M shrugs like I’ve proposed a trip to the corner store. “Works for me.”
But I see something building in Abram. His eyes are on the ground, weary and sad. He is shaking his head as if caught in some bitter inner argument. Then he stops. He looks up at Julie.
“Good luck.”
He starts walking.
“Where are you going?” Nora calls after him.
“I’m going to find my daughter.”
“So are we! Get back here!”
I see his head shaking as he walks. “No, you’re going to destroy BABL and expose Axiom and build a better world. I’m going to find my daughter.”
“We’re going to the same place, dumb-ass! If we don’t find her on the way to Post, we’ll find her in Post!”
“You’re not going to make it to Post. The world’s going to eat you alive.”
“You said yourself we can help you!”
“I was wrong.”
Nora throws up her hands. M looks uncertainly from me to Julie. “Should I stop him?” He cracks his knuckles. “Don’t need guns to take a hostage.”
Julie doesn’t seem to hear him; her face is taut with overlapping emotions as she watches Abram recede, so I answer for both of us.
“Let him go.”
I feel a rush of guilty relief as the words leave my mouth. We’ve dragged this man across the country hoping he would emerge from his stupor, see the light leaking into his life and walk toward it, but instead he walks away. He says, “It’s too far, no one will ever reach it,” and he walks away. And I am tired of him. I am tired of him and the people who made him and the people he will make if he can. I am tired of the tradition he carries, the legacy of a low existence, and if he wants to carry it far away from us, I say let him.
But as always, Julie is warmer. As always, she’s the last to give up.
She bolts after him.
“Abram!”
I follow at a distance, just in case this escalates.
“Abram, wait!”
“You know what’s funny?” he says without slowing down, and without a trace of amusement. “You keep saying you’re sorry for shooting me, for taking me hostage. But that was the closest I ever came to respecting you.”
Julie’s hands clench at her sides.
“That was the one time I saw you look past your ideals to do what you had to for your family. And now you’re going back. Giving up on your mother and running off to save the world.”
“I’m not giving up on my mother,” Julie says through gritted teeth. “I’m going to find her and be with her for as long as I can. But there’s more at stake here. We might be the only people outside Axiom who know where to find BABL, so we—”
“Good luck!” He quickens his pace. Julie starts to fall behind.
“Abram, listen to me!” Her face is all dogged determination, but her voice is getting hoarse. “I know what it feels like to lose your family. Like you’re cut off from humanity, like you’re meant to be alone?”
He turns onto a dark side street, gaining ground with every step.
“I fight that thought every day, but it’s not fucking true!”
He finally stops. He spins around, and his blankness is gone. “Then what is true, Julie?” he snaps in a voice like acid. “What do you believe if you don’t believe your own thoughts?”
“I believe what my mother always told me.” She stands straight and meets his anger with soft immovability. “That humanity’s a family you can never lose. No matter what happens.”
I stare at the side of her face. Is she aware that I’m listening? Is she speaking to me too?
Abram is looking at her like she’s from another world. An impossible shape speaking alien tongues. I expect a burst of cold laughter, but he just squints at her, dragging his escaped emotions back into the prison of his head. Then, safely blank once again, he turns and walks away.
Julie doesn’t follow. The fervor drains out of her; she seems to shrink three inches. Abram shrinks too as he increases the distance between us. Then he slips around a corner and he’s gone.
IN THE CORNER of a shadowed parking lot, surrounded by stripped cars and heaps of trash, something big sits beneath a brown tarp.
“Is that it?” Nora says. “It’s huge.”
“Please tell me it’s camo painted,” M says uneasily.
Tomsen approaches with a hand outstretched like she’s calming a frightened animal. “I’m so sorry, baby,” she coos as she unfastens a corner of the tarp. “I didn’t mean to leave you for so long.”
Julie has been quiet since Abram left. She walked the six blocks from the promenade without a word to anyone, and I imagine her wandering gloomy halls of memory, perhaps reliving the last time she failed to save a Kelvin. But I glimpse a faint spark of interest as she watches this unveiling.