by K. Chess
“That old school? All the way upstate?”
“No,” Vikram said. “The house. Where he wrote his books. You know.”
Klay looked surprised, much more surprised than she had when she’d seen the pristine iceberg on the screen of his phone.
“In Brownsville,” Vikram clarified. “It’s still standing. It’s a dump, but it’s still standing.”
How strange, he thought, watching her note the address in her phone, that Hel had never thought to mention this fact to her.
Asyl tracked Aitch due west, following the curve of the valley. She picked out a trail invisible to John Gund. When it grew too dark to see the ash beneath their feet, they camped outside an abandoned filling station. John Gund set up the tent on the cracked concrete apron where the pumps had been and warmed up rations for them both while Asyl climbed up on top of a twisted metal cabinet that had mostly survived the first burn. John Gund recognized what its purpose was—holding bags of ice offered for sale in the long-ago Before—and knew that Asyl didn’t know, that she didn’t care. She crouched on her haunches, staring out into the darkness.
“He could be getting away,” she muttered. “He can travel at night and we can’t follow.”
“He has no food, and hardly any water,” John Gund reminded her. “He won’t get far.” Between the helmet and the encroaching night, it was impossible to make out her expression, but he could tell from the way her shoulders slumped that she was not comforted by this truth. “I think he must be headed for Vic City.”
Twenty years ago, survivors had dug beneath the hills, creating a network of tunnels that began just half a day’s journey in the direction they were walking already. “He wouldn’t,” Asyl said. “Never.” Victory City was her own birthplace.
“Why not?”
Without answering, she jumped to the ground, unfastened the door of the tent, and went inside. The walls glowed, and he could see her shadow. He knew she was removing her protective gear. “Because that would be a compromise,” she said from inside, her voice slightly muffled.
“And outlaws never compromise?”
“If they do, what’s the point of being an outlaw?”
Silence from inside the tent for a moment, and then he heard her begin her nightly prayers, thanking out loud the God who had pulled her from the pit and set her in a place where she could not burn.
To give her privacy, John Gund walked away from the tent, away from the filling station. He felt a vestigial urge for a campfire, and wondered at it. These days, flames meant something else to him. They were not special. All day, every day, he burned things.
A cement-block structure stood twenty feet away, its fire-marked walls uncollapsed. He walked through the gaping doorframe into what he imagined had been a small cafe. Long ago, traveling salesmen would have sat before cups of coffee, slices of pie, chicken-fried steaks, and boxed mash. Checkered oilcloth on the tables. A radio. Now, there was nothing but piles of charred rubble. At the back of the space, the door to the old kitchen stood open, miraculously preserved but hanging askew on damaged hinges; he knew from experience that the room back there would be a dark husk or, if not, that anything of value would have been cleared out by a scavenging party. He stuck his head in and saw, to his surprise, that most of the back wall looked relatively undamaged. There was a stove and some empty shelves and even two kitchen chairs, whole. Looking around, he saw rubbish in the corner, ration packages and empty cans.
People had stayed here. Not pyronauts, but certainly people who’d traded with pyronauts.
Someone had dragged in the chairs—why, only Asyl’s God could tell them.
John Gund pulled the nearest chair away from the stove and brought his booted foot down savagely on one of the wooden legs, breaking it off with a splintering crack. Yes, this would catch easily. He carried the legs outside, made them into a pile. Asyl had fallen quiet—praying silently, perhaps.
He didn’t use his flame pistol. Instead, he struck one of the matches he kept in a tin with a photo of his mother and her sister, arm in arm in front of a house he could almost remember growing up in.
“I’m going to Vic,” Asyl announced. “As far as the watchtower, at least.” She said the words through the tent wall, knowing he could hear her outside. “Tomorrow.”
Ten cards would have told her.
This is you.
This is your disguise.
This is your past.
This is your future.
This is what is above you.
This is what is below you.
This is your house.
This is your lover.
This is your riddle.
This is your answer.
How Hel wished the deck were with her. She knelt on the ground between two graves, orienting herself by the angel over her shoulder. The wet grass froze her; her fingers itched. She wanted her knife back, but more than that, she wanted answers.
For Truth to work, the reader must first be sure of what she is asking.
Where was the book?
But it wasn’t so simple. Other questions clouded Hel’s mind, confusing the mantic properties of the cards that she did not hold. Questions layered like sodden leaves beneath the surface of a placid lake, questions she’d already asked over and over. Where was The Shipwreck? Why had Sleight died? Why had Hel’s number come up? Why had she found Vikram and then driven him away? Why must she suffer this world, so familiar at every turn, yet so alien?
Where was Jonas?
You never heard any answers if you asked a dozen at once like that. You had to think small. You had to settle. Settle in.
She didn’t recognize the man as he approached, though maybe she should have known him by his bouncy walk, his skeleton frame. Her first deluded, hopeful idea was that new voyagers were passing through the old barrier. But no, he was just one person, wearing jeans and an army-style coat with the collar turned up, the hood of a sweatshirt worn underneath protruding, pulled up. No one at home wore a hood. Sweatshirts didn’t have hoods. If he came from her world, he’d be wearing a hat. Always, these little details oriented her. The ground under her feet remained solid, the sky gray, mundane, and devoid of the blue-lightning trace of the Gate.
Never for a moment did she think he might be a ghost. She didn’t believe in ghosts.
The man coming toward her was Dwayne Sealy.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Weeks had passed since their only meeting, but she knew him now, and he clearly knew her too.
He shrugged, shoulder to shoulder with the angel. “Saw you get out of a cab on the boulevard just now. Followed you from there.”
“Did Vikram send you?”
“No. I had no idea you’d be here.”
“I don’t believe you.” The more she thought about it the angrier it made her; the idea of Vikram declining to help her when she needed it, sending a stooge to keep tabs on her only after the crisis subsided. “Fuck him! In fact, you and Viki can fuck each other! Get a cancer and fuck each other to death!” She felt foolish yelling like this, from her knees in the dirt. She struggled to her feet, eye level with Dwayne, who looked unimpressed by her outburst.
Actually, now that she thought about it, she remembered how she’d declined to try Vikram’s phone number in the station house. How could he have known she needed his help? And besides that, what could he have done? Her chest throbbed, not with anger but with faint stirrings of guilt.
Dwayne backed away. “Have some respect,” he said. He gestured with an out-thrown arm. “Look around you. I’m here to see my brother’s grave.”
“Really?”
“You UDPs. Think everything’s about you, all the time. Even Vikram. I like the man, but come on. There’s a whole world of pain and suffering and shit.” He started to walk back down the path in the direction from which he’d come. “You don’t have a monopoly on it.”
“Where are you going?” Hel asked.
“I said already. My brother. He’s in New
Calvary.”
Suddenly, she did not want to be left alone. “Hold on,” she said to his retreating back. “Wait. I’m coming with you.”
“What if I told you I needed some peace and quiet?”
“Oh.” Now she felt doubly foolish. She stopped. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
He let out a breath. “It’s all right. You can come if you want.” He turned to her. “Seriously, come. I’ve got some news from Vikram, anyway. If you want to hear it. But I gotta do my thing first.”
Together, they threaded their way through the graves and left the old part of the cemetery, crossing on foot underneath the BQE, then proceeded along industrial Fifty-Fourth Avenue, its packaging companies and shipping companies, a business on the corner that sold custom neon signage. Without speaking, he led her under the LIE and onto Forty-Eighth Street and back onto hallowed ground.
Newer graves here. Granite instead of slate and marble. Dwayne seemed to know exactly where he was going. His jouncy walk, his fists inside his pockets—they seemed endearingly boyish to her. Yet he’d scolded her and she knew she deserved it.
He slowed to wait for her. “Shawn was sick most of his life,” he said. “He had a lung disease. But he was a fighter. Have you heard that before? It’s a cliché that they use here about people who are sick—that they’re fighting their condition. That’s not what I mean, though. Shawn hated talking about cystic fibrosis. He was a big baby about it. He would get stuff in the mail from the hospital and just tear it up unopened, without seeing whether it was a bill or test results, or anything. I always had to get to the mailbox before him. What I mean when I say Shawn was a fighter is that he was a fighter. A regular scrapper. Tough guy, you know? One time, he caught me and my friend trying on his new cologne, this stuff I saw him buy on clearance at the Rite Aid. Man, he beat our asses for that. But he always kept me safe. Had my back, like a big brother should.”
They turned up a sort of alley. Hel noticed a fleet of candy-pink stones to the left, their inscriptions carved in a script she didn’t know. A family. “You come here a lot?” she asked.
“Never.”
“Oh. How long has he been dead?”
“Years. Three years.”
Hel thought about what that meant. Maybe he was right about her self-centeredness. On the day her life fell apart, the day she won the lottery and stepped through the Gate to begin a new one, Dwayne Sealy and his grandmother had been newly bereaved and grieving.
“So, what about your kid?” Dwayne asked her. “Vikram says you lost a son.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jonas didn’t walk across the country. That would have been crazy. He traveled out from Western Refuge, the renamed township where he lived with his father, on a borrowed blazer. Even including the stops he had to make to scavenge for fuel and for food, the cross-country trip took under two weeks. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Hardly any of the main roads had been repaired since Jonas was a child. He had a map, but it was hard to predict which routes would still be passable. In the first years, when there was still fuel to be bought, some municipalities sent out wrecking crews to clear away the junked pods, but in other places, rusted pileups impeded passage, forcing Jonas to wheel the heavy bike along the shoulder. He knew enough, as he moved east, to avoid the cities.
He was close enough now to the Exclusion Zone that he needed to seriously consider his entry point. The highway Jonas had been following since the ruins of Buffalo now led south and east and ended right at a checkpoint. That meant that for any nonmilitary purposes, it was a dead end.
He’d been warned about this already by a stranger he met on the road. Together, the two of them broke the window of a room in a chain motel, a Du-Sleep-Inn. They took the unit on the far end, which ended up having two double beds. Jonas opened the door and wheeled the blazer inside, leaving streaks of grime on the carpet, and then he and the stranger piled the two dressers in front of the window, put the dead bolt on, and spent the night in there, taking turns watching the approach through an old-fashioned spyglass John wore around his neck under his dirty coat.
John. That was the guy’s name. “I always take the end room,” John said. “It’s good luck.”
John? Like John Gund, in the book y’all keep talking about?
No. Hiram. That was the guy’s name. “I always take the end room,” Hiram said. “It’s good luck.” He gave Jonas a fishy look. “Normally, I like to leave the door open, too. That way, I can see what’s coming. Anybody comes up on me, I take off before they can bother me.”
Jonas could see the logic behind the strategy. Hiram was younger than Jonas by a few years—maybe young enough to have been born Before, but too young to remember much about it—and he had a cough. He didn’t seem strong. Probably chronic radiation syndrome.
“Too bad,” Jonas said. He felt no pity. His mission had to come first. If anyone spotted them, he’d never be able to wrestle the big diesel bike out from where he’d propped it. The better option was to pretend they weren’t even there. That meant a closed door.
In the morning, the two went their separate ways. Hiram headed west, out of the Neverlands, while Jonas continued east.
People told him he couldn’t do it, and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would stop at the fence. But maybe not.
Neverlands, did you say?
That’s what I said.
Also, is this now? Wouldn’t Jonas be, like, thirteen? That seems too young to be out on his own.
This isn’t now.
Oh. OK.
He’s older. Why couldn’t he be older? I want him to be strong. I want him to live a long time.
Jonas passed through a town as he started to lose the light. It was clear immediately that no one lived in this area anymore. Even the people who’d weathered the crisis years on their own, refusing to be evacuated, tended to stay on the outskirts, avoiding the populated areas where Homeland Defense was more likely to conduct sweeps. So this was a ghost town. And it hadn’t been resettled. Everyone knew what the officially sanctioned radiation levels were, but no one knew how far you could push it. If you’d lived on the verge like this, it was usually wiser to pull up stakes. Jonas found his way to the streets in the center of the town, where the post office was and the routing station. Then, he found a house with an attached shed. He didn’t like staying in other people’s homes, even if they were never coming back. Even if they were dead.
That night, he curled under his two tarps. He’d had enough to eat—canned goods pillaged from a small grocery store he’d hit the night before—and so he slept soundly, without dreams. He’d heard tales of people in the Neverlands who grew their own crops and actually ate them, but Jonas would never do that. Don’t take any risks, his dad always warned him. All you have is your health. Not everything his dad said was foolish; they’d seen so many get sick, even in Western Refuge, 1,500 kilometers from the nearest site, the one in Escondido.
What kind of parent would let his child—
Teenager, like I said. And I’m not saying he would let Jonas do anything. He’s a stubborn kid. He would have snuck away. Raym—my ex—he would know Jonas enough to see it coming. That’s all.
Can I ask, without sounding rude—can I ask what the point is, of all of this?
The next morning, Jonas found his way to the fence. He’d left the highway and was feeling his way on local roads. The map wasn’t much help so he consulted his compass frequently, always heading east.
And then, up ahead, he saw it.
They’d put fences all around the Exclusion Zone. Barbed wire topped the chain-link, and charge boxes placed at intervals hinted that the fence was electrified, but Jonas doubted the current still ran. What would power it? Of course, he wasn’t sure. He’d never seen an electric fence in operation in his whole life.
He wheeled the blazer to the far side of a little meadow—farther from the road than you could get, most places, without a machete or something to hack through underbrush—and lai
d it on its side beneath the low-bending branches of a blight-resistant crab apple tree. He covered it with his larger tarp, which had a subdued green-and-brown camouflage pattern.
Leaving the blazer didn’t trouble him too much. He’d done the best he could to hide it. Either it would be here when he got back, or it wouldn’t.
And he continued inward on foot, through the second-growth forest.
I was there in the hospital. I saw Shawn die, so I could never pretend that he wasn’t gone. But I used to think about what he could have done in life, if he hadn’t been taken from us. I still do think about that, sometimes.
Even this close, it was hard to tell that anything had happened. The trees were green and healthy in appearance. Birds called and the sun rained down fat drops of light between the leaves. Poison. It was all poisoned. After America Unida sympathizers took down the plants, the standoff was off and the USA showered Caracas with warheads. And after that, AU flattened New York City with its fusion-boosted fission bomb. That was the end of the war, but everything within fifty klicks was still Excluded. Would be forever, the old-timers said.
He put his ear to the fence. Didn’t hear any buzzing. He could risk it. He stretched out a hand to the metal links.
The closest he’d ever gotten to the place where his mother had died.
But it hurts, wondering like that. Makes you ache. It ain’t real. Don’t do no good. I don’t think this is healthy, Helen. And having him come there, for you? Putting himself in danger?
Jonas decided. This was the nearest he would approach. He could not see her city, that mass grave. When he was a kid, he used to imagine she got out, in that lottery. Now, he knew how unlikely that was, and he could mourn. It was the feeling, here, that made the journey worthwhile. The feeling he got standing here in the Neverlands of upstate New York. Remembering a picture he’d made once, a drawing of a tiger. He’d signed it with a shaky, deliberate J. He remembered traveling by airship to meet her, long ago. How she’d been waiting when he disembarked, just like she’d said she’d be. How she’d taken him into her arms.
