The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  Oh, to have seen the things Eliza speaks of. Even if the truth is only half her words.

  Selina stretches out her limbs, contorts this way and that, folding herself flat and turning this way and that way, feeling every soreness morph into warmth.

  As the sun continues to fight with the clouds for dominance, she wonders how much longer Eliza will sleep. It doesn’t seem right to spend this much daylight resting.

  She crouches down by her and, cautiously as if poking a dead animal, puts a hand to Eliza’s shoulder. No change. She shakes her a little. Eliza’s breathing doesn’t skip a beat.

  “Eliza?”

  This is silly.

  “Eliza!”

  She doesn’t want to shout.

  She shakes her hard.

  And finally, Eliza opens her eyes. Selina flinches and dives back, expecting some form of shouting, some kind of defensive strikeout, but none comes. As Eliza blinks at the intrusion of the light, she looks quite different from her usual self. Selina’s silhouette falls across her vision, and just for a moment, she smiles. A real, warm, heartfelt smile. Selina finds herself more shocked than she would have been if Eliza had lashed out at her.

  Then, as gently as it came, the smile fades. Lines cross Eliza’s brow.

  “I hope you’re ready,” she says, quick to her feet, quicker still dressed with all of her belongings about her.

  “I am,” Selina rejoins, pleased that she’s had the time to arrange herself as she’s been accustomed to. Considering they’re out in the middle of nothingness, it’s a little surprising it’s formed the calmest and most civil morning she’s had since she was forced from the castle. The thought that this might be related to Alej’s absence twitches at the back of her consciousness, and she dutifully shoves it down where it belongs, out of sight and out of mind.

  They walk, and walk, and walk some more. The terrain doesn’t change at all.

  “Eliza?” Selina asks, time enough into their travels that silence is louder than shouting.

  “Yes?” She doesn’t look back, walking, as she insists upon doing, a height in front of Selina.

  “Did you dream, last night?”

  Now she looks back, and now she stops, sudden and tall so that Selina is a hair’s breadth from walking right into her.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You looked happy.”

  Eliza laughs, but it isn’t real. She walks on again, and says no more for quite some time.

  Far south of there, Ali, Alej and Kit are once more attending to the Caracaras. Or, rather, Kit and Ali stand in the background, watching, as Alej runs his hands over the nose and sides of the Caracaras again and again, as if that in itself were a healing process.

  “You think he can do this?” Kit asks Ali, uncertain, because through all of yesterday and all of today thus far, he’s done nothing but caress the machine. They themselves have been standing there long enough that they’re already cold.

  All last night Alej wouldn’t talk about a thing: however hard they tried to engage him, he’d just nod and smile and shrug, as if they were speaking a language he didn’t understand. Eventually they suggested that he get himself back to bed and rest, and he disappeared only too gladly.

  “This is it.” Ali had said to Kit , once Alej was well out of earshot.

  “This is what?”

  “The chance/ The chance to get away.”

  “You say that like you’ve been waiting for this moment since we got here?”

  “I have.”

  Kit frowns at that. She’s been so keen to make the best of her time here that he’d almost, almost begun to settle. Even in hoping Alej might be able to fix the Caracaras, he hadn’t really given much thought to the idea that they might be able to get out of, not just here, but off this whole continent. Now, with Eliza gone, maybe for good, there’s no third party giving them that tiny odd sense of three-piece community that made it feel, in the smallest and most peculiar of ways, as if they had a duty here, rather than their being stranded. But maybe they’ve been too attached, too willing to take a break from what had already been, when they arrived, a quarter-lifetime of hard work. The emptiness, awful as its truth seemed, had been a relief. But they’ve stayed too long.

  They should’ve been doing a lot more than waiting.

  That feeling leaps up and smothers them in cold understanding. It cloaks them strong as the darkness that woke Aiden up an age ago, right back where we began our story. Their time hasn’t just come; it’s almost passed.

  Ali and Kit have been too comfortable, imagine that, even in this waste of a land. They’ve been waiting a long time for something to change, it’s true, but the change that came, the arrival of the newcomers, was not for them. It only illustrated the extent to which they were never meant to stop in one place. The two of them have purposes too, and just because in this land their purposes and skills are neither welcomed nor respected, this doesn’t mean they ought to stop here forever.

  They’ve kept very quiet about their own pasts, the things they know, the things they do. Did. What they could do, if they were somewhere with life left to it. Eliza’s turn from smallscale survivor to woman with a mission caught them as much by surprise as Selina and Alej’s appearance, never mind Selina’s sudden and peculiar willingness to accompany Eliza to who-knows-where. Things are changing, and they can’t afford to watch or wait any longer.

  Back here and now, in the undergrowth, in a wet heat that drips of them from time to time, Ali responds to Kit’s You think he can do this? with a stern look. They can’t afford doubt, not now. “Of course he can fix it. If he can’t, Kit, we’ve nothing. As much nothing as we’ve had since the day we figured we were stuck here. So we’ll say he can, and then he will. Understand?”

  Kit appreciates the firm tone, because when Ali gets like that about anything, she’s right. Confidence never lets her down. And her confidence has been…understated for much longer than he’d realised.

  They watch, and wait. There isn’t much to see.

  Alej is calmer and happier than he’s been since the moment before he discovered the fire. To be left to do something, to examine something, it’s a massive relief. There are things he recognises inside and things he doesn’t recognise at all, but everything makes sense. Everything looks like it ought to do something, and even if he doesn’t know what that something is, it’s something it looks easy to work out.

  “What noise should it make?” he asks, with a loudness at odds with the quiet demeanour that’s characterised him since they encountered him.

  Kit and Ali exchange glances. Eventually Ali steps forwards, and leans over the control panel. “It clanked when you started it up. A kind of rumble that went all the way around it, and then it was just quiet.”

  “Completely silent?” Alej asks the question as if the answer will be important.

  “Completely. Only the clicks of the steering mechanisms moving in and out of place as you tilted and twisted them with the levers.”

  “Clicks…” Alej repeats, and nods, satisfied, and there might even be the slant of a smile to his lips as he turns back to the Caracaras, and recommences his stroking, and staring at it, climbing around it, inside, outside, edging along the one wing and then the other, climbing to the peak of the tail and discovering latching flaps that can be opened, searching out sockets of a sort at the sides, and underneath. He makes his way around one more time, then disappears beneath the Caracaras once more. He is scrabbling at the ground, now, and pressing its surface with the flat of his hand. The problem has made itself known, at last.

  Things are missing. Where have they gone?

  A long way north of the Caracaras, Selina and Eliza are still walking. And they’ll be walking for all the rest of this day.

  Eliza is still silent. She looks back over her shoulder every now and again, keeping an eye on Selina, judging, Selina thinks, the speed of her walk. Selina is trying to pace herself, assuming that she will be walking until into the night once m
ore and not wanting to find herself short of breath or water. Already the food they’d intended to last the journey is all but gone. Eliza eats when she wants, and, in Selina’s eyes, eats considerably more than her share. Selina is fine with that to a certain extent - she has, of course, the childhood experience to enable her to make the best of what’s available - but she’s noticed the concern that Eliza appears to have. She can’t find anything to hunt. There were beetles of a sort, yesterday. You could suck them for a few moments, and swallow a texture akin to food, with the taste of licking metal, before spitting out the unexpectedly soft shell. But now, even the day’s walk they’ve gone since then, it’s only dry, and dust, and there aren’t even shells, or casings, or any signs of anything.

  Selina doesn’t talk about these things. And Eliza still won’t talk about anything. The quiet air is the hardest part of their journey, which is not, in itself, arduous, or hard. It’s just one foot in front of another, again, and again, and then again. But even Alej was more companionable than this. And yesterday Eliza was happy to share plenty. More than she’d expected. But when she tries for more, today, she received not even the slightest of acknowledgments.

  And they walk, and they walk. And the landscape couldn’t get any more barren, nor any crunchier, sharp sand seeping into Selina’s shoes so constantly that she no longer stops to shake it out. When, finally, well into the night, (which is somehow hotter and more silent than the day, something Selina had thought impossible,) Eliza decides to decamp, it is only with the word “Here,” and nothing more than that.

  As darkness moves closer and closer to Alej, Kit tries to get him to stop, to come back with them.

  “No,” Alej tells them, his eyes sparking wide with a distracted concentration that gives him the appearance of mania. He knows what’s missing. He doesn’t know why, nor what he’s going to do about it, but the Caracaras is completely within his grasp now. He has ideas, things to test, to examine. “I want to stay. Come back when the light rises again. I think that’s all the time it will take me to fix this.”

  “Come on, leave him if he wants,” Ali says, yanking at Kit’s fraying sleeve.

  “But what if…” Kit says, and Ali knows he’s worried that somehow, magically, perhaps, the boy will have the Caracaras all sorted in their absence, and they’ll come back in the morning and it’ll be gone, and Alej with it, and then they’ll always be stuck here, with whatever becomes of here, and they won’t even have the hope of reclaiming their old lives.

  “That’s not going to happen,” she says, and she knows, inside, that she’s right. Alej needs space and peace and quiet and will be best served by being alone.

  “But he can’t work out here in the dark.”

  “The way he’s been around that thing today, I’d say he knows every palmspan of it inside and out, light or shade.”

  And so they go.

  Once they’ve left, it’s much easier for Alej to work. It implies a trust that their scrutiny did not give him.

  As he works his way around the area, investigating anything he can get his hands on for its properties and possibilities, he discovers tubers that are good to eat, that fill him with a calm fullness, and a plant with long, yellow stems which yield seeds that crunch so brightly between his teeth that they drive out any hint of sleepiness as it comes to him.

  He makes rope, twisting and knotting stems together in different ways, testing their strength. He identifies the systems that drive the mechanisms which tilt the Caracaras’ wings. They’re all intact. The parts that are missing are simply the conductors. The Caracaras has veins, just like those in the greenhouse. For one reason or another, most are missing, but, right inside, there are remnants. And he can see what needs to be replaced. And, the more he examines the plants about him, the easier it is to work out what will make a fitting substitute. He’ll have just enough time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Pulse

  The note begins as the long, long night is just about to tip into the next day. It pierces Selina’s sleep even at its faintest, for it immediately breaks up the absence of noise that’s been so oppressive to her since they began their journey.

  Time has become irrelevant; distance insignificant. At least when Selina walked so far before, to her examination, and to the castle, the scenery was ever-changing, the people omnipresent. The emptiness has been emphatic, so incessant it swallowed any fear, curiosity, or even any conscious thought she might have otherwise had.

  So when the whining starts it’s as notable to Selina as pins in her spine would be, pincing and quivering and horrible all the way from neck to tailbone. After the initial cold she is flushed with adrenaline and heat, and then with fear. It takes moments more for her to assert the source of the feelings, for her to hear the sound itself, to place it, to react to it. She yells for Eliza, who is sleeping still, and when Eliza doesn’t turn over she runs the paces that separate them and yanks at her shoulder. Eliza wheels over, legs kicking out and capturing Selina at the ankle, managing her so Selina crashes down into the dirt, fall cushioned by her waterbag, which splits on impact and soaks away before she can do a thing about it.

  The cold and wet are a weird sensation through the thin material of her clothing. Eliza catches on as Selina catches her breath, and she’s fastening her helmet to her suit quick as anything, pulling the hand coverings from the sleeves of the jacket and closing them tight with drawstrings and whipstitches through holes ratcheted so closely that they leave not even the smallest of gaps. She’s so deft and practiced at this that her process is complete before Selina has so much as got back to her feet. Eliza shoves at her, pushes her aside from the damp, and starts stabbing at the ground with a long knife made of rough-beaten steel. It makes a terrible sound, but that sound is nothing like as terrible as the one that is rising, gathering…behind them? Around them?

  Is it for them?

  The thought reaches right up over Selina’s head and then douses her like more water. She fights her way around herself, crawls up on top of her physical reactions, understanding even as Eliza is shouting at her what it is that her companion is doing, and that there’s no time to waste. Eliza rakes the wet dirt left and right and back again, doing her best to let the moisture loosen up the earth, and Selina pulls at the coarseness, scraping it away, too frantic even to try to avoid the flick-flack of Eliza’s blade driving left and right stirring up more and more.

  The noise grows, and Eliza can’t hear anything Selina says, nor vice versa, but they are both yelling anyway, as if it could be a counter to the sound. They’re both on their knees, now, pushing handfuls of dirt to the end, and every now and then there’s the sleek of Eliza’s knife and it seems like for all they catch and pull at the dirt they make no impact at all, with the noise ringing louder in Selina’s ears by the second.

  At the same time, the dawn is coming, but it looks so unwelcome, so cruel, so intentional and so in time with the sound that the crawling yellow light has Selina feeling as if it’ll burn her if it reaches her flesh.

  And they dig, and dig, and how much longer do they have? There are no bolt holes here, there’s no cover, nothing to help them. Just four hands and a knife and a hell of a survival instinct.

  The volume increases, but either time is stretching out or it isn’t quite as fast, or as loud, or as something as it was that night back in the ruins, with Alej, it’s got a different…texture to it, or the landscape makes it echo in a new way, there’s no judging, no telling what this does or doesn’t mean, so all they can do is dig faster, Selina’s hands bleeding, her nails prised back from the quick by the dirt, but she can’t feel that for all her haste.

  The trough between them grows larger, and they push and scrape and dig faster, and Selina grinds her teeth together so hard she feels they’ll bend and crack against each other, but that doesn’t matter, even that wouldn’t matter, all that matters is this hole, and that they finish it in time.

  Time, time. Time is fluid and curious, now. Th
e stupidity of everything occurs to Selina.

  Why would Eliza bring me out here? She knows about the Pulse. She must have known I’d have nowhere to hide. Why did I think I could do this? What did I think I was going to do? After everything I’ve escaped…it comes down to how quickly I can bury myself in the ground…

  And Eliza grabs her and pushes her face down the second it’s large enough, not a moment too soon. Selina fights the urge to clamp her hands over her ears because it’s more important to save space beneath her for air whilst she continues to dig down with her feet, kicking up dirt as best she can with her soft, worn shoes, so that Eliza can scoop it back over her.