Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

Everything sounds louder than it is, more brutal.

  I’m on her now, and I’m smashing my fists into her head, over and over. My hands hurt. They’re not used to this. They were calloused on Australia; now they’re clear and clean. She spits blood then pushes upward, heaving me with her. She raises her leg, kicks me off, and I fly back into the wall. Another thump, another fall, and I’m face down on the ground. I feel her hands in my hair and she pulls my head up, grips my hair between her fingers.

  She slams my face into the ground. There’s nothing to cushion it, but it doesn’t hurt as much as I know it should. I wonder if I’m just not feeling the pain, if it will hurt in the morning instead. If I will even see the morning.

  Don’t die.

  I push back and she tries to fight me off but I grab her hand, pull it out from under her, and she falls face down next to me, her nose smashing flat. I smack her straight on, right on her nose. Blood gushes. She scrabbles backward and I crawl toward her, hold her ankle, yank her back toward me, slam my hand—open, using the flat of the palm, closest to my wrist—into her nose again. The blood starts fountaining out, spraying the floor. She cradles her face, screams. She pushes away from me, goes to the corner of the room. The floor is wet—blood and sweat and urine.

  “Please,” she says.

  I stop. She is not herself. The Rex I knew would never have pleaded, not for anything. We both breathe and we fall into a pattern, inhaling and exhaling at the same time, somehow in perfect unison.

  We don’t say anything for hours. There’s no sense in talking. I don’t know what I would have to say to her anyway. She stares at me from under her hand, still cradling her nose. I pull off my shirt, leaving only the vest underneath. She needs to stop the bleeding. I can’t have her die from her injuries and I can’t stand seeing her with blood all over her hands and face. I go to her, shuffling across the floor. She takes her hands away, lets me tend to her. I press the shirt against her face, holding her head back, tell her to stay still, and she does. I hold the bridge of her nose until the blood stops.

  “This is going to hurt,” I tell her. I put my hand around the nose. I can see where it’s broken, where it’s bent now. She doesn’t flinch when I touch it, but she howls as I click it back into place, gasps as I let go. Better, I think. I give her the shirt, soaked in dark red, to hold there for a while.

  I tell her it’ll be all right, as if that’s what she needs to hear.

  I think about how much hurt she has gone through in her life, how many battles she’s fought. She lost a limb and still she fought. And now here, in this room, a broken nose—shattered maybe, because it’s swollen and sore, the skin blackened and bruised—is enough to finish it for her.

  She pulls the shirt away, the blood ceased, and hands it back to me with a nod. She’s grateful for my help.

  I crawl away from her, to the opposite wall. I try to listen to the noises of the rest of the complex, but there’s nothing—no sound of voices, classes, footsteps, whatever. Just the echo of something down the corridors and the hiss of Rex’s—Polly’s—breathing.

  “I don’t know who I am,” she says out of nowhere into the darkness. Everybody is asleep, but we’re not. We’re trapped here and they won’t let us out. There’s no food. They want us to starve, or worse. Maybe they want to see how feral we can become. They aren’t pumping the gas in to make us sleep. Neither of us has moved, not since we fought, and this is the first thing she’s said. Her voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it. I shift to try and see her, to catch any light that’s in the room. I wait to see if she says anything else. That’s it, though. Silence after that.

  So I fill the silence. “When I knew you, you were called Rex,” I say. I hear something, I suspect it’s her fingers on her skin, running over the scabbed grooves on her chest, feeling out those letters. “And now you’re called Polly. Why that name?”

  Silence, again. Then, “I don’t know. I remembered it.” More silence. Breathing. “I don’t know who I am,” she says. Her voice is desperately sad and small.

  “Do you want to?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. I tell her anyway.

  I tell her about the people that she killed, the fights that she started, the violence she caused, the nightmares she enacted; I tell her about the wars for territory. I tell her about the night that I helped her—or, the night that my mother’s death helped her, really, in the most terrible way—to take over the Lows from their previous leader. I tell her about everything that she did to me, how somehow she’s the reason that we are here, damaged and ruined and broken. I tell her all of this and she doesn’t say a word in reply.

  In the silence, I think about my mother and about how, as a child, I would be given something and I would break it because I would push it too far. She would give me a toy that she had worked hard to get for me, and I would want it to do everything for me—to be everything. It never lasted. Nothing does. And she would tell me: That’s why you take care of what matters. That’s why you don’t push things.

  I let Rex take in all that I’ve told her. I want to say that I blame her for everything: for Agatha’s death, for Mae being missing—for the deaths of friends, of people who made my life good, the breaking and bending of lives to fit her own. But I don’t. I let the silence tell her for me. I listen to her breathing and then, I’m sure, the sound of her sniffling, rubbing her eyes. Gibson thought he didn’t get through to her, that she couldn’t be changed. But I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if all it took was removing her from that place.

  Because this Rex is not the person she once was.

  “I need to leave here,” she whispers at some point in the night. I’ve been asleep and her voice wakes me. For some reason, I’ve slept heavier than any night on the bed. My back feels better. This hardness is what I’m used to; it’s what my body needs. “I have to leave here.”

  “So do I,” I say. “They want us to kill each other, though. We won’t get out until they carry us out.” I stretch my body until it aches again, contorting myself to feel the still, cold hardness of the floor doing my muscles good.

  I listen to a new sound in the darkness—Rex touches her hand and her now-useless false arm. She plays with it like it’s another scar that she simply cannot stop scratching.

  When I wake up again, her hands—the one good hand, the real one; and the fake one, which she’s pressing underneath the other—are around my throat, and she is pushing down at me with all the strength that she can muster. Her grip is too tight. I’m already blacking out, already feeling the room, her, the world swim away from me.

  I choke, or try to. I beat the floor with my hands and feet. I try to hit her, but there’s no strength left in me, not even a little bit.

  And then I feel Rex’s breath on the skin of my cheek. “Stay still,” she whispers. She’s letting air in, but only slightly. Enough. She shouts, “She’s dead. Chan is dead.” I hear the sounds of feet on concrete, running toward us, shouts. “Get ready,” she says to me. So I am. I want to tell her that it feels like I’m always ready for anything, because I have to be. Now is no different.

  The door clanks open. Screaming, shouting. Then she wrenches. She pulls back from the false arm, which stays at my neck. I see the stump of her elbow, plugs and sockets exposed in the flesh from where she detached it. She grabs the false arm and, holding it like a club, darts forward and smashes it into the face of the warden closest to us. He screams, falls backward. There’s blood again. She snarls, swings once more.

  “Get up!” she screams at me, and I do. I have to even though I can barely breathe, even though my vision is cloudy, swimming in green and purple flashes. I’m dizzy, so I steady myself on the wall. She kicks a warden. He stumbles toward me; on his face I can see deep scratches from the wounds she’s made but I can’t tell if they’re from the false arm or her fingernails. He sways in front of me, then regains control and reaches for his striker. But he’s slow. I kick at his shin really hard and he slams forward, face on the floor. I stamp o
n the inside of his knee, and he howls as it crunches. Don’t want him getting up again.

  By the time I look up, Rex is already gone. I peer cautiously into the corridor, and I see the trail she’s left: three wardens, and now a bird—which she smashes before it can whip her, the enclosed space somehow giving her an advantage. She’s going for freedom and I am going with her.

  It’s amazing how fast peace can turn into a riot, how quickly a single violent act can upend the status quo. She makes it to the dining halls, where the rest of the prisoners are eating breakfast, and she throws a warden into one of the serving tables, spilling the food, making the wood shatter. All the prisoners rush into the room to watch, their eyes wide. I recognize so many of them now from Australia. Out of context, out of place, they look almost normal: their hair grown back, their skin clean, free of blood and grime, their tattoos and scars hidden. The wardens pile onto Rex, ignoring me, trying to keep her down, but she’s a fury, unstoppable. I remember that power even if she doesn’t. They try to restrain her and she whips them around. A bird lassos her and she grabs the cable and uses it to swing the drone around. It slams into one of the other prisoners. He lashes back, smashing the bird under foot, piling in toward Rex. The wardens turn to him and he slams his head into their helmets as they try to restrain him; he kicks out, hurls things around. He’s not the man he was just a moment ago and he doesn’t know why. Others join in the fight as if their bones are telling them to: Nothing’s triggered it, not specifically. It’s just a feeling they’ve got that they should. That this is what they do.

  Alarms sound, but they’re distant. More wardens run in, clearly having just come from their bunks, pulling on their uniforms. They’re carrying riot shields and weapons. The fight is a mess of bodies, of rioting that I can’t keep track of. This is an opportunity. I run for the outside toward the mall, to the shop that they use to test us. It’s locked up this time, but that’s never stopped me.

  The door collapses and I run in and through to the back. Everything I need is here. I wrap some of the clothes I find around my fist and then lay into the glass cabinets, over and over, watching the reinforced glass crack and then shatter. I feel the skin on my knuckles split, feel the fabric on my hand wet with my own blood. I smash them, all of them. Even the ones that don’t hold anything I need I smash, because breaking the glass feels something like relief.

  Later I take the knife that they took from me. I’ve had a lot of knives in my life, but this is my favorite—a gift from somebody who wanted me to look after myself. Never be without a knife, I tell myself. I take a striker as well, in case I need it, and I run out of the shop and through the mall toward the main center.

  I see Jonah. He’s staring—confused, lost, standing outside the doors, watching the distance. He looks at me and I stop running.

  In the distance, there’s a sandstorm rising. Every few weeks they hit, swirls of wind picking up the soil and turning it over and over. The wind here carries the debris, flinging it at us into our eyes, our mouths. We shield our faces with our forearms against it.

  “Please don’t do this,” he says.

  “I have to,” I reply. “This is a lie, all of it. You’re not who you think you are. You’re Jonah. I know you.”

  “Don’t say that.” Anger on his face, eyes red—that wall in his memory, it doesn’t want to be destroyed. But I have to get through, I have to.

  “You are Jonah and I remember everything about you. You were with the Pale Women. You saved my life. You came with me down into the depths of the ship and you helped me save Mae. You and I were—”

  “This is my truth!” he shouts, screams almost. “This, here. This is where I am meant to be!” He sinks to his knees and I rush forward, hand on his shoulder, on the skin at the side of his neck, feeling that rough texture under my thumb. He cranes his head toward me, as if that comforts him a little, to feel it there.

  “Jonah,” I start to say, but then I hear somebody behind me. The soft crunch of their feet on the sand that’s been thrown here by the storm. They grab my arm and I spin, hand darting to their throat.

  It’s Gibson.

  “Do you see what you’ve done?” he asks. His hand tightens as mine loosens. He’s no threat. He’s shaking with fear, with sadness. With anger. I can feel his hands tremble against my skin.

  “I didn’t do this,” I tell him. He doesn’t let go of me even when I try to shake him off, so I push him gently. He falls onto his backside and sits there like a child, arms in front of him. He’s crying.

  “You could have been amazing,” he says. “You could have been so much better. Special, even. I want to make you all special, make you all valuable parts of an infrastructure that abandoned you, that would have left you for dead. But you’re too weak to see that, set in your ways. You think humans don’t change? You think that they can’t? Of course they can! I wanted to make you perfect, a contributor. I wanted to make it so that you could have been anybody. But you chose to fight. Look at you—a broken, sad little girl who thinks she can save everybody.” The words hurt, but only slightly.

  “I don’t think I can save everybody,” I say. “Just the person I promised I would.”

  There’s a crash from behind me. Rex, dripping with blood, weapons in her hands, ready for more.

  She heads for Gibson, eyes fixed on him. Her remaining hand, closing and opening, closing and opening. I know what she used to do to those she found responsible for wronging her. I wonder how deeply set that is inside her.

  I step in front of Gibson, put myself between them. “Please,” I say. “No more.” I don’t know if she’s killed anyone inside. I know that it’s quiet in there. I wonder what ended the fighting and yet I really don’t want to know.

  “He ruined me,” she spits, “who I was.” Everything about her scares me: the look in her eyes, the gravel in her throat. But I stand firm, feet planted, and even as the sand whips into us, into my eyes, I don’t blink. I feel Gibson tremble behind me and I stare at Rex’s eyes. I let her know that she will not kill him. Not today.

  She drops her shoulders. She holds her arm, the stump of what Agatha took from her, that I was so complicit in her losing; she turns, looks down the road out of town.

  She starts to walk. I don’t know how far she’ll get without help, in this heat, this storm. We’re not far from the re-breather cabinet, so I let go of Gibson, who slumps to the ground. I run to the box and take as many re-breathers as I can carry and some bottles of water as well. There are backpacks here for when we’re working further away from Pine City. I grab a couple of them and I stuff them full of anything we might need on our journey. No sense in leaving anything behind.

  When I get back, Gibson has already gone back inside the facility. Jonah is waiting at the side of the road. He is scratching at his neck, his only tell; he remembers something, even if he claims that he doesn’t. I can’t tell if the redness in his eyes is from the sand or not.

  “Gibson told me to leave,” Jonah says. “He said that he doesn’t want me here anymore.”

  “It’s for the best,” I tell him, but it feels wrong. Jonah is coming with me but it’s not his choice. I think about reaching for his hand, for his skin—using the warmth of it to comfort me even in this heat—but he holds his arms close to his side, his head down. He doesn’t look at me.

  We walk away from the facility, toward where Rex is fading into the distance, framed by the haze of the heat coming from the road. I want Jonah to remember. He will, once he’s out of this place, once he’s had a couple of nights’ sleep without the conditioning. He’ll remember everything about who he is. Who I am.

  Of course he will.

  YOU ARE NOW LEAVING PINE CITY, the sign says. Rex stoops by the side of the road and grabs a rock in her one good hand. She walks up to the sign and swings the rock hard, denting the sign. She beats it again, over and over, until the sign bends back on its supports; until the letters painted onto it are so badly scratched they can’t be read anymore
, until the metal starts to tear and her knuckles are bloody and torn.

  PART

  THREE

  ELEVEN

  Way back when I was a child, I got sick. I caught a fever so bad (to hear my mother and Agatha tell the story when I was older) that I was as close to death as you can be without having a knife in your chest. They took me to the coldest place on Australia that they could find—the mouth of the arboretum stream—and they sat with me for hours on end, soaking me in the water then lifting me out, letting me shiver myself dry before starting again. My mother said the water would evaporate from my skin, my temperature was so high. For a time, she said, I was the warmest thing on the whole of Australia—engines, forges, everything included. But I didn’t die. I survived that heat.

  My mother told me that she knew that if I could survive that sickness, I could survive pretty much anything.

  The blood smeared across Rex’s shoulder has dried. At a glance it looks like the plates of soil on the side of the road: smooth then cracked, like there are rifts underneath it pulling it apart. The ground changes as we walk. Lumps of clay turn to dust, kicking up clouds as we tread along, splitting beneath our weight. I feel heavier, that’s for certain; it’s the heat and how tired I am, how difficult the walking is. Gibson hasn’t followed us or sent anybody after us, which is something. We’re prisoners, though. According to those in charge, we’re dangerous. We should be punished. Gibson must have surmised that we’ll die out here.

  There are moments when I think that’s a safe assumption.

  “We go this way,” Rex says, the first words she’s uttered since we left. I watch her as we walk. Her handless arm lies flush across her body, as if there’s a sling supporting it. She pulls her re-breather off to give herself a break, to try and choke her way through the gritty hotness of the air instead. Jonah is refusing protection entirely. I don’t know why, and it infuriates me. Freckled and shiny, his skin has turned a deep red. Sweat beads on his forehead. It’s as if he’s punishing himself. I’ve seen that in him before. But that’s his choice. I can’t protect him from himself.