It bothered him that his mind seemed full of holes and crazy angles, but Ruiz told him he was getting better, and Nam would nod agreement before going back to the radio.
They were in Western Australia, Myell knew. They had been on a ship called the Kamchatka. Their lifeboat and several others had launched when the Roon did something to push the ship out of close proximity. The Kamchatka had suffered some damage but was still in orbit high overhead, on orders from Team Space. Nam talked to them every now and again on the radio. Myell listened, though it was hard for him to maintain focus on the way words worked, the way sentences flowed together and made sense.
He knew it hadn’t always been that way. He remembered living on Fortune, marrying Jodenny, being stationed on the Aral Sea, joining Team Space. But he couldn’t remember what it was like to have words flow out of his mouth like water in a river. Couldn’t remember how to freely express what was going on in his head.
But the pictures … he could see pictures, day and night, pictures even when his eyes were closed, images of ruin and destruction that soaked into his flesh and sank to the bone. He couldn’t shut them off completely no matter how hard he tried. Nam and Ruiz told him that the images weren’t true, that the Roon weren’t attacking.
“They will,” Myell said.
Nam asked, “You’re sure?”
Myell wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
Sitting with Jodenny helped. When she held his hand, the burning cities and charred bodies behind his eyes faded into faint shapes that he could almost ignore. But she was groggy, in pain, fading, and fear made him afraid that just one more of his touches, one hot breath against her face, and she would be lost to him forever.
“Why don’t they come for us?” he asked Nam.
“They are,” Nam said. “But this place was the middle of nowhere even before the Debasement, and it’s taking a long time to muster a land rescue. The Roon have grounded all airships, remember?”
Jodenny, the pregnant passenger, and two of the crew had been injured in the crash. The lifeboat carried plenty of water and food, but the hull was breached and of little protection against the heat of the day. The sunlight was indirect, diffused, victim of Earth’s dirty atmosphere. It hadn’t always been that way, because there was something Nam called the Debasement, which Myell understood to be a bad thing. Nam was in charge, but he was different from how Myell remembered him. Silent, mostly, his face drawn in deep lines.
“He’s worried,” Jodenny explained. “We’re stuck out here and he holds himself responsible for all these people.”
Karl raised his head from the nest in Jodenny’s blankets. He too had been damaged in the crash, his fur singed and one paw bent. Often he curled up in Myell’s lap, and Myell would pet him for hours.
Commander Nam sometimes talked about going for help. Ruiz told him he would die in the heat, or from snakes, or from any of the wild dingoes that circled the lifeboat at night. Because of the Debasement there were other things out there too, radiation-besotted, deformed, snarling. Nam scoffed at that notion, but on watch, at night, he was careful to keep the lifeboat’s mazers close at hand.
On their third day in the desert Jodenny was groggier than usual, but she did open her eyes long enough to ask Myell how he felt.
“Hot,” he said, which was the truth.
She gave him a crooked smile. “Memories all come back?”
He didn’t think so.
“If I have to go…” Jodenny said, and swallowed hard. She touched his face with trembling fingers. “If I have to leave you, it’s not because I want to, okay?”
“You can’t leave,” he said, stretching out beside her on the deck, scooting as close as he dared. “Can’t.”
She fingered his hair. “Sometimes we have to,” she said, her eyes bright. “Sometimes we can’t help it.”
Myell whispered, “I won’t let you.”
That night, at sunset, two rescue teams arrived from Carnarvon. The crew cheered and even Jodenny mustered a smile. They crammed themselves into the flatbed vehicles and left all their gear behind. The flits turned west, toward the red sky, and in the excitement Karl was left behind with the wreck. By the time Myell remembered him, it was too late to turn back.
* * *
Jodenny was in a hospital in hell. The Carnarvon clinic hadn’t been fully stocked or staffed before the Roon arrival and it certainly wasn’t now. All forty beds were occupied by the ill or elderly, most struck down by dysentery or chronic illnesses. Other patients lay in cots in the hallways. The medical crew from the Kamchatka’s lifeboat were helping out the Aboriginal staff as best they could. If not for Dr. Ruiz, the only physicians would be a dentist and an unlicensed podiatrist. Post-Debasement Earth wasn’t strict about medical staffing standards, especially with a nine-hundred-kilometer stretch to the nearest major city.
The hospital’s air-conditioning didn’t work, which made every room an oven. Ice was in short supply. The power generators were rationed, four hours off for every four hours on. Flies and roaches were a problem, as was overall sanitation. Nam had mustered up some volunteers to tackle the septic system, which was overtaxed and badly in need of new parts. Back on Fortune, it would take a few hours to get the parts made. On pre-Debasement Earth, it might take years.
“I’m afraid their bone knitter isn’t working either,” Ruiz said.
Jodenny squinted up at him from her lumpy, sweaty bed. Painkillers kept her broken hip numb, but could do nothing about other discomforts. “Can it be fixed?”
Ruiz squeezed the bridge of his nose. “No. We’re trying to find another nearby, but the likeliest source is Perth. None of the flits around here could make it that far without running out of fuel. The Roon still aren’t letting ships take off.”
So she was to be laid up, crippled, for the foreseeable, horrendous future.
Myell came to Jodenny every day. His speech had gotten better since the crash but he looked haggard, weary, lost. Nam brought them both as much food and water as he could scavenge.
She said, “I’m glad you’re here. I know you must be tempted to go off down to Perth, to do what you can about the Roon. Thank you for all your help.”
He shrugged. “Least I could do.”
Jodenny wasn’t sure where Myell went when he wasn’t with her, but sometimes he came to her with hair stiffened by sea salt, his face burned from wild solar rays.
“What are you doing out there?” she would ask.
He shook his head and kissed her cheek, which only made her worry more. The town wasn’t safe. At night there were often gunshots, drunken singing, fistfights. The volunteer police force was vastly outnumbered by locals, stragglers, scavengers, and outback marauders looking for a place to lay up while the Roon ships roamed overhead. One tiny, thin strip of civilization, Jodenny thought, losing the battle against enemies outside and inside.
The clinic had no wallvids, but someone had a radio. According to news reports out of Perth, the Roon were still methodically scanning the whole of Earth. No more missiles had launched their way, no Team Space ships had tried another close approach, and no communications had been established.
“But the Kamchatka’s still up there,” Nam told her during his next visit. “I imagined that passenger petition has grown pretty long by now.”
Jodenny asked, “Do you know where Terry is?”
“At the beach. I left him there a little while ago. One of the med techs is watching him.”
“The beach?” Jodenny struggled to make sense of that. “Why?”
“He goes swimming. Throws himself into the waves and stays in the water for hours.”
“He doesn’t like the ocean. Never has.”
“I know.”
After that, Jodenny dreamed of sharks. Their fins sliced through the surf and their teeth bit into Myell’s leg but it was her hip that flared into agony. She woke in the middle of the night, coated with sweat, biting into her lip. The med tech was late with the painkillers.
/> Jodenny turned her face into her pillow and wept.
She didn’t see Myell again until that afternoon, and she begged him to stay with her. “Please,” Jodenny said. “I don’t want you going to the ocean.”
“The water makes it easier,” he said.
“Makes what easier?”
He waved his hand in the air. “Everything.”
She persuaded him to stay the night on a cot that Nam found and set up near the window. Jodenny’s roommate, an old woman with pneumonia who never received visitors, was in no position to object. The room smelled of urine and the night was like a furnace, the sky lit by fires from looting on Carnarvon’s south side.
“Kay,” he whispered in the orange-tinged darkness.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I wasn’t always this way.”
“Which way?”
“Broken.”
“You’re not broken.” Jodenny peered at him as best she could. “We’re just going through a rough patch.”
He made a noise that might have been a laugh, then was silent.
Jodenny dozed fitfully. Dulled pain made her clench and unclench her fists. She was trying not to think of the Kamchatka, the Roon, the dying old woman in the next bed over. The smell of sickness wafted through the hospital, along with rot and bleach and blood and feces, and she wanted to scream, but didn’t have the energy.
Sometime before dawn, she was woken from a restless sleep by Myell. He was standing beside her bed, his hair rumpled, his expression serene. She thought he might have been kissing her in his sleep.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I have to go,” he said, almost a whisper. “I know what to do. How to stop them.”
He sounded utterly confident. And that confidence scared her more than anything else could have done. She said, “Terry, no.”
He kissed her, openmouthed, his lips warm and convincing, his hand cradling her head.
“Look at the ceiling,” he said.
Jodenny tried to focus. All she saw were cracks in the plaster and a light bulb that didn’t work even when the power was on. After a few more seconds of staring she thought she saw some kind of shape, an outline. An egret. She remembered swooping through the air with feathers in her nose and hands. The exhilaration of flight, and the bird’s cry when it was attacked.
“It’s a crocodile,” Myell said.
“No, it’s not,” she said, and grabbed his hand. “There’s nothing up there.”
His gaze lifted. “I didn’t tell you. I met crocodiles. Dozens of them. Free-not-chained. She kissed me in the ocean, and I couldn’t stop her.”
Myell’s skin was warm, his eyes wide. Jodenny thought maybe he was sleepwalking, though he’d never done that before. They were so far gone from normal that anything was possible.
“Can we talk about it after breakfast?” she asked. “Can you wait that long?”
He bent very close to her. “Do you trust me?”
Jodenny trusted her old husband, her husband before Garanwa had done whatever he’d done, before brain damage and trauma and whatever else had gone wrong in his head. This man couldn’t even tie his own shoes, but he liked to throw himself into the sea.
“Don’t go,” she begged.
Myell watched the ceiling. “Now it’s a gecko,” he said. “It’s leaving. I have to follow it.”
He kissed her again, brief and fleeting. Then he walked out of the room.
“Terry!” she shouted, trying to rise. “Come back! Get back here!”
Her frantic shouting eventually brought an overworked Aboriginal nurse, and the nurse finally found Nam.
“You have to stop him,” Jodenny said.
“Stop him from what?” Nam asked, irritated.
“I don’t know.” Despite her broken hip, Jodenny started to pull herself up. She would throw herself to the floor and crawl across the outback if it meant stopping Myell from whatever craziness was going on in his head. “I have to go after him.”
Nam pushed her back down. “Don’t be stupid.”
“He’s out there, alone! He can’t defend himself. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Tears stung her eyes, and angrily she wiped them away. “He’ll die, and you know it.”
Nam grimaced. “If I leave you, you might die.”
Which was true enough, though hard to admit. Nam had brought her food, had changed her stinking bedpan, was there when the med techs and Ruiz couldn’t be.
Jodenny raised her head in challenge. “I’m not the one with the power to summon a token, maybe control the whole Wondjina network.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t, but you do.”
Nam gazed past her to the dirty window.
“I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll stop him. But not because of that.”
The why didn’t matter.
“Find him,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Myell walked out of Carnarvon just before dawn, following the paths of the Dreamtime gods.
The town was not quite in ruins, because it hadn’t been much to begin with. Back before the Debasement it had been a quaint outpost between the Indian Ocean and the Gascoyne River. But the long decades since had been rough. The trees and shrubs had mostly died off, and the tourists were long gone. The people who lived there had no place else to go and not much to hope for. The town was all they had.
And now Myell was leaving it. Leaving, probably never to return.
He had spent days by the sea, wading in the water, trying to talk to crocodiles. He had clutched Yambli’s dilly bag so tightly that his knuckles ached, but the totems gave no answer. He had walked around Carnarvon until every street seemed familiar, every sad building like home. He had wandered through the clinic where Jodenny was, slipping through the rooms like a ghost. Nothing had made a difference, nothing had changed. He was still only half of who he had been. Maybe a third. An illiterate, impaired third, and he suspected that he was even worse than he believed.
Lying awake in Jodenny’s room, the smells and sounds too strong for him to rest, he had peered into the darkness under her bed for hours. Watching shadows, waiting between heartbeats for mental acuity that would not return.
Then the crocodile came slithering across the ceiling. It peered at Myell with eyes darker than the blackness of the room. Its jaws opened, its teeth gnashed—
And Myell was back on Yambli’s beach, the old crone sitting across the fire from him.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He tipped his head back to a sky full of bright stars. The breeze off the ocean was cold and made his arms prickle.
“Waiting,” he replied.
“Waiting for what?” Yambli poked the fire with her stick, sending sparks spiraling into the night.
“I don’t know.” Myell peered into her eyes but saw only his reflection. “There’s no more time, is there? Everything’s going to end.”
Yambli poked him with the stick. He yelped.
“You’ve learned nothing,” she said. “You are Jungali. There is no end, only a beginning.”
A beeping noise brought him back to Jodenny’s hospital room. A nurse paused in the doorway to hush a gib. Myell watched her come in and check on her patients. If she saw him lying awake on the cot, she said nothing.
When the nurse left, her feet disturbed the golden lines glowing on the floor.
Myell sat up slowly. Lines to follow. Garanwa’s station, the ever-changing rooms, the songlines. He was in Old Australia, land of the Wondjina, and he’d never thought to look for the songlines under his feet.
He closed his eyes and saw them weaving and unweaving beneath the hospital, beneath the town, all the lines, branching out like dried-up streams through the land, his to follow.
The hardest part had been saying goodbye to Jodenny.
The second hardest part was trying to persuade Nam not to join him.
He hadn’t expected Nam to find him, never mind f
ollow him, but when Myell reached a road that led east he heard footsteps behind. The sky was still gray with night. The drunks and rioters were sleeping, leaving the town quiet and still.
“Go back, Commander,” Myell said, without breaking stride.
“The sea’s the other way,” Nam said.
“Not going there.”
“Really? Going somewhere else?” Nam sounded out of breath. “Your wife was wondering. You left her without much explanation.”
The gecko songline was pulling him now, strong like a magnet, always here, always waiting for him.
“What’s at the end of this road you’re traveling?” Nam asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You think maybe we could bring water, some food?”
Myell frowned. “You can’t come. It’s not your journey.”
Nam pulled on the bandanna around his neck. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in a while, and there was stubble on his chin. “Well, maybe, maybe not, but I promised Jodenny I’d come with you. She’s a little worried.”
The air smelled burnt, rotten, but there was a cleaner wind out there, singing over the countryside. Myell stopped and met Nam’s gaze.
“I don’t know what’s there,” he said, struggling again with words, their meanings, their shifting vagueness. “But it’s not for you.”
“So when we get there, I’ll wait outside.”
Myell said nothing.
Nam held his right hand up in a pledge. “You’re not going alone, Terry.”
Myell stared. Nam had never used his given name before.
“I’m coming with you,” Nam said. “For more reasons than I can say. At the end of the world, it’s rare that you get to pick your own exit.”
Myell resumed walking. Nam followed.
The sun came up in the hazy east. The heat came up, as well. The road out of Carnarvon was littered for the first few kilometers with abandoned cars, rusty vehicles, old jeeps. The pickings were slim, no hope of water or food. Nam found a crushed bush hat and dropped it on Myell’s head.
“Keep your brain from frying,” Nam explained. “More than it has already, that is.”
The debris gave way to acres of refuse that the townsfolk had hauled out in years past, before the effort became too much. Steel and glass, and plastic garbage bags, and small animals that scurried in between them, but the worst thing was the smell, and the flies that bit at their clothes.
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