Requiem (66 page)

'I'm trying to
help them... but I can't.'

'Why not?'

'They won't
listen.'

'Why won't they
listen?'

'I guess they
don't really know any better or maybe they just don't care.'

'I'm a pretty
good listener. You could tell me if you want.'

'I'm not sure
you'll believe me.'

'I won't be
mean like the others, if that's what you're worried about.'

Seline thought
for a moment; afraid of how big the sense of failure would become
if yet another barrage of insults, or worse – indifference was
thrown in her face. She looked into the boy's eyes. They were
strong. She knew it could break her but this might just be the
final chance.

'What's your
name?' she asked.

'It's
Donny.'

'Do you know
what's about to happen to this place, Donny?'

'You mean the
big machine? The one that eats suns?'

She stopped
walking again – suddenly alert. 'So you know about Icarus? You know
that the big machine is coming to destroy Earth?'

'I didn't know
it was called Icarus but yeah, I know.'

'Do you
care?'

'Mmmhmm.' He
nodded sincerely. 'I care a lot.'

'Then we have
to get you out of here! You must know people; people that can
convince others to leave.'

'I don't really
want to go, and besides, I really only know one person.'

There was a
sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach. 'You don't want to go?
Why not? Do you understand what will happen if you don't?'

His voice
hardened as if, for just a moment, he'd become someone or rather
something else – something sinister. 'I understand what will
happen. That's why I don't want to go.'

'You don't want
to go?'

'No.'

'But you'll die
if you don't.'

Donny thought
of the book of quotations. The first page. The one underlined in
red. 'The passing... the passing antidotes of life will always be
bound by the... the... the in-e-scap-able gravity of death.'

'Who told you
that?' Seline asked.

Donny was
surprised. He knew he'd mispronounced a couple of the words but
thought that he'd passed them off as his own. He thought about
lying to her but found that he didn't want to or rather that he
couldn't.

'My friend told
it to me,' he admitted.

'Did your
friend explain what it means to you?'

'I know what it
means. I'm not stupid.'

'I'm not saying
you're stupid. What I'm saying is that you're too young to invite
death so readily. You're too young to give up.'

He wondered if
this was some kind of test. If the Warlord had sent this girl here
to see if he had what it took. To see if he deserved friendship.
Acceptance. Love.

'I'm not stupid
and I'm not giving up!' he said. 'I'm being kind. I'm not letting
the pain continue. It's wicked and needs to stop!'

She could hear
the Warlord's voice echoing in the boy's words. 'There's more than
one way to make the pain stop,' said Seline. 'If you know what pain
is, Donny, then you must know about happiness too.'

'Happiness' the
word was almost foreign to him. He couldn't remember the Warlord
ever using it around him. 'Happiness? Umm...' he scratched the back
of his head 'What do you mean?'

'I mean there
must be some things in this world that make you happy.'

He shook his
head. 'No,' he said stubbornly.

'No?'

'Nothing.'

'I used to
think the same thing,' said Seline. 'Sometimes it's easier to
convince yourself that you don't have happy memories so you can
justify being angry or sad. Do you think that you might be doing
that right now, Donny?'

She kept using
his name. Why did adults always do that? He didn't offer an answer
to her question.

'When I'm sad I
think about my friend, Belameir. Is there anyone special to
you?'

Donny still
didn't answer.

What would
the Warlord say?
He asked himself.

Seline knelt
down next to him. With what remained of her strength, she looked
straight into his eyes and smiled. She kissed him gently on the
forehead. She reached into her bag and pulled out the blackbox. She
handed it to him.

'If you can't
find your own happiness then maybe you can have some of mine.'

He played with
the blackbox in his hands. 'You can do that?'

'I truly hope
that I can. I hope that you can see there are things worth fighting
for, even if they seem really far away and even if they don't
necessarily belong to you.'

'But it's too
late... isn't it? It's too late.'

'Life is too
important to make that assumption.'

'But how could
anyone be happy in a place like this? How can it be worth
saving?'

'Look on the
blackbox. You'll see. By remembering that life can be so much more
than this we can hope for something different.'

'Something
different... It used to be different didn't it?'

'Yes. I've been
told that it was.'

'I don't think
it can be different again.'

'Why not?'

'Everything is
broken. Everyone is angry and selfish.'

'Everyone?'

He thought of
the Warlord and the strange girl that was standing before him,
speaking so softly to him. What would the Warlord think? With his
own thoughts, Donny was betraying his only friend. He broke his
gaze and stared down at the ground.

'No,' he said.
'It's too late. You're just trying to trick me.'

'Don't do this
to yourself, Donny. I can help you... just let me help you.'

The confusion
was welling inside him. The Warlord had to be right.

But how could
an angel be wrong?

The blackbox
was cold and smooth in his hand. He held onto it tightly, trying to
force the ideas together into something that made sense, like
pushing a rectangle into a circular hole. She was still in front of
him, staring. He could see the sorrow in her eyes. She wanted
something from him but he had no idea what.

He turned and
started running. He didn't look back. He didn't need to. He could
imagine the expression on her face. He sprinted off down the road,
towards the city centre.

Seline watched
the small skeleton boy running. The blackbox was still in his hand.
She remained completely still, kneeling in the middle of the road
even after he had disappeared from view.

How long would
it take to convince them? Not all of them, just some?

Too long.

She knew that.
The worst thing was that she'd known it the moment Sear gave her
the news and yet it still wouldn't sink in. Like a blunt knife, she
was forcing that piece of understanding into her brain, trying to
accept it, but it wasn't her brain that needed to be told what to
believe.

Around her, red
numbers and symbols marked the doorways of the surrounding
buildings. Belameir was down the road, talking to an old man. His
face looked like all the others. Dirtied, bloodied, and exhausted.
She wondered how much she was like them, how much of herself she
saw in them and what it meant that they tried so hard not to
care.

She looked
behind her. Down the road was a large green door lying in the
road's centre.

Abigail.

She walked
towards the house. The entire face of the building had been blown
out. Discarded entrails lay about the street. Broken records. Torn
pages. The charred remains of knotted wooden floorboards. Pieces of
cloth and second hand china. She stepped onto the green door,
laying face down in the sand. Loose scraps of paper scuttled along
the ground in the wind. She walked into the house, through its open
face into where the lounge had once been.

A portion of
the back of the room was mostly intact. She was thinking of nothing
in particular when she approached the shelf on the wall. She lifted
a piece of shredded ply off and dropped it to the floor.

Sitting beneath
the ply was a small, metal box. Seline picked it off the shelf and
examined it. There was an on-off switch on the side and two dials
on the top with an anaemic, metal rod sticking out the back. In the
bottom right corner was an exposed speaker, smaller than the palm
of her hand. The casing was cracked and almost falling apart in her
hands. She looked over it carefully and flicked the switch on the
side but nothing happened. She turned one of the dials until a low
static came from the speaker. She played with the dials again but
could find nothing but static. She placed the radio back on the
shelf, not bothering to turn it off.

She walked
silently through the rubble, unable to pin down or even direct her
thoughts. Half buried beneath a sheet of corroded metal was one of
the two red, lacquered recliners or at least a piece of it. She did
not want to see it again.

She looked up
to see Sear, standing where the front door once was. Belameir and
Therin waited on the far side of the street.

'I've tried to
help these people,' said Sear. 'For years I've tried, Seline.'

A siren wailed
in the distance. There was a deep boom. Then another. The pattering
of gunfire. The static from the radio scratched at the air.

'It's easy to
vilify the Yurricks' response, Seline, but you have to understand
that they are doing what they can to save those who want to be
saved.'

'Those they
deem worthy of saving, you mean.'

'You may not
want to believe it, Seline but the majority of humanity has fled in
the opposite direction of Saranture under their own will. They have
been conditioned to believe that we cannot be trusted, that our way
of life threatens their own, that we are their direct enemy.
NeoCorp has dispensed these stories through the population ever
since our species came in contact with one another. Try as we may,
we cannot dispel these beliefs.'

Seline said
nothing.

'While we
turned down a lot of humans because they couldn't be trusted we
didn't even get a chance to talk to most of them because
they
fled from
us
.'

'You told the
council to abandon us!'

'What did you
expect me to say, Seline?'

'I expected you
to convince them that they were wrong.'

'But they
aren't.'

'You don't
think I know that?!'

Sear hesitated.
'There was nothing I could have said. The council only spoke to me
to reaffirm a decision they had already made. A decision they
had
to make.'

'I know. I
fucking know. If the Yurrick are destroyed then Icarus continues
completely unopposed.'

'You know this?
So what do you want of me?'

Her knees felt
weak. Her legs ready to crumble beneath her. She ran her fingers
over her head. '… How could I let this happen?'

Sear took a
step closer. 'This is not your fault, Seline.'

'Really?
Because it feels exactly like it should be. I unlocked the blackbox
for your scientists. I gave them the information they needed to
wipe out my entire species. However indirect it may be, I set the
whole thing in motion.'

'The whole
thing began well before you came into the picture. These people dug
their grave with their own hands.'

The radio
static crackled into life. Plucked strings and bent notes
reverberated through the gutted house.

Seline sat down
on a piece of timber. Dirt and dust saturated the air. Light from
the setting sun barely managed to push its way through the cracks
and bullet holes of the wall. The faint, distorted shadows of her
three companions were cast upon the rubble. Sear's boots crunched
through broken glass and gravel. He knelt down next to Seline and
placed his hand on her shoulder.

A hushed and
sorrowed voice echoed from the radio. Through graceful rhyme it
asked its questions, reserved to the familiarity of the
silence.

‘We have to
leave,' said Sear.

‘I know,' said
Seline.

‘They will
close the gate if we don't leave now.’

‘I can barely
feel the sun’s warmth. It’s as if it’s the only one that
understands what’s about to happen.’

‘You can’t save
these people, Seline.’

‘I can’t just
let them all die like this. We deserve better!’

‘You can only
save those who want to be saved.’

Belameir spoke
from the doorway. ‘This isn’t your fault, Sel. You can’t keep
holding the weight of an entire civilization by yourself.’

She sat
motionless.

‘You told me
once,' said Sear, 'that your God abandoned these people a long time
ago. But what if God didn’t abandon them...

'What if they
abandoned themselves?’

These thoughts,
these ideas and concepts already existed in her head. She knew them
intimately, had entertained their assumptions, danced with their
notions, and weighed their implications. An event horizon dividing
theory and practice. An inevitable action void of true agency.
Whether she could justify it or not was quickly becoming
irrelevant.

Sear placed his
hand over Seline’s. She turned her hand over in his and held it
tightly.

‘I'm sorry,'
said Seline. 'For blaming you.'

'Just promise
me you won't blame yourself.'

You've seen
what you need to see. There's nothing left for you here.

'Let’s go,'
said Seline.

The choice
wasn’t hers to make. Icarus had already made it for them.
Humanity’s absolution was to be found at the end of a gun
barrel.

Sear pulled her
up off the ground. Still holding hands they walked out into what
would be the final moments of a star that was walking into its own
sunset. The tired, old song kept playing. The melody followed them
through the door towards the fading light, seeping into the
footprints left within the dirt, dust, and ash, trying in vain to
tether itself to reality.