“What is it?”
Sawyer and Felix are looking at footprints in the soot—large footprints with a tread made up of triangular patterns in a kind of segmented formation. There are several. Whoever was wearing these boots, there were a few of them.
“Nahx?” I say. Somewhere around my bladder, something clenches.
“We have no way of knowing. Their tread pattern was never in the videos we saw. But I’ve never seen boots like this. They look . . . mechanical.”
“Mechanical” is the mystery word no one talks about. It’s easier to think of the Nahx as organic, humanoids. Obviously, they are armored, but if we imagine them with biological innards, it’s more realistic to conceive of defeating them somehow. If these are nothing but robots, we’re completely fucked. Because whoever is controlling them has no compunction whatsoever about annihilating us.
Topher steps up behind Sawyer. “That’s one more thing we know about them,” he says pragmatically. “We can track them. That helps.”
“Track them?” Sawyer says. “Aren’t we trying to avoid them?”
Topher steps backward, his eyes fixing on mine. “Yeah. Whatever.”
I can almost feel his rush of energy. Of vengeance. Topher could follow these tracks to the ends of the earth. He believes he will.
I see Tuck so much in him right now it hurts like fire. And I don’t know whether to run away or follow.
We camp not far from the burnt forest, in a dense grove of shaggy willows and scrub. Sawyer doesn’t think a campfire is wise, but we have a few cans of Sterno fuel, so we’re able to heat water and cook some noodles, eaten with cubed Spam and canned peas. Then we spend several hours trying to perfect a way to melt marshmallows with matches and lighters.
Darkness falls, and the mood changes. The Nahx are known to be much more active at night, when they can barely be seen. We shrink together, wrapping open sleeping bags around us, rather than crawling inside. This way we can get up and run faster, if the need arises. Sawyer has decreed that if we are attacked, we should all run in different directions and rendezvous, those of us who survive, at a designated point farther down the river. The idea doesn’t exactly fill us with confidence. Only the exhaustion of the day-long hike offers us any hope of sleep at all.
Topher volunteers to take the first watch, and I volunteer to join him. With our friends curled up, backed into the mangled remains of a fallen tree, we sit back to back on a smooth rock. Topher has both rifle and crossbow on his lap. I settle for one of the rifles, even though I’m loath to fire it.
“How long is the drive from Calgary to Vancouver?” I ask when I’m fairly certain the others are safely asleep.
Topher sighs heavily. “We’ve had this conversation,” he says. “About twelve hours.”
“If they left early that day, they would have been nearly on the coast.”
He shifts his weight forward, away from me, and the cold night air makes goose bumps rise on my back where his warmth has left me.
“Maybe, but . . .”
“But what?”
“That doesn’t mean they’re safe,” he says. There is no empathy in his tone. He’s back to being irritated with me. I guess the brief reprieve of our shared grief is over. “If they were in Vancouver . . . well, Vancouver probably got bombed too.”
“But if they were on the road when it started, there’s no way Jack would have . . .” I shake my head. My stepfather was a survivor, a fighter even more than me. “He would have turned onto some little back road, headed into the wilderness. Or hooked up with one of the First Nations out there and gone deep into their land. Someplace white people never go.”
“The Nahx aren’t white people.”
I hear him moving behind me and turn to look at him, barely visible in the light of the sliver of moon.
“If I really wanted to go west, would you come with me?” I ask.
He looks back at me and shrugs. And then shakes his head.
Somewhere an owl or a bat flutters in the treetops. We both clutch our weapons and tense, watching the sky. After a moment Topher sets his weapons down.
“This vendetta. This is for Tucker, not for you,” he says. “What’s best for you is to go with the others, find shelter, find other people. I get that I’ll probably never find the one that killed him. I’m not stupid. But maybe I can kill enough of those bastards to make up for it. I could find a base or one of the ships and blow it up. It’s a suicide mission. I don’t care. It’s for Tucker.”
“Didn’t we make a pact to do it together?”
“Yeah.” Topher sniffs. “That was a dumb idea.”
We sit silently, in the dark, waiting for an owl to hoot or a coyote to howl, or crickets to start chirping. Something to create a little atmosphere, to fill up the void around us.
“I don’t know why you hate me so much,” I say, though I had no intention to until the words were already floating away. I’ve said such things to Topher before, and his standard answer has always been that he doesn’t hate me; we’re just too different, or some other platitude. But this time he surprises me.
“You mean before you got us all arrested? I thought you would get Tucker killed. He never took drugs before you came along, never snuck into clubs or broke curfew. It was like he was trying to be exciting enough for you. The long hair, the earring. He stole a car, for God’s sake. Punched that douche bag math sub who got you suspended. He could have done time for that. And setting fire to the bandstand. Jesus, that was an ode to you. So yeah, I hated you. And you pretty much did get him killed, because he did all those stupid things to impress you.”
This is the first time I’ve heard Topher correctly assign the blame to Tucker for the fire that got us all arrested. His change of heart makes me dizzy. Up until this moment he accepted his part in it and took his punishment, but I was sure he blamed me. He’s still blaming me indirectly, but for Topher even that is progress.
“I didn’t need any of that, or ask for it,” I say.
“Whatever. I could see after a week that your relationship was a time bomb. I could never get him to see it.”
“So you tried to break us up?”
“Yeah. Sue me.”
I’m not going to sue him, but I am going to punch his lights out when the time is right. I squeeze both my hands into fists under my sleeping bag. Topher leans back on his elbows and looks at the clouds drifting across the moon. His face goes in and out of focus as the moonlight ebbs and flows. In low light I can almost see Tucker in him. As the light gets brighter, there is no mistaking Topher’s tense, pinched expression for Tuck’s easiness.
Topher frowns at me. “Look, sorry,” he says.
“For what?” I say, feigning calm. I should feel nothing for him. If not for his connection to Tucker, he would be irrelevant. As it is, I’m developing a pathological obsession with keeping him alive, while also wanting to murder him.