Way back when I was a child, I got sick. I caught a fever so bad (to hear my mother and Agatha tell the story when I was older) that I was as close to death as you can be without having a knife in your chest. They took me to the coldest place on Australia that they could find—the mouth of the arboretum stream—and they sat with me for hours on end, soaking me in the water then lifting me out, letting me shiver myself dry before starting again. My mother said the water would evaporate from my skin, my temperature was so high. For a time, she said, I was the warmest thing on the whole of Australia—engines, forges, everything included. But I didn’t die. I survived that heat.
My mother told me that she knew that if I could survive that sickness, I could survive pretty much anything.
The blood smeared across Rex’s shoulder has dried. At a glance it looks like the plates of soil on the side of the road: smooth then cracked, like there are rifts underneath it pulling it apart. The ground changes as we walk. Lumps of clay turn to dust, kicking up clouds as we tread along, splitting beneath our weight. I feel heavier, that’s for certain; it’s the heat and how tired I am, how difficult the walking is. Gibson hasn’t followed us or sent anybody after us, which is something. We’re prisoners, though. According to those in charge, we’re dangerous. We should be punished. Gibson must have surmised that we’ll die out here.
There are moments when I think that’s a safe assumption.
“We go this way,” Rex says, the first words she’s uttered since we left. I watch her as we walk. Her handless arm lies flush across her body, as if there’s a sling supporting it. She pulls her re-breather off to give herself a break, to try and choke her way through the gritty hotness of the air instead. Jonah is refusing protection entirely. I don’t know why, and it infuriates me. Freckled and shiny, his skin has turned a deep red. Sweat beads on his forehead. It’s as if he’s punishing himself. I’ve seen that in him before. But that’s his choice. I can’t protect him from himself.
We stare at the ground as we walk because looking up means looking into the glare of the sun. The heat is bearable, but only just. It’s getting hotter and hotter with every minute.
“Keep going,” Rex says, though I wasn’t in any danger of stopping. Stopping means giving up—and if we give up here, we’re dead. There’s no question of that.
For the rest of that first day, we see nothing. We keep walking along broken roads, along the shattered sections of what Ziegler told me is called a freeway. Sometimes the road disappears, swallowed into the ground; then you see it reappear a ways off, so you get back onto it. We reason it must lead somewhere. That’s what a road does.
So we walk.
We don’t talk, not really.
We drink the water, trying to be sparing with it, but it’s hard.
We prop each other up when we stumble and we rest when we feel like we might fall.
Then, when night starts to come, we find trees, a group of them, so dry and skeletal they seem like they must be dead, but I can’t be sure; I don’t know how they’re still standing if they’re no longer alive. As we sleep next to them, propped up against the trunks, I move closer to Jonah, huddling close to him to try and protect both of us against the cold wind that kicks in during the night; but he moves away from me, a subtle shift of his body over to one side, an arching of his back. I wonder if I am actually cold, or just cold compared to how hot the daytime is, how brutal.
We’re drenched in sweat when we wake up, the sky just getting light, the heat of the day not yet set in. I have no idea how the body makes that much sweat when it’s so water deprived, but it does and it has; Jonah is so soaked through it’s as though he’s sick. His clothes are wet, and he pulls at them, yanking them off. He stands there, red where the sun has charred his skin, the rest of him pale. I remember the welts that run all the way down his back, like the rungs of some awful ladder. I prop myself up and watch him as he drapes his clothes on the dead branches of nearby trees. The scars bend and twist with his muscles as he stretches to get to the higher branches. I look at Rex, sleeping through this. Face soft. Her hand seems to be holding the space where the other once was. She looks so still and so tranquil.
I don’t have scars like they do. I want to feel mine, because I think that could be calming; to run a finger down them, to understand where they start and where they end, to know that they are finite. But like Gibson told me, the worst scars run deeper than skin.
“Chan,” Jonah says. He’s standing in front of me now, his clothes wafting in the breeze behind him. The sun frames him, shining in my eyes from the horizon, and I have to squint to see him, shield my eyes with my hand. “You did the right thing,” he says. I’ve heard that before from him, but I can’t quite remember when.
“What?” I ask.
“Bringing me with you.” I don’t know if he means here and now—out of Pine City and into this wasteland—or to Earth from Australia. He’s somebody that I’m not sure has come out of this better. Back there, he was safe. Here, I think he’ll be on the run now. We’re all on the run. I wouldn’t blame him if—
Then Rex is up and on her feet. “Talking,” she says, not looking at either of us but explaining what we’ve done wrong, either because it woke her or because we’re wasting precious energy. The metal plug from her missing hand—where they attached the augments to her bone, her nerves—looks sore. There’s red around it, like it’s infected. It’s not the neatest augment job anyway, but I suspect she doesn’t care about that. She picks up the water bottle she was carrying last and drains it. “We’re leaving,” she says.
“Jonah’s clothes are drying,” I say, but she doesn’t care. She starts to walk, the sun on the left of us; Jonah doesn’t even ask if we’re going with her. He scrambles to his trousers and top—barely minutes in the warmth—and he pulls them on, grimacing against the dampness of them, but starting to walk all the same.
We see something in front of us, in the distance. The haze coming off the ground makes it seem as though it’s not really there. We’ve been fooled already by pools of water that didn’t exist, that disappeared as soon as we were close enough to understand that our own eyes were lying to us. This time we see tents—fabric stretched across poles jutting from the ground. Rex, walking at the front of us, stops and raises her arm into the air to halt us. She’s still and silent, and we follow suit.
We watch. There are people there as well. Their shapes move around. Rex crouches. They aren’t looking for us and there’s nobody watching this direction.
“They might be dangerous,” I whisper. I think about the stories that Ziegler told me, about those who were outcast from the cities. Criminals, or people who simply didn’t fit in. Not good people, he insinuated. “We should go around.” Rex glares at me—a look I recognize, that still chills me—and throws me her empty water pack. Her re-breather is almost empty. Our skin, our lips, are cracking in the heat.
She’s right, I know that. I know. But Ziegler told me that the people who live out here, outside of the cities, only do so because they don’t have any other choice. They’re not allowed in the cities.
“Wait,” Rex says to us. Jonah reaches over and wraps his fingers around my hand, clasping it. He pulls me toward him. I try and remember if I’ve ever seen him this unsettled before, this scared. But I can’t. Not even when we knew we were leaving Australia.
Rex creeps forward. We watch her go; she moves so slowly a trail in the dust behind her is the only indication of her movement. Minutes later she’s behind the tent. The sun makes it hard to watch and hard to stay still. Sweat runs off my forehead down my neck to the small of my back, making me itch.
Jonah’s grip on my hand grows tighter as Rex stands and walks up to the camp. We lose sight of her behind their tents and temporary fabric structures, but the sound of voices carries in the air. She says something. They say something. I hear a man’s voice, then another man’s voice—another, then another. They get louder. Rex stays quiet and measured.
Jonah’s fingers are almost too tight on mine.
Silence, for a moment. A moment that lasts altogether too long.
Something’s wrong.
I let go of Jonah and I run, and it’s only as I’m at full speed that I hear Rex scream—but not in pain. It’s fury, and it’s a sound I’ve definitely heard before.
I get tangled up in the tent fabric as I try to get through, and something behind me—a pole—comes loose, clattering, bringing down more fabric. It takes me a second to see what’s happening, but the blood is a giveaway. Rex is covered in it, her hand clutching a curved weapon with a wooden handle. She’s swiping at someone, or several people. One of them—a man, naked, his skin leathered and awful—clutches at his throat, blood coursing out from between his fingers. Another man is holding his groin, weeping. Another looks fine, until I step forward and I see that he’s not quite whole anymore—his shoulder is divided by a sharp line from his neck, threatening to peel away from the rest of his body.
Rex kills the fourth and last while I watch: two smacks of the blade into the neck before the head comes off the body. Watching her fight, every memory comes back. The last of the wall around her comes tumbling down. She is a dervish—dangerous and, in her own way, quite incredible.
Jonah rushes to us and sees the blood; he falls to his knees, starts to retch. He’s not ready for this. It’s too soon for him.
“They started it,” Rex says. “I asked them to share, but they . . .” She nods to the one who’s holding his groin.
Behind him there’s a barrel and around it, the floor is wet. There are a few tins of food sitting against the barrel’s side. Rex pulls the lid off the barrel, reaches in and raises her hand to her mouth. She drinks, and she smiles at me.
She beckons me over to drink with her.
We take some fabric to make our own tents. When it’s time to stop walking for the day—a slower day, bellies full from eating the tinned food—we drape it on bushes and dry shrubs and lie underneath it, as if it will give us protection. Jonah wakes us with screaming and moaning. Rex stands up and walks away from us until she’s out of range of the noise; I watch her lie down underneath the stars, flat on her back.
I want him to feel better. I feel calm with him, but worried. He’s not himself, not yet. He will be, I tell myself, eventually. It’ll take some time.
But I wonder if he’ll thank me when he is. I stroke his head to try and calm him, half hoping he’ll wake and look up at me and show that he remembers me, but he doesn’t even stir under my touch.
Midway through the following day, we come to an abandoned town. A row of houses on either side of the road, a few other streets coming off that.
WELCOME TO STAUNTON.
We pass what used to be shops, before they were abandoned. There’s evidence of fire in the buildings; on one side of the road stand the jagged remnants of a forest, the stumps of charred trees and blazed-out brush on the ground. Far off in the distance, I can just make out a large depression in the ground. Maybe it was once a lake or something like that: Now it’s dry, cracked, running off in the distance, the ground like dried-up old skin. Jonah lags behind Rex and me. He slept all night—unlike me—but is so tired and weary it’s as if he barely shut his eyes. He doesn’t say much of anything. Instead he shuffles, trips over his own feet. Leaving the prison, us freeing him, it’s exhausted him. I don’t say it aloud, but I want to find a house for him—a bed where he can sleep again. Even if it’s just for a few hours.
I don’t have to suggest this, though. Rex is the first to turn off the road as we pass a house: big windows, wooden slats across them to keep the light and heat out. Nothing like the houses in Washington—it’s more like something you see in a holo of what life used to be like on this planet. Rex walks to the front door and doesn’t even try the handle. She kicks the wood away and it shatters, brittle and dry. The inside of the house reeks like rot. It’s worst in the kitchen, where Rex scavenges for food, opening cupboards. Insects scurry out across the floor, over and under our feet, completely unconcerned by our presence. There are lizards on the walls that stare at us then dash away when we get closer until they’re all clustered in the furthest reaches of the room.
Rex finds a can of fruit with a faded label and smashes it on the counter, tearing the metal apart. She considers the contents but dismisses it, throwing the can aside; as it lands, it spills out a green mulchy paste.
“Useless,” she says. Her voice sounds much more like it did on the ship than even a week ago: graveled and harsh, coming from somewhere deep in her throat. It could be the heat, the dryness of being out in the world; it could be her remembering more of who she is.
“We should stay here awhile,” I say, looking at Jonah, then Rex. She doesn’t make eye contact but nods. So I lead Jonah upstairs, opening doors.
There’s a body in the first room I enter. The remains of one, anyway. I shut the door as fast as I opened it.
In the next room, there’s an empty bed. On the blanket, a picture of a man in a dark outfit and a mask. Poses like he’s fighting somebody. I lead Jonah to the bed, pull back the covers, and I lay him down.
“Stay here,” I say. “We’ll just be downstairs.”
“I missed you,” he says. Out of nowhere. His hand finds mine again. “When I couldn’t find you.”
“I’ve been here,” I tell him.
“Not now. Before. When we landed.” He lies back, shuts his eyes. He’s remembering. I sit by his legs, our fingers entwined. I swear something feels different in his touch. “What they put us through. Do you know? Did you have it happen to you?”
“I did,” I say.
“I kept thinking: Chan will save us. But you weren’t there. And then . . . Then I forgot.”
“I was trying to find you.”
“I know. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You save us. That’s why you’re so good.” His speech slurs. He’s drifting. “That’s what makes you who you are.” I lie down next to him as his words fade away. “You want to save everybody, but you can’t. Have to let us save you once in a while. But that’s why you’re special.”
“I’m not special,” I whisper. “I was lucky. My family made me lucky.” My mother. Agatha. You, I don’t say.
We lie in the silence for a while; his even breathing is so soothing I feel like I could sleep as well. But I don’t. There’s work to be done.
In the kitchen, Rex breaks open another door. There are stairs behind it that lead downward. She goes down them into the pitch-black. I follow her. I don’t want her to be alone. It’s immediately cool as we head down. I keep my hand on the rail, hear her feet on the steps below me.
“Wait,” I say. “Our eyes will adjust.” We spent years of our lives—from birth—in a place that was badly lit. The light from upstairs is enough, and I start being able to make out shapes: racks, rows and rows of shelves with circular shapes on them. She reaches for one, and she passes it to me. It’s heavy. I go back up the stairs into the brightness coming through the huge glass windows along one wall of the house. CABERNET SAUVIGNON, it says. It’s full of liquid. I break it open and pour it out. It’s a thick red color, like blood almost. Wine. Ziegler drinks this. I’ve seen him—bottles of it like trophies in a rack on his kitchen counter. Dusty. Better with age, he told me. I’m betting these are older than anything he’s got.
By the time I get back down, Rex has smashed the neck from another bottle, and I hear the sound of her lapping at the liquid as she pours it out. I wait, expecting her to say that it’s bad; that it couldn’t possibly survive this long under these conditions. But she doesn’t. Instead she hands me the bottle and I run my fingers over the shattered glass, feeling for where it could cut me. I pour it into my hands, lift it to my mouth, and I drink. It’s ridiculously sweet; it’s not pleasant, but it’s wet. And right now that’s enough.
I can see the outline of her glugging from yet another of the bottles, raising the shattered glass to her mouth and taking it straight down. I hear it spilling over her, spattering onto the floor. She laughs. I’ve never heard her laugh before.
We’ve been here a long time. Everything swims in my head. It feels like I’ve been punched, kicked, hit in the gut, hit in the head. She’s in worse shape than I am. She drank more. She slurs her words, while I’m sure mine are fine—sure that I’m making sense. I talk slowly when I talk. But we’re mostly silent.
“You could have killed me,” she says, and her words are quiet and slow, and measured. “I remember that.” They broke her for months, but it wasn’t enough to destroy Rex. “You were going to kill me.”
“I was,” I say.
“Did I wrong you?”
“You were a murderer,” I tell her. “You would have killed me and everybody I loved. You took Mae.” I realize I’m shouting at her, my voice angry.
“Mae,” she says. “The little girl.”
“You took her from me. You scared her. You could have ruined everything for her.” She nods while I’m talking. It looks like she’s falling asleep, her head lolling as she listens, her eyes shut. “You were a bad person.”
“You weren’t better. You hurt me.”
“It’s not the same,” I tell her. “You gave me no choice. I had to stop you.”
“Maybe.” Then she’s quiet for the longest time. I can feel the room starting to spin. I can’t see it spinning, though. Perhaps that’s better. She doesn’t say anything else until I’m on my back, trying to focus on staying perfectly still, feeling everything—today, the last few months, years maybe—drifting away from me. “But I was stopping you, as well,” she says.
I can hear birds, real birds, twittering in the trees—those that survived the catastrophes that changed the planet. I used to dream of animals—of cats and dogs and cows and birds—all the things that some on the ship remembered through their own parents, their parents’ parents. The noises that those animals would make when they saw you or when you stroked them. Some kids’ song about a farmer and the noises that the animals made. All we had to tell us what the animals looked like was drawings from books or that people had made themselves.
Now most of the animals are gone. The birds that survived aren’t much to look at. They have patches of feathers on their bodies, they’re tired-looking, and they don’t go anywhere near the cities—they wouldn’t have a chance with the air conditioners being as they are. Birds stay wild, unseen, away from people. Their survival instinct must have kicked in: Running and hiding was the only way for them to save themselves.
All through the night I wake—to use the bathroom, which is a proper bathroom, and maybe it was once beautiful, though now the floor tiles are cracked and the paint faded; to get a drink, to try to find water before giving up, having more of the wine, as sickeningly sweet and now wrong-tasting as it is; to the sounds of Rex making this noise that’s halfway between a sob and a growl; to just revel in this house, in being somewhere that is safer than maybe anywhere else I’ve ever lived, that’s a dream of some sort—and I hear the birds in the far-off, twittering at each other, chatting. I listen to them until I drift off to sleep again. It’s almost tranquil, the sound of life.
In the morning, I wake to birdsongs again but now it feels different, more forceful. The chirrups have turned into beeps that sound generated and fake and are growing louder and louder. I don’t know how long we slept for, but it’s light out. I run to the windows at the back of the house; they line almost the entire wall. In the distance, I see specks of dust—motes—moving. That’s them. They’re coming. I don’t know if it’s for us or something else entirely, but we can’t risk it. They’re heading this way, and fast.
I shout Jonah’s name, Rex’s name. They don’t reply.
Jonah’s room is empty. He’s gone.
Their names again, this time screamed, as I run down the stairs into the basement. Rex is splayed on the floor. I reach for her, shake her. She rolls over and vomits onto the floor, onto my feet. I pull her upright and grab her face, my hands on either side of her head, and I stare into her eyes.
“The birds are coming,” I say, “and I can’t find Jonah. We have to do something.” She shakes her head and she makes that growling sound she’s so fond of. “Okay?”
“I need water,” she says, but so do I, and we don’t have any, not now.
“Get up,” I say. I order her, and she responds to that. She nods. I scramble back up the stairs into the kitchen and I scream Jonah’s name once more but there’s no reply.
Rex follows me up the stairs without missing a step, all of a sudden acting like she’s not feeling the effects of everything we drank last night. She drags open the windows, stands outside in the blazing morning sun, stares up at the advancing cloud of birds. I grab her by the arm—I reach for her hand, but it’s not there, because I forgot (from the way that she flinches, she didn’t)—and I pull her back into the house, away from the windows. I don’t know how far they can see, but I don’t want them to spot us. They’ll be scouring the landscape, following the roads, looking for us that way. And there’s no way we’re fast enough to outrun them, not in the state we’re in, not with so little cover out here in the wilderness. “We need to find anything that can help us.” I start to turn out drawers and cupboards, throwing cutlery around to find things that we can use as weapons.
“We have to leave,” she says.
“Not until we find Jonah,” I say. But she’s right, I know she’s right. We can’t stay here. I shout his name again but she hushes me.
“They’ll hear you,” she says, and she’s right about that as well.
We go through the downstairs of the house, as quiet as we can be. We know they can hear a long distance, and out here there’s barely any other noise. We open doors, cupboards, wardrobes, cabinets, looking for weapons. There’s nothing. Then we pry open a door into another dark, windowless room on the ground floor. There’s something in the middle of it, under a tarp. I pull it off, trying to be quiet and failing, but praying that the noise isn’t significant. Underneath I see fabric, metal, thick rubber wheels; everything a deep, heavy black, polished to a sheen.
“It’s a bike,” I whisper. Rex doesn’t know what that is, but I’ve seen them in the city—going around the streets, people perched on the back. The noise that they make, like a roar of some long-extinct animal. “It moves. It’s like . . .” I don’t know how to explain it to her. “Just trust me. It moves and it’s fast. Much faster than we are. Maybe as fast as the birds.”
“Do you know how it works?”
“No.” I look at the handlebars. People hold those. But the ones I’ve seen are automated, just like the cars. This one is older. The computer system here looks like it’s hacked in, an afterthought. It doesn’t wake up when I touch it.
“Then it’s useless.”
“No,” I say, “it’s not. I can try.” There’s a key hanging from the handles at the front, and a hole. I slide it in and turn it. The bike coughs, as if it’s choking on something. I turn it again. The battery meter whizzes up. It’s held a supply of power, even after all this time. Smoke billows into the back of the room, and Rex grins.
“Can you drive it?” she says.
“No,” I say.
“Can we learn?”
“We can,” I tell her. I look around, trying to find a way out of this room. On the walls, illuminated in the glare of the bike’s light, are animal heads—stuffed and mounted on wooden boards, their teeth bared as if they’re all vicious, all about to attack. In the middle of them is a kind of rack, mounted midway up the wall. Inside it, something black, long, metal.
“What is that?” Rex asks.
“It’s a gun,” I say.
They banned them when the cities began burning, when the planet got too hot, when the riots started. That’s what always happens—the museum told me, Ziegler told me. People live in a state of stasis for long enough, then it gets hot, and they explode. But this time it was on a scale that nobody had seen before. So to help keep the peace, guns were banned. Lots of things were banned in those early days. But of course people found a way to keep them. Alala’s got one hidden away in her home that she thinks nobody knows about (we all know). It’s power, in a strange way—something so dangerous, so deadly.
“I’ve never held one,” I say. “I don’t know how they work.” But I’ve seen statues of people in the museum. Men from some war that happened centuries ago clutching them with one part to their shoulders, pressed up against them, staring along the thick metal barrels. And their fingers on the triggers—aimed and primed.
I reach up and pull it down from the rack. It’s heavier than I thought it would be. I feel the weight of it, spy down its length like the people in the museum diorama. I put Rex in the sights.
“They needed bullets,” I say. “Things that they shoot.”
“Like arrows.”
“Like arrows but smaller, metal, pointed. Have a look.” We both turn out the drawers, throwing things onto the ground. Suddenly we’re less concerned about the noise. We know that they’ll find us, we’re the only things out here.
It’s inevitable.
“These?” Rex asks, and she yanks a small gray box up into the air, props it on her stump, and brings it into the light. They look like the bullets from the museum, sort of. Must be right.
“That’s them,” I say, “Get as many as you can. Put them in the bag on the side of the bike.” I leave her to go back into the main part of the house. The birds are nearly here. They know where we are. I shout Jonah’s name one last time, desperate now because we have to go. If we stay here we’re done for, and—
I see him, then, through the windows at the back of the house. He is walking toward the birds, his hands in the air, raising them slowly, giving himself up.
No. I don’t know what they’ll do to him, why he would want to go, why he doesn’t want to stay here, to learn more about who he is. To stay with me.
I open the door to shout at him, to plead with him. I want to tell him to stop because we can get away—the three of us, we can be safe. But then I see how close the birds are, and as I open my mouth to say the words I’m not sure that I quite believe it.
He turns and looks at me. He doesn’t smile—doesn’t do anything—just looks at me, right into my eyes. And even as far away as he is, I can see into them. I can see them, green and clear. Unblinking as he stares at me, and I stare at him. He knows me. In that moment, I can tell. He remembers me perfectly.
The birds surround him, scan him, circle him. He falls to his knees and he holds his hands up. I realize that he’s not running from me—back to them, back to the lie—he’s buying us time.
The birds descend and I shut the curtains because I don’t want to watch them drag him away. We can’t waste the gift he’s given us.
I rush back to Rex. She doesn’t ask if I found him.
“Ready?” I ask. I want to ask her to come with me, to fight them, to rescue him, but I know there’s no point.
And for some reason, I’m not even sure it’s what he would want.
Rex raises her amputated forearm to show me. She’s strapped something to the stump—a hunting knife with a serrated edge on the blade, huge and unwieldy, fastened with thick gray tape to her skin. The tape is wound around and around, bulky and clumsy, but it holds the knife fast. It’s threatening and, somehow, it’s perfectly right.
“Ready,” she says.
There’s a moment, just a brief moment, where it feels like I’m going to fall off this thing—where the sheer rush of it moving forward feels as though it could push me backward, send me tumbling to the ground that’s already far behind us. But I hold on, my hands on the grips that sit at the front, feeling the vibrations of it running up my arms, through my chest, into every single part of my body.
Rex hangs onto me as we tear down the road. The bike does most of the work for me, accelerating, steering along the road. I’m just a passenger, but that’s fine. The screen at the front lights up, shows us the route ahead.
“Where would you like to go?” the tinny voice of the bike asks. This one is definitely older than the Gaia voice, much more robotic. The battery is mostly full, the voice tells me, and the roads ahead are clear of traffic. “Where would you like to go?” it asks again.
“Washington,” I say.
“Should I avoid toll roads?”
“I don’t care. Just drive.”
So it does. The bike swerves to avoid the holes and cracks in the road. All I do is hold the handlebars, and Rex holds me. The sun is to one side of us, the streets, the burned-down forest, the dried-up lake on the other. Rex clings to me. I can feel the gun slung around her body, pressing against my back; as we judder on the road, it digs into me. Her good hand clutches my waist. She doesn’t say anything; I know she’s looking for the birds, and I know that they’ll find us. But we’re fast, and Jonah has given us time.
I can’t think about him now. Not yet.
I watch the road. We pass land that was once used for farming or living but now lies sweltering and wrecked under the heat of the sun. I think about how I’ll probably have to head back into the wilderness when I’ve got Mae. I wonder where we’ll go, what sort of life we’ll lead. I’ll need to start something new, for both of our sakes, something safe. I wonder if Rex will want to come, if I will even want her to.
I don’t notice Rex nudging me, and it isn’t until she leans closer to my ear and shouts that she gets my attention. She points behind us, into the distance. I turn my head quickly to glance at what she’s seen.
The birds are coming. They scream over the fractured bones of the trees that occasionally jut out from the land. I can see them framed against the clear, crisp, blue-white of the sky, swooping and swirling. The formation they make in the air is almost like the flow of water, tumbling and whirling. Jonah’s sacrifice has taken some of them out of the equation and kept the rest of them far away, but not nearly far enough.
“Can we go faster?” Rex shouts, and I turn the handlebar, but the computer voice cuts in. It can’t calculate the path if it goes any faster, it says. The ground on either side of the road is ripped up and torn everywhere, cracked and scarred like Rex’s chest, Jonah’s back. It is impractical to ride on it. But the birds can find us out here, no matter which way we go. Maybe we’ll outpace them, I think; so we’ll stick with the road until we’re somewhere that we can hide. I’ve seen them when they want somebody. I think about them in that block in the city, breaking through the windows, smashing through the doors. They’re relentless—and that was only a few of them. I wonder what they’ll do to us now given how fast we’re running from them.
There must be something we can do.
“Give me the gun,” I shout back to Rex. I let go of the handlebars, trusting the computer to keep us straight and balanced. Rex pushes it into my hand and drops the bullets over my shoulder and into my lap. I fiddle with the catches and find a hatch that flips open. I flick the bullets into the only hole I find (which seems like the right hole) and I point the gun into the sky.
I pull the trigger. I don’t know what I’m expecting. Not this. The gun almost kicks against me and I nearly lose my seat, have to grab the handlebar again, wrapping my arm almost around it. The noise is insane even over the sound of the bike, so loud and so angry. Rex grabs me, holds tighter, stops me from falling. She needs me. We can’t escape without each other.
“You take it,” I say. She ignores me. I turn around, craning my neck, and I look at her.
She’s terrified. I’ve seen her scared, angry, desperate to save herself, but I’ve never seen her like this before. On Australia she acted as though she didn’t care if she lived or died. Agatha called it a death wish—because death was inevitable and Rex acted as though she didn’t care when it came. But here, now, I can tell that she doesn’t want to die.
And neither do I.
“Take the gun and shoot them,” I say, channeling my mother’s voice, her commanding tone, as best I can. “If you don’t, they will catch us.” I want to explain to her what they’ll do, but she hasn’t seen it for herself. She doesn’t know. “They will kill you,” I say. Nothing. She’s frozen. “And if they don’t? They’ll try what they did to you at Pine City, only worse. They’ll take away who you are, and this time they’ll make it stick.”
She snatches the gun from me and rests the barrel on her knife-arm, then turns on the seat and bends backward as far as she can. She aims up toward the birds.
“Just like firing an arrow,” I shout, “think about them moving, where they’re going, what we’re doing.”
“I know,” she says. She pulls the trigger. I grab the handles to steady us, squeezing down hard, instinct kicking in. I try to compensate for the kick of the gun; the computer squeaks, slams a word up onto the screen, a voice that I can barely hear over the sound of the ringing in my ears.
“Override,” it says.
“No!” I scream. We lurch left to right. “Just faster!” But it’s in my control all of a sudden, and we wobble on the road then veer slightly. I wrestle with holding the handlebars steady, trying to steady the bike.
“Again,” I hear Rex say, and she pulls the trigger once more. In the sky behind us, something explodes. I swear that I hear Rex laugh.
“Take over!” I scream at the bike, but it doesn’t listen. I don’t know the right command. It’s old, and it doesn’t understand me, or maybe it just won’t. Maybe it’s broken, unable to listen, to take orders. I clutch the grips, tell myself to hold them tight, tell myself that we’ll be fine. The road is pretty much a straight line. As long as I don’t move, the bike won’t move either.
Then Rex shifts her weight, swinging around so that she’s facing the birds, riding backward. I almost lose it. “Stop moving!” I shout. I hear her plant her knife into the seat, to hold herself tight. I turn to look at it, to see how close the blade is to me, and I accidentally squeeze the handlebars tighter—or turn them, or something. We go faster still. Rex screams, a noise of absolute pleasure, and I look back at her in the mirrors, just a glance.
She’s aiming at the sky and she squeezes the trigger. Behind us, one of the birds collapses on itself, tumbling, colliding with the others around it. They explode, smoke and flames. The other birds swoop and churn around the falling debris, making a new formation—spreading themselves out, making the group harder to hit.
I swear that they’re getting faster.
“Again!” I shout. Rex aims and fires, but they’re ready for it this time. They roll and dive, carving through the sky, leaving empty spaces where they were only moments before. They’re changing their tactics and edging closer to us.
I squeeze the grips again. Faster, faster. I need to see what the bike can do. The road is speeding by so fast that it’s just a gray blur in front of us, around us, behind us. On either side the landscape is endless desert, peeling off into whatever’s in the distance—trees, the remains of towns, places that I’ve never been and I’ll never go. Everything blurs into color and noise.
“They’re getting closer!” Rex takes more shots, single bullets that ring out. In the mirror at the side of the handlebar, I watch as birds spark and tumble to the earth or (when she really nails a shot) burst in the sky, a cloud of bright orange flame for a second before the debris falls onto the road in the distance behind us.
The bike shakes. I look at the road, trying to focus on it. I can tell it’s in terrible condition, cracked and riddled with holes, worse than anywhere we’ve been yet. I don’t know what to do. I slow us down, then move the handlebars a little; the bike tilts according to my direction, swerving on the road around the cracks. They’re getting bigger; I can make out one giant one, running right down the middle of the road. I’ve got to pick a side, stick to it. I have no choice.
In the distance, I see where the crack ends in a crevice, a split in the earth that drives sideways through the road itself, driving it upward into what looks almost like a pursed lip. I think about turning off, going onto the dirt, but it’s too late. The lip comes, closer and closer, an upward curve.
“Hold on!” I scream, and I feel her reach back, fumbling, clutching onto my shirt.
The bike roars to the lip. We go up it and I see the front wheel leave the ground, and I shut my eyes for what feels like an eternity; but when I open them we’re still in the air. Below us the crack yawns—so dark that I can’t see its bottom. There’s just blackness down there. An abyss. For a second, we’re flying; there’s nothing below us, nothing holding us down.
We’re weightless.
Only for a second.
Then we slam onto the road on the other side of the crevice and I struggle to keep the bike steady. We skid to the side—off the road and onto the soil and dusty remains of what was once maybe fields. The bike seems to slip out from underneath us, and then Rex is gone—thrown off, rolling along behind us in a cloud of dust kicked up around her. I tumble after, helpless. I watch the bike spiral away, flipping, plowing into the dirt, smoke coming from its vents.
I shout Rex’s name but she doesn’t reply. It hurts to move, to push myself to my knees, hurts still more to get to standing. My clothes are ripped, shredded around the knees. My hands are torn up and bleeding, so I press them to my belly to try to get the blood off, to see how bad the damage is. I run—hobble—toward where Rex is lying, curled up.
My ears are ringing. I forgot about the birds for a moment. It’s only as the ringing fades that I hear them, their tiny engines whirring in the sky, a buzz that’s closer than it has been. I look up and they’re in a new formation pretty much right above us.
“Get up,” I say to Rex. I nudge her with my foot. She could be dead, I know. “Get up.” She doesn’t. She stays perfectly still, and I can’t even see the rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes are open. Your eyes are only open like that when you’re gone. I’ve seen it before. I’ve closed too many eyes myself.
And I wonder, in that moment, why we close the eyes of our dead. When did we decide that the dead shouldn’t face whatever comes next with their eyes open? When did we decide that they should be put into the dark, shut away, blocked out from everything after them?
The birds swirl. They make a spiral in the sky, round and round, and they start to descend. I hear the sound of a whip lashing out and I shut my eyes.
The sound of the gun going off is louder than it was when we were on the bike. Here, without the rush of the air as we sped along the road, it’s the most colossal noise. A few of the birds are caught in the blast, and we’re showered with sparks and chunks of metal as they fall to the ground.
The rest of the birds disperse. For a second, they look almost like the shape of a star: different points going off in every direction. Rex coughs, breathing hard and heavy. She’s bleeding, I see—some wound on her chest, a spot of it coming through the fabric of her top.
“Let’s go,” she says. She keeps the gun trained on the birds. They don’t fly away but they don’t come any closer, either. I help her to her feet and we run to the bike, half dragging one another as we go. The birds stay back. They didn’t get close enough to take us, but we were lucky. If Rex hadn’t woken up . . .
“Get it started,” she says. We climb on, just as we were before, and I tell the bike to start, to put us back on the road.
“Operating at fifty-percent efficiency,” it tells me, but I don’t know what that means.
“Just go,” I say. Rex keeps the gun aimed back at where we came from. It’s the longest time before she stops, puts the gun down, turns back around toward me; I hear her sigh, feel the weight of her head as it rests on the back of my neck.
We stop to stretch our legs. Halfway to the city, the bike’s screen tells us; but the battery is more gone than that. It wore itself down when I was in control, or when it was putting itself right after the crash. Either way, it’s running lower than it should, I think. We’re both aching, and neither of us says very much. We stand in the desert, we look at the horizon, and we stare. As the sun starts to set off in the distance, I know what I’m looking for. The shaking line in my vision that could be—should be—the sea.