Nyx calls it kinema.
What we are doing, that is, our mode of travel. For some reason, my brain reaches for Galileo, for whom I developed a strange fixation as a child. I secretly wished he’d been my grandfather. Nyx means to train me to ride the motion of energy that is everywhere. “It supercharges you . . .” and I feel like a human battery.
Kinema brings us hopscotching across Earth. Nyx says I’m learning to control my own energy. Nyx says we have far to travel. As I understand it, it is something like riding telluric current, combined with the most intense human-to-human—or whatever Nyx is and I am—embrace that I’ve ever experienced. Not even a lover’s entangled body knot could be tighter than this embrace. (Not that I would know. The one and only time I let my desire happen I nearly killed Leone.) Our combined energies dematerialize us and rematerialize us anywhere Nyx aims us. Kinema. Just like the red rock with my brother in the field when we were kids.
I feel the tear of Leone’s future ripping my body apart. If I can’t learn this form of transportation I believe she will die. Nyx knows it—uses it like bait. I do not believe that Nyx gives a shit whether or not Leone lives or dies. All Nyx wants is revenge, and yet Nyx speaks of revenge as a portal back to “love.” Whose love? Where? I want to get up to Leone so badly I have shredded the insides of my cheeks from chewing at them so impatiently.
We make camp underground in all the caves Leone and I have lived in and more, sometimes finding evidence that others had been there, too, or maybe it was just the trace of things before or during the Wars. It is impossible to tell. Long-deserted fire pits and bone fragments, petroglyphs and the metal carcasses of weapons and vehicles and machines meant for killing, irrigation system remains and adobe structures and lighting and power systems and underground gardens gone crackled and black. Caches of long-spoiled food or irradiated stuff, burned-up bones of people in heaps or scattered like some great carnivorous bird had shat them across land masses. Once we found a tandem bicycle on its side, red and flat-tired, but with spokes intact. For some reason the bike crushed me. It reminded me that individual humans were always yearning for an other. The old ache in my chest. After seeing traces of people for so long, believing most of them dead, it was still shocking if what Peter said was true. That an entire group existed . . . no way to know without looking. Survivors be damned; my only impulse to live rests in the body of Leone.
Graves.
We see graves everywhere.
Something else that haunts me: the graves, they all have different depths. I don’t know what, if anything, it means. There is no hierarchy to death, to grief, to the end of life. The small graves of children, shallower than the graves of adults—does it really mean anything different? Did decomposition happen more quickly for children?
In any case, they remind me of the children I buried who died where they lay, the children I raised from the dead only to watch them drop to dirt, but not before they each looked me in the eye with one question: Why couldn’t you save me?
There is a recurring dream I keep having that seems to be telling me something.
When I was a child, it seemed beautiful: a white lady in space who spun stories like spiderwebs. Roomfuls of stories. And the ink of space surrounding her made her glow all the more, like some kind of moonwoman, her skin radiating night light. The stars seemed to carry her voice.
During the Wars, the dream came to me differently. I don’t mean the dream changed; it did not. But how I felt within the dream changed. Suddenly the woman’s stories seemed urgent. Her eyes wider and more focused. Her mouth more deliberate. Her words heavier. Once I thought I even heard her call to me, say my name. But I can’t be sure. Someone else’s voice had woken me for battle. So it’s hard to say whose voice I really heard. It’s just that some part of me wanted it to be hers. I thought I heard the name Christ. I thought it was her name.
Most recently the dream has turned brutal. The woman is still beautiful, still spinning stories, still embedded within the night and stars. But the pull of her voice is so intense I can feel it in my chest and abdomen. The stories are not for little girls. The stories say, Get up. Now. The stories say, Turn your head away from everything you’ve known. Look down. At the dirt itself. Mother. Sister. Daughter. Her name, the woman, I know now it is Christine.
And the dirt, it’s screaming.
Kinema. Nyx is taking me toward something but she won’t tell me what. We kinemaed subterranean passages to avoid Skylines or biologic trace. I’m too much like bait, Nyx says. We don’t have much time, Nyx says. Does this mean that Leone is in danger? Is there some carefully designed form or plan evolving above us? Briefly a tinge of my former desire to fight for humanity surfaces, for a briefer moment still I wish the feeling would linger, but then all I feel is Leone again. And Peter’s dying breath. What do I do?