Rootless - Howard Chris. Страница 39

I pulled the sheet around me and hunched my shoulders in. My breath blew steamy, the same color as the clouds. Air was so cold it was hard work just to breathe it. But it helped my mind come back into focus, even if my body felt like it might snap apart.

I stared back at the steel walls of the cargo hold where my fellow survivors were now huddled together, escaped from the fire. Escaped from the burn.

But still taken.

I remembered Sal. Too high to be scared, robbed even of emotion as they’d tossed him to the flames. And I reckon I’d been a bastard to Sal, pretty much right from the beginning. I mean, what had he done? Other than live up to the way the world seemed to treat him. Father like Frost and what chance did he have? I pictured Hina holding the kid, giving him some sort of feeling, and I figured that was such a good thing to have done for someone. To give without wanting nothing in return. But Hina was gone, too. I shuddered as I pictured her about to tell me her secrets but then stolen away and lost in that swarm. And who was left? Me. Crow?

I stared at the cargo hold.

And what about Alpha?

I’d not seen her in the factory, or whatever you want to call that place. I’d not seen her since the cornfields. The back of the wagon, where she’d been dying in my arms. Dying from a poacher’s bullet I might as well have shot from my own gun. May as well have killed them all with my selfishness. Running around without thinking, instead of doing what I’d promised and finding the trees.

And you know what? For a moment I didn’t even care about the damn trees.

All I wanted was my pirate girl back.

I wanted her the same way as when I’d run barefoot through Old Orleans with my hands empty and my heart full. The way you want something when every part of you says that you ain’t going to get it.

I was scared to go looking for her. So scared to know full out she was gone. She probably hadn’t made it to the factory at all. And if somehow she had, then she’d likely been thrown like poor Sal into those hungry flames. And how could I stand not seeing her among the stolen and shaved sat huddled on this ugly barge? What would I do if she was ash and smoke when she should have been beside me with her voice soaring free?

Eventually, though, I staggered up to go try and find her. Because even when there is no hope, somehow you can still find a place to pin inside the things that you need.

I started across the deck but I tripped and fell. Landed on my face and began crawling, dragging myself through puddles of icy water. And as I tasted the water, I stopped crawling and just stared off the boat.

Water. Flat water. All the way to every horizon. And this water wasn’t just flat — it was fresh. Like out of a river. Water you could drink, not salty like the Surge. We were on a lake. Cold and deep and wide.

The freeze in the air told me we were north. Way north. Had to be somewhere above the molten wastelands, this cold this early. Somehow GenTech must have figured a path through the steam and ash of the Rift. And I figured if this was a lake, then somewhere there had to be a shoreline. A place they were taking us. And some kind of reason we had been kept alive.

I crashed back through the steel doors and let the warmth and the stale air consume me, felt every bit of skin and bone I had come roaring back to life. I steadied myself against the door as I thawed out. And then I stared around the cargo hold.

There were agents stationed along the walls, their bright purple suits in contrast to the white paint and the pale neon blast. The agents were weaponed up, no doubt about that. Pistols on their belts, spiky clubs in their hands. But I tell you, those agents had nothing to worry about. My fellow prisoners might have been moving some, but they still looked like corpses.

Vacant eyes. Lips too tired for screaming. We were a broken crew. Silent. I thought again of King Harvest and his hull full of bodies. That’s why they’d needed so many, I guess. That damn test they were running. Take some of us off across the water and burn up the ones left behind.

But what test had we passed?

I couldn’t see us being meant for working. Or eating. Not the state we were in.

I stared around for Alpha. For Crow. Scanning those shaved heads and plastic sheets for a face I knew. I wandered between the bodies that were sprawled and twisted on the floor, stepped past groping fingers and patches of flesh half-covered in plastic. Voices rose up. People whispering to one another, moaning and holding on to the person beside them.

I kept walking. Stumbling is what it was. I kept an eye on the agents along the walls. Watched for Crow’s melted skin or the stump his legs had left behind. And in my mind, Alpha didn’t fit in with anything I was seeing. Like two worlds that could not meet.

Fingers gripped cold around my ankle. They tugged at me, squeezed at me, and then went limp. I looked down. And no part of me was surprised I had walked right past her.

I remembered when I found Alpha on the wall in Old Orleans, with her arms above her head and her vest all matted with blood. I held that image close inside of me, really lodging it tight so I’d remember. So I couldn’t forget.

Because this time, Alpha wasn’t towering above me, legs spread and head thrown back. This time she was crumpled. The fuzzy pink vest with her name etched upon it had been replaced by the white of her shoulders and the crappy GenTech plastic. They’d shaved off her mohawk, and it changed her whole face. Made her look younger. And older.

I squatted down to her. My hands on her hands. My feet touching her feet. We’d been stripped of everything and painted gray, but it didn’t matter. Not in that moment. Not right then. I ran my hand over the stubble on top of her head, and she blinked at me like her eyes might work her mouth into a smile.

“I’m here,” I whispered. “Right here. And I won’t go nowhere. I promise.”

She pulled my hand to her cheek and touched her mouth to my fingers. And we sat that way for a bit, comfort enough to just keep on breathing. But finally I wanted to tell her about the lake outside we were floating over. And I wanted to know if she’d seen the things I’d seen. If she’d been awake when we’d been pulled into the city, if she’d seen the buildings grow tall and the lights explode. I wanted to know if she’d seen the fire at the factory, if she’d watched as people were torn from the rest of us and the bodies were cast into flames.

But I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. Not yet. And I had another question, one that somehow seemed more pressing.

“Your wound?” I said. “You were shot.” I pointed at my own belly. “Right here.”

“Sealed up,” she said, and her hands went to her stomach, clamping down on the plastic sheet.

“Let me see.”

She shook her head.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Show me.”

She let her hands fall beside her and I pulled apart the plastic. And there, where the wound had been, a chunk of her skin was missing. And where there used to be skin, now there was bark. Not the old piece of wood I’d shoved there to stem the bleeding. This was new. Grown fresh to patch her together. It was pink and green and knotted. I tapped on it. That unmistakable sound of wood.

Alpha yanked the plastic back across her and turned her eyes from me, as if ashamed.

“No,” I said. “It’s beautiful.” And I weren’t lying. All the beauty I’d seen before was just a dream with her in it. I tried to kiss her, but she spun her head away.

“Where are they taking us?” she muttered, tears streaming down her face.

“I don’t know,” I said. But truth was, I was starting to think I did know. It was the same place the old Rasta had been taken. The place where he’d seen my father.

The place where he’d seen the trees.