“WHAT’S THIS?” BOB said.
“It’s a SPOT tracker.”
“I know it’s a SPOT tracker. It’s my SPOT tracker. What I want to know is what it was doing in your goddamn pocket.” He was sweating, despite the cold; pale-looking.
She looked down; touched her jeans. “You’re frisking me now?”
She felt Aidan move in closer.
“I wanted to know why those men came after us with frickin’ assault rifles. You said you’d explain, but I haven’t heard any explanation coming out of your mouth.” It was about the longest thing he’d said since they’d crashed.
“It’s…hard to put into words. And anyway, you fell asleep as I was about to tell you. Last night.”
He barked a short, unamused laugh. “You know we could have been rescued by now if I’d just pressed a button on this thing?”
“No,” she said. “The men with assault rifles would just have come quicker.”
A pause.
“Why? What did you do? I mean, apart from burning down the goddamn school.”
She shook her head. “It was the stadium,” she said. “Not even that. Not really. A locker room. And apart from that, I didn’t do anything.”
His forehead creased. “Someone else did?”
“Yeah.”
“Your brother?”
“He didn’t do anything, either.”
“Then what?” asked Bob.
“I did do something,” said Aidan quietly. “I existed.”
“Aidan, you don’t have to—”
“I think I do, probably,” said Aidan, teeth chattering very lightly.
He was sitting now, hugging his knees to his chest, all vulnerable little boy, his skin so pale, and Emily wanted to grab hold of the rock beside her and pull it out like a concertina from the cliff and stretch it around him, cocoon him in stone, so nothing could ever harm him. To set light to the whole forest, to keep him warm.
Silly, really.
She reached out to bring him into a hug, but he shook his head.
Bob was looking between them, from one to the other, bemused. “Are you…were you…was someone hurting the kid?” he asked. “Your…f—” He shook his head. “Your family?”
Father, he’d been going to say.
“No,” said Emily. “But they will hurt him if they catch him.”
“Your family?”
“No. The men in black.”
“White,” said Bob.
“What? Oh. Yeah. Whatever.”
Bob sat down heavily, still holding the SPOT tracker. “I really don’t understand what’s going on,” he said.
Aidan sighed. A meaningful sigh.
Emily sent him a look: You don’t have to.
He sent one back: It’s OK.
That was the thing about looks. You could use them to speak with. They were a kind of universal communication. Emily liked that. She wasn’t big on speaking. Her mom was always doing it—narrating everything. That wasn’t Emily’s style. She liked to find other ways to communicate. Her eyes. Dancing: the movement of her body through space.
Fire.
Though that had been kind of an accident, and totally Jeremy’s fault.
OK, not really.
“I think,” said Aidan, “I think I can show you.”
Bob was watching him closely now.
Everything was very still. There was bright light outside the shelter; but inside, it was as if the moment before dawn persisted, everything dull and shadowy, gravid with the day about to be revealed. Everything shaded by the pine-needled branches.
Aidan closed his eyes; rippled with effort. She knew that what he did was a reflexive survival instinct; it was hard for him to override it like this.
Then his outlines, the silhouette made in space by his body, the actual boy shape of him, began to shimmer, to heat-haze, to blur.