by Chad West
She stared at the red semi-circle where the wound had been, then—as he rose—the place she’d burned his back too. It was healed as well. But the sun’s heat wouldn’t let her process what she was seeing, or even conjure a question concerning it. Looking ahead, out across the never-ending desolation before them, everything seemed to be jerking a few inches to the right or left every few seconds. She thought she might pass out.
He took her arm. “You kept me alive. It is being a debt now.”
“Okay.” She took an arid breath and rubbed her eyes, then looked at him. “I’m sorry. I just don’t have any idea what’s going on. Where are we?”
He breathed an unsmiling laugh, still holding his side. “Home, child. This is our home now. Our Queen’s former world, I am believing.” He looked about, his eyes becoming sad. “For us,” he took a moment to catch his breath, “The war is being over.”
***
Lucy’s eyes had fluttered open to Aern blasting Angela to nothing. In the smoke, in the dust, in the confusion, she had slipped past them through the broken wall and ran into the woods until she could run no more. She fell onto the grass, panting. The smell of the earth was redolent, but not as strong as the stench of smoke in her head. She closed her hands over the grass, listening to it snap off into her fingers. She thought of Jonas, trying to wish him there. Then, she was no longer there.
She was a soldier. There were seven others behind her. They pushed through the high grass in a shallow ditch onto the side of a road. They stopped, as quiet as death, examining their surroundings. The first signs of civilization—a barber shop—stood to their right. A body lay on the sidewalk. They knew without looking that it was strapped with explosives. The woman had probably died there waiting on someone to help, some Wraith making her believe she was paralyzed or staked to the ground before leaving her. But she was dead, desiccated even, and that meant the trap was old. They might be free of Fade for a bit longer.
As they stalked through the small town, its stores and homes now mausoleums, the stench became oppressive. Lucy looked at the rest of them through Jonas’ eyes, feeling those weary eyes tense, and pulled the mask from her pack. He’d/She’d had to wear that far too often for her liking in recent months. The Fade’s hold was expanding every day. Three months ago, this area was still a safe haven for humans. Then Fort Caraway got hit, and within a week the Fade had trampled down three counties.
They had gained nothing by murdering the people of this town. (She/he didn’t even know its name.) The Fade had done it because a squad from Caraway had taken out one of their strongholds. It was all a message. Every damn thing they did was a message that they were stronger than the frail, gutless humans.
Lucy took in a great gulp of air, back in the woods. She could still smell the rot of the town, feel the road under Jonas’ booted feet. She shook. It felt like her memory; like she’d been there. But it had been Jonas again, she had to remind herself—another of his memories sucking her into it. Everything was going wrong. Why had Jonas left them in the shelter alone? He had promised her—promised her—that he wouldn’t.
She held her knees, rocking against a tree, wanting to get up, to run, but there was nowhere for her to go. The idea of going back home to her mother didn’t even enter her mind, and Jonas’ shelter—who knew what thing still waited there?
It felt like she had run so far already, but she could still see the smoke rising over the treetops, warning that she hadn’t run far enough. She could smell it on the wind. If the smoke could find her, so could they. So she tried to get up and run. Anywhere. But a sharp pain sat her back down. The world wavered around her. She closed her eyes. If she could sleep there awhile. Everything would be better if she could just sleep.
***
Kah’en and Angela wandered through the barren lands that afternoon, passing a few skeletal remains of villages, a narrow stream, from which they drank with lust, and then miles of little but salted earth. They slept in the remains of what looked to be an old temple. Runes spotted the walls and ancient characters were imprinted carefully in the stone under a broken altar. That night they went hungry.
Angela rolled over in the almost morning to see Kah’en sitting on the foundation of what once was the western facing wall of the building. Stars still shone in the sky but the hungry sun would come soon. She made her way over and sat next to him. He kept looking up.
“Jonas didn’t trust you,” she said.
He cut his eyes her way. “I will not be killing you, child. Battle is being over between us.”
“You keep saying stuff like that. How do you know we can’t get back?”
He looked at her full on in the rising light. “No one has.”
Angela’s heart sunk. This wasn’t fair. Everything had been taken away from her. She was coming to the end of high school and would have her pick of colleges, after a semester off in Paris, of course. She would live on the comfort and riches of a wonderfully enmeshed family for the rest of her life. Now this stranger, who had brought all of this on her, was telling her that she would grow old in what might as well be a desert, sleeping in old buildings like some derelict.
“Screw that,” she said, rising.
He looked at her, brow furrowed, lips compressed.
“I’m not giving up my life just because you say no one has. I don’t even know you.”
Without raising his voice he took a breath and gestured at the horizon. “We are not knowing what kind of predators stalk here. Not only animals.”
Angela started to protest, but dropped her chin and sat back down next to him instead. “Today you told me this was some kind of prison. Then you told me to shut up because talking would make me thirsty.” She raised her middle finger as she recalled this last bit from their walk that day. “Well, we’re stopped now. Where the hell is this place? And, seriously, why can’t we get back from here?”
He sat, speaking in tones as low as the light. “We are exiled. The rod Aern has shot us with, it is being like the gates we use. But it was taking us to a place we cannot leave.” He laid his hands in his lap, his eyes on the dim horizon. “It is being the rod our Queen carried. Our stories told us it was holding her world, which had been ruined by a war long passed. Like Aern, she would be sending those who were opposing her here.” Something howled far away. Angela tensed, but Kah’en went on unruffled. “But our scientists were finding that it did not hold her world, but a way to it, and to other worlds. Then we were taking this knowledge.” He looked at Angela for the first time. “It was a sign, we were believing, that she wanted us to find her.”
“Sounds like a lot of bullshit to me. I’m going home.”
Kah’en did not bother to look at her again and, after a while, she resigned herself to the moment.
A rush of cool air brought Angela’s arms around herself. “I’m hungry,” she said, both of them staring at nothing.
A rupture of deep red began to spread on the horizon. The black sky paled to layers of grays and blues, unfamiliar stars faded. The night had been cool, almost uncomfortably so, but that would soon be a memory. Kah’en rose after a while and Angela, silent, walked after him.
SIXTEEN
Cynthia held Jonas’ head in her lap, rubbing a bit of his hair between her thumb and forefinger. Her mind was a white hot nothing. Everything had fallen apart so fast. The point everyone said that she’d come to, when she truly messed something up beyond repair—the point she believed would come, but not for a long, drugged-out while—had arrived.
She had imagined it as some dip in the road where she would see the error of her ways and started moving toward a life more befitting a post-teen druggie. It was something she would move past. But this moment cut deep. It ripped her raw and salted her. She felt that it revealed her inmost failings as a human being. Not as a daughter or a friend, a student or a girl—a human-damn-being.
Helpless.
She wiped at the tears that had fallen onto Jonas’ face. She raised her head to the sky
and pushed at the bags under her eyes. It was there, in the stinging cloud of burnt wood, in the bright of the afternoon sun, that she broke. She twisted her torso away from Jonas’ face and wept into her palms. A bubble of spittle rose and popped in her silent throat. Her chest heaved, but she made no sound, then roared.
“I’m sorry.” The words were garbled as she moaned the opposite of pleasure. “I’m so sorry. Sorry!” She slapped at the grass next to her. Then, her leg jostled Jonas, whom she attended to at once, cradling his head like a baby.
“Cynthia?”
She straightened, her wet, red eyes staring into his bleary, dilated ones. “If I had been here,” she started, her voice panicked, her words running together, “I could have stopped them. I should have been here. It’s my fault. I know it’s my fault. Don’t hate me. I’ll do anything. I’ll go with you. I’ll fight them, Jonas. I’ll be there and fight them. Get Angela and Lucy back. Safe! Get them safe!”
He curled his arm up, his hand searching for hers. “Calm, dear.” But she could tell, even though he was still woozy as hell, he was anything but calm. But she tried. She tried for him. She took in a deep breath, and she let it out in a staggered wave. “Help me up,” he said.
The wind changed and he began to cough up the smoke he’d inhaled from the wasted shelter. He let her steady him and he stared at the smoldering ruins. She watched the knuckles of his right hand turn white as he squeezed his trembling fingers into her shoulder. She barely felt it.
“I used to have hope.” His eyes widened, reddened. He took a few steps away. “I just,” his breath caught in his throat, “expect the worst now. I woke up every morning of that war and told myself to pull away a little more because the friends that survived yesterday probably wouldn’t today.”
Cynthia hugged herself, staggering to rest against a tree. In that moment, she knew that she would watch everyone she knew or cared about die. Cynthia said, “I need to go by myself. Do you know where they’re at?”
“No. That’s not how this is going to happen. The rebellion’s dead. They’ll all fight for Aern now.”
Cynthia deflated. “We can’t beat them, can we?” Her voice had flat-lined.
Jonas shook his head once. “You won’t be going.”
She built up breath to speak in her tightened chest. “That’s stupid. I could give us a chance. Why go at all if you don’t even have a chance?”
“I taught you to use your abilities so that you could defend yourself if they came for you, not so you could fight my war for me. I want you safe.”
“Your war?”
“My war. Not this planet’s. Not even yours. They found us because of me. People have no doubt died because of me. Also, if this queen of theirs is here, and has some weapon in her tomb, or if she herself actually does turn out to be some kind of damned immortal with a ton of power, then I might have destroyed this world by coming here. So, yes, this is my war. Sending you to die is pointless.”
Cynthia stood, her lower jaw jutted, shaking. “I don’t want to be this person anymore. I want some damn thing I do to matter. Maybe not in some grand scheme of things way, but for right now. I want a moment I can point to and say I freaking mattered.”
Jonas opened his mouth to argue, but just shook his head.
“What?” Cynthia’s lip was quivering.
“This is not going to give your life meaning.” He looked at her. “This is murder to prevent murder on a grander scale. It’s not some heroic adventure. You won’t magically feel like you matter because you kill people or even rescue innocents.” Jonas shook his head again. “Is it the right thing to do?” He shrugged. “It’s the only thing I know to do—stop bad, do good. Pray God’s in there somewhere.”
“You know what? Forget you; I’m going.” Her voice wasn’t as steady as she would have liked.
Jonas rested his back against a tree and threw his hands in the air. “I can’t stop you. But think about your mom.”
“That’s what I’m doing, you bastard. Don’t tell me to think about my mom!”
He gave up and stepped away. He looked tired, empty of any real fight. He began to gather every supply he could get his hands on. He crawled into the precarious remains of their once-home and came out carrying a backpack and an Uzi slung over the other shoulder. He walked right past Cynthia, into the woods. She followed without a word.
They walked a ways before Cynthia spoke again. “I did think this was going to give my life meaning.” She pushed at her hair so it covered her wet eyes.
He seemed to have found some semblance of a center by then and responded. “Like I said, seems like it would, doesn’t it? Fighting evil and saving the world and doing something. Seems like it would fill that hole.” He closed his eyes and took a breath. “Doesn’t. You have the same problem as everyone else on this planet.” He coughed a laugh. “Mine too, I guess.”
“Yeah?”
“You think something you do will suddenly satisfy that hole in you. We just think too small. Redemption. That’s what we need. That’s the thing you’re looking for, Cyn.”
Tears dripped from her downturned face. She kicked at a fallen limb. “Jan calls me that. All—” No more would come. She smoldered for a moment and then slumped down, her arms hanging limp between her knees. “I don’t even know what redemption…” She sighed. “‘You will never be anything but what you are not, and the despair of being what you are.’”
Jonas nodded, summoned a thought, “‘Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and negate.’ Something like that, anyway.”
“Didn’t take you for a Camus guy.” She sniffled, rubbing her palms under her eyes. “So, you’re saying I want to feel this way?” She snorted dubiously.
“More surprised you’re a fan of Camus, and yes. Or, rather, you choose to.”
“Knowing the whole thing is pointless kind of makes you feel pointless. That’s just how I see the world though.”
“Not saying it isn’t how you see the world. But, look at you, wanting something to give your life meaning. Something new going to come along and do that? I’ve seen a lot of people want to find something new. But since they can’t find anything new they’ve made themselves ignorant so that everything is new. You can’t live like that and expect not to fail.”
“Ouch. Don’t pull the punches on a fragile girl, now.” She smiled, but it was weak. “I know people like that though. I kind of wish I was like that. Ignorant.” She stopped, pulling at her thumb. “So, I’m guessing you’re a God-guy. Would I have been some fundy, happy-clappy Christian if you had raised me?”
He shrugged, stopping next to her. “You’re a smart girl. Would have been your choice. But I would neither describe myself as fundy nor happy-clappy. God’s how I see the world.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Fair enough. I’ll see life as a dark, ultimately meaningless series of events leading to final death and you live yours getting all slobbery excited about your pie in the sky.” She nudged him.
Jonas huffed what sort of sounded like a laugh. “Kind of missing my bigger point, but I’ll take your compromise wrapped in sarcasm and raise you a package of crackers.” She nodded, rubbing her stomach.
He turned around, pulled the gun that hung from his shoulder free and let her get into his pack. She rummaged around for a moment. “What do these electronic toys do? Please tell me one of them’s a super weapon.”
Jonas smiled poorly. “One pinpoints specific energy signatures. It’s how I found you girls. The other thing, in the yellow plastic, that was our ticket home if the war ended. You know how I told you we disabled their tech back on my Earth? That does what I’m assuming the Fade did to get here—boosts the signal on this side because their tech couldn’t make outgoing calls, if you will. Not one’s they’d survive, anyway.”
She pulled her hands from the bag, holding the crackers. “You mean, we could go see our birth parents if all this stuff gets resolved.”
He lo
oked wistful. “God, I hope so.”
She grinned a real grin. “Absolute-Nothingness, I hope so, too.” She nudged him again.
***
Lucy woke, her body quaking. The muscles in her face were tight with pain. Her head whirled, eyes blurred, as she took a trembling breath to try and calm herself, slow the ramming of her heart. In another few seconds it would come again. She needed these moments to ground herself, or she feared she might get lost in them.
She lay beside the same tree she had been resting against, what, moments ago? That’s what it felt like. But the sun was lower, the sky more carroty around its edges. A small pool of blood had accumulated in the gathered front of her shirt, at her lap, from the wound in her side. She touched her forehead. The gash there had clotted. But everything hurt. Even looking at the sky was too much visual stimulation.
Then she felt it coming again to take her.
It was a pinprick in her brain—a small rush of endorphins. It felt like remembering. The memories inflated in her head, like everything she’d ever tried to remember had decided to reveal itself at once. “hu…” she said, overwhelmed. “huah!” She gripped her head then freed it, raising it to the sky, eyes open, but seeing nothing. She felt the pain of giving birth to knowledge—too much knowledge. A guppy birthing a whale. Everything she’d somehow pulled from Jonas’ mind was springing out, fully formed, writing itself with the hard edge of a blade onto her brain. There were no more vignettes of memory. Everything was coming at once. The dam had broken. She tried to scream but could only gurgle out the pain she felt.
Then, it was done.
Sweat dripped from the tips of her hair…
thac… thac… thac…
…as she took in broken breaths. The sky was presently full dark. Lucy raised her sunny-day eyes and nothing else, moving them back and forth, mouth falling open, experiencing what were new memories to her. Full understanding of every concept and idea was elusive, but she understood that they were Jonas’. Lucy tried to stand and the pain in her side sat her back down once more. She lifted her shirt, which stuck to her bloody stomach. The hole was about a quarter inch in diameter, and she had lost a lot of blood. It was impossible to tell how deep it went, but her back was clear of an exit wound from whatever flying debris had stabbed her. She ripped at the bottom of her shirt and made the best dressing she could. She knew, as she was doing it, that she was pulling from the knowledge that had followed her home like some stray from Jonas’ head.