The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  “No, no, that’s not something she would do. But you understand how it is to her, that you were protected, your whole life -”

  “Not my whole life. Not at all.”

  Ali sweeps her hand as if she were brushing these words aside. “I don’t think the difference matters. You’ve been protected from the worst of it. In her eyes.”

  This, Selina can concede.

  “So,” Ali continues, “that she resents you, that might work for you. It might. Or it might be a problem for her. She might want to teach you a lesson. She’s done that with us before.”

  “Why did you let her stay with you for so long?”

  Ali takes a second to think about this, twisting and knotting a piece of her rough fringe between her fingers, as if that would help her find the answer.

  “This land isn’t anyone’s.”

  “But you live here.”

  “Well, we all live here. You never know what might happen. Eliza has survived many Pulses. If they come, well, as I say, she’s saved our lives. She likes to be in control. I think it’s important to her that we need her. Which we don’t. She’s already been telling me all the things she does for us, and we do know and appreciate that she does them, but they’re not things that we couldn’t do for ourselves. We’re good at looking after ourselves, Kit and I. So we’re not worried about her going.”

  “But don’t you worry, about this world? About what it is?”

  “It isn’t for me to worry about. We’ve lived in many worlds. They don’t stay the same for long. I can tell change is coming. We’ve seen it, felt it, in many places.”

  “But how can you tell?”

  “Eliza, to start with. The way she’s trying to do something, rather than spending all day sitting and ranting about it. That you’re here - we felt something, or someone, would come. When you’re so used to there being so few of you, it’s as if you can taste change in the airspace.”

  Selina tries to imagine being that attuned to Outside, imagines trying to explain to her younger self, in her crowded existence here, that there would come a time when you could tell the difference between two more people being near you. It’s impossible to square that.

  Just like that, the time for parting is upon them. Selina expects to feel sad or scared or something, based on the attention everyone has given her, but all she can sense is her own impatience. It’s time to go.

  But first she must say her goodbyes.

  “Please…” Alej starts, but does not finish. He takes Selina’s hands in his own, and squeezes them tight, and pulls her close to him for a moment. He registers her scent, her warmth, and then she moves back, and dips her head to catch his gaze, pulling it back up with strong eye contact.

  “I promise,” Selina says, understanding everything he means to say even though he has not said it, and, behind her, Eliza rolls her eyes. Selina can feel the disapproval, but she does not care. She knows that she means it, and that she can be true to her promises. After all, she has nothing else to hold onto.

  She looks different, Alej thinks, and not only in that she’s covered in a layer of baggage that conceals everything about her body, and makes her look more solid, more human. He’s only ever seen her in one way. But now, she’s…how would Aiden put it? She looks like a princess.

  He goes to speak to Eliza, to say something about how she should look out for Selina, take care of her, maybe, but then Selina has been taking care of him all this time, and perhaps she doesn’t need anyone to look out for her, perhaps it would be a bad thing to send her off, as it were, with the suggestion that she might not be able to completely fend for herself, because, of course she could. Eliza gives him a look before he can speak, and he is so quelled by it that he swallows his confused thoughts, concentrating instead on a last look at Selina as she walks away from him.

  Eliza is gone too, then with no more than a cursory ‘goodbye’, and Kit and Ali reciprocate, unmoved, and then there are only the three of them there left behind.

  For a moment, Alej sees it: everything is how it once was, in his old home, a girl and a boy - age and maturity not withstanding - and himself, but this is not the comforting group it used to be, no, this is very different. Here, there are the two of them, and the one of him. And he does not want to recreate the castle here. Not without Aiden at his world’s centre, and Selina at his side.

  He shifts uncomfortably, right foot to left foot and back again, and wonders what’s next.

  What’s next is, Ali claps him on the shoulder with a strong hand, and smiles. Alej thinks it might be the most human expression he’s ever seen, although, of course, he doesn’t think it quite like that, in quite those words.

  “It’s good that they’ve gone,” she says, and she looks, for Alej, a little too pleased, there.

  “It is?”

  As Kit fastens the latches, Ali guides him back into the sitting room. “Yes, it is. We’ve got a plan of our own, you see.”

  “Sit down,” Ali says. “Urgh, with Eliza gone, I’m going to have to get used to making tea again, aren’t I? Unless you want to do it?”

  Alej’s reaction is a look of absolute fear. It’s not as if he can’t make tea, indeed, it was one of the duties he liked most of all, making pots of fresh leaf tea for Selina to drink from her old, ornate teacups. A handful of leaves, a handful of herbs, a kettle of hot water and ten counts of brewing, followed by ten counts of stirring. Served on a tray with a golden spoon. He didn’t know what the spoon was for, but he put one there anyway, because it looked right. Perhaps one day he could make tea here, but the leaves they use are crisp and brittle, and don’t seem as if they would stand up to the process.

  Perhaps, if it’s all as Selina suggested, one day he can make tea here in the old way.

  Alej is increasingly confused by Ali. She looks, sounds so kind, so warm, but her words don’t seem quite right to him. It could be as simple as the fact that he’s not familiar with the conversations of others. It could be something more. Time will tell, he thinks, just like Michael would say when they planted so many seeds. “Only some’ll come up, see, so we’ve got to get as many as we can under the soil.”

  Ali boils water over a handful of flames and sloshes it into three rough clay cups. She drops a pinch of leaves in, and Alej bites back the urge to tell her that it would go better if she poured the water over the leaves. It seems so obvious. Surely she’s thought of that, and has her reasons.

  She hands him a cup, calls for Kit, and sits opposite Alej, positioning herself between one hole in the fabric and the next. Kit appears, rubbing his hands together as if they were cold, even though it’s edging on humid in here by now, as midday approaches.

  “So,” Ali says, “bet you want to know what the plan is?”

  Alej makes a noncommittal sound, unsure as ever as to the best way to respond. Regardless, she continues.

  “Up at your castle, what did you do again?”

  “I made food happen. I looked after Aiden and Selina, when it wasn’t their turn to look after me.”

  They’re frowning at him, but he can’t work out why.

  “I cleaned, I swept, I polished.”

  “Did you ever fix things?”

  “Fix things?

  “You grew food, right?”

  “Yes, in the light room.” What he wouldn’t give to be back there right now, with the odd light of Outside, and the strange, heady air of row after row of plants springing and flourishing into life.

  “Right. And you had some kind of machines in that room?”

  “To make the air clean.”

  Ali sucks at her teeth for a tsssking sound, frustrated. It takes a continued interrogation, from both of them in turn, to get Alej to describe the complex system of tubes and mechanics which fed something into something else - they don’t pretend to understand it entirely, and Alej doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe it completely, but with a lot of gesturing and imitating of noises of things, they reach a point at which everyone seems sa
tisfied.

  “But why,” Alej asks, with a great effort, in case he’s confused something, “did you want to know about those things? I thought you had a plan for something?”

  “We do,” Kit says, “but it relies on you understanding a few things we don’t. We’d hoped that if anyone would, you might.”

  “Oh, but you should have asked Selina. She understands so many things. Or Aiden. He understands everything.”

  “Maybe, maybe, but he isn’t here. And Selina, well, she has her own mission. And from what you’ve said since you arrived, I think you underestimate just how much you do know.” Instead of finding the compliment, Alej worries that underestimating is something he ought not to be doing.

  Kit’s about to continue, but Ali puts a hand on his knee and stops him. Voice low, she says, “I think that ought to do for now. Maybe it’s best if you take him there and then you can show him, and we can see how it goes? We could talk all day, but I get the feeling he’s used to doing things, you know, more hands on than we’ve been used to.”

  Kit nods. “Okay. I’ll take him out there this evening. Besides, we ought to take a look at the food Eliza’s left, and make sure we’re not going to starve here.”

  Ali runs her hands through her hair, screwing up her face in pain as doing so pulls at a clump of curled-up tangles. “I miss the other places…” she says, so quietly it should surely only be heard by her own ears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Journey

  “How do you know where we’re going?”

  Selina asks this even as Kit is locking the door behind them. It seems like a question she ought to have asked before, but it didn’t occur to her.

  “I don’t,” Eliza says, “but I’ve heard things.”

  “Heard things?”

  “Yes. And I’ve travelled up from the south, and I can tell you this much: they’re not in the south.”

  “That’s something. And the castle is…must be…to the east?”

  “Seems so,” Eliza says, not even looking at her now.

  “And to the West?” Selina perseveres.

  “The Westlands are - were - famous for their artists. In the south they spoke all the time of the great cities of thinkers, of talkers, of those who would make worlds exist from the insides of their own heads.”

  Sounds like Aiden, Selina thinks, and she wonders if that pang when she happens upon his name in her mind will ever fade.

  “…that’s why I think it can only be north.”

  She has, it seems, missed the main part of Eliza’s argument, but by now, it has dawned upon Selina that this is all vague as anything anyway, that all any of them have in this world as it is, there are no maps, no guidelines, and it’s just them, and the city, and its sprawl, and whatever lies beyond that, and beyond that.

  “And if the Pulse comes?”

  Eliza grins, her cruel, daring grin. “Well, I’ve got a suit.”

  “And I…”

  Eliza diverts her course to the side of the road and gives an illustrative thump of her heel into the soft ground there, sandy soil instantly flying up all about her, Eliza replies, “You start digging, get flat, and take a deep breath.”

  “Does that…does that work?”

  “Saved Ali. Should save you. You’re half her size, so it won’t take as long. I’ll help, if I can. So don’t make me angry.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll need me to dig you out. Once it’s passed. Out here, what I say, goes.”

  There’s that calm and fear, in equal measure, at trusting Eliza. Her pace is fast, even and confident, the dust flying about her feet as she marches, as if she’d been trained for this - perhaps she has…

  It’s a stretch for Selina to keep up, but she finds it welcome. Alej is many things, but he was slow, and he wanted to see, to understand everything, where there was neither time nor explanation. It isn’t long before the slope of the mountain shows itself, either, rising above the crests of the rubble.

  And all this time, Selina thinks, we were so close. Now, it feels so close. To Eliza, she asks, “And you never thought to climb the mountain?”

  “I never believed the stories. There were so many stories about the mountain-”

  “I would’ve thought you of all people would be the kind of person to want to find the truth behind stories.”

  “Then you just don’t know me very well, do you?”

  Perhaps not, and perhaps I’m all the happier for that. “Maybe once our journey’s over, that will have changed.”

  Eliza hesitates in her pace for the first time since they set out. “I wouldn’t count on it,” she says, and the pause passes.

  They walk in silence for an amount of time that could be anything. The colour of the sky passes through a yellow, to an amber, to a faint red, and then to burnt grey. The grey becomes thicker, and thicker, and then it’s difficult to see anything but the track of the road, which glows faintly lighter than its sides, broad and constant.

  Selina feels hunger come to her, but doesn’t mention it. The air tastes thicker as the sky cycles through its colours, and at one point it’s hard to breathe, dust-laden and dry, so dry, but that point passes quickly. They’re skirting the outside of the mountain now, inasmuch as Selina can see it on her left if she looks right up, and they must, Selina thinks, be going at double the pace that she and Alej managed. They’re just inside the city, one building and another crumpled atop each other, lining both sides of the curving road as they go. As ever, not a sign of life, not an animal, nor a human, not anything.

  “And you’ve never seen anyone else?”

  “There is no-one else.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Eliza’s defensiveness is infuriating, exhausting, but constant, and she shows no sign whatsoever of letting up.

  “There are things I’d like to know more about,” Selina tries, because, yes, she can walk in silence, but then they’d arrive - presuming they arrive at all - exactly like this, and she’d have had no chance at all to evolve her ideas, her thoughts, her plans.

  “What things?”

  “Tell me the stories.”

  “Which stories?”

  “The things people have told you. Tell me more about your travels. Tell me more about where you came from, or through. Tell me anything. I gave you everything I have to share, and I know that you’ve told me the worst of it-”

  “Have I?”

  “You said you had. With the Pulse. You said that was the worst. And if it wasn’t, then…tell me what was. Judging by all I know, we have so far to go here. I’d like to know more of the world - of your idea of the world, before we arrive at the complex. Your stories mean a lot to me. I’ve had my eyes closed since I was thirteen years old, and I’ve nothing to fill in that gap. I’ve seen three places in my life. It sounds like you’ve seen so much more.” She hopes to appeal to Eliza’s ego, and it seems to be much more effective than straight-out asking.

  Eliza nods, at last.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you some things. I’ll tell you a few things. But you keep them safe like they were precious, right? Like…like jewels, or something you understand.”

  “I understand.” She really does, too.

  Eliza walks still faster, unbuckling a water skin to take her first drink of the journey before she begins her tales.

  These tales are winding, harsh - Selina senses early on that Eliza is quite the would-be storyteller, maybe aspiring to be like those Westlanders, because everything is embellished a little, everything sounds so dramatic, so that all her walks are anxious or racing or hounded or all three. And that reminds her of Aiden yet again, as so many things do. She wonders if he’s made his own stories yet.

  If he’s even still alive. Of course he’s still alive. She’d know if he wasn’t. Then, she didn’t know when her parents were killed…

  Eliza tells of the palace, the empty palace, and of the desert, and of nights alone on the sand,
and of coming to the city and fighting her way through the people, and of watching and listening and learning and fearing and of fights and competitions for space, for food, for stories. She tells of animals Selina has never heard of, thus she imagines that they too have been exaggerated beyond her understanding. But she draws a good mental picture, and with the unrelenting stretch of destruction and despair, the colour and pace of Eliza’s tales switch off Selina’s exhausting threads about her own small existence, and that is more than welcome.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN