“Tried. Can’t. I’m not sure it is armor. And it’s boiling hot.”
The other human trains his weapon on me, an arrow poised to pierce into me. As he takes a step forward, I growl with as much force as I can manage. His quick recoil satisfies me. Weak and stupid human. He’s still scared of me when I’m chained up and half dead.
“DON’T do that again!” the human says.
Or what, stupid human? You’ll poke another hole in me?
My shoulder spasms with sharp pain. I look down to see the arrowhead sticking out. Shot in the back, I think, and this reminds me of something. A name. A tap on the shoulder over a star-shaped scar. Thick sludge gurgles in my brain. My hand makes the signs for “bird” and “black.”
Ah, death, muddy death. I’m the stupidest creature who ever lived.
Pretty. Wind. Flower.
Dandelion.
I came back for her, as if she even remembers me.
RAVEN
Topher finds me in my quarters, curled up on the bottom bunk, fists pressed into my eyes, trying to get my breathing to be normal.
“I just heard,” he says, sitting on my chair. “We’re going to get together a search party tomorrow. See if we can find your friend, this August. Why didn’t he come all the way to the base with you?”
I don’t answer. Of course I don’t answer.
“Liam says there’s probably another group of refugees somewhere. Is that right? Why didn’t you say anything? Do you know where they are? Liam says you stopped answering his questions.”
I press my hand over my mouth because if I open it, I’m afraid of what will come out. Topher rolls the chair forward and touches me, his fingers gentle on my cheek. “He might not be dead. He might have dropped the book or . . .” But he doesn’t believe this. He gets out of the chair and kneels by the bed, curling his arms around me. “We’ll find him, Raven. If that’s what you want.”
I know what he’s thinking. That this human boy, August, is the obstacle between us and the thing neither of us really wants. And maybe that Topher’s willingness to search for this imaginary boy is enough of a demonstration that I might finally begin to thaw toward the absurd idea of us. But it’s so insincere it is almost nauseating. Because Topher knows as well as I do that if there ever was a human boy called August, he’s dead. Their “search party” is not a rescue mission. It’s a recovery. Topher expects to find him with a dart in his chest and learn a new thing about the Nahx—that they sometimes take trophies from their victims.
“Can you tell me about him?” Topher says. “Tell me what happened. Where you were all those weeks.”
I turn my face to the wall.
“It’s not going to hurt my feelings or anything, if you had something with him. I just want to know why he didn’t come back here with you. Unless he had somewhere else to go. That’s what Liam is thinking. That he was part of a group of refugees that were heading west, but that you wanted to come back here for . . .”
I know what Liam would think of this. That romantic sentimentality will get us all killed. I didn’t go with August because I’m in love with Topher. August came back for me because he’s in love with me. A Nahx trailed him, killed him, and maybe transmitted our location to his command. We’ve all been fucked over by love.
If only they knew that love might be the one thing to save us.
“Do you want to bug out?” I say to the wall. “Head west, I mean. Use Xander’s map and get the hell out of here?”
Topher doesn’t answer quickly enough for me. In his hesitation I see all the hours he and the other boys and men have spent training, adapting the weapons, planning assaults. It all comes down to fight or run again. I have no fight left in me. And sometimes I think Topher is nothing but fight.
“I want to get you out,” he says finally, and I guess I have to be satisfied with that.
“What are they going to do with the Nahx they captured?”
Topher sits back in the chair, his hands on his knees. I’m struck by his appearance, taking a moment to really look at him for the first time in months. He looks much older than seventeen, and the last vestiges of the warmth that made him look like Tucker are fading. For all his lies about love, Topher is hard as the icy mountains that separate us from the rest of the human world.
“They’re going to try to interrogate it, I guess.”
“Interrogate? You mean, like torture?”
“I guess that depends on how much it’s willing to tell us.”
An urge from my past, long since forgotten, to punch Topher in his pretty face, crashes over me. “The Nahx don’t speak,” I say before I can stop myself.
Topher leans back, studying me. “They don’t speak to us. When have they had an opportunity before this? As far as the NKVs go, this is only the second time one has been captured. They’ve never even managed to bring one in dead.”
“They don’t . . .” But how can I explain what I know? How can I make Topher understand? His hate for them is like a living thing, as ugly and consuming as it was that day by Tucker’s grave. I backtrack, trying to get us onto a safer topic. “I know a way we can get to the coast. Safely, I mean.”
“Xander’s map?”
“Yes. But that’s not all.” I press my eyes shut. “An escort. Someone who knows the way. Who knows everything about the Nahx. Knows where they are and how to evade them.”
Unexpectedly, Topher slides out of his chair and kneels in front of me again. “Raven . . . he’s . . . August is dead. I shouldn’t have said what I did before. There’s no way that Nahx would have left him alive. That’s never happened. Never. I know what you think happened back in the trailer park, but that was some kind of hallucination. There’s no such thing as a Nahx that leaves people alive. That Nahx they caught? It killed August.”
I search his eyes. Search for the spark of joy that I once loved so much in Tucker. But there’s nothing left. My own eyes fill with tears. For Tucker. For the world. For the fact that Topher is the human left that I trust the most, and I can’t trust him with the truth. But I have no choice.
“Topher,” I say, my hands on either side of his face. “The Nahx they caught is August.”
A gust of wind in the quadrangle rattles my window suddenly. Topher glances at it and looks back at me, his face inscrutable. He looks like someone trying to figure out the punch line of a particularly complex joke. Then realization dawns on him like a new day. Slowly. And colorfully. But it’s a new day broken by winter, like everything else around here. He stands abruptly and steps out the door.
“Call a security team!” he yells down the hallway. “Right now!” There’s a muffled reply, and the sound of a door opening and closing.
“Topher,” I try.
“You shut up!”
He remains in the doorway, silhouetted by the bright hallway lights. Finally, he turns back to me, and I see that truly, Tucker is gone. Topher is gone. All that remains now is a vengeful soldier. I’m neither surprised nor disappointed. Resignation is what I feel, like the Nahx girl in the video, just before she lost her head.