***
The guards are killing each other. The guards are killing themselves. They’re firing their weapons at the rocky dirt, at the concrete walls, at the metal roof. They blast away at Balthazar and the Great Bobina and the Little Squeaker. They perforate each other.
The courtyard is a melting pot of sound and dust and light. Gravel sprays through the air. Blood and gore mix with it. Even with their faceless smiles, the guards all won’t stop screaming.
Grady clamps his teeth together, molars against molars. He chews and grinds and chomps but the world stays out of whack. “Can we stop it?” he calls out. “Is there something we can do?” But Cassie’s face is taut, her rectangular teeth bared. Her raspberry-yellow hair whips back like a mane. “We can’t!” she yells. “We won’t! It’s s’posed to be like this!” She yanks him along with her too-pink hands, past the flailing guards, past the burning rocks, past the blazing metal sky where her once-great stories lived. She yanks Grady across the courtyard, toward a smoking hole in the wall—a hole where his secret crack used to be.
“Isn’t this—?” Grady stammers, but Cassie isn’t listening. She’s too busy clambering into the hole. Too busy pulling him through.
***
The world outside is . . . unexpected. The sky is dark. The trees are still. The pink-green buds are shriveled up like insect shells. This isn’t spring—it can’t be. Everything’s all wrong. “Where are we?” Grady yells. “What’s happening?”
Cassie releases his hand and throws her arms up in the air. “Don’t you get it?” she says. She twirls and laughs and leaps. “We’re free, Grady! Free!”
All around them, this new version of spring hums like a drill.
***
Grady doesn’t sleep. How could he? Outside, there’s no cot to lie on. No metal door to lock him in. No rocky, moon-draped ceiling. He sits straight as a beam with his eyes fixed on the dark horizon. “What about the others?” he whispers. “We weren’t the only ones.”
Cassie lies beside him on the soft, damp earth, her chest rising and falling inside her dirty clothes. “We’re far enough,” she mumbles. “They won’t find us out here.” But then her mumbles turn to slurs. Her slurs turn into vowels. Soon her eyes are locked away, like children in their cells. And though he doesn’t want them to—tries to fight it, even—soon enough, Grady’s eyelids droop shut, too.
***
Grady tumbles through space. It’s loud in space and full of rocks, full of streaks of light and heat. Cassie is with him, pulling him along, her raspberry-yellow hair blazing like a sun. Together they pass planets and giant, milk-colored stars. Around them, comets big as galaxies are drilled by screaming guards. The guards don’t have smiles anymore—now they just have holes in their heads, like curved, bottomless pits. Like imploded crescent moons. And when the drills come out, the blood doesn’t stop spraying. It doesn’t stop spraying until all of space is filled.
***
Grady wakes to the scent of smoke and the lilt of Cassie’s voice. “One fish, two fish,” she sings. “Red fish, blue fish.” Her words are barely audible, muffled by a distance filled with swishing things and rustling things and things that chirp and tweet.
And when Grady opens his eyes, it’s clear: the old spring has returned. The dancing trees, the pink-green buds, the purple bruise of sky. He and Cassie, they’re in the real outside world. “It’s true!” he cries. “Last night—it really happened!”
Somewhere beyond the trees, Cassie stops singing. For a moment, only the wind hushes through the leaves. Then her voice returns, her words thin and trotting. “Oh,” she says. “You’re up, huh? Well, come on! I made breakfast.”
***
Breakfast in the outside world is scaled and burnt. It has gills and fins and glossy eyes that watch you no matter where you sit. When Grady stares too long, Cassie says, “Relax, it’s just a fish. Easy to catch, too.” She pulls off a sizzling piece and pops it into her mouth. “Isn’t hard,” she mumbles, “’cause I know which ones’ll die first.” She points to a bend in the stream behind her and grins. Her mouth is lopsided, her cheeks puffed out. Saliva glistens on her chin.
Grady watches her eat with something fiery in his gut. Eventually he reaches out, pulls off a chunk, and plops it on his tongue. Breakfast in the outside world is hot and salty and wet. He gulps it down and stammers, “Is there more?”
***
Cassie teaches him about sprouts and nuts and wild, dew-speckled berries. Sometimes she says, “You can eat these,” and she does, just to prove it. Other times she just points and says, “Those’ll tear you up inside.” Grady stays clear of those. He may have rock-proof skin, but he’s pretty sure his insides are as soft as anyone’s.
***
A week passes before Grady asks, “What do you think happened to the guards?”
They’re wading through a hip-high stream, dunking themselves in it. Like dead leaves, their loose gray clothes hang from a scraggly tree. Cassie smooths her dripping hair behind her right ear and says, “One of the kids made ’em do it, I guess.” The water rains off her chin in shiny rivulets.
Grady bunches his face. He sweeps the stream around him into glinting crescent streaks. “But how?” he asks. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
Cassie clears her throat and says, “We’re not the only ones with powers, you know.”
***
There are other seasons in the outside world. Summers and autumns and the cloudy breaths of winters. Over time, Grady’s clothes lose their looseness. Cassie’s turn a chalky white. Grady’s hair grows out, too. Eventually he ties it behind his head with milkweed stalks. But Cassie seems to change the most—her body growing long and lean. Her body growing curves.
Nowadays, when they bathe in the stream, she turns her back to him.
***
They make love for the first time under a tree with purple leaves. It’s been over a dozen seasons since they met. The sun has bronzed Grady’s skin like torched metal. Cassie’s is creamy and dappled, like cool milk flecked with dirt. Grady runs his fingers across her ribs and smiles. It’s nice about her, the way she splotches instead of tans. Even her skin is rebellious.
It storms while they fumble and grope, while their teeth click together, while their mouths gasp. Cassie closes her eyes when Grady moves and opens them when he stops. By then the sky has cleared. The sun flares through the clouds. Rainwater drips through the leaves.
When they gather their clothes off the damp grass, Grady feels it: a wadded lump in the pocket of his pants. The horse picture. It’s still there after all this time. He watches Cassie slip into her ash-white clothes, like a bird climbing back into her egg. Maybe now she won’t laugh at him. Maybe now she’ll understand. “Wouldn’t it be exciting to see a horse,” he says, “even though they don’t exist anymore?”
Cassie shakes her head and eyes the thinning clouds. “Not really,” she says. “Everything dies for a reason.”
Grady frowns and lets go of the lump. He tugs his pants back on. Whatever that thing is inside him—the part of him that’s been falling for her for all these years—it slows down, just a little.
***
They find the man lying with his back crumpled around a boulder. His eyes are milky and glossy, just like a breakfast fish. His skin is rosy and sky-bruised. Beneath him and all around, his red cape flutters like a bloody leaf.
When they’re close enough, Cassie squats and pinches the man’s blue-white elbow. “I saw him in my dream a few nights ago,” she says. “They chased him with guns, like the ones the guards used to carry. They called him a freak.” She reaches up and unties the cape from the man’s blotted neck. “He tried to fight them off, but there were too many. Even with his speed.”
The cape comes free and Cassie swings it around her shoulders. She ties it above her collarbone and steps side to side. She pivots. She twirls. The cape whips around her l
ike a red streak of wind. “It looks good on me, don’t you think?” She smiles and shrugs. “I rather kinda like it.”
But Grady can’t stop staring at the man’s twisted face. “If you knew this would happen,” he mumbles, “why didn’t you say something?” He looks Cassie in the eyes and says, “Why didn’t we save him?”
***
Over the next few months a silence grows between them, like a plant with poisoned roots. When they walk through the fields where the berries grow, neither of them speak. The only sound comes from the tall grass rustling against their knees.
Grady searches for a way through the quiet, but this isn’t like the courtyard—out here, in the outside world, Cassie’s walls have no cracks.
***
In the sharp air of winter, under the tree with purple leaves, Grady watches Cassie smooth a wrinkle from her cape. And maybe it’s the way she always slumps against the bark—like she’s heavier than she’s ever been, though she’s never been thinner—or maybe it’s because it’s been weeks since she looked him in the eye. Whatever it is, lately it’s become a sort of pressure, an air pocket that’s always trying to push words out of him. “You don’t see it?” he says. “With your vision and my healing, think of the people we could save.”
Cassie pauses. Then she presses another wrinkle flat with her too-pink thumb. “I thought we were done talking about this.”
“Done?” Grady clamps his teeth together, but more words tumble out. “We’ve never talked about it. Every time I bring it up, you always change the subject.”
Cassie exhales, her breath pluming like a fog. “Because you know how I feel about it.”
“And you know how I feel about it,” Grady says, pointing at his chest, “but that doesn’t seem to bother you.”
Cassie sighs and shifts her weight away. Subtle. Obvious. “You don’t know death,” she says. “I do. I know that it’s s’posed to be. That’s how the world works.”
The pressure swells in Grady, pushing against his veins. “But we can change that,” he says. “That’s the whole goddamn point. We can change all of it.”
Cassie narrows her eyes and turns her face away. “The only thing I want to change,” she says, “is us.”
And just like that, the pressure vanishes, dissipating like a cloud. Grady opens his mouth, but not a word comes out.
***
They say goodbye in the fall, when the leaves are drenched in color and the wind swirls around them, warm and thick.
It’s been six years since they met, six years of fish and berries and bathing in the stream, six years of living together and slowly growing apart.
There isn’t much to say, really. Not after all this time. Not since the thing inside Grady stopped falling completely. Now it just hangs there, somewhere in the center of him, like a cold, heavy knot. But the horse picture is still there, pressing against his thigh, digging against his skin like a rock. There’s no confusion about that now—it’s clear Cassie won’t like it, clear she has no interest in the things that are meant to die. But he pulls it from his pocket, anyway, and presses it into her slender hand. “It’s a picture,” he says. “To remember me.”
Cassie glances at the crumpled wad, then clenches her fingers around it. She looks Grady in the eyes, her green irises quivering with tears, and says, “Why the hell would I want to remember you?” Then she turns and runs toward the distant cliffs, her raspberry-yellow hair streaming behind her.
Grady watches her sprint through the tall grass, her red cape whipping around her. He watches until he can’t tell it’s her anymore, until the ache inside him blazes like a solar storm, until she looks just like another leaf tumbling in the wind.
***
Grady starts to walk. Across the woods, through the streams, under the hum of wild bees, he puts one calloused foot in front of the other until the days turns to nights and back to days again, until the solar storm in his belly grows quiet and weak, until the forest opens and the dirt turns to stone and the trees harden into cylinders of metal and glass and light.
After four days of walking, Grady finds the rusted gates of a sprawling, smoking city. Above him, far up on a rocky ledge, a young man stands with his legs braced, his slender body silhouetted against the ashen sky, his baggy shirt flapping in the wind.
“Hello!” Grady yells. “Are you from the courtyard, too?”
The young man lifts an object to his head. A puff of smoke surrounds him.
Grady doesn’t even hear the bullet until it’s too late.
***
When Grady wakes he’s lying, shirtless, on a scratchy cot. His throat is dry and his eyes burn. Above him, instead of a rocky ceiling, there’s only a muddy sky and clouds the color of burnt wood. He coughs and leans out of the cot.
“He’s awake,” someone says. “Get Res,” says another. Soon there’s a swarm of people jostling around Grady. Young people. Old people. Men and women and kids. None of the kids have their heads shaved. None of their arms have bandages. All around, as far as Grady can see, there isn’t a single guard. “What is this place?” he asks.
A hand grips his shoulder, the fingers wrapped in dirty fabric, the nails caked with soil. The hand is attached to a sunburnt arm that disappears into a blue shirt. Above the shirt is the smiling face of a sweaty young man. “I’m Reslo,” the young man says. His gray eyes look too large for his narrow head. “Welcome to Ferin City.”
Something shudders through Grady, like a drill bit spinning free. This young man, there’s something familiar about him. The wide-legged stance. The oversized shirt.
This is the bastard who shot him.
***
Ferin City is full of gears that twist and churn and cough. The whole city shifts and moves, like the bones of a fish, every hour, on the hour. “This is the home of the survivors,” Reslo says. “Here, we save humanity.” The young man walks with a limp as he shows Grady around.
Everywhere Grady walks, he’s flanked by two armed men. They keep their distance from him, their eyes squinted, their fingers close to the triggers. Grady gets it right away: he isn’t a guest here. Even though Reslo smiles when he talks; even though they feed Grady milk dusted with brown sugar; even though they drape him in new clothes, the fabric smooth as a fresh stream; even when Reslo speaks on a pedestal high above the earth, his voice booming against the grinding city walls; even when Reslo points to Grady and tells the city, “The gods have given us a gift!”; even when the people raise their arms and cheer. Even after all this, Grady knows: here, he is a prisoner.
***
Ferin City has its own drills, down in the bowels of the earth. The drills are rustier than the drills of Grady’s past. They’re louder, too. Bulkier. But they bite and whine and hurt just the same. “The way you can heal,” Reslo says, “it’s just amazing. Even a bullet to the head can’t stop you.”
The men with the guns are nearby, as always, their eyes narrower than ever, their fingers tense against the triggers of their tattered weapons. And while the drill spins and the glass tubes fill, his blood brown and sloshing and sticky as mud, Grady sees that these men aren’t really men at all—they’re just guards all over again, guards with human faces.
And Reslo, with his too-big eyes and his face that never stops smiling, he leans close to Grady and says, “Man, your blood is gonna save the freaking world.”
***
They cut Grady’s hair with a knife, just like just they’re gutting a fish. Quick. Efficient. The remnants tossed away. “Now you look more like a man,” Reslo says. “Not that wild thing I saw in the scope.” But Grady looks away from the young man’s grin, down toward the heap of matted hair, down at the broken stalks of milkweed scattered through it. And something in him—some cold, knotted spot in the center of his being—loosens, just a little. He grew that hair in the outside world. He grew that hair with Cassie.
***
Reslo shows Grady the gun—the gun he shot him with. “We don’t take newcomers anymore,” he explains. He pats the gun and strokes it, like he’s petting a wild horse. “Supplies are low. Illness spreads. Got enough to worry about.” He gives Grady a wink, his parched lips thin and smirking. “So of course I had to shoot you. It’s a hard job for somebody, but that somebody is me.” He slaps his bandaged hand against Grady’s shoulder and says, “Lucky for us, you’re freaking bulletproof.” Grady meets Reslo’s smile with a forced smile of his own, but deep inside, in the place where his muscles meet his bones, something starts to burn.
***
At night, while the city clanks and grinds, Grady lies on his starchy cot and stares up at the charcoal sky. The guards take turns watching him, their eyes red-rimmed and narrow, their dirty fingers perpetually brushed against their triggers. Grady grits his teeth. He never should have come here.
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