by A. E. Shaw
Eliza leads Selina out and back up the way Kit and Ali led them down, what feels like days before, but wasn’t.
“Where are we going?” Selina asks, once they hit the surface of the ex-city. There isn’t a hint of rain left out here now, with the sun bare and planted right above them. Its rays remind Selina of the well-lit fire in her quarters, heat striking her face so hard that she instinctively brushes at her skin, like the layer of warmth could be moved aside.
“Nowhere,” Eliza replies, straightening herself up and brushing the dust off her overalls, a gesture which serves only to make room for new dust to find a home there.
“I don’t understand.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why couldn’t you talk to me down there?”
“I wanted to talk somewhere we wouldn’t be disturbed.”
“What do you want to say?”
“You’re here for a reason.” Eliza might have liked a little more quavering from Selina, but she won’t get it.
“A reason? Whose reason?”
Eliza’s tongue trips silent briefly as she adjusts her words to match a question she hadn’t assumed. “Everyone’s. All of those who died. Mine. You owe me.”
Elisa long-since realised Selina’s tiny, confused, privileged life has left her open to manipulation. The smallest of appeals to a higher purpose, to a special purpose - no, a duty - and the girl is transformed into just the sidekick Eliza hadn’t realised she needed. Until now.
Inside her, Selina feels denial rising like vomit, but she grits her teeth and keeps it in her chest, and waits for more.
“So long I’ve spent, trying to find who’s left in this world, who’s to blame. So very long. I’m not waiting any longer. I’m going to find them this time. And you’re coming with me.”
And she continues, and Selina listens, and she’s a good listener, sure enough, and Eliza’s an even better speaker, and she hits every note of fear and anger that Selina’s been playing inside herself since last night, and it riles her.
“There’s no-one else,” Eliza says, “don’t you see? Everyone else is dead. It’s me. And you. What other choice do you have? What other kind of life were you planning on leading, running away from this Pulse, running away from things you don’t even know about, searching for a miserable shadow of a life in this festering hole of a ruin?”
And Selina couldn’t answer that, could she?
Now she just has to get this across to Alej.
Who won’t be coming with them. Alej, to whom she’s just said she’ll see everything through with. She shudders, because Eliza has dragged her into a lie.
But that’ll be fine, she tells herself, has to tell herself, because Alej wasn’t made for quests, was he? He was built to live, and to keep everyone else living too, and that’s it. All function, no soul.
Tell that to this Alej, lying here feeling useless, wondering how this helps - understanding it’s what Selina wants, but not knowing why. The arched stone ceiling isn’t that different from that in his room in the castle, but it’s not like he would be spending time lying on his back doing nothing if he were there, no, he’d be working, making his regular checks on the machinery, ensuring the food he or Michael had harvested was ready and waiting for Miriam to cook with as and when she needed it.
He’d be so tired from chopping firewood that if it were time for sleep, he’d be doing it already. So comfortable, even under a blanket on the floor, that he’d feel rested and complete by morning, not only half-alive as he does now. His body aches and his stomach runs concave where it oughtn’t. He’s used to a sufficiency of food, and is finding the lack of it incomprehensible. His mind is half-hearted, his body is becoming slack. His mood suits the gloam of the room at least. He turns over, and buries his face in the unfamiliarly-scented blanket. It doesn’t help, and he still can’t sleep.
He tries to zone out, to let his brain wander as he could so easily when he had a physical task to carry out. He keeps coming back to the imperfections he can see in the building around him. He wonders how Selina is. If she’ll wait, if she’ll come back. What if she decides to go along with Eliza? What if, like Aiden, she’s just gone from his life? What would he do?
This thought is so far from something he can construct thoughts about, it sends him into a darkness, which starts in the peripheral vision and wraps himself right around him the harder he tries to peer into it. A barrage of ‘what if’ thoughts spike him from every side, and he is sweating, shaking in a panic the like of which he’s never experienced. He’s got himself wrapped up so tight in the blanket that he’s too hot now, his skin is like fire, it’s like the fire, there are flames coming up about the bed, and he is searching for people who aren’t there and everything he’s ever known is being consumed and wasn’t that fine, wasn’t that okay, wasn’t it that and move on and what’s next?
It was, as long as he wasn’t alone.
Is that what he is, now? Has she abandoned him?
Not yet, Alej, not just yet, but give it just a little longer…
“I don’t understand.” Alej’s expression defines blank incomprehension.
“I have to do this.” Selina is being odd. Serious. As if she were an elder.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“Alej, the man killed all those people. Killed them. Do you understand what murder is?” Alej looks at her with a blankness that replies for him: No.
“He…forced the world to be like this. Empty, dry. Like this.” Selina gestures with open arms, as if the room could represent everything.
“But this is how the world is.” And that isn’t an explanation for what you’re trying to do.
“This isn’t how the world ought to be, though.”
“But it is this way. We can’t do anything. Wasn’t the point of all this to try to find somewhere else to live? You and me? To find somewhere else to be?” It isn’t quite what he means, but it’s all he knows how to say.
Selina throws up her hands in irritation. “Surely you can’t think we can stay here forever? It would be so easy to die here, Alej. Just a second’s lack of thought, just a moment where you forget to care…we aren’t like that. We don’t want to be like that. We weren’t built to live like this. This is not what was supposed to be out here, and I need to try. Eliza needs to try. Between us, we have a chance.”
“Do you think you ought to be making this kind of…” it takes him a moment to find the word, and then another moment to get it across his lips, such is Selina’s glare “decision? Is there not more that could be spoken about it first?”
“If you were Aiden, perhaps there would be things you could say that I might like to hear. After all, he knew many things about much more than the world I came from. But you aren’t Aiden. So you shouldn’t try to speak of such things. Please Alej. For me.”
“And I cannot come with you?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“I don’t know what I ought to do.” At least Alej has found the heart of his issue with separation. After all, he’s has always had ‘what to do’ neatly laid out for him; hasn’t had to make a decision in his life. It doesn’t seem right that they should split up, because what will become of him alone? How will he manage with these strange people, people he’s spent barely any time at all with, people whose words confuse him, whose faces he struggles to keep in his head for longer than the time he’s looking at them.
“Do what I ask of you. Please. Just…stay, and take care of yourself, and try to fit in a little. See if you can help with…something. Then I’ll know that you’re here, and that you’re safe. I trust Kit. And Ali. They’ve been good to us.”
Alej nods.
Selina swallows. “And another thing. it’s important to me that everything I am…that everything I’ve told you continues to exist. Whatever happens to me.”
Alej’s eyes widen, and his mouth parts in question. He doesn’t hold fear inside himself yet, but there’s a ch
ance he’s learning that sensation.
“Nothing,” Selina reassures him, and, going by the double-strike of her heartbeat, herself, “is going to happen to me.”
About this, she is wrong. The things that will happen to her, the things that the journey will cause to happen to this world, they’re few, but they’re key, and complex. But even if Selina knew where this was leading, I think she’d make the trip all the same. Even if Alej knelt down and begged her, uncommon tears streaming down his pleading face, desperate for her not to go, she’d go all the same.
So even when he doesn’t do that, when he looks at her with eyes conveying more meaning than she can ever recall them having done, she still doesn’t give an inch of doubt, and tries, instead, to offer comfort.
“I’ll come back,” she promises, “when Eliza and I find out how this world is truly working. I’ll come straight back to you, and we’ll know more, and maybe we won’t have to move anywhere, maybe we can set up here. We can find a way to make home, and make it good like home ought to be.”
Alej hears and understands that much, he finds that something, yes. Comforting? Not quite that far.
“This world is broken,” Selina says, trying to find a way to explain it best to Alej, and consolidating the conclusions he’s trying to draw in his own mind. “We need to know if we can fix it, or, if we can’t, how we need to change ourselves to survive in it.”
“It’s hard enough without Aiden…” he says, quietly, as if he thinks this is the wrong thing to say, but can’t help himself. He thinks it’s wrong enough, though, that Selina doesn’t seem to care that Aiden is not here.
“I know,” Selina says, with a warmth and a sadness that surprises him, “it’s hard for me too. But he chose to leave us. Maybe this is what I need to do to find him.”
Maybe. Maybe it is that.
Alej tries to think what Aiden would have said about this moment that they’re having, about these plans. They’re a long way from any conversation they ever had the chance to have, but then again, they are the kind of thing that Aiden would definitely have understood. He would have liked this. Quests. Adventures. What was that word, the thing that the great men of old went on, when they wanted to find out new things…voyages.
“I know you’ll be alright,” Selina offers, and there is something in that, something in the way she places her hand on his shoulder, and squeezes, in her soft, sad smile, and her strong gaze that makes him feel as if she knows things he doesn’t, as if that’s true, or will be. That feeling, that’s something Aiden always gave him, and Alej realises, even if he doesn’t realise it consciously, that when Aiden left, so did a little of that confidence that all would be well. If Selina tells him that things are going to be fine and good because she is leaving, then that might be all he needs to get by, until it becomes true.
“How much can you carry?” Eliza asks, looking Selina’s frame up and down with obvious disdain.
“As much as I need to,” Selina says, confidently. Whilst it’s true she hasn’t done a great deal of pack-horsing in her time, she has always felt strong, physically, capable as she is of manipulating her body into a multitude of poses for as long as needs be.
Eliza doesn’t question her further, but hands her two water bags, supple hide of some sort - Selina doesn’t quite dare ask exactly what sort - and oh, they’re heavy. Heavy as Selina herself feels she is.
“Sling them across your back, like this,” Eliza says, taking up two more and demonstrating, hefting them over her head one after another, and letting their O-shapes settle sidelong across her shoulders.
With a strong inhalation and all the strength she can find, Selina does the same. She stumbles as the second settles crosswise over the first, the weight off-setting her perfect balance. A forceful exhalation and conscious repositioning has her back and stable. Eliza raises an eyebrow, and Selina has no idea what she might mean by it.
“Take a few minutes to get used to these. You’re going to be wearing them for days - it’s going to be no good to us if we have to write off a day’s travel because you’ve sores across your body.”
Selina nods. Preparation is good. Just like stretching, before she dances. If you don’t let the body flow into each movement, it can freeze and tear, and, whilst this has never happened to her before, her mother told her how it happened when she herself was a girl. That the reason Selina was to work so hard, from so young, was because her mother could never do it herself, for she had tried too hard, too old, and had to suffer a lifetime of poor mobility, in every way, as a result of it.
“Haven’t you any better shoes than that?”
It hasn’t occurred to Selina that her thin shoes, tattered now, stained ash-grey and soaked over and again, her shoes designed only for dancing and never for walking, might not be the only kind of shoes available in the world. She’s noticed the thick dark boots that Eliza wears, but not in the sense that she understood them to be different from her own. Now she tries to imagine their heft and weight on her own feet, and if they might protect her from something. It doesn’t seem likely. Surely they would only slow her down?
“These shoes are perfect,” she says, looking down at her feet, then back up, defensively. “Shoes just like these took me all the way up to the castle, and all the way back down again, and through many, many cycles of my life. Had I not grown, that very pair would be serving me just as well now. And these are the same, so I think that they will be just as good as any other shoes.”
“And if the Pulse comes?”
“From all you’ve said, if the Pulse comes, I will be gone anyway. There is no point in preserving only my feet.”
Eliza puts her hands to her hips. “And this doesn’t frighten you?”
At this, and for the first time in a while, Selina laughs. Eliza is such a serious, lean figure. She is a relief, in a way Selina couldn’t explain.
“No, no. It doesn’t frighten me at all. It irritates me a little. We have so much to do. I’ve promised Alej we’ll be back soon. If I am Pulsed, then that will have been a lie.”
“You shouldn’t make promises like that. You’ve no idea what’s to come.”
And Selina wonders, at last, how much idea Eliza herself has about this. She is clearly trying to be older, wiser, braver, but it doesn’t seem to come from any kind of fact. How old, she wonders, is Eliza, anyway? But, as with Aiden, Selina understands that there are people who will function best if you trust them to take a lead, even if that trust is in itself unjustified. Having led Alej all the way here, and having had to fence around him whilst they’ve been staying here, to take a break from that feels like something very welcome.
Ali catches Selina by surprise. She comes from the shadows, and grabs her upper arm, tight. “Shhh,” she says, holding tighter as Selina instinctively tries to whip her arm from her grip.
“Let go,” Selina says, keeping her voice obediently low all the same.
Ali does, which is fortunate, or else Selina would not have stayed to hear her words.
“What is it?” she presses.
“You’ve only known Eliza a matter of days.”
“I know.”
“Of course. And I don’t mean to worry you - I don’t want to frighten you, and I have no interest in stopping you leaving with her, but I want you to understand that Eliza is not…” she stops, abruptly.
“She’s not?” Selina prompts.
“She’s had a hard life. She had to do some very difficult things to survive.”
“I know. She told me.”
“She’s told us many things, and yet I know that even those things aren’t the half of her life. I have a feeling there are things that happened to Eliza that she herself is not truly aware of. No, what I mean is more, she acts alone, even when she is with others.”
Selina nods. This seems obvious.
“She’ll do anything to survive. And if that is to your cost, then this won’t matter to her. It won’t even occur to her.”
And this too i
s obvious, but only with the application of a little thought.
“You’re telling me to be careful?”
“No. I’m telling you to be the same. Watch her like she’ll watch you. Be ready, at any point, to match her, to surpass her. She is a dangerous person. But, she’s saved my life more than once. Kit’s, too.”
“Right.”
“In all our travels, I’ve never met anyone like Eliza. I’ve never met anyone who leaves me so on edge as her. And I’m sure you’ve noticed she has issues with you. Please. Take care.”
“Has she said anything about me? To you?”