He points to the scar on his chest. Not the one Topher made, the other, more faded one. He taps it hard and hunches over, clutching himself with one hand, reaching with the other.
“He shot you first? Then her?” Tucker could reload the crossbow as fast as Emily. He had practiced for hours. In between . . . the other stuff.
August looks up, tilting his head backward, pointing to the gaps between the armor on his neck.
“An arrow went through her neck. That killed her.” Like we speculated. Just as August once showed me. There’s a weakness in the neck.
He doesn’t reply. Doesn’t nod or acknowledge me. Lowering himself, he leans forward and buries his hands in the snow.
“And you were scared because you were lost. Lost without her. She took care of you, right? You didn’t know what to do.”
He hisses out a long, shaky sigh.
“Did you chase him?”
Still hanging over the snow, he chops one hand into his chest hard. Sorry.
I find I can’t say any more. Tucker’s death plays behind my closed eyelids like the worst kind of horror movie. I wonder if he yelled as he ran, if he screamed. I wonder if he knew in those last moments that he was going to die. Did he think of me? Or Topher? Or only of himself? Minutes tick past. I see Tucker fall, face forward, the soft mulch of pine needles and willow leaves cushioning his fall. I hear the whine of the dart gun. I feel the punch of the dart at the base of my neck and the sour stinging of the Nahx poison rushing through my veins and out my eyes.
“Was it painful?” I say at last. “Did he suffer?”
August shakes his head.
“Was it painful for you?”
After a moment he answers, signing fluidly, and clearly, though one of the words is new to me.
Tucker had a square machine.
“A square machine?”
He makes the square in front of his face, pointing at his eyes. Picture. Machine. Like the time I broke the table.
Oh. God.
“A video? He had a video. On his phone?”
Yes.
“A video of him killing your . . . the girl? The girl you loved?”
Yes.
So.
There’s the truth at last. Tucker wasn’t hunting for food when he left my bunk that night. He was hunting for glory. Why would he do that? He knew already that I hated the videos. That I thought they were stupid.
But Emily liked them. I’m not sure why that changes everything, but it does. Tucker filmed his attack on August and his companion, and it was playing back when August caught him. Maybe they both watched it as Tucker died. Then poor August smashed the phone to pieces.
He lifts one hand out of the snow and lays it on his chest over the scar, over his heart, if he’s anything like me inside.
I reimagine the scene, this time from August’s point of view, and it breaks me. Bleeding from his chest and in terrible pain, his only companion murdered in front of him, a dead human boy under a tree, lost and scared and alone on a planet full of people who want him dead. With a video playing back the moment his life fell apart. I can’t imagine his pain.
I could no more kill him now than myself, than Topher, than my own poor parents who tried so hard to keep me out of trouble, who forgave so much and lost me anyway. Tucker will never get his vengeance, not from me. I drop the knife. It rings like a bell when it hits the ice at our feet.
The world, which may or may not have ground to a halt while we resolved this catastrophe, starts moving again. I feel it lurch beneath my feet, unbalancing me, while things that have cycled between terrifying and familiar so many times they became a blur settle on familiar again. There’s a kind of finality to it. I trust him now, and that won’t change again. Trust is enough for us to go on.
Standing, August takes two steps before turning back to me, holding out his hand. I reach for him, his fingers close around mine, and we walk like that, holding hands like two children, back to where we left the packs, as the sky lightens around us. His hand pulses warm in mine and squeezes to the knife-edge of too tight, to the precipice of painful. The stinging and heat radiates up my arm, my shoulder, and neck. I wonder if he doesn’t know his own strength or if the grip is intentional, if there is some unspoken message in it.
If he is angry with me, at last, I suppose I deserve it. Angry, fed up, exhausted, frustrated—it’s not like it’s a new sensation to me, to inspire such emotions. But this time I decide to give myself a little break. I have the right to grieve and be bitter and resentful. And so does he. There are no easy answers, not anymore. Probably there never were any.
Morning breaks, and a blue sky blossoms above us, making a wonderland of the craggy rocks and hills ahead. But the day passes in silence. August lets go of my hand only to give me water or food. I open my mouth only to drink or eat. Was it just a few days ago that I told him we could be friends in a different time or universe? I’m not sure I meant it then, but now I think I’d like to be his friend. It feels safe walking hand in hand with him, the first time I’ve felt safe in what seems like forever. I know who he is and what he did, but that was somewhere else. Maybe this is the universe in which we can be friends.
It is dusk when we reach the helipad at the canyon’s edge; it emerges from the ice haze like a mirage. August silently considers the dormant helicopter, tucked away under camouflage tarps and a thick layer of snow. He turns and looks at me, setting the pack down between us.
I breathe deeply, exhausted from our daylong walk, and emotional, too. Emotionally exhausted, like I’ve been watching children die. I feel as fragile as glass, a stained glass replica of myself.
Before this all happened, I had never said a real good-bye. I close my eyes and picture Sawyer, in the grocery store, the expression on his face, the silent something we shared the second before he gave his life for mine. Tucker and I never had that chance. He snuck out of my bunk as I slept, took his crossbow into the forest, and I never saw him alive again. But that is death. In a way it is a better good-bye, because at least you don’t wonder forever. My parents, if they live, must wonder about me, as I do about them. Topher wonders about me. Wonders whether I am alive or dead. What must have been going on in his head when he saw August carry me away? That kind of good-bye is torture that never ends.
I will never see August again. Never know what happened to him, whether he lived or died. Whether he rejoined his kind and their pillage of our planet. Or if he snuck away and hid somewhere, alone in exile, until . . . what? He died? Can he even die? There are still so many unanswered questions. And no more time.
“I have to walk to the base,” I say, struggling to keep my voice even. “There’s a narrow path, and the entrance is kind of hidden. It’s a secret base.”
He nods at this last fact.
“You can’t tell your people where we are.”