Nora studies her friend for a moment. “You were crying.”
“Yeah.”
Nora sighs and heads up the stairs. “Come on. There’s an open bed.”
What was once a large master bedroom has been converted into a sort of boarding school barracks. Rows of single beds run along the walls, thin pillows and blue wool blankets. No other furnishings whatsoever. It’s too hot for the blankets so they lie on top of them, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.
“You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Julie says.
“Honestly,” Nora says, still fighting the knot, “I don’t know what I want yet.”
“All right. I’ll go first then.” Julie folds her hands on her stomach. “R just told me everything.”
Nora turns her head on the pillow, trying to read Julie’s face, but her eyes are far away.
“Who he was before. What he did.”
“And?” Nora says quietly.
“And it was bad.”
“Worse than eating your boyfriend?”
“Somehow…yeah.”
“Wow.”
“Because there isn’t any plague to blame for this stuff. It was just him. His choices. His character.”
They’re silent for a moment. Nora considers asking for specifics but decides she doesn’t need them. “I don’t know, Jules,” she says. “I feel like that doesn’t add up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…R may be awkward and kind of a whiny bitch…but if there’s one thing he’s got going for him, I’d have to say it’s his character.”
Julie glances over at her. “You think so?”
“Have you ever seen anyone try harder to be a good person? Everything’s a moral puzzle with him. He agonizes over every step. It’s fucking annoying, to be honest.”
Julie looks back at the ceiling. “That’s what I don’t understand. How could he be a monster for so long and then become who he is now? Is it just the magic reset of being Dead? Did he…cheat his way into a new life?”
“I’m sure that’ll be a big topic in post-plague philosophy,” Nora says. “But I don’t think that’s it. I think there are lots of ways to reset. I mean, how did you do it?”
“Me?”
“Seven years ago you were an insufferable emo kid who thought the whole world was built for your torment. You walked around flashing your wrist scars like they were badges of courage.”
Julie grimaces.
“You actually listed off all the bad shit you’d been through to see how it compared to mine, like it was a fucking contest. Like whoever had the most trauma had the most authority on life.”
“Please stop before I puke,” Julie mutters.
“My point is…you used to be the worst. And now you’re my favorite person. Now you’re kind and caring and fucking hilarious, and you take everything seriously except yourself. You love the world, and you fight for it.” She rolls onto her side and looks right at Julie. “And you fight for your friends. When they’re falling apart, you chase them across the country to catch the pieces.”
Julie keeps her eyes on the ceiling. They are glistening again.
“So how did you do it?” Nora asks her. “How’d you break all that bad momentum and become who you are now?”
Julie wipes her eyes and looks up at the ceiling with a faint smile. “I think it was you.”
Nora frowns. “Me?”
“I think meeting you was my reset.”
Nora snorts, but there’s affection in it. “How?”
“You were solid. Rational. You were immune to my melodrama but still…human. The opposite of my mom without being like my dad.”
Nora listens in cautious silence.
“You shook me out of myself. Knocked me off my course.” Julie chuckles. “Maybe literally, when you punched me in the face.”
Nora can’t help smiling. “Well…you’re welcome.” She swallows another knot and takes a steadying breath. “But we’re…we’re not talking about me, remember?”
Julie rubs her palms into her damp eyes, trying to smother the itch. “So you think it doesn’t matter who R used to be. Even if he was a fanatic and a warlord. Even if he helped create all the shit we’re fighting.”
Nora hesitates. It’s getting harder to resist demanding details, but she tries to keep herself on track. “It does matter. Whatever he was, it’s a part of him.” She weighs her words carefully. “But what matters more…is who he is now, right? What he built with those parts?”
Julie is silent.
“Maybe that’s why he tries so hard. Because he knows what it’s like on the other side.”
Julie sits up, cross-legged on the wool blanket, and twists a chunk of her hair into a knotted braid. “So you think I should forgive him.”
“I don’t know if you should or shouldn’t. But I think I would.”
Julie takes a deep breath and exhales, releasing the braid to unravel. “So does that mean you forgive Marcus?”
Nora opens her mouth, then clamps it shut. Her wisdom doesn’t sound as wise when it’s reflected back at her.
“Does it mean you’re ready to go with us?”
Distant voices float through the open windows. The tourists are returning. Nora rolls onto her back and studies the topography of the ceiling. Cracks like canyons, water stains like lakes, black forests of mold.
“Nora,” Julie persists. “Are you ready to go home? So we can do what we need to do?”
Nora listens to the approaching murmur of laughter and conversation. When the tourists enter the house, it rises through the floorboards like music, and if it had lyrics, they would be about about belonging together, marching together, safe and full of conviction.
“Are you?” Nora asks quietly.
Julie turns to look out the window. She squints into the muggy night air, a rippling blackness like molten tar. “I don’t know what I’ll feel the next time I look at R. I don’t know what I’ll do when I find my mom.” She takes a shuddering breath and straightens her spine. “And I don’t know know what’ll happen in Post, or if any of us will be alive next week.” She chuckles darkly. “So fuck no, I’m not ready. For any of this. But I know I have to do it.”
Nora sees conviction in her friend’s face, and it’s a different kind than the fervent intensity of her new Ardent companions. It’s not a graft; it’s old-growth, weathered and real, sprouting from her own experiences with no outside framework to prop it up. The laughter downstairs suddenly sounds thin, like something recorded long ago and replayed too many times.
“What if I wanted to stay here awhile?” Nora says in spite of the sinking in her stomach. “To take care of Addis.”
“Nora,” Julie says, twisting around to face her. “We can’t do this without you. I can’t.”
“Why not?” Nora half-whispers. “Why am I so damn important?”
“Because you’re my friend—no, fuck blood, you’re my family.”
Nora blinks. Her throat spasms.
“And wherever this nightmare’s taking us, we should go there together.”
Footsteps pound up the stairs behind an eruption of laughter. Julie gives Nora a final pleading look, then drops onto her pillow and pretends to be asleep. The tourists barely lower their volume. It doesn’t matter. Nora will not sleep tonight. She will lie on top of the blanket, sweating in the dark heat, watching black clouds of choices swirl behind her eyelids.
I
IN DOWNTOWN MISSOULA, across the street from the ice cream parlor, there is a religion store. It sells books of theology, guides for righteous living, and thirty-six different versions of the Bible. There are paintings and plaques bearing scripture, paraphrases of scripture, and modern aphorisms mistaken for scripture. And there are weapons. The sign calls them “disciplinary aids,” but when I see a rack of wooden clubs and rods hanging from leather straps, I find it hard not to think of a castle’s armory. Or its dungeon.