Fade (19 page)

“Hey.” She sat on her ankles and touched the caramel skin of his arm with the back of her hand. “You need to wake up. Seriously.” Her breathing picked up as she began to think that she was going to watch him die. There was some simple first aid thing she could do—of which she had no idea—and he was going to bleed to death because he was stuck with her. “Hey!” She said, wanting to shake him.

Apply pressure
. That bit of knowledge gleaned from a thousand television shows popped into her head. But she didn’t like it. Her wet eyes went to the wound and she grimaced. Unsteady hands came together on top of one another and she pushed them onto the wound. It was warm, slick and wet. She gagged. He flinched at the pressure she applied and she pulled her hands away, yelping and splattering her face with lines of his blood. She stood, gagging again, and pulled up the neck of her shirt to wipe the mess away.

She stopped, tore off the hoodie she was wearing and folded it into a semblance of a square. Taking a deep breath, she tried again. After a moment she could feel the warm liquid soaking up through the cloth, but fought the urge to let up. She stayed like that for what seemed an hour. Her arms were both numb and stinging. Her face was red and flushed from heat, sweat dripped off her like she were melting, swallowed up by the parched ground. At last, he moved.

It took him a few minutes to come to. He looked at her like he recognized her but was also confused at her presence. His good eye followed her arms down to his abdomen. He took her arms and moved them away, lifting the hoodie, now heavy with blood, from the wound. Wincing, he reached a shaking hand for a small pouch on his belt, unfastening it. He held it out to Angela.

“The brown one,” he said in a dry rasp which reminded her how thirsty she was.

She poured the contents out. There were several small capsules of varying size and color. She picked out one of the three brown ones and placed it in his hand. With those unsteady hands he gave the capsule a twist and let half its contents, a thick brown powder, pour into the wound. He fell back, clenching his teeth, the wound sizzling.

When the bubbling stopped, Kah’en took a moment to catch his breath. Then he wiped the foam from the now closed wound. He threw the other half of the tablet into his mouth and swallowed. “Now we are moving.” He placed a hand above his eyes, the left of which was healing now too, to shadow them. “Getting out of this sun.”

She stared at the red semi-circle where the wound had been, then—as he rose—the place she’d burned his back too. It was healed as well. But the sun’s heat wouldn’t let her process what she was seeing, or even conjure a question concerning it. Looking ahead, out across the never-ending desolation before them, everything seemed to be jerking a few inches to the right or left every few seconds. She thought she might pass out.

He took her arm. “You kept me alive. It is being a debt now.”

“Okay.” She took an arid breath and rubbed her eyes, then looked at him. “I’m sorry. I just don’t have any idea what’s going on. Where are we?”

He breathed an unsmiling laugh, still holding his side. “Home, child. This is our home now. Our Queen’s former world, I am believing.” He looked about, his eyes becoming sad. “For us,” he took a moment to catch his breath, “The war is being over.”

***

Lucy’s eyes had fluttered open to Aern blasting Angela to nothing. In the smoke, in the dust, in the confusion, she had slipped past them through the broken wall and ran into the woods until she could run no more. She fell onto the grass, panting. The smell of the earth was redolent, but not as strong as the stench of smoke in her head. She closed her hands over the grass, listening to it snap off into her fingers. She thought of Jonas, trying to wish him there. Then, she was no longer there.

She was a soldier. There were seven others behind her. They pushed through the high grass in a shallow ditch onto the side of a road. They stopped, as quiet as death, examining their surroundings. The first signs of civilization—a barber shop—stood to their right. A body lay on the sidewalk. They knew without looking that it was strapped with explosives. The woman had probably died there waiting on someone to help, some Wraith making her believe she was paralyzed or staked to the ground before leaving her. But she was dead, desiccated even, and that meant the trap was old. They might be free of Fade for a bit longer.

As they stalked through the small town, its stores and homes now mausoleums, the stench became oppressive. Lucy looked at the rest of them through Jonas’ eyes, feeling those weary eyes tense, and pulled the mask from her pack. He’d/She’d had to wear that far too often for her liking in recent months. The Fade’s hold was expanding every day. Three months ago, this area was still a safe haven for humans. Then Fort Caraway got hit, and within a week the Fade had trampled down three counties.

They had gained nothing by murdering the people of this town. (She/he didn’t even know its name.) The Fade had done it because a squad from Caraway had taken out one of their strongholds. It was all a message. Every damn thing they did was a message that they were stronger than the frail, gutless humans.

Lucy took in a great gulp of air, back in the woods. She could still smell the rot of the town, feel the road under Jonas’ booted feet. She shook. It felt like her memory; like she’d been there. But it
had
been Jonas again, she had to remind herself—another of his memories sucking her into it. Everything was going wrong.
Why had Jonas left them in the shelter alone? He had promised her—
promised her
—that he wouldn’t.

She held her knees, rocking against a tree, wanting to get up, to run, but there was nowhere for her to go. The idea of going back home to her mother didn’t even enter her mind, and Jonas’ shelter—who knew what thing still waited there?

It felt like she had run so far already, but she could still see the smoke rising over the treetops, warning that she hadn’t run far enough. She could smell it on the wind. If the smoke could find her, so could they. So she tried to get up and run. Anywhere. But a sharp pain sat her back down. The world wavered around her. She closed her eyes. If she could sleep there awhile. Everything would be better if she could just sleep.

***

Kah’en and Angela wandered through the barren lands that afternoon, passing a few skeletal remains of villages, a narrow stream, from which they drank with lust, and then miles of little but salted earth. They slept in the remains of what looked to be an old temple. Runes spotted the walls and ancient characters were imprinted carefully in the stone under a broken altar. That night they went hungry.

Angela rolled over in the almost morning to see Kah’en sitting on the foundation of what once was the western facing wall of the building. Stars still shone in the sky but the hungry sun would come soon. She made her way over and sat next to him. He kept looking up.

“Jonas didn’t trust you,” she said.

He cut his eyes her way. “I will not be killing you, child. Battle is being over between us.”

“You keep saying stuff like that. How do you know we can’t get back?”

He looked at her full on in the rising light. “No one has.”

Angela’s heart sunk. This wasn’t fair. Everything had been taken away from her. She was coming to the end of high school and would have her pick of colleges, after a semester off in Paris, of course. She would live on the comfort and riches of a wonderfully enmeshed family for the rest of her life. Now this stranger, who had brought all of this on her, was telling her that she would grow old in what might as well be a desert, sleeping in old buildings like some derelict.

“Screw that,” she said, rising.

He looked at her, brow furrowed, lips compressed.

“I’m not giving up my life just because you say
no one has
. I don’t even
know
you.”

Without raising his voice he took a breath and gestured at the horizon. “We are not knowing what kind of predators stalk here. Not only animals.”

Angela started to protest, but dropped her chin and sat back down next to him instead. “Today you told me this was some kind of prison. Then you told me to shut up because talking would make me thirsty.” She raised her middle finger as she recalled this last bit from their walk that day. “Well, we’re stopped now. Where the hell is this place? And,
seriously
, why can’t we get back from here?”

He sat, speaking in tones as low as the light. “We are exiled. The rod Aern has shot us with, it is being like the gates we use. But it was taking us to a place we cannot leave.” He laid his hands in his lap, his eyes on the dim horizon. “It is being the rod our Queen carried. Our stories told us it was holding her world, which had been ruined by a war long passed. Like Aern, she would be sending those who were opposing her here.” Something howled far away. Angela tensed, but Kah’en went on unruffled. “But our scientists were finding that it did not hold her world, but a way to it, and to other worlds. Then we were taking this knowledge.” He looked at Angela for the first time. “It was a sign, we were believing, that she wanted us to find her.”

“Sounds like a lot of bullshit to me.
I’m
going home.”

Kah’en did not bother to look at her again and, after a while, she resigned herself to the moment.

A rush of cool air brought Angela’s arms around herself. “I’m hungry,” she said, both of them staring at nothing.

A rupture of deep red began to spread on the horizon. The black sky paled to layers of grays and blues, unfamiliar stars faded. The night had been cool, almost uncomfortably so, but that would soon be a memory. Kah’en rose after a while and Angela, silent, walked after him.

SIXTEEN

C
ynthia held Jonas’ head in her lap, rubbing a bit of his hair between her thumb and forefinger. Her mind was a white hot nothing. Everything had fallen apart so fast. The point everyone said that she’d come to, when she truly messed something up beyond repair—the point she believed would come, but not for a long, drugged-out while—had arrived.

She had imagined it as some dip in the road where she would see the error of her ways and started moving toward a life more befitting a post-teen druggie. It was something she would move past. But this moment cut deep. It ripped her raw and salted her. She felt that it revealed her inmost failings as a human being. Not as a daughter or a friend, a student or a girl—a human-damn-being.

Helpless.

She wiped at the tears that had fallen onto Jonas’ face. She raised her head to the sky and pushed at the bags under her eyes. It was there, in the stinging cloud of burnt wood, in the bright of the afternoon sun, that she broke. She twisted her torso away from Jonas’ face and wept into her palms. A bubble of spittle rose and popped in her silent throat. Her chest heaved, but she made no sound, then roared.

“I’m sorry.” The words were garbled as she moaned the opposite of pleasure. “I’m so sorry.
Sorry!
” She slapped at the grass next to her. Then, her leg jostled Jonas, whom she attended to at once, cradling his head like a baby.

“Cynthia?”

She straightened, her wet, red eyes staring into his bleary, dilated ones. “If I had been here,” she started, her voice panicked, her words running together, “I could have stopped them. I should have been here. It’s my fault. I
know
it’s my fault. Don’t hate me. I’ll do anything. I’ll go with you. I’ll fight them, Jonas. I’ll be there and fight them. Get Angela and Lucy back.
Safe
! Get them
safe
!”

He curled his arm up, his hand searching for hers. “Calm, dear.” But she could tell, even though he was still woozy as hell,
he
was anything but calm. But she tried. She tried for him. She took in a deep breath, and she let it out in a staggered wave. “Help me up,” he said.

The wind changed and he began to cough up the smoke he’d inhaled from the wasted shelter. He let her steady him and he stared at the smoldering ruins. She watched the knuckles of his right hand turn white as he squeezed his trembling fingers into her shoulder. She barely felt it.

“I used to have hope.” His eyes widened, reddened. He took a few steps away. “I just,” his breath caught in his throat, “expect the worst now. I woke up every morning of that war and told myself to pull away a little more because the friends that survived yesterday probably wouldn’t today.”

Cynthia hugged herself, staggering to rest against a tree. In that moment, she knew that she would watch everyone she knew or cared about die. Cynthia said, “I need to go by myself. Do you know where they’re at?”

“No. That’s not how this is going to happen. The rebellion’s dead. They’ll all fight for Aern now.”

Cynthia deflated. “We can’t beat them, can we?” Her voice had flat-lined.

Jonas shook his head once. “You won’t be going.”

She built up breath to speak in her tightened chest. “That’s stupid. I could give us a chance. Why go at all if you don’t even have a chance?”

“I taught you to use your abilities so that you could defend yourself if they came for you, not so you could fight my war for me. I want you safe.”

“Your war?”

“
My
war. Not this planet’s. Not even yours. They found us because of me. People have no doubt died because of me. Also, if this queen of theirs is here, and has some weapon in her tomb, or if she herself actually
does
turn out to be some kind of damned immortal with a ton of power, then I might have destroyed this world by coming here. So, yes, this is
my
war. Sending you to die is pointless.”

Cynthia stood, her lower jaw jutted, shaking. “I don’t want to be this person anymore. I want some damn thing I do to matter. Maybe not in some grand scheme of things way, but for right now. I want a moment I can point to and say I freaking mattered.”

Jonas opened his mouth to argue, but just shook his head.

“What?” Cynthia’s lip was quivering.

“This is not going to give your life meaning.” He looked at her. “This is murder to prevent murder on a grander scale. It’s not some heroic adventure. You won’t magically feel like you matter because you kill people or even rescue innocents.” Jonas shook his head again. “Is it the right thing to do?” He shrugged. “It’s the only thing I know to do—stop bad, do good. Pray God’s in there somewhere.”