So. There. I failed her one last time.
I hurt all over. My insides hurt. Parts of me that aren’t even real hurt. Like my mind, my memories, such as they are, the part of me that resists all that is expected of me. I wonder if those parts are dying now that she’s gone forever. I wonder whether I can go back to being a soldier, an assassin, go back to my people and resume my duties now that she has been excised from my life.
If she made me rebel, surely her absence might make me comply. But I would rather die a million painful muddy deaths than return to that unliving life. I don’t care if it was all a trick. I am free.
In the darkness the idea that captured me once, twice, more times I am too ashamed to admit even to myself, takes me again. I pull my arm back and hurl my rifle far into the night. Faintly, I hear it thump in the distance. Without it I feel as light as the mist rising from the fresh snow.
My mind drifts back to that sunset on the roof when I stood there staring into nothing while she screamed at me, screamed and screamed and cried, shackled to the bed below. There is something so vulgar about that, so unspeakably vile, something I don’t quite understand. How she ever forgave me, I will never know. How she forgave me for anything, for everything, not that I deserved it.
She would never know, would she, if I broke my promise? Just like I will never know whether she lives or dies, she would never know if I drew my knife and slipped it between the armor plates on my neck.
I would do it. I would. But I’m not sure I can actually die. If I can’t die, maybe Sixth is not dead. Maybe she is out in the world somewhere searching for me, waiting for me, waiting to judge my failures again.
PART FOUR
SPRING
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “The Premature Burial”
AUGUST
Time passes, snowflake by snowflake, sunrise by sunrise. I’m scared that if I disconnect and purge my body of the thick oil that keeps me alive and awake, the memory of her might go with it. Or worse, I might forget that I have promised to leave her and her friends alone. I have promised not to reveal her location to my people. What if I forget that?
So instead I wander through the trees, hiding from daylight like a . . . something . . . a vampire? That was in one of the other books I left behind in the tower. I lurk in my tree trunk chamber dreading the raven who will tell me nevermore.
Raven. Nevermore. Like I need reminding. I look at the book sometimes, but the words swim in my vision. I think I have forgotten how to read.
Nevermore.
It stops snowing and starts raining. I imagine the raindrops dripping down the armor over my nose are tears. I only ever remember crying once, after I lost Sixth. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I thought maybe I was very sick or dying, it felt so bad. But after a while it became familiar, and the familiarity coalesced into a word, and I knew I was crying. I was ashamed at first, because I thought crying was for humans and children, but later it felt good, like the tears were sucking the malice out of me. That was when I began to resist, before I first saw Dandelion. Was that the reason I didn’t shoot her in the river? Because I remembered how to cry? Was it actually the pain of losing Sixth that saved me?
Irony. A word I didn’t know I knew flops out of the sludge in my brain and gasps on the shore for a few seconds, like a dying fish. Irony. What possible use could that knowledge be to anyone, least of all me? Why remember these useless things now?
So much is remembered as I roam through the dark forest. The broken parts of my brain have finally repaired themselves. But the charge of the armor is wearing out. It no longer keeps me entirely awake. Sometimes I find myself dozing on my feet, my back resting against a tree. It no longer ties my thoughts up in knots. Images wriggle out and dance behind my eyes. I remember being on the big ship with the others. I remember being smaller, and eating, and injections that made me sleep without dreams. I remember waking up so full of hate for the humans, I attacked the one who woke me and squeezed their throat until others tore me off.
I don’t remember being punished for this.
A human woke me—this I remember distinctly. I don’t know how that can be. A human on the big ship? Maybe I’m remembering that wrong. The captured fragments of story in my head seem so implausible. We are preparing, but for what? There is a great battle coming, but with whom? Surely not the humans. They are all gone. And anyway, even with the living ones, it would not be much of a battle.
I’m soaked in oily fluid, but its power is waning too, along with my strength. Once, when I kneel to look at a fallen bird’s nest, I forget momentarily how to stand up. Like a baby. I think Sixth might have warned me about this, too. If I stayed in the armor for too long, if I let the power cells run out, it would start to shut down my nonessential systems first. Speaking, walking, thinking. It is getting hard to think. I know I have an organic brain too, my own brain that can think for itself, but it has been so long contained and infiltrated by the sludge that I’m not sure it works.
For the first time, I recognize this as something stolen from me, as a terrible violation. My mind was stolen, my history. I try to claw it back but can’t tell which parts are real and which are imagined.
Sometimes I do the signs to myself.
I feel very, very sad.
When I remember to do it and it feels safe, I stand in the sun, if the clouds clear. But the solar is just a backup. I should recharge properly, disconnect, and recharge. But I’m scared.
Scared.
I’m scared I’ll forget her. Forget my promises. I hear the transports sometimes, and hide from them as they swoop in low, careful patterns. They are searching, but what could they be searching for? I feel like I should know.
Recharge. Eat and sleep, Sixth would say. Eat and sleep, like a human.
Eat. Sleep.
I make the human girl’s names with my fingers. Raven. Dandelion. Again and again until my hands ache.
Time has passed. The moon has bloated and shrunk. The Firsts, Seconds, Thirds, and Fourths have all begun their second year.
If that boy . . . His name is gone, something about an arrow in the shoulder . . . If he were there waiting for Dandelion, she . . .
She . . . Dandelion . . . she has another name, doesn’t she? A speck of black in the bright sky. Something about memory.
A transport hums above the mountains. Searching.
Someone should warn . . . her . . . the flower . . . and the bird.
The rain drips off my face. I turn my body away from the setting sun and meander off into the dark.
I need to disconnect, to take off this monstrous armor for a few hours. To recharge by eating and sleeping.
Like a human.
RAVEN