by David Arnold
Kit brushed his hand against the grainy wood. I see you, he thought. I know you exist.
NICO
Reminders
"I’m staying,” said Loretta, holding St. John in her lap. “Last night was good for me, I can feel it. I just need another night, maybe two.”
In perhaps the least surprising news ever, Monty said he was staying too.
The two of them sat together on the mattress, holding hands, and again, Nico found herself in some jealous-adjacent land where you did more than love, you fell in love, where you did more than sing songs about holding hands, you actually held hands. She was glad Monty and Loretta had managed to find this elusive legend of a country, but glancing at Lennon—and then quickly away, as he was looking at her too—Nico wished they would report back with a route and map and appropriate list of snacks for what was surely a long and perilous journey.
Speaking of which . . .
“I need to get going,” she said. “You think Echo would mind if I took some food?”
Monty waved toward the cupboard, and as Nico filled her backpack with dried meats, Lennon made the case for going to Boston now. “You look better, Rett. And who knows what we might find once we get there. A community. Maybe even some kind of . . . medicine for you.”
He was out on a limb and they all knew it. Shelf lives and expiration dates might once have been mere suggestions, but when every date you saw was a solid fifteen years prior, suggestion became law.
“You go on, Len.”
“What?”
“I’m telling you,” said Loretta. “Go without me.”
“I’ll wait on you if you need more time, I just—”
She coughed, fist to mouth, and when she stopped, she simply looked at him.
Lennon searched her face. “You don’t want to go.”
“I loved them,” she said. “But for me, it was about getting out of Pin Oak.”
Lennon stood, walked to the boarded-up window, said nothing.
“You were dead set on Boston,” she continued. “I figured, sure, Boston, let’s do it.”
As Loretta explained her plan to join Monty and Kit on their passage to the Isles of Shoals, Nico felt Kit’s eyes on her and she considered the clarity she’d had last night by the river, how she might enact certain qualities of love. She wondered what it would look like, inviting them to join her on the road south. Manchester, the Waters of Kairos, the geological anomaly, if it even existed, there were so many unknowns, she couldn’t possibly be responsible for them, Kit, especially, so young, but maybe Lennon, if he was headed south to Boston alone, why not . . .
“I’m going to Manchester,” she said.
They all looked at her.
“It’s a city south of here.” She looked at Lennon, and her stomach felt like a diving cormorant. “I’m pretty sure Boston is on the way. If you—”
Before Nico could finish, they were interrupted by a deep, distant rumble, like the earth was an apple whose core was trying to burst free. It lasted seconds, and then, as suddenly as it began, it receded, as if the swarm were simply reminding them of its presence, that while humankind might go on with their little plans, the Flies were there, purring, crouching in the long shadows where the dusk of humans met the dawn of Flies.
KIT
fantastic hugging
"You’re not the boss of me.”
This was one thing Kit knew for sure. Once his Dakota was gone, and once Lakie got carried off by Flies, and once Monty fell all the way in love with Loretta, he had ceased having a boss.
Nico was saying things like “It’s not that I don’t want you to come,” and “I can’t be responsible for you,” and “It could be dangerous,” and other things Kit wasn’t really listening to. He was his own man now. Proud owner of a psyche fully unleashed.
Monty bent down so they were at eye level, and Kit could see that he was also going to try to talk him out of it. “Kit—”
“You’re not the boss of me either.”
His words were close and quiet, and Kit felt himself about to cry. He wanted Monty to see in his eyes that he meant what he was saying, that his decision to go south with Nico and Harry and Lennon had not been made willy-nilly, which was a phrase he had been meaning to use.
“You’re serious,” said Monty.
Kit nodded. And the tears he’d been trying to hold off started to come, and because he couldn’t speak, he leaned in for a hug. He put everything he had into this hug, hoping Monty might feel his heart, his apology, and yes, how much he meant this.
He hadn’t expected to feel all those things back.
“I’m sorry,” Monty whispered in his ear. “I should have been there to protect her.”
And even though he couldn’t see Monty’s face, he could feel the hurt buried deep inside this boy he loved but had never quite understood how to say so.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Kit, knowing he meant Lakie, and also knowing . . . “If you’d been there, the Flies would have taken you, too.”
His relationship with Monty had never been affectionate. Only now, too late, did Kit realize this error. He’d hugged his Dakota a billion times of course, and Lakie, too. It wasn’t like he loved Monty any less. Was it because they were boys? Did boys have a harder time hugging other boys? If this was true, it was stupid. And he’d been missing out.
Monty was a fantastic hugger.
“I want you to know”—Monty paused, and Kit suddenly felt that he was not ready for this conversation—“I don’t blame you. For my parents.”
The hug tightened, and Kit thought of the characters in books, who, after hearing some bit of good news, felt a “weight lifted off their shoulders.” Monty said it again, said Kit was just a little kid, it wasn’t his fault, and Kit realized just how tired his shoulders had been.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
As it turned out, the best way to tell someone you loved them was in a hug.
what he knew, and how long he knew it
There had once been a human for everything. Cleaning trash. Fighting battles. Keeping grass short and buildings tall. Driving large groups of small humans to school. There were doctors, not just for each human, but for each human part. A doctor for feet, a doctor for eyes, a doctor for privates and brains and colons.
There was a lot about the olden days that made little sense to Kit. But maybe the most baffling was the human inclination to say, Yes, I will do that.
“There used to be people whose entire job was to walk on a rope without falling off.” Kit balanced himself on the steel railing of the train track. He’d made it a little challenge. See how many steps he could take without touching the ground. “People who dressed as clowns. People who got shot out of cannons.”
Nico sat with her back against the Cormorant, Harry beside her, the two of them watching Kit balance and fall, balance and fall. “I guess when you’re not worried about basic survival, you have to find ways to entertain yourself,” she said.
Kit hopped off the railing. “Those are called crossties.” He pointed to the slats of wood running perpendicular between the two rails. “In England, I think they call them sleepers. People had to build those. And then other people built trains. And then someone drove the trains while a bunch of other people rode them. And if this wasn’t a people train, then it was a food train, probably, and people had to load the food onto the train.” He sighed and shook his head. “I wish I could ride a train someday.”
Kit left it at that, thinking he’d probably done a lot of talking, and he didn’t want to overstay his welcome with Nico, which was a phrase he knew for when a person annoyed the ever-loving bejesus out of you.
“Maybe it was a circus train,” said Nico, putting to rest his fears for now.
“Maybe.”
He joined her at the base of the Cormorant; w
armth from the morning sun mixed with the chill of wind off the river. Up on the hill, Lennon was saying goodbye to Loretta. It seemed to be lasting a while. But Kit understood.
“She looks better,” said Nico. “Loretta, I mean.”
Kit thought so too, though he didn’t want to jinx it. Even for a Knower of Things of his stature, these sicknesses made no sense. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m sick, only I don’t know it, so I’m just passing it around.
“You feel okay?” he asked.
“What?”
“You don’t feel, like . . . sick?”
“I feel good,” said Nico. “You?”
“I feel fine.”
Harry drank from a section of the river that had somehow isolated itself. Like a little pond. A little pond river.
“You have a plan,” he said. “Right?”
Nico put an arm around his shoulders. “I have a plan.”
“And I’m part of it.”
“I didn’t really know until now,” said Nico. “But yes, I think so.”
Kit thought of last night, how he’d watched her here by the river, and how he’d realized then that he’d known her for a very long time. He and Nico were part of something. He didn’t know what yet, but it felt like the pyramids in Egypt, which, according to the nonfiction shelf in the Taft Elementary library, had been built around five thousand years ago.
“I knew,” Kit said quietly.
“Hmm?”
He looked at Nico. “I knew I was part of the plan.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ve known for a super-long time.”
NICO
Assurances
"Before we get too far, I need to know if Kit can come with you to Boston.”
Fifty yards downriver, Kit and Harry played fetch. Lennon walked beside her, the cabin a mile or more behind. “What’s in Manchester?” he asked.
“Right now. Before he can hear. I need an answer.”
Lennon looked at her. “Of course he can.”
“Promise it.”
“I promise.”
Beside her, the river seemed louder than it had last night, wild and lawless. The haze had cleared, the morning sun shone bright, and in the water’s reflection, she saw cold trees and sky, and she wondered if the Merrimack was a siren calling her south, or a snake chasing her there. She was glad to have Lennon and Kit with her; but she was concerned, and not just about Kit’s fate. Echo’s version of the story still rang in her head, and in light of his disappearing act, her decision to wait until morning to ask questions now seemed grossly irresponsible.
Surely there were other scientists at Kairos, which made it plausible for Echo to be one of those scientists’ children. So what else had his mother told him? Whatever Echo knew, he seemed positive it was bullshit, but didn’t the mere fact of the Cormorant’s existence corroborate her father’s story? For that matter, did she even want her father’s story corroborated? So far, she’d been more preoccupied with the validity of his claims, but what of the claims themselves? Say she got to Manchester, found the Waters of Kairos spinning, what then?
In you go, my dear.
With no clue what was on the other side, did she have it in her?
Maybe that was why she’d put off asking Echo questions: A small and timid part of her had hoped he would prove her father wrong. That some fact had been passed to him, which could be passed to her, and which she could use as evidence to turn back, give up, and go home.
“Nico. What’s in Manchester?”
“Nothing, Len.”
He had Boston. Kit, too, if it came to it. Whatever her story’s validity, it belonged to her. She would only share it with them if the need arose.
“I like that,” he said. “In case you were wondering.”
She turned to find Lennon looking at her with that almost-smile, and suddenly the possibilities of what, exactly, he liked seemed endless. A timely gust of wind blew his hair in a way that felt downright boastful— Look what I get to do, said the wind. And Nico wondered if this slightly nauseating, overly exhilarating, entirely new feeling she had was what the characters in her books meant when they claimed their hearts had skipped a beat.
“You like what?” she asked.
The almost-smile flowered; he looked away. “When you call me Len.”
KIT
hands & feet
Squad was a word Kit knew, which denoted a group of cool kids who talked in shorthand and mostly walked around towns causing nonviolent shenanigans.
Kit, Nico, Lennon, and Harry (an honest-to-goodness “squad”) followed the Merrimack south. The river was an easy enough go, winding in some places, occasionally cutting through fields or smaller towns, but mostly keeping to the woods. There were riverside houses and buildings, and occasionally a wide bridge would cross the river to the east bank. They would walk underneath these bridges, and Kit would imagine how cars had once passed overhead.
One of the main roads from the olden days ran alongside the river, disappearing for long stretches and then reappearing around bends when they least expected it. They avoided the road where they could, hoping to remain unseen, keeping close to the water and the old train tracks (which continued their parallel route beside the river).
As they walked, they talked about histories and hopes. About their parents. About their lives before they’d met.
Nico said she’d been raised in a boarded-up farmhouse in the middle of the woods, which had a deck on the upstairs attic. When she was little, she said, she would sit up there and pretend her farmhouse in the middle of the woods was a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. “I used to think Dad saved his best stories for the attic deck, but now I think maybe the deck brought those stories out of him.”
Kit liked watching Nico talk, all these soft words blossoming in the air in front of her face, disappearing as new ones came. And when Lennon described their circle of campers in Pin Oak Forest, Kit watched his words blossom and disappear too, and he thought, Maybe words are the origins of a breeze, and he found he wanted to contribute.
“Before I was born, my Dakota practiced midwifery, which is a fancy word for helping pregnant women have babies, which means she was there at the genesis of hundreds of lives. She was my beginning, and she was a dancer and a runner before the world went dark, and I’ve seen pictures of her twirling a baton in high school, and she liked to move her hands when she talked. She used to live in a commune in the mountains. And since she helped so many other people have babies, she was scared to have one herself. But one night in the commune, an angel spoke to her in her dreams. The angel told her not to be afraid, and then, when she woke up, she had this key in her hand”—he pulled the necklace out from under his shirt and coat, showed them the silver key attached to it—“and then she got pregnant with me and saw a sign that she remembered from before the world went dark, and that sign reminded her of Town, and then she moved into an old cinema, which is where I was born, and where I lived my whole life, in the projection room upstairs. My Dakota spent most of her days in a garden, where she grew vegetables, and tomatoes were her favorite. And they were my favorite too, and I just really love her. Loved her. I miss her. And Lakie. I miss them both a lot.”
Kit felt every ounce of the silence that followed. I went overboard, they don’t want to be friends anymore, I knew I would annoy the bejesus out of them.
Nico reached out a hand. “Dakota sounds lovely.”
He took her hand in his, and felt his Dakota’s key around his neck, and it was like a perfect circle with no beginning or end.
“Nico?”
“Yes, Kit.”
“Why do you draw marks on your hand?”
He’d noticed them before but hadn’t wanted to pry. Now, holding that marked-up hand, seemed a good time to ask.
“See how there are five?” she said. “When there a
re eight, I have to be in Manchester.”
“How come?”
Nico smiled but in a way that made Kit wish he hadn’t asked. “My dad sent me to find something. And I need to be there on a certain day to find it.”
“Can I help you look?”
“I was hoping you would.”
“Is your mom dead?” he asked, immediately regretting it. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Yes, she died.”
Somewhere a bird chirped, and he thought maybe it was a finch from the sound of it, and he said, “My mom died too,” as he looked at his feet, such weird little feet, and he wished they were wings. “That’s who I was talking about. She called me her Kit and I called her my Dakota because we belonged to each other.” But his feet were just feet, sadly, not the flying kind, and so he tossed his thoughts into the air instead, watched them glide around, blossom into breezes, little I-see-yous floating this way and that, landing like a soft quilt on all the world’s small forgotten things.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to answer,” Nico said. “But do you mind if I ask how she died? Was it recent?”
He felt like climbing a tree, and just living there forever. “Yes, it was recent. I don’t know how.”
“Did she sweat a lot?” Lennon’s voice, quietly, behind them. “Bad cough?”
“Yes,” said Kit.
“Start getting confused, mumbling? Seeing things that weren’t there?”
I see you, little knot, little Elefint.
I see you, beautiful purple flower.
“Yes,” Kit said.
“It was the same with Jean and Zadie,” said Lennon.
And suddenly Nico’s blossoms weren’t so pretty as she explained her father’s theory that they all had Fly Flu, but that in some, for whatever reason, the virus was dormant. “It’s called a latent virus, and a person can have it for years and not know it, until something reactivates it. Could be another sickness, wholly unrelated. Could be physiological changes. So maybe . . . age? I’ve seen a few other people but can’t be sure any were adults.”