“I’m tired of waiting,” he confides, attacking the drifts with a shovel.
I pause, leaning on my own shovel. “For what? Going after that Nahx? How are we going to find him after all this time?”
Topher digs and digs, frowning with concentration. Suddenly, he hurls his shovel far out into the snow. “I need to go after something. To do something.” He lets himself fall backward in a snowdrift, which opens up to a sort of throne for him. He leans forward and holds his head in his hands. “Tucker wanted to go look for our parents. We talked about it before . . .”
“If he had done that, he would have gotten himself killed.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he did get himself killed, of course!” I toss my shovel away too and fall down beside him. The snow is as soft and yielding as an old sofa. If it weren’t for the cold, we could be sitting in Topher and Tucker’s basement lair, playing video games and eating junk food to quell the weed-induced munchies. “We’re not prisoners here. We could go back to Calgary, in theory.”
Topher stares at me for a second. “But you think it would be suicide?”
“Not if we were allowed to take weapons, supplies. If we had a vehicle, a Jeep or something.”
I’m indulging him again. There are ways to make a mission like this more feasible, but I can’t see Kim going for it. Even with a vehicle it could take days on remote snow-covered roads. We would have had a much better chance if we’d left before the real snow started. And went west instead of east.
“Why now?” I ask. “What brought this on?”
Topher exhales heavily, surrounding himself in a cloud of mist. “A video,” he says, and I think These fucking videos will get us all killed. “An NKV yesterday. Liam doesn’t know where it came from, but it shows a Nahx getting creamed by a Molotov cocktail.”
“Charming.” I hoist myself out of the snow throne and revel in the irony that I now have to dig my shovel out with my hands.
“It looked like it was in Crowfoot Park.”
I pause, hands full of snow. “Our Crowfoot Park?” Crowfoot Park was a hangout for kids from the dojo and other karate clubs. We had semi-illegal martial arts scraps there some Friday nights. Not exactly Fight Club, but I occasionally woke up with a black eye.
“You know the weirdly shaped slide and that bug climbing thing? I could see them in the background. And the rock wall that Tuck broke his thumb on. You can just catch a glimpse of it.”
I adjust my knitted hat, pulling it farther down over my ears, which I’m sure are about to freeze off like an alley cat’s. “So? That means there are survivors. We knew that.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t know the Nahx were still there. Some kind of secondary ground assault? And there are humans there, fighting back. We could join them. Every day that goes by . . . if they’re still alive . . . Fuck it, Crowfoot Park is blocks from my house. They don’t even know . . .” He struggles to regain his composure. Another thing Tuck would never do. Tuck would give into it, weep and rage and rail against whatever was bothering him, usually his own weaknesses, until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I’d take him in my arms and tell him everything would be all right. But Topher lets himself get tied up in knots. And I’m probably the only person left alive who can unknot him.
“I should have gone weeks ago,” he says. “I should have left as soon as . . . It’s just . . .”
I stare out into the white expanse, knowing what’s coming. But he is silent next to me. After a few seconds I finally work up the courage to turn and look at him. He’s hunched over, one mittened hand covering his face.
“Toph . . .”
He speaks without looking at me. “I shouldn’t have told you about Emily. That was a dick move.”
I wasn’t expecting that. He hasn’t mentioned it apart from that one drunken time. “It’s true though, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And there were other girls, before that too, right? Before camp?”
He hesitates before answering. “Yeah.”
I have to close my eyes to let that sink in, as fundamental beliefs about what Tucker and I had reorganize themselves in my head. I made excuses for the way he acted around other girls sometimes, telling myself it didn’t mean anything, that he loved me. But clearly I wouldn’t know real love if it smacked me in the forehead.
“I’m sorry I was such a dick about you and Tucker.” Topher is practically whispering now. “It’s was because . . . you spent so much time with him and I didn’t . . . couldn’t . . . kind of . . . function . . .” His voice breaks, shrinking to the pitiful cry of a little boy. “I never knew what to do . . . without him.”
He suddenly sobs. “It’s so hard to make a decision without him.” He cries as he speaks, tears freezing on his cheeks. “I barely even know how to get out of bed or get dressed. I can’t think. I can’t sleep. . . .”
Kneeling down in front of him, I slide between his knees and put my arms around him.
“I sometimes wonder how I’m even still alive,” he says, pressing his face into my shoulder.
“I’ve wondered the same thing,” I say. “Don’t get snot on my coat, okay?”
This makes him snort out a desperate little laugh.
“Everything will be all right.”
He pulls back and looks at me as though I’ve gone mad. “No, it won’t,” he says, wiping streaks of ice from his face with the back of his mittens.
“No, you’re right. I just thought I’d try it out.”
This time he laughs properly and wipes what I’m almost sure is snot from my shoulder, letting his hand linger for a moment.
I sit back on my heels and look up at him. The morning sun makes his brown eyes seem gilded, like they are made out of gold. His cheeks are ruddy and flushed from the cold. A chin-length strand of dark hair has escaped from under his hat. And he needs a shave. I breathe, reminding myself that he is not Tucker, though each day that goes past, it gets harder to remember that, harder to resist Topher’s pathos. Maybe if I closed my eyes and fell into his arms, it would feel like going home. Maybe all the bits of Tucker that we both carry around combined would be enough to reconstruct a kind of facsimile of him. It’s a tempting idea. And at least Topher has never seemed very interested in Emily.
“So the plan has changed,” I say, swallowing. “Vengeance goes on the back burner. We get to Calgary somehow. We look for your parents or other survivors. We kill some Nahx, to make it worthwhile. Deal?”
He closes his mittened hand around mine.
“Deal,” he says.