NAZ LET ROJAN LIGHT THE TINY FLAME AGAIN, EVENTUALLY. The man’s last name was Wright. He refused to say his given name. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Please don’t make me talk about it.”
They didn’t make him talk about it. After an hour of questions, Naz finally felt safe enough to lower her bow. Her arms were so badly cramped she couldn’t move her fingers for a good while afterward. Wright didn’t know how to make a fire or hunt, but he did have a lot of water, in a huge camping-type rubber bladder he’d found somewhere. Naz and Rojan offered him a third of their roasted squirrel once they cooked it, and he gave them as much of the water as they could drink. The next morning was the first time Naz’s piss wasn’t uranium yellow in she couldn’t say how long.
“I came north through the Bronx,” Wright told the sisters as they picked the tiny bones clean and then sucked on them. “Something happened in Midtown, near the Empire State Building. Something very big. That’s when I knew I had to go. I doubt there’s anything left now.”
“We were heading for New York,” Naz said. She slipped her bow over her shoulder again and pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. Vague colors swam against the pressure. It felt nice. Now what? “I don’t know where to go instead.”
“I don’t know where I’m going, either,” he replied. “Can I come with you two?”
Naz said no, and Rojan said all right. In the end, Rojan won the argument. Wright could carry a lot of water in the rubber bladder, enough to split between three people. And he could make their endless night watches into bearable shifts.
The going got much smoother. Naz still didn’t trust him, but with more sleep and better hydration, she had to admit they moved much faster. As they passed Hoboken in New Jersey, the three of them went to the edge of the Hudson River to look across at Manhattan, just to see. They stood on Sinatra Drive, just before the shore, staring out across the dark water. The moon glimmered, its reflection spliced by ripples.
“Is that . . . really?” Naz trailed off as she stared.
“Yeah,” Wright said. “That must have been what everyone was screaming about as it killed them, neighborhood by neighborhood.”
They stared. New York was being destroyed by its own monster. At least three times her original size, the emerald woman rose up between two skyscrapers, the huge torch in her hand blazing with real fire. With a deafening roar, she lifted the tablet in her other arm and brought it down on top of a building, flattening it to the ground. Shock waves skipped across the water as the green hands tore into the wreckage.
“I can’t believe you made it out alive,” Rojan said softly.
“I know,” he sighed. They watched it for a little while longer. “To think at one point I thought maybe I could just wait it out if I laid low enough.”
Naz couldn’t understand what she was seeing. “It’s almost kind of beautiful,” she finally said as the giant woman tossed the hem of her long robe behind her, crushing everything in its path. Glass and metal sprayed like silver confetti as buildings collapsed. Somewhere just south of Central Park, from where the statue had been a few minutes earlier, an explosion rose up in an angry dark cloud. Her crown glinted in the orangy dusk. “Horrible, but beautiful.”
They camped on the shore that night, and ate crayfish they caught along the bank. Wright still wouldn’t tell them his name, but he told them a lot of other things. How he watched Boston on TV, how the Forgetting overtook New York, how he should have left with his friends when they said they were going to steal some motorcycles and head south. “Have you ever heard about the One with One Eye?” he asked them as they huddled near the small flame.
“The One with One Eye?” Naz repeated.
“Or maybe it was No Eyes. That’s what my buddies were calling—it? him?—anyway. Whoever it is. Or was.” Wright paused. “The One Who Gathers. That one I know I heard them say for sure.” He leaned forward as Naz nodded in sudden recognition. That was the name she and Rojan had seen spray-painted on the side of a building just outside Boston. “My friends said he was in New Orleans,” he added.