sleep, regardless of how deserved the killing may have been.
Aerin turns over to lie on her side with her back near mine and adjusts the blankets. The pocket of air between us is warmed by our combined body heat, and though I’m very aware of it, at least we aren’t actually touching. I keep my eyes closed and steady my breathing.
Despite all the insanity of the evening, I’m exhausted and fall asleep relatively quickly.
“Talen! Behind you!” Byron’s voice echoed off the brick buildings.
I spun around
, knife gripped securely in my hand. I only barely registered the figure closing in on me before I had to attack. I pivoted, flipped my right-handed knife into chambered position, and struck with both knives at once without a thought. The figure dropped, blood covered my hands, and my mind blanked as the body fell to the ground at my feet, eyes staring forward.
I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t move. I’d killed him, and I couldn’t take it back.
I heard a loud blast and then a shout from my companion. I turned around just in time to see him drop to his knees.
“Go, Talen!” he screamed. “Run!”
Bullets whizzed around me as I sprinted around the corner and down the alley. I ran as fast as I could, fighting against a deep cramp in my side and my thigh, until I couldn’t run any more. I had no idea where I was or if I was still being followed. The night grew dark and cold as I hid myself behind plastic rubble and tried to catch my breath.
Despite all the lessons with the knives, Byron was the killer, not me. He already had blood on his hands and had no qualms about taking a life. I wasn’t supposed to have to do such a thing. I told him time and time again, and he agreed. He would do whatever killing was necessary for us to escape.
“This isn’t me,” I whispered to myself as those blank, dead eyes filled my head, and tears flowed down my face. “This isn’t me. This isn’t me.”
The image faded and was replaced with another and another. More blood, more killing. All I wanted to do was save lives, and instead, I had become a monster. I rose up, blood dripping from my daggers and screamed at the ash-filled, grey sky.
I awaken with tense muscles and a pit in my stomach.
For a moment, I don’t know where I am. I feel a warm body cradled in my arms, and my immediate thought is that I’m in Ava’s bed, but it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t smell right.
Aerin.
At some point in the night, I must have rolled over and wrapped my arms around her. My thigh is up against her hip, and my arm is wrapped around her waist. My head is pressed against the edge of her pillow, and I can feel her hair tickle my cheek.
When I open my eyes, I see her head tilted up and her eyes staring right into mine.
For a long moment, I can only look at her—frozen in place—and wonder how long we’ve been like this. I feel her body alongside mine and have to resist the urge to press up against her. Before the urge becomes too great, I snatch my arm away and roll to my back.
“Sorry,” I mutter. I feel my face flush.
“It’s all right,” she says quietly. “It’s still kind of cold in here.”
“Yeah, it is.” I push myself up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The tile floor is cold on the soles of my feet, so I hurry into the bathroom to relieve myself, put a little distance between us, and get myself together. My clothes are reasonably dry, so I put them back on and head back into the living area where Aerin is sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal.
“There isn’t any milk, of course,” she says, “but it’s not too bad on its own.”
I nod and pour some corn flakes into a bowl. I pick them out one by one and shove them into my mouth. I can feel Aerin’s eyes on me, but I don’t look up at her. I keep my gaze on the flakes in the bowl.
“You talk in your sleep, you know,” she says suddenly.
“I do?” I look up from the bowl to find her smiling.
“Yes, you do.”
“What did I say?”
“You kept repeating, ‘This isn’t me,’” she says. “Everything else was just mumbling.”
I avoid looking at her as I swallow hard, trying to remember what I had been dreaming about. The pit in my stomach is back.
“We need to get going,” Aerin says. She stands and grabs her empty bowl from the table. “Long walk ahead.”
I gather supplies from the cabinets and load them into our packs as Aerin gets dressed in the bathroom. When she returns, her hair is pulled back into a long ponytail that snakes down her back and waves back and forth when she walks. I watch her as she slips the blue diary into her pack and then looks up at me.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Ready for answers,” I reply.
We return to the main corridor and head off to the west. It takes a few moments for my eyes to fully adjust to the dim light of the flashlight, but even when they do, I still can’t see the end of the corridor.
“How far does this passage go?” I ask.
“Most of the way through the mountain,” Aerin replies. “We can follow this all the way to the western exit.”
“Fifteen miles?”
“About that.”
“Damn. How did they even build this?”
“It was here before the Great Eruption, as far as I know. Technology worked then. Communications worked. Planes flew all the way across oceans. Energy was wasted; leftover food was thrown away, and there was a strong global economy.”
“Straight out of the history books.” I have to walk a little faster to keep up with her. “People used to walk around the focal point of the quake, you know. It was a tourist destination.”
“Hypocenter.”
“What?”
“It’s called the hypocenter, not a focal point.”
“Oh. Gotcha.”
“It was a national park,” Aerin says. “Yellowstone National Park.”
“Right! I forgot the name.”
“Changes to a geyser first alerted geologists to the coming quake,” she says. “It had erupted on a regular schedule as long as they’d been paying attention to it, and it suddenly just stopped. They were just examining their findings and getting them ready to present to Congress when the whole thing blew.”
“April 1, 2029,” I say with a nod. “A lot of people thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke. Half the continent was gone within forty-eight hours.”
“The Great Eruption triggered catastrophic events all over the world. Reports were coming in from Australia and Japan before the ash clouds blocked satellite and cell communication. Solar power was useless, dams broke, tsunamis wiped out everything coastal, and here we are now.”
“Still trying to figure out where our society went nearly a hundred years later,” I say.
“As you can imagine, my geologist mother had a particular interest in the science stuff more so than the social stuff.”
“Well, my dad has a thing for politics, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I noticed.” She glances over at me though her features are barely noticeable in the dim light. “Was he always power hungry?”
“He likes control,” I reply. “His way is always the best way, and power gives him the ability to make sure everything goes his way.”
We continue along the corridor, mostly in silence. Though we stop briefly to eat and rest, our pace remains steady. We pass several more rooms and other passageways, but Aerin is determined to make time, so we don’t stop to check any of them out. I’m overwhelmed by the size of this place, and I shake my head often in wonder.