“Spare me the speech,” Ani said. “I’ve seen you on the network. I get it. But you don’t understand what the Brotherhood is about.”
“Oh, really? It’s not about ripping your head open and trying to find a way to get rid of us? Because I was there, and I know what I saw. What they did to you.”
“That was Savona,” Ani said. “Auden’s in charge now, and he’s different. You, of all people, should know that.”
“He was different,” I agreed. “You, of all people, should know that things change.”
“And the Brotherhood has,” she said, with a serenity I could only assume masked insanity, or at least severe delusion. “So have I.”
“Okay, tell me. What does this new and improved Brotherhood have to offer, besides self-hatred?”
“The Brotherhood of Man celebrates humanity in all its forms and services those who have been overlooked or forgotten by—”
“Spare me the speech. I’ve seen the press release. What’s it got for you?”
“I don’t know.” Ani wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe… absolution.”
“Ani—”
“Everyone belongs somewhere,” she said. “They have to.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“So when is this joyous reunion taking place?” I asked finally.
“They say I can get out of here in another week.” She smiled. “You should go. I don’t want to fight. Not with you.”
I stood up. “Fine. But I’m coming back.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said, but she didn’t tell me not to, and that was at least a start.
I was almost out the door when she called my name, so softly that I almost thought I’d imagined it.
“I lied,” she said, louder. “Jude’s been texting. Once a day. I don’t write back.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t delete them.”
“Okay.”
I waited.
“One of the texts was for you,” she said. “If you ever showed up. I don’t know what made him think I would even read it.”
Maybe because he knows you, as much as you know him.
“It’s a zone,” she said, then scribbled something on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. It was nothing but a random scramble of letters and digits. “He says when you’re ready to see him, drop a text and he’ll meet you there.”
“Where?”
“‘Where the sky meets the sky.’ He said you’d understand.”
Another riddle. Just as useless. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Ani said. “Sorry.” She didn’t sound it. “If you ask me, you should forget the whole thing. Let him come to you. After what I saw…” She was talking about the kiss. I willed her not to make it real by saying it out loud. “…he will. Probably at the worst possible time.”
It’s exactly what I was afraid of.
Where the sky meets the sky.
A mile past human sorrow.
Where nature rises again.
They meant something; they meant something to me. Jude wouldn’t have left a clue I didn’t know how to follow. I repeated the words, over and over, an unending litany, waiting for something to click. There was an echo of memory, enough to convince me that I had the answer, buried somewhere in my mind. But not enough to dig it up.
Remember, I willed myself, knowing that if I didn’t track him down soon, he would come for me again, at the worst possible time—or he would come for Riley, and I needed to get to him first.
Remember.
Remember.
When I finally did, it wasn’t Jude’s clue—it was that word. Remember.
The place itself was a memory. The Windows of Memory, memorial to the fallen, windows that peered out on a sanitized corner of a flood zone, a shadowy city buried beneath the sea. I hadn’t been inside the museum since I was a kid—Riley and I always skirted its edge, walking the shore until we found ourselves alone with the water, its algae-slickened surface reflecting the clouds. Where the sky meets the sky. And always, on our way back to the car, dripping and content, we passed the sculpted glass antelope, memorial to the city’s forgotten victims. I’d paused to read the inscription only once, that first time, but the words must have etched themselves somewhere in my memory, and a network search confirmed my suspicions: “In the midst of our human sorrow, let us never lose sight of the greater tragedy: the death of millions, innocent victims of civilization. As cities fall, may nature rise again.”
A mile past human sorrow, where nature rises again; I knew where to find him.
I wanted to be wrong. Because that was our place, Riley’s and mine. Riley had told me that he’d never brought anyone else there, not even Jude. He wasn’t supposed to know how much it meant to Riley, that it was the place he went to be alone—and now, the place he went to be with me.
But that was the thing about Jude, as he so loved reminding us: He had a way of knowing things. Especially things he wasn’t supposed to know. Those were his favorites.
I dropped a text at the anonymous zone. I figured it out.
The return message came a few seconds later, in the mouth of a cartoonish avatar, its sad puppy eyes and floppy puppy ears a mismatch with the lizardlike torso and dragon tail. It looked like the kind of av you build yourself when you’re getting started on the network, designing a zone with all the features of the fantasy world in your head, making up for the increasing drabness of real life. Like this was a game. Tonight, seven p.m. The puppy-lizard chirped, in a songbird voice, “I’ll be the strikingly handsome fellow with the charming smile.”
And I’ll be sick, I thought.
But I knew I would go.
I had never been there at night, and I’d never been there without Riley. Without him, without the sun glinting off the glass spires and shimmering on the water, without the crowds of orgs pretending to mourn, it felt like somewhere else. Somewhere new.
I scaled the fence that separated the tourist area from the wilderness, and padded softly down to the water. There was no reason to think that Jude would meet me at the same spot I always met Riley, but it was about a mile out from the Windows of Memory, a mile from “human suffering.” So that’s where I would begin. I’d had visions of Jude laying an ambush for me, emerging from the water like some kind of mutant swamp monster, just to hear me scream. If he was hiding, he’d hidden himself well; the coastline was deserted.
It was too dark to see the horizon. The ocean stretched into sky, and standing on the edge of it was like looking over a cliff into nothingness. I imagined what it would be like, wading into the dark water and floating above the silent city of death, with its frozen cars and grinning corpses. Floating away into the vast nothing.
I’d never been one to fear monsters crawling out of the dark—but I couldn’t turn my back on the lapping waves. I edged backward up the shore.
And bumped right into him.
So he got to hear me scream after all.
I whirled around. “What the hell are you trying to—Riley?”
“Hey.” He didn’t look surprised to see me. “Did I scare you?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Uh, you told me to meet you here?”