by K A Riley
“I’ve got him!” she shouts. “We’re okay.”
Rain’s hands appear first. Card and Manthy grab her by the wrists and help to guide her out. Brohn is next. He clambers his way out of the small opening and stands in front of us, his face a mess of dirt and tears.
“Did you find any—?” I start to say.
But Brohn cuts me off and pushes past me toward the road. “I can’t free the rest. There’s nothing. There’s no one left.”
“I’ll take care of him,” I tell the others. “Just give us a minute.”
Cardyn looks around at the wreckage and at the bodies of our friends. He drops his head, and his voice quivers. “It’s okay. We’ll start…looking after all of them.”
I thank him quietly and walk over to stand with Brohn on what’s left of what was once Center Street. The blacktop and concrete are buckled in places and smooth as glass in others. White plastic pipes from the old sewer system poke out like jagged splinters. It’s barely recognizable as a street now. More like a deep, infected scar gouged into the skin of the earth.
Behind us, Rain, Card, Manthy, and the twins go about transporting the bodies as best they can to the small field next to the school where Card says he hopes to give them a proper burial. Render lands on a broken section of rocks on the other side of the burned and brittle field from where Brohn and I are standing. The cracked and blackened blocks form the ruins of what used to be part of an old perimeter wall between the school lot and the road. Render flaps his wings wide and kraas at me. I can feel him in my head, wanting to connect with me, to see if I’m okay. I swipe my forearm tattoos, and his consciousness comes into focus. He’s calling me over.
“What is it?” I sigh. My heart’s too heavy to deal with little things right now. I’ve got my arm around Brohn’s waist. His arm is heavy on my shoulders, but I don’t want to move away from him. We’re supporting each other, physically and emotionally, and I don’t know how either of us would stand up right now without the other. Render kraas again, and I turn to him, annoyed. “I don’t have any food for you. You’re going to have to be on your own for a bit, okay?”
Inside my head, Render’s mental voice, urgent and raspy, makes his wordless meaning clear from across the black field:
Come here! Important!
9
“Something’s up with Render,” I mutter to Brohn.
“Go ahead. See what he wants.” Brohn is still teary-eyed as he slips his arm from my shoulders. “I’ll be okay.”
It kills me to disrupt this moment. We’re all grieving, and Brohn needs me right now in a way no one’s ever needed me before. Losing Terk and Karmine was a devastating loss of two good friends. The loss of Wisp, though, is something beyond even that. He lived for his little sister. He was more protective of her than I’ve seen anybody be over another person. In return, she made his life worth living. She could switch him on and light him up with a smile. Now, there’s an emptiness in his eyes and a flatness in his voice that fills me with dread. For the first time since I’ve known him, which is basically my entire life, he seems deflated. Defeated.
Render kraas again, and I tell him I’m coming. As annoyed as I am right now, I’ve also learned to trust him over the years. He’s been known to launch into loud, dramatic outbursts to draw my attention to an animal carcass, to drag me out to a field to watch him tumble and dive, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. He has a mischievous and playful side. Right now, though, he’s all business.
As I approach the broken wall where he’s perched, Render flaps his wings again but doesn’t take off. I cough at the dust he kicks up, and I walk over to stand in front of him. He gives me a series of croaking groans, another kraa! and another flapping of his wings. This time he does take off, his five-foot wingspan unfurling his shadowy black feathers cape-like around him as he hurtles airborne. I look up as he soars and circles overhead.
“What was that all about?” I ask the air. But I get no answer.
Although my connection with Render has proven to be quite strong at times, there are plenty of other times—right now, for example—when I have no idea what he’s thinking, feeling, or trying to convey. At the moment, he reminds me of a Sixteen named Peter from the Valta. I was just a Neo when I knew him, but not surprisingly, I remember a lot about him. He rarely spoke, but when he did, nearly nothing he said made any sense. He rambled off a jumble of philosophy, science, and religion—usually to himself. He squirreled himself away in a corner of a small room, a broom closet actually, on the top floor of Shoshone High School.
That little room became his sanctuary, his bedroom, and, more often than I care to remember, his bathroom. No matter how much the other Sixteens tried to intervene, Peter lived his life on his own terms. He came out and went back in when he wanted. In between, he muddled around on the fringes of his Cohort, spouting off random phrases from books he’d read or spewing out long speeches about alien space probes, genetic experiments, or how we were all really just digital simulations living out our lives in a virtual-reality game being played by a cabal of secret government operatives. In the month after my father died, Peter started following me around. He’d track me down in the school or by the beach and would lecture me about taking care of my implants and about how I would one day help to “save the fallen from themselves.” I tried to be nice and listen, but eventually, those encounters became overwhelming, and I found ways to be where Peter wasn’t. Eventually, he lost interest in me and latched on to a Juven named Werner who wasn’t the most patient person in the world and was constantly pushing Peter away and telling him to get lost. The Recruiters would normally leave someone like Peter behind, but instead, they took a special interest in him. On November 1st of that year, when the Recruiters loaded the new Seventeens into their transport truck, they gave Peter the royal treatment. They fussed over him, threw a blanket around his shoulders, wiped the sticky saliva from the corners of his mouth, and then let him ride up front in the escort vehicle.
I never did manage to understand Peter, and I wonder if he was as frustrated with my inability to communicate as I was with his. And now I’m wondering if Render ever feels the same. After all, he’s probably clear as day in his own head. He knows what he’s thinking and what he wants. Surely, I must seem pretty ignorant to him when I get as confused about his intentions as I am now.
Overhead, Render banks hard and vanishes behind a grove of tall trees. I wait for a second and watch, but he doesn’t come back.
“Thanks for nothing,” I say, still irritated about being lured away from Brohn for no reason.
But before I turn to head back over to Brohn, I glance down at the broken wall Render was perched on. There seem to be markings of some kind etched into the surface of one of the gray-brown stones. At first, it just looks like random chips and cracks, and I’m about to turn away when I realize it’s actual words. I push aside a bundle of prickly green vines and brush away a layer of dirt with my hand. It is words, jagged and slanted, like they were carved into the stone by someone in a hurry.
It says, Follow Render to San Francisco for your answer. It’s been an honor.
“Hey!” I call out to Brohn, a flicker of hope springing to life inside me. “Come here a sec.”
Brohn looks half-upset and half-relieved at having to move. Head down, hands plunged deep into his pockets, he walks over to where I’m standing and looks at the cryptic message. He kneels down and feels the imprint of the markings in the stone. He scratches his head and looks up at me. “San Francisco?”
“Yes. But look at the last part. The part about honor.”
“So what?”
“So, that’s the last thing Granden said to me before he helped us get away. I think he must have been here. I think he left this message for me.”
Brohn stands up and wipes his hands on his pants. “You think Granden was here?”
“It makes sense. He helped us escape from the Processor. He knows about Render. He was still an insider as far
as I know when we got away. There’s no reason to think Hiller’s people suspected him of anything.”
Brohn clenches his jaw and looks back to where Rain and the others are sorting out the bodies of our dead friends. “Then he was here when they…”
“I don’t think he would have been part of this.”
“How can you know that?” Brohn snaps.
“I don’t know how. I just…feel it.”
“So you feel that he just stood here carving mysterious messages in stone while his buddies wiped out our town?”
“I-I-I’m not, I mean I don’t think he could have…Maybe he came here later?” I stammer. “After they…”
“Killed everyone we know?”
I nod, tears welling up in my eyes.
“And the ‘answer’? What’s that about?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, wiping my eyes. “But Granden used to look at my tattoos all the time. I don’t think he knows I noticed. Once he asked me about them.”
Brohn says, “Okay” and reaches over to wipe a tear from my cheek with his thumb. He tucks some of my stray hair behind my ear and offers me a weak but warm smile. “I remember that. We were in the Agora. Walking back to the Silo after one of our war-games exercises.”
“I told him I had all kinds of questions about my dad and Micah and about the war. I wanted to know what my connection to Render really was and what I was supposed to do with it. I told him I felt that knowing about my tattoos was the one thing I needed in order to make all the other answers fall into place.”
Brohn seems to think about this for a second. He looks down at the stone and then back up at me. “Hey guys!” he calls out to the others. “Come here. Kress found something.”
Cardyn, Rain, Manthy, and the twins turn away from where they’ve been carefully lining up the recovered bodies of our friends to prepare them for burial. With Cardyn walking slowly in the lead, they come over to where Brohn and I are standing at the low, broken wall.
I show them the writing etched into the stone.
“What’s it mean?” Trax asks.
I explain to him and Chace about how Granden helped us Seventeens escape from the Processor. “He grabbed my arm right before I got ready to run into the woods with the others. There was gunfire and shouting behind us. He could have killed us himself if he wanted. By then, it was probably his job. Instead, he told me to follow Render and that ‘It’s been an honor.’ Then he led the Processor guards in the wrong direction so we could make our escape.”
“She also had a conversation with him about getting an answer,” Brohn adds.
Chace looks up at me. “An answer to what?”
I push my jacket sleeves up and hold out my arms. “To these. To Render. To everything.”
“And you think this Granden person wrote this here?” Chace asks.
I tell her that I think so. “It’s possible, anyway. Probable, in fact. I can’t imagine who else.”
We all look over at Render who has just flown back over and is now busily preening himself on the trunk of a burned and fallen tree just down the way from where we’re standing.
Rain kneels down and looks closely at the writing. “So, I guess this means we follow Render to San Francisco?”
“Yes,” I say with more certainty than I’m feeling. “That’s exactly what we need to do.”
Cardyn raises his hand and clears his throat like he’s a little kid in a classroom. “Not to throw water on this happy little bonfire, but there may be a couple of potential problems here, Kress.”
“Like?”
“Like for starters, we don’t know where San Francisco is from here or how to get there. We don’t know who or what might be standing in our way. We don’t know if this is just another trick of some kind. And we don’t know for sure who left this message here or if it was even meant for us.”
“I agree,” I say. “There’s a lot we don’t know. But the only way we’re going to find out anything is by having a little faith.”
“In a bird? Or do you mean in a man who helped kidnap and manipulate us?”
I suddenly feel very defensive, but I’m not sure if it’s more about Render or about Granden. “Even if Granden didn’t leave this message, we know we can trust Render. We’ve already put our lives in his hands more times than I can count.”
“Wings,” Cardyn says. “Technically, we’ve put our lives in his wings more times than you can count.”
I’m about to punch Cardyn in the face when he smiles, and I realize that I’m smiling, too. Even here, in the middle of our ruined town with all of our murdered friends and my eyes red and raw from crying, Cardyn has a way of balancing me out. He doesn’t augment or reduce my rage. He just keeps it from totally taking over my common sense and sanity.
“Thanks for the clarification,” I say with a sneer. “Now, tell me what you really think. What do all of you think?”
Rain stands up from where she’s been having a closer look at the message. “Granden may or not be on our side. But Render’s never steered us wrong. I say we see where he takes us.”
Manthy shrugs and walks over to where Render is perched and starts running her hand along his feathered head. He leans toward her and ruffles the feathers on his neck. I think he’d smile if he could.
“I’m up for anything that will get us as far away from this place as possible,” Brohn says evenly. I can tell he’s struggling to keep his voice measured, and I can only imagine how hard it is for him. “San Francisco can’t be any worse than being on the run in the woods. How long to get there from here?” he asks Chace.
She closes her eyes like she’s visualizing a map. “Not sure. Four weeks on foot. Maybe more.”
“Then we’ll need supplies,” Brohn says, taking charge like he used to back when we lived in the Valta, before I somehow became the leader of our Conspiracy. “First, we need to finish giving our friends a proper burial. Then we need to get back to your camp. From there, we can head out.”
I swipe my fingers along my tattoos and re-connect with Render, who is practically purring over on the log where Manthy continues to stroke his head while she gazes absently into the distance.
When the connection is made, he looks up at me and lets out a contented kraa!
“Thank you,” I whisper.
What he sends back to me aren’t words, of course, but I get the idea.
He’s saying something along the lines of What are friends for?
10
With the decision made to follow the cryptic message carved into the stone, we talk for a bit about the logistics of the next leg of our journey. Having something to focus on seems to be giving Brohn some respite from his grief. A reason to keep breathing for now.
Chace and Trax assure us they can point us in the right direction. Their knowledge of everything from the terrain to the now-obsolete highway system is impressive.
“We’ve always been interested in geography,” Trax tells us. He’s a funny combination of child-like and knowledgeable. His voice is high and chirpy, but on occasion he sounds like a professor. At least, how I imagine a professor would sound.
His sister nods her agreement as she looks over to where Manthy is still petting Render. “Maps. Guidebooks. Atlases,” she says. “Topographical diagrams. You name it.”
“We didn’t have a lot of paper books in Miner,” Trax explains. “Just the ones that survived in an old archive section of the library. And it wasn’t much of a library.”
“But it was enough for us,” Chace says. “No power meant no digi-texts. So all we had were the maps.”
Trax blushes. “So we maybe got a little obsessed with them.”
“Your obsession might just be the saving grace we need,” Rain says. “In all our time in the Valta and then the Processor, it was hard for us to really know where we were in the world. We studied some geography, but because we never traveled to any of the places we learned about, we didn’t have any context.”
Chace looks at Rain t
hen drops her gaze to the ground at her feet. “Not knowing where you are in the world sounds sad to me.”
“Well, with your help,” Rain says, “we can change that.” She gives Chace’s shoulder a friendly shake and then gives her a full-on hug. “Thank you for helping to give us direction,” she adds softly, and I understand exactly what she means. We need it. We need purpose now, more than we ever have. Without it, we’ll break. Shatter into a million pieces, never to be put back together again.
Chace smiles and walks over to stand next to her brother, who takes her hand in his own.
“I hate to be the one to bring us back down to reality,” Cardyn says. “But we still need to take care of…”
We follow his gaze back to the crushed school and to the waiting bodies of our departed friends.
“You’re right,” Brohn says, his voice low, beaten down by the weight of the world. “We need to give them the respect they deserve.”
It takes us the rest of the day, but we’re finally able to transport what’s left of our friends to the makeshift graveyard we started so long ago. In those early days after the first wave of drone-strikes, our all-too-frequent burial ceremonies were a constant reminder of the horrors of war, the temporary nature of life, and the need to keep the reins on our emotions in a time of crisis.
While I knew I’d be facing the horrors of war once again after Recruitment, I somehow thought the days of burying my friends were behind me.
I thought wrong.
As we did in the past, we’ve managed to fashion some primitive shovels out of lengths of synth struts and alu-iron. It’s slow going, but we silently bury the remains in graves dug as deep as we can get them with the limited tools and supplies we have. The ground is rocky and dry. The only remotely soft earth in the Valta is down by the riverbed, but we decided long ago not to bury our dead there. Partly because it was the safest spot for us to congregate and have fires, but also because we always hoped the water would return someday, and we didn’t want the bodies of our dearly departed to get swept away by the river.