by Lee Winter
“I do. But that’s too easy. Come on, we’re all tired. We all think there’s gotta be more to life than the daily grind. But you just gave up on life. You! Who’s so strong. What’s the real reason? I don’t buy that you’re just tired of it all.”
Nyah joined Lena in leaning against the rock wall. She held Lena’s gaze. “I warned you that you wouldn’t want to know the truth. I meant it.”
Lena didn’t flinch. “Try me. I’m so done with all the tagshart right now, including my own. I’m sick of the lies I tell and the lies the world tells me. I think, right now, I have never wanted anything more than hearing the whole truth. So, will you share it? Your truth?”
Nyah searched her face. Finally, she nodded. “Let’s go back to the fire.”
CHAPTER 9
Nyah placed a plate of food in front of Lena. “You should probably eat first,” she said.
Lena wondered what could possibly be so bad that Nyah assumed she’d lose her appetite after hearing it. She didn’t ask. Instead, she picked up a fork. The risotto was delicious, but Lena ate it quickly, anxious to get to the point. They didn’t speak, and Lena felt a heaviness behind Nyah’s solemn eyes watching her.
Pushing away the now empty plate, Lena looked up. “I’m ready.”
“I wish I had been.” Nyah brushed her thigh with her hand, a gesture that looked almost nervous. Lena felt a dusting of fear spider along her nerves at the sight.
“When I first arrived on this world,” Nyah began, “I knew nothing of a people so close to their primal emotions as your people are. On my planet any feuds tended to revolve around science and be intellectual in nature. Never things such as gender or skin color or who we love.”
“We can be petty at times,” Lena said uncomfortably.
“No, it’s not petty,” Nyah said darkly. “It’s deadly. The way your world treats differences as a threat is chilling.”
Not everyone does that, Lena wanted to protest. But taking one look at Nyah’s haunted, dark features, she didn’t speak.
“I had only been on your world a few years the first time I saw it,” Nyah continued. “I came across a man with wild black hair, skin darker than mine, and terrified eyes. He looked right at me, right into me. He couldn’t talk he was so frightened. He’d spoken to a young, white girl, asked her her name, and the townsmen hadn’t liked it and claimed he was up to much worse. They were tying the noose when I arrived. Forty of them. Forty grown men, against one young man.”
“A lynch mob?” Lena felt ill. “What did you do?”
“They were flung up to the top of the tree they were planning to use. It was a very high tree, so it terrified them all.”
Nyah stared into the fire. “But I could hear their thoughts. The way they regarded their victim. The disgusting things they thought about me. It was a level of hatred and revulsion I had never experienced in my life. I was unprepared for it. The echo of what I heard that day followed me for years.” She rubbed her temple. “Fear and loathing filled my brain. I had nightmares for months.”
“Did the police do anything when you reported them?”
A hollow snort sounded. “I didn’t need to report them. The sheriff was among those clinging to the tree, trembling, and screaming for vengeance.”
“Hell. I’m sorry,” Lena said sincerely.
“Why? You didn’t do it. Nor did you light a garment factory on fire in South America. I saved twenty-four impoverished workers that day. Fifty-eight more died when the ceiling collapsed because I couldn’t get to them in time. The best part was how the newspapers blamed me for spreading the fire due to my ‘excessive flying speed.’ They didn’t want to say that the prominent businessman who ran the factory had been cutting costs on safety. The asbestos from the ceilings got in my lungs. I usually heal rapidly. Not from that, though. That took months.”
“I’m...that’s awful.”
Nyah studied her hands, knotted tightly in her lap. “That was nothing. It’s not the fire that haunts me. I heard their screams. The dying workers lived inside my head. I heard their final thoughts. Can you imagine what that’s like? To feel all their lost dreams, lives wasted, regrets for children they’d never see grow up, loved ones they hadn’t said ‘I love you’ to before they left for work that day. After that I never wanted to go near a fire again.”
Lena couldn’t imagine something so horrible.
“I see inside people’s souls, Lena,” Nyah continued. “I see what no one ever should; what only the gods they believe in should.”
“Is that why you quit?”
“No. But time and again, after decades of seeing lives cheapened and injury deliberately inflicted, I asked myself, why should I be a slave to those who don’t value life or each other?”
Lena’s stomach sank at the brittle way she said it. “Is that really how you see us? All of us?”
“What I see is a species that judges me for factors beyond my control and yet is surprisingly obtuse in facing its own malfunctions. Do you know that sometimes I hear people wishing I wasn’t touching them, or wanting to debase me in disgusting, perverted ways, at the very moment I’m saving their damned lives? That sort of thing ate away at me.”
“Some of us are stupid, violent, and cruel,” Lena said tightly, hands curling into defensive fists, “but what about the innocents? Surely they’re worth it?”
Nyah ran her hands over her scalp, pausing at her eyes, drilling the heels of her hands into them as though wishing an image could be ripped from them. “These innocents you speak of—to hear their thoughts is torture of another kind. Little ones crying for their parent or a favorite teddy bear or pet. Broken hearts, crying for the dead. The sick grieving their lost vitality. The frail and elderly their youth. I hear their voices in my mind, laid over and over, like sad, endless whispers. They rustle around my head like fall leaves.”
Lena’s hands uncurled. “Sorry” seemed so inadequate, but she said it anyway, stumbling over it, the word sticking awkwardly in her throat. There needed to be a bigger word.
Nyah studied her, eyes unreadable. “What are you sorry for though? Do you even know?”
“I’m sorry for all the ways we’ve failed you as a people.”
“You think this is about me?” Nyah asked, sounding appalled. “How self-absorbed do you think I am? Your people haven’t just failed me. You have failed yourselves and your planet.” Nyah stood abruptly. “Come with me.”
“Where to?”
“I’ll show you exactly why I have no time for your people anymore.”
She gestured for Lena to stand. Lena did so uneasily.
“But the storm? Is it safe?”
“No, it’s not safe,” Nyah said, biting off the end of the word. She began striding toward the cave’s front entrance. “But your education is necessary. The cyclone’s shifted west now. And we’re going to head east.”
“But where?” Lena repeated and scrambled after her.
Nyah ignored the question. They reached outside and Lena was almost ripped from the ledge by the gale. Nyah quickly clamped a hand on her bicep and pulled her firmly against her torso. “Ready?”
“No.” Lena’s heart began to thump in a mix of fear and adrenaline.
Nyah said grimly, “Good answer.”
And then they were airborne.
“Have you ever been to hell?” Lena remembered she’d been asked that question once. By a social worker, years ago, when she was a teenager. The question had stuck. As had her answer. “Don’t be stupid. Hell isn’t real.”
She was wrong. So utterly wrong.
Lena yanked her shirt up at the collar over her mouth to stop from gagging. Her eyes were watering, and her hair and skin now reeked of acidic chemicals.
Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Nyah had called this place. It had been their fourth stop on what Lena was starting to think of as a tour of hell.
In the distance was a giant, crouching factory complex that spanned as far as the eye could see—a single Chinese, city-siz
ed corporation swallowing the entire 180-degree horizon. Row upon row of cooling towers and discharge chimneys clawed at the bleak skies, belching out grey and white smoke, like some dystopian nightmare.
But that was nothing compared to what was spread out below them—a lake oozing with thick, black sludge.
“What is it?” Lena asked, barely moving her lips beneath her shirt.
“A tailings pond. It contains all sorts of toxic chemicals, acids, and radioactive elements. The price paid for the next phone or gadget upgrade. This used to be pristine farmland.”
The smell scratched at her throat, making Lena gag. “I never buy any of that crap,” she muttered.
“Well, that makes it all okay then,” Nyah said dryly.
“I didn’t do this,” Lena said, desperate to get her to understand.
Nyah glanced at her as though she was missing some obvious point. Lena gritted her teeth in annoyance.
“I am showing you what matters to your world. What humanity values most.”
“This isn’t us. That’s crap. This isn’t what we value most.”
“No?” The tone was faintly mocking. Without another word Lena was pulled tightly into Nyah’s chest and catapulted skyward.
They touched down in the middle of a rundown city street lined with cardboard boxes. It smelled of sweat, dirt, cigarettes, and urine. She recognized slogans and names on the boxes. They were in America.
“Now we’re at the epicenter,” Nyah said, “although others might disagree.”
“Epicenter of what?”
“There used to be a factory around here that had jobs for thousands before they were offshored. That simple act, a flourish of a pen on a piece of paper, ripped the heart out of the whole city.”
Nyah’s eyes scanned the streets, blinking against a fierce wind. “The workers who stayed failed to find new work and the economy died. Now a second generation has been born into poverty, never knowing a family member with a job. Some were born alcohol or drug addicted. Some sell their bodies for food or drugs. Gangs sprung up. You stand here for long enough, and you feel it. Waves of it. We’re at the epicenter of the absence of hope. I find that it spreads from here like a spiderweb, not just from where we stand, into the surrounding streets, but from one generation to the next. This, for me, is the exact beating heart of human despair. I feel their worthlessness like a clammy hand pressing at my throat. No one here has hope. No one has dreams. They’re all shells of what they once were, ghosts of what they could have been.”
A chill wind whipped around, flipping up the cardboard flaps revealing that the boxes weren’t empty. People lived here. Lena saw feet, like rows and rows of dirty matchsticks. She saw smaller feet, too tiny to belong to adults, in the boxes as well.
Lena rammed her fists in her pockets feeling the bleakness settle around her like a cloak, turning over Nyah’s words. So many feet. So many broken dreams.
“So,” Nyah said, “tell me again what your world values most?”
Lena couldn’t look at her. “Not this,” she muttered. “We don’t want this.”
“Really? And yet, here it is.”
Lena bit her lip.
Nyah suddenly stiffened beside her.
“What is it?” Lena asked.
“A car just crashed a street away,” she said, squinting, as though trying to work out exactly where. “Someone’s…trapped. She’s so afraid.”
Lena wondered what Nyah would do. Didn’t she say she was retired?
Nyah exhaled heavily, resignation crossing her features. “Well,” she said dryly, “duty calls.” She glanced at Lena. “I can’t bring you along. It’d raise too many questions.”
“I know. Go. I’ll find you.”
Lena skidded around the corner, keeping an eye skyward to see where Nyah was heading. When the guardian angled back toward the ground, Lena put her head down and sprinted. She emerged onto a street empty of cars but filling with onlookers. Fifty so far and counting. Nyah was nowhere in sight.
A driver had lost control on a bend and punched into a pillar just inside a building’s parking garage entrance. Above the garage sat a multistory residential building. The demolished pillar clearly had been a support column as the cracks from where it once attached to the brickwork were spidering upwards into the apartment building. The whole structure was tearing itself apart before their eyes.
The wedged car now had the weight of a barely supported building starting to crush its roof. Beyond the cascading bricks and dust came high-pitched cries from the driver.
Lena shuddered at the frightening sounds and peered up. The building had several balconies and one, three floors up, was only hanging on by a single strut. Rubble was raining down now. A deafening crunch sounded as the whole structure shifted suddenly along the spreading crack, dropping a few inches.
The woman’s screams were more desperate, buried somewhere deep inside the mess. Lena could only see the square taillights of the car now. Her brows knitted together. Where on earth was Nyah?
Dust rose, more bricks fell, and the crowd surrounding the area thickened. The building stuttered again, offering a low moan like a pained old man, and the shrieks from the car became more terrified. Suddenly the car lurched back a few feet toward the road, screeching as its roof scraped along the garage’s ceiling that pinned it. Part of the brown trunk could now be seen.
Its movement was not enough to free it. Hundreds more bricks showered from the higher levels. A window creaked opened on the top floor. A shadow passed by it.
The driver’s cries were much louder and the crowd began to shout assurances.
“Ambulance is on its way.”
“Police called.”
“Hang in there!”
“Don’t move.”
“Are you hurt?”
The car lurched again, its back doors now outside, and this time, through the debris, Nyah could be seen standing beyond it, almost obscured. Lena could see her arms outstretched. Her mouth was a line of grim concentration, her brows pulled into a fierce frown, as she propelled the car out of its prison with the sweep of one arm, while pushing back the weight of the half dozen floors above her with her other straining arm.
The crowd screamed its recognition.
“A GUARDIAN!”
“HOLY SHIT, LOOK WHO IT IS!”
“I NEED MY CAMERA.”
“SHATTTTTERGIRL!”
Nyah’s eyes snapped shut and she grimaced.
Lena stared at the incredible sight of one woman literally holding back the world from crushing her—not to mention a mangled car in front of her.
As the crowd grew louder, their thoughts, emotions, fear, and excitement mounting, literally closing in on her, Nyah’s shut eyes tightened.
“BE QUIET!” Lena shouted. “You have to let her concentrate!”
They ignored her, and some began to press forward.
“Move back!” Lena called out again. “Look at the building! It’s cracking in half!”
“Shuddup,” one man hissed, holding out his battered phone. “And move over, you’re blocking my shot.”
“You wanna die trying to get that?” Lena glared at him. “Cos this building’s coming down the moment she gets that car out. Look at it, it’s barely holding together as it is. She’s the only reason it’s not rubble now.”
Trembles and tremors were rocking the building on its foundation each time the car inched back toward the street. Lena’s gaze flicked back to the open window a few levels up. A small girl’s head popped up.
“Oh hell,” Lena groaned. “No.”
The child crawled over the window ledge, dropping onto the now drunkenly swinging, barely attached balcony. There she sat, uncertain what to do next, one small fat fist holding the strut of a thin rusty balcony rail.
The crowd saw her too, and began screaming and pointing.
“SHATTERGIRL! THERE’S A CHILD!”
Nyah’s head whipped around toward the crowd in confusion, but there was no way she
could see anyone above her from inside her crumbling tomb. Chunks of concrete suddenly rained down on her as her attention shifted, and her arm waved abruptly to deflect them away.
The car moved another foot, now two-thirds of the way out, its roof almost completely shredded. The strain of manipulating it while holding back the building seemed immense. Lena could see the extent of Nyah’s effort in the snarl of her now-bared lips and the grimace on her face.
A dozen people had rushed over to the balcony, shouting to the girl, some holding out their arms. They were well inside the footprint of where the building would crash when it finally lost cohesion.
“GET BACK!” Lena shouted. “IT’S NOT SAFE!”
She ran over and tried pulling them back, grabbing fistfuls of shirts, jackets, blouses. A few retreated; most did not. The man filming on his phone turned to her. “Fuck off. This is my payday. It’ll make all the news feeds.”
SCREECH.
The car abruptly shot clear ten feet and safely out into the open. The entire building shuddered. It bounced the balcony with the child on it, which snapped its final strut.
The girl fell. The crowd screamed, and two men rushed toward her, arms outstretched. Lena shut her eyes, focused hard, and dropped all her mental barriers and repeated only one thought: A girl is on the balcony out front, falling.
The world went dark.
Lena opened her eyes, coughed, and sat up. A four-story building was now a grey, dusty pile of bricks and cement, wrought iron spikes from the formwork jabbing at the skies. A fire engine’s siren wailed. A woman was crying. Lena turned toward her. Oh. The woman in the car. Some bystanders had wrenched the door open and were trying to calm her down. She had a bloodied face, and looked dazed and shaky, but otherwise unharmed.
“You okay, lady?”
She looked up into the eyes of the man she’d warned to stay back. He shifted his gaze back to his phone, giving it an annoyed shake, but it was a cracked mess. So much for his big scoop. She glanced behind him and saw everyone staring at her.
“What happened?”