Zero Repeat Forever

by G. S. Prendergast

  After a few seconds I feel his hand on my shoulder.

  Why hopeless? he signs when I look back at him.

  “Oh, you know, I was a brat.” Understatement, but whatever. “I broke rules,” I add when he seems to not understand.

  I broke hard promises too.

  “Hard promises?” He flicks his head back a couple of times. “Your language is interesting.”

  You are interesting.

  We sit in silence for a moment while my face gets hot. “On the road again,” I say finally. A weak attempt at humor.

  Happy, he says.

  “You are?”

  He nods. Happy to be outside. Happy to be moving. Happy to be with you. He changes position slightly, his armor creaking. I don’t like being alone. I don’t like my own people. I don’t like your people. But I like you.

  This is about the longest speech he’s ever made. Maybe the saddest, too.

  “You know when we get to the coast, you’ll have to leave me, right?” I say, putting my hand on his knee. His armor is almost too hot to touch. “We won’t be able to stay together.”

  He places his armored glove over my hand and squeezes gently. Maybe the world will end, he signs. Maybe the sky will fall. Then he signs another sentence I don’t quite catch.

  “Maybe something and something will be friends? What were those two signs?”

  With his finger he draws two childish pictures in the dirt. A bear and a bee.

  “Maybe bears and bees will be friends?” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry as he nods.

  Maybe snowflakes will rise and time will stop moving.

  The way he says maybe is “almost hope.” Almost a flying dream. With every word I know him better. I had no idea he was such a philosopher. So many things I don’t know about him. So much to learn and such a limited time in which to learn it. But then again, as he says, maybe time will stop moving, and I will come to know him better than I know myself.

  I want to get out of here, back to my parents, to safety. I want to save Topher and Xander and everyone else I can. I want the human race to survive. I want us to have a chance to redeem ourselves.

  But I almost hope time stops moving too.

  AUGUST

  She sleeps, eventually, her little head tumbling onto my aching knee as I rest my hand in her hair and stare out at the dark beyond the cave entrance. I don’t think the other humans would be foolish enough to come after us at night. But I have miscalculated their foolishness before.

  As for my own foolishness, that knows no bounds. I will take her to the ends of the earth, descending to elevations that will make my nose bleed inside my mask. I will see spots and my joints will seize up, if Sixth’s words are anything to go by. Maybe those were all lies. Maybe I could slip my armor off and stroll into the human refugee camps without anyone noticing. I don’t look that different from them. Taller, my skin made dull by the sludge in my veins. Mainly, I think my behavior would give me away. I’d probably kill someone in a jealous rage within the first day.

  Anyway, Sixth was probably telling the truth.

  I check the altimeter on my sleeve. 3,900 feet. I could disconnect for a few minutes and . . . what? I don’t even know. Watch her sleep without my mask between us? Breathe the same air as her? Wake her and ask her to put her hand on my face again? The possibilities are too numerous to consider. But it’s a noisy, messy thing disconnecting from armor so recently recharged. She would be terrified and maybe run away and fall, tumble off a cliff in the dark, her last thoughts of the monster that woke her.

  Tomorrow we head south, to a small town I’ve visited before. I can find her the clothes and food she will need for the journey. Then, unless my addled brain betrays me, we turn north and look for a series of low tunnels through the rock. Early on, long before I met Dandelion, some humans tried to escape that way. Tried. We watched it from a distant cliff, but the noise of the explosion was enough to rattle my eardrums. Sixth celebrated by embracing me tightly, then was so angry with herself she pulled out her knife and chased me down the mountain until I hid in a human car. She drove her fist through the windshield and dragged me out, but by that time her anger had abated. At least her desire to stab me had. That was the time she let me drink the fizzy brown drink that nearly killed me.

  But the tunnels, long quiet now that most of the humans are processed, are the safest road west. They will be dark, and many miles long in places. And under tons of rock, and low most of the way. If Sixth is right, it could finish me.

  Dandelion murmurs in her sleep, and I gently let her head slide off my knee and onto the ground, tugging the hood of her jacket up to protect her from the dust and ash. I pull myself to standing and stretch out my aching limbs. At the cave opening I see a wisp of movement and have weapons in each hand before even taking a breath. But when I step forward to investigate, I see that the movement was only a fat snowflake drifting onto the ledge outside the cave. Another follows it, then another, until the air is full of snowflakes, each one like a . . . a tiny human with wings. A magical creature . . .

  Fairy. I capture the word and hold it a moment in the dungeon of my ruined mind. Something about this small rescued memory along with the glinting snowflakes fills me with a sense of peace and resolve. My objective is clearer than it has ever been. Dandelion must reach the human territory.

  If, for me, that’s a path to death, so be it.

  RAVEN

  I wake to shouts. It takes a moment for me to interpret the noise as bad news. A moment to remember that I’m with August, and he neither shouts nor speaks. That shouting means trouble. Leaping up, I look around to see I’m alone. I tuck my pistol into the back of my belt and poke my head out the cave opening. My throat clenches back a yell as I duck backward and process what I caught a glimpse of.

  On the plateau below us, twenty feet away, is August, hands above his head, a crossbow pressed into his neck.

  A crossbow that Topher is holding.

  “Where is she?” I hear him shout again. August, of course, is silent.

  “They don’t talk,” another voice says. Xander. Thank God. A voice of reason.

  “He’s darted her and left her somewhere. WHERE IS SHE?!”

  I hear the crack of metal on metal, then the unmistakable clatter of August tumbling over on the rocky ground. “Get up!” I risk another look.

  Topher and Xander have August hemmed in, facing him, weapons raised and a steep cliff face behind him. I know August could scale that cliff effortlessly, but beyond climbing slowly back to his feet, he doesn’t move or make any attempt to escape. Because of me. He could run, get away easily. If one of them managed to get an arrow into him, he would pull it out and be good as new in a day. But he won’t leave me. And Topher looks like he would kill him.

  I step out of the cave. “Hey!”

  “There she is,” Xander says. “I told you.”

  All three of them seem to relax a bit. As I step out of the cave, I catch a flash of movement from the other direction. And the still morning air precisely frames the unmistakable sound of a bowstring being pulled back. In one movement I turn my head, shouting at the shape in the shadows of the rocks and leaping recklessly down to the plateau.

  Gravity bends, slows down, and I feel that I hover in the air for far too long, my head still turned toward the movement in the rocks. Liam, an arrow nocked, bowstring drawn. He looks at me as I yell, his face lighting up with recognition.

  Time stops then, and I start to think maybe August was right. I’m stuck in the second I jumped out of the cave, in the moment I’m suspended above the plateau. The moment I meet Liam’s eyes and see his surprise that I would attempt such a leap. The surprise that makes him jerk backward, lose his aim on August, twitch his bow and arrow slightly upward in my direction. The arrow sails toward me in slow motion as I turn in the air. When it hits, I expect a noise, but it slices through me like a warm knife in butter. Silent.

  I land hard, my knees giving way under me. I just ma
nage to stop myself falling on my face with my hands. And I have this tiny thought in the moment before everything falls apart.

  August, I’m so sorry.

  I would do the “sorry” hand sign, but the arrowhead is poking out of my chest in the exact spot where the side of my hand would go. Instead, I look up at him as he turns. As Topher turns. As Xander takes a tentative, stunned step forward.

  August hisses, a loud, harsh hiss, and in the microsecond that Topher loses his concentration, August lashes out, grabs the crossbow, and smacks Topher hard in the face with it. Then he dives for me. Dives and catches me as I slide downward.

  As he lays me on my side, the noises he makes are terrible. Growling, woeful hisses. Vaguely, behind him I see Xander helping Topher to his feet. I feel August snatch the pistol out of the back of my pants.

  “No,” I croak, but August ignores them, pointing the gun instead at an approaching shadow, hissing, his free hand cradling my head.

  “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hit her. I swear I was aiming for him.” I’m not sure Liam is talking to August. He seems to be directing his words to Topher and Xander, who step toward us cautiously. August pulls back the safety on the pistol, snarling, making Liam take a step back. “I didn’t mean to hit her,” he says, raising his hands up. “She surprised me. I lost grip on the arrow. I swear.”

  I turn my head as much as I can to look at him, standing there five feet away in the thin snow, looking as insipid as ever. His face is bruised, one eye circled in black. Concussed, pale with shock and fear. Cold, scared. I almost feel sorry for him. He lost all the things I hope to find again one day.

  Hoped.

  I have a second, which stretches out like a slingshot, in which to see that Liam is wearing one of the helmet cameras. And I half complete the thought that one day maybe he’ll let go of his lust for blood and glory before the question becomes irrelevant.

  August hisses once, I feel his fingers twitch in my hair, and he pulls the trigger.

  The world disappears. For that second the sound of the gunshot erases everything—the mountains, the snow, the sun, the sky. The past, present, and future shrink down to the size of a mote of dust and then nothing. Nothing but the red spray of Liam’s life exploding out of the back of his skull, and the slow, almost graceful fall of his body.

  “Oh, August . . . ,” I say. I watch him breathe as the world slowly returns. I turn back toward the boys. Topher unarmed, blood dripping down his face from a cut near his hairline, and Xander, behind him, his own weapon dropped carelessly to the ground.

  I blink, but it seems to take a long time. While my eyes are closed, I hear a soft snip and feel the swish of the arrow being pulled out from between my ribs. I assume that the person who screamed in pain was me.

  When I open my eyes, August has pulled me up into his lap, hanging over me with the hand holding the pistol pressed to his head. Above him Xander tosses the remains of the arrow away.

  “Can I take a look?” he says. August nods. He’s shaking, his armor pulsing scorching hot and freezing cold. Xander crouches down and lifts up my hoodie and shirt. They’re both soaked with blood. I try to curl my head up to see, but that effort seems to push more blood from the wound. I feel it dribble down my side.

  “Oh fuck,” Xander says. “Try not to move. Uh . . .”

  Topher appears, stepping into my field of view. This seems to snap August out of whatever trance he’s been in. His hand whisks out, pointing the pistol in Topher’s face.

  “No!” I cry, pushing another bubble of blood out. “No more. August, give Xander the gun, okay?”

  He obeys without hesitation, flipping the pistol and handing it over. Xander tucks it away as Topher approaches, pulling his jacket off. Xander bunches it up and presses it over my wound. Pulling his own jacket off, he tucks it behind me, over the hole where the arrow entered.

  “Pressure, here and here,” he says to August, who wraps his hands around the front and back of my ribs, the gentle pressure making pain begin to register properly for the first time since it happened. Since Liam accidentally shot me with an arrow.

  I could almost laugh.

  If I weren’t so sure I was dying, that is, I could probably laugh.

  “I’ll go back for a medic. Or we could take her back to the base,” Topher says. But his voice has the tone he used when he talked about us loving each other, belonging to each other. He doesn’t believe it.

  “It’s three hours at least,” Xander says. “She doesn’t . . .”

  August starts to rock. He lets the blood-soaked jackets fall away and pulls me closer, hugging me to his chest.

  “I’m sorry, August,” I say.

  No. No.

  “Please, can you take my friends through the pass? To the human territory?”

  No. No. No. Leave you nevermore.

  I lift my hand up and touch the side of his face, the metal still pulsing hot and cold. He hisses mournfully.

  “I told you we would be friends one day.”

  He makes a series of signs then. Some I know, and some I’ve seen before but never quite understood. Some new ones. But now, in this hazy space before death, they make perfect sense.

  You walk in my dreams, Pretty Wind Flower.

  “You too, August,” I say, registering the nickname he’s given me properly for the first time. He’s said it a million times, but I never understood what it meant until now.

  Pretty Wind Flower.

  Dandelion. Yes. I think there’s a dandelion inside me too, somewhere, with the raven and the hope. I’m apparently not as invincible as I thought.

  When I blink next it’s hard to get my eyes back open. Only the sound of Topher crying gives me the strength.

  “I’ll go back to the base,” he says through his tears. “I’ll bring back a medic.”

  Xander, who is sitting by my feet, calls after him. “Topher! Wait! It’s not . . .” Then he glances at me, his face not hiding the hard truth he was about to yell out. “It’s dangerous!” he finally says, but there’s no spirit in him, either.

  I turn my head to look at Topher, standing by the path down from the plateau. He looks at me, but I don’t have the strength to interpret his expression. And he, I think, lacks the will to speak. He just turns and walks away.

  He walks away. Didn’t he tell me once he would never leave me? Or was that someone else?

  August pulls me closer again and moves one thumb to wipe a tear from my face.

  “Try to hang on, Rave,” Xander says.

  I try. But I can feel myself unraveling, and the puddle of blood I’m lying in is getting larger.

  Feel broken?

  How many times has August asked me this and how many times have I lied and said no?

  “Yes,” I say.

  Repeat me.

  We stare at each other until my reflection in the glass of his eye mask starts to blur and darken.

  Breathe, he signs. I needed the reminder. But the next breath I take has bubbles of blood in it, which drip down my chin. As August wipes it away, I see his hand is shaking. He’s trembling. He pulls me into his lap, sliding down to sit cross-legged beneath me, cradling me as he did that night before I learned the truth about what happened to Tucker. About who August was.

  Despite the warmth he surrounds me with, I’m shivering too as my mind travels backward, back through the months I didn’t know whether August was alive or dead. The months I tried to love Topher, tried to ignore the coldness growing inside him. Through the days August and I walked through the snow to return me to a life of hiding and scheming, through the weeks in the penthouse, hating him, fearing him, longing for him when he was gone. And the rocking climb up the stairs half conscious in his arms, and the glimpse of him outside the barn when Sawyer thought I was dreaming, and him carrying me, carrying me, with snowflakes drifting down around us, with the stars falling. And staring at that latch on the bathroom in the trailer, staring and wishing I had locked that door. Though with his propen
sity for breaking locks, he probably would have just torn the door from its hinges. Maybe that act of violence would have been enough to incite anger toward me. Maybe he would have darted me and walked away.

  Either way, that unlatched door is the reason we’re both here now, my life leaking away, his heart breaking. Either way, when he opened the door he saw something that made him hesitate, and that was all it took.

  He remembered the girl who floated away in the river and didn’t want to let her float away again.

  I wonder if there is such a thing as love at first sight. I thought once that Tucker loved me. I see now that I was wrong. This is what love feels like: August’s trembling hands trying to hold my blood inside me. In my memory, as he carried me away from the trailer park, he trembled too. Was he scared of me? Or scared of losing me? Maybe both.

  I blink again. When I open my eyes, my hand is resting on August’s face, his own warm hand pressed over it.

  “Can you take this off?” I ask. “Your helmet? Your armor? Can you take it off?”

  No. Yes. Die.

  “You die if you take it off? Even for a minute?”

  He adjusts the hand sign slightly—I’m not even sure how—but it changes the tense to passive.

  Not die. Be killed.

  “Who would kill you? Other Nahx? It’s forbidden to take it off? No one will know, August.”

  He looks up to Xander, who I had forgotten was even here. Xander sniffs wetly before answering.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  August turns his face back down to me, and with the morning sun shining on him, I can almost imagine I see his eyes behind the mask. “Would you take it off? Please? I’d like to see what you look like.”

  He stares down at me, running his trembling fingers over my hair. Finally, he reaches out with one arm and touches Xander on the shoulder.

  Take, he signs. Take her.

  Xander moves to sit closer as August gently slides me into his lap. The movement causes a fresh burst of blood to bubble out, and Xander clumsily presses his bare hand over it.