“I don’t blame you,” he says, oblivious to the epic battle inside me. “I don’t hate you. Not anymore.”
Through the thick trees I can see the moonlight glinting on the blackened strip of forest we left behind. The Nahx footprints are there, a trail that will take us to them. I imagine following them mindlessly, driven, like Topher, by anger and a desire for revenge for days, weeks, months, never finding them, walking and walking through the soot, then the snow, until everything about me is gone and I forget who I am. Because Topher has just reminded me of something.
I blame myself. For everything. And it doesn’t matter to me how he feels.
EIGHTH
The transport must have come after all. She’s gone.
I suppose it’s possible she got up and walked away, but I think she would wait for me. Or look for me.
The grass where she fell still holds the imprint of her shape, each blade pressed sideways, broken. She lay on her back like . . . something, something, from before that is behind a door in my mangled mind.
The shape in the grass is too much to look at. The wings of blood where her life seeped out from a torn-open throat, they make my own throat ache like there is something hard inside it. I want to use my knife to let it out.
There’s a weakness there, in the armor. They told us that.
Keep your chin down, Eighth, she would tell me. She was looking up to the sky, looking for the transport. It was late.
I try to think. The thick syrup flowing through me dulls things, slows my thoughts down. I think of running or fighting easily enough, but there is nowhere to run and no one to fight. My other thoughts are sluggish. Like a slug. Slug. Slugs can be eaten, if necessary. Humans don’t normally eat them. My brain is not quite working, like every time I reconnect. I feel powerful but stupid. I could run across the mountains or break down a thousand doors, but I can barely string two thoughts together.
She lay here for days. The earth beneath where she lay has not forgotten. The broken grass, the stain of blood. My fingers find the mark on my chest where my own blood spurted out. My wound wasn’t bad enough to make me fall, and I dove for her, to knock her down, but I was too far away. Or she was already falling. I don’t remember.
She had pushed me away minutes before.
Defective.
If I had reached her and saved her, she might have stopped calling me that. Terrible aim, and stupid. Only good for breaking things. If I could have saved her life . . .
Is it possible she got up? Did the transport take her? Could they fix her?
I want to disconnect again. I can’t think with all this armor closing me in and filling me with slug syrup. I’m too far from a hub to receive directives if they change. I don’t know how to send a signal. I don’t know what to do without her.
Sixth. I miss you.
Sweet painless death, I know that’s wrong. She hated me. Called me stupid and useless and made me find my own food and let me drink some sweet thing she found in a car that made me throw up and throw up until blood came out of my nose. Then she laughed at me.
You scared me, Eighth. I thought you would die.
I think of the way my head snapped back when the missile fragment hit me. So sudden and disorienting. Sixth was like that sometimes.
If I close my eyes and reach out to the left, I might find her steady shoulder there. She might let me walk like that.
I close my eyes. I reach out to the left.
Sixth?
Someone, please help me. I don’t know what to do.
I walk away. Walk away from her shape in the grass and the wings of blood. Walk away from her. The sun is rising. I walk during the daylight, even though it’s not safe.
I will shoot the first human I see. And the second one. And the one after that. I will do it for her. I know I can hit them now. I hate them.
I hate them, as much as she hated me.
I walk away from her, reaching out with my left hand. It is easier to keep my balance this way.
RAVEN
When I wake I can hear the others stirring around me. We are quiet, cautious, but more at ease now that the sun is up.
Moments later, all hell breaks loose when Sawyer does a half-serious head count and comes up one short. Topher is gone.
“Did he say anything to you? Anything?” he says as Felix, Xander, and I prepare to go looking for him.
“He wants to find the Nahx that killed Tuck. I didn’t think he would go.” This is something of a lie. I didn’t think he would go without me. “Maybe he went to follow those tracks.”
Sawyer is furious. He agrees to wait at the campsite for six hours while we backtrack to the burnt forest. If we don’t return with Toph by then, he and the others will continue on to the resort. There is no way of knowing when Topher left. If he left just before dawn like a sensible person would, we may have a chance to catch up with him. If he left in the dark—by anyone’s measure a reckless thing to do—he’s hours away by now. So was he thinking like Topher or Tucker when he left?
Back at the burnt forest, it is easy enough to find his tracks. He’s not trying to conceal himself. Perhaps he wants to be found. I hope he’s not making himself conspicuous in the hopes that the Nahx will find him. That would be stupid as well as reckless.
Sweating in the rising heat, we follow his tracks up the side of the valley. The sun beats down on the ashes at our feet, warming them, causing waves of the rich earthy scent to rise up around us. It is silent and still with barely a breeze. All the sound is in the crunch of our boots on the burnt debris and the twittering of morning birds. We listen for anything, any footsteps, any engines. None of us has ever seen a Nahx or one of their ships up close, so we don’t know what we’re listening for. All we know is that their dart guns make a whining noise before they fire. Felix learned this from the videos before they stopped. You hear a high-pitched whine and then you die.
It’s an hour before we come across the landing site, just on the other side of the ridge. A large patch of blackened forest is flattened, the triangular, segmented shape mimicking the footprints we and Topher have been following.
“It’s kind of small,” Felix says. “Must be some kind of transport.”
Xander examines the scorch patterns around the landing site. “This is how the fire started,” he says. “But it was weeks ago. See these?” He points out some small green shoots, straining out of the ground where the ship flattened everything.
“But the Nahx footprints are more recent,” I say. I’m not the greatest tracker, but even I know that prints won’t last in loose ash and soot much beyond a couple of days. The weird segmented tracks don’t look much less defined than the ones Topher left a few hours ago. “Earlier yesterday? We might have only missed them by a couple of hours.”
“I could kill that boy,” Felix says, looking around nervously. “Next time you get wind that someone is on a suicide mission, you tell me, got it?”
“Yes, sir.” I hope my insincerity comes across as strongly as I feel it.