AS SOON AS the sun rose, they should have been running, they should have been on the move, but Emily found herself strangely reluctant to leave the cabin. They were warm there, they had food, they had a view of the lake and the steep rise behind them, and it would be hard for anyone to sneak up on them. Of course, they’d have to go eventually: Bob needed proper medical treatment.
They had to go that day, actually. Keeping the fire burning when the sky was dark, when the smoke would be visible from far away—it had been far too risky already. To do it again would be madness.
But for now, when Emily got up, there was a stove, flour, jam, and a seat to sit on, and those things pulled at her, like the surface of the earth, like gravity.
Actually, morning was a stretch: it was nearly noon, by her G-Shock.
OK.
OK, they would eat again, take full advantage of the food at the cabin, and then they would move. Take the canoe, maybe, and head farther west. Try to keep out of sight, though that wouldn’t be easy with the early spring foliage.
While Bob snored and Aidan slept too—or seemed to sleep; he was lying facing the wall, totally quiet and motionless—she searched the cupboards and drawers. She had had an idea she might find a fishing rod or a line, and she was right: in the far left drawer of the dresser near the door was a set of lures and a rolled-up line. No rod—but she wouldn’t need one if she found a good enough stick.
Bob sat up, rubbing his eyes, in what would have been a funny cartoon cliché of tiredness if he hadn’t had worryingly dark circles under his eyes. His skin was pale too.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said. “You want pancakes?”
“Always. You making them?” An edge of irony in his voice. But not a sharp edge.
“Nope,” she said. “I was going to get Aidan to do it.”
They smiled at each other. And that was it: friends again.
Aidan, apparently hearing his name, got up. It was that abrupt: one of the things he had not learned about humans was that people insert hesitancy into their movements—interludes, breaks, pauses. They pantomime waking up, for example, with little stretches and turns of their necks, rubbing their eyes, before actually standing—it was something Emily hadn’t really noticed until Aidan revealed it by its absence.
What he did was: he sat up, then stood up, and walked over to her, with no parentheses in between the actions.
Just: done.
She held up the fishing line, to show him and Bob.
“I thought we could try the lake after that,” she said. “There should be trout. Arctic char.”
“Fishing!” said Aidan. “I’ve never done it.”
“You’ve never done most things.”
Aidan took a lure from her and examined it. “Your father’s father took him fishing when he was a boy.”
“How do you— Oh.”
He had touched her father’s skin, and absorbed his memories—that was how he knew. She was always forgetting he could do that. It wasn’t that she was stupid—at least, she hoped not. It was that it wasn’t something people were meant to be able to do.
That he wasn’t a person—that was the other obvious thing she kept forgetting.
“Fishing is a thing that fathers like to show their sons,” Aidan continued. “I have gathered that from films.”
Emily glanced over at Bob, who looked down at his boots, lacing them laboriously, looking down almost aggressively, not meeting her eye. She was sorry for what he’d lost, but she couldn’t help feeling on edge when he got that look of pain and anger.
Finally the pilot raised his head. As it turned out, there was no anger: there was a faraway look to him, as if he were in the room but something behind his eyes was in another place, another time. “You don’t want to keep moving? To send that signal?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Emily. “But we need rest too. And food. The men in black don’t seem to be on our tails right now.”
“Based on what? Taking a look at the scenery?”
The embarrassing answer was: yes. “I…well. I didn’t see any movement.”
“Wonderful,” said Bob. “You didn’t see anything, so it must be safe. You remember their white suits, right? Their helicopter? These people are not amateurs. And you shouldn’t stay in one place too long.”
“Not we?”
A pause.
“Huh?” said Bob.
“You said you. Not we.”
He touched his arm, where the wound was. “I don’t think I’ll be going much farther.”
She must have looked stricken; her alarm must have showed on her face.
“Not dying,” said Bob. “I don’t think. But I might have to stay here while you carry on. I’ll call for help once you’re far enough away. That way they can’t get to you through me.”
“How are you going to call for help? There’s no radio.”
“I’ll think of something.”
“No,” she said. “You come with us.”
He stepped forward, put a hand on her arm, lightly. “Come on,” he said. “You know what I’m saying is right. You just don’t want to admit it.”
For a moment she just stood there, breathing.
Finally, nodded. “Yeah. Maybe. I guess.” It was true. She’d known it, in the deepest part of her, in the core beneath the mantle of herself, but hadn’t wanted to voice it. They had to leave him here. “But…not yet.”
Aidan handed back the lure. “Later we’ll get going,” he said. “First we’ll fish.”
Emily and Bob turned to him, together, synchronized. Like: The alien kid is in charge now? A weird moment of solidarity.
“The men are not coming—not now,” said Aidan.
“You know that?”
Aidan looked calmly at Emily. “Yes. At least, I know they’re not in the immediate vicinity. Also, protein would be good for you. It sustains for longer than carbohydrate. The body has to break it down into glycogen first.”
“Um. Right,” she said.
So: they fished. They cut two lengths of line and went out the door, careful to shut it firmly behind them to keep the warmth in the cabin, then walked down the pebble beach to the shore. Emily took one length of line and Bob the other. He limped along the edge of the water a little, and Aidan—she was interested to see—followed him.
She tied one end of the line to a short stick, then a lure to the other end. She cast it into the glass-clear water, as far into the lake as she could manage, and pulled it slowly back toward her. Nothing.
She hugged herself to keep warm; an eye always on the landscape around them, looking out for the men in black. She also watched Bob and Aidan, twenty feet away. Bob was saying something, she couldn’t make out what, but Aidan was looking up at the pilot, totally intent on what he was telling him. It made her feel a warm constriction inside; she didn’t quite know why. Bob got Aidan to tie on a lure, and they threw it out into the lake together, and Bob showed him how to draw it back in.
She turned back to her own line: threw out the lure and gathered it.
Nothing happened.
Rags of clouds clung to the snowy peaks all around.
Then:
As sudden as a phone call in a silent house, a fish struck. She was pulling the lure back and it was flashing through the water, small and silvery over the stones, when a shadow detached itself from a dark part of the lake’s bottom and shot after it. She had an impression of an opening mouth, and then the gleam of the lure winked into invisibility as the fish swallowed it.
She pulled on the line—the fish rolled, hard, sending a small wave up onto the pebbles at her feet. She stepped back, stepped back again, yanking on the line, turning it onto the stick to shorten it and tire the fish, which thrashed violently, turning the water white.
Eventually she pulled it up onto the stones, the water shockingly, stingingly cold against her fingers, and she bent to pick up a large one: she noticed that Bob and Aidan had come to watch as she brought the stone down on the fish’s head and stopped it flipping and twisting. A lake trout, maybe eighteen inches. Bright yellow fins; green sides.
Bob straightened, and winced. “Now we’ve got to get one to match, son,” he said to Aidan.
They walked off. She wondered if he knew he had used that word.
They did get one to match: actually, they got two, and she didn’t catch another. But three trout were enough to make a good meal.
She wandered over to them when Bob pulled the second fish from the lake and laid it on a flat rock. Aidan crouched down. The light was low and made the expanse of water beside them seem like something made of metal. Aidan touched the twisting trout, closed his eyes for a moment, then stood.
“Strange,” he said.
“What?”
“That thing is more alien to you than I am,” he said. “It lived in a different world. This is the first time it has felt weight.”
She couldn’t tell if he was sad or not.
Bob brought down a rock, and the trout went still.
In the cabin, she let Bob dress the fish. He was exhausted now, face gray, but it was a job he could do sitting down, and he wanted to show Aidan how it was done. The boy sat next to him as he gutted each fish with the Swiss Army knife, drawing out their bright, glistening entrails. Funny how she kept thinking of him as a boy.
One of the fish had a mouse in its stomach. She’d seen that before, on camping trips with her parents. Always amazed her: how did a mouse get in there? Fell into the lake, she supposed: a fatal mistake.
She felt a little like that mouse right now: not in her proper element, despite what Bob had said. Pursued. Perhaps to be caught, and killed, by something hiding in the shadows.
She shook her head, shaking the thought away. Bob gave her a plate with the entrails on it, and she threw them outside; they steamed when they hit the air. The little camp robber flashed down from a tree, lit on the guts, and pecked at them.
She went back inside and heated the pan and fried the fish. Eating them, hot, off the wooden plates from the dresser, reminded her of something she had known as a child—food you caught tasted better. It was sweet, and yet mineral, the flesh of the trout.
“This is good,” said Bob. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” said Emily.
“It tastes like stones,” said Aidan, marveling. “And salt, and rain.”
“Tastes like fish to me,” said Bob, but he was smiling.
“This is a world of wonders,” said Aidan. He closed his eyes as he ate the fish. “You are so lucky to have all this. I will miss it.”
Bob cleared his throat. “Do you…do you have to leave?” It was a question that could be understood in more than one way.
“Yes,” said Aidan. “I do.” Slowly he set his plate down. “I am…in the literal sense of the word, alien to this place. It is not good for me to stay too long. I would disrupt the order of things. Everything must be in its place. Order must be preserved.”
“Oh,” said Bob. “OK.”
Aidan stood and went over to him. “You showed me how to fish, so I will give you a gift.”
Emily looked up, saw Aidan put a hand on Bob’s shoulder.
“You’re going to heal him?” she said.
“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said Aidan. “At least, not in the way you mean. I am only going to show him something.”
“Show me what?” said Bob.
“This,” said Aidan.
And then Bob was out of the room: not like he passed out, more like he was just gone. Emily could sense it, like his body was now a shell and there was nothing inside, his consciousness was elsewhere.
Gone.