“Look, Your Majesty,” I say. Felix rolls his eyes. “There is no age of majority after an apocalypse. Can we agree on that? And even if there was, how could you stop us from leaving? Five of us are going. I’m not going to lobby Mandy, though I’m pretty sure she will be joining us when it comes down to it. We’ll take a fair share of what’s left of the food and weapons and see you later. How does that sound?”
I don’t wait around to hear their response.
“Someone give me a gun,” I say when I reach the others. Topher hands me a rifle obligingly.
“Just the targets, right?” he says with a nervous smile.
I shoot three rounds with the rubber bullets we have for practice, none of which come close to the cans propped on the fence at the other side of the field. The recoil of the rifle pounds into my shoulder painfully on the next round, but the bullet hits a fence post with a satisfying crack.
“Nahx armor is bulletproof,” Topher says quietly as he reloads the rifle. There was a surprising amount of both live and rubber ammo in the gun locker. Maybe they were expecting a plague of bears.
“Bulletproof? How do we know that?”
“It was in one of the last videos we caught. Those emergency broadcast network ones. Facts-about-our-enemy sort of thing. You didn’t watch that one?”
I shake my head. I watched a few of the early videos—battle scenes mostly, if it can be called battle when civilians are mowed down as they run away. Some were long-range shots of cities on fire, or explosions. There was one, which streamed every day for two weeks, of what looked like a Nahx ship blowing up, but that might have been faked. Anyway, I stopped watching. I decided to pretend it wasn’t happening, that Tucker and I were on vacation together. All that seems like a very long time ago already, like a half-forgotten story from childhood I didn’t know I was quite done with.
I press my eyes closed. Topher has seen me at my worst, and I him, but this doesn’t seem like the moment to show weakness, or emotion, or that I’m a human being. I feel him give my arm a squeeze and a pat. When I open my eyes, he’s walking back to the cabin, the rifle propped on his shoulder.
“Wanna try the crossbow?” Emily says.
I ignore her and follow Topher to the cabin.
“So what do we do?” I ask him. He’s sitting on the edge of one of the beds, looking out the window at the lake. “If we can’t shoot them, what do we do?”
He has the rifle resting on his knees, one hand gripping the barrel. “One guy thinks there’s a weakness in the neck. Another thinks knives or arrows might work. You know, since they go through Kevlar and stuff. Maybe it’s the same kind of armor.”
I take a moment to run my own little video in my head. “Arrows, okay, maybe I can see it. But knives? How do you think a knife fight with a Nahx would go down?”
“Best-case scenario is you’d both end up dead.”
Down on the lake a group of Canadian geese takes off, heading south, as if nothing has changed in the world. I wonder if they even notice, or care. The sky is clear, the air is still. It could be any other autumn day.
Snap-twang!
Except for that.
“We’re all dead anyway, though,” I say. “Right?”
Topher nods, watching the geese.
EIGHTH
The relief of being able to think more clearly is worth the effort it takes to breathe without my mask. What a choice, breathe or think. I check my elevation. Just over 5,000 feet. I could breathe better if I went higher up, but I’m scared now. Sixth said the Rogues, the noncompliant lower-ranked Elevenths and Twelfths, are up there. I prefer to avoid them, as she instructed. They are dangerous, as inclined toward violence against their own kind as humans. Each other, too, Sixth said.
I need to focus on remembering the things she said, on what she taught me. If I stay at this elevation, I have a few hours before I need to reconnect. I can think. I can try to organize my thoughts. I wasted an hour sleeping, but I needed the sleep. When I woke up a lot of the fear and confusion had drained away, and I could assess my situation a little more rationally.
I’ve really screwed up. I should not have left her. I’m sure the transport came eventually. Or maybe it will still come. When I reconnect, I’ll walk back down there. Maybe she’s still there. Maybe she got up at last. She might be wondering where I am.
I wonder whether she’ll look for me. I think I would look for her if it were the other way around. But . . .
I’ve never heard of one of us getting up after so long.
The color and the smell of the trees up here help me concentrate. This is the kind of thing I could never tell her. I know enough to understand I’m not supposed to care about the color and smell of pine trees. I knew enough not to tell her how sometimes I would lose thoughts right after thinking them. She would tell me something, and a moment later it would be gone, leaving a blank space in its place.
Eighth is defective.
I’m more defective than even Sixth knew. But at least I can think now, better than when I’m connected anyway. I still have a giant empty wasteland for half my mind, but the other half works okay. It’s hard not to worry about the emptiness though, about the missing thoughts. Have I forgotten important things? Even not knowing what they are, they feel important, if missing things can be important.
I miss Sixth. She is important.
Important. Defective.
I need to get back to a hub somehow. Find a transport, get back to a hub. If she’s still alive, then I’ll rejoin her and we’ll continue the preparations. If not . . . I don’t want to think about that. I’m sure I’m not supposed to care.
Maybe another one will like me more than she does, won’t get angry when I make new signs.
You have all the signs you need, defective low rank. She would hiss as she said it.
Another one won’t call me defective and shove my hand off her shoulder. We’re supposed to walk like that, so I can push her down if there’s any threat.
I think she’s dead. I hope that thought will slip away too, but it doesn’t.
If I close my eyes and reach out, it’s almost like my fingers could find her shoulder. It’s easier to walk, easier to forget the pain in my ribs if I think like that. That’s wrong too, but I don’t care.
RAVEN
We leave two days later, at dawn. Sawyer, Felix, and Mandy agree to come with us finally, because Mandy could see that being left in a remote wilderness camp with a gay couple might not be all that she dreamed of from life. And Sawyer and Felix couldn’t let us all go on our own. They are the senior camp leaders, after all.
Before I leave I want to visit Tucker’s grave. Alone, I plan, but of course, when I reach it, as the sun is peeking up over the valley ridge, Topher is there, sitting cross-legged, his fingers trailing in the loose earth.
“What a surprise to see you here,” I say. A pathetic attempt at levity.
Topher sighs. “My parents will want to know where he is.”
If they’re alive, I think.
“If they’re alive,” Topher says, looking up at me. I’ve dressed for the journey and armed myself. “Knives?” he says, eyeing the two hunting knives, one in each thigh holster, strapped over gray cargo trousers. A third is tucked into the top of my hiking boots.