I WOKE UP WEEPING. I CAN TELL I’VE BEEN CRYING A LONG time: my chest is sore from heaving, and my face is swollen and stings at the corners of my eyes where the tears have streaked down. The dirt beneath me where I’m sitting against the side of the RV is pockmarked with salty droplets. How long have we been parked here, in the middle of this roadless, dry valley? Everyone looks hazy in the setting sun. Ysabelle is still crying, tiny choking sounds, and Victor is sitting next to her, one hand hesitantly on her shoulder. The others are bunched together near the rear tire, comforting one another. Some are still sniffling like Ysabelle, and a few—Ursula, Wes, Intisaar—are bent under the strain of sadness, but their cheeks are already long dry. Above me, the mural painted across the side of our RV is glowing with colors more vivid than I can ever remember seeing. Urging us onward, urging us toward New Orleans.
“Max,” Ursula said to me when our eyes met, “why are we all crying?” There was a horrible desperation in her voice. “It hurts so badly, but I can’t remember why.”
For a moment, I could feel the sharpness of a pain that had a name, and the loss of something I could still feel. Something tremendous. What have we just given up, Ory? What have we given up, and what have we gotten for it? But the more I tried to answer her, the more dull the pain became, until it ebbed away into empty exhaustion. Nothing.
I realized that I couldn’t remember either.
Mahnaz Ahmadi
IT RAINED FOR SO LONG THAT EVENING THAT EVEN UNDER cover of a patch of trees, Naz couldn’t make a fire.
“Too much water is better than not enough,” Malik said as he set out extra buckets to collect the downpour for drinking later. But Naz could see in his glances at each carriage that he was worried about leaking, too. The roofs seemed sturdy for now, and each cache was stacked under layers of tarp, but she didn’t blame him—she checked just as often as well. The books were all they had left.
Naz didn’t like that they had to stick to main roads, but they had no choice. The carriages needed flat asphalt—especially the two antique models. Trying to drag three thousand books across a wild, forested stretch of states would be no better than leaving them there for the Reds to burn. The axles would snap in the first mile.
They had pushed the horses southeast at a gallop until Clinton, Maryland, when they were sure the last of the Reds were no longer following them, and then had finally slowed down. Watson was gasping, and every step flanged droplets of froth from her bridle into the air.
“She’ll be okay,” Vienna said as she leaned in her own saddle toward Naz to pat Watson’s neck. They both were riding even with the first carriage, where Ory was sitting. “Right?”
“She’s just tired,” Naz replied softly, but still felt guilty. They’d had to ride as hard as they did to survive, but she knew how much Vienna loved Watson.
“Watson is my horse,” Vienna explained to Ory, as if on cue. She was talking to fill the silence, so none of them had to face it yet. The silence was where the General—now just Imanuel—was now. “Well, not mine—I used to take riding lessons at the Georgetown stables, before the Forgetting, and she was the horse I practiced with there. That’s how we knew to go get them and bring them to live at the Iowa.”
Ory tried to cooperate. “Your remembering them probably saved our lives. And the books,” he replied.
Vienna blushed, caught off guard by the compliment. For a moment, she looked like the teenager she was, suddenly awkward as she remembered that Ory wasn’t the grunt that she’d decimated in basic training anymore, but the new General of their small war. Naz chewed her lip. She didn’t know how to approach it either. She could already feel a shift in Malik’s tone, and the other soldiers barely spoke to Ory at all—just saluted and then dropped their eyes respectfully to the ground.
Naz watched a small lake to their left curl up and disappear like magic as she considered the situation, leaving behind a patch of wet mud. The creature that had been crouched drinking at the water’s edge startled and darted back into the trees. Yesterday she had been giving Ory orders. Now it was the other way around. But it still seemed like he needed it the first way.
“Was that . . .” Vienna trailed off. She’d seen the lake and the animal, too. “Well, what was that?”
“I don’t know,” Ory said. The creature had looked like a hodgepodge—a rabbit and a pig and a frog smashed together. “It didn’t seem carnivorous though, so I think we’re probably fine.”
“So, General,” Naz said.
He made a face. “Please.”
“Fine. Ory. You need to make an official address to our group once we break for camp tonight. Reintroduce yourself to the rest of the soldiers and such. It might be good to prepare something now.”