Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Then he lifts my hands and puts them on either side of his face. Looking into his eyes, locking on to him as my mind drowns in darkness, something of the mystery of August begins to unfurl and sail above the waves, something of the mystery of the Nahx, of their darts, their strange blood. What they are doing to our planet. It makes sense at last, and with that comes such relief that I think I smile. August smiles back at me through his tears. I tug his face down until our lips touch. His kiss tastes like fresh snow and the smoke of a campfire. He pulls back and touches his lips with his fingers.
I feel my heart stop, like it has stepped into quicksand and sunk without a struggle. Things start to move slowly. August blinks, and it seems to take an hour, a day. The poison of the dart infuses all parts of me now, and I know. This is time stopping, just as August said. I know what the darts are for. I feel the beginnings of disdain for my own weak, imperfect species. This is how we become perfect. This is how we live forever.
My brain focuses on his face, which is frozen, inches from mine, his eyes wide and frightened, snowflakes suspended in the air around him, like stars.
There is darkness underneath me, like that murky lake of my dream. There is something under the water, pulling at me, something I’ve forgotten, something vital. If the Nahx darts are human perfection, if they are immortality, then what have I forgotten? Something too terrible to remember. Something under the earth, under the snow, something under the shadows of a leafless tree.
It comes back to me as August’s face dissolves into nothing. With the last impulse of my human body, I form the word and whisper it through half-frozen lips.
“Tucker . . .”
Then the darkness sucks me down.
AUGUST
Her eyes are open, but I know what she sees. Nothing. I can remember the nothing.
“You should close her eyes,” the black-haired boy says. He wipes snot from his nose with his sleeve. “What did you inject her with? Was it medicine or something?”
I can’t move. I don’t want to close her eyes or stop looking at her. I know when she opens them again, if she opens them again, she won’t be my Dandelion anymore. Even now there are streaks of black in her golden hair, veins of spiderwebs on her skin, no longer warm sunlight brown, but gray as a storm cloud. Gray as mine.
“I guess it didn’t work. Unless . . . well, she was going to die anyway. I think the arrow went through her spine.” He wipes his dark eyes. His tears are as clear as ice, unlike mine. They smell of salt, and sorrow. “She was in a lot of pain.”
I gulp for air, and it feels like swallowing claws and teeth.
“You need to put your mask back on,” the boy says, reaching for it. When his fingers are a few inches away, the tentacles of the breathing tube spring to life and wind around his hand.
“Ugh! Get it off!” he says. But the mask rejects him, the tentacles curling back and falling slack. “What the fuck is that?”
I gulp another breath. But before I put the mask on, I bend down and kiss Dandelion’s cold lips again. And close her eyes.
The boy looks away as I reconnect to the mask, the tubes finding their way into my nose and mouth, making me gag and cough. When I fix the helmet into place and latch it closed, I’m rewarded, or punished maybe, with a burst of slug syrup. The relief of pain lasts only a moment, because I cling to Dandelion and remind myself she’s gone. And I’m not sure how to bring her back.
I lift her into my arms and hold her tight. My mind struggles with the thought-numbing fluid, tries to hang on to the feeling of losing her. I think if I lose that, I lose everything. If I stop caring, I’ll kill the black-haired boy and dump Dandelion somewhere for the others to gather. They know how to bring her back, but then she really will be lost to me forever. They’ll cut parts of her away, her mind, her heart, the part of her that begged for life, the part that told me I have a choice. I hang on to the pain and wish that I had said more things to her, that I had a voice to tell her how much I love her. I’ll hang on until I’m sure the pain has carved a permanent mark in my syrupy brain.
“The ground is too hard up here to bury her,” the black-haired one says. “But we could make a cairn. There are enough rocks.” He grimaces as he glances at the dead body slumped in a puddle of blood. “For Liam, too. We should cover them.”
I ignore him, pulling Dandelion closer, pressing my face into her hair. After a moment I feel the boy’s hand on my shoulder.
“She was pretty special, wasn’t she?”
Before I can stop myself, I hiss at him. He stumbles backward.
“Not that . . . There was never anything between us. . . . We were just friends, right? She explained that to you? Right?”
I put my face back into her hair.
“Really though. We should, you know, bury them or whatever.”
Stupid human. I’m back where I started. He doesn’t know my words or understand what has happened. And he’s terrified of me. I hate him. I could break him in two and toss him down the mountain.
No. Think. He and I are so alike. Looking at him I wonder now how I could have ever believed that I was so different from the humans.
Think.
Dandelion’s eyelids streaked with black veins. The smell of her hair. Not pine needles now. Charcoal. Like me. Dead but not dead.
Stopped.
I might have been someone else once too. We all might have been.
I try to breathe out the hate for the black-haired boy. I promised Dandelion I would save him. And I will, but first . . .
She wanted something else in her last second.
Tucker.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what that means.”
I close my eyes behind the mask and try to remember the shapes, the letters. I know I can read. I can make letters, too. Remember.
I trace letters in the snow between us.
T U K R
“Oh. I’m sure she just said that because, you know, your life flashes in front of your eyes apparently, when you die. But he’s been dead for a long time.”
Tucker’s not dead. It’s odd how I’m not sure when exactly I realized this.
“I’m sorry, I don’t . . .”
I growl with frustration, and the black-haired one recoils.
Tucker and Dandelion are not dead.
He shrugs. It’s unfair how humans can put an apology on their face so easily. Or any feeling. It’s hard to stay mad at them.
Xander. He needs a sign name.
I draw a Z in the snow and point to him.
“Yeah. Actually it’s X, but . . .” I growl again. I will have a daily struggle not to kill this one. “No, Z is fine. Z it is,” he says, his hands up.
I make the Z in the air and point to him. Then I make my own sign name.
Eighth Cycle of the Moon.
I haven’t used this since Dandelion renamed me.