A warning. Not a threat.
We pause there, while I absorb that reality. So, there is some secrecy to whatever is happening here, to what he’s doing with me. Maybe I should be comforted by his protection from others of his kind, but there’s something horrifying, too, about being the secret consort of a monster. I’d probably cry if I didn’t think it would take my headache from merely ball-shrinking to heart-stopping.
“I can’t take those pills you found for me anymore,” I say, turning away to look out the window, at the fridge, anywhere but him. “They’ll make me sick. I need ones that come in bigger white bottles, not the little yellow ones. Can you look for me?”
He takes one step forward and opens the narrow cupboard by the sink. It’s full of various medicines, Band-Aids, sunscreen. Plenty of everyday ibuprofen. Whoever lived here was well supplied.
August trusts me to dose myself with these pills, I guess. He turns back to the doorway and strides off, disappearing into the hall.
AUGUST
Humans have photographs. I have no sign for that, but the sound of the word plays clearly in my head.
Photograph. I draw the shape of it in the air, a rectangle or square. There’s odd familiarity to this peculiar human habit, as though this is something from the hidden parts of my mind. But there’s also something wrong about the photographs I find. The shape of them is off, or the color. And they are treated so carelessly for such precious objects, tossed into drawers, stuck behind magnets on doors, pinned to walls. If I had a photograph of the human girl, I would keep it somewhere safe, I think. Maybe the ones the humans left behind aren’t their precious ones. Maybe they took those with them when they ran.
For humans, memories can be held inside the mind as thoughts, or outside as objects. I have few memories to keep as thoughts, and no objects to keep at all. I wish I had taken something from Sixth after she . . . died. Or whatever happened. But what? I could have taken her rifle, I suppose, or her knife. At least that would help me remember how violent she was. Sometimes when I think of her I still miss her steady shoulder. I have to keep reminding myself that’s wrong. It’s like the memory of the mission directives humming in my mind. I still hear their echo sometimes, still think I should dart a human if I see one.
But I see no humans, not alive, at least. The city is quiet. I find evidence of my kind once in a while and occasionally hear the grumble of a distant transport, but so far I don’t encounter any. I don’t know what I will do if it happens. They would want me to go with them, but I can’t leave the human, Raven. She would die without me. Or the others would find her and dart her. Or she would be left alone in a dead city.
The empty human streets spread out like a maze around the high tower where I took her. My search of them has become a compulsion. I know it’s another echo of the directives—search, search for humans, flush them out of hiding places, and dart them, all of them. Leave none standing. But if I found one, I think I could resist. That’s my plan—find another human, capture it, and bring it to her. Make it understand that she needs help. Then I could leave her, as she wants. I should have given her to the human who shot me with the arrow. It was a mistake not to; I see that now. The sludge inside me makes every emotion urgent and catastrophic. It is so hard to think in moments like that and without the focus of the directives, without Sixth to guide me. . . .
I make mistakes. I’ve made many mistakes.
I’ve searched for days and haven’t found a single living human.
She is sleeping when I come back to our refuge in the sky. I have other bottles of the pills she wants—I hope they are the right kind. And I have thick blankets I took from beds two flights down. There are darted humans still lying in some of the beds. I leave their blankets in place; it feels wrong to disturb them, and anyway, the directives were to leave them where they fall. I take blankets only from empty beds, secure in the knowledge that the darted humans mean this building has already been processed. There is no reason for any of my kind to come back through here.
I suppose if her people are all gone, and my people are all gone, then the two of us could stay here indefinitely. There is plenty of food for her, and though the elevation is low, I could recharge if I needed to, if I was quick about it. I could protect her and take care of her until spring. Or summer? And then what?
Something comes next, and though I don’t know what it is, I’m sure it’s not good, for me, for her, for dandelions or snowflakes or spiderwebs. How can any of this be good?
RAVEN
The hallway outside the door is approximately one hundred feet long. I know this because I pace it out several times a day. There are four penthouse apartments on this floor. August has broken the locks and propped the doors open on all of them, and as my leg improves, I wander in and out as I please, sometimes stopping to practice a karate kata with my shadow on the walls. The door to the stairwell has been torn off its hinges too. I usually hobble down a few flights of stairs and back up once a day too, trying to build the strength back in my leg and lungs. I want to keep going, every single day, want to complete the journey down to the street below, back to the stadium and the tunnel, toward my human friends. Away from him.
But I know to leave now would be suicide. Still, some days even suicide seems preferable to . . . whatever this is.
Counting the eight days I floated in a fever, I have been here for just under three weeks. I rarely see the Nahx, August, now. He leaves food out for me, usually cold, although sometimes if I happen to be awake when he brings it, he will slip back into the kitchen and return a few minutes later with a steaming bowl. I’m not sure how he heats it. Oddly, when I finish eating, he throws the bowls off the balcony. Once I hobbled out there with my bowl, ate, then called out to him when I finished. When he appeared, I handed him the empty bowl expectantly. He held it over the railing and dropped it, with what I’m almost sure was a sigh.
Broken, he signed. This was the first sign he had made in days.
He doesn’t communicate much. He doesn’t touch me or come near me except to check my injuries. But I learn a few signs.
One, where he waves two fingers in front of his chest, is a useful one. It seems to mean “repeat.”