by K. Makansi
“Good,” Eli says. “Pack up. We leave in ten.” Everyone starts to pull themselves to their feet but Eli, who hasn’t moved from his spot. “Firestone, you stay.”
Within minutes, the place looks as desolate as it did on the night we arrived—and more, because we’ve cleaned out all the food stores. We’ve been half-settled this whole time, prepared to leave with little warning. All our bags are mostly packed, ready to move. When I haul my pack outside, Firestone and Eli are still sitting huddled together, poring over my plasma, which has some decent maps of the area and the Resistance bases scattered around the Wilds. Finally, when everyone’s ready to go, Eli stands and announces the plan.
“My group is going directly to Normandy. It’s about one hundred and fifty kilometers, almost due north, so it should take between five to eight days, depending on the weather and how much ground we cover per day. Firestone’s group is taking a more roundabout way. They’re going to stop in at Waterloo, an outpost about a hundred kilometers northeast, and it’s another sixty or so to get to Normandy.”
“What if Normandy isn’t safe?” Kenzie asks. “How will we find you if you can’t stay there?”
I feel Eli tense. He meets Firestone’s eyes and then looks around the group.
“If Normandy isn’t safe, we’ll head back toward Waterloo. If Waterloo isn’t safe, you’ll continue on to Normandy. If neither is safe, we move to plan B and try to make our way on to the next closest known base. Each team has the encrypted coordinates of all the bases, so we’ll find each other eventually.” He pauses, and then looks back at Kenzie. “We have to operate on that assumption. We’ll reconnect. We have to believe that.”
There’s a dull silence for several moments. I find myself watching Vale’s mannerisms, the way he casts his eyes around on the ground as though he’s looking for something. The way he meets my eyes for only a half-second and stands straighter when he does, as though he has something to prove.
“So that’s the plan,” Eli says. “Good luck, everyone.” He pulls Firestone in for a bear hug and thumps him on the back as if trying to dislodge something from his throat. Firestone laughs and coughs and pushes him away. We exchange fraught farewells, all of us aware there’s a distinct possibility this is the last time we’ll see each other. I hug Firestone and Kenzie, and cling to Jahnu a little too tightly before I let them all go.
I turn to Vale. I know I should say something, but my mind draws a blank.
“Be safe,” he whispers, for my ears only.
Soren comes up beside me and points his knife at Vale’s throat. “Don’t fuck this up, Vale.”
Vale’s jaw clenches and his shoulders tense, but he doesn’t respond. Soren, apparently satisfied he’s had the last word, shoulders his pack and stalks off.
I keep my eyes on Vale until the moment I turn to follow the others. My hand, tucked into my jacket pocket, clutches my grandfather’s compass, the heirloom Vale returned to me not a month ago. A compass is more than a navigational tool, my grandfather Kanaan told Tai and I all those years ago. It represents the search for truth. It’s a symbol of finding true north.
What’s your truth, Vale?
Lying flat on my back, I watch the treetops quiver as birds alight and flit off, squirrels jump from branch to branch, and the wind teases bare branches, making them sway and bend like they’re dancing to a song only they can hear. It’s almost as if the trees themselves are waking from an evening’s rest. They probably got more sleep than I did. Curling up between the gnarled roots of an old hemlock, pinned between Eli on one side and Soren on the other, isn’t the best way to get a solid eight hours. Like usual, I woke early and wandered a few meters off to find a solitary place to await the dawn.
Today is our seventh day on the trail. The days pass in an empty blur, a haze of shivering cold nights and unseasonable warmth during the day. We sweat in the sun, soak our clothes through, and then freeze at night. Three days ago it rained: cold, sharp, ugly droplets, and, by the harvest, that was miserable. We froze, all of us huddled together in the same tent, trying desperately to recover the body heat lost during the day. But the rest of the journey has been uneventful. We watch for drones in the sky, but there are none, and Eli’s drone detector never lights up.
Breathe in, breathe out. I close my eyes and let dawn’s crisp pink light wash over me. One more step forward, and another, and another, and then we’ll be there. Normandy draws closer every day. Dry clothes. Warmth. Beds. Food we didn’t have to kill, skin, and cook over a meager fire. And a shower. A shower!
The breathing exercises were Soren’s idea. He says they helped him after his own parents were, well, he won’t really say what exactly happened to them. He doesn’t even know the full extent of it. But he encouraged me to start meditating after the attack on Thermopylae. Soft as the lilting wind, he was the quietest I’d ever heard him when we first sat together and practiced. I replay his words in my mind now: Imagine that each thought is a little messenger bird carrying a slip of paper. Open the thought, examine it, accept it, and then tear it up. Watch the pieces of your thought disappear in the wind. Exhale, watch the bird fly away on the wind. Feel yourself become lighter. Let your breath center and ground you. Release. Breathe.
It helps. A little.
Every night has been the same since the attack that drove us from our base. The nightmares. My mother’s face, pale like the flesh of a crisp apple, her stillness, the exhale that never came. I thought I’d never get over Tai’s death. And now my mom’s gone, too. I am running on empty. I am empty.
After so many nights of feeling as cavernous as the black, starlit universe around me, the sleeplessness began to take hold of me. So I started the breathing exercises.
What helps the most, though, is watching the bruised, deep blue and purple sky fade into lilac, fierce orange, and rose pink. It reminds me that behind every black night is a rising sun, behind every cold hurt is a fiery healing, a new beginning. That thought keeps me going, even when Tai’s face swims in front of me. Even when my mother’s eyes close, over and over again, behind my own eyelids.
“Remy?” Eli’s voice calls. I open my eyes, the dawn blooming full and welcoming. “You okay, Little Bird?”
Still hazy with sleep, he stares down at me through bleary eyes. Weeks ago, Eli would have had a conniption when he woke up and found me missing. But I’ve made it such a habit that it doesn’t bother him anymore.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t sleep these days, either,” he says, sitting down next to me and laying back, his hands behind his head. “There’s too much in my head.”
“Strange,” I say, forcing a smile. “It feels like mine is too empty.”
“Empty?” He turns to look at me. “After everything that’s happened?”
I shrug.
“I guess it’s not that my head is empty, but that I am. I can’t figure out where I’m going, what I’m doing. All I want is to make them suffer.”
There’s a silence. I don’t have to say who them is. Eli knows. With anyone else, the silence might be awkward. But with Eli, it’s just calm. There’s never any judgment.
“We share that goal, Little Bird. But it’s not enough to build a life.”
“I don’t need a life,” I bite back. “I need revenge.”
Eli is quiet. When he speaks, his voice is low and calm, but there’s an intensity to it I haven’t heard in a long time.
“You know better than that. I know you do. You might not be able to see beyond that horizon, yet, and I don’t blame you. But you’ll walk that path and crest that mountain and you’ll find yourself wondering what’s on the other side.”
I nod. “One day, maybe. Not today.”
“Maybe not. Maybe today, we just find Normandy, get some real food and half-decent beds. Let’s go. We’re almost there.”
Eli stands and offers me a hand. I let him pull me up. Together we walk a little ways back to where we’d pitched our tents for the night. Soren, his blond hair s
ticking up in every direction, is boiling some water for oatmeal and tea, and Bear and Miah are packing up our gear. We’re silent as we go through the now-familiar ritual, the packing, cleaning, and cooking.
“Gotta get moving,” Soren mutters eventually, betraying our shared reluctance to begin yet another long day of walking. As much as I don’t want to walk twenty kilometers today, I’m anxious to reach Normandy. We’re going a bit slower than we’d like because of Miah, but we’re still making good time. We’ve done a little over thirty kilometers a day, by my estimates, which should put us into Normandy tonight, after five days on the trail.
“We should be there before dark,” Eli says, pausing as we crowd around the plasma examining the map of the surrounding woods that the Resistance had hacked from the Sector a few years back. Because my plasma can recharge on sunlight, we’ve been able to use the most recently downloaded terrain map of the region, and, while I’m sure it’s not as detailed as the latest Sector version, it has reasonable zoom capacity and an exceptional one meter raster size.
“It looks like we’ve got a river to cross.”
“I could certainly use a rinse. I’ve almost definitely never smelled worse.” Miah mutters. Soren laughs; he’s been noticeably happier since Miah arrived from Okaria. When he turns his gaze on me, the flash of heat takes me by surprise, and I remember our time together on The Zephyr, journeying downriver in our escape from the Sector. The time I almost lost myself in my hunger for him, for closeness, warmth.
I take the plasma from Eli’s hands and examine it more closely. “We should head south for about five miles, and then cut through this old highway to the west. The dominant tree species will shift, and we’ll know to turn toward the river. Then we can bypass the rapids and cross at the narrowest point. Right here. We’ll be closer to Normandy anyway because then we can follow this old roadway here,” I use my fingers to zoom in on the map, “straight to the base.”
“Great. Let’s go.” Eli stands abruptly. Without another word he shoulders his pack and starts down the trail.
“Eli,” I call to him. “Not that way. This way.” I point down a different path, a sharper cut to the East.
He stares at me for a moment, his eyes narrow in concentration. But then he relaxes, his face settling into a grin, and he laughs at himself.
“Right. I knew that.”
I shake my head. “It’s a good thing you made me your navigator.”
Eli winks at me as he walks by. “Birds are the best navigators,” he says. “Especially if you navigate us to a river so we won’t have to smell those oafs anymore.”
I lean in, wrinkling my nose and fan the air.
“Better not exclude yourself.”
Eli chuckles, cinches his pack tighter, and we set off.
After several hours, Soren, Eli, Bear and I stop for a few minutes to rest and allow Miah to catch up to us. We haven’t seen him in about twenty minutes. He always falls behind—he’s had trouble keeping up with us since the beginning. Back at the safe house, it made sense. He was going through withdrawal. Anyone who’s been raised on Sector MealPaks will get sick if they’re suddenly taken away. It’s a rite of passage for Resistance members. A cleanse. As the body adjusts to the new, untreated food, it experiences sudden withdrawal from myriad medicines, targeted cellular enhancers, antioxidant supplements, phytochemicals and who-knows-what-else. Fever, vomiting, inflammation, exhaustion, muddled thinking: any and all are possible. Everyone goes through it differently. With Miah, it seemed like it was everything at once. It was brutal. The strangest thing was that Vale was fine. No withdrawal, nothing. Not even forgetfulness, mild confusion, or dizziness, the most common symptoms of all. We pestered him about it enough, no one more than Miah, but Vale insisted he had no answers.
Even now, weeks later, Miah still struggles. As an engineer in the Sector, he never received the same type of physical training as the rest of us. As members of the Resistance, we’ve been training more or less every day for almost three years. As a soldier, Vale’s physical training, sleep, and diet regimen would have been optimized to create the perfect leader for the Okarian Sector’s Seed Bank Protection Project—intelligent, sharp, creative, not to mention in peak physical condition. A formidable foe. Even Bear is in excellent shape from all the physical labor on the Farms. But Miah didn’t go through any of that. Although Eli is adamant we stick together, he often walks too fast for Miah to keep up, so we end up stopping to wait for him. We get to rest, but not Miah. As soon as he catches up, Eli’s ready to go again.
Minutes tick by, but Miah doesn’t show. As it becomes more and more clear that Miah’s far behind, I take off my boots. My feet feel like they’ve been pounded by hammers. But the panic buds inside me as I imagine the worst. What if he collapsed or wandered off the trail? Or worse, was captured, killed?
“I’m going back.” I say quickly, tying up the laces on my boots and standing up.
“No, I’ll go,” Soren says at once, looking at me, but his words are quicker than his feet. He makes no move to stand. “I’m sure he’s fine. Can’t be too far behind.”
“Why hasn’t he shown, then? We’ve been waiting fifteen minutes.”
“Remy’s right,” Eli says. “We can’t afford to lose someone.”
So we stand, reluctantly, and turn back the way we came. As we walk, Eli uses our signal, the horned owl’s call, and we all strain our ears for a response.
“Wait. I think I hear him. That way, off-trail.” Soren says, pointing through the woods at a side path. Eli makes the call again and we all stand still, waiting for the response. When it comes, I heave a sigh of relief. We were stupid, losing track of him. Any one of us could have been in his place. These woods aren’t exactly welcoming. He must have mistaken this path for the main one. We push our way through the branches, bushes, and trees, making the owl’s call again and waiting for Miah’s echo, louder now. He’s close.
We find him lying on his back, staring up at the clouds, looking pale even as his silken black, quite hefty beard threatens to overtake his face. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and offers us a strange smile.
“Hello.”
“What are you doing,” Eli says. It’s more a statement than a question.
“I hallucinated.”
“You what?” Soren stares down at his friend.
“I think I’m dehydrated. I don’t think this wild food is good for me. I took a positively explosive shit earlier.” He looks up at me with an embarrassed smile. “Sorry to be so descriptive, but anyway, now I’m out of water.” He holds up his empty water bottle and shrugs, resigned to his fate. “I thought I heard a waterfall, and I saw this beautiful albino fawn who looked just like Moriana, except for it being a fawn and all, and albino, and I followed her here because she told me to. Then she disappeared and I realized I was going crazy, and that I was out of water, so I lay down. Then I realized I was lost. I mean, where the hell are we, anyway?”
After all that, Miah’s face cracks and he starts laughing like it’s the last time he’s ever going to laugh. Desperate, awful; a pouring out of giggles, hee-haws, and uncontrolled hiccups culminating in a crying cough that leaves tears streaking down his cheeks and disappearing into his beard. Bear and I exchange worried glances.
“Well, shit.” Soren joins him on the ground. I unscrew the cap to my mostly-full water bottle and offer it to Miah. He nods his head in thanks and tips his head back, draining half the bottle in a few gulps.
“Ok,” I say, “We’re about two miles to the river. We were some fifteen minutes from the crossroads when we stopped, so that’s another half-hour from here, and another forty or so minutes after that if we slow our pace. I think that’s the nearest water source.”
“Let’s look at the map again.” Eli pulls may plasma from my pack, and we both peer at it. “Maybe there’s a stream or spring or something closer. Miah,” he looks down at him, “don’t drink it all at once. That can make you sick, too. The rest of us need to rati
on our water so it lasts until we get to the river. Let’s make sure this idiot doesn’t die out here, okay?”
We’re lucky we’re so close to Normandy, I think, as we plow on. The sun rises to its noon height then fades, snuffed out as the air stiffens and shivery grey clouds like sinister wisps of smoke sidle in. Bad weather. My stomach growls. I’m thirsty. We tell Miah funny stories about Rhinehouse, about Eli’s antics at base, our reconnaissance missions, and anything we can think of to keep ourselves entertained. He grunts and half-laughs and keeps his head down as if watching every footfall was a requirement to propel himself forward. At half-past noon, we reach the river, though the sun has completely dissolved into the mist and the temperature has begun to drop. After the river, thankfully, the terrain won’t be too rough, the elevation change is minimal, and we’ll have the vague path of an old world highway to guide us.
I fill all our bottles and treat them with the probiotic UV filter. Eli and Soren prepare a light lunch of leftover fruit and meat from a trap Bear set yesterday evening. It’s far less than what we should eat, but it will have to do. I attempt to scrub the dirt off my face and rinse my hands and arms with the cold water. Predictably, Miah’s mood lightens soon after he eats.
We set out again on our slow, meandering way, but Miah disappears again into the woods not twenty minutes after our meal and when he returns, it’s clear he’s every bit as ill as he was earlier.
“Damn,” he shakes his head and whispers when he walks back our way. I stick out my tongue in disgust.
“Anyone else hear thunder?” Soren asks, casting his eyes skyward, a sly glint in his eyes.
“Fuck you,” Miah returns.
It’s well into evening by the time we make it to Normandy, and we’re all just as filthy as we were before the river, and twice as hungry. But Miah especially is a pallid, glassy-eyed mess. He strongly resembles an oversized dying woodland creature. An old grizzly, maybe, that came out of hibernation too soon.