The driver figured out how to lower the window so that a slice of the outside sky reached into our moving home. We all stuck our hands out, mesmerized. Ory, you wouldn’t believe—it was cold! So cold to the touch it burned when the little shards landed on our fingertips. It wasn’t water at all. It was something else. The driver pulled her hand in at once, hissing in surprise, but I left mine out there. I cupped my palm to try to collect as many as possible. I endured it as long as I could—my hand was white fire! But then when I pulled it in, there were only a few little silver crystals there. The rest had vanished somehow, and my fingers were misted with a light, wet sheen.
“What’s it called again?” I asked the creature on the man’s arm again. It repeated the name, but it was gone from me once more as soon as I heard it.
The road has been bumpy for miles now. I don’t know why. I almost dropped this small plastic thing as I examined it. Beside me, a woman with very short hair is grimacing as she looks through the front window, and keeps pushing her feet against the floor.
“Wait,” someone behind us said. I turned around. There was a person in the backseat—a man. He stood up and gripped the back of my chair. “Wait, where am I? Where are we going?”
“We—” the driver started to answer, but then she shook her head.
They both turned to me, but I shrugged also, feeling a tingle of fear start to rise in my chest. “I don’t know either.”
We slowed our house down until it stopped. The door was jammed, but the man pushed it open with the face of the beast living on his shoulder, and the three of us stepped out into the grass. So much green everywhere. It seemed like we had come from nowhere, and were going nowhere either.
“Do you think we did this?” the man asked. I turned away from the emerald forever to see him studying our moving house—the entire wall of it was one massive, breathtaking painting.
“We must have,” the woman driving us said. “We must have made it to remind us.”
The man brushed at his arm absently, as if the wind was tickling the skin. His fingers came away lightly tangled in a long strand of golden, silky hair.
“I keep finding them on my clothes,” he shrugged, having no explanation. “I don’t know why.”
I climbed up the stairs after him, followed by the driving woman, who took another long look at the painting, to make sure it matched the road we were on.
“Do you think we’ve done this before?” I asked her over the breeze.
“Done what?”
“Forgotten where we were going, and then saw the painting and decided to follow it.”
“I’m not sure. But yes, I think so,” she said.
“How many times do you think it’s happened?”
She licked her lips slowly as she stared off into the distance. “Maybe ten.” She closed her eyes. “Maybe a thousand.”
Before I ducked inside, I glanced back one more time, to make sure I hadn’t missed it. But no—none of the people in the picture looked like you.
Mahnaz Ahmadi
NAZ LEFT THE CAMP AT DAWN, LONG BEFORE MOST OF THE others were awake. She had orders from Malik to set out early with Original Smith and Dos to scout the road ahead of the army. She was to push all the way to Chattanooga, to see if the I-24 was still intact enough to allow them to cross through the ruins of the city rather than having to work five wooden-wheeled carriages through the uneven mountains.
“I want a loose triangle, twenty feet between each of us, on the ready at all times,” she ordered as she secured her fiberglass bow across the back of her saddle. The black, liquid surface shimmered in the morning light.
“Yes, ma’am.” The two Smiths saluted.
“Watch for mud,” Malik said as he handed her a piece of jerky wrapped in a thin cloth. “Runoff from the mountains could make everything soft.”
“I’ll bring the horses back,” Naz smiled down to him.
“Yourself too,” he warned.
They set off at a canter, but soon they were trotting, then simply walking, picking their way through the firmest ground as the road narrowed, then fell off into nothing. At one point, her horse’s hoof tipped something small and curved, and it rolled to the top of the grass and lay still—half a skull. Naz studied it as they passed, wondering why it looked so strange. It wasn’t until she was almost past it that she realized it was because it had been child-sized. Its human no more than five. After that, she stopped looking so closely at the bones.
Dos checked the compass while Naz and Original Smith scanned the horizon with their bows. They had a few guns, but these were worth more at the caravan than with the scouts. Ory—Zhang, now—had argued with her several times to take at least one when she went out on forward duty, and wouldn’t give up no matter how adamantly she refused. Other times, he seemed not to care at all. They would go days without speaking, but then suddenly every single thing she said to him would make the muscles in his jaw tighten as if he could barely manage the strain of being with them all. Other days she’d come back in from a ride covered in dust and want nothing more than to eat all the food in the camp and joke with Vienna by the fire, and he’d be beside her, practically teary-eyed with relief that she’d survived, begging her again to take a gun next time, any gun, to do it for him, please, that he could not lose another. Then the gears would abruptly shift again, and three days would go by before she realized she hadn’t seen him since.
“Something at eleven o’clock,” Dos whispered, her bow snapping up.