You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
84<br />
COVERED IN ASH and dust, five gray ghosts occupying the woods at dawn.<br />
Megan and Sam finally drifting off to sleep, though more of a passing out than a drifting off. She was<br />
clutching Bear to her chest. Wherever there is someone in need, Bear said to me, I will go.<br />
Ben watching the sun rise with his rifle across his lap, silent, wrapped tight with anger and grief, but<br />
mostly grief. Dumbo, the practical one, digging in his rucksack for something to eat. And me, wrapped<br />
tight, too, with anger and grief, but mostly anger. Hello, good-bye. Hello, good-bye. How many times<br />
do I have to relive this cycle? What happened wasn’t hard to figure out; it was just impossible to<br />
understand. Evan found the baggie that Sam dropped and blew (literally) both Grace and himself to<br />
lime-green oblivion. Which had been Evan’s plan from the beginning, the self-sacrificing, idealistic,<br />
alien-human hybrid asshole.<br />
Dumbo came over and asked if I wanted him to take a look at my nose. I asked him how he could<br />
miss it. He laughed. “Take care of Ben,” I told him.<br />
“He won’t let me,” he said.<br />
“Well,” I said, “the real wound your medical mojo can’t touch, Dumbo.”<br />
He heard it first (the big ears maybe?), head coming up, looking over my shoulder into the trees: the<br />
snap and crackle of the frozen ground breaking and dead leaves crunching. I stood up and swung my<br />
rifle toward the sound. In the deep shadows, a lighter shadow moved. A survivor of the crash who<br />
followed us here? Another Evan or Grace, a Silencer finding us in his territory? No. Couldn’t be. No<br />
Silencer would be caught dead tramping through the woods with all the stealth of a bull in a china shop<br />
—or they would be caught dead doing it.<br />
<strong>The</strong> shadow raised its arms high in the air and I knew—knew before I heard my name—that he’d<br />
found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn’t make, the one I had marked with my blood and who<br />
had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my Silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly<br />
pure light of a late winter’s sunrise promising spring.<br />
I handed my rifle to Dumbo. I left him. <strong>The</strong> golden light and the dark trees glistening with ice and the<br />
way the air smells on cold mornings. <strong>The</strong> things we leave behind and the things that never leave us. <strong>The</strong><br />
world ended once. It will end again. <strong>The</strong> world ends, then the world comes back. <strong>The</strong> world always<br />
comes back.<br />
I stopped a few steps from him. He stopped, too, and we regarded each other across an expanse wider<br />
than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor’s edge.<br />
“My nose is broken,” I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious.<br />
“My ankle’s broken,” he said.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>n I’ll come to you.”