Following Garvin’s brisk pace through well-trodden snow helps me to warm up a bit.
“How many people are here?” I ask.
“Only twenty,” he says. “Twenty-one now.”
“And it’s just guys?”
“We had a couple of girls, but they went down to Kelowna over the summer. I think one of them was knocked up.” Garvin pushes a door open, leading me into another warm hall. We cross it and go through another set of doors that leads to an enclosed gangplank.
“Logger accommodation,” Garvin says when he sees me checking out the scene. “It’s a pretty sweet setup that used to chug up and down the reservoir during the season.”
“What happened to the loggers?”
“They legged it when the Nahx landed up in the hills. Survivors in town were evacked. Their loss is our gain.”
We step out onto the deck of what looks like a miniature cruise ship, only lower, flatter, almost like a river barge. As we walk along the deck, dim lights flicker to life above us, and a low rumble vibrates the floor under our feet.
“We normally don’t keep the lights on every day. Do you have a flashlight?”
I shake my head.
“We’ll get you one. The cabins are heated, but coolish, you know. We don’t want to waste fuel. But there are two hundred beds and only twenty of us, so you can basically have ten blankets if that’s your thing.”
We turn into a long, narrow hallway. Five doors along, Garvin pushes a door open.
“Home sweet home,” he says as he flicks on an overhead light and points around the room. “Bed, desk, a little toilet and sink. You’re going to share with Dylan. You met him earlier.”
I’ve never been on a cruise ship but I’ve seen enough commercials for them, and the room is just like cabins in the ads. Two white beds piled with fluffy blankets, a side table, a desk. There’s even a TV.
“Not much to watch,” Garvin says, pointing at it as though he read my mind. He takes my meager belongings from me and tosses them into a tiny closet. Then he pulls out the desk chair and sits down. I sit on one of the beds.
“When you were on the other side, did you get our videos over there?” he asks “We had reports you could pick them up in Manitoba sometimes, on the other side of the red zone.”
“The videos? You mean the Nahx kill videos? That was all we got, pretty much. The only way we knew anything.”
Garvin nods, satisfied.
Wait. Our videos?
“That was you? You broadcast those?”
“We made them. Did you see the one where the Nahx gets beheaded?”
Even though this cabin is warmer than anywhere I’ve been in weeks, I get a chill. There was a time when I would have been thrilled to meet the maker of that video or any of the nastier NKVs. We watched them back under the mountains, dreaming of the day when we might have a chance to video our own revenge on the species that took our planet. I went sour on them before most of the other guys, but I watched them, especially the one he’s referring to, the one where a group of men taunt and finally behead a female Nahx.
“I saw that one, yeah. A few times.”
“That was me,” Garvin says. “With the machete. That was me.”
“Okay.” I can see he’s disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm. “Sorry. I haven’t seen those videos, or anything like that, in a while.”
Garvin recovers from his disappointment. “No. They’re outlawed in Prince George; in a lot of places, actually. I mean, people still find them, but not in the camps. Were you friends with any locals?”
“No. I kept to myself mostly.”
He nods as though he approves.
“How much do you know about…” He waves his hand around. “Everything that’s going on?”
I shrug. The information we got on the other side of the web was very limited, but since I’ve been on this side, I think I’ve been brought up to speed. “As much as anyone else, I guess.”
“Anyone else doesn’t know very much,” Garvin says. “The official picture is of a human population well and truly conquered and obediently abiding by the treaty. Is that pretty much your impression?”
“Yeah.”
“And are you okay with that?”
“No. The treaty totally fucked us on the other side of the web. I barely got out. None of my friends did.” It feels so good to say this out loud that I get a slight buzz.
Garvin’s eyes seem to drill into me as he nods approvingly.
“What you’re going to learn here is that there is a lot of unofficial information out there too, if you know where to look.”
“Like what?”
“Well, everyone acts like the darting only happened to other people. But people got darted on this side of the web too. Not many, but some. And about a month ago the Nahx marched right through the web like it was nothing and collected as many bodies as they could.”
He looks at me as though he expects a very specific reaction.
“That’s… messed up,” I manage.
“Yep, busted into morgues and labs and all. Darted anyone who tried to resist and hauled them off too.”
“I never heard anything about that.”
“Like I said. Unofficial information. And there’s more. Like this isn’t the only web. And not all the webs are in high altitudes.” He smirks at me. “Does that surprise you?”
“The Nahx…” I pause, taking my time, because I’m in danger of revealing that I know more than I should about the Nahx. “I thought they preferred high altitudes. Didn’t they pretty much leave lower altitudes alone?”
“They did most of their killing, their darting, in high altitudes, but for whatever reason it appears they fancied a few other places. No one knows why so far. They’re mostly pretty remote and unpopulated. Some are connected to populated high zones, like inside the same web, and some aren’t. They’ve even put webs around places in the middle of the ocean. The web you went through covers pretty much all of Alberta and Saskatchewan, up north all the way to Yellowknife, and down south past Denver to New Mexico. It’s massive, but there are some smaller webs too. Some in Siberia, for example.”
“That’s weird.”
“Isn’t it? They’re tricky bastards, the Nahx. Not very forthcoming with their intentions.”
I nod, looking at my slowly thawing feet, and don’t say anything else for fear of revealing too much. But enough time passes that I start to feel like Garvin is waiting for me to speak again.
“Why am I here?” I ask.
Garvin chuckles. “I was wondering when you’d ask that. Do you know where we are?”
“Williston Lake?”
“Good guess,” Garvin says. “We’re just west of Mackenzie. This was a pulp mill. The border web comes down just east of town. Not much Nahx activity this side of the grid. But enough to be interesting.”
It takes a moment for that to sink in. “You’re still making the videos?” I ask.
“When we can.” He stands. “You should get some rest. There’s only cold water on board but tomorrow you can have a hot shower in the mill.”
“Okay.” The soft bed does feel inviting. And I haven’t slept properly in months. Though why that would change now I don’t know.
“Is this the resistance? Like you guys are insurgents, right?”
“Partly.”
Now I’m mildly annoyed at Captain Chaudhry for yanking my chain. Obviously she never cared that I was trying to join the insurgents if she handed me right over to them. “Dozens of guys in the camps want to join up. That’s all they talk about. Why did you want me?”
Garvin turns in the doorway, leaning on the frame.
“Do you hate the Nahx?”
“Yes,” I lie, because I know that’s what he wants to hear. And self-preservation wins over honesty every time.
He nods, with another unsettling grin. “That will have to do for now. Sleep well.”
RAVEN
I’m floating in an empty space that’s sta
rting to feel familiar, even welcoming, but the feeling doesn’t last. Too quickly I get that sense of the world breaking open again, of reality fracturing and parts of me getting sucked into the void behind the fissures and cracks.
And something waiting there for me. Something awful.
My eyes snap open. The gray mask of a Nahx fills my vision. His hand is on my face.
“August?” My fleeting joy quickly dissipates. The armor plates on the Nahx’s face pulse, revealing the sharp defensive spines. This is not August. This is the one I kicked back on the dunes, with the blade permanently bent into a sneer. His hand slips down around my throat as I tense up, shoving upward and encountering the hard armor of his chest.
“Get off me!” Choking, coughing up water, I try to wriggle backward. The sneering Nahx kneels over me, one knee on either side of my hips. I lash one hand up to his face and clamp the other around his wrist. With a hard push I’m able to destabilize him enough for his grip on my throat to loosen. I slide back, threading one leg from between his knees and wrapping it around his neck. I twist my torso and he goes down with a crack of his helmet on the hard floor. As I scramble away, he leaps after me, his weight shoving my arms out from under me. I slip down, smacking my chin.
In front of me, in my blurred vision, I see a metal bar and grab onto it, pulling myself forward. The Nahx slides with me, his head slamming against something hard as I skid underneath. While the Nahx is momentarily stunned, I untangle myself from his limbs, roll away, and leap to my feet. The Nahx swings his leg around, trying to trip me, but I dodge him. With a growl he lunges for me again, pressing my back against something not quite solid—a wall? It seems to bend and crackle with the pressure. There’s a pulse of electricity and we both reel back, tumbling to the floor. I use the momentum of our fall to swing the Nahx under me. Sitting back, I punch him hard. Then I grab his face, smacking his head on the floor over and over. The blades hiss out of his armored mask again, cutting into my hand, but I don’t let go. He grips my elbows, squeezing until I hear my bones creak. I wince, and that’s all he needs to slither out from under me. His fist catches my chin, sending me flying backward. Shaking the stars from my eyes, I see him lunge over me again, fists raised.
“Fifth! Stop that! Stop it at once!”
He reacts, hesitating, and I use the opportunity leap to my feet, poised to fight. As the Nahx steps back I realize he’s at least twice my size, in height and breadth. I don’t know how he didn’t kill me.
“Who gave you permission to touch her?”
I turn toward the voice but can’t find its source, though I’m finally able to take in my surroundings—a featureless gray room, empty but for a narrow steel bench fixed along one wall.
As I turn, one of the walls crackles with electricity, before it fades and vanishes, revealing another identical room. Tucker leaps off a bench, staring at me. In proper light, his skin and hair are slightly metallic. Looking down at his bare feet, I see his toenails are silver.
“What’s going on? Where are we?”
“Fifth, return to your post.”
The sneering Nahx strides across the cell to stand against the far wall. Just as he takes his position, part of the wall shimmers and fades like a wisp of smoke. There’s another Nahx there, this one a female, I think; she’s a bit smaller than the sneering one. And next to her, a human male.
The human is very tall, nearly as tall as the Nahx standing on either side of the door, but lacks the grayish coloring that August had, or even the weird metallic highlights that Tucker has. He still manages to look not quite alive, though. His eyes are unfocused, his longish brown hair limp. When he moves there’s something odd…
With a rush of recognition everything I’m seeing seems to slot into place in my head, and a word emerges. Puppet. This creature is some kind of puppet. As my eyes adjust to the glare from the open door I notice a small swarm of what look like fireflies hovering around his head. They vibrate as he speaks.
“Why is it that whenever we bring a snezjinka into a cell, chaos ensues?”
I file away the unknown word. Whatever this thing is, it creeps me out.
“Sit,” he says.
We both edge back and sit on the bench, the cool metal making me notice the silvery blood on my hand for the first time.
“You’re hurt,” Tucker says, reaching for me.
“It’s fine.” As I wipe my hand on the green satin of my dress, I see that the bleeding has stopped. I feel that weird shimmery swoosh through my body again, and almost before my eyes, the wounds close as my skin knits back together.
“Small wounds will do that,” the puppet says. “Larger ones take longer. Grievous wounds will put you out for several days, sometimes weeks, but you’ll recover from most things eventually.” His mouth curves into what might be a smile on something more human. On him it looks like badly executed Claymation.
“Am I supposed to be happy about that?” I snap. I don’t like the way Tucker is just sitting there like a zombie. And I don’t like this puppet and his abusive guard. And the fireflies swirling around his head are making me dizzy. A few of them drift away from the cloud and buzz lazily up to the ceiling.
“Happy to be nearly immortal?” The cloud of light trembles as the thing speaks again. “Free of disease, free of the slow decline of time, practically indestructible? That doesn’t make you happy?”
“No.” It’s a lie, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.
The fireflies vibrate, the cloud shifting to the left and to the right as the puppet looks at Tucker.
“You humans remain inscrutable, even perfected like this.”
“What did you do to us?”
The puppet-human looks at us again, the cloud of lights waving from side to side. He fixes his gaze on me.
“What is your name?”
“Raven.”
“And…?” He turns to Tucker, who is still sitting quietly. “What is your name?”
Tucker glances at me blankly but says nothing.
“His name is Tucker,” I answer for him.
The puppet sneers at me, his unnatural face made all the more monstrous with disdain, and the cloud of lights seems to throb and its color intensifies to lurid yellow. “This one is incompletely processed.”
It happens so fast, I barely see it. The female Nahx leaps at me, one hand closed in a fist, the other wielding a black knife. But before she makes contact Tucker springs up to wrap his legs around her throat. By the time they both hit the steel floor, Tucker has the black knife jammed neatly in between the armor plates on her neck.
Her partner, the Nahx with the sneer, lunges forward, but the puppet holds him back with a hand on his chest.
“That’s enough, Fifth. Don’t damage this one.”
“You don’t touch her!” Tucker growls, and pulls the knife out of the female Nahx’s twitching body.
“Give me the knife… Tucker.”
Tucker tosses the silvery-bloodied knife away. It clangs on the floor.
“Your protective instincts are well honed,” the puppet says. “But you’re very obedient. Sit down.”
Tucker returns to the bench beside me and sits there staring forward, as though he hasn’t just killed someone on my behalf.
As I turn away from him and watch the other Nahx, the male, my heart crumples at his rocking posture—his left hand raised to waist height and reaching out, his other hand clenched in a fist. He growls but it comes out staccato, almost as though he’s choking. More than maybe any human on earth, I understand the Nahx capacity for sorrow, and this one has just had his heart broken.
The puppet turns and looks at him with a disdainful flick of his head. “Grief is beneath your rank, Fifth. Take Third down to cold storage. She may recover.”
Fifth. Third. Rank. Something becomes clear to me after all this time. August’s name wasn’t actually August. And it wasn’t a name. It’s a rank. Eighth.
I gave him a name. That seems like more responsibility
than I deserved.
Fifth leaves, dragging the girl Nahx ungracefully behind him by her foot. She leaves a streak of dark, silvery blood on the floor. With his free hand he makes two signs I recognize.
Sorry. One.
The puppet only sniffs, the cloud of light contracting around him.
“First?” I ask. “Is that your name? Your rank?”
He turns slowly, his eyes narrowed. “We told our soldiers not to dart humans in the head.”
“What does that mean? What difference does that make?”
First picks up the knife and steps back until he’s outlined by the bright opening in the wall. The cloud follows him out as the opening contracts, disappearing around his last words.
“Perhaps you’ll find out.”
I stare at the blank wall for a few seconds as everything that just happened seems to sear into my thoughts.
“Are you all right?” Tucker asks behind me.
“Yes, I’m fine. But you…” I don’t finish my thought. I’ve never needed Tucker to defend me, and I certainly don’t now if I’m as strong as I feel. But if he’s feeling protective toward me, maybe that’s because he remembers us in some way, remembers what we had. And maybe we could go back to that, if only for a day, or an hour. It would be as if none of this had happened. The idea makes me grind my teeth. Why does he still have this effect on me, after everything? I want him to put his arms around me. And I also want to strangle him.
“I’m super strong,” he says. “Did you see how far I jumped with you in the forest? When that grenade went off? That felt weird.”
“Weird how?” I think I know what he means.
“Like I knew I needed to jump that far and suddenly I could. Almost like… my thoughts made me able to.” He shakes his head, frowning. “And we could run so fast. Did you see that?”
I turn and look at him, taking in the weird silvery pallor of his skin, the metallic gloss over his brown eyes. He’s still the same pretty white boy, but harder somehow, more detached. Worst of all, he’s talking like a six-year-old who doesn’t remember who I am and clearly doesn’t care at all that we’re in mortal danger.
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