I don’t know how deep the cave goes.
There’s a lantern propped by the entrance, but its light only reaches a few feet in. The space I can see reminds me a little of the Nest, back on Outer Earth: a total mess, with blankets and tools spread out over the uneven floor. A battered metal stove is puffing away, smoke curling out of the top and collecting near the ceiling. The narrow entrance is covered by planks of rotting wood, nailed together to form a makeshift door.
The stranger is crouched by the stove. He hardly said anything on the way over, only that his name was Harlan, and that he had a place where I’d be safe. He has dark brown skin, offset by a scraggly beard. Both the beard and his hair are streaked with grey. Guessing his age is impossible–he could be forty, he could be four hundred.
He wanted to leave Syria’s body behind. I wouldn’t let him. He carried it on his back, bringing it into the cave. It’s somewhere behind me in the darkness. I keep wanting to look, have to force myself not to.
It crossed my mind that it might not be safe, that all this could be a trap. I found I didn’t care much. There’s nothing Harlan can throw at me that I haven’t survived a dozen times already.
He shuts the stove door with a clank, then gets unsteadily to his feet, pulling something from a pocket in his cavernous coat.
“Eat this,” he says. He has the strangest accent, mushing together certain sounds, as if he never quite learned how to form individual words. “You were damn lucky with the wolves. They got a big pack round these parts, gettin’ more aggressive every year. No idea why those three were off alone, but those leaves you used must have changed your scent some. You want to be careful, though. You pick the wrong kind of leaves, you get this rash all over your body. Itch’ll drive you crazy.”
I stare at him, my mouth hanging open.
He grimaces. “Sorry. I ain’t talked to other people in a while. Guess I ain’t used to it. Here.”
I reach for the food, then hesitate. Alarm bells are going off already. But my hunger wins out, and after a moment I take it. It’s like a strip of tree bark, brown and hard, with a grainy surface. I have to work to tear a chunk out.
The taste nearly knocks my head off. It’s salty, like the fried beetles we used to get in the market, only a thousand times more intense. My stomach growls, and I take another bite, filling my mouth with the chewy substance.
“Good, isn’t it?” Harlan says, grinning. “Cure it myself.”
Cure. I suddenly realise what I’m eating. “This is… meat?” I say, speaking around it.
Harlan has gone back to work on the stove. There are logs piled up next to it, and he’s busy jamming one of them inside. Light dances on the rock walls. “Mule deer. Caught it last spring, down near Whitehorse. First I’d seen in years. Didn’t even think they were alive any more. Can’t believe I got it before the Nomads did, I tell you that. Set a trap, over by the falls. Sucker walked right into it.”
I make myself chew slowly, savouring the taste. It’s not just delicious–it’s incredible. For a moment I forget about where I am, forget about everything except this, the first piece of meat I’ve ever eaten. I tell myself to take it slowly, not wanting to upset my stomach.
“Where are we?” I say, after I finally swallow.
Harlan glances up at me. His eyes are rimmed with wrinkles, an endless field of them, reaching all the way round to his temples. “You don’t know?” he says. “Seems strange, since you crashed down here. Figured you might have had some idea where you were going. That space station you came from–hey, is that really true, by the way? You ain’t just trying to fool me? Because if you are…”
I shake my head. “No, it’s the truth.
He gives a long, low whistle. “Boy. Is it still there? Or did they come crashing down, too? I think everyone else you came down with is dead, or they will be soon. Can’t survive long in these mountains ’less you know what you’re doing.” He’s having trouble controlling his volume–some sentences are almost shouted, while others drop to a whisper.
I focus on the first question he asked. “I got separated from the others,” I say, doing my best not to think of Okwembu.
Harlan jams a piece of the meat in his mouth, swinging round and pulling a battered backpack from its spot near the wall. He rummages in it, then withdraws something long and thin. It’s paper–a whole roll of it, torn at the edges but otherwise intact.
“Scooch over,” Harlan says around the dried meat, and unrolls the paper across the dirty floor.
It’s a map. I’ve seen plenty of them before, but always on tab screens, crisp and sharp. This one is faded, the tiny place-name letters all but gone. The land on the map, marked out with thick black lines, forms an uneven, top-heavy blob. At the top, near the map’s edge, the land breaks up into dozens of tiny islands.
“Hold this side down,” Harlan says, tapping the edge closest to me. The paper feels fibrous under my hands, almost alive, as if it too came from an animal.
“All right,” says Harlan. He rests a finger on the map, where the left-hand part of the blob begins to curve and mushroom out. “This is where we are. The Yukon. Canada. Ring any bells?”
I shake my head, but he’s no longer looking at me. “Not that it matters,” he says. “Canada, the States, whole damn planet far as I know. Most of it’s all dust now. Everything below this line is dry as anything.” His finger traces a curve across the blob, east to west, a little below the place he called Yukon.
“So why is it OK where we are?”
“Can’t say. A few years ago, we were living in one of the bunkers here.” He taps a point about ten inches below Yukon, his finger nudging the faded word Utah. “Those were bad years. Ever since I was a kid. Dust storm three-quarters of the year and frozen solid for the rest of the time. Air was nasty. You couldn’t stay above ground long, not that people didn’t try. We didn’t get a whole hell of a lot further than Red Rocks. I remember this one time, Garrison told us about this electrical spike he was reading down by…” He looks at me. “Doing it again. Sorry. Just, I don’t know, click your tongue or something if I talk too much.”
“It’s OK,” I say. “But… what about up here?”
He shrugs. “We got word that things were changing. That you could live outside. Trees, air, whole deal. Paradise, compared to where we were. You hear that kind of thing, you go for it. Beats living in a tunnel underground, believe you me.”
Trees. I glance at the door, thinking of the barren landscape beyond. The only trees I’ve ever seen were the ones in the Air Lab–the big oaks. I try to picture a forest of them, stretching to the horizon. I can’t even begin to imagine it.
Harlan sees where I’m looking. “They’re down at the lower elevation, round Whitehorse. Not much of a forest, but it’s there. Air’s good, too. Go outside anywhere south of the 49th parallel, and you gotta be wearing a full-face gas mask.”
“What about the wolves? How are there… I mean, we thought all the animals were dead.”
He grunts. “Oh, they ain’t dead. Not completely. Most parts, sure, you never see ’em, but animals are funny. They find ways to survive. Probably don’t need no more than a handful of ’em to do it, neither. You ask me, I think they just kept moving. Couldn’t go underground, like we did, so they found places they could get food. ’Course there’s been a lot more in the last few years, now the air’s cleared up.”
“And there are more people here? In Yukon?”
“The Yukon. You gonna live here, you gotta get the name right.”
He turns away, letting go of his side of the map. It curls over, covering my hand. I spread it out again as he jams a poker into the stove, muttering to himself.
“Why are you up here, and not in the forest?” I say, still staring at the map. “Is it because of the… the Nomads?”
He grunts. “Something like that.”
“Who are they?”
Harlan doesn’t answer, poking at the fire.
I don’t bother repeating the question. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is getting back out there. Prakesh and Carver must have come down close by, and if Harlan knows this place as well as I think he does, then we might be able to find them. I actually smile–the thought of seeing them both again, of coming across them, seeing their faces, feels amazing. I could bring them back here.
And then you’ll have to choose between them a second time, says the small voice in my mind.
I ignore it. That can come later. I try to picture the forest again, imagining running in the sunlight, in a place where there’s air and water and food. Where I can see the sky.
“So, my friends were on another escape pod,” I say, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. “I need to find them.”
“Yeah?” says Harlan. “Where were you folks headed?”
The name jumps up out of nowhere. “Alaska.”
His brow furrows. “Alaska?” He comes back, bends over the map, so close that his nose almost touches the paper. “The border’s over a hundred miles away. Well, what used to be the border. Plus, state itself goes all the way across to the Bering Sea. Nothing but ice out there.”
A sick feeling starts to swell in my stomach, as if the meat is turning toxic. I didn’t have time to think about the physics of our re-entry before, but I’m doing it now and it’s chasing away the good feeling I had before. At the speed we were travelling, two pods launched thirty seconds apart could come down hundreds of miles from each other.
Not good. Not good at all.
Harlan clears his throat. “Where were you supposed to end up? In Alaska?”
My mind goes blank. My finger hovers above the map, as if a name will leap out at me, but all the letters run into each other. There’s got to be a way. I have to find them.
Then I remember. “Anchorage,” I say. “We were going to some settlement in Anchorage.” I scan the map for it, and let out a cry when I find it, nestled into a small bay. “If they launched when they were supposed to—”
“Kid,” Harlan says quietly.
“—then they would have landed nearby. And there are other people there, so—”
“Kid.”
I look up at Harlan, and the sick feeling in my stomach expands, spreading through my body.
“What?” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Your friends are already dead.”