Scareship_Issue8

“What if they don’t?”
“They have to. We can’t be it—the last ones left. Why should
we be the last ones left?”
Kai is more afraid than he means to be. Light staggers down
from heaven and brown eyes flash white so that he can see what he
has done to his sister, who is forcing her teeth down onto her lips
and gnawing at dead skin, a bad habit she forgot to break.
“I want to run,” Em says.
“It must be them. It must.”
“It’s not. It’s just a storm. Just a storm! Can’t you see?”
“No.”
“They told lies.”
“We have to wait for them. That’s all we can do.”
“We have to hide.” She means to say where, but then she
glances over her shoulder and finds the storm at their backs. The
scrap heap is no sanctuary to them now.
“We have to stay here and wait for them. They’ll miss us.”
“I want to go down there. I don’t like the light.”
“We can’t. It’s…” He stops, the words catching, because he
doesn’t know what it precisely it is, or why they can’t go, except
for that the broadcasts and his mother said so.
“It’s just the wild.”
He nods stiffly and tightens his hand around hers.
Light explodes into being behind them as they tumble down
the ravine. Em shuts her eyes so she cannot see the ragged mess of
wilderness reaching up to drag her inside of itself. The
complexities of the angles of the moon are lost to her as she comes
into the darkness but she can make out new shapes in her mind and
calculate their dimensions when she imagines the curvatures of the
hungry branches that reach up with their black fingers to swallow
her headfirst.
And when they fall, Kai can remember the shadows of the
trees at the edge of town, of the wild that was too dangerous, of the
wild that they chopped down and hid away. He can remember why
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