“Where’d he come from?” Avian asked. He threaded a needle. I watched with wide eyes as he started sewing the man back up.
“We don’t know,” West said quietly. “Is he going to be okay?”
“The wound is dangerously close to his heart. There are a lot of major blood vessels in that area. I can’t repair the internal damage so there’s a risk that even if the bleeding stops on the outside, it may not stop on the inside.”
West’s face blanched white.
The man opened his eyes, rolling around in his head. “My wife,” he said. His voice was rough sounding and then I noticed the tears rolling back toward his ears. “My son. They found us. I… was out. They got them. …had to run.”
We all looked up at each other. Avian dropped what he was doing and opened the box that contained the CDU. Less than thirty seconds later he had it charged up and calibrated. The man jerked away as it was pressed to his bare arm. His eyes continued to roll around in his head.
Organic but dying quickly.
“Where did you come from?” I asked, leaning over him so he could look me in the eye. His own eyes remained unfocused.
“He may not be able to speak right now,” Avian said as he cut the threads of the stitches. “His body is going into shock.”
“Where did you come from?” I asked again.
“E… east,” he barely managed to whisper. “Been running since… day before yesterday.” He then started coughing violently. Red splatters coated his lips.
“His lung has been punctured,” Avian said in despair as he sat back and rubbed his hand over his stubbled hair.
“He’s not going to make it,” I said quietly, looking back down at the man. Avian shook his head.
“I killed him,” West whispered, backing up to sit on a stump.
“You didn’t know,” I said, glancing at him. “You were trying to feed us, keep us alive.”
“He’s obviously not food,” his voice was hoarse.
Two hours later, the man whose name we didn’t even know, took his last shallow breath. Avian checked his pulse and pronounced him dead, his voice shaky and hollow. Gabriel instructed Bill and Graye to bury him on the outskirts of camp. After it was done, Gabriel, Avian, West and I gathered back in the medical tent.
“They’re getting close again,” I said as I paced the length of the tent. “Attacks don’t usually come from the east. It’s just mountains for miles and miles.”
“Graye was right,” Avian spoke. “They’re getting more and more aggressive. This man probably lived in a cabin somewhere with his family. They tracked him down. We all know what they did to the gardens a few weeks ago.”
Gabriel rubbed at his beard, deep in thought. I wanted him to say something, to tell us what to do. But I didn’t think he knew what to do though.
“We’re going to have to leave,” I spoke when he didn’t. “We have a few months of food left but it won’t be enough to last us through the winter.”
“Where would we go?” Gabriel asked. I saw something frightening in his eyes that I had never seen there before. A loss of hope.
“It would have to be south,” Avian spoke up, his eyes coming to my face.
“Exactly,” I said. “If we can get somewhere warm enough we should be able to scavenge for food until we can figure something else out. I think it would also be wise to go southwest. Heading east first will take too much time. The trucks we have might not make it very far and it could take months just to hike over the mountains, if or when they break down. By then winter will claim the rest of us.”
Gabriel nodded his head, his brain seeming to start to work again. “I agree but going west won’t be easy either. We leave now and we’ll be crossing nothing but desert in the heat of summer.”
“Do we wait?” West asked, the first he had spoken since the meeting began.
“We risk the Fallen pressing further in on us if we wait,” I pointed out.
“We risk the desert heat claiming us if we go now,” Avian said, sitting forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Temperatures can get close to 120 degrees out that direction. Without massive amounts of water, no one would last long.”
We seemed to be at a standstill. What was the right thing to do? The safest thing?
“I say we take it to everyone,” West said. “We have to let everyone in Eden know what is happening. They have to be figuring it out for themselves anyway. Let’s let everyone decide what to do.”
“I agree,” Avian said as he sat back again.
Gabriel nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “Fine. We’ll call a meeting tonight after dinner.”
West and Gabriel exited the tent to spread the word. I stood rooted and closed my eyes. I counted backward from ten to help push out the feelings of loss and despair I didn’t know how to deal with. A warm hand slipped into mine, immediately enhancing the calm I was looking for. Without opening my eyes, I raised our hands up to my face and rubbed the back of Avian’s hand against my cheek. I could feel Avian’s eyes on my face and I realized what the emotion that was rolling off of him was. Worry.
I wanted to reassure him that everything was going to be okay. I wanted to tell him that we were all going to make it out of this. I wanted to tell him that I knew exactly what to do.
But I couldn’t do any of those things. I didn’t have any answers.
I finally opened my eyes and looked into Avian’s. Raising my other hand, I placed it on his cheek, feeling the stubble that was growing there. His eyes burned as he looked down at me and I felt a strange feeling in my chest. Almost as if it were splitting in two. I wanted to press my lips to his in that moment, to bury my face in his chest and to have him wrap his arms around me again.
But I also remembered what I had done with West, remembered Avian’s own words.
I let go of Avian’s hand and stepped outside into the dying light.
You can’t have both.
Avian was right. Even though I didn’t know how to handle feelings like this, I knew what I had been doing was wrong. I couldn’t have both. It was unfair to both of them. And it was tearing me into two people.
But how was I supposed to choose? I felt a tie to both of them, a tie so solid I wasn’t sure that even I was strong enough to sever it. On the one hand, Avian was home and made me feel secure and right. Everything felt okay when I was with Avian. But at the same time, he was still so much older than I was. And he would be tied to Eden in such a permanent way. He would never be able to go on raids with me, never be able to go hunting or on scouting duties. We would always be separated at times and there was always the risk that we might be permanently that way.
On the other hand, West had woken up something inside of me. I never felt more alive than I did when I was with West. West pushed me to be more. More human and yet more cybernetic at the same time. West could go anywhere with me. He could nearly match me step for step on scouting duties, could hunt with me.
But I still didn’t fully trust him. West kept too many secrets, had lied to me too many times. And he almost seemed to like to make me angry.
It would be so much easier if I didn’t have to make either choice. Picking neither and going back to the way I was just a few months previous would have been so much simpler. But something inside of me had changed. There was no going back now. I couldn’t live the same without them.
But how was I going to sever one of them?
I decided to pull Sarah aside after the meeting. I needed someone to talk to or I was going to explode.
Someone had to sit out and keep watch during the meeting so West had volunteered. The rest of us gathered in the center of camp. I watched them as they gathered, saw the way the lines around their eyes were tighter, the way their breathing was just slightly shallower. Everyone was on edge.