Cold Falling White

by G. S. Prendergast

  “Tenth!” I rush to his side. “Just try to breathe. Help me!”

  Mandy and Tucker take an arm each, and we try to haul him upward while Blue zips around frantically.

  We drag him ten feet but suddenly he wrestles away from us with surprising vigor, his signing slurred, almost nonsensical.

  Leave me. Feel broken. Thank you. Sorry. Please.

  His coughing has been replaced with a wet whooshing sound, as though a river of blood is flowing out of him.

  Sorry. Repeat forever.

  He falls to his knees. I fall down with him, putting my arms around his waist.

  “You haven’t done anything but help me, Tenth. You don’t need to apologize.”

  One of his hands wraps around my shoulders as I look up at his face. Blood is leaking out of his helmet in a torrent now, as he signs weakly with his other hand.

  Raven. You fix…

  But his body slumps until I can’t hold his weight. He pitches forward into the snow.

  “Blue! Help!”

  They zip over Tenth’s body, disappearing for a moment into the armor at the back of his neck while my heart pounds hard enough to hurt. But seconds later they reappear and trace a slow sad circle around Tenth’s head.

  I lean down on Tenth’s back but can no longer hear his breath at all, nor a heartbeat.

  “Is he dead?”

  Yes.

  “Like dead dead? He won’t get up?”

  No.

  “Are you sure?”

  Yes.

  I look down at his shape, my vision blurring with gray, and angrily pinch away the tears. Why did he stay with us? He could have climbed up to higher ground hours ago. Maybe that would have saved him.

  “Help me flip him over.”

  Tucker and Mandy kneel with me, and we heave him over. His weight seems to have doubled somehow, though the snow under him is stained with his gray blood. I feel around his helmet, over his ears, and find something like a latch, which I tug on until it gives and lets out a loud crack like a gunshot. The latch on the other side is easier to find. It clicks open loudly.

  With two hands I yank up on the front of Tenth’s helmet and the whole thing splits open, revealing the mass of tentacle-like tubes that snake into his mouth and nose. His face is covered in gray goo. Mandy helps me tug the tubes out, and I let his helmet roll away.

  “Oh gosh,” she says. “He looks young.”

  She’s not wrong. He looks young and dead, and if there was ever a more apt metaphor for war, I don’t know what it is. I use the long folds of the green satin dress to clean away some of the gray gunk, revealing a soft, hairless face with lips so plump, they look swollen, a long freckled nose, and wide gray, staring eyes wet with silvery tears. His hair, when I wipe away more of the oily fluid, is almost like rose gold, as though he might have been a redhead in his normal human form. Or the boy he was copied from was a redhead.

  Tucker takes one of his hands and Mandy takes the other, while I can’t help but be reminded of how many times we’ve done this since the invasion. Me and Topher, crying over Tucker’s body. Sawyer sobbing in Emily’s lap when Felix died. Liam hanging his head over Britney’s grave. And so many others—too many to name. I know now that half those people aren’t actually dead. Or at least they are only half dead, walking, talking shells who barely remember themselves, destined for some purpose as yet unrevealed.

  Poor Tenth has been spared it, whatever it is. I reach over to close his eyes, but hesitate. Above us, the sky is alive with northern lights and stars, the moon still peeking out from behind the craggy mountains. In daylight, I remember, it’s beautiful up here too, with a bright blue or cool gray sky framed by the rocks and cliffs. The mornings are misty and fresh, the twilights velvety and soft, and the nights, like this one, often almost magical. The colorful sky seems to be singing to us. No one argues with me when I decide to leave Tenth’s eyes open.

  “Good-bye, Tenth,” I say.

  Tucker actually lifts one of Tenth’s hands to his mouth and kisses it, a painfully familiar gesture. It’s exactly what Topher did to Tucker before we buried him, never thinking for a moment that we would see him again.

  Blue lingers for a moment over Tenth’s body, grieving, I suppose, in their own way.

  Tucker moves Tenth’s body into a more dignified position, pushing his legs together and resting his hands on his chest. After a few seconds he retrieves Tenth’s knife from its holster and tucks it into his hand, adding a kind of sci-fi Viking effect to the scene.

  “Why do you think he helped us?” Tucker asks, stepping back.

  “He was just a nice person. Some of them can’t help being nice, I suppose.”

  Blue buzzes around my head as Mandy joins us. We hold hands and look down on Tenth where he lies. It doesn’t feel right to pray—I don’t believe in God, and anyway, wouldn’t the Nahx have a different god? A song might be okay, but I’m not much of a singer, and no one else starts one. Instead we let the sky sing for a while, until by some unspoken agreement we determine that enough time has passed. We leave Tenth there to stare at the sky.

  “It’s sad,” Tucker says, unexpectedly, as we step back down onto the steep path. “When someone’s nature is so contrary to their… expectations.”

  He could be speaking of any of us. I look back to the plateau before we get too low to see it, where Tenth is just a wisp of gray in white snow and moonlight.

  XANDER

  After hiking south for days, we have fallen into a pattern that feels so familiar, it’s as though it’s carved into my bones or written in the blood that fills up my socks. At night Aurora carefully washes them in a puddle of melted snow while I wriggle my blistered toes over the fire. When she gives back my socks, they are toasty warm. It occurs to me that when a Nahx decides to take you into their care, there is very little they won’t do for you.

  Aurora stands guard while I poop behind bushes. She digs a hibernating squirrel out of its den and roasts it on a stick for me to eat. She melts snow in the metal cup, heating it in her hand until it’s steaming, then watches me drink, making sure I finish every drop.

  It’s like having a terrifying robot mom.

  One night I wake up in the dark, blanketed in snow, with her hanging over me. Bitter cold has set in, along with a snowstorm so dense, I can barely see past the remnants of our campfire.

  Go now, Aurora says, urging me upward. She shakes out my sleeping bag and tarp, rolling them up and stringing them over her shoulder with the bungee cords. We trudge off through the storm, her walking behind, guiding me with gentle pressure on my shoulder.

  I’m starting to think I might die out here. Cold does that to you. Growing up where I did, I’m familiar enough with the sensation. You stop caring about it. If it wasn’t for Auror, I probably would have stayed in my sleeping bag, let the fire die down, the snow bury me, my heart trickle to a stop. She seems to have a destination in mind, though, and whatever it is, it is probably something I wouldn’t want to miss.

  We keep the glowing web to our right, never straying farther than about a kilometer away from it, though sometimes that requires difficult climbs or clambering over frozen rock falls or squeezing through dense forest. When I ask where we’re going Aurora simply signs friend. I don’t know whether this means she’s my friend so I should trust her or that we’re looking for my human friends. She says other things to me sometimes, as though she’s trying to explain, but I can’t understand. I think her sign language might be slightly different to the way August spoke, as though they use different dialects. And I never had time to learn his words anyway.

  For the past year and a half I’ve had too much time to do nothing and not enough time to do everything else.

  Just as the rising sun crests the eastern peaks, Aurora slows by a frozen stream, pointing to the opposite side. I have to strain to see in the low dawn light, but finally spot what she’s trying to show me. Tracks—and by their size and the distinctive triangular tread, I recognize them.
Nahx. My insides curdle.

  She turns us away from the web to follow the stream, careful to step only on the stones and not leave footprints in the fresh snow up the bank. I do the same. About twenty minutes later she stops, holding a finger up to silence me, and then points into the scraggly trees.

  I don’t see anything. I shake my head.

  Drawing me closer, she redirects my attention, pointing emphatically at a section of forest that seems thinner than the rest, light streaming through from the reflective icy terrain behind it. Finally I see what she’s pointing at—hacked-off stumps of slim saplings. The stumps bear the easily recognizable wedge-shaped marks of a hatchet. Humans did this.

  “Someone building a shelter?” I whisper.

  Aurora nods. We proceed carefully, silently, as the frozen creek carves a gully through the rock. Soon we are creeping along the edge of a steep cliff a good twenty feet above the creek bed. Ten minutes farther along, she stops me again, this time pointing at a clearing in the trees and a mound of dirty snow.

  Aurora points to her nose.

  Human, she signs.

  “You can smell them?”

  As I stare into the clearing, my impression of the mound of dirty snow suddenly changes. It’s not just a mound, and the “dirt” is actually thatch made of twigs and forest debris.

  It’s a shelter.

  “Wait here,” I say. “Stay out of sight.”

  I look down at my feet to find a safe way of climbing up the slippery bank, and when I look up again, Aurora is gone, as though she vanished into thin air. Turning in a circle, I search for her, just to have an idea of where she is, but I can’t see any trace at all. I know Nahx do this, disappear like this—I’ve seen it before—but it’s still disconcerting.

  I step carefully through the undergrowth, hyperaware of the loaded pistol at my hip, the rifle slung over my back. This is a human shelter, but there’s nothing to guarantee it’s a friendly human. I’m not even sure such a thing exists anymore. I stumble and have to shuffle around dozens of large stones that look as though someone has scattered them among the trees like marbles. I wonder if whoever made the shelter left them here, and why. Some kind of early warning system? It would be easy to trip over them in the dark.

  The shelter is empty when I reach it. Under the blanket of snow, I can see it’s a beautifully made conical wickiup, a kind of tepee made from the slender trunks of young trees, layered with pine boughs and needles. It’s the type of winter shelter Sawyer taught us to make right after the invasion, to pass time at the nearly empty camp; one of the activities he had planned for the campers who never arrived.

  Topher excelled at it. It’s a lengthy, tedious, and precise task that suited his meticulous personality.

  Inside the shelter, I remove one glove and bend to feel the embers of the round hearth. They are cool but not cold, as though the fire has been out for hours maybe, but not days. Army green sleeping bags are folded up neatly and stacked on top of a tarp to keep them dry. There is evidence of meals eaten in here, animal bones and an empty can, but no weapons or tools.

  I step back into the bright clearing.

  “Topher?” It seems crazy to hope, but Aurora brought me right here. She obviously knew about this camp, knew where the humans were. And Topher knows how to build a shelter like this. Those sleeping bags are just like the ones they issued us at the base, and according to where I think we are, we’re mere miles from the path I mapped out—just south of the Yellowhead Pass. If Topher was anywhere, he could be here. He might have seen Aurora. He might be hiding.

  “TOPHER!” I yell it so loud, it seems to disturb the trees. “It’s me, Xander!”

  I wait for a minute, bleeding hope as though from a lethal wound. But nothing happens. The wind rustles the scrub around the camp. I spin when I hear a small noise, but it’s just Aurora, delicately picking her way up from the stream.

  “No one here.”

  She nods, bending to look into the empty shelter.

  “The hearth is not completely cold. There might have been someone here last night or yesterday. Maybe we should look for tracks.”

  As I turn, she grabs me, hand over my mouth, and holds me there, her head flicking from side to side.

  I use one of her signs, wriggling my fingers in front of my face.

  What is it?

  She takes her hand off my mouth and taps her ear.

  I heard something.

  A second later I hear it too—a creak, followed by the distinctive twang of an arrow being loosed from a crossbow. Aurora shoves me down into the snow, spinning away as the arrow glances off her shoulder.

  “Wait!” I shout. “I’m human!”

  The next thing I hear is gunfire, a loud crack of a rifle. The force of the bullet sends Aurora flying backward, skidding along ground.

  “No!” I dive for her, yanking her back milliseconds before she sails over the edge and down to the creek.

  “Are you hurt?”

  No.

  “Get out of here, then. They won’t hurt me.”

  She hesitates, her hand on my shoulder. Another bullet zips over our heads and cracks into the rocks on the other side of the creek.

  “Go!” I shove her. She flicks her head back once and leaps over the creek to the sheer slope on the other side, scrambling up it like a spider and disappearing over the top.

  I clamber to my knees, hands raised above me just as a hooded figure appears from the dense trees.

  “Get your hands up. Keep them there!”

  He looks like a yeti, swathed in a dark coat, crusted with snow and ice. He’s armed to the teeth with a rifle, a crossbow, and knives in holsters strapped over filthy jeans. The only visible parts of him are his watery brown eyes in a thin slit between a knitted hat and a thick scarf.

  “Where did the Nahx go?” he says. His voice is heavy and raspy.

  “What Nahx?”

  He jams the barrel of his rifle right into my solar plexus, knocking the wind out of me. I sway backward.

  “There was a Nahx with you!” he says. “Where did they go?”

  “I… I’m not sure… I—”

  He reaches forward and tears my scarf down. I watch those glassy eyes widen with shock as he steps back. Almost as an afterthought he raises his rifle again, aiming it at my head.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m—”

  “Where’s Raven?”

  Up to this moment I had thought the cold was making me hallucinate, but now I struggle to speak. Even though I’ve imagined this moment a million times, it never looked like this.

  “She’s dead, Topher. She died.”

  “Was that him? Raven’s Nahx? August?”

  “No. He’s… dead too.” We stare at each other over the rifle, which I note is cocked and ready to fire a bullet right into my forehead. “Topher… come on.”

  The frigid air freezes the tears in my eyes. What has happened to him? The coat he’s wearing hangs off him, his eyes are sunken and haunted, his skin parched and red. Even his voice sounds like an old man’s, as though he’s aged a hundred years since I last saw him. I try to piece it together. He left the base? Maybe with some of the other guys? And they’ve been out here in the wild, in the winter, for God knows how long? Why is he alone?

  “Topher… what happened? What happened at the base?”

  “Shut up!” He pulls his scarf down, revealing his gaunt, windburned face, his lips drawn back, practically growling at me. “My friends got darted over the summer. Know anything about that?”

  “No! We only got here a few minutes ago.”

  The sudden pressure of the rifle on my neck makes me tumble backward, sitting and slipping on the ice. I have to fight to keep from sliding closer to the edge of the creek bank.

  “You admit there was a Nahx with you?” He plants his feet on either side of my legs, looming over me, the rifle now aimed at my heart.

  “She doesn’t even have a dart rifle,” I say. “All we
have is human weapons.”

  As though saying it makes it real, the unmistakable red dot of Aurora’s rifle laser sight appears on Topher’s chest. My eyes draw Topher’s attention down, and as he lurches back, the laser moves up to his face

  “No! Aurora, don’t!”

  The red dot flicks off—a warning. I scan the other side of the creek, the sparse edges of the tree line, the high drifts of snow, but I can’t see her anywhere. I have to gasp a few times to catch my breath enough to speak.

  “Nahx aim is flawless,” I tell Topher. “She could take you before you even spotted her. You know this.”

  “What are you doing with her? What are you doing here?”

  “I came back to look for you,” I say. It sounds ridiculous now it’s out in the open.

  “You led the Nahx right here.”

  “I didn’t! How would I even know where you were?”

  Topher sneers at me again. “You found me, though, didn’t you? Explain that.”

  “I can’t.” My arms are starting to ache from holding them up. All the blood has drained out of my hands, leaving them numb and tingling. “Aurora… the Nahx. She knew I was looking for you. I’ve just been following her. She must have known you were here.”

  I see him hesitate, but it’s as though someone else is thinking for him, as though his mind is possessed or decayed. He re-aims the rifle.

  “You know what they do in wars to collaborators?” he snarls. “They shoot them.”

  “Have you done that?” I wonder now how many humans have been adopted by rebellious Nahx, if Topher has encountered such a thing before. Is it common? “Toph?”

  His eyes widen, staring at me, and I see an eternity of grief in them, as though he’s witnessed every death that ever was since the beginning of time. Or maybe it’s just Tucker’s death that broke him in a way that can never be fixed.

  It seems to go on for so long that I start to think maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe this is one of those nightmares that feels real and not real at the same time. Topher has never said or done anything to hurt me for as long as I’ve known him. He and I clung to each other those weeks Raven was missing. Most nights I would wake up and find him curled up at the end of my bed, like a faithful dog. Eventually he would just crawl under the covers with me, and…