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Chal shaded her eyes and looked out at the desert. The ridges of the dunes were sharp lines of light and dark, the red and white sand laced like a paper doily. She saw the patterns he was talking about, the curves of colored sand rippling out over the rolling surface of the desert. As she was watching, a gust of wind swept the ridge away, crumbling it into a cloud of sand that rolled over the dune, changing it with a broad sweep of miniscule particles.
“You’re not crazy,” she said.
“And the fact that you’re worried about being crazy means you’re definitely a real person.”
Alan chuckled.
Chal was thirsty, her throat parched with grit and sand. She was tired, and hurt, and for the past few hours had been thinking of nothing but the small village they were heading toward and how nice it would be to finally arrive. But as she looked out across the desert, she felt herself grow bigger with awe. The dunes were beautiful, their lines stretching out in the casual fling of wind and stone.
She had not seen them because she had had her eyes on other things. Things that weren’t even there. She breathed easier as she walked now.
“It is beautiful,” she said. “The whole desert. Truly amazing.”
“I think you’re just teasing me now,” Alan said, but she could see that he was pleased. Then he did something that nearly stopped her heart.
He reached out and took her hand.
She was startled by the gesture and lost her stride, stumbling slightly in the dunes. He waited for her to regain her balance and they walked on over the ridgeline, hand in hand.
His palm was smooth and warm, his pace slow enough for her to keep up. The small slips and stumbles that befell her were caught up by his strong grasp, and Chal soon grew accustomed to leaning on him for support during the tricky paths that wound around the blunt edges of the dunes. As they walked on Chal realized that Alan was no longer paying attention to anything but the desert horizon. When they came down into the valleys of the dunes his eyes would fix themselves on the high ridge in front of them, but along the tops of the dunes he looked far ahead into the dusty blue sky.
She watched with him and saw the desert as it really was, not barren at all but fully alive. The sand which lay before them was not an obstacle to be overcome, no, not even a hard journey to be endured. This – this! – was life, part of the universe which encompassed all things, Chal and Alan both.
It was some hours before they had to rest, and when they did they were silent. There was nothing they had to speak of that the desert did not already say.
Chal tried to push herself to keep going, but an hour or so after sundown she stumbled and did not regain her balance easily.
“Let’s rest here,” Alan said. Chal could not protest; she did not have the energy. She lay down on her side in the sand, the dunes sloping up gently to either side of her, and exhaustion took her over. Alan lay next to her, sliding his arm around her back.
“Alan – ”
“It’s cold,” he said. His breath was hot on her neck. “We’ll need the warmth.”
“Yes.” It was nice to be so warm. His strong arms entwined themselves around her, cradling her against his chest. She felt happy.
***
“Breakfast?”
Alan held up the canteen of water, a huge grin spreading over his face. The world skipped into a pause as Chal’s heart vibrated, plucked by the picture of innocence that lay before her eyes. They didn’t have any food left, and still miles to go with their remaining resources. Chal should have been frightened.
And yet – yet when she looked at him, she was not frightened at all. Just being near him made this whole ordeal feel like more of an adventure. With Alan around this was all a game, just another obstacle or three to jump over for fun. She wondered at his optimism, and how he had rekindled that feeling inside of her.
Perhaps it was that growing up in the world was so hard to do without losing innocence. His face was the picture of it, his features boyish, and oh – his smile! The grin wrinkled the corners of his eyes and gave him his sincerity as he reached out and handed her the canteen.
It was this quality of his that drew her to him: that, apart from everything he was built to do, apart from all of the wiring they had done in his brain, that in this unconscious way he should be so kind. It was this kindness that melted her resistance to everything he represented. Representation was not reality, and sometimes there was more to a man than his circuitry and chemicals would lead you to believe. It was the thing of the universe.
They walked on like two explorers into lands unknown.
Hours later, they still trudged wearily across the desert floor. There was more foliage around, but they had not yet come across water of any kind. Chal marveled at the way the shrubs managed to claw their way up onto a boulder, taking refuge in the shadows of a rocky crag, collecting dew with their leaves in the morning and turning toward the sun during the day.
There was a buzzing sound in the far off distance.
“Do you hear that?” Chal said. Alan nodded. He had heard it just as Chal did. They both turned to find the source of the sound.
The sunlight shone brilliantly in Chal’s face, and she held her hand up to block it out. The buzzing was coming from miles away, but Chal recognized the plane’s motor for what it was immediately.
Where Chal had lived in Catalonia there had been a perpetual state of tension, with mortar fire raining down upon the roofs from the northern edge of the nation. Rogue French militia had taken it upon themselves to retake Catalonia by whatever means they could. Catalonia’s response was mostly diplomatic, and mostly ignored. France was one of the only other non-Digital states in that Eurasian district, and they had much more of an army than the newly incorporated Catalan nation-state.
The buzzing continued to grow, and Chal felt the blood drain from her face. Her skin was like ice even in the hot desert sun. The pinpoint of dark on the horizon was so faint that she could hardly see it. She closed her eyes. No. No. This wasn’t happening.
Not again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She had been playing in the bedroom with her sister when the sirens sounded.
Her sister was younger than her by half, for she was a proud four years old and her sister just two. They were playing at paper dolls, she remembered. The girl’s face had nearly faded away from young fingers touching the colors, and the tiny tabs for all of the dresses were either torn or so bent that the outfits seemed to hang on by some kind of magic, or will. Marie’s fingers were still too infant to grasp the dolls without tearing them, but Chal would hold the dolls in front of her sister, dancing them in the air. There was a low buzzing in the air, but Chal did not notice it until she held up a doll in front of Marie and saw a hundred black birds flying from far away in the sky.
Birds? Birds didn’t buzz.
Her vision shifted from the doll to the window and beyond, and then Chal realized that the birds were not birds.
The air raid signal sounded.
Its howling twisted nasally up until it resounded through the room at a high pitch. Chal could hear it echoing through the narrow streets, the sound bouncing off of the plastered walls across the city.
The planes were growing bigger already in Chal’s vision. She stood and took two steps toward the window, walking right past her sister. Pure curiosity had seized her. She would come to know the feeling well over the next few years, but this was the first time she felt it and it seized her with a terrible purpose. It was a blinding curiosity that stormed through her, leaving her vision focused on the sole thing she cared about at that instant. This was the budding of her intellectual career, the very tiniest sliver of that emotion which would come to dominate her life. This was the instant Chal let her curiosity reign over her whole being, regardless of consequence.
It was perhaps the instant she most regretted.
***
“We have to hide,” Alan said. The buzzing in the distance was unmistakable now.
There was only low brush, a handful of scattered rocks and boulders. Nothing that she could run toward. The dunes would have been worse, but here she felt the agonizing indecision more acutely, for she could see farther in every direction and see there was – nothing. Tumbleweed and playa. It was hopeless. Chal’s breathing grew shallow, and she noticed her body’s response to the surge of adrenaline – tension, fear, a burst of energy that impelled her to action.
And no action that would save her. No action that would save Alan.
***
Chal felt rather than heard the lumpen apartment’s door slam open and before she knew what was going on her heart began to pound.
“CHAL!” Her mother’s voice sounded from the hall. Chal opened her mouth but found that she could not speak, not even to cry out. The most basic word, the first word she had learned – mama – was nowhere to be found in her brain.
No matter. Her mother was in the doorway. Wind blew through the room. The front door, always kept carefully closed because of the draft, had been left wide open, and the paper dolls blew across the floor. Chal sank to her knees, placing her hands on the floor as though she could hold the world together from falling apart.
One doll blew straight under the bed, where Chal saw that Marie had crawled to hide. She was all the way in the back, her hair matted to her face with tears.
Marie was crying, and Chal was confused – had she always been crying? When had she started? Then Chal realized that it was the sirens that had drowned it out. Her sister’s cries matched the siren almost exactly in a higher register, and the two howls rose and wound together in the room so that Chal felt like her ears were being pierced from the inside.
Her mother screamed at her to run, run to the kitchen. Her face was white with fear. Chal had always imagined her mom as a perfectly omnipotent being, able to protect them from any danger, and the expression on her face now was so horrific that Chal felt the tears come to her eyes too, as if her mom were yelling because of something she had done and not because of the black birds that were no longer birds but planes in the sky.
***
“Come on!” Alan’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts. He had grabbed her arm and was pulling her toward a cluster of boulders that lay a couple hundred yards away.
“It’s no use,” Chal said. “We can’t hide.”
“We have to try,” Alan said. She saw the fear in his eyes, but above that there was a calm confidence.
“They’ve already seen us,” Chal said, her eyes glued to the horizon. The plane was just a speck in the sky, but she knew the kinds of technology they had.
Alan peered at the plane.
“No. Look at the way it’s moving,” Alan said. “That’s TFR.” Chal looked up as they continued to make their way toward the boulders. The speck was moving slightly up and down on the horizon. The buzzing was growing louder.
“What does that mean? TFR?” she asked.
“Terrain-following radar,” Alan said. He was already moving toward the denser part of the chaparral plain, breaking off branches. “It works by sending the signal toward the ground instead of forward, so that the plane can track the terrain and hug it closely. It’s to avoid detection.”
“And they don’t want to be seen,” Chal said. The territory close to the Mexican border was volatile, and a rogue aircraft could set off a frenzy of diplomatic threats.
“Won’t they see us with the radar?” Chal asked. She was tense as a jackrabbit who had just heard a loud noise, ready to leap out in any direction.
“It’s unlikely that they are using a phased array,” Alan said. “Not too many planes have those installed.”
“How do you know this?” Chal asked. They were at the boulders.
Alan shrugged. “I don’t know what I know,” he said. “Hell, they might have implanted false information and I wouldn’t have a damned clue, though I don’t know why they would have. But I know that it’s got to be a single radar.” He threw the branches in a heap and went for more.
“Why?” Chal asked.
“Because otherwise they’ll catch us,” Alan said, a wry expression painted on his face.
***
“Marie! Marie!” Her mom had heard Chal’s little sister crying under the bed, had zeroed in on the noise of a crying child in that supernatural sense that all mothers seemed to have. Even with the sirens blaring.
Chal was in the doorway and turned back to see her mother on her knees, reaching out under the bed to Marie. Her arm could not reach all the way to the back of the bed where Marie was huddled, crying. She had caught the paper doll in her hand and was clutching it in her chubby fingers, crumpling and tearing the paper.
“Go! Run! Go to the kitchen!” her mom screamed again, pointing. Chal tottered to the doorway and stopped, looking back only once. Her mom was trying to pull the heavy bed away from the wall and Marie was still crying.
“Go! RUN!” her mother screamed, pulling all the while at the bed. The heavy feet scratched the wood floor, leaving a deep white groove where it scraped the planks. “Marie! Marie!”
Chal turned and ran.
***
Alan pulled up an armful of brush. The nettles pricked at his arms and Chal winced as she saw the trickles of blood that ran over his skin. She bent to help him, although she did not know what they were doing. The buzzing was getting louder and louder, and the spec k in the sky was distinctly a plane now. Chal watched its path. It seemed to be moving in a broad curve, still bobbing up and down to maintain a constant distance over the low-lying terrain. Then it hit the playa and the bobbing stopped, the plane over flat ground.
“Get down,” Alan said. “Put your head down.”
Chal obliged, huddling next to the boulder that was not more than a foot taller than her when she squatted. Some cover.
Alan pushed the brush close to her body, then placed another armful of brush on top of her, directly over her head. He was moving carefully, deliberately, but his actions were growing quicker as the plane approached. The buzz was loud now, loud enough to distinguish the type of plane from the sound of the motor.
“Come on,” Chal whispered. She was frantic, her heartbeat racing in her chest. Alan pulled the remaining brush over him as he knelt down next to Chal.
“It’s fine,” Alan said, huddled next to her. She could feel his breath on her face. As she breathed, dust and dirt crumbled and fell off of the branches onto her face.
“It’s fine,” Alan repeated, and she couldn’t tell whether he was talking to her or to himself.
“We’ll be fine.”
***
Her mom had yelled at her to go and hide in the kitchen, for it was the only room in the house that did not have windows. She had run barefoot over the cold red clay tiles – very cold, she remembered, and felt a chill of goosebumps move over her skin even now – and hid underneath the sink, the only cabinet that wasn’t completely full with boxes of papers and plates.
She had bent down and wedged herself deep into the cabinet. She closed the cabinet door behind her, her childish mind believing in her panic that a quarter inch of brittle plywood would save her, that anything could save her. If she could not see the dangerous world outside, how could it see her?
It was dark and damp under the sink, and it smelled like Sunday mornings when her mother would clean the tub and the rest of the house, and Chal would sit on the floor and watch Marie and keep her out of the cleaning supplies. Sometimes her mom would give them bowls with a bit of flour, and then they added a bit of water and played “cooking” for hours on end. Chal would be the head chef and Marie would be her assistant.
There was a roaring that grew louder and louder, she could hear it coming ove
r the sirens. Explosions rocked the buildings nearby, the sharp cracks echoing through the streets on the wake of the siren’s wail. Chal covered her ears, her eyes clenched shut, hoping that she would wake up at once and it would have all been a dream, but no, the roaring was so loud that it vibrated the cabinet doors and Chal bit her lip and tried not to cry.
Then there was a loud CRACK and the building shook with a deep rumble. The siren wound down, sounding almost like a plane flying away until only a faint hum of it could be heard. There was a pause where perhaps it was silent or perhaps it was simply the ringing in Chal’s ears that blotted out any noises of doors being closed or opened, of people walking around, of the world outside. Only one sound made it through the noise in her ears, and it was a sound that Chal would hear over and over again in her nightmares for the years to come.
She heard her mother scream.
***
“Try not to move,” Alan said. “It’s a good chance their radar is just picking up motion and heat underneath. They might miss us completely.”
Chal tried, but she could not help her body shivering. It was dim under the layers of brush, sunlight coming in through the cracks of the branches. The buzzing was so loud that Chal felt they would be spotted for sure. She closed her eyes and began to pray silently for the second time in as many days.
The plane was close, so close. The roar built and built in her ears until it was so loud she thought she couldn’t take it. Like a quail being flushed from the bush, Chal wanted to leap out of her hiding place and run, run as far away as she could.
Then she felt Alan’s hand take hers, and she twined her fingers into his, gripping them tightly. She had to be quiet, had to hide, had to be safe. A tear made its way slowly down the side of her cheek, but her body stopped shivering. It was so loud.
***
The small girl inside the cabinet held onto her knees and tried not to cry. A rush of air carried the smell of smoke and dust under the cracks of the cabinet door.
The world was gone, Chal thought. She would open the cabinet door and there would be nothing left, just a stark black nothing of universe. There wouldn’t be an apartment, not a brick left on its foundation, not a flake of plaster. Her head had begun to buzz with an insistent dread, and no matter how hard she pressed her hands to her ears it would not go away. The whole world would be this, a dark eternal roar.