The farther east they migrated, the less alone Timeica felt on her journeys. That prized lonesomeness, that privilege of solitude she had gathered about her in the quiet of the verdant tranquility, the red of the sky and the gray of the earth began to leech. Paper burger wrappers strewn around tree trunks, hypodermic needles crushed beneath a stampede of heedless bootheels or plain bare feet. Used and unused condoms. Sometimes hotplates or a makeshift rice cooker, or a pot of hot water and cut-open Coke cans for cups. Evidence of people leaving in a hurry. She could no longer be alone in these places because the shame of what people had done to each other hung thick from the branches like rotted, blood-dotted laundry, choked the pride and dignity out of the whole enterprise and left her walking back to Wyatt with shoulders hunched, feet dragging, in a posture of shamefulness, as though a guilty conscience were pulling her back to confess her sin.
Along a side of highway, they couldn’t tell which one as the signs had long since rotted, Wyatt leaned against their car, chewing bits of a taco he’d bought a while back. He had wanted to get far enough out of town that Marauders or less organized bandits wouldn’t see them enjoying their meal. Timeica wanted to needle him about how ridiculous his caution was, but then she remembered sneaking past Wyatt’s room one time when Mama was alive and hearing her reprimand him for wearing his red Blackhawks hoodie out at night, chiding him with great desperation about how dangerous it was, and Timeica had thought she was talking about gangs but would later learn she was talking about cops. Mama lit into Wyatt fierce about it, in his ear about how we had to be twice as good for half as much and how they didn’t need an excuse to make you a corpse and Timeica had stood frozen by that crack in the door, staring at Wyatt with his head down looking at his lap, utterly still because he hated hearing this stuff again and hated even more that it was all true.
From the back seat, Timeica looked out over the unending sprawl of former farmland. It was desert on both sides, rendering this slice of southern Illinois indistinguishable from the Texas she saw on the Net or in the pictures Madeline would send her via Flex of her own family’s odyssey through the South.
Telephone lines sagged toward the earth, the poles to which they were connected curled like a gang sign. The occasional abandoned house or dwelling that Timeica would think was abandoned but Wyatt would warn her was not had melted windows and sometimes a roof was missing and sometimes dogs chewed carrion out front and sometimes a banner would be hung or a name spray-painted in radiation tag marking the spot as territory belonging to one set or another. Whenever they drove by, Timeica would follow the outposts with her gaze, trying to figure out how street gangs adjusted to a place where there were no more streets. How could their ambitions expand to fit such vastness?
Timeica asked Wyatt this around a small fire by the side of a highway, in a little ditch that managed to hide much of their flame, according to Wyatt. And in Wyatt’s face was a moment of contemplation, of empathetic projection. “Maybe it’s like when you realize you could do something physically that you couldn’t before. Like you short your forty-time or you do a few more push-ups than you could yesterday. You can stretch yourself out a little bit. Imagine you claim a set and instead of a street corner, you get all this.” He waved his arm up and down the strip of highway, indicating its entirety.
She had an idea of what he was talking about, but couldn’t square it with why someone would want all this. “What do you do with this, though?”
Wyatt shrugged. “Own it.” He was thinking of the purple, patterned banner hanging down the front of that last house. A cemetery, someone else’s cemetery, lay in a plot right next to it.
She squinted into the darkness. “Is this what happens?” A memory of their old kitchen and Mama and one of their uncles sitting across a table and that uncle wearing glasses and drinking something dark and sweet.
“When you push someone out, yeah. This was before your time, before the red dust, but it’s like what they did to Brooklyn decades back. New York, really, before it got evacuated.”
“Like when the rent goes up?”
“Yeah. Like when the rent goes up.”
There was nothing she could see in the darkness, but she looked anyway, the wall just as impenetrable as it had been a moment ago. “Who’re we pushing out, then?”
“We ain’t pushin’ anyone out. You think if white people wanted any of this, they’d let anyone from Grove Street have it?” He chuckled, and Timeica didn’t quite understand why.
They’d get to cities—Gary, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio—and Wyatt would tense for the first week until, she realized, he knew where the patrols were and where they weren’t, whether the police here skirted the perimeters of the Bounded City with red-blood cops or mechs and would seem almost goddamned relieved when he saw a purple dragon in profile tagged on a wall or the Grove Street marijuana leaf.
She grew to grudgingly accept the cities, so that by the time they’d arrived in the East, she could wander the collapsed opera halls and hollowed-out factory buildings and voided school gymnasiums and find in them the same reverent quiet she’d once looked for in forests. Her footsteps, in those moments, echoing in the cavernous maws of the opera hall, the factory floor, or the gymnasium, would be the only thing wrong with those perfect places.
Wyatt never let Timeica see his hurt, tried, at least. And Timeica remembered much of their trip thinking he hurt for having lost Mama. But in those soft, warm moments stopped on the side of the road or seeking shelter beneath an overpass, from flying mechs or Marauders or the wild-eyed, double-jawed monsters that only seemed to move across that land at night, Timeica saw him smile a smile that wasn’t yet wistful.
Chicago had still been teeming with life by the time they’d left. Too many people for the jobs that paid. And within the Dome, folks were still tearing each other to pieces. When Mama died, their blood-tie to the place broken, they knew they had no choice but to leave. It was what Mama would have wanted.
Here, farther east, Wyatt’s smile turned into the kind that recalls a memory or a place where something was better, kinder, freer, and it never occurred to Timeica until then to think of her older brother as a frontiersman. They’d been privileged, she realized, to have lived on the edge of undiscovered country, and it hurt Wyatt that they’d had to give that up.
In West Virginia, there was still forest. Varying green shades that rose up small mountains into misty diadems.
One fogged morning, Timeica rose before Wyatt and bounded into the forest by the side of the Interstate, her pistol slapping against her thigh, her knife sheath bobbing beneath her armpit. Giggling, giddy, she soon remembered her proper posture and let her shuffles become the only noise announcing her passage.
The forest ended.
Like a blanket had been lifted from her eyes, a pitted, ravaged moonscape lay before her, bits of honeycombed earth held up on stilts where the things hadn’t yet collapsed.
Shock kept her from crying until she returned to their tent, and when she did finally start bawling, Wyatt held her like he knew why she was weeping. And she let him hold her because she knew he did.
Jonathan had a wool blanket draped over a coat draped over his shoulders as he sat on the front porch of his yet-unfinished home. The new freezer deep in the bowels of the house had brought with it a new serenity, what one of the other settlers called an insh’allah attitude, something she’d learned traveling somewhere in Mesopotamia. A sort of “it’ll get done when it gets done” mindset. A leaving-behind of control, so that everything that happened was its own miracle. Even the mug of hot chocolate in his gloved fingers.
David hadn’t said what time he’d be arriving at, as neither of them could guess at the time difference between New Haven and the Colonies. As soon as news came that David’s paperwork had gone through and the next wave of arrivals was scheduled to fly out, Jonathan had insisted on being at the shuttle station to meet David, and when David had rebuffed him, Jonathan had insisted on meeting him at the Fairfield Station. But David had said no to that as well, perhaps understanding without even having to be told that Jonathan was in the process of assimilating this new mindset into his thinking. Learning that he didn’t need to be the dictator of all things. How had David changed in the meantime?
He arrested that line of inquiry before it could spiral into paranoia and instead schooled himself into being present for this quiet, for the sound of winter around him and the feel of it in the seat of his torn jeans. For the moonlit clouds and the lights winking out in window after window on his street, some of them staying on for Jonathan to wonder at what sort of life was lived in those rooms. When David finally came, Jonathan would begin introducing him to their neighbors and showing him the stable, closed for the season, where kids rode horses.
A truck rounded a corner and emerged from the darkness, sounding of Eamonn. But when it pulled up in front of Jonathan’s house, Aurora was at the wheel. “Look who I found,” she crowed, just as the passenger’s side door swung open then shut and David revealed himself, standing still in the street, gilded by the truck’s headlamps.
For five of the longest seconds of Jonathan’s life, they held each other’s gaze, not knowing where to begin but wanting to tell it all and wanting, at the same time, to hold some of it back, to tell it in its own time. How much life have you lived without me?
“Come to the bonfire!” Aurora hollered. Her fox had migrated to her lap, its tail feather-dusting her face.
Jonathan stood, too suddenly, and hot chocolate splashed onto his gloves and his blanket fell off his shoulders. He heard chuckling behind him as he turned around and was secretly grateful he could give David this to laugh at. “One second, I…”
“No, come on! They’re already getting started. David said he’s already down. Bring whatever it is you’re drinking!” Her commands overrode whatever objections might have grown inside Jonathan, so he gathered his blanket into his arm and tried to negotiate his self-insulating mug, pressing the button that slid a lid over it, and he made his way down the steps.
David said nothing as he opened the back door for Jonathan and Jonathan climbed in, only smiled. He was still smiling as he came in after Jonathan, sitting beside him, close, lovers-close, and Aurora set off.
Jonathan still struggled to muster something meaningful to say, but David pulled out his Flex.
“Look,” he said, in a quiet voice as he pulled a video from his Cloud. “We passed the sun on the way in.” He started the video. “These are the magnetic fields coming out of the sun’s active regions, and this is the hot plasma tracing them.” Ribbons of gold undulating in arcs and fans, as though sustained by movement. “When the loop breaks, you get a solar flare, and the charged particles go speeding out into space, and that’s how you get aurora at the Earth’s poles.”
Jonathan stared, transfixed.
“Did you catch it here?”
“No,” said Jonathan quietly. “I think we’re a little too far south to see these, but it’s beautiful. You saw this on your way in?”
“We did.” David ended the video, then leaned his head on Jonathan’s shoulder and was soon asleep, even as the truck jangled over the poorly laid magnetic lines under the cracked concrete.
Later, around the fire, David remained quiet while the others danced in their flannel jackets and passed around spiked cider someone had made.
“I was reading,” David said at last, “about these people at the South Pole.” His voice was softer, his words slower, and Jonathan wondered if that was still the travel lag dragging at him or just another deep and meaningful change Jonathan hadn’t been a part of. “They set up camps in the emptiness and look for meteor fragments. They camp near the base of the Graves Nunataks—it’s an Iñupiaq word, a rock exposed over an ice sheet. The temperature gets below negative-twelve Fahrenheit, but there’s almost no wind, and when it’s there, it kind of walks slowly over the snow. The light has this flat quality to it. And it’s one of the few remaining places where the atmosphere is transparent enough that the mountains in the distance—those crisp edges—can seem so close, even though they’re so far away. And you’ll be kneeling over this patch of bluish ice, surrounded as far as you can see by snow, and you’ll be looking at this tiny thing just below the surface. People go there looking for meteorites.” At this, he looked up at Jonathan and smiled.
