Render

by K A Riley

  “There’s nothing left to figure out,” she sobs. Her face is a mess of dirt and tears. “They won. Whatever they are, whether they exist or not, they’ve already won. We don’t even think for ourselves anymore. We’re conditioned. We’re taught to hate everyone until there’s no one left to hate except ourselves.”

  Brohn starts to say, “Whatever you’re thinking about doing—,” but he doesn’t get to finish.

  The woman presses the barrel of the small gun to her temple and pulls the trigger. In a flash of light and an explosion of bright red blood, she pitches sideways and crumbles to the floor of the cave next to the two men.

  5

  In a rare display of raw emotion, Manthy slaps her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide with shock and horror. She points at the cluster of three dead people in the cave. “Why did she do that?”

  Brohn tells her to take it easy, but his rapid-fire breathing and the rocky rise and fall of his chest tell me he’s barely holding it together himself.

  “She sounded crazy,” Rain says. “The enemy may not be what she thinks it is, but something spooked her.”

  “More than just spooked her,” Cardyn says. “Sounds like someone put her brain in a blender and pressed ‘frappé.’”

  As usual he’s trying to sound flippant, but the quiver in his voice betrays the distress we’re all feeling. The only thing worse than being in a crazy situation is meeting someone who’s even crazier than the situation you’re in.

  Kella drops to her knees and starts to cry, which makes me start to cry. With tears of his own welling up, Cardyn takes a step toward me to try to comfort me, but I wipe my eyes and wave him off.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I tell him. “See to Kella.”

  Cardyn pauses but seems to realize that Kella definitely needs more emotional support right now than any of us. He kneels down next to her and puts his arm around her shoulders. She leans her head against his and asks, “Why?”

  “I think maybe she had some kind of mental illness,” Card says. “Maybe she’d just been through too much.”

  Kella shakes her head. “I don’t mean about them. I mean about the world.” She swivels her head from Cardyn and then up to the rest of us. She has little streams of tears trickling along her nose and down to the corners of her mouth. She wipes the tears away with the heels of her hands. “Why does the world look like this? It’s all come apart. Everything…everyone is dying. Are we going to disappear? Or go insane like them? Are we next?”

  I cross over and kneel down by her other side, wondering if it’s possible to bring hope back to a person who’s lost it. “We’re not next,” I assure her. “We’ll survive this. We’ll find others, get help. We’ll find out what’s going on, and we’ll fix it.”

  I’m aware I’m making promises I can’t possibly hope to keep based on facts I don’t know. But Kella is on the edge of something dangerous, and the murder-suicide we just witnessed is more than enough to push her the rest of the way over. Right now, I just need to talk her down, get her back to a neutral place where she can try to recover from the onslaught of tragedies we’ve experienced. Cardyn gives her shoulders a comforting squeeze and talks gently to her about how this is as bad as it’ll get and about how the only way to a better future is by putting one foot in front of the other. “You always have one more step left in you,” he promises. “There’s always that one more step.”

  Kella nods, but I can tell by her face that she’s not convinced.

  “What happens when I can’t even take that one more step?” she asks in a whisper.

  “Then I’ll take it for you,” Cardyn says. He looks over at me, and I give Kella what I hope is my most reassuring smile.

  “We’ll all take it for you until you can move forward again on your own,” I say.

  With Kella still crying but at least not hyperventilating anymore, Brohn goes over to the three strangers. Rain joins him as he kneels down and presses his fingertips to each of their necks one by one. He leans in to see if he can feel their breath and checks for any sign of life.

  “Dead?” I call to him from across the cave.

  “All three.”

  I step closer to him, knowing that I can’t avoid the bodies forever. I need to help. To be strong. Now, more than ever.

  “Just as well,” Cardyn says as he stands up and walks over to join Brohn, Rain, and me around the bodies. “If she hadn’t done it to them, she’d have likely done it to us.”

  I pick up Asha’s gun. “Empty.”

  “Any more ammo on her?” Cardyn asks.

  Rain volunteers to check. She pats Asha down, flips her jacket open, and slides her fingers along Asha’s legs and into the pockets of her pants. She slips Asha’s boots off and shakes them upside down. Some red sand slides out but nothing else. Cardyn and I go through the men’s clothes, but they’ve got nothing we can use.

  “We’ll hang onto the gun. Just in case,” Brohn says.

  “Pretty worthless, though, isn’t it?” Cardyn asks. “Without bullets, I mean.”

  “Not necessarily. We may find compatible ammo somewhere along the way.” Brohn brushes red sand from the barrel of the gun. “Besides, if there’s anything Hiller and her people taught us, it’s that a fake threat can be every bit as powerful as a real one.”

  He’s right. Having a gun, even an empty one, is empowering. As long as no one decides to call our bluff.

  Brohn tucks the gun into the waistband of his cargo pants and gets ready to step out of the cave. The rest of us start to follow.

  “Should we do something with them?”

  It’s Kella who asks the question. She’s behind us in the cave, standing over the three bodies.

  Brohn walks over to her and starts to try to nudge her along, but I stop him. “It’s okay,” I say. “Let me.”

  I slide over and stand next to Kella. She’s still staring at the three dead people. Her eyes are red, but she’s not crying anymore. In fact, her voice sounds oddly calm, all things considered. “We should bury them. Or cremate them. Or something.”

  “It’s too dry here,” I say. “Too much sand and dried brush. And we can’t risk a fire.”

  “I’m just so tired,” Kella mutters.

  “Tired?”

  “Of leaving people behind.”

  I know instantly what she means. Over the years, we witnessed hundreds of people die in the Valta. Friends. Family. We were able to recover and bury some of the bodies in what became a growing graveyard. Those who died in the bombings were gone from our lives, but we still always knew exactly where they were. After losing Terk and Karmine in the Processor, that changed. Now there’s a distance between us even greater than death. It’s the distance of the unknown, and I can feel it hitting Kella full-force. I put my arm around her, but I can’t think of anything to say.

  Fortunately, I don’t have to. Cardyn steps in front of Kella and lifts her chin a little with his fingertips.

  “I have an idea. Let’s take something of theirs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we took something it’d be kind of like a souvenir. A way to help them stay connected.”

  “Connected?”

  “With us. With each other.”

  “We have the woman’s gun,” Brohn reminds him.

  Cardyn shakes his head. “But we took that for ourselves, Brohn. Let’s take something as a reminder of them. It doesn’t have to be much. A scrap of clothing. A belt. Anything. That way, something that touched them can keep going with us. Kella’s right. They deserve that much.”

  Kella manages the closest thing to a smile I’ve seen on her face since we escaped from the Processor. I’ve always been thankful to have Cardyn as my best friend. It feels good to share that feeling with Kella as I watch the way he’s able to ease her mind with a soothing hand and just the right words.

  Kella points to the woman’s jacket, which has a patch on the shoulder. It’s an eagle with a snake in its beak and a cactus in its talons. A
larger eagle stands behind it with its wings spread. Around the image are the words, “Great Seal of the State of New Mexico” and the number 1912. The words “Crescit Eundo” appear on a faded yellow banner just below the image. Cardyn kneels down, rips off the patch, and hands it to Kella.

  “What’s it mean?” Kella asks Rain as she fondles the patch like it’s a rare seashell she just found on the beach. “Crescit Eundo?”

  Rain shakes her head. “I don’t know. Brohn?”

  “Got me.”

  “It’s Latin.” I say. “It means ‘It grows as it goes.’”

  Rain’s eyebrows go up. “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrug. “I guess I just remember it from when we took Latin lessons from those Sixteens a few years back.”

  Rain gives me a skeptical look. I know she’s been keeping track of my collection of weird knowledge and all the trivial bits of memories I suddenly seem to have, but I’m still not ready to tell her my hypothesis that it has something to do with my growing connection to Render.

  Kella is absorbed with the patch. She runs her fingertips over it and holds it up to her nose to smell it. “And what’s that mean?” she asks. “It grows as it goes?”

  “I think it has something to do with a storm gathering force and increasing in strength as it rolls across the sky,” I tell her.

  “Gathering force…,” Kella mumbles. “I like that.”

  She slips the patch into her pocket, and we head outside. As we step into the waning hours of the desert night, Rain gets an idea. “We can pile rocks up and seal the cave, kind of like a burial,” she says to Kella with a half-hearted shrug.

  Kella grins and starts helping the rest of us shuffle as many loose rocks as we can find up to the opening of the cave. It’s already getting hot out, but we work fast, and we work together. Before long, we’ve managed to cover the opening as best we can and fill in some of the gaps with dried shrubs and crisp, black vines we scrounge from the desert floor.

  When the cave is as sealed off as it’s going to get, we wipe the sand and red dust from our hands and begin the hike toward the plume of smoke still fluttering skyward in the distance.

  It’s near morning, and the first streaks of pink sunlight give the world an eerie glow. I look out toward the East in the direction we came from. I wonder what’s happening back in the Processor. Hiller is dead. Terk, Karmine, and Trench. All dead. Is that ominous silver halo still rotating up there somewhere? Are the guards still coming after us? For a second, I contemplate sending Render back. Maybe he can tell us what’s happening or let us know if we’re being followed.

  In the end, I decide against it. Too much focus on where we’ve come from will only distract us from what’s up ahead. Cardyn’s words to Kella echo in my head. One more step, he said. We can always take just one more step.

  As we walk along, Kella fidgets with the New Mexico patch we took off Asha’s jacket. She smells it again and holds it to her cheek. My heart breaks for her and for what she’s turning into. In the Processor, she was a fierce fighter and an instant expert with any weapon our trainers put in front of her. Now, she’s more like one of the Neos, skittish and scared, latching onto anything she thinks will give her a hint of stability in an unstable world. Cardyn sticks by her side, occasionally offering a helping hand when the terrain gets too rough. After a few hours, we make it across the desert. As we take our first steps up the small embankment and into the scraggly forest that forms the treeline, Kella collapses. Brohn and Cardyn try to help her, but she refuses to move.

  It’s taken a long time, but she’s finally given up.

  Rain seems desperate to connect with her. She puts a gentle hand on the small of Kella’s back. “What happened to Kar affected all of us.”

  “It’s not just Karmine,” Kella says. “It’s all of it. Those three back in the cave…? That could have been us. That could still be us. We can’t go back to what we used to be.” She fights off our attempts to help her before her eyes glaze over and she slips into unconsciousness.

  Brohn and Cardyn take turns carrying her limp form slung over their shoulders. She’s lost a lot of weight, but Manthy, Rain, and I aren’t strong enough to carry her like that. It’s an uphill climb into the woods, and we’re all hungry, thirsty, and exhausted.

  Render leads the way now. Darting among the tree branches and down into the dry gullies along the way, he clicks, chirps, and kraas! out to guide us toward the best paths. It’s easy for him, of course. He gets to fly. The rest of us non-bird types have to trudge over the uneven ground that gets steeper and more hazardous with every step.

  Just when even Brohn and Cardyn look like they might not be able to go on, we finally get a whiff of the smoke we’ve been following. The smell gets stronger as Render leads the way.

  “Can you do your Render-surveillance thing again?” Rain asks.

  “I can try,” I tell her. “It’s a good time to take a break, anyway.”

  We lean against some of the trees that surround us. The events from last night, the physical exertion of crossing the red desert and now hiking up this hill that’s practically a wall have taken their toll on me. My leg muscles burn. My brain is mush. Still, I scan my arm tattoos, and flickers of Render’s perspective come into view but then fade out again. I take a deep breath and try to concentrate.

  We link up again, but just like before, the link quickly fades.

  “I don’t know if I can do it right now,” I say to Rain. “My mind’s not in it.”

  A soft voice from behind me says, “Don’t try so hard.” It’s Manthy. I turn to see her sitting cross-legged on the forest floor. She’s staring down and fiddling with a dried twig in her hands. “Don’t reach out,” she mumbles. “Open the space between you and Render. He’ll meet you halfway.”

  I’m stunned at first. Partly because Manthy almost never talks unless it’s absolutely necessary. And she never offers advice. But she’s right. In trying to activate my connection with Render, I’ve been pushing and pulling and ultimately failing.

  “She’s got a point,” Cardyn says. “It’s like the way water avoids you the more you reach for it.”

  I must be giving Cardyn a confused stare because he laughs and explains what he means, like I’m some ignorant Neo.

  “We’re used to being able to grab onto things,” he explains, “so when we come across something like fog or water or sand, or even feelings and emotions, we treat them like a solid, something we can hold onto and manipulate instead of treating them like what they are.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A different state of being with their own characteristics and their own rules. I think maybe Manthy’s right. Instead of trying harder, you might be better off trying softer.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But it might be easier said than done.”

  “Everything’s easier said than done,” Brohn says. He’s leaning against a tree, and Kella, barely alert, is leaning against him. He flashes me a knowing smile from across the small clearing. “That’s never stopped you from doing some pretty amazing things.”

  I know he’s talking about the time I somehow managed to fly when we were in the Processor. Well, I didn’t actually fly. But I did leap across a distance I had no business being able to clear.

  When Brohn, Manthy and I finally told Rain, Cardyn, and Kella what happened leading up to our escape, we filled them in on Hiller, the Order, and even about how Manthy was able to read the strange code and communicate with the Processor’s tech-system. But we didn’t talk about my impossible soaring leap. Not even with each other. It’s like we made a silent pact to keep it under wraps just in case it didn’t really happen.

  Or because we know it really did.

  With the vote of confidence from my friends and fellow Conspirators, I tap my forearm implants again and clear my mind. I imagine a wide, open lake, the calm blue kind we used to read about but that doesn’t seem to exist in the real world anymore. Right now, I’m on
one side of my mental lake. Render is on the other. Our reflections form in the water, and the gently rippling waves carry our images toward each other until we overlap, and I can no longer tell one of us from the other.

  In the hypnotic rhythm that follows, I reach out with my mind and ask Render a question. He flies off, and I can only hope he understood what I was asking.

  It’s not long before he disappears into the tangle of trees off in the distance.

  Render’s feelings meld into my mind like rolling waves. He seems to think it’s safe.

  I don’t talk to the others about the depth of my connection to the raven, partly because it fades in and out in ways I can’t entirely describe. Sometimes it disappears, leaving me to wonder if I’ve only just been imagining it, or if it was real for a time, but now it’s over.

  Other times, though, the connection is beyond crystal clear. During those times, I feel like I’m only one step away from being Render.

  I’m having one of those moments now. Like I’m strolling through an open door, I tap into Render and enter his mind’s eye. He’s seen the source of the smoke. He’s seen what’s there: Kids like us. Tangles of trees. Thick bushes. Anxious breathing. Footprints.

  I pull out from our connection and relay what Render is seeing to the others.

  “There are more than ten of them,” I say. “Maybe as many as twenty. Two are tending the fire. The rest are waiting.”

  Cardyn chews nervously at his fingernail. “Waiting? Waiting for what?”

  “For us.”

  6

  Cardyn and I help Kella make her way along the uneven ground. These woods, like most of the rest of the world we’ve encountered since leaving the Processor, are a husk, a dried and tangled mess of bombed-out wreckage barely hanging onto life. There is some green, but not nearly as much as there should be. The earth is soft in places but scabbed and crusted over in many others. Half of the trees we pass are blackened out and leaning against each other. Their singed, tired trunks and entangled branches form dark, enclosed mazes, which we navigate by the columns of light beaming down from above. The atmosphere is sad, even a little scary. I keep feeling like something with fangs is going to leap down at us from the twisted canopy above and eat us.