Cal had no exact purpose except to walk through this maze with an alert mind. He had his pistol and the walkie-talkie, and Dave would find him should he need help. The goal, really, was to just get used to the Forms, to learn them as he would streets in a strange city.
He walked slowly, careful of the glass at the outskirts. The easiest way to understand the layout of the Forms was to imagine a series of spirals. He studied each Form as he passed, memorizing its contents. The door of a washing machine; a plastic air-freshener plug-in; a shopping basket missing its handles. Just objects. Collected by people, reused by them.
Not many had seen the maps. Sailor had unrolled them solemnly, said, “These are closely guarded,” and hovered as Cal read them. Cal understood that the others—the ones not in the Group—were hemmed in by these Forms. They couldn’t leave easily, not without people finding out. Not that they wanted to leave. They lived a good life here, and that was all anyone could hope for nowadays.
Cal stopped walking and turned off the lamp on his helmet. The miner’s cone of light disappeared. His eyes should get used to the dark, as an animal’s did, and as his own had, back when he and Frida were holed up in the shed. He imagined the Form next to him exhaling, relieved to be back in the safety of darkness, and Cal felt a kinship with the thing.
In L.A., when Cal could no longer improve the world by growing food, he had resolved to escape the wretchedness, take Frida to the edge of the world, and start over. And when he discovered the Millers had killed themselves, Cal had buried their bodies and resolved to retreat once more from ugliness, from the familiar wretchedness that seemed to follow them. How impossible, though, to turn one’s back on all the horrors in the world; there had to be another way to live.
Passing beneath these makeshift monsters, Cal understood that he was now part of Micah’s scheme. He would be man enough to admit it. Frida was wrong; he didn’t think this was Plank, the sequel. This was a brutal wilderness where people did what they had to in order to survive. By taking back his gun and ascending the Tower and studying the maps, Cal had tacitly accepted whatever was going on behind closed doors on the Land. That’s what Frida would say. She was right about that, but maybe that wasn’t a terrible thing. Cal had rejected the Group back in L.A., but out here, where there were Pirates to fight, and people to protect, it was easier to accept. It made sense. There had to be a part of Frida who agreed with that.
The past didn’t matter if it was the future they had to worry about. It would all be okay; he’d have to convince Frida of that. At least for now, alone in the dark save for the glow of the moon, it seemed okay to him.
Cal soon found that he wasn’t lost, that he could recall the maps Sailor had unrolled on the tower floor and see the maze’s tricks before him. He did have that kind of mind. He walked carefully but with confidence. He put a hand out to the closest Form, gentle enough that the edge didn’t cut him. They were just objects. Made by people to fight people, and to protect them, too.
Maybe all along he had wanted Micah to find the revolutionary in him. He’d wanted someone to seek out that place in him that could be powerful.
17
It was darker than dark, and far too early to meet Anika downstairs, but Frida couldn’t stay in bed any longer. Cal wasn’t back from security yet, and thank goodness, because he was the whole reason she couldn’t sleep. Imagining him out there, patrolling the Forms, or watching from the Tower for any suspicious movement, made her sick.
She crept out of bed and put on her shoes and coat in the dark. She lit a candle, and followed its light out of the bedroom and down the hallway. The stairs creaked with each step, but she kept going, one hand dusting the banister as she went.
Once Frida was outside in the cold, she followed the flame’s flickering light down the path. If Cal was up in a Tower, he’d see her. Was that what she wanted? She couldn’t shake the thought that he might blow his whistle instead of climbing down to talk. Stop being so dramatic, she reminded herself. She’d asked him to find out everything, and that’s what he was doing by watching the borders until sunrise. He’d learn this place for the both of them.
Frida let the candlelight dance across the dirt. She kept her eyes on the flame but didn’t move. She had no plan, nowhere to go. Every time she thought of her fight with Cal, and about Anika’s story, about the Pirates attacking this place, about the kids who used to live here, about her brother beheading another man, and about Cal being blind to what had happened here, she wanted to scream. She stared into the flame. It was so feeble against the blackness.