Rogue Touch

by Woodward, Christine

  Touch said he thought that was probably part of the reason that they didn’t know much about us, the people who came before, and not only because we’d managed to somehow lay waste to all traces. The society was so corrupt, and so focused on bringing pleasure to a very few people, that there never was a whole lot of reflection on the past.

  And then, about five hundred years before Touch was born, an idea started on this one fishing boat. All these people, they had shrimp nets put into their hands almost as soon as they could walk. They grew up under the hottest sun you can imagine, with very little space for anybody and no choice except to fish and sail until they died, usually very young. But on this one boat people started talking. Touch couldn’t come up with a translation for the name of the boat—the word in his language sounded like the most ghostly whistle you ever heard, echoing through the caves at Horseshoe Mesa—so I decided to call it the Lincoln. All these people worked on the Lincoln, never wearing much clothes, living on the scraps left over after they made their deliveries to the rich folks on the three continents that remained. And they got to thinking—realizing—that the people in control couldn’t do a damn thing for themselves. And so instead of making their deliveries, they started sailing around the sea, meeting up with other fishing boats, and convincing the people—who outnumbered the ruling families by thousands—that there was no need to continue living this way just because they always had.

  The first revolts started. Over the next hundred years the ruling classes were overthrown. It was a long and bloody revolution, but when it was over a new government emerged, except it wasn’t like the government we had at all. It was just a world where everyone worked together, and everyone had what they needed, and nobody had more of anything than anybody else. When people turned eighteen, they had to go work on the fishing boats for four years. After that, they could go home and pursue anything at all. The whole world worked in concert, with all people choosing the thing to do—the thing they did best—and using it toward what was best for everyone.

  What Touch did best, what he liked to do, was build those devices that to me seemed like magic—like the translator, and the blue ball, and the golden ring—but in his world they counted as technology. When he came home from serving his time on the fishing boats, he set to work making new inventions, traveling in ways that had never been seen before.

  “I know what happens next,” I said, as Touch paused. “It’s the families, isn’t it? The original families. They want things back the way they used to be. They don’t want everything shared. They want everything for themselves.”

  “Yes,” Touch said in the blackness. “That’s exactly right.”

  “So Alabaster,” I said. “She must be descended from them, the original aristocrats?”

  “Yes,” he said again. “She is.”

  We sat quiet awhile, and I thought on how human nature never changed. Not even in Arcadia. A different picture of Planet Earth was forming in my head, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking of it as many different seas and landmasses, but as one gigantic ocean. That’s what the Earth was really, one rising sea, and all the land jutting up from under it was temporary. It didn’t really matter what became of our world, even as I knew we were hurtling toward being buried under water. Even Touch’s world—for them it was just a matter of time before the one sea rose and claimed them all. These may sound like depressing thoughts, but honestly they comforted me, because after all I was sitting there waiting to die, and if losing whole worlds didn’t matter, what could be less significant than two people, trapped inside a series of caves?

  “The thing is,” Touch said, and I stopped him.

  “I know what you’re going to tell me,” I said. “It’s not just Alabaster who’s descended from those families. It’s you. Right?”

  Touch didn’t say anything. He just nodded. I felt his chin bumping against the top of my head, and I buried my face even closer against his chest to protect him.

  And I couldn’t help but smile a little, thinking on how elegant Touch had seemed to me, even when I first found him scamming for food stamps on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi. Those upper-crust types. It doesn’t matter whether they come from the Bellhaven neighborhood in Jackson or from Arcadia ten thousand years from now. You can spot them a mile away.

  Time continued down there in the caves, impossible to measure. Every once in a while we’d take a sip of water or eat a cracker. We slept, and woke up thinking we’d heard someone, but it always turned out to be our sleepy imagination. At one point I woke up and thought the cave was full of light, but it must have been an image left over from my dream, because the next second all the blackness had returned.

  “Touch?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Touch?” I shook him a little, wondering if I should just let him sleep. Who knew how long we’d been down there? Time had stopped moving. Even if we could’ve taken out the ring and gone forward and backward thousands or even millions of years. For us all of time existed without light, here in the caves, and there was no measuring it any longer.

  Before, I’d figured I would die before Touch on account of my size. But I’d forgotten about the wildebear, and Tawa, and the extra strength they’d given me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them they were full of water. Touch, dead in the cave, me not far behind him, and I never even got around to saying I loved him.

  “Touch,” I screamed, in the general direction of his ear.

  I felt him bolt upright. “What?” he said. “Rogue, what?”

  The relief I should have felt didn’t get a chance to wash over me. Because exactly in that moment, the cave went from blackness to blinding white light—too bright even for the crystals to glitter.

  Bam! Crackle! Boom!

  He’d done it on purpose. I knew it. He’d talked and talked about his world, hoping the words and the stories would bring one of his hunters to us. Because it was our only chance. My only chance. He was willing to be captured to give me a chance to live. Because he loved me. I knew it. He did.

  “Touch,” I whispered. “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  At least I got to see his face—pale and beautiful and full of dread—one last time. Because there in front of us, lighting up the cave, stood Alabaster. I never would’ve thought such a tiny person could look so fearsome and so formidable. But there she was, like an angel out of hell, this time all bundled up in white wool, her arms outstretched, her face a study in fury.

  And she wasn’t alone. A man stood beside her, with eyes as blue as Touch’s, but with none of their kindness, and a craggy brow—that same deep line Touch got between his eyes, but in the other man’s case etched there permanently. He looked, if it were possible, even madder than Alabaster, and when he spoke it was in a deep and frightening tone, a low and angry note, sustained too long.

  As the man spoke to Touch, who was so weak he could barely raise his head, Alabaster turned toward me. The expression on her face softened. And when she spoke, it wasn’t in that whistling language, but in English, and her voice sounded kind and even nurturing.

  “Dear one,” she said. “Step away from him. Let us keep you safe.”

  I looked over at Touch. He shook his head, just perceptibly enough that the man barked something very sharp at him.

  “Don’t listen to Touch,” Alabaster said. “He’s not who you think he is.”

  A very large piece of my insides melted away, a cool gust of fear that froze my organs solid. All the moments when I hadn’t quite been sure of Touch—when I first hadn’t trusted him, and then had decided instead to mistrust my own reactions—started playing on a frantic reel inside my head.

  Which I guess is what Alabaster wanted, because she took the daintiest step toward me. I saw that she wore gloves, and one of her hands was cupped—no doubt hiding one of their bite-sized and all-powerful weapons. At the same time the man with her raised his hand. He didn’t seem to be holding anything, he just spread his fingers wide, and from them
emanated a loud, eerie, and piercing noise. At that moment I saw that both he and Alabaster were wearing tiny little plugs in their ears, no doubt to guard themselves from this particular weapon. Touch immediately sank to his knees, hands over his ears, in agony.

  I waited for the same effect to take over me, but I must have been protected by the strength I’d gathered along the way. The noise sounded unpleasant and spooky—echoing through the caves—but not debilitating.

  Now was no time for mistrusting Touch, or myself, or anyone except these two people from the future. I knew that if I didn’t act fast, Touch would be whisked away, and I would be left here in these caves, alone, to die. So while Alabaster and her friend looked at me, amazed that I was still standing, in that split second I stepped forward and grabbed one plug out of each pair of their ears.

  The wildebears must’ve supplied me with good survival instincts along with strength, because it came to me at exactly the right second. While Alabaster and her friend sank to their knees—the terrible noise still blasting through the caves—I grabbed Touch around the waist, scooted him onto me piggyback style, and went running for the archway. It may have seemed like I was using him as a shield, and I kind of was, but I knew that they wouldn’t kill Touch. Because they needed him.

  The noise stopped abruptly, which I knew meant they’d be right on our heels. Alabaster and her companion brought so much light with them that it spilled on into the next cave. As I rounded the second corner, what felt like ropes curved around my ankles. I fell face-first to the ground, with Touch sprawled out on top of me. He rolled off my back, and when I looked down at my feet I saw tentacles of light winding around my legs, and reaching back into the cave behind us.

  Touch knelt down and pulled at the light cords. They wouldn’t budge. A second later Alabaster came around the corner, holding the other ends. She had lassoed me like she was a futuristic cowgirl and I was a runaway steer. Except thanks to the wildebears I was more predator than prey. So I leaned down, picked up the slack of that glimmering rope, and bit right through it. Sparks of light erupted all around us, flying out toward Alabaster, who stepped backward. The next thing I knew Touch had thrust the golden ring into my hand. The whole world whirled and whooshed. This time, since I knew what was happening, I felt a wonderful rush of adrenaline along with it, plus the worry that he and I would end up in just another piece of the bleak, black cave.

  But when we arrived, the cords around my legs still shone, bright ribbons of light. Touch and I knelt to unravel them, then held them out in front of us to lead our way outside, where we were greeted by morning sun, and the most fantastic quiet all around us.

  Never in my life had I been so happy to see the wide blue sky over my head. I breathed in a great lungful of dusty air, like someone dying of thirst might gulp down a glass of water. Which is not to say I wasn’t thirsty, too. Hopefully our water still sat waiting for us at the campground. I had no idea how far ahead in time Touch had brought us. Not to his time, certainly, because although it was hot, the temperature felt familiar, bearable. And the other half of the Grand Canyon stretched out below and all around us, still a long way away from being filled with water. Touch stood there on the other side of the ring, the two of us still holding onto it. He looked gaunt and dehydrated and very pale, more like the man I’d seen in the SNAP office than the man I’d come to know since we’d been on the run. And I could not for one second think on believing what Alabaster had implied, that he was anything but exactly who I thought he was: the man I loved.

  Back in the caves I’d almost lost him without ever saying the words. Who knew what these next few minutes would hold? I wasn’t going to let another opportunity go by.

  “I love you,” I said. “I love you, Touch.”

  His face changed. The twinkle came back into his eye, and his mouth turned up at the corner. “Hey,” he said. “I love you, too.”

  The natural thing to do then would’ve been to kiss. But of course we couldn’t do that. So we just stood there, staring, drinking the sight of each other in, while the morning around us grew brighter.

  As we walked up the ridge to our campground, Touch told me he hadn’t brought us far ahead, just to the next day. This seemed pretty risky to me, since what would stop them from just hanging around and waiting for us?

  “I don’t think they will,” Touch said. “For one thing, they have no way of knowing which direction in time I went, or how far. For another thing, it’s so cold here. These are not people who enjoy being uncomfortable. It makes much more sense for them to go home and try to track me from there.”

  His hope was that if he only went ahead a day, the stuff we’d left at the campground might still be there. But when we arrived, the ground was empty, no trace of the blankets or extra clothing or food. Alabaster must have taken everything before she returned to the future.

  Touch reached out his gloved hand and took mine. Squeezed it real hard, almost until my bones crunched, as if that pressure could make up for the lack of skin on skin. We’d barely eaten or drank or seen the light in days. We had no money, no food, nothing but the clothes on our backs.

  But we had each other. And just then, in that moment, it made us feel like the richest people in the whole damn world.

  That feeling didn’t last long. As I’d often heard Aunt Carrie say, a person can’t live on love. Touch and I, we didn’t have a drop of water. We didn’t have a scrap of food. We were dehydrated and starved. And to even get started on figuring out what to do, we had to get up to the rim of the canyon, which was a good four-hour hike.

  That hike was the worst thing I ever had to do in my life. Worse than the days in the cave, and worse than being attacked by those wildebears. In fact I think having the wildebears in me was the only reason I made it at all. I don’t know how Touch managed to do it—I couldn’t even let him lean on me on account of the trail being so narrow. The whole trail was this series of very narrow switchbacks, so you never even knew how close you were to the top. I kept looking to the end of each section, hoping against hope this was the last bit, only to come to the top and find myself at the bottom of another. One after another, switchback after switchback, the two of us staggering from hunger and thirst and exhaustion, but careful not to stagger too much; otherwise we’d teeter over sideways and fall miles and miles, down into the canyon, to certain death.

  And then, with no warning, Touch’s footsteps slowing down behind me, we turned a corner and saw the rim of the canyon. What seemed like a hundred fat tourists in flowery shirts, with cameras dangling from their necks, stared down at us—two tall, starved, wild-looking people dressed in leather.

  I kept walking, two, three, four, and then ten more steps, before I collapsed right at the feet of an old couple. The sky above looked perfectly blue, not a single scrap of a cloud, but Grandma and Grandpa’s hair wisped white into the background. Grandpa had a bottle of water in his old, gnarled hand. He must’ve just bought it, because I could see how cold it was, the condensation sweating under his fingertips; I think one gorgeous little freezing drop might have even fallen on my bare cheek.

  Don’t ask me how Touch managed to still be standing. Maybe because for him it wasn’t so hot? He reached out his hand toward the old man. “The girl is very dehydrated,” he said. “May we take your water?”

  It may not have been out of the goodness in his heart that the old man handed it over. He might’ve been just a teeny bit afraid of Touch. Touch unscrewed the top and took a drink of water himself, a long, slow draw that half emptied the bottle. Now, I never had been on an airplane, but Wendy Lee had, and I remembered how they say in the safety rules that you’ve got to put on your own oxygen mask before you help anyone else. He knelt down beside me and very carefully lifted my shoulders till I was in a sitting position, sort of half lying against him. Then he brought the water to my lips. I drank and drank, the best stuff I’d ever tasted in the world, until it was empty.

  “You need a doctor, honey?” Grandma asked. By
now she was handing us her own water bottle, which made me feel real warm toward both of them.

  “No,” I croaked out, as Touch took the bottle and then handed it to me. “No doctor. I’m fine.”

  They looked at each other a little too quickly, Grandma and Grandpa. And I knew however kindly they might be—or maybe even because they were kindly—some authority or other would be hearing from them about us.

  Life sure would’ve been easier with only one set of pursuers.

  We had two pieces of good luck, one the blue truck sat waiting for us right in the parking lot where we’d left it. Two, we weren’t penniless after all, because Touch still had that twenty-two dollars in the back pocket of his jeans. Twenty-two dollars may not be much, but since we’d thought we had nothing, it suddenly felt like a fortune. It felt like the difference between making it to the next minute or not.

  “Let’s put ten dollars of gas in the car,” I said, “and spend twelve dollars on food.” Ten dollars wouldn’t get us far in that guzzler, but it would get us far enough that we could think on what to do next.

  Touch and I drove to the nearest gas station and filled up the truck, the whole twenty-two dollars’ worth. Then we stopped at a little café and ordered plenty of food, but light food. We didn’t want to wreck our empty stomachs, so Touch had toast and tomato soup, and I had oatmeal with fresh fruit, and we drank lots of iced tea, not that rancid sweet tea like they serve in the South, but good black tea over ice with just slices of lemon. It was the best meal I ever ate in my life, and when the waitress went into the kitchen to pick up some other customer’s food, Touch and I skedaddled on out of there. We climbed into our blue truck and drove and drove till the sky was dark and the tank was near on empty.