I can feel the pulse of the veins that feed her brain, but its secrets remain just out of reach, sealed behind that quarter inch of bone.
“Why?” I ask her.
She is silent for a while, her eyes still closed, and when she answers, it’s barely a whisper. “Perry. Dad. Rosy. All in two months. And any day now…if we can find her…I’ll be saying goodbye to Mom.” Her voice is so faint it seems to sneak past her lips without permission. “I’m losing too many people. I’m not ready to lose you.”
My eyes slide open. Her words spread through me like icy water.
She kisses me, hard but brief, then rolls over. I lie awake all night, staring at the back of her head.
WE
IT’S 5:32 IN THE MORNING and the sun is a faint glow behind the distant hills of Pittsburgh, shining through the tiny window of the doctor’s office where Abram Kelvin—twenty-five, smooth-cheeked, skinny—has just become a father.
The doctor lifts the baby from the bloody mess on the sheets and frowns. He turns her over and gives her a quick swat. She wriggles silently. Without a word of assurance he hurries her out of the room, and Abram starts to panic. His wife’s eyes are swimming, dilated; she seems unaware of what’s happening. But before Abram’s terror can take hold, the doctor returns, shaking his head at the newborn in his hands.
“Strange,” he says. “She’s breathing fine. I don’t know why she doesn’t cry.”
Kenrei reaches out for her baby but her hands shake and sag. She is a frail woman and the labor was hard and Abram sprung for the full drug package to make sure she wouldn’t feel pain.
“Take her,” she whispers to Abram as her eyes close and her arms fall.
Abram braces himself as if to catch a falling bomb, and his hands bob up under the the baby’s unexpected lightness. Is she made of air? Some otherworldly ether? Is she really there at all?
“Murasaki?” he murmurs.
The name doesn’t roll easily off his thick American tongue, but he doesn’t argue with his wife’s choice. It’s rare that Kenrei expresses any desires of her own. A traditional woman from a traditional culture, it’s rare that she speaks at all. So when she insisted this name was important to her, he didn’t argue. He didn’t even ask why. Names will be the least of his concerns for the children he brings into this world.
“Just a reminder,” the doctor says, wriggling out of his blood-soaked scrubs, “the delivery ran over schedule, so that’s coming out of your paternity break. You’re due back on the airstrip in…eighty-four minutes.”
“What about my wife?” Abram mumbles, lost in the contours of his daughter’s tiny face.
“Don’t worry about her.” The doctor stuffs the scrubs in a trash can and slips back into his beige uniform. “Maternity break is a week.”
He opens the door of the tiny white room and Abram glances out into the hall. An endless corridor of blinking, buzzing fluorescents, wires hanging from the ceiling, doors to other offices opening and closing continuously like valves in a monstrous engine.
“Eighty-three minutes,” the doctor says as he shuts the door behind him, and then Abram is alone with his family.
He takes a deep breath, trying to purge everything else from his mind. He looks at his wife, her long black hair slick against her forehead, her skin damp and pallid, drained of its tawny warmth. He looks at his daughter, barely bigger than his hands, her eyes shut tight but roving beneath the lids. She turns her head and stretches her fingers like she’s exploring the room. He can almost feel her eyes on him even though they’re closed, a strange, humming heat pressing against his mind.
“Murasaki,” he says again and the baby goes still, as if listening attentively. He feels a chill run down his spine. Not just from the eerie calm on her wrinkled face, but from the realization of what he’s looking at. A new chapter. A new generation. Before this moment, Abram was the dangling end of an ancient chain. Now he’s a link inside it. He feels an electric connection, a giddy expansion. Finally, after so many years of failure, mistakes, and darkness, he has put something bright into the world.
A lovely, elegant thought. But close behind it comes something louder and hotter, primal and inarticulate:
Anything. Anything.
He will do anything for this child.
Abram’s eyes are burning, but he’s sure it’s from the wind. The road has a hypnotic effect, gliding toward him in its endless sameness, undulating gently from side to side, and he finds his thoughts wandering off task, indulging in nostalgia and sentiment—but it’s the wind that’s blurring his vision. And when the road briefly becomes a vast gray snake writhing underneath him, that’s just the sleep deprivation. And the hunger. And the clawing, unbearable thirst.
The engine sputters again, skipping beats like a bad heart. The fuel gauge screams at him like a hungry baby, but he can’t provide. Very soon he will be on foot, trudging through these woods in dreamy slow motion while his daughter speeds into the distance.
His mind feels soft, his senses slippery. So when he sees a cluster of buses parked in the valley ahead, he’s not quite sure they’re real. He stops the motorcycle and rubs his eyes, but the buses remain, lined up in rows in the parking lot of an ancient truck stop, surrounded by men in beige jackets.
Adrenaline jolts through him, squeezing the last reserves of energy from his cells. His head clears.
“What is your job?”
He creeps through the surrounding woods to the back of the service station and pauses there. He’s close enough to hear chatter from the camp, not the words but the familiar drone of their voices, the low, growling timbre of men hiding weakness behind puffed chests and crossed arms. Even the smell is familiar: Axiom’s signature blend of diesel, sweat, and fear.
He doesn’t see the ad-covered bus that took his daughter, but they could have transferred her. She could be anywhere, loaded from bus to truck to trailer like common freight, a little sack of apples bruising and rotting.
He grits his teeth, takes a deep breath, and plunges into the camp, striding casually as if just returning from the restroom.
No one pays him any attention as he moves from bus to bus, scanning the windows and poking his head through the doorways. No one recognizes him from his brief television appearance an eternity of weeks ago. The Feed has moved on to other targets—a glimpse of one dashboard screen reveals a procession of traitors and insurgents from every major enclave, accompanied by brief statements of condemnation. Abram thinks whoever is running the Feed should be fired. When you’re spending more airtime on your dissenters than you are on your agenda itself, it’s time to stop broadcasting.
Most of the guards are busy securing the perimeter and scouting for salvageable goods, so the buses are empty. Except they’re not empty. They are packed tight with the Dead. Abram will continue to think of them as Dead, even the ones who meet his gaze with quiet contemplation in their gold-flecked eyes. The idea that there are more than two categories—and that there is travel between them—is a knot that sticks in his brain, and behind that knot is a swelling balloon of black blood that he can’t allow to leak through. A truth he can’t allow to be true. A decision he only survived because he thought he had to make it.
Abram scans for Sprout’s face among all these rotting corpses. She is more and more a mirror of her mother, though she didn’t have time to learn Kenrei’s demure grace. She has begun to bristle with will and wildness, like Abram’s own mother. Like all the girls he used to fall for, before his father-bosses set him straight.