Enoch just shrugs.
“Well, get some sleep.” I yawn, reaching down for a canteen to rinse out my mouth.
“I can’t.” He avoids my gaze, but I can tell by the set of his chin that I won’t be able to budge him. I don’t have the energy to fight, so instead I stand and stretch.
“Suit yourself,” I say, packing the bags and wrapping the piece of meat in a length of cloth. Then I reach down and wake Pip gently.
“Where are we going?” he asks sleepily.
I smile, helping him into his coat. I shoulder my bag and take his hand, turning and heading south. “You’ll see.”
TWELVE
Late in the afternoon, as the shadows are fading toward our left, we call a halt. The long walk is taking its toll, but more so is our hunger. Though we still have several dehydrated meals and the large piece of meat, along with a few apples, it will all go quickly, and I haven’t yet figured out how we’re going to get more. Enoch and I are letting Pip eat as much as he wants, but rationing ourselves carefully, and we’re both starting to get grumpy.
All day we’ve stuck to the uncovered perimeter, staying just out of sight of the beautiful residential enclaves, the gardens and the shops. Even if it is slightly more dangerous, it feels good to get sun on our shoulders. Now we bask in a quiet little park, no one in sight. It’s warm enough that after a moment we remove our coats.
“Want a snack, Pip?” Enoch asks, digging through his pack for another of the cereal bars.
“No.” The little boy looks tired, even his Mark unable to keep up with the hours of hiking. From the Library to the Painter’s Palace isn’t that far, only 7 or 8 miles as the crow flies, but we’ve had to slow our pace considerably to allow for Pip’s shorter legs. That, and there isn’t much open ground anywhere in this City, most of it either overdeveloped or rubble-strewn and ruined, making for a trek that is sometimes more climbing than walking. I’d hoped to get to our destination tonight, but I’m starting to doubt we can.
“Come on, have a snack,” I coax.
“No.”
Now it’s my turn to shrug. “Anything?” I ask Enoch, who is again staring at his little screen. He shakes his head.
“Where is Papa?” Pip asks suddenly. His tone is one I’m starting to recognize, harsh and demanding, peculiarly deep for his small size. I take a deep breath, glancing at Enoch. His expression mirrors mine: one of confusion, despair and anxiety. He looks like he wants to run.
“Pip,” I begin, then stop. It is a struggle to control my voice, and I have to wait a moment before I can go on. I can’t lie. I wish I could, but it wouldn’t help. “Papa is … gone.” Don’t lie. Just say it. “He’s – he’s dead. You know that.”
“No, he isn’t. He isn’t.”
“He is,” Enoch says gently, kneeling down by his brother. “It’s a truth we all have to face, even though we don’t want to.”
“No,” Pip says again.
Enoch doesn’t seem to know what to say, merely lays a hand gently on his brother’s shoulder. I can’t help but notice it’s the good one, his other curled protectively behind his back.
“Listen – ” he begins.
“You listen!” Pip screams suddenly, voice dipping in and out of a snarl. I want to look away, hating the change in his face, his beloved features. “You should never have let us leave him! Why did you do that? Didn’t you know what would happen? Didn’t you?”
“Pip, there was no way to – ”
“You knew! You knew! How could you leave him, Enoch? You let him die! He’s gone and it’s your fault, it’s all your fault!” He begins to rage, screaming and striking out. I step toward him, but he whirls out of my grasp, trying with all his might to hurt his brother. His shouts devolve into a simple, repetitive cadence. “Go away! Go away! Go away! Go away!”
“Stop, Pip! Stop!” I shout, grabbing a hold of one shoulder. But the boy continues to scream, struggling against my grasp. The heel of one of his shoes lands firmly in my thigh, and I feel it strike the bone. Even my muffled scream fails to deter him, and he begins to slide out of my grip.
Enoch looks stricken, tears welling up in his eyes. He shakes his head mutely, looking at me, the appeal clear. What should I do?
“Go,” I gasp. “Go. We’re close enough. We’ll meet you there, okay?”
Still shaking his head, Enoch pulls himself to his feet and grabs the knapsack next to him. He swings it onto his shoulder, striding out of the clearing. He is quickly lost to sight. As soon as he disappears, Pip’s screams dissolve into sobs. I wait just long enough for his shoulders to slump, his eyes to fade, before I grab him firmly by his upper arm and begin to drag him away, moving in the same direction as Enoch but at a more oblique angle. I don’t want to run into him just yet, but we can’t stay where we are. Someone might have heard us.
Heart pounding, I haul Pip along mercilessly for a good five minutes. He sobs and stumbles, but eventually his tears fade to sniffs and his sniffs to heavy breathing. He falls once, then twice, his normal surefootedness gone.
“Naiya,” he pants eventually, pulling on my arm, trying unsuccessfully to dig in his heels. “Naiya!”
I ignore him. The sympathy I’d felt last time is gone, as unreachable as the Broken Moon.
“Naiya, please! I’m sorry!”
“You’re sorry?” I snort, stopping and whipping him around to face me. I throw the knapsack at my feet. It’s all I can do not to yell. “You have just behaved abominably, and now you’re sorry?”
Now it is Pip’s turn to look horrified. “Yes, I – ”
“You what, Phillip? What could your excuse be? I’m ashamed of you. We’re all sad, we all miss Papa, but we have to stick together. What was that? Why would you blame this on your brother?”
“Because … ” He stops, his lip trembling once more. “Because if he hadn’t left him – ”
“We all left him. All of us.”
“But Enoch is supposed to … ” He trails off.
“Supposed to what? Protect us? He stays awake all night to let us sleep, watches out for us all the time, and this is how you repay him? By blaming him?”
Pip begins to cry again. Against my will, I soften.
“Honey, Enoch couldn’t stop this,” I say, hypocrisy twisting my insides. Honestly, I feel the same guilt at abandoning Papa to his fate, but I’ll never tell Pip that. “If we’d stayed, we would have died too. Or – or worse.”
“Worse?” he whispers.
“Worse,” I echo. “What do you think that Mark means? It means you’ll be like them. You’ll help them hunt down and even kill good people like Papa. We don’t want that to happen to you. That’s why we left home, okay? And that’s why we’re going to leave this City as soon as we can.”
The words seem to startle Pip, and I realize as soon as they’re out of my mouth that I’d decided this last night, the moment Achilles had told me he might be able to help Pip. To fix him.
“We’re leaving?”
“Yes. Just as soon as we finish … this.”
“What about Amy? And John and the baby?”
“They’ll come with us,” I say, a little surprised. He’s never seemed to care about the baby before, but then, his family is dwindling. Besides, I don’t want to leave them behind either.
“Where will we go?”
“Out,” I say shortly. “But that’s not the point, and I’m not finished with you. You could have gotten us caught, Pip, screaming like that. And now look, we’re separated. If you care about keeping our family together, you can’t act like that. Not ever again. You – you just can’t, no matter what.”
He registers my eyes as they flick down to the little thorn rune, raised and purple on the back of his small hand.
He nods, his eyes huge and green and still wet, lashes hugging one another. “Okay, Naiya.”
“Okay.” I pull him to me, holding him close for a minute, pushing away the revulsion that threatens. He’s still my little brother. Still Pip.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks as we pull apart.
“Yes, I think you bruised the bone,” I say. “It’s probably going to hurt for a while.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again, crestfallen and hopeless.
“Tell that to your brother.” I hand him a water bottle and cinch my bag closed once more. “Drink.”
He holds the water bottle in one hand. I resist the impulse to comfort him. Bending back down, I curse quietly as I realize that the knapsack I’m holding actually belongs to Enoch. In his panic he must have taken mine, and his was in his pocket, which means that he has both power packs. We have no way to get in touch.
I shake my head, shouldering the strap and grabbing Pip’s hand once more. Just then I hear a noise behind the nearest pillar, and freeze. I wait for the awful prickle to climb my spine, but it doesn’t.
“Hello?” I call after a moment.
Silence, then another small noise. Maybe it’s just a rat. I wait.
“Who’s there?” I venture again.
Suddenly something moves in the gloom, then makes its way slowly out into the weak sunshine.
It is a man. He looks confused and scared, and starts when he sees us. Even from a distance of almost twenty feet, though, something about his eyes strikes me as familiar.
Different.
Haunted.
“Wait!” I shout recklessly, as he darts back into the shadows of an overhanging deck. His silhouette, pausing, bending, is just visible in the gloom. Slowly he turns, standing still as we approach. I have to smother an odd little laugh at the railroad spike he’s holding, thinking of Enoch’s choice of weapon against Achilles. Thinking how easy it would be to kill this man with one throw of the knife that’s now in my hand.
“What do you want?” he asks warily. There is something childish about his words, something that smacks not of accent or upbringing, but merely too little experience using tongue and lips to form the delicate sounds of speech. It reminds me suddenly of that night at the Top of the World, Amy splayed on metal grating. Of course his eyes look familiar.
“To talk to you,” I say quietly, not wanting to spook him. “I just want to know who you are.”
“So you can tell them?” He asks it dully, as though his chances of evasion are too slim to be worth fighting for. Likely they are. Without real weapons, without knowledge, he has no hope.
“I won’t tell them, I promise. I just want to know who you are. How you got here.”
He shakes his head. “How I got here,” he muses. “It was funny. I live in … you know, up above. One of those big buildings. Clean. White. Or I did, until some men came, set me loose. Set fire to it, blew it all up. It was scary.” Gazing off into the middle distance, his predominant emotion now does not appear to be fright, but mild wonder. Perhaps gratitude.
I ponder this information. So he lived in one of the laboratories. There was an accident, or something worse. Possibly a sabotage, a break-in; almost certainly the same one Doctor Black asked us about, knowing we’d seen Amy. This could explain the deaths of those scientists, the presence of their white coats at the execution. The Mayor sending a message, even to the elite: No one is safe. No one confronts the Party and lives.
That still doesn’t explain this man, though. His eyes, his walk, his speech. As though he were a baby, still learning to be human. I hear Chen’s voice in my ear once more, hear her father’s story whispered through her lips.
“And who are you?” I ask again.
He looks at me then. “I don’t know,” he says frankly. “Or I can’t remember. All I know is I don’t want to go back, and you can’t make me.”
“We won’t try to,” I reassure him. “I just want to know where you came from.” I can see the keycard in my mind’s eye, its strange code: 5HRP217.
“I told you,” he whispers. “The white building.”
“What’s your name?” Pip asks after a moment. He is all sweetness again, looking at the man with concern and frank curiosity.
“No name,” the man replies. “Just a number. No name.”
“A – a number?” I repeat dumbly. So the nameless copy of Amy might truly have been nameless, just a collection of digits on someone’s clipboard. It seems almost too heartless, even for ruthless Doctor Black, even for his sadistic employees, to deny someone such a fundamental birthright. I shudder to think of this man’s original, walking or working or sleeping somewhere in the City even now. Assuming he’s alive, that is.
The man, whose attention is beginning to wander, shrugs.
“Where will you go?” I try instead.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I had a home once. Or I think I did.”
She knew the things Amy would know, I hear myself telling Enoch.
I wonder if this man is right to think he has a home, or if he’d simply been given someone else’s memories. Images of an apartment and a life that had never been his and never would be. That someone would fight him for if he ever tried to claim them, or that perhaps lay unclaimed even now. I glance down at Pip uncertainly and find him looking back with a strange expression on his face. We can’t help him. So even Pip recognizes these people for what they are: lost, hopeless.
If all you have is someone else’s face and someone else’s memories, are you even human?
“I hope you find your home,” I say quietly, at a loss.
Pip, at least, seems to know what to do. Staring silently up at the stranger, he hands over his canteen with a shy smile.
The man pauses, almost returning the boy’s smile. “Thank you,” he whispers gently.
Human after all.
THIRTEEN
Only moments after the man departs and we begin walking once more, a distressing noise cuts the air.
“What’s that?” Pip asks nervously, unconsciously pawing at the back of his neck.
“Aircar.” I look frantically for a place to hide. “Over here.”
Pip follows me into deeper cover, the shadow of a tumbled museum adding to the gloom of the overhanging deck above. Glancing around, pulling Pip along silently, I search for a building without a door, an underground parking garage, anything we can duck inside and lose ourselves to view. But nothing jumps out, and too soon, I hear voices. They aren’t picnickers, either.
“3145’s around here somewhere,” says a deep baritone. Boots crunch on old asphalt and gravel, muffled as they move onto dirt and thin grass.
Just a number. No name. I wonder where the poor man went.
“What about the Barrigan kids?” a second voice asks. Higher, a woman’s. “I’d say they’re the priority. Been off the map for five days now, and they pop up out of nowhere fifteen minutes ago?”
They know we’re here.
“Not all of them,” the first voice answers. “The older boy’s still missing.”
Enoch. I kick myself for letting us get separated; I should have known better, no matter what happened.
“Stop talking and start looking,” a third orders. His voice sounds like a rockslide. “Doctor Black wants them all.”
“Won’t have to look too hard for the girl and boy,” the first returns. “They’re right here.”
In the distance I hear the faint hum of another aircar. More guards?
I lead Pip quietly around another building, but the voices are getting closer. I cock my head, doing a quick count: only three pairs of footsteps. The Home Guard are moving much more quickly than we are, making no effort to be silent.
“We’ll find you eventually,” sings the female. “Come out and nothing will happen to the little boy.”
The first man chuckles. “We plan to take good care of him anyway. Don’t be afraid, Naiya.”
I pull the knife from my belt, reaching into the rubble for a rusty piece of rebar. I don’t relish the thought of bloodshed – I’ve never hurt anyone in a fight, unless you count knocking the wind from Enoch. But I’d welcome the opportunity to hurt these guards.
“Come on, girl.” The voices
are getting lower, nastier, more taunting. They can smell my fear, and they love it. “Come on out.”
I search for another option, but can’t find one. The only way to keep Pip safe is to get away from him, hope that maybe his signal fades before they can find him, that he can last long enough for Enoch to realize something is wrong and come back. Barely breathing, I walk him to the doorway of an abandoned building, pushing him down amongst the dust and debris. When he tries to rise, I push more insistently.
“Stay here,” I whisper. “But if I tell you to run, you run. And if anything happens to me, you run. Understand?”
Pip looks like he might cry, but he nods slowly. I turn and tear around the side of the building and into the gloom, churning carelessly through a desiccated grove of dead trees, making plenty of noise to draw off the guards.
It works. Within seconds they’ve got me surrounded, the three of them closing in seamlessly in a coordinated attack formation. I want to curl into a ball and cover my head. Instead, I raise the knife.
“The little runaway,” says the woman, moving lithely to cut me off. Her words hiss from between thin lips. “You’ve decided to reappear.”
“Stay away from me,” I warn. I rotate slightly, unable to keep them all in my sights at once.
“Well, well, well,” says the owner of the first voice, his red eyes at odds with his almost lazy words. “Feisty. I like that.” He flashes me a lascivious grin, looking me slowly up and down.
I flush angrily, raising my weapons, the otherworldly heat swelling in my palms once more. “I dare you.”
“You want to fight us?” he asks, fingering the brutal-looking instruments on his belt. He toys with his baton, his knives, a small canister of teargas. His metal-plated vest glints evilly in the gloom, and I watch as his fingers settle on a pistol, pulling it slowly from the holster.
I quail, feeling the heat in my neck and hands intensify. Enoch hasn’t been gone that long: he might hear me if I scream, come back. But what would that accomplish? Then I’d just get him killed too. No, better to go down fighting, try to distract them long enough to give Pip some sort of chance.
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