He turns his head to the side appraisingly. Prettier, he signs, making the “pretty” sign while lifting his hand above his head. Despite the cool wind, my face burns as I turn and walk away. After a few seconds his hand drops down on my shoulder as soft as a butterfly. We trudge down the sparkling ice road. I imagine from the sky we must look like two determined beetles or ants, vainly searching for home. I hope that from the sky we look like two Nahx, doing whatever it is Nahx do.
An hour passes, the flat white giving way to sparse trees, then thicker forest on either side of the road. He stops and makes me drink from a bottle that he has kept tucked into his armor somehow. The water is so warm it’s like flavorless tea. After another hour he hands me a packet of dry Asian noodles, which he knows I love. I munch them gratefully as we walk.
Another hour later the light changes, the air changes, and it begins to snow. Fat, ripe snowflakes drift down, quieting the wind, absorbing the sounds of our footsteps until it feels like we are walking in the silent vacuum of space, with stars tumbling around us. A sudden lightness settles on me, and I walk ten paces before I realize August has taken his hand off my shoulder.
I look back to see him standing next to the pack, with his arms out wide, face turned to the sky, feather snowflakes drifting down onto him. It’s almost as though he is worshipping. Though I feel like an intruder, I can’t help but watch. His shoulders rise and fall with deep grumbling breaths. After long minutes he slowly lowers himself onto his knees and presses his hands into the fresh snow. Now I really am intruding. As I turn, something zips past my ear and lands in the snow ahead of me. A snowball.
Behind me Augusts kneels primly, innocently, his snow-dusted hands folded in front. He raises them as if to say, What?
“I see. Is that how it’s going to be, then?” I crouch down and form a snowball. The temperature is warm enough for the snow to be nice and sticky, and soon I have a good, round projectile. August doesn’t even flinch as I send it sailing three feet to the left of him. As I stoop to pack another snowball, he pulls one out of the snow and sends it flying precisely. I turn and it disintegrates on my back.
I launch a counterstrike. This one flies about ten feet over his head. Now August is laughing at me, tipping his head back and shaking.
“Oh yeah?” I say, gathering a handful of snow. “How about a point-blank attack?” I run at him before he has a chance to clamber to his feet and mash the snow into his head. As he tries to escape, I swing my leg, sweeping his feet out from under him. He falls backward into the snow.
“Oh! Sorry! Are you okay?”
He lies there for a second, like a fallen angel, a black silhouette on a white background.
“August?”
Shooting upward, he flings more snow at me. I leap down on him, pushing him backward, and land on top of his chest, my knees pressing his arms down.
It’s hard to say how I know he’s laughing as I shovel snow onto his head. He flicks his head back and shakes and doesn’t try very hard to escape. But suddenly he twitches upward, and I find myself flipped over on my back. By this time the snow is deep enough to form a cushion around me, like a supersoft feather bed. Kneeling beside me, he sprinkles snow from my head to my feet.
I’m not sure what is happening. We should be moving, getting as far as we can before dark, but time seems to have stopped. It’s as though we’ve both been spirited out of the world with all its horror and into a dream. The falling snow hypnotizes me. I can almost feel my blood pressure lowering as he lets the snow trickle between his fingers.
“You like snow, don’t you?” I say, blowing snowflakes from my lips. He nods, scooping up another handful. “Why?”
Makes me feel very happy, he signs, sprinkling my knees.
I feel very happy at that moment too. The snow is comfortable underneath me, and the air is cool and fresh. The fat, falling snowflakes tickle my face as they fall and decorate August’s armor until he looks like a postapocalyptic Christmas card. All the antagonism I’ve felt for him melts along with the snowflakes on my eyelids. Lying back with my face to the sky, it’s easy to forget the devastation that surrounds us, or that his people stole my world. It’s easy to forget the weeks I spent hating him and how he once frightened me. It’s easy to forget how he burned Topher’s letter. Not why, though.
You make me feel very happy.
“I thought I made you very very sad,” I say. Not cruelly, I hope, but his reply reassures me.
Happy. Sad. Happy. Sad. Then he draws a spiral on his forehead. Sitting back on his heels, he looks out into the distance. A large snowflake drifts down and lands on his face, around where his eyebrow might be. I sit up and brush it away.
“Can you feel that? The snowflakes falling on you?”
He nods.
“Do you ever take your armor off? I mean, I know you’re not a machine inside, are you?”
He shakes his head, signing. Breathing here hurts my chest. Pointing up to the mountains in the distance he continues. Up the mountains, breathing is better.
“Oh! Where the air is thinner?” That explains the Nahx preferring the high country, such a simple explanation for something that screwed us all over so thoroughly.
August nods again, looking at the mountains. Another snowflake lands near his nose. I brush that one away too. Then I pull off one of my mittens and lay my hand on the side of his head. He turns and presses his head into my hand, the way a cat would. I run my fingers from the top of his head to his chin. His armor seems to be pulsing hot and cold—some snowflakes melt and some don’t. His breath rattles deeply, like the purring of a tiger.
His left hand rises up slowly and lingers there for a moment, suspended in the air, before coming to rest on my shoulder. Seconds later he slides it onto my face.
We sit like that, snowflakes drifting down on us, for several minutes. August purrs softly, as meanwhile I have things caught in my throat. Words. Stuff I should say and stuff I want to say and a whole lot of things that are ridiculous.
August’s hand slips down from my face, slowly, and stops, curved around my breast. With my coat on and all, it’s possible he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. At least I think that until he squeezes, gently but definitely intentionally. I feel my face get hot.
“August, I . . .”
He pulls his hand away as though he’s been burned, freezes there for an instant, then leaps to his feet, striding back to where he left the pack.
“It’s okay. Really,” I say, clambering to my feet as he passes me. “Wait.”
He pauses on the road as I catch up, facing our destination, not turning to meet my eyes. I take one step in front of him, and his hand falls on my shoulder, shoving me a little roughly. We walk in silence, back into the silence that feels like punishment, though I’ve done nothing wrong. We walk until night falls, still not finding the winding road that heralds the hidden base. He stops me then, and I sit and have some water and food while he stares off into the dark.
“So I suppose you were just curious? Or you misunderstood . . . ?” I ask when I can stand the silence no longer. I probably should be angrier at him, but if I’m honest, I think maybe I wanted him to touch me like that. Or something.
He kneels facing me, resting back on his heels.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
“I accept your apology.”