“Canada is out. You know that. We have to get off this continent.”
“I told you,” he says without looking at her, “I can’t navigate across the ocean without radio.”
“Drop that bullshit,” she snaps. “I didn’t buy it at the beginning and I certainly don’t now after you got us from Post to Helena to Ontario like we were on rails.”
Abram is silent.
“You have some kind of analog system. I’m guessing that’s the part that got damaged, since the nose is where the nav gear goes. One of Perry’s friends was a pilot; I know how planes work.”
Abram looks over his shoulder, but not at Julie. “Do you understand this girl?” he asks me. “Can you translate her for me? Because I’m lost.”
I see Julie’s face darkening.
“Does she want to fight Axiom and save America? Does she want to run away to Iceland? Or does she just want everything she wants, all at the same time, because she doesn’t know how reality works?”
Julie stops, perched on the roof of a Chevy Tahoe. Her lips are tight and her eyes are narrow, but it’s not entirely anger. Abram’s questions are valid, and I think she knows it. What does she want? What matters most? How does anyone make choices when so much can depend on so little?
She seems to be crumpling inward, imploding under her confusion, and I’m searching for something to ease the tension when a sharp scream cuts through it.
Sprout is staring over her shoulder at the collapsed remains of an antique movie theater, her good eye wide with alarm.
Abram’s rifle slides over his shoulder and into his hands and he scans the surrounding buildings, darting from opening to opening with a practiced efficiency. “What is it, baby? What’d you see?”
“That building,” she says. “It changed.”
“What do you mean it changed?”
“I don’t know,” she says, frowning in concentration. “It was . . . different.”
“Different how? Did you see something move? Baby, this is important, if you saw—”
“It wasn’t broken.” Her frown warms with a hint of wonder. “It was pretty.”
This seems to put some kind of tag on the moment for Abram and he relaxes. He holsters his rifle. He resumes walking. Sprout glances back over her shoulder a few more times, then falls into step behind her father.
“Is she okay?” Nora asks with raised eyebrows.
“She has vision problems,” Abram says. “Sometimes she sees things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things that aren’t there.”
I watch the girl’s face as she climbs car after car, clinging to her father’s arm like it’s a mountaineering rope. Every few minutes, her eye widens on something in the ruins around us, but she keeps whatever she sees to herself.
“What happened to her?” I hear myself asking.
“Nothing,” Abram says, shooting me a dark look. “She was born with it.”
I stare at the places where Sprout stares, squinting into the ripples of heat rising from the sun-baked concrete. She notices what I’m doing and a look passes between us, eerily nuanced given our gulf of age. She shuts her eye, and at first I think she’s winking at me, but then she scampers over the next car with her eye still shut, not noticeably hindered by her apparent blindness.
She glances back, taps the daisy on her eye patch, and flashes me a gap-toothed grin. My spine tingles.
WE
DO YOU KNOW THE FUTURE? Is there a future? What will you do? Can you even do anything?
The boy asks us questions, knowing we won’t answer. He skims the spines of our volumes, searching the endless stacks, but we are not sorted and cannot be checked out. We must be read all at once.
What’s it for? Why remember all this? What can we do with it?
His anger ebbs and flows as he traverses mile after mile of silent highway, his leathery feet dragging through dead leaves and trash. Momentary spikes of rage sink back into grim contemplation. We understand these feelings. We watch them fill the pages of his books and so many books around them.
Are you only good people? he asks us in the bleak mumble that often follows his spikes. Or are you everyone?
Leaves and beer cans swirl around his ankles in a sudden gust of wind.
Are you Mom and Dad?
No answer comes for the boy, though we wish we could give one. We would like to help him because he sees us and talks to us and can very nearly read us, and some pages of his books line the highest shelves. But we are many, and it takes many to make us move.
Another city. The carpet of trash deepens. A broken bottle penetrates his foot’s callus and cuts into live tissue. A few drops of lukewarm blood ooze out, dark but not black. He feels no pain. His mind is far away, occupying other worlds, and it has no time for the needs of his body. He does not hear the van approaching behind him. He does not hear the man calling to him. He does not realize his sphere of solitude has been punctured until the man is kneeling in front of him.