Cold Falling White

by G. S. Prendergast

  The dead Nahx boy should be on the third landing, but all that is there is a tiny pile of crushed metal, wire, and glass. Blue hovers over it, vibrating, their light glowing brighter and throbbing as though they are angry.

  “What is that?” Mandy bends down to examine it closer, closing her human eye. “Huh. It’s radioactive. Nahx technology?”

  Blue bobs up and down curtly before whizzing up the center of the stairwell and out of sight.

  “Whatever it is, I don’t think Blue likes it.”

  We follow their flicker up ten flights, twenty, then thirty. The exertion doesn’t affect me the way it might have once, though my heart thuds more and more heavily the closer we get to the penthouse level. I don’t know what I expect to find. It’s true that some of the stuff I left behind might be useful—clean clothes, a few weapons, food. I reach up and feel the bulky braids I made in the drugstore. There’s a king’s ransom of hair products upstairs that will help me improve on them.

  And maybe… would he go back there if we got separated somehow? Would he think that I would go back there? It does seem sort of logical, but August was not very logical. And there’s my suspicion that he left me on purpose, that he was done with me at last.

  It’s not like I didn’t tell him a million times that we didn’t belong together.

  We reach the fortieth floor. The door from the stairwell has been torn from its hinges, a reminder that makes me smile despite my unease. In the communal hallway, four open doors lead into four penthouse apartments. I’m drawn to the most familiar one, of course, but as though by prior plan, Mandy, Tucker, and Blue each disappear one by one into the others. Maybe they sense I want to be alone.

  I linger in the doorway. Outside, through the western windows, the sun is setting, casting a golden glow over the modern furnishings, and the bright glare nearly conceals the mess we left, so for a moment I can remember the time I spent here as an idyllic retreat rather than the den of domestic indolence it really is. My eyes adjust to the light and travel over the mess—piles of clothes, discarded magazines and food packaging, different knickknacks and trinkets August brought me over the weeks.

  I step slowly into the living area, afraid to disturb the quiet, afraid to touch anything, just letting my eyes drift over the familiar chaos and mess. Memories play in my mind as clear as a movie—August standing out on the balcony with the sun shining on him, August emerging from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of soup, August carrying me, kicking and screaming, down the hallway as I tore mirrors and pictures from the wall and smashed them on the floor.

  August’s shadow in the dark, sweeping up the mess I made.

  My eyes fall on the coffee table, and something glitches in my photographic recall. The coffee table is not where it’s supposed to be. Just before we left the apartment, when I fought with the female Nahx who is now dead out in the snow, the coffee table got turned over and kicked to the side. The books and dishes that were on it are still tumbled on the floor, but the table itself is back where it’s supposed to be, in front of the couch.

  “August?” I call out. He’s been here. He might still be here. “August?” But I only hear the whistling of the winter wind through the balcony doors. I poke my head into the kitchen, grimly taking in the unspeakable mess we left in there. It’s not unsanitary, at least; August was very sensitive to bad smells and would quickly throw away any leftover food, usually off the balcony. But there are clean dishes stacked everywhere and unopened boxes and cans of food, as well as books and medicine and clothes on the counters, the floor, on top of the stove. It’s as though a hoarder was living here.

  But there’s no sign of August. At least, it doesn’t look any different from when I last saw it. I leave the kitchen through the other door, emerging into the long hallway to the bedrooms and the second bathroom. All the doors are open except for one. At the end of the long hallway, the door to the master bedroom, where August nursed me back to life, is shut. This is different. While we stayed here, this door was rarely closed because the walls of windows in the bedrooms would let light into the hall.

  I move toward the door with trepidation, glancing into the guest bedroom and bathroom but finding them empty. I don’t know why I’m so reluctant to open that door. It’s true that even when we stayed here, after I had recovered enough to move onto the sofa, I didn’t like going into that room. It smelled of sickness and reminded me of things I couldn’t remember. I didn’t like thinking of how vulnerable I had been, delirious with fever, weak with nausea, with a giant alien hanging over me, at his mercy.

  Even with the changes in my heart, the changes to my feelings about August, there are parts of me that think I should reexamine those days I lost, just to confirm there was nothing… untoward. But I know he would never do anything to hurt me, never, indeed, do anything self-serving. The fact that Tucker is with me is proof enough of that.

  I open the door.

  And he’s there, kneeling by the bed, just as he did those long days and nights when he tried to stop my life from slipping away. His hands rest on the box spring in front of him.

  “August.” I whisper it, because of course he would have heard me yelling and come to me if he could.

  I don’t want to move. I don’t want to cross into the world where August is… where I have to learn that he’s…

  I don’t even want to think the word.

  Dead. I think he’s dead.

  I’m not surprised or shocked, not really. I’ve known all along that this is what I’d find. The only reason August wouldn’t be with me is if he were dead. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I don’t know where he went after he left me, but I know enough about him to know he wouldn’t stay away forever. August has tried to stay away from me before, and it never worked.

  I move slowly, as though I’m walking in the thickness of a nightmare, and sit on the bed, nudging his hands to the side so I can face him. His head is hanging, almost as though he nodded off here, just lowered his head to rest and never lifted it up again. I take one of his hands and hold it in mine, trailing my other hand over the star-shaped scars on his chest and shoulder. His armor feels icy cold.

  “August…” I start, and then, despite myself: “Wake up.”

  He doesn’t move, of course.

  I don’t believe in fairy tales, but I lean forward and kiss the armor of his mask, where his mouth would be.

  “Wake up, please. I don’t think I can do this without you.”

  And the reality of what “this” is cascades over me like an avalanche. There’s going to be a battle of some kind, a battle in which I’m a soldier, along with Tucker and Mandy and the other Snowflakes, both those who know enough to resist their roles and those who don’t.

  “I’m so tired, August. I’m tired of fighting.”

  I take his other hand and hold both in my lap, touching my forehead to his. He still smells the same as he did, almost. His smoky charcoal smell has cooled to damp ash. And there is no buzzing breath, no creak of armor as his shoulders move up and down. I wonder if I stay here long enough, I might join him in his silent stillness, and we might become a monument to the infinite capacities of…

  I don’t want to think that word either.

  Love.

  I love him.

  “Raven?” Mandy’s voice breaks me out of my nihilistic daydream.

  “I’m in here!” I call out, still watching August, despite every piece of evidence, for any sign of life, for any reaction.

  I look up to see her skid to a stop in the doorway.

  “Oh. Is that…?”

  I nod.

  “Is he…?”

  I don’t nod this time. I can’t move.

  XANDER

  After two hours of slippery, awkward ascent we reach an ice wall, where a narrow glacier bisects the mountains. The Nahx ahead of us start to disappear, and as we catch up to them I realize they’re jumping into a shallow crevasse. The four Nahx who are acting as our guards and escorts ease us do
wn carefully, one at a time. The bottom of the crevasse is slick ice that I struggle to find my footing on, on either side of a trickling stream. One of the Nahx steadies me as I watch Topher being tugged down. I search along the crevasse to where the water disappears in the dark, while the rest of the Nahx gather, adjusting their gear and signing among themselves.

  “They’re like punks,” I say to Topher, in a vain attempt to start a conversation. He ignores me. “Topher, you need to talk to me. Tell me what happened to you. Help me understand.”

  Suddenly, the dark end of the crevasse is infused with a golden glow, and seconds later the source of the glow appears—two Nahx, toting burning torches, emerge as though from within the ice.

  Our escorts urge us forward, and rounding a curve, I see that the crevasse leads into a long tunnel in the ice, its glistening walls now dancing with reflections of the torches and the Nahx’s lights as they flick them on.

  “What the hell…” Topher says, the first words he’s spoken in hours.

  The river tunnel seems to go on forever, meandering and narrowing in places before widening to small caverns where the water has pooled in slushy puddles. When Topher slips and crashes to his knees, one of the Nahx gently helps him back to his feet. Topher shoves the Nahx away, brushing ice and snow off his hands. They haven’t even bothered to shackle us, because I suppose they don’t think two exhausted humans are much of a flight risk.

  Nearly an hour has passed in the ice when the illumination changes and the Nahx start flicking off their lights one by one. Ahead of us the two Nahx with the torches round a corner and disappear. Our escorts hurry us along behind them, helping us jump over a wide swath of flowing water and through a gap in the high cave walls, toward glowing a blue light. Large hands reach down from a bright hole above us and haul us up, one by one.

  We clamber out of the hole into a wonderland of frost and mist, delivered into a wide craggy basin sheltered by looming rock faces and gnarled pine trees. To one side of the basin, another waterfall has been frozen in its tracks, creating a fantastical castle of ice out of the rolling cascade of rushing water locked in time. The tiny amount of water still trickling down is what formed the river that led us through the tunnel in the glacier, what carved it open, no doubt, over decades or even centuries.

  Toward the center of the basin, surrounded by craggy, snow-covered rocks, a rippling pool of water glows like a milky blue opal, the steam rising from it infusing the surrounding air with the unmistakable sulfurous smell of a geothermal spring. Fat, fluffy snowflakes drift down, softly landing on the surface of the water, where they disappear, sucked into the pool as though by some magic.

  “Is that…” Topher starts, but when I turn to him he bites his lip and falls silent, though I can see the longing in his face. Hot water. My frozen fingers and toes tingle at the thought of it as we tentatively approach. I pull off one of my gloves and feel the water. It’s actually not very hot, but certainly warm enough to bathe in comfortably. When I look up, Topher is turning slowly on the spot, his eyes scanning the basin, and I know he’s looking for escape routes, trying to formulate a plan of attack. His posture is guarded and tense, like a cat preparing to pounce or to defend himself. Attack seems unlikely, but Topher clearly can’t see that.

  The Nahx, who are ignoring us, milling about the landscape, crouching up on rock overhangs, kneeling in groups in the trees, or trailing toward us, weapons hanging loosely at their sides, seem to be so integrated with the landscape it’s as though they have been here for centuries too. Everything—the rocks, the trees, even the Nahx—is coated with frost as though the whole scene has been carved from alabaster. Topher’s pale, chiseled face fits right in.

  “If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it already,” I say.

  He presses his lips together and turns back to gaze up into the mountain peaks.

  Out of the haze, a Nahx approaches us as our escorts drift away.

  “Aurora?”

  Good Xander?

  “Yes, we’re fine. Cold.”

  Yes. Angry Boy wash. Smell mud death.

  I cover my laugh by pretending to cough.

  “We need towels or something, and dry clothes, or we’ll get too cold.”

  Aurora starts to answer, but we’re interrupted by a commotion in the trees above us, which seem to explode in a cloud of snow and ice as a very tall Nahx plows through them. Topher yanks me back, startled, but the Nahx hurls a pile of clothes and blankets at us before crash-tackling Aurora and sending them both sliding off into the mist. Seconds later the tall Nahx has picked Aurora up and is swinging her around as they cling to each other. Now that the tall Nahx is not moving at breakneck speed I can see that they aren’t wearing a helmet—their long hair swings around as they spin.

  “I think they’re friends,” Topher says in a dry voice.

  I turn back to Aurora and her companion, who is now tearing at Aurora’s helmet. When it finally comes away with a slurp of gray sludge, they fall down together into the soft snow, kissing and laughing and touching their faces, arms and legs intertwined. It starts to feel rude to watch, so I look away.

  “More than friends, apparently,” Topher says. We stare at each other. “I don’t know how you found me,” he says at last, and I can see his composure start to crumble.

  “I have a theory.” But now is obviously not the time, because I’m too struck by how bad he looks, how thin, how pale, scarred by frostbite, hollow-eyed. “Topher, I…”

  He sighs, a long slow sigh that conjures up a cloud of mist around his head as though he’s already becoming a ghost.

  “Did you ever tell Raven about us?” he asks, and it’s so unexpected that I have to cough again before I can answer.

  “No. Did you?”

  “Of course not,” he answers almost irritably.

  “Probably one of us should have.”

  He nods, and I can see that he’s about to cry, and there are still Nahx surrounding us, not watching us, exactly, but not ignoring us either. And because we’re both human males, even when it’s probably totally reasonable, maybe even healthy, I doubt Topher wants anyone to see him break down, so I do the only thing I can think of.

  I put my arms around him and tumble both of us into the hot pool.

  We sink in our layers of winter gear and boots, but the floor of the pool is only a few feet deep. Topher surfaces, dripping, red-faced, and gasping. I expect him to get angry, but all he does is start peeling off his scarf, hat, and coat, pitching them and the rest of his clothes onto the shore in wet piles. I join him, and soon I’m trying not to laugh, the pleasure of getting out of those fetid, itchy winter layers making me almost giddy. Topher sinks down under the water again, scrubbing at his disheveled hair and beard with his fingers.

  The Nahx leave us in the pool but linger nearby, keeping watch. One of them gathers up the piles of clothes the tall Nahx threw at us and folds them neatly on a dry rock nearby, presumably so we can get dressed when we finish our bath. Aurora and her companion seem to have disappeared for the time being.

  “I think that other Nahx was a girl too,” Topher says, breaking his long silence. “The one who was kissing your friend.”

  “Really?” I didn’t get a good look. “Have you seen Nahx out of their armor before?”

  He doesn’t answer for a few seconds. “Only dead ones,” he says at last.

  I hesitate to ask for any details, but it seems he’s ready to share them anyway.

  “The Nahx were already there at the base,” he says, pausing for a moment to rub the warm water on his face again. “After I left you and Raven on the mountain, by the time I got back, the Nahx were already there. Half the base was dead out in the snow. They’d made a run for it but the Nahx took them out. Darted them. They left a couple of the kids, though. They were just standing around crying.”

  “Fuck…”

  “Yeah. I grabbed them and went down into the canyon and back through the thermal vents. I stashed the kids behin
d one of the generators and went looking for other survivors. The sentries were dead. Jayden was one of them. I can’t remember the other one’s name. It was an older woman.”

  “Why did you go back into the base? If you’d come back up to the plateau where you left us, you could have caught up to us. You could have come with me.”

  He looks at me like I’m crazy. Or stupid. Or both.

  “That would have led the Nahx right to you. I figured you still had a chance to get away. I didn’t want to…” He stops, his face pained, and I know he’s thinking about watching Raven die and not being able to do anything about it. Maybe he’s even doing what I’ve been doing for months, obsessing about the choices that if one of us had made differently, everything would have been better.

  If I had stopped Topher from going after Raven.

  If Liam had let August surrender peacefully.

  If we hadn’t gone to Calgary in the first place, because that was stupid.

  If we’d never left camp.

  If Tucker hadn’t been so reckless as to go hunting alone at night.

  If one of us had had the guts to tell Raven about Tucker and Emily before it was too late.

  If… so many ifs.

  “Anyway,” Topher continues at last. “I found Dinesh, Chris, and Mason hiding with a few girls and another kid. You remember that one whose great-grandmother died in his bed?”

  “Oh God, yeah.”

  “We waited for hours, hiding down in the vents. We were going to sneak away, but Chris wanted to get the intel files from the command level.”

  “Why?”

  “I never found out. He went up there to get them but never came back. When we thought it was safe, we bailed.”