I stood there, staring at West, fighting with the emotions I felt inside. I wanted to feel the fire again, to push and see how far I could go till I burned to ash. And yet something inside of me felt that was wrong. Being with someone wasn’t just about feeling the blaze. There were other things you were supposed to feel as well.
“Can I stay with you tonight? Will you just…” I hesitated. “Hold me?”
He looked at me for a moment, a million different things running through his head. “Of course,” he answered, his voice hesitant.
West lay back on his cot and I folded myself into his chest, his warmth immediately seeping into my skin. He wrapped his arms around me and I was surrounded by his scent. I pressed my cheek into his chest, listening for his heartbeat. Exactly the same but yet so different from Avian’s.
“Are you okay?” he whispered into my ear.
I shook my head. “No. But I hope someday I will be.”
TWENTY-THREE
Two days later, the flap of my tent was opened in the dead of night. Avian stepped inside, his face grave and illuminated by the lantern in his hand.
“Can you come with me?” he asked. I had never heard his voice sound so rough. I then noticed the red rim around his eyes. I nodded once and followed him through the dark without a word.
Somehow I knew we were going to his tent before I had even left mine. The darkness felt heavy and cold, despite the summer heat. My hands felt clammy and my insides hollow.
We stepped inside and I felt myself freeze up in despair.
Sarah lay on her cot, her eyes closed, rimmed with a frightening shade of red. Her face was covered with a sheen of sweat and her entire frame trembled slightly. Her breathing came in terrifying gasps.
“She’s been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours,” Avian said, his voice sounding as if it were being dragged over rocks. “I can’t wake her up.”
I knelt at her side, pushing the hair back from her face. Her chest twitched violently as her body fought for air.
“Sarah?” I said quietly, taking one of her bony hands in mine. “Sarah?” I said again, my lips pressed into her clammy skin.
Avian sank to his cot, resting his face in his hands. In a few moments his shoulders started to shake as the tears consumed him.
I knew then why Avian had asked me to come. He had wanted me to be able to say good-bye.
I closed my eyes as I pressed my lips to her hand again. Every time Sarah had gathered me up in her arms, every encouraging word she had spoken to me as a young teenager reverberated in my mind. Flashes of her smiling face swam through my head. I recalled all the squabbles she and Avian had gotten into, remembered all the days they wouldn’t talk to each other afterwards, and then the awkward apologies that followed.
West, Bill, or even Gabriel might say that I had never had a mother, never known a sister. But he was wrong. I’d had Sarah. She was better than both.
“I’ll always miss you,” I whispered, surprised at how rough my voice sounded. Avian’s sobs became all the louder as he heard my words. “I will always remember you. I don’t know that I would have turned out as human if it wasn’t for you. You gave me a family when I didn’t have one.
“Thank you for everything, Sarah.”
Avian gave a heart-wrenching cry, his shoulders shaking violently. In that moment I had to push out his pain and stay with my best friend. These were our final moments together.
The sound of Sarah’s labored breathing became all the more terrifying over the next hour. Her skin started turning a grey purple and her hands grew cold. I squeezed her hand all the tighter.
Just before dawn, Sarah’s body was finally still.
We buried Sarah by the lake. Bill and Graye had found a perfectly smooth salmon colored rock and had somehow managed to carve her name into its surface. Gabriel snapped out of his stupor just enough to speak, to give honor and remembrance to her name. Avian hadn’t said a word since he had come to get me the night Sarah died. I held his trembling frame for two whole days after.
TWENTY-FOUR
I rolled the blue barrel up the ramp and it settled at the front of the truck bed with a small sloshing sound. I hopped down and West helped me roll the next one in. The rest of the first group started packing in the rest of the water, then loaded the supplies and our food stores.
The boxes I grabbed rattled as I picked them up and I suddenly realized just how valuable all of our ammunition had become. We couldn’t grow ammunition, we couldn’t scavenge it out of the woods. Ammunition had to be found in civilization and it had become nearly impossible to go into the cities. We were going to have to be even more careful than ever.
Sarah’s death seemed to have woken something back up in Gabriel. I had talked to Avian about it. He’d explained that more than likely, Gabriel had just snapped. He’d been trying to keep everyone alive for so long and finally, after recent events, he just couldn’t take anymore. But he was back to his old self, taking charge and making sure things were taken care of. It was he that had come up with our future means of leaving messages, just twelve hours before we were to leave.
“What are the Fallen?” Gabriel asked one day.
“The Fallen?” I asked, confused at his question.
Gabriel nodded. “The Fallen. What are they?”
“Robots.” West said. I hadn’t heard him approach us and jumped at his voice.
Gabriel nodded again, bending down to pick up a rock. “And what are they made of. What makes them tick?”
“Metal.” I said, watching him pass the rock from hand to hand. “Nanites. Pulses and currents. I don’t get what you are…”
“Exactly.” Gabriel interrupted. “They aren’t organic. Not anymore. They don’t see the world. Fallen don’t notice nature. The cybernetics in them only seek out human tissue, to spread itself. We’ll use nature to hide our messages.” He crouched to the ground, gathering stones that had any size to them. Carefully, he started stacking them, one on top of the other. “The Fallen won’t notice them. They will just see the rocks. But we, Eden, we will see the messages. They’re called cairns.”
“We could leave notes at the bases of them,” West said, his voice excited as he observed Gabriel’s work. “The things we’ve found, any warnings. If we place them under the stones the Fallen will never see them.”
“Exactly,” Gabriel said, his smile disappearing into his beard. “My wife has been copying the maps as exactly as she can for the last few weeks so we can leave locations. We run a smaller risk that we will be permanently separated that way. Pick a destination in the direction we are headed and let us know. We have our general direction but there is going to have to be room for change. Who knows what we’re walking in to.”
The work on the trailers was completed that night. The one that had been rusting away for years, left abandoned, was the one that the first group would take. The second one that Bill and Graye had brought back from the city would transport the second group. And if either of them failed to function, we always had our legs.
On our last night in Eden we feasted. At least a starvation feast. Food never tasted so wonderful as I helped myself to two rolls, a heaping scoop of canned corn and a baked potato. The thought to share my portions with Sarah flashed through my mind. Then I remembered.
I glanced down the table at Avian who sat talking hurriedly with Victoria, pointing at something in the book that was laid on the table before them. Not that it truly mattered, but her status and usability in Eden would be greatly increased if we ever all actually made it south. She was going from seamstress to the other doctor.
The thought that that would free up Avian crossed my mind and the smallest of a smile tugged at my lips.