“That sounds so … isolated.”
“Doesn’t it?” David replied dreamily.
Jonathan considered the boy huddled next to him. What if it never snows here? “Come on. I want to show you something.” He hoped David couldn’t hear the desperation in his words or see the furtiveness in his movements—see him looking for any trace of Eamonn—as they moved through the woods. If David wanted a place cut off from the rest of the world, a place where no notification could ping on your Flex and nothing could be added to or removed from your Cloud, a place devoid of announcements and news and questions, a place encased in magic, Jonathan would show him.
So he hurried this boy he loved through the woods and brought him to the hill’s edge and pointed at the darkness that encased the field.
“What am I looking at?” David still had his mug of cider in his hands.
“There’s a field there. Adjust your eyes.”
And David did, calibrating his eyesight, tuning and adjusting frequencies.
“Do you see it?”
“Is that a … is that a stable?”
“For horses,” Jonathan said, grinning.
David shook his head. “How do horses happen here?”
Jonathan laughed. “Magic, I dunno.”
“Do they have implants? Are they mechanized?” The questions were breathed, as though they weren’t even meant for Jonathan, who suddenly felt so stupid standing next to this man. Why did he think David might ever want a place teeming with life, with birds flying across the sky and plants growing, with animal tracks remaining in the soil until rain came or humans with their own bootprints? Why did he think David might have ever wanted to hear the gurgle of flowing water?
“I’m sure they’re beautiful,” David said, indicating in the way he turned that it was time to head back to the group.
Moonlight cut through the forest almost at random, but sometimes David would pass through a beam, and that was when Jonathan saw it.
The patches, the tears, the worn-ness of it. His old leather jacket.
It fit David perfectly.
“You get rough hands,” Linc said to Jayceon, feet dangling over the flaking steel waterfront pier. He felt the patches where duct tape had been put over his holes. Took off the gloves to stare at the skin of his palms, pale beneath the moonlight. Kendrick picked up bits of stone and shrapnel behind them and tossed them into the ocean. The whole place smelled like seaweed and skunk, but the moon shone bright overhead and he could pinpoint just where in relation to the celestial body the Colony hovered. It was a speck no bigger than the farthest star, but he imagined he could see it rotating. “Rough feet too, walking around in them boots all day, kicking piles of trash. Feel like I’m turning into a brick.” He turned his hands over, let them sit in his lap. “You think anyone up there got hands like us?”
Bugs was on Linc’s other side, hands limp in his lap, just staring out into the water. The look on his face telling of the moment you’re watching something drift away and it finally settles in your brain stem that you’ll never see it again. Maybe being reminded of his old neighborhood when they’d gone to pick up Ace and seen him get thrown out his house had done something to him. Realizing how little must have been rebuilt after the storm, how Bugs could no longer pretend it was a place he could go back to, maybe that was what had his face like that. Linc wanted to pat him on the leg or punch his arm, but instead just looked away, pretending his own thousand-yard stare, hoping his posture said “it won’t feel like this forever” loud enough for Bugs to hear, and certain enough to hide the lie.
Kendrick tossed more junk into the sea. “White folk ain’t got our constitution. Can’t none of ’em swing a hammer like I can.”
“Goddamn right,” Jayceon said quietly around a new cigarette.
Linc turned and could see, seated on a bench, Mercedes, with Timeica leaning against the back of the thing, testing its strength by propping herself on it by her arms. Mercedes was rolling a Turkish cigarette that glowed with flecks of radioactive dust.
“You ain’t a stacker till you smash your thumb,” Timeica said. “First busted finger I had, the nail turned all the way black and just fell off. Took about a year to grow back.”
Mercedes didn’t seem to be listening.
Timeica laughed, then let up off the bench, came around, and sat on it.
Linc didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, but saw Mercedes wearing the look of someone whose head keeps falling off their hammer, someone frustrated, realizing any light at the end of the tunnel’s just more tunnel. She looked ready to die.
“You seen Ace around some?” Kendrick asked no one in particular. He’d stopped throwing shit into the water.
Jayceon lit up another Newport. “He somewhere he can’t stack.” The flame danced at the end of his cig. “Might be there for a couple years.”
Winter was on its way, and Linc could already see in his mind’s eye the warehouse they’d huddle in, the rusted garbage can whose burning refuse would provide their warmth. He could already feel the cold biting through his duct-taped fingertips, could see the stackers dropping off who caught pneumonia and couldn’t get it treated. He could feel hammers accidentally breaking hands, leaving them monstrously swollen and constricted.
“We ain’t dead,” Linc whispered to himself.
He looked up at where he thought the Colony sat. “Good luck to you, Officer,” he said before walking back the way he had come.
It had been less than a second, but, in the way that daydreams stretch time like a rubber band, it had felt long enough to hear a whole sentence. Long enough to see Kendrick turned into Jake, tossing debris into the California Aqueduct and Linc turned into a little boy, legs dangling under the bridge railing, and Mama standing behind them. Long enough for this smaller Linc to feel her smile on his back and to hear Pop walk up behind her, Pop before Nevada and the drink and Jake hanging from a tree and the family splitting up and Mama lost in her grief and Pop taking his last remaining boy to join the Exodusters, Pop before his dying, and wrap his arms around Mama’s waist and lean in and lose his face in Mama’s hair and murmur in a voice dripping thickly with love, “Hey, Miss Pepper,” and smile because Pop was the only one who could still make a joke over Mama’s name and not get hit for it.
Less than a second but long enough for Linc to have felt it, to have held it in his beat-to-shit hands, and collected it, the memory so heavy in his pockets that it slowed his walk.
He didn’t mind.
PART III
WINTER
Leaves moved across Rodney’s target reticle, crisp and flaking with veins like gnarled spines. A mountain wind carried them through Sniper’s Alley. Reflected in the shards of glass beneath his one straightened leg: food wrappers, the remains of cheese-and-flatbread sandwiches with half moons chewed into them, cigarette butts crushed and leaning with some of them curled in on themselves, sticking like stubbed tree branches out of mountains of ash and soot and silvered dust.
It was dusk.
Weeds split the concrete floor by his other boot, pressed as it was against a stump of once-marble, what had maybe a long time ago been the base of a column. Fiber-optic snakes coiled through the cinders and flakes. Angled toward him was the screen of a small, foldable tablet. It flashed with scrambled images. Interrupted by dead-channel television grain: a school building in the aftermath of an artillery attack with its steel supports bent like half-flexed fingers and the bars over the windows crimped like fangs in an animal with no face above its mouth, hospitals where even the blood had been incinerated and where building and pulverized bone corkscrewed into the sky, wafted by waves of burn. Somewhere above him, clutched in a corner of the roof, was a wasp’s nest. And every morning, a metal swing would creak with activity, hung from a crossbeam coated in blooddust, the floor beneath it scuffed soft as flour.
A fallen column propped his back up. Stopped being discomfort a long time ago and was now numbness. Small, rotted bits of ceiling fell down to splash on his outstretched thigh. His shooting arm lay at his side. Palm facing the ceiling. Eyes closed. The fingers of his left hand twitched. Electricity hummed in the veins of an arm that bled cables. His right, he crossed over his stomach.
