“You also know how to fight,” she muses, almost to herself. “You’re weirdly lethal for such a skinny dude. You must have been a soldier or something, right?”
I don’t answer.
“Have you killed a lot of people? Is that what you didn’t want to remember?”
I don’t answer. I don’t like this path. I didn’t expect her to get so far so fast.
“It’s okay, R, these days everyone’s killed a few people. I killed three before I turned thirteen. How many was it? More than ten?”
“Yes.”
“More than twenty?”
“Yes.”
She pauses. Her steps are slowing a little. “We’re talking about your first life, right? Not the people you ate when you were Dead?”
“Yes.”
“More than…a hundred?”
I feel the skeleton of a small mammal crunch beneath my boot. I stop walking and look Julie in the eyes. “Directly? With my own hands? One person.”
She seems smaller somehow as she looks up at me. “Just one?”
“Just one. Directly.”
The followup question is obvious, but the dark heat in my eyes steers her away from it. She swallows. She looks queasy. “What about…before Axiom?” Her face brightens as she seizes on this idea. “Yeah, enough about the fucking Axiom Group, what did you do before they got to you?”
A laugh bubbles in my throat like vomit and I swallow it back down. She thinks she’s changing the subject to a lighter one, to simpler times and better days, but she has no idea where she’s heading. Each nested doll is uglier than the last.
“Did you have a job?” she asks. “Like…farming or something?”
“No.”
“Were you an artist?”
The question dislodges a few memories of me toying with a camera, snapping shots of mundane objects, macro lens closeups of dirt and skin, but this was during the leisure hours of my Axiom princehood, to distract myself from the horrors of my workday. It had nothing to do with these innocent early years that Julie is hoping to hear that I had.
“No.” My voice is gravelly and hard. It sounds like a verdict. “Not an artist.”
She’s looking queasy again. Her voice is faint. “Well what did you do, R? How’d you spend your days?”
I feel the bitter laugh rising in me again. Julie is remarkably flexible; her heart can stretch to accommodate many jagged shapes, but how much can it fit? What would it take to exceed her capacity? To break her fierce grip on compassion?
She reads my eyes and seems to wilt a little. “Maybe that’s enough for now,” she mumbles.
I nod.
“We should get back. They’re probably almost ready.”
She turns and starts walking. The wind sounds like a voice again. Not singing but whispering. I notice that I’m not following her.
“Are you coming?” she says over her shoulder, but she doesn’t stop to wait for me.
“In a minute.”
She doesn’t argue. I watch her dwindle. Then I turn and walk further out.
I hear the rhythms of syllables in the wind, the contours of phonemes, but it’s like a voice on a radio buried in static, just audible enough to make me wonder. I cock my ear, straining to make it out. Does the wind always speak? Is it always out here whispering to itself and whoever might happen to hear? What secrets would I learn if I could decipher it?
It’s blowing from the east now. A cold wind, and strangely stale, like a draft from some deep cellar. But it’s still speaking, and I’m starting to pick out words.
I tried to get away. I tried to hide you from the corruption.
It sounds like my father in his later years, his voice raw and wheezing through the tumors.
But you let the world seduce you. You gave in to your wicked heart, and now you’re going to burn. I’m sorry I failed you.
Why does the wind have my father’s voice? And what are these sharp bits of debris it’s blowing around me like tiny teeth?
Are you coming for me, kid? Are you coming to see what we built together?
The timbre has shifted. It’s raspy now instead of wheezy, older and more brittle.
You can’t sell your stock in this company. It’s locked in your blood, in your past, in a lifetime of choices.
I catch some of the debris in my hand. It’s not sand or bits of brush. It’s bone. Splintered fragments bouncing off my clothes and scratching my cheeks.
It’s inside you. It’s you.
A whirlwind is forming in front of me. It writhes and shimmies on the dry earth, filling with dust and leaves and ancient remains. It’s drifting northeast, away from the road, and it undulates like a beckoning finger, not seductive but commanding. A master to a slave.
Come, it says, and I obey.
Behind me, I hear a horn. It blasts insistently like a call to battle, but it’s miles away, someone else’s concern. I follow the whirlwind out into the night.
The underbrush grows thicker with each step. Gnarled roots tangle around my ankles and I trip into the sage and fireweed. Sharp leaves scrape my lips; I taste their bitter spice. I get up and keep walking.
Come get what you’ve earned. Come collect your inheritance.
The voices are in the whirlwind. There are many of them. They talk over each other, every statement an interruption, one trailing into the next. My father, then my grandfather, then a voice in a strange accent, then one I can’t understand at all. And then grunting. Growling. Hissing. Buzzing.
I look past the whirlwind at the dark skies to the east, and I glimpse the outline of something behind the stars. The curving edge of a maw too vast to comprehend, approaching slowly, inexorably, yawning around the universe to swallow every hope and struggle.
I move toward it.
And then someone tackles me. I topple onto my back and before I can right myself, a small but steely fist hammers into my jaw. My thoughts burst in flashes like a fireworks finale—and then it’s over. My mind is an empty night sky.
“Are you back?” Julie says between hard breaths, crouching over me with her fist cocked. “Or do I get to hit you again?”
I rise shakily to my feet. “What was I…?”
My question dies on my lips as I take in my surroundings. The RV is flashing its headlights and honking its horn, but it’s so far away it looks like a toy. And in the other direction, just a few steps from where Julie stopped me…
A cliff. A ravine of jagged rocks, like shadowy teeth in the darkness.
“We have to hold on, R,” she says, half accusing, half pleading. “Tomsen warned us. Our thoughts can change things. We have to hold on or we’ll fall apart.”
Her face is twisted with distress, but she doesn’t stay to hold me together. She heads toward the road with stiff strides, like she’s done all she can for me and can’t bring herself to look back.
I follow a few paces behind her, but I look back constantly. And I see nothing. The sky is empty. The wind is warm and silent. But my cheeks still sting from a dozen tiny scratches, and when I brush a hand through my hair, a few white fragments shake loose.
No one says anything as I step into the RV. Julie’s back is to me in the passenger seat. Tomsen starts driving without a single I-told-you-so. I retreat to the bedroom before M can break the silence, and I find the kids watching me with secretive smiles. It’s not amusement or mockery. It’s not about me at all. They did something they’re proud of, and they’re waiting for me to notice.
And then I notice. The wind buffets the coach as we hurtle down the highway, but I hear no off-key singing from the hole in the rear window. Because the hole is no longer there.