"I won't hurt you, Ams. Even if I ever wanted to, I owe you for what you did for me when we first met. I couldn't ever hurt you." His voice was quiet and soft now, more like old Riley, but there was tension in it too. It made her ache, hearing his soft voice, and him calling her Ams again. She felt him move and then felt his hands on her shoulders and she jumped at the touch. She didn't mean to do it, didn't know why it hurt so much just to have his hands on her like that, and she felt bad for it
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to jump like that. I'm sorry." She felt like she was holding her insides from breaking apart in her by sheer force of will, and everything was threatening it. Riley and his soft voice were threatening it. She needed him gone, but couldn't say anything to him, not without letting more of the tension that held her together go, so she stood still, not looking at him, digging her hands into the windowsill, holding her breath.
His hands were gone, but she could feel him standing right next to her, so close she could hear him breathing. "Just bloody talk to me, Ams. We can't keep going at it like this. I can see it's killing you, and it hurts to watch you like this, and I want to wrap my arms around you, but I can't, not after what you did to me. Not until I know why you did it. Please, Ams, tell me what the hell happened today," he said softly, took her by the shoulders, and turned her around, not letting go now, trying to get her to look at him.
She didn't trust herself not to cry if she saw any of what she did still on his face, so she kept her eyes closed as she told him all about Keller and how it scared her afterward, the way he and Laurel were looking at her, and how she felt the wrongness of what she did, but she couldn't help it.
And she told him that all of it made her feel that it was wrong for him to like her, that she never wanted to see him look at her like she was a monster, so she did the only thing she could think of to make him not like her anymore. And how she wished he'd stopped her, but she knew he wouldn't, and how she felt like an even bigger monster because then she was truly angry at him for letting her do it to him. He held her tightly to his chest, and she sobbed into him, feeling like the biggest idiot for it, and knowing that she didn't deserve his comforting her now, but she couldn't move away, couldn't move at all.
"You’re not a monster, Ams. You’re just doing an awful lot of growing up in a hurry, is all. Please stop hiding from me. I have to tell you something, and you have to let me." He moved a little back from her and lifted her face up to his by her chin, and looking at her still-tear-filled eyes leaned in and very gently planted a soft kiss on her lips. "I've been meaning to do this for weeks now, only you weren't supposed to be crying for it. You’re stuck with me if you'll still have me, at least until you truly want to walk away. But no more secrets, Ams. I can't do that with you."
It was almost morning when she woke up on the couch under a pile of blankets. This was the most comfortable sleep she'd had since they ran. Riley was at the window, looking into the emptiness below. "Drake found us enough food to last for a week at least, but he didn't find anything else. It's like all the people disappeared from here, but everything else seems entirely intact. It doesn't make any sense. Even the lights work, and the water, just nobody to use any of it. I can't figure it out, Ams." He was supposed to wake her up so he could get some sleep, that was the deal.
She walked up to him and peeked out through the glass. Nothing had changed. Not that she expected it to. Something in her already decided that they were the only people here. She heard Drake at the door: "Nothing on our side, Riley. Ella's made everybody breakfast. I'll bring you some." And he was gone. She always wondered how such a large man moved so quietly. Drake moved like a ghost. If it wasn't for that sage smell on him, she'd never know when he was there at all.
The breakfast was incredible. They had eggs, and some smoked dried meat that was crispy and salty and unbelievably good, and Ella made everyone coffee. Drake couldn't find any tea, and they were all out. She hated the bitter taste of it but liked how it made her mind feel sharper almost immediately, so she drank all of it, hoping that it'd make her think of something to help Riley figure this out, so maybe he could sleep for a bit at least, instead of standing there like a sad statue. A part of that was likely still her doing, but that she couldn't fix now. The other thing, she hoped she could.
Riley, finally tired of standing, slumped into the chair closest to the window and closed his eyes. She watched him for a beat, and when she was sure he was asleep, she covered him with a blanket and let him be. She stayed a few steps away from the window, just far enough to where it didn’t make her dizzy and watched for whatever it was they were all supposed to watch for. She stood like that for hours, counting the stories in the other buildings by habit, then counting the number of doors, and windows, and when she ran out of those, she counted the tiles on the roofs of smaller houses that she could still see from here, and then the light posts and window boxes.
With nothing else left to count and Riley still asleep, she was about to go and lie down on the couch, but something caught her eye on the street with the tile-roofed houses, something moving on it, a miniature person.
"Riley, wake up, somebody is there on that little street with the tiny houses, a speck of somebody with arms and legs, and it's moving." Riley was up and standing to her before she had a chance to say anything else, and then he ran out of the room, only stopping to tell her to stay put and that he and Drake were going to deal with this.
She watched him and Drake run toward the street with the miniature person on it. And then it hit her that the person was only miniature because of how high up she was and because she now watched Riley and Drake turn into almost specks as they got farther and farther away from her. Riley and Drake specks approached the unknown speck, and then they had the speck by the arms, apparently dragging him toward the building. As he got a bit larger, she could tell that he was struggling, dragging his feet on the pavement.
She walked away from the window once the three of them were inside the building, and paced around the room, waiting. A few minutes later everyone filed into the room, with Riley and Drake still holding this man by his arms. His hair was long, too long for a man, and falling around his head and down his back in matted clumps, as if he hadn't washed it in weeks. He wore a gray shirt with half the buttons missing, and she could see dark hair on his chest. Strangest of all, he was barefoot, his feet dirty and bruised looking, but he didn't seem to pay any attention to any of it.
He was making grunting noises and jerking his head wildly. He looked Zorin-born, but a slightly lighter dark of everything than Riley. He had those things Riley called freckles on his face, only his he couldn't have covered up, there were so many of them. He finally stopped flailing and stared at her, eyes full of anger or hatred, or maybe fear. Definitely fear, she thought. He turned his head, scanning the room, and his eyes landed on Laurel, and she could tell from the way Laurel’s face changed that he looked at her like that too. The man was afraid of the two smallest girls. It didn't make sense. And then suddenly it did. They were the only ones not like him. They were like the ones that probably killed everyone in his city.
She'd never had anyone look at her with so much fear in their eyes, not even Riley when she had the gun pointing at him. This man definitely saw her as a monster, it was unmistakable, and she couldn't stand it at that moment. She walked over to Laurel, grabbed her by the hand, and left the room with her without a word. Nobody tried to stop them from leaving, because they saw that look too, and if this man was going to calm down and tell them anything at all, they couldn't be there for it.
She felt almost relieved they didn't have to hear whatever it was from him anyway. She sat down on the floor in the hallway, just outside the room, and waited for whatever it was to finally come out, hoping the knowing would make it better, not worse for them. And mostly hoping that they wouldn't be looked at like that by every Zorin-born that they run into.
"He thinks we killed his city, Ams. The way he looked at us. That's what it wa
s," Laurel whispered at her, looking at her like she didn't know what to do about it.
She didn't know either, so she nodded that she knew. She remembered the way she looked at Riley at first, and it was like that, with fear in her eyes. She knew that now. And she thought that when he didn't seem to care if she killed him or not, it was in part because he didn't want anybody to look at him like that. Nobody could possibly ever want to be looked at like that.
20
The Fire
Ella, April 26, 2236, Reston Office Tower
She'd seen plenty of mad people when she worked in the clinics to know that this man was mad. Ella watched him flail and then freeze when he saw Ams and Laurel. The fear on his face so primal, it hurt to look at him. It was a good thing the girls left when they did. The boys finally let go of his arms and Riley was trying to talk to him, but she could tell he wasn't listening. He was lost to whatever it was that happened here, completely lost.
She took her pad and walked over to Riley. "He's mad, Riley. I've seen it before. He won't talk until he needs to until he can again. Let him be for now."
He nodded to her and gently walked the man to the chair and made him sit down in it and then draped a blanket over him.
Drake brought him a steaming mug of coffee and he drank it greedily. They sat in silence, watching him, reading his face for any changes, but his eyes kept darting from one to the other of them and then to the sky through the window, and back over them again. She watched her brother's face and knew Riley couldn't take it anymore.
"Tell us about this place, Reston. What was it like before? What did you all do here? It looks unlike any place I'd ever been, not Zoriner almost. It looks rich, Alliance rich," Riley asked.
The man almost jumped out of the chair, spilling what was left of his coffee in his lap.
She shook her head at her brother, but she knew Riley was right.
This looked like a real city, everything clean and rich. Even the little houses looked taken care of. No shacks, no unfixable roofs. Enormous office buildings. None of it made sense for Zoriners to have. It's as if the Alliance was keeping this city full of Zoriners alive, but that didn't make any kind of sense.
She took her pad and wrote: "What were you before? What did you do?" She walked it over to the man, slowly, not to scare him, and just put it on the chair in front of him.
He looked at her, curiosity replacing fear in his eyes. "Mute. I can fix mute. Fixed mutes before." He was nodding his head at her and smiling now. A mad smile, but what he said, that was the strangest thing of all. Nobody ever became un-mute once they took the voice out of you, everybody knew that. He kept looking at her as if finally intrigued by something. "How long? Your voice, how long?" He got up and walked over to her, taking the pad with him.
"A few weeks,” she jotted down quickly.
“Need a lab to fix mute. But no fire. Can't have fire. Need lab without fire. We can build one. Scientist. Before this—scientist. Can't do science without fire. Can't do science." He went back to his chair and curled up in it as if he were a small child, and pulled the blanket over his head.
As if on cue, Drake and Riley got up to leave the room. She knew they all needed to talk without the man hearing them. Ams and Laurel were huddling against the wall, looking very out of sorts. She would too. She knew what it felt like when someone looked at you like that. There was no talking them out of feeling what they were feeling.
The mute thing—what he said—it worried her. She didn't want Riley to believe that this madman could fix it for her, or Drake. She didn't think Drake would believe him or any of his kind, but the girls and Brody. Riley watched her, asking without asking. She couldn't let them waste any time on that, not when there was so much they had to worry about. Important things, like getting that tag out of Drake. They had to do that or they were going to lose him, and she didn't want to lose him again. Not after finally knowing all the things she knew now, all the things he told her by the fire, when nobody else could hear him and seeing the pain in his face for not being able to lie to her when she asked the one thing nobody else was asking about.
"If we can't get the tag out, you’re not going back, are you?" She wrote it before he could tell her anything else and shoved it in his face, and he couldn't lie to her.
"I'm sorry, El, but no. I can't. I can't go back there. I don't mind it, really. I'll do what Keller did. I'll have a grave at least, somewhere without the walls around me. I'm okay with it." He said it all so softly, not looking at her, not wanting to see her tears.
And then he told her everything else he needed to, and she sat there staring at this big man in front of her, feeling every shade of stupid for not-knowing for all these years, for not once guessing that Drake loved her even back when they were little kids, and how it pained him that she felt she had to defend him all the time, and all the times when he wanted to tell her, but couldn't because he was always ashamed of how he was. Poor Drake who mistook kindness for cowardice his whole life, and who still looked ashamed over it even now. She hugged him so close then, hugged him for all the years they missed, inhaling that sage smell of his.
"Drake's tag. We need to get it out. Ask him." She handed the pad to Riley, watching him read it. They walked back into the room.
The man was by the wall, drawing something on it with a piece of chalk he must have had in his pocket. The drawing looked as if a child made it, boxes for buildings, different sizes of boxes with lines in them for each floor, and then lines going across for windows, she thought. They stood back and watched. He drew stick figures of people, different sizes, but otherwise the same and made them spill out of these boxes, so many of them, and he kept adding more and more of these different sized people to the streets outside of each of the boxes.
He stopped drawing and stood there looking at the wall, shaking his head at it, as if it upset him to see what he drew. He walked over to the clean patch on the wall that he didn't put any boxes or people on and looked at it for a long time, and then drew a circle on it, and wrote "FIRE" inside the circle, and then he drew the stick figures of people going toward that circle. All the different sized people spilled out of the boxes - that's what happened, she thought, they all went to the fire, but it didn't make any kind of sense. There were no planes or bombs or stick figures with guns or anything in his picture, just the boxes of buildings, people, and fire. There was nobody in the picture to make them go to the fire. It's like they all just did it themselves.
And she had it in her head before anyone else did, that if they could take her voice just by talking it right out of her, they could maybe do this too. And she could almost see it, the real people of all the different sizes in this childish drawing coming out of all the real houses with the window boxes and doors, and stepping on real grass, and then on the asphalt of the streets, ones they walked on every day, and the kids, stepping on all the dirt they played on and dug for worms in, all going to that circle, the only thing that wasn't real to her yet, the only thing that couldn't possibly be real.
She wrote on her pad and showed it to him, and he nodded without turning around, without looking at any of them. And then he sat down right where he was, put his head in his hands, and rocked back and forth, like a little kid who couldn't understand something basic, something everyone else knew. Riley took the pad from her, looked back at the wall for a very long time, and ran out of the room, and then out of the building, and she could see him through the window running all the way to the end of the street, and the two little girls running behind him, going to where the empty spot on the wall was.
She felt Drake's arms around her then, and she knew that he saw the picture and knew what happened; that he didn't need to run to where the circle with the word was. He could see it all in his mind just like she did. She let him hug her for a very long time, as she cried into his chest until she had no tears left, and she knew looking at him that she couldn't make him go back, even to save his life. That to make him do that would be the worst
thing of all, a cruel thing, and she could never do that to Drake. Could never do that to anyone.
21
Bones
Laurel, April 26, 2236, Reston
Laurel felt it from when Riley was talking by the fire that this thing would be heartbreakingly sad. She felt it even before that, when she crouched alone by the edge of this city, watching for any sign of life, and she knew after a very long time of watching that there wasn't any life left here.
She knew that when Riley ran out of that room with the strange man in it, they would know for sure what that sad thing was, and she didn't want to go with him. But she knew Ams would go after him, and she couldn't let Ams see it alone, whatever it was. Riley had the strangest look on his face for the second he stopped for. It wasn't anything she'd ever seen on him before, on anybody. Nothing she could identify, she just knew looking at him that he needed to do whatever it was he was running out to do and they had to let him.
They ran, nobody saying anything until her legs and lungs couldn't take it anymore, and she had to stop to catch her breath. Ams stopped just ahead of her and walked back a few steps, panting, face flushed, sweat making her shirt sticky. They watched Riley keep on running as if they weren't there and then he disappeared around the curve. Neither one of them was strong enough to run, so they walked, slowly at first to where they saw Riley turn. The buildings were much shorter here and then there weren't any more buildings, just houses, all neatly arranged next to each other, white, and pink, and light brown. Most had window boxes with dead flowers in them.
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