by Jason Letts
Her harsh tone seemed to sting everyone’s ears. Then she suddenly turned up the path like she’d been slapped in the face, climbing a few steps and vanishing around a corner. Vern, dumbstruck, looked at the rest of the group scattered around the area.
“Come on, I can’t be the bad guy here, right? Nobody else wanted to voice their opinion?” he wondered.
Clearing his throat, Chucky started up the path after Mira.
“I’m gonna, well, you know,” he said, excusing himself.
Leaving the group behind, he followed Mira’s path. The wind returned, and he rubbed his arms to try and get some of the heat back. He understood that if the only thing Mira could do to help her family was walk, she’d want to keep walking, but there was something else he needed to talk to her about. He felt nervous knowing if he explained himself the wrong way, it would cause a bigger problem than it was. He only needed to clear things up, and he wished he could do so without putting her under any more stress, if it were possible for him to stress her at all.
Coming around another bend, he saw Mira perched alongside a cliff face cluttered with plants and trees. She looked through a hole in the foliage, a natural window, toward the steeper mountains to the north. They were miles and miles away, and anything on them was just a speck, but there was no doubt what she was searching for. Chucky’s next step snapped a stick, making Mira flinch and turn back to him.
“Hi, did I do something wrong?” she said, sounding tired.
“Sorry about scaring you like that. I didn’t mean it,” he said.
“We’re not dressed appropriately for this elevation. We were foolish to think these uniforms would be enough if it got colder.”
The window in the brush distracted her, and she turned away from him to glance through it once again. They had so few chances to speak privately or enjoy private moments, and it pained him when they didn’t take advantage of them. It seemed to crystallize what was really important to her, and in this case it was the uniforms or the weather and not him.
He could still see in her the girl he admired with the pink knit cap in the middle of the creaky senior schoolhouse with the snowdrifts outside. But whenever he saw her in his mind, she was always remote. He still could never see himself beside her.
“Mira, can we please talk for a minute?”
Bashfully, she turned from the window with her eyes to the ground.
“I’m sorry if I came off as harsh. It’s just frustrating. I hadn’t planned for this!”
“No, we all know how important this is, and we all want to see your family recovered. You don’t have to question that. But I’m talking about something else,” he said.
Mira raised her eyes to look at him, really looking at him for the first time in the conversation. It always gave him a charge when she did. He thought her to be very pretty, even though she was not considered to be the pretty one.
“Oh,” she said, but he couldn’t tell if that was a blank recognition of his intention or a question inviting him to go on. Either way, he had no choice but to do so.
“I’ve been thinking about something you said. You wanted to be pure and perfect with nothing but your ideas. I need to know how I fit into that,” he said.
“Well I haven’t been doing a very good job of acting like that, have I?” she asked, conjuring a wry smile. “I want to be true to myself, authentic, and finally accept who I am. Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
“I need to know what you want me for, what you want me to do,” he said, almost interrupting her. It pained him to speak so directly, but there didn’t seem to be any other way around it. Either it would get said or it wouldn’t, and missing the chance to know would be too much to bear.
“Oh, Chucky,” she said, her eyebrows dropping out of concern. She took his hand and held it in hers. “I can’t tell you the answer to that. Please don’t fit neatly into my equation or be a cog in the machine of my life. You’re the one who’s supposed to be teaching me, remember? Because I don’t have any idea what I’m doing.”
And Chucky smiled, knowing she was right. Even though it made him feel better to talk about it, he was foolish to think she would be able to give him a few orders that he could faithfully execute. He had to be the answer to the question of how they functioned together. Still with his hand in hers, she pulled away to cast another glance between the trees at the rocky mountainside beyond.
“They’re out there, somewhere, right now. And if we don’t get this right then they’ll be lost forever. Am I being naïve to think I can hold onto my ideals and still get them back?”
Chucky tugged on her arm and pulled her close to him for a hug. Wrapping his arms around her back, he could’ve easily lifted her off the ground, and he wished he could do so and take her right away from all of her problems. But there was no escape from the course they had started on. It would have to be followed through to the end.
“There is one thing you can do,” Mira said, laying her head on his chest. Her arms squeezed him tightly. “Please don’t let me be wrong.”
Jeana rose from her stone seat, elbowing Jeremy next to her rather than getting any closer to the fire. It was cold, and there wasn’t much vegetation around, but she saw a bush peeking out from around the corner and started across the gravelly mountainside to it.
“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?” Neeko howled from his spot on the other side of the fire. Unnerved, Jeana spun around on the spot and voiced her frustration.
“I’m going to relieve myself before it gets dark. What, do you want to watch? Then give me a break!”
“I know an escape attempt when I see one,” he shot back. “And it always starts with some likely excuse like that. Well, it’s not going to work on me.”
Jeana took a few steps at him, not at all giving in to his insinuations.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not trying to escape! We’re just waiting out this temporary inconvenience. So give me one minute and I’ll be right back.”
She turned around and continued on to the relative privacy that the bush around a corner could offer, but Neeko stood up to hound after her.
“You can’t fool me!” he started, but soon turned to the rest of the group when he realized they would be his only audience. “I know you know we’re serious about what we’re doing. And nothing’s going to stop us from carrying out our plans. But you know we can’t just let you go after it’s all over, so you’ll be looking for any chance to get away you can.”
Gloria and Jeremy watched him enthusiastically, and it looked like they might start clapping. But Kevin could barely keep his eyes open.
“Yeah, but we’re still not,” he shrugged, warming his hands near the fire.
Neeko sat there for a moment, exchanging glances with his comrades, and wondered. If he were in their shoes, and they were going to do to him and his family what he had to do, he would’ve broken for the hills at the blink of an eye.
“You’re not trying to escape? Why not?” he asked, unable to maintain his coveted mean demeanor. Kevin chuckled at his daughter, who had her hair tangled as usual without any discernable expression.
“In the last week, you three managed to get us lost when the directions were to simply head west. You tried to build a shelter like an igloo with sticks, and you’ve spent the rest of the time fighting amongst each other about who had it best back during the glory days of Sunfighter rule. Come on, kids, how long are you really going to be able to keep this up? What do you really think is going to happen when Mira and her friends get here?”
His words perked up Clara, who lifted her head and shook it secretly at him, but no one noticed because Jeana was returning from her brief trip around the corner.
“What are we talking about now? Scoot over. A little more,” she said, reclaiming her seat at Jeremy’s expense. “Is it how big the reward’s gonna be for Mira’s head? I spent some time chasing a reward too, and all I got was you three loons. But maybe if it’s big enough I’ll have
to go after it myself.”
“You’re stupid if you don’t think we’re going to be able to handle them when they get here,” Jeremy said, replying to Kevin. “At any second I could call up a storm cloud’s worth of flies that none of them could stop. Only Aoi can touch Gloria, and none of them will be able to see Neeko. We’re invincible together.”
Jeana chuckled at her husband, who smiled back.
“One of my favorite memories is of Mira at six years old. Using Widget’s Manuals of Science, she was doing an experiment on the genetic structure of fruit flies. She had separated them according to their different characteristics—she tried to show me with a microscope, but I for sure couldn’t see any difference—and she said she was going to breed them for fifty generations and by the end the thickness of their eggs would diminish. Why, of all things, right? But she was gung-ho about it. Do you remember, honey? There were bottles everywhere, and so many of those flies escaped. But by the end she was jumping up and down because she’d done it. Fifty generations. Six years old. That’s the kind of tactical thinking you’re up against.”
Clara again started shaking her head, and it looked like she was twitching. Because of the fire and her place on the opposite side, her parents didn’t get her signal to stop.
“She always was an impressively bright child,” Kevin added.
“At that age, all I was doing was trying to get candy into my mouth,” Gloria said, a little taken aback.
“Have you got something to say?” Neeko asked Clara with a sudden sharpness, noticing her strange behavior. The figure of her projection started to appear behind her, which had come to indicate she was about to speak.
“Come now, let’s practice using your voice,” Jeana said, encouraging her daughter, who let the projection fade away. Clara looked at them through her bangs, appearing still and solemn unlike the raging figure hidden within her mind.
“It sounds nice,” she said, her real voice scratchy and hoarse. “I ’member when I was six. He said time’d come to start the war. I didn’t know but to follow him, me and the others he’d found. I made myself the red armor. We attacked the first village. Felt like a game cuz I couldn’t get hurt, and nothing was real cuz I wasn’t even there. I was six the first time I made myself a sword and…”
A log from the fire shifted and made a snapping sound. Jeana and Kevin looked into the writhing flames, and Clara put her head down too. For their captors, the growing sense of unease had become unmistakable. Neeko caught eyes with Gloria and Jeremy, and he pondered whether or not the three of them could even defeat their three captives if they decided to rise up against them. A surge of rage gripped him, and he hopped up from his seat and leapt at Clara, gritting his teeth as he grabbed her arm and forced her to look at him.
“What are they going to do when they get here? What’s their plan? I know you know. You have to tell us!”
He squeezed her arm as hard as he could, hoping the bone would snap under his pressure. She maintained the same calm reserve though, looking back at him as though the feelings of her body barely even registered.
“There ain’t nothing you can do to me I ain’t already done to somebody else. Whatever punishment you got, I know I’d deserve it.”
He gave her arm one last hard squeeze before letting go. Checking the spot where his hand had been, he looked for bruises or damage to the skin. It looked fine.
“Either of you two have anything you want to tell us,” he said, gesturing to the parents over the fire. “You’ll wish you did, because we’re not about to give this up without a fight!”
“What are we going to do?” Gloria asked him point blank in front of the whole group. He wished she’d just kept her mouth shut rather than try to expose him.
“We’re going to do what we set out to do,” he said, picking at his teeth with his fingernail, a nervous habit. He wished he had something more intimidating to say, but it was a lot better than saying he didn’t know what to do. At least Jeremy had enough sense not to blab about another one of his plans. It looked like his last one turned out not to be good for anything. The last thing they needed was for their captors to find out how they would sort through the mess they were in, but it turned out the bad part of taking hostages was how they had to be around all the time. It made it such a pain to talk.
No one said much of anything for the rest of the evening, and Neeko, Gloria, and Jeremy anxiously waited for bedtime with the understanding they would make time to talk as soon as the Ipswiches were asleep.
After hours had passed and there could be no mistake they had gone under, Neeko crawled from his cramped spot near the fire and beckoned his companions to follow him some distance along the embankment. It was a shame to leave the fire behind, but they would have to tolerate the shivering to make absolutely sure no one heard them.
“What are we going to do?” Gloria asked, her arms crossed in front of her. She had bags under her eyes and looked altogether exhausted. For his part, Neeko didn’t need to sleep much, but that didn’t make their predicament seem any rosier.
“That’s a good question, Jeremy!” he growled through his teeth, struggling to keep his voice down. “You got us into this mess with your terrible plan. And now we’re just waiting here for the axe to fall. They’re not going to let us get away with this. We have to do something!”
Jeremy scowled and sucked on his saliva like he was going to spit. A few flies crawled across his face and down his neck, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Oh, it’s my plan again? How nice of you to give me the credit. And I’ll have you know things are not nearly as bad as you’ve been duped into thinking they are. They’re trying to scare us into making a mistake, and it looks like it’s worked on the two of you. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something to shake things up, make sure we have the advantage over Mira,” he said, running his hand through his greasy, knotty hair.
“Like what? What can we do? We have to stay here and guard our bait,” Gloria said.
“No, we don’t. Now how far away do you think they are?” Jeremy asked.
“It’s impossible to tell,” Neeko scoffed. “Who knows how fast they’ve been walking or if they even made it into the mountains yet?”
“Wrong,” Jeremy stated. He slowly raised his hand into the air, palm up. Keeping his coal black eyes on them, he posed for a moment until something met his hand. Lowering his arm, he revealed the moth that had landed on it. It scuttled in circles until taking to his arm and crawling inside the loose underside of his sleeve. Neeko watched the little bulge move around his upper arm and shoulder, and it made his stomach turn.
“They’ve made it to the high mountains, and they’d reach us by midday tomorrow. We’d have our glorious last stand, and then they would find some way to squash us. That’s what we have to look forward to, but we can’t shy away and run. No, we have to be even bolder,” he intimated with a long grin.
“We’re going to go now, aren’t we?” Gloria asked, warming to the idea.
“If someone’s counting on you to do something for their predictions, you’ve got to do the opposite. They expect us to stay here and wait for them to show, so we’ll go to them and get there before they’ve even woken up,” Jeremy said.
“Oh, this is going to be beautiful,” Neeko beamed, finally getting it. “They’ll just be sleeping there, helpless. We can do whatever we want. You know, I’m glad we brainstormed like this. We come up with our best ideas when we put our heads together.”
“Right. Now let’s go. I can’t wait any longer!” Gloria said, maneuvering off to the side.
Neeko took one last look back at the fire and their sleeping captives. They were hunched on the ground against a bag of leaves. They looked pathetic, and Neeko had intended to eliminate them, but maybe they had served their purpose. It would be more fun to show them their daughter’s head anyway. That would teach them how good for nothing it was to think fifty generations ahead. Turning away, he started after Gloria and Jeremy,
who traversed the mountainside by the dim glow of the web above on their way to one of the uncountable peaks speckling the landscape.
After hiking all night, descending one mountain only to climb another, they finally made it to a makeshift campsite lodged on the shelf of another towering heap of rock. Neeko had spent most of the time worrying about whether or not they’d make it before the sun came up. This whole thing would be for nothing if they got there and everyone was milling about having breakfast.
But when their eyes drifted over the rocky ledge, they saw a campfire, a small group of sleepers snuggled around it on comfy-looking mats with blankets, and one guard who sat on a rock staring blankly at the flames. It was Will who guarded the others, and Jeremy had to hold Gloria back from tumbling onto the ledge and tackling him. Shaking with fury, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him.
“How are we going to do this?” Jeremy asked, holding Gloria back by the shoulders.
“It’s the same as last time, right? Don’t worry, once the guard is gone it’ll be safe for you two to come over. Hold her back,” Neeko ordered.
“No! Let me go!” Gloria growled, but Neeko had already vanished and climbed onto the ledge. From this height, he could see the spine of the mountain stretching out for miles. There were few trees and bushes, meaning they could’ve easily been spotted if Will had been watching their side.
But as it was, the light moved through Neeko freely, and the darkness made his shadow indistinguishable. He walked the short distance to Will and the others with ease and confidence. And there they were right in front of him, the whole wretched bunch. He could reach out and touch them, deliver a swift kick to the ribs or a knock on the head. But that’s all he had, one free shot.
He hadn’t seen so many of them since the Battle of Darmen, and it surprised him they hadn’t been killed in the camps. Leaning over Roselyn and Mary, who slept right next to each other, he couldn’t even figure out how those two had survived, let alone those he hadn’t seen.