| |
Harmony rolled off her stomach and opened her eyes. Too tired to move, she buried her face in the covers and moaned.
It had taken most of the night to remove crates and recovered items off Molly. A row of shelves, fragile from the crash, had fallen over on top of the tiny robot, covering her in piles of objects from The Forbidden Lands. The strange angle Airus was sitting at because of the crash had made it harder to free Molly. Every time they pulled one object off another fell and took its place. Fortunately, Molly wasn’t damaged in the accident, but Harmony and Boy had to sit with her and listen as she reminisced about to all the gory details of how awful it had been to be stuck underneath the shelves.
It was tempting to stay in bed all day. Every single muscle in her body ached. Her big toe throbbed and her head felt as if it might split in half.
A squeaking sound forced Harmony to lift her head. “Hey, Molly.” The tiny robot was seated in the only chair in the cabin. “Have you recovered from last night now?”
Molly moved her fingers and stared at them before nodding. “Everything seems to be in good working order. Boy insisted I stay in here with you just in case something had been broken.” She moved her head, as if testing to make certain it too was in good working order. “I feel fine, but I know how he worries about us.”
Harmony slowly pulled herself up off the bed and sat on the edge of it. She too moved every joint, just to make certain everything still worked. Since they all screamed in protests, she figured everything did.
She lifted her head and looked at Molly again. “I still can’t get over those photos from the past. You lived back then. What was it like? What happened to ruin its perfection?”
Molly didn’t say anything for a while but stared at the wall before finally saying, “It was never perfection. Most people had enough to never want for anything but you should have Boy show you the scenes of poverty and war. They are the photos that will show you the beginning of The Great War. Water sources were running low, people in third world countries were starving in large numbers. At first the news was filled with a few hundred here and there being slaughtered for many different reasons.”
Molly stood and walked around for a moment before continuing. “And then it was a few thousand. That drew some attention, but it still wasn’t enough to make the world stop and take notice of what was happening around them. It wasn’t until the numbers tallied in the millions that people saw things had escalated out of control. They were fighting over water, food, religion, and skin color. But it wasn’t until the very end, when the killings were in the billions and it was too late to recover, that the few left realized how those in power had misled and used them.”
The little robot blinked. “Humans are good at hiding their head in the sand when faced with an unpleasant truth. The photos Boy keeps for humanity are only bits and pieces of what the world was really like. It could never show you what was brewing beneath the surface, and people had the tendency to only take photos of beautiful things. Much was lost in The Great War, but not everything.” She came over and patted Harmony’s hand. “Humans now have the chance to create a better place to live, but only time will tell if they will or not.”
“It feels like most people are good these days, don’t you think?” Harmony placed a hand on Molly’s shoulder.
“Yes, but then most people were good back then too. History clearly shows that wars are usually started by a few that mislead others into believing they’re fighting for a good cause.” She paused. “I don’t know if that will ever change.”
Harmony grabbed a clean shift from the pile of clothes on the bed and slipped it over her head. “The Great War has changed us. We see what war can do. Another war would destroy the few of us left. Surely, no one wants that.”
Molly headed toward the cabin door. “Only time will tell.”
“Do you think we’ll get off this island?” Harmony had been afraid to ask up to this point for she wasn’t certain she could handle the answer, knowing Molly had probably already calculated the odds and come up wanting.
Molly turned. “I believe we will for no other reason than I believe in you.”
That left Harmony speechless, only able to stare at the tiny robot.
“Your greatest abilities are your focused determination and not giving up when any other sane person would. You want to return to your family and Griffin so I don’t believe, for that reason alone, there’s any problem you can’t solve.”
“You’ve been with Griffin most of his life.” Harmony bit her lip as she tried think how best to ask her next question. “Do you ... do you think Griffin will be waiting for me when I return?”
“No.”
A ragged sigh slipped from Harmony before she could contain it.
Molly drew near and placed a hand on Harmony’s arm. “You don’t really believe Griffin’s just waiting somewhere, do you? If I know anything at all about him, he’ll be searching high and low for you, and he’ll never stop until he finds you.”