Chapter Three

THE DREAMS STARTED immediately.

In the first, he knew who he was, and he knew who Mir was, but somehow, they were wrapped in one body, one body that, in waking life, was neither of their bodies. The skin was too pale and the muscles were too big and the eyes weren’t piercing enough: he knew about the eyes because he could see them reflecting back at him in the cockpit of the jet. They were all he had to focus on, to steady himself—to steady Mir, who he felt the burning need to comfort, even though they were, somehow, the same but also different—as the tilt of the jet changed from a constant, steady, comforting thrumming forward, horizontal, horizontal, safe, to an unsteady plummet, a weightless collapse, a pitching forward, vertical, vertical, down, down. Peter screamed with Mir’s throat, and he was only conscious of the need to land, not crash, but he knew they were going to burn up, and they would die, and Peter would be alone.

He woke from the first dream just as the jet became a ball of fire, just as his skin started to feel the first searing heat of the explosion his body was about to become. He woke, but he wasn’t in his pod; he wasn’t even in his and Mir’s hideaway off the alley. He was somewhere bright.

So bright, in fact, he yelled out and threw his arm over his eyes, slamming them shut and breathing hard, focusing as much as he could on the ground beneath him, steady, because it had just been a dream. Until he realized he hadn’t yet woken, not really: because the ground beneath him was not synthetic. The ground beneath him was scratchy, grainy, and then, something ice cold touched his toes.

“What the—” He scrambled away from the water, opening his eyes with a rapid and painful series of blinks. The air seemed to fill his whole throat, not like the manufactured oxygen of the Commons or his pod; and there was wind. Wind he hadn’t been warned to expect days in advance, wind that did not come from turbines. And a roaring. A roaring that was, he realized as the light stopped piercing his eyes, a massive body of the only blue water he’d ever seen outside of simulations.

It transfixed him, and he stared, long and hard, his heart almost as loud as the surf crashing into the shore and onto his unprepared toes. He swiped his hand across his eyes to clear them, because what he was seeing couldn’t be real, but solid specks of tiny crystals, tiny rocks, scratched across his eyes, and he gasped as he pulled his hands back to look.

“Sand,” he whispered, turning his hands over and over before dipping them back toward the ground incredulously. “This stuff is sand.”

He wasn’t sure how he knew, but his right hand tingled just around the fleshy part of his palm where his chip was embedded. He’d been fascinated by the museum trips he’d taken with his keeper, of course; the simulations of the old earth, of things like open skies, green plants of all kinds, and, occasionally, sandy beaches—a beach, that must be where he was, somehow—but he had been fascinated in the same way most people he’d ever known were fascinated. Entranced only until they left the walls of the museum and entered back into the silver-specked world of reliability, of safety, of consistency that couldn’t be found on old Earth, with all those uncontrollable variables, all those unreliable frames of knowledge.

He shuddered as he stared out at all that water, that mass that roared and slammed and foamed and had no end in sight until it met the sky on all sides, curving around the shore, surrounding everything. He backed away even as part of him called him to dive in, to swim, to feel real water surrounding his body, seeping into his pores.

Peter saw all that water—ocean, he knew automatically, that strange tingling in his right hand again—and he tried to imagine what it would taste like. He wondered, too, what it tasted like to the creatures who lived in it. Because surely there were creatures; he remembered seeing so many in the museum.

But still, he retreated, fear gripping him because more prominently than memories of the museum, he had memories of the serials they’d put them all in, in the VR when they were just little kids. The water, water just like this. Those waves rising up, higher and higher, not innocently like they were doing in this dream, innocuously rising only to crash far below his knees, below his ankles even, and die out before gentle foam reached out to wet his toes.

No, he remembered what he’d seen in the VR: versions of the waves he was seeing now—what did it smell like? Was it salt in the air? Why would there be salt?—only bigger. Entire magnitudes bigger. Big enough, monstrous enough to destroy entire cities, to crash over the entire shore and—were those trees lining the land where the sand gave way to other ground?—cover those trees, snapping them, uprooting them, drowning them and everyone in them, in one swallow, in one crash, in one wave.

Peter backed away, knowing he would never be able to back away far enough if the waves grew to that size.

But just as soon as the fear swept over him like the waves he was imagining, a calm suffused him so thoroughly he almost sank back down into the sand, the tingling in his chipped palm growing by the moment.

As though guided, somehow, by the sensation, he turned in the direction of the wind. With the ocean still in the corner of his vision, he gasped as he took in what lay behind, what lay in the trees.

A kaleidoscope of a creature—more massive than at least four Peters and Mirs combined—soaring lazily out from the treeline. Dragon, the word occurred to Peter from somewhere in the back of his mind, calling up his mythology studies with Mir.

The dragon was gleaming with colors he’d never seen: nothing in the Commons or nearby grounds glowed like that. The dragon’s wing buds were pure golden, massive delicate wings like little suns glittering over the water far out where it was calm; the underbelly was such a brilliant red that the ancient curseword radioactive flooded his mind. Neon.

But no fearsome sound emerged from the dragon’s mouth. No threat and no fire. Not even music. The undulations in the dragon’s wings, the cascade of colors shimmering in the sunlight, made Peter blink and look harder. And as he peered closer, he realized this was not a dragon. It was, instead, a swarm. A swarm of hundreds of smaller winged creatures, all flying as one to create the illusion of someone larger; butterflies.

The swarm was somehow tinted with belonging, like they were such an intimate part of the forest that lay behind the beach that they needn’t have a separate word to describe the vibrancy of their wings. Golden, reds, oranges, yellows—not the colors of a dragon’s different body parts, but of each different butterfly’s wings—all swooped first up, then down, then undulated like the waves themselves, wings fluttering with a unison he’d never seen before. Not since he and Mir had snuck into their refuge those nights when it was too cold, too lonely, too solitary in their pods to stay alone, separate, away from the warmth of each other’s skin.

Peter wondered if the butterflies ever longed for touch—they were close to each other, so close, but perhaps not touching—or if the wind sweeping their delicate yet powerful wings was enough for them.

He sat, transfixed, noticing little else, for he didn’t know how long, until he realized with a jolt that they were the only remaining lights in the sky. That the butterflies, still arching up and down along the coast in united dragon form were the only pinpoints of light, of color left in the growing night, the growing dark.

Peter gasped when a round, pockmarked spot of gray brightness appeared in the sky, a golden hue around its edges, distinguishing it from the deep blue silk of the night.

“Moon,” he whispered, like he was greeting an old friend.

Just gazing up at its glow warmed his salt-stained face. Until two silent figures streaked through the sky toward the orb, toward the soft face of the moon.

Missiles.

They collided with the moon nearly at the same time, in rapid succession, one immediately following the other. Peter trembled as the night orb did, but Peter didn’t crumble, each of his lines, his cracks, his points of bodily tension fracturing, breaking, tearing apart from one another. Instead, he scrambled to stand as that very thing happened to the moon itself, exploding out into the otherwise quiet night, the scream of the missiles only reaching him at that moment, just before the catastrophic roar of the dying moon sounded over the rhythmic roar of the flowing ocean.

He turned back, chaotic and panting, toward the kaleidoscope of butterflies, intent bizarrely on warning them, on telling them to make a break for it. His throat itched with the need to wave them away from the incoming debris that would surely rend their wings from their tiny, glowing bodies. But they were nowhere to be found.

Peter was alone on the darkening beach, with only the exploding death of a majestic figure to light the creases on his face.

Until a thin whistling grew louder and a dark, speeder-like figure drew closer. Bigger. Like the waves he’d feared, except this was not in his imagination.

The jet that had sent the missiles into the belly of the moon was careening down, and it was going to crash into Peter.

He did not tell his legs to move, but they acted without the guidance of his mind. Down the beach, right into the surf.

He cursed loudly. His legs were not moving him away from the crashing jet’s trajectory. They were moving him right into it.

The whistle of the crashing vehicle morphed into a thunderous wail the closer it drew, yet Peter was rooted, right in its path, squinting up into the glowing lights, into the transparent glass of the ever-closer cockpit.

For a wild moment, his own face reflected in the glass: rounded cheeks, delicate eyebrows, piercing eyes, soft, full lips that always felt warmed when they touched Mir’s.

Mir. Their name ripped Peter’s throat, because his own reflection shifted out of focus—the jet was close now, so close Peter could feel its crashing heat, its impossible heat that would surely boil the water he was standing in, and him along with it—to reveal the face of the adult—no, the child—in the cockpit.

The face, wild with fear and yet somehow also set with fiery determination, with the grim satisfaction of having done something right, of having accomplished a task, of having won for once—the face of the crashing, soon-to-be-dying pilot, belonged to Mir.

Peter woke with Mir’s name still scorching his throat, and his face and shirt were soaked through. It was not, as he first felt for urgently, ocean water that covered his face, nor was it blood. But it was salty.

“Mir.” He whispered this time because his throat was sore from his dreams. “Please. No. Not Mir. Not Mir. Send me. Send anyone else. Give them some other way to fly. Not this. Not them. Please.”

He sat up shakily, the dull grays of their refuge disorienting after the rich blues, sandy browns, lusty greens, and fluorescent sunset butterflies on the beach. He blinked and looked down at his hands, flexing them deliberately, when, saddened, he found them free of sand.

Peter swallowed before swinging his legs over the side of his and Mir’s refuge cot. He stood by bracing his hands on his thighs heavily.

He’d seen Mir die. He’d been Mir, dying. Twice in one dream sequence. That didn’t feel even remotely like a dream.

I’m such an ass. He clenched both fists as he glanced at the time projected on the wall, cursing aloud.

He had to convince Mir not to join. They’d find a way to keep them safe. They’d stay in the refuge, like they’d always planned. He’d beg if he had to. At the very least, he’d send them off with his love.

Selfish. He glowered as he ripped off his pants and shirt and grabbed for the spare binder he kept in their refuge. He wrestled it on in a hurry, feet first, grunting slightly as he tugged it up and adjusted himself before slipping his clothes back on. He checked the mirror that Mir had smuggled into their refuge just for this purpose, and his heart broke. Again. Satisfied with the way his shirt fell over his binder, he wrenched open the door to their refuge.

Selfish. Thinking I could let them leave without begging them to stay. Without ever touching them again.

Selfish.

Without bothering with the usual precautions of leaving the refuge, he darted out of the alleyway and back toward the Commons. Damn what his keeper might think. He had to get to Mir.

The Commons was a blur as he streaked through it, ignoring whoever was in his path and casting over-the-shoulder apologies at the people he slammed into in his haste. He slid under one speeder and vaulted over a parked one, curling his body into itself in midair to avoid cracking his head open on the hovertrain tracks hanging in the air like a winding bridge.

He ignored the scandalized shouts and the siren-like bursts of the passing speeders. He ignored, too, the burning in his lungs from running in his binder.

He ignored everything, outside of whatever it took to get up to his and Mir’s room unscathed. Or relatively unscathed. The bruises from his rough-and-tumble journey would not bother him until later, when he would poke at them and relish the soft aches they brought.

Time slowed to a near-complete standstill for Peter as he looked at their abandoned room, the other boys long since at their various jobs. The only pod left perfectly made, as always, was Mir’s. Already, it had the number of a boy, a new boy, etched into its edge.

Already, they’d replaced them.

Forcibly forgotten them.

Erased them.

Peter fell to his knees in front of the pod, breathing through the thin oxygen leaking into the room from the rest of the stead, and—as though Mir had known Peter would collapse on seeing the pod empty, even though he’d left in such a hurry to get away from the boy who’d enlisted, who shattered all their dreams of ever being together, of ever staying alive long enough to discover what graying hair felt like—as though Mir had known Peter would be back and in a pain that would bring him to his knees on finding Mir gone—his knees crumpled into a note Mir had left. On their last sheet of ancient paper, an expensive piece of memorabilia Peter had gotten for them for their last birthday, combining the practical with the beautiful, the wondrous with the tragic, in a way Mir would never fail to love.

Peter lifted one knee, the knee that had crunched the thin white sheet, and took the page up between trembling fingers.

It reminded him, forcibly, of the creatures in his dreams. The dragon. No. The butterflies. Their wings.

 

Peter,

 

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry I ambushed you with the information. I should have told you the moment I signed up.

No. I should have told you before I did.

I have to fly, Peter. VR isn’t enough for me anymore. It never has been. You know that.

I’m not sure why flying. I just know I feel it in my bones. In my back. I don’t know if that makes sense. I just feel it the same way you feel hunger in your stomach, when you get all empty and irritable and pained until you eat. But nothing can quench this, Peter. Except the Hub. Even if we both hate the war. And I do. I do hate the war. I’ll do my best not to hurt anyone. I want to just fly on reconnaissance missions. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want wings.

I also don’t want to hurt you. I’ve never wanted to hurt you. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m selfish, usually. This is selfish. I don’t know whether to apologize for that part. You’re always telling me to be more selfish. Hello! I tried. This is me trying. Bet you’re not too happy for giving me that particular brand of advice now. Whoops.

I am not planning to die. I am planning on doing every single thing with you that we ever dreamed of. Except avoiding the choosing. Because, like I said, I want this. I want to fly, Peter. I just want to fly. I need it. Almost like I need you, but different. I don’t know how to explain it.

Anyway. I am not planning to die. But if I do, Peter—and actually listen to me here, don’t roll your eyes and pretend to listen like you do when you know you don’t want to hear what I’m going to say next—if I die, it won’t be because I wanted to leave you. I don’t want to leave you. If I die, your face will be the last thing I see, your lips on mine the last thing I feel. And that will be a great comfort. Because your love will hold me, if I die.

Not that I will. I won’t. I’ll be back. I hope you can forgive me by the time I do.

 

Love, Love, Love,

Mir