26
I awake in darkness, to the sound of bottles clinking in the distance.
My body is battered and sore, but hey, what’s new? The headache is ruthless, but my biggest concern is my left arm, which I must have landed on during the carnage at Titan Hall. I was too pulverized to notice at the time. A single finger touch to my elbow sends a radiating wave of pain.
I reach for my jacket pocket, hoping . . . but the handgun is gone. The binoculars are in my other pocket. Still there. Yes, my captor removed the gun. Not an entirely positive sign.
I have one good arm to fight with and no information to go on: basically the same situation I’ve been in continually since Flight 305 crashed. Don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.
I wait for my eyes to adjust, to get a glimpse of where I am, but it never comes. The darkness is absolute. I’m indoors, I know that. The floor is hard and there’s no wind; it’s cold, but not unbearable.
Muffled footsteps. A large door swings open, revealing faint light. I hold my hand up, squinting, but I can’t make out who it is. It closes the door quickly, without a word, then stands there a moment, unmoving.
A match strike. The light from the flame lights my captor’s face from beneath. Not captor, rescuer . . . I think.
Grayson Shaw.
His face is bruised and caked with dried blood. Dirt and debris from the forest litters his long blond hair. There’s no hint of a smile. He touches the match to a candle in his other hand and sets it on the floor beside me.
We’re in a supply closet—in a store, I would guess. Shampoo and dish detergent line the shelves. Guess those weren’t in demand when humanity fell.
“How do you feel?” Grayson asks. It’s a question I never thought I’d hear come out of his lips.
I pause. Could this be a charade? A ploy to get me to talk? Could we both have been captured by the suited figures, who have enlisted him to facilitate their interrogation? It’s possible. There’s a fine line between paranoia and brilliance. I’m not sure which side I’m on right now.
I’m only sure of two things. One: I’m extremely lucky to be alive and in reasonably good shape. Very lucky indeed. Two: I need to find Harper. There were over a hundred survivors when I left for Stonehenge, and some are probably still out there somewhere, but she’s the one I’m after, the one I have . . . what were Sabrina’s words? An emotional connection to. Sabrina certainly has a way with words, a very clinical, unsentimental way, but if I’m being honest, she’s okay. She and Yul hid things from me, but I see why now. Messages from the future? Nah, wouldn’t have believed that five days ago.
Grayson fidgets as he waits for my response, and I realize his question must have felt awkward to him too, given our history: snarky comments escalating to casual threats culminating in a punch to the face—his face, two punches, in fact—and subsequent more serious threats.
“I’m all right.” I sit up. “Just a little banged up.”
He sets a bottle of water on the floor and holds out his hand, waiting to drop something. I extend a cupped hand, half expecting him to yell “Psych!” and punch me in the face. I suppose it would make us even—or closer to even, at least.
To my surprise, two small pills drop into my hand. “Aspirin,” he says.
I wash them down with the water. Figure it’s a fifty-fifty chance they’re cyanide. Given the full-body pain right now, I’ll roll the dice. “The others?”
“They have Harper for sure—saw them carrying her off after the first ship came down. Not sure about Yul or Sabrina.”
Harper’s alive. “Where are we?”
“The back room of a small chemist’s across the street from Titan Hall.”
He reads the shock on my face. “Only option. I couldn’t carry you far. Between the smoke, the battle, and the darkness, I don’t think they saw us slip away. They probably think we’re under the rubble somewhere.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Four hours. Figured they would have found us by now, but there’ve been no signs of them. A few ships flying over—that’s it.”
What to do now? To me, there’s only one play.
“Listen, Nick,” Grayson says, his voice quieter. “On the plane . . . I was in a state. My dad had just told me he was giving away his fortune and cutting me out of his will, leaving me with nothing. He was putting me out on the street so I could finally, in his words, ‘learn to fend for myself.’”
Harper told me as much, but I stay silent. It feels like this is something Grayson needs to say.
“Imagine every assumption you lived your life under instantly changing, your whole life upside down, uncertain, for the first time. It felt like a total betrayal, the rug pulled out from under me just like that. I was scared. I felt double-crossed by the person I had depended on my entire life. It seemed like just a whim, a little game he wanted to play: see if his coddled son could cut it in the real world, starting from scratch at age thirty-one. I thought it was cruel not to tell me when I was in school, or just after, when I could have changed my life and taken a different path, before I developed all my . . . habits.”
He waits, but I’m not quite sure what to say. The awkwardness builds. Finally I say, “It’s never too late to change your life.”
“That shit might sell T-shirts, but it doesn’t help me.” His voice is bitter, a brief flashback to the Grayson I met on the plane. He pauses. “Sorry. It’s just that . . . changing is a hell of a lot harder when you’re older, especially after you’ve come to expect and . . . depend on certain things.”
“That’s true.”
“I should have snapped out of it after the crash, but I was still so . . . upside down.”
Incredible. He really has changed this quickly. I have to admit, when he first started up with his story and explanation—apology?—I half expected it to end with a joke on me, accompanied by that classic Grayson Shaw sneer and nasty laugh. But I don’t see either now, just humility and a longing for understanding and forgiveness.
I don’t think it’s the battle outside Titan Hall that changed Grayson, but what he saw inside: that panel that detailed the Grayson Shaw affair. I think seeing what his decision in 2014 led to, what he became, has given him some perspective. I wonder what the world would be like if we could all glimpse our future before every major decision. Maybe that’s what stories are for: so we can learn from people living similar lives, with similar troubles.
“Don’t worry about it. Look, we’ve all done things we’re not proud of at some point. Just part of being human. What counts is what we do right now.”
The air slowly flows out of Grayson, and he glances around at the candlelit storage room. “What are we going to do right now?”
“Now we’re going to go on the offensive.”