It felt disgusting to be thanked by him.
Zoe said nothing. She just watched as he raced for his truck, the pale soles of his boots shining as he ran.
The engine coughed but wouldn’t start. Zoe knew what an engine sounded like when it wanted to cooperate. This one just wanted to be left in peace. After thirty full seconds of profanity—in which Stan strung together curses that she was pretty sure had never been strung together before—he got out of the truck, pulled a blanket from the back, and ran into the trees like an animal.
X sat up on the ice. She expected him to be in a rage, but he just stared at her, mournful and confused.
“What have you done?” he said.
Zoe didn’t answer—she didn’t really know what she’d done, other than act on instinct.
X turned to track Stan’s progress into the woods.
“Don’t go after him,” Zoe said. They were the first words she ever said to him and, though she often encased even the most sincere statements in sarcasm, she dropped her guard now. “Please. It’s wrong.”
X weighed her words.
“Yet if I do not go after him,” he said, “someone will surely come after me.”
But still he didn’t move. He lingered on the ice with Zoe, listening to branches break as Stan scurried up the hills in the dark. Why wasn’t X chasing him, Zoe wondered. Why was he doing what she wanted? Why would he care what she wanted?
“If you kill him, you’re as bad as he is,” she said. “It’s not our job to punish people.”
X lowered his head.
“Perhaps it is not yours,” he said.
Zoe stumbled back to Bert and Betty’s house to retrieve Jonah, pausing just long enough to take a picture of the license plate on Stan’s diseased-looking truck. Spock and Uhura followed her. X did, too. Zoe didn’t look back, but she could hear him wading through the snow behind her. He didn’t follow her inside. He stayed on the porch out of respect—or shyness, maybe. He hushed the dogs when they whimpered so he must have known somehow that Jonah was sleeping. Spock and Uhura lifted their heads and eventually X figured out that they wanted to be scratched under their chins. He knelt and rubbed them cautiously and whispered their names. Zoe set a candle on the windowsill and watched for a long moment.
Jonah was still lying on the couch. He appeared to have slept through the chaos. But when Zoe went to lift him his body seemed tense, not the floppy mass of bread dough it should have been.
Holding Jonah made Zoe’s arms ache—she’d never get him home this way. Still, she couldn’t bear the thought of rousing him and forcing him to march back through the woods. He deserved to wake up in his bed, the nightmare over and his Nerf guns and Stomp Rockets right where he left them. She wanted innocence and forgetting for Jonah—all the more because she couldn’t have them for herself.
She laid him on the couch again, her palm cradling the back of his head like he was a newborn. Then she stood and waited for a solution to appear out of the ether.
Through the window, she saw X sitting with the dogs on his lap. His face was damp with sweat, and the snow on his coat was turning translucent as it melted. Spock nipped at him playfully, which seemed to startle him. Had he never played with dogs before? At last he understood what Spock wanted. He pretended his hands were birds and teased the dog by making them swoop and dive just beyond his reach.
X must have known he was being watched. He looked back at Zoe through the glass. She was struck again by how sick he’d become. But he seemed not to be asking for help but to be offering it. Did he have some plan for getting her and her brother back to their house? Because that was the only thing in the world Zoe wanted right now. She met X’s eyes. She didn’t move, she didn’t so much as mouth a word—but he nodded.
After that, she saw flashes of sky and what seemed like a video of the trees blurring by on fast-forward.
X was dizzy and staggering and in the grip of some sickness that Zoe had never seen.
But he carried them home.
Even in the darkness, Zoe could see that the snow in the driveway was untouched, and her heart sank at the sight of it: her mother hadn’t made it back yet. She was desperate to see her, but it was just as well that she wasn’t home. Zoe couldn’t have explained the strange figure who had delivered them and who—after refusing water, shelter, gloves, a hat, a blanket, and even veggie jerky (but then who said yes to veggie jerky?)—was now retreating in the direction of the woods.
She looked out at X one last time. She saw him stagger a few feet, then fall to one knee in the snow. She made herself turn away.