“Give me the crossbow, too, please.” I make the “please” sign, pressing my fist into my breastbone. August glances in Xander’s direction. “Xander’s a friend. Right, Xander?”
Xander shrugs, his black eyes wide with fear. But August tosses the crossbow down. I snatch it up and note the arrow loaded into the channel. Could I shoot August? I wonder as I stand and face up to our situation. Could I aim that arrow at the weak point in his neck and let fly? Hopefully, I won’t have to find out.
“Come here, August. Xander’s going to check out . . . these two, okay? Everything is okay. Calm down.” August steps back toward me, reaching for my face. I flinch away and he lets his hand fall.
Don’t be scared.
“I am scared. You killed someone right in front of me!”
Sorry sorry repeat sorry forever sorry four give. Four give . . .
“Stop it!”
His hands still. Then after a second or two, he drops slowly to his knees, sitting back on his heels. I wipe my eyes and watch as Xander hangs over Emily. The eye she has left is open and staring, her skin changing to the color of cooling ash.
“She’s dead,” Xander says, unhelpfully. He takes Liam’s pulse and checks under his eyelids. “He’s still with us. Not sure if he’ll ever wake up again. I’ll go get a medic, I guess.”
Xander stands, and as the three of us look at one another, a moment passes so full of possibility and disaster that I feel I could choke on it.
“Xander, August and I are leaving.”
Xander blinks. “Okay,” he says uncertainly.
“We need you to help us get out of the base. Will you do that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
August looks up at me, and I have the chilling realization that he would kill Xander where he stands if I wanted. That he would kill every human in the base if I asked him to. I’m still not sure what I did to have such power over him, or if that power is absolute. Maybe one day August will finally tire of me.
“No,” I say to Xander. “You don’t have a choice. Bind Liam’s hands.”
Xander pulls a cable tie from his pocket and fastens it tightly around Liam’s wrists. Liam moans softly, but does not quite come around.
“Where are you going to go?” he asks as he finishes.
“Away from here. West. Toward the coast. August, you can get me to the coast, right? To the human territory?”
He looks up at me for a moment, then nods slowly, turning his face toward the floor. I have just asked him to deliver me out of his life again, I realize. I wonder how many times I will ask this of him. How many times he will do it. And whether we will ever truly be rid of each other. Somehow between here and the coast I’m going to have to make him understand that he doesn’t belong in my world.
But August doesn’t belong in his own world either. He doesn’t belong anywhere.
“You’re covered in his blood,” Xander says, frowning thoughtfully. I’ve seen this look from him before, before August captured me in Calgary. It’s a mixture of panic and practicality. As though he’s putting off a scream of terror while he figures out how to avoid what’s inciting it. “We can get out through the thermal vents, I guess. Down to the river and out via the walkways to the northwest exits. That’s my favorite sentry shift because it’s so warm.”
“Will there be sentries there?”
Xander bends over and closes Emily’s staring eye. “Maybe. Probably. Likely sleeping though, if they’re anything like me.” He straightens up and shakes his head. “This is fucked up.”
Sorry. Repeat sorry.
“What do those signs mean?” Xander asks.
“He just apologized. He does that a lot.”
“How very Canadian. Can you ask him not to kill the sentries at the northwest exits, if they’re awake?”
“Ask him yourself.”
Xander takes a tentative step toward August, who rises slowly to his feet. Next to this giant alien, Xander looks slight and small, almost childlike, though I’ve never thought of him like that before.
“Well, August? Can you get out of here without killing anyone else?”
August studies Xander for a moment, then nods.
Promise.
“He promises,” I say.
“I see. And does he usually keep his promises?”
If you only knew how much, I think.
The low-ceilinged hallways outside the detention cells mean August has to stoop, which he does with one hand resting lightly on my shoulder. Xander leads us, and I make sure he knows I have the pistol in my hand. The crossbow hangs over my back.
“Did you have a rifle, August?” I ask as Xander checks the entrance to the thermal generators. August shakes his head. “Do you need a weapon? Where’s your knife?” He shakes his head and shrugs. I suppose I could give him the crossbow if we get into a fight. I don’t know how good he would be with it. And I wonder how Liam and his team subdued him, if they took his weapons. I never had a chance to ask someone how it all went down. Maybe August can explain it to me when we get a moment.
August’s boots clang against the metal catwalk above the humming generators, but apart from that, we walk in silence. As the minutes pass, August’s limp lessens until he walks just as easily as he ever did. Whatever he is, his resilience is extraordinary. He had three arrows in him not ten minutes ago. Now he’s walking along as though nothing happened.
“Are you in pain?” I ask him.
A little, he signs, holding his index finger and thumb an inch apart.
“Will you be okay?”
Don’t be scared, he signs, which I translate to “Don’t worry.”
Sure. Nothing to worry about. Escaping a veritable fortress with an enemy killer. No big deal.
As we begin the descent to the river, he starts to wheeze a bit, but repeats his Don’t worry when I turn back to scrutinize him. “If the Nahx do come, you should bring the civilians down here,” I say to Xander. “Nahx don’t like being underground, and this is getting low for them, I think. Isn’t that right, August?”
He nods as Xander turns and walks backward for a few steps.
“Why do you walk like that?” Xander asks, pointing at the hand August rests on my shoulder.
Push down. Danger, August signs, wheezing. I translate.
“And it’s always a male and a female, right? Like you’re a bodyguard or something?”
August nods.
“Well, that’s very chivalrous, I guess. Kind of old-fashioned.”
August takes his hand off my shoulder then and places it on his head, rubbing, as though he has a headache. We walk in silence for a minute, until my thoughts threaten to bubble up and leak out as hopeless tears again.
“August, would it be okay if I told Xander some things about you? About the girl you traveled with?”
He takes my hand, giving it a little squeeze. I take that as a yes.
And so as we walk along the catwalk, now above the steaming river, our progress marked by the rhythmic clanging of August’s footsteps, I tell Xander the tale. What I know of it, anyway. How Tucker killed this girl that August was bound to. How August killed Tucker, then wandered lost and alone until fate put him outside that bathroom door in the trailer park. Until he let me live and lost his whole world.