“Yeah. Wait outside.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to do something.”
Addis looks at the hatchet clenched in her hand. His lips tremble a little and he backs out of the room.
Nora stands over the man, staring at his shiny bald head. She has never done this before. Her mind moves ahead to the sensations that will vibrate up her arms through the hatchet when it cracks the skull and sinks into the dense, rubbery tissues inside. She raises the hatchet. She shuts her eyes. The toilet stall behind her creaks open and something groans and Nora screams and runs. She doesn’t turn around to see what’s there, she just runs. She grabs her brother’s hand and drags him down the hall at a full sprint. Standing in the elevator pounding the “door close” button, she sees movement reflected in the restaurant’s windows and hears a ragged howl, low and guttural but distinctl Sbutves y female. Then the doors slide shut, and they descend.
• • •
Addis is crying. Nora can’t believe he still cries so easily after all the things they’ve been through. He cried when his mother dragged them out of bed and hid them in the bathroom while their father killed a looter with a crowbar. He cried when their apartment and the rest of Little Ethiopia went up in flames, his snot smearing against the window of the family Geo. He cried all the way from D.C. to Louisiana and then again when he saw New Orleans, yelling at his mother that the Bible said God would never again destroy the earth with a flood. He cried when his father said God is a liar.
Crying. Expelling grief from the body in the form of saltwater. What’s its purpose? How did it evolve, and why are humans the only creatures on Earth that do it? Nora wonders how many years it takes to dry up that messy urge.
“It’s okay, Addy,” she says as the elevator settles on the ground floor. “We’re okay.”
His sniffles don’t completely subside until the Space Needle is hidden behind buildings far in the distance.
“What was that?” he finally asks as they trek north on Highway 99, the first words out of his mouth in thirty minutes.
“Guess,” she says.
He doesn’t.
They cross the Aurora Bridge just as the sun disappears behind the western mountains. Nora stops, although she knows she shouldn’t. They are standing on a narrow sidewalk hundreds of feet above what was once a busy waterway, now a graveyard for sunken and sinking boats, million-dollar yachts floating on their sides, palaces for king crabs.
“Where are we going?” Addis asks.
“I’m not sure.”
He pauses to think about this. “How far are we gonna have to walk?”
“I don’t know. Probably a million miles.”
He sags against the railing. “Can we go find somewhere to sleep? I’m really tired.”
Nora watches the last red glow of the sunset glitter on the water. Just before the sky goes completely dark, she catches movement out of the corner of her eye and glances back the way they came. On the edge of the hill, just before the bridge leaps out over the chasm, she sees a silhouette. A big silhouette of a big man, standing in the street and swaying slightly.
“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Let’s go.”
The cloud of hands has grown so large and strong it has begun to feel like an extra sense. Some warped hybrid of sight and smell and intuition. The tall man feels it reaching through the forest, its wispy fingers brushing through ferns and poking under rocks, seeking whatever it seeks. He struggles to ignore its constant moaning, which has begun to form words but is still too simple to be understood.
Get. Take. Fill.
He tries to distract himself by remembering more things. What is your name? Nothing. How old are you? Nothing. He hesitates before his next question. Who was the woman by the river? Something surges up from his core, a surprise heave of emotional vomit, but he gags it back down. Her name was—the weight in your hand, the trigger—
GUNS CAN KILL YOU! YOUR BRAIN I Vbutvee wS IMPORTANT! DO NOT GET SHOT IN THE HEAD!
He is deeply relieved when this second voice interrupts. Its simple information is much easier to process than that terrifying eruption of feeling.
What you did—all the people you—
FIND OTHER THINGS LIKE YOU! THEY CAN HELP YOU GET THINGS YOU WANT!
And so a strange bartering session begins in his mind. He gives up the grief he felt upon seeing the woman and remembers what guns do and that he should avoid people who have them. He hands over the aching desire to see his mother again and receives the knowledge that he will be safer if he can find a group to join. It seems a very fair bargain.
A jolt ripples through the cloud of hands and his eyes snap open wide. His new sense has found something. The hands have reached very far, perhaps miles, and touched something that arouses them. They stretch off into the darkness of the woods, sending pulses of excitement back to him like morse code.
Come. Follow. Take.
He obeys.
His muscles, which begin to cool and stiffen any time he stands still, become supple again with whatever unknown energy drives them, and he walks at a brisk pace. The forest grows darker as he nears its heart. He glimpses strange things from the corner of his eyes: crystalline frogs and birds that glow, doors in the dirt and cyclones of bones, but he doesn’t stop to wonder at these things. He has traded wonder for hunger. He follows the brute.
The sun sets faster than it used to. Nora is almost sure of this. It plummets like a glob of wax in a lava lamp, so rapidly she swears she can trace its motion, and she wonders if the earth has sped up. If perhaps somehow, all the bombs pummeling its crust have actually increased its spin. A ridiculous thought, but she still raises her walking pace. It’s unfair to Addis’s little legs, but he doesn’t complain. He maintains a half-run to keep up.