by Nirina Stone
Gideon’s safe though as he can see. The old man is flipping switches and moving parts around in the console of the car. Then he jumps out the side, pats Henry on the shoulder. “Good going, mate,” he says. “Too bad about the water. Engine’s defo not working, either.”
Great, Henry thinks. All that for nothing.
He turns towards where Sidney waits, watching them with massive eyes and her hands on the glass. “We’ll have to break the brick,” Gideon says.
Chapter Forty One
Sidney
AS THEY WALK THROUGH the glass door, Sidney takes a close look at Henry to make sure that snake didn’t get him. She grabs his arm, looks it up and down, then turns him around to study his shoulders.
She was on the exact opposite side of the car when he was attacked. She saw the serpent raise its head up, up, up into the air, looked like a good two or three stories from her vantage point, but she could hardly see the top of Henry’s head. Then the snake bore its fangs and struck out at him as Sidney yelled out. She was about ready to run out the glass enclosure after him, knowing she’d get in massive trouble if she even survived the decision, but seeing what was clearly the snake’s blood and guts on the earth, then Gideon giving her two quick thumbs up from the car telling her all was fine. Well, maybe not fine, but fine enough that she didn’t have to get herself in trouble out there. Still, having to wait in here while Henry took on that—thing—by himself was too much for her. Next time, she tells herself, next time I’m definitely heading out too. I can’t just watch another friend die. Friend—not a word she would have assigned to him mere days ago, but a friend he is now, she decides. Perhaps not as precious as Petra was to her, but still important.
She’s not sure what to call Gideon quite yet but he’s proving to be useful out here in the desert. Despite her growing reliance on him, she can’t put her finger on it, but a part of her still doesn’t trust him. After all, weren’t his granddaughters weird? Dangerous to boot? Not as dangerous as that snake though, she thinks, as she drops to look at Henry’s legs, to make sure it didn’t catch him there.
Henry pulls away from her, laughing. “I’m fine Sidney,” he says as he swats her away. “It didn’t get me. I’m fine!”
“What happened out there?” she asks. “Why isn’t the car starting?”
“Well for one thing, the water’s gone,” Henry sighs. “That reptile shredded our water container. Gideon reckons we need to bring this brick down, now. That’s our only option.”
She doesn’t understand what one thing has to do with the other and looks at Gideon with a tilt of her head and a raised eyebrow.
Explain yourself.
He nods his head. “Indeed,” he says. “We’ll need to get through here and try to salvage something in the wrecks.”
Clearly he knows more about this place than he’d let on. “What’s behind this brick?” Henry asks as he places a hand on the structure. It looks like it’s been a part of this place for years—it’s certainly not new.
“Remnants,” Gideon says, “of another dome that failed—that broke. They left this portion here as a rest area for weary travelers, back in the day when there was more traveling done out here. The rest of it was covered up because of a particularly bad flu outbreak.”
“I’ve never heard of this place,” Henry says. “I thought there were only three domes in Allenda: Blue, Red, and Gold. What is this one?”
“Oh it was eons ago,” Gideon says with a wave of his hand as though it’s unimportant. “It’s clean now, anyway.”
Sidney catches on that Gideon hasn’t answered Henry’s question and realizes something doesn’t add up, the same moment Henry turns to frown at her. She shrugs her shoulders in response.
Nayne had always told her the flu wasn’t that big a deal, anyway. Something that could be cured with a simple medicine. Besides, she knows she has it already, she’s had it since since she was in Nayne’s stomach. If Gideon thinks this place is safe enough for them to scavenge around for a bit, who is she to say otherwise? It occurs to her he hasn’t specifically said it’s safe but she’s learnt there isn’t much safe about the Allenda she’s known all her life. Still, maybe they’ll find water.
Gideon and Henry start to chip at the brick with small hammers he’d taken out of the car. He hands her another tool, a simple metal piece with a smooth curve on the end the ends in two tapered bits. “Don’t need anything sharper than these,” he says. “The brick should break apart easily, long as you aim for the seams.”
They work at it for an hour or so, then take a small break to eat and sip tiny sips from their packs. “Only a liter left of the water by my calculations,” Gideon says. Then they get back to it again.
“What are you humming, dear?” Gideon asks Sidney at one point. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it, but the tune comes to her as something Nayne once taught her.
“I think it was called ‘Into The Blue,’” she recollects. “A song that Nayne sang to help me to sleep.”
“How did your Nayne die?”
Images flash through her mind and, like always over the last year, she tries to tamp them down. Usually, she’s capable of keeping herself so busy, or focused on finding the next source of sustenance, she hasn’t really allowed herself to sit and process all of it.
But, watching his intent face on hers, the words automatically flow out and at some point, she doesn’t resist it. In fact, the more she speaks, the more the tightness in her chest loosens. It’s been an ever-present feeling. Sharing the details of the day with him seems to make sense, like it was never a story meant for just her.
“Nayne knew I loved these berries we’d found on the southern end of the Blue Dome,” she says. There were more in the North East but the area was taken over by raiders so they’d stayed away.
“She wanted to surprise me so we were traveling farther away than we had in awhile. She’d packed us a small picnic and everything—she’d made what she called ‘deviled eggs’, with some spring onions and lemon we’d found the week before. It was delicious.
“It didn’t take us long to get to the berries. Luckily, the birds and lizards didn’t have a taste for them or it would have been empty. We plucked so many of them, our fingertips turned purple.
“And that’s when it showed up—the assassin bot that had tried to hunt down Nayne since she was first pregnant with me. It just stood there, thirty meters away from us. I guess it was scanning like they do. She didn’t have to say a word, coz we’d done this so many times before. We dropped everything, turned West and ran, I was slightly ahead of her.”
“Why West? I mean, why that direction, specifically?” Henry asks.
“It was her rule,” Sidney explains, “because she knew most times we wouldn’t even have time to coordinate where to go. So, any time we’d have to run, we’d head West. We’d try to get as high up as possible from the things. They can run fast but for whatever reason, they have a more difficult time on stairs than we do. Don’t ask me why. So, we’d run west, find the tallest building we could find and run to the top as fast as we could. “What we would do once we got there always depended on whether there was an intersecting floor to another building. More often than not, we’d just find an empty apartment to lock ourselves in, where we could put together blasters made out of the silver, and blow the bots out of our way.
This time though, we weren’t so lucky, we ran all the way to the roof.”
Henry’s eyes grow wide. He must know what’s at the tops of all buildings in the Blue Dome. No way out but down. He watches her as he bites down on his top lip as if he wants her to stop talking, but he doesn’t say a word and continues to chip away at the brick. It doesn’t matter anyway. She knows there’s no way to stop this now. She replayed the scenario over and over in her head, and always fantasizes that, somehow, they made it off that rooftop, both alive and well, laughing at what a close call that was. Like all the other times before.
But when Nayne locked the door to
the roof and took off her bag to put together her blaster and she asked Sidney to do the same, Sid reached behind her to find—nothing.
Her eyes grew big as she fought the tears. She had several blasters in there too. Nayne’s ones wouldn’t be enough to take care of this thing, would they?
When she froze in her spot, Nayne looked up at her.
“What is it, Sid?”
“I—I left my knapsack,” she’d whispered, and Nayne had sat back on her haunches as all the blood in her face drained.
Sidney remembers this so vividly, she lets the tears flow freely and she gasps for air. “I didn’t bring my bag,” she explains to Henry. “I left it where the berries were. We just jumped up, moved so fast, I wasn’t thinking....”
Henry makes a move as if to hold her in his arms, but she steps away, moving closer to her portion of the brick. The story’s not done yet. No, not yet.
“We put together as big an explosion as we could, but half an hour later, the bot was there. It broke its way through the door and came straight at us. Nayne pushed me behind her—they never shot Nayne directly, they knew she was healthy. They were only ever after me. Still, the thing about Nayne was—even knowing that these bots were programmed to kill me, she’d always try to talk to them, like they were people. She would try to talk sense into them. It never worked.
“She whispered to me that the moment she said to run, I had to run. I started to argue but she pinched my arm hard and pushed me behind her again. Nayne had never, not a day in her life, ever yelled at me or hurt me. Not even by accident. So the pinch surprised me, but I knew right away that it meant no negotiations, no arguing. So I stopped and braced myself.
“The bot told her to move out of the way but after she tried to talk to it, she sighed and turned around, stared into my eyes. ‘I love you. You must promise me you will always keep running. Never stop running. You live. Never stop running.’ Before I could reply, she grabbed the blaster out of my hand, and held all three on her chest. Then her eyes shifted to the right and she nodded her head in that direction. In her lowest voice, she said, ‘That way. You run that way. Then out the door. Don’t stop running.’
“Then she turned and ran towards the bot at full speed. I turned where she told me to and ran, to hide right behind this large metallic outdoor fan thing.”
She watches Gideon’s face, expecting him to correct her on what the real name of the thing is, but he’s as still as she was on that rooftop.
“When I looked at them again, I could hardly see Nayne, the bot’s back was to me, but her arms wrapped around the thing, and they were grappling. Or wrestling, I don’t know. Then the blasters went off....”
She wants to leave it at that, but for some reason, her mouth keeps moving as she hammers harder at the brick.
“They both went over the edge of the building.”
A gasp from Gideon tells her he’s been listening intently all along. She thought he was preoccupied. Still, she looks for the shame, the panic within her that he’s heard all of this even though she didn’t intend to share so much about Nayne with him. All she feels is empty.
“Oh Sidney,” Henry says, then he does come in closer despite her moving back again. “I’m so sorry you experienced that,” he whispers and his hold tightens. Her tears are free-flowing now as she drops her tools. She knows she can’t say anything else, not for a while. It took several months of utter silence before she could start talking again—to the birds, to the buildings.
No, she wants to say as she pushes him away, there’s so much more. You’d think it ends there, but no. She remains silent instead.
What she doesn’t tell Henry and Gideon is, when she finally had the courage to head down the stairs, she wanted so much to turn and run West, like they always did. It was already dark, she knew the acid rains were coming soon. So she had to get off the roof though she knew it would take several hours before a new bot was deployed to come after her. She also had to know—had to see—even though Nayne would not have wanted her to.
So she turned to where they’d fallen. The blood—all the blood—she’d never seen so much blood like that, not even the time when they’d managed to hunt down a wild dog to eat. Nayne had cleaned it so well, there was hardly a mess at all, but this—
Then she heard a moan and ran up to the dark mound on the ground. It was a twenty story building—how in the world could Nayne survive such a fall? She was lying on top of the remnants of the bot, her legs twisted in a way that told Sidney she’d never walk again, least of all run.
Sidney dropped to her hands and knees and wailed. “Naaaaaayne,” she said, to more moans from her mother’s body. It was only getting darker, telling her the rains would come within the hour, she had to get her under cover.
Wincing at every moan of Nayne’s obvious pain, Sidney put her arms under Nayne’s and pulled her into the front of the building. There’s got to be a way, she told herself over and over and over again. We’ll make splints—or something—out of that bot. That’s it! She ran out the doors again once Nayne was securely inside, then she grabbed the bot’s broken body, all blown up to the point she couldn’t tell any of its limbs apart. But it was too heavy, she couldn’t carry it, couldn’t even drag it over the naturally slippery ground under the blood. Still, she pulled and pulled, yelling out for strength. It didn’t budge.
As she noticed the gray clouds come in, she ran, just in time to make it back through the front doors of the building before the acid came gushing down.
Then she made it to Nayne who was moaning something in her direction.
She sat listening to the rain, and to Nayne dying. “Please, Sidney,” she was saying. “You have to kill me.”
“No, Nayne!” she yelled. “No! You’ll get better. Remember that time after we both got sick, we thought we were going to die. We thought—but you’ll get better! You always get better. I’ll give you something for the pain.”
She rummaged through Nayne’s knapsack, all bloodied up but she knew just some salt, some lemon juice, some time in the sun would clean it up. She looked for medicine, and found one of their last remaining containers of pain medicine. She poured some into her hand, looked at Nayne. More, I need more. She shook three more out, and put it all into Nayne’s mouth.
At first she thought Nayne would just spit it out—that’s always the way she was, always wanting to save everything for Sidney to use at a later time. “I can handle all the pain in the world,” she’d once said to Sidney, “long as I know you’re okay. Long as I can take care of you.”
But Nayne swallowed the pills eagerly. Then she said, “You have to give me the whole bottle. It won’t work otherwise.”
What? Sidney thought. Nayne always told her, only one or two, three at tops if the pain is that bad. Never more than that, she’d said, or it can cause—
“No, Nayne,” Sidney said, then pulled the bottle back again. “You’ll get through this, Nayne!”
“I won’t Sidney. Please. It’s too much. Let me have the rest of it. You don’t have to watch. You can go upstairs.”
Sidney doesn’t share any of this with Henry and Gideon. She doesn’t want to tell them that it must have been two hours of this before Nayne started yelling at her, getting delusional. Called her ‘selfish’. Called her all sorts of awful things as she wept, still hoping there was a way to fix her.
Finally, Nayne’s hand landed on hers and she said, “It’s okay, Sidney. It’s okay. It will all be okay.”
It felt like days passed. In the morning, she headed out looking for something to use as a splint for Nayne’s legs. They were badly broken though. Finally, that afternoon, as Nayne’s labored breaths came to her and she saw the blood poisoning on her legs, she finally gave her the bottle, opened. “I can’t watch, Nayne,” she said.
Nayne couldn’t answer any more, she simply grabbed the open bottle and popped the rest of the pills, then she closed her eyes through a rattled breath.
“I can’t watch you die,” Si
dney repeated, placing her head on Nayne’s chest. “I can’t.”
When Nayne’s breaths stopped coming, Sidney dragged her still body back outside where the rains would get her. Nayne would hate to know she withered somewhere, she’d want to be cleaned away by the rains.
So Sidney left her exactly where she’d fallen the night before and popped Nayne’s knapsack on her back. She looked up into the sky. It will only be a couple hours before the rains start again, she thought. She couldn’t watch Nayne getting eaten away by the acid. She couldn’t even stay in any of these buildings, they were all too close.
So she took one last look at her nayne, she faced West, and she ran.
Holding Henry, Sidney’s back strains again. Just remembering these things are enough to exhaust her. As for the guilt—well that’s something she reckons will never go away. Henry holds her at arm’s length. “She really loved you, Sidney. Not that one can blame her.”
She doesn’t know what he means by that, but nods. “She really did.” Her voice cracks. “I failed her. So badly.”
The look on Gideon’s face is neutral though he shakes his head from side to side as if to disagree. He says, “The song sounds beautiful. Please don’t stop humming it on my account.” He offers her a warm smile and gets back to work.
There was something about the way he asked her about Nayne that made her wonder what went through his head. Clearly he recognized the song. He seemed surprised that she knew it though, and she wonders why.
As they work away at the structure, they look through small holes and see a vast land ahead of them—definitely more city than anything else. It looks like a smaller version that the Blue Dome had been, though it’s hard to tell from this viewpoint.
Another half hour later and finally, one particular seam in the brick gives away completely, bringing down the entire thing as the three of them jump back, waving away clouds of red dust thrown into the air.
As the brick lays still, the cloaker that renders the hidden dome invisible stays on. From within, they see a large cracked dome above them, covering several kilometers ahead.