“Like the moon, or the goddess?” Storage and retrieval—I can’t help it. My particular brain retrieves data whether I want it to or not. A survivalist’s occupational hazard when all books, buildings, data banks, all collected forms of knowledge, have been annihilated.
“Just Nyx.”
The figure leans back over me and more gentle than a whisper dabs at the place where the blue light lives in my head. I can see grafts from shoulder to shoulder. Stupidly, I think I see my own name embossed there in the flesh as Nyx draws away again.
My elbows ache, but I use them to sit up anyway. I study this speaker’s body and face. The broad and muscled shoulders. The masculine lantern jaw, the thick neck, yet with cheekbones and brow that are soft, calm, kind. Long-fingered and gentle hands, like an artist’s. But that’s an idiotic thought. This clearly is a young warrior. And yet the gentleness of this person’s touch says caretaker. It’s not clear whether this Nyx is a boy leaning toward manhood or a girl leaning into womanhood. Besides, that skin seems to trump the question of gender. What on earth could be the cause of this moonlike hue? Is Nyx diseased? Alien? Mutated? Enemy, or something else? Everything seems possible when you haven’t seen much humanity for decades.
“Yes,” Nyx says, checking my pulse as efficiently and smoothly as a nurse.
“Sorry?” I say.
“I can hear every word you are thinking.” Nyx lets go of my wrist and stands, walks to the fire, and puts it out with bare hands. Light remains around us in the form of the glowworm walls and now blue ghost fireflies, whose appearance shivers the cave ceiling and creates a blue-green glow. Nyx stands, arms crossed. “But none of these questions are very important.”
So did I hallucinate you? I stare at Nyx, testing this telepathy bullshit. Or are there more of . . . you?
Nothing. I’m an idiot.
“You’ll want to stand up and walk around soon,” Nyx redirects. “You want the energy between your body and the ground to rebalance itself as soon as possible. The travel we have ahead is difficult.”
“Wait,” I say, trying to stand. My head swims. My legs go boneless. “I have questions. A shitload of questions . . .” My eyes swim in their sockets.
“Are you experiencing any variations in sight?” Nyx asks, walking over to the nearest cave wall.
“Why?”
Nyx’s hands are on the cave wall in front of my face. I feel the ground vibrate up through my ankles, shins, spine, shoulders, giving my bones back to me. “Keep your eye on the wall,” Nyx instructs. “And you did not hallucinate me. There are many humans left on Earth. We number in the thousands. Of varying strength and abilities. But I’m the only one who is dual-world. And very few of us are like you and me.”
Dual-world. I snap to standing, though my head throbs and spins. My heart beats me up in my chest. “Do you know how to get up to CIEL?” If Leone is still alive, that’s where she’s been taken. If that’s even possible. Nyx doesn’t answer. “Listen,” I venture, standing and lunging like some newborn, now-extinct gazelle toward Nyx. “I need you to get me up there—” But Nyx cuts me off, and I feel the very air between us press against my chest, keeping me from forward motion.
“The wall,” Nyx says, gesturing toward the sloped walls of the cave.
I swivel my bloated head. “What about it? It’s a wall,” I say, impatiently. But then it isn’t.
First the wall goes from dark umber to amber to azure. Then it begins to sweat and glisten. And then the wall seems to swim in front of us, until what had been solid is suddenly not, and Nyx walks straight through it, blurring out of sight. Within a minute, the wall returns to its impenetrable self.
Nothingness.
Pure and thick.
“Okay! You have my attention,” I yell. The walls echo back at me. “What the fuck was that?” My voice merely ricochets around. I walk closer to the wall. I put my hands against it; solid matter. “Nyx?” Nothing. Just the vanishing points in the cave where light gives way to shadow.
Then it’s Nyx’s voice: “Please take care to move slowly; you are not exactly among the living.”
What the fuck does that mean? Not exactly among the living?
Now my head feels so light I think it may float off my neck. I drop to my knees, nearly passing out. I put my face on the ground. I taste dirt.
“Watch.” Nyx’s voice again.
I don’t move, but I eye the wall again. It dances with shadows and shapes, as if the former fire had created projections that lingered.
“Put your hands into the wall,” Nyx’s voice says.
Right, I think, as if I should trust the disembodied voice of a blue-green alien. And yet I find myself standing, walking over to the wall, and placing my hands on it. Into it. For the wall is not solid. The shapes crackle and hum with electrical current. On the other side, my elbows feel a great pull—not another person, but a kind of energy that feels centrifugal. Then the wall buckles and I am in to my shoulders, and the wall has become an abalone-colored screen, a 3-D screen quickly swallowing me up, until I find myself standing in a room with something I haven’t seen in what feels like eons.
A girl.
I am alone, in a child’s room, with a white-haired girl. A young child’s room, from the looks of it. Three of the walls are violently bombed-out. There is no ceiling. The floor is peppered with rubble and dirt, sticks and leaves and rocks and pieces of walls and things. Shredded stuffed animals, toys, and shoes. And what appears to be the shattered glass of a chemistry set. The bed is unrecognizable, save for the gutted mattress. Somehow, a little desk has survived intact, set in front of what is left of a window.
“La fenêtre,” the little girl says, pointing to the place where a window used to be.
“What is your name?” I venture. I have no idea where we are, if things are real or imagined.
“Nyx,” the girl says. “We should hurry, they’ll be here soon.”
I step closer to the girl, but she leaps back. “It’s okay,” I say, “I won’t hurt you.”
The girl laughs. “That’s funny,” she says, returning to her desk.