It’s bleak, but to me it looks pure, and clean. Cleansed. This is a natural part of forest life. I remember this from bio classes. The forest will regrow. Fireweed first, then other things. If it had been last season, the forest floor would be bursting with purple and white and green. As it is, it’s black and dead. I find it sort of beautiful though. Like turned earth, or a . . .
Well, I was going to say a fresh grave, but what’s beautiful about that?
Walking through the harsh landscape, I drag my hands on the blackened tree trunks until my palms and fingernails are stained with soot. The fine particles make my hands satiny and soft, as though dusted with expensive powder. But the smell is earthy and ancient, the smell of fire and wood and time, like a campfire from long ago. It makes my heart ache.
“The Nahx did this,” I say. My voice surprises me. I didn’t mean to speak, but words came out anyway, unbidden.
“It was probably lightning,” Felix says, his appraising eyes drifting over the black charred spindles.
“Has there been a thunderstorm since that day?” I ask. One of the many ironies of this whole nightmare has been the perfection of the summer weather. We’ve had sunny days, with enough drizzles of rain to keep the dust down and the trees green. It’s been warm and moist, but not humid. Like the climate is teasing us, reminding us of this perfect world we’ve lost.
We walk on, coating our boots with soot. Sawyer, at the lead, stops us with a raised fist.
“Fee?” he says, staring at something on the ground. Felix moves forward to the front of the group.
Sawyer points to the forest floor with the barrel of his rifle. “Seen treads like this before?”
Topher, Xander, and the rest freeze. We are lined up in the scorched trees, like pins in a pincushion. I push forward.
“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.”
&nbs
p; 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.
“I don’t blame you,” he says, oblivious to the epic battle inside me. “I don’t hate you. Not anymore.”
Through the thick trees I can see the moonlight glinting on the blackened strip of forest we left behind. The Nahx footprints are there, a trail that will take us to them. I imagine following them mindlessly, driven, like Topher, by anger and a desire for revenge for days, weeks, months, never finding them, walking and walking through the soot, then the snow, until everything about me is gone and I forget who I am. Because Topher has just reminded me of something.
I blame myself. For everything. And it doesn’t matter to me how he feels.
EIGHTH
The transport must have come after all. She’s gone.
I suppose it’s possible she got up and walked away, but I think she would wait for me. Or look for me.
The grass where she fell still holds the imprint of her shape, each blade pressed sideways, broken. She lay on her back like . . . something, something, from before that is behind a door in my mangled mind.
The shape in the grass is too much to look at. The wings of blood where her life seeped out from a torn-open throat, they make my own throat ache like there is something hard inside it. I want to use my knife to let it out.
There’s a weakness there, in the armor. They told us that.
Keep your chin down, Eighth, she would tell me. She was looking up to the sky, looking for the transport. It was late.
I try to think. The thick syrup flowing through me dulls things, slows my thoughts down. I think of running or fighting easily enough, but there is nowhere to run and no one to fight. My other thoughts are sluggish. Like a slug. Slug. Slugs can be eaten, if necessary. Humans don’t normally eat them. My brain is not quite working, like every time I reconnect. I feel powerful but stupid. I could run across the mountains or break down a thousand doors, but I can barely string two thoughts together.
She lay here for days. The earth beneath where she lay has not forgotten. The broken grass, the stain of blood. My fingers find the mark on my chest where my own blood spurted out. My wound wasn’t bad enough to make me fall, and I dove for her, to knock her down, but I was too far away. Or she was already falling. I don’t remember.
She had pushed me away minutes before.
Defective.
If I had reached her and saved her, she might have stopped calling me that. Terrible aim, and stupid. Only good for breaking things. If I could have saved her life . . .
Is it possible she got up? Did the transport take her? Could they fix her?
I want to disconnect again. I can’t think with all this armor closing me in and filling me with slug syrup. I’m too far from a hub to receive directives if they change. I don’t know how to send a signal. I don’t know what to do without her.
Sixth. I miss you.
Sweet painless death, I know that’s wrong. She hated me. Called me stupid and useless and made me find my own food and let me drink some sweet thing she found in a car that made me throw up and throw up until blood came out of my nose. Then she laughed at me.
You scared me, Eighth. I thought you would die.
I think of the way my head snapped back when the missile fragment hit me. So sudden and disorienting. Sixth was like that sometimes.
If I close my eyes and reach out to the left, I might find her steady shoulder there. She might let me walk like that.
I close my eyes. I reach out to the left.
Sixth?
Someone, please help me. I don’t know what to do.
I walk away. Walk away from her shape in the grass and the wings of blood. Walk away from her. The sun is rising. I walk during the daylight, even though it’s not safe.
I will shoot the first human I see. And the second one. And the one after that. I will do it for her. I know I can hit them now. I hate them.
I hate them, as much as she hated me.
I walk away from her, reaching out with my left hand. It is easier to keep my balance this way.
RAVEN
When I wake I can hear the others stirring around me. We are quiet, cautious, but more at ease now that the sun is up.
Moments later, all hell breaks loose when Sawyer does a half-serious head count and comes up one short. Topher is gone.
“Did he say anything to you? Anything?” he says as Felix, Xander, and I prepare to go looking for him.
“He wants to find the Nahx that killed Tuck. I didn’t think he would go.” This is something of a lie. I didn’t think he would go without me. “Maybe he went to follow those tracks.”
Sawyer is furious. He agrees to wait at the campsite for six hours while we backtrack to the burnt forest. If we don’t return with Toph by then, he and the others will continue on to the resort. There is no way of knowing when Topher left. If he left just before dawn like a sensible person would, we may have a chance to catch up with him. If he left in the dark—by anyone’s measure a reckless thing to do—he’s hours away by now. So was he thinking like Topher or Tucker when he left?
Back at the burnt forest, it is easy enough to find his tracks. He’s not trying to conceal himself. Perhaps he wants to be found. I hope he’s not making himself conspicuous in the hopes that the Nahx will find him. That would be stupid as well as reckless.
Sweating in the rising heat, we follow his tracks up the side of the valley. The sun beats down on the ashes at our feet, warming them, causing waves of the rich earthy scent to rise up around us. It is silent and still with barely a breeze. All the sound is in the crunch of our boots on the burnt debris and the twittering of morning birds. We listen for anything, any footsteps, any engines. None of us has ever seen a Nahx or one of their ships up close, so we don’t know what we’re listening for. All we know is that their dart guns make a whining noise before they fire. Felix learned this from the videos before they stopped. You hear a high-pitched whine and then you die.
It’s an hour before we come across the landing site, just on the other side of the ridge. A large patch of blackened forest is flattened, the triangular, segmented shape mimicking the footprints we and Topher have been following.
“It’s kind of small,” Felix says. “Must be some kind of transport.”
Xander examines the scorch patterns around the landing site. “This is how the fire started,” he says. “But it was weeks ago. See these?” He points out some small green shoots, straining out of the ground where the ship flattened everything.
“But the Nahx footprints are more recent,” I say. I’m not the greatest tracker, but even I know that prints won’t last in loose ash and soot much beyond a couple of days. The weird segmented tracks don’t look much less defined than the ones Topher left a few hours ago. “Earlier yesterday? We might have only missed them by a couple of hours.”
“I could kill that boy,” Felix says, looking around nervously. “Next time you get wind that someone is on a suicide mission, you tell me, got it?”
“Yes, sir.” I hope my insincerity comes across as strongly as I feel it.
Felix tramps off, away from the landing site. Xander and I follow.
“You know what, Rave?” Xander says to me. “Tell me. I know Toph thinks this is his own private True Grit, but Tuck was my best friend. And this is ridiculous. What does he think he’s going to achieve?
”
I stare at Felix’s back and try to formulate an answer. But my ability to speak is overwhelmed by anger as I properly process the danger Topher has put us all in. And more than that, I’m furious at him for leaving without me. How can I keep him alive if he walks away from me? And why do I even want to, if he’s so determined?
“There he is,” Felix says suddenly. He’s gazing across the ridge through a pair of high-powered field binoculars. Pointing to the edge of the burned-out swath, he hands them to me.
I scan the spindly black landscape. At first I see nothing. Then, taking another scan, I spot Topher, sitting, his back to a tree stump, his head hanging. I have to press my lips together to keep from calling out to him. He doesn’t move. My ears strain to hear anything.
“It doesn’t make sense for us all to go down there. It’s too dangerous and exposed,” Felix says, shaking his head. “What was he thinking?”
“Let’s go back up. We’ll have a better angle,” Xander says. “We can provide cover if anything comes up.”
We move farther up the slope. Every few minutes I check through the binoculars. Topher still hasn’t moved. “Wait here,” Felix says. He eyes the rifle I borrowed from Lochie. “Can you shoot straight?”
“Not really,” I admit.
“Wonderful. Shoot high, then. I’d rather not get hit with friendly fire today. Let Xander go for the kill shot.”
What is Topher doing? I wonder as Felix leaves us. He still hasn’t moved. Felix jogs down, sticking close to the trees and ducking out of sight wherever he can find cover. I follow his descent through the binoculars.
“Shit,” I hear Xander whisper beside me.
“What?”
“The birds have stopped.”
Suddenly, a guttural, animal screech pierces the air, and two black shadows descend from the sky. They seem to have come from nowhere.
“Topher!” I yell. Down the ridge Felix is running. I flatten myself on the ground and yank the binoculars back up to my eyes. Topher is gone. Felix bolts past the tree where he was sitting and disappears, leaving a puff of ash and dust in his wake.
Zero Repeat Forever Page 4
