The Grand Ballast (29 page)

But the truly miraculous thing was how
unafraid he felt. He was ready for whatever the world wished of
him, a willing participant in all sorts of mischief.

Once Kilroy was asleep,
Bode climbed out of bed. He took one of Kilroy’s cigars and smoked
it on the deck between cars. Snow blanketed the ground and stood in
walls on the tree branches. The world seemed very different, bright
and scribbled around the edges. He felt the heavy-limbed sense that
he was dreaming. He limped off the deck and into the snow. Knelt
there, letting himself get cold, get numb. Blood dripped from his
shoulder and stained the white ground.

He looked up. Above him was
a vivid blue twilit sky and stars as sharp as diamond. White flakes
fell against his cheeks, and his mind began to blur. He felt as if
he could sleep—here, right now.

This is what I am now.
This is where I belong.

And the cold didn’t
matter.

PART TWO

6.

THE SACRED ROCK

They made for the woods,
Bode dragging LJ and Valen clearly trying to downplay how difficult
it was for him to run after nearly a week of confinement. His wrist
and ankle were raw and dark with bruises.

“
LJ, come on,” Bode urged.
His voice was still hoarse from the smoke, his body still sluggish
from the drug. He propped LJ against him and unfastened the
mouthpiece, easing it from LJ’s mouth. Looked for a second at the
jumble of metal spikes, then tossed the contraption as far as it
would go. LJ worked his jaw absently. “Feel better?”

LJ turned bloodshot eyes on
Bode. His skin was so hot it hurt to touch.

“
Why did you bring him?”
Valen was breathless, limping. Dirt stuck in the sores on his legs.
“He’s only going to slow us down.”

“
So I was supposed to leave
him there?” Bode struggled to support LJ. He still had Lein’s gun
jammed in his belt. He didn’t want to stop—was convinced they were
being pursued, that any moment Kilroy would be standing in front of
them, blocking the way. But he didn’t see another
choice.

“
You left the
others.”

Bode ran a hand over his
swollen lips. The others weren’t sick. The others hadn’t been his
friends. The others had climbed on him like so many nightmare
creatures years ago, while Bode had begged them to stop. “I won’t
leave him.”

“
He was going to suck me
off with all that shit in his mouth,” Valen muttered.

Bode glared at him. “He was
forced. Same as you or me.”

Valen didn’t say anything
else.

They caught their breath
then continued on through the darkness until they were exhausted.
LJ’s breathing had shifted to a rattle, and he leaned against Bode,
his legs unable to support him any longer.

Bode guided him to the
ground. LJ immediately began to cough. They were beside a massive
rock that gleamed silver in the moonlight.

A trickle of blood oozed
from LJ’s nose, and his body was drenched in sweat. Bode unbuttoned
his shirt. Stopped when he noticed something odd. A bruise was
forming on LJ’s chest. As he watched the blood spread under the
skin, creating a wide, moving shadow. LJ choked and
whimpered.

“
He’s dying,” Valen said
quietly beside Bode.

Bode swallowed. “No.
There’s got to be something we can do.”

LJ coughed
again.

“
I can try to find a town,
find a doctor, but…” Valen trailed off as LJ gave a wet gasp and
closed his eyes.

But if people are already
looking for us, we can’t afford to be seen.

“
Shh.” Bode placed a hand
on LJ’s chest. “Just think about…” He didn’t know what to tell LJ
to think about. If he’d known what had power over fear, he’d have
stopped being afraid a long time ago. He looked up at Valen. “What
did you think about when you were underwater?”

Valen’s expression slipped
from contemptuous to soft and unsure. He stepped over to LJ. Knelt
and cupped LJ’s forehead. LJ’s face screwed up. He shifted, and the
shadow under his skin glided down toward his hip.

“
Death is death,” Valen
said in that monotone Bode recognized from their first conversation
in the equipment car. “Nothing more, nothing less. It’s easier than
you think and more permanent than you can imagine. It
is—”

“
Shut up! He doesn’t want
to hear any of your cult bullshit. Just…tell him something
real.”

Valen passed a thumb along
the lines in LJ’s forehead. LJ’s mouth opened and closed softly.
Valen leaned down. “Bode cares about you.” His voice was quiet and
rough. He indicated Bode with a tilt of his head. “We’re both here
with you.”

Bode’s throat tightened. He
saw life, in that instant, as a series of borrowings. You slopped
together a brain from atomic mud, your cells clustered together and
built you a frame, and you grew layers of flesh and draped it over
your bones. You took vibrations from the air and made a voice; you
drew light through your eyes and the world appeared like projector
thrusting an image onto a dark screen. You learned rules, and your
feelings shaped themselves into something beyond your control, a
weapon you had to master if you had hoped to destroy anything
specific.

And when you died, you gave
it all back—body and bones and voice and eyes. But your feelings,
you pressed those onto others. If you gave someone your love, your
fear, your anger, and asked them to match it, to co-shoulder the
burden or the blessing and build on it—that person got to keep a
part of you. The world faltered now because people had given up on
permanent things in favor of transient joy, fragile amusement that
cracked with the sound of laughter. They hoped that by making their
favorite things fleeting, they could make pain act the same
way.

Bode hoped, for the first
time, that Kilroy
had
loved Driscoll.

“
I do,” Bode whispered. “I
want you to be happy, LJ.”

He wished those words could
be magic, that LJ’s face would go slack and his gaze would be
peaceful. That he would smile and fall into sleep knowing he was
loved. But LJ continued to clench and release one fist, until
finally his throat contracted and he froze. His eyes went wide and
his lips trembled.

He died with the blood
still spreading under his skin, Bode holding his hand.

Valen walked away and
didn’t return until much later, when Bode was numb with cold, his
muscles aching from the stillness. Then he stepped beside Bode and
said, “We have to keep moving.”

Bode looked up savagely.
“We have to bury him.”

“
With what?” Valen glanced
around. “We’ve got no tools. The ground’s all rocks.”

“
I don’t
care. We have to
bury
him.”

“
He’s dead. He doesn’t care
what happens now. For fuck’s sake, do you want to get
caught?”

Bode stood. “We don’t leave
him here for the buzzards. You understand? We dig with our hands if
we have to, but we bury him.”

“
We can’t—”

“
Just because you’re too
brainwashed to remember what it means to be human doesn’t mean I’m
going to leave him here to get picked apart like an animal!” Bode
stared up at Valen, breathing hard.

He saw the rage flare in
Valen, and they struck at each other like snakes. It was a fight
Bode was sure he’d lose—Valen was larger and stronger. But Bode had
the shock and pain of loss on his side, and he got Valen on the
ground and straddled him, his hands around Valen’s throat until he
saw the fear again. Until he remembered pulling Valen from the
water. He eased his grip.

Valen didn’t fight. He lay
under Bode, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Bode climbed off
him, and they sat for a while as the air chilled and the crickets
sang. “I’m sorry,” Bode said finally.

“
The rock has an overhang.
We could lay him there. Give him a ceremony.”

Bode glanced at the rock.
“The buzzards can still get him under the rock.”

“
It’s either birds or
worms.”

They laid LJ under the
rock. “You want to say a few words?” Valen asked.

Bode didn’t know what to
say. He had a vision of LJ, his wide, earnest eyes and his grinning
mouth full of steel shards.
No.
LJ, lying with him in a coffin. The warmth of his
body. The gentleness of his touch.

When he looked up, Valen
was watching him. Bode faced away, embarrassed. Then he began to
strip LJ of his clothes, trying to be efficient,
unemotional.

“
What are you doing?” Valen
asked.

“
You need something to
wear, don’t you?” Bode got LJ’s clothes off and tossed them to
Valen.

Valen hesitated, frowning
at the pile. “He was sick…”

“
If he had something
contagious, we’ve already got it. You wanna walk around
naked?”

Valen dressed
silently.

Bode got up and walked
across the field. A moment later, Valen caught up. Bode didn’t want
to look at him in LJ’s clothes.

“
Where are we going?” Valen
asked.

“
Harkville,” Bode said
shortly.

“
Harkville?
That tourist
trap?”

“
They’re against the
X-shows. Maybe they’ll help us.”

“
Wouldn’t Kilroy know that
too?”

“
Do you have a better idea?
The only people on our side are the X-show protestors. If we go to
Harkville and they can’t hide us there, we’ll move on.”

They headed west. Valen
knew the roads well. “We can take Highway 20 as far as Fable. Not
much traffic there; small risk of being spotted. And from there I
know a county road that will take us toward Harkville.”

They traveled a long way
that night. Westbound, the land flattening then rising again. Every
now and then, they saw a small work of art. A flower, brilliant
blue as the sky, with a blood red stem. An elaborate painting on a
rock.

When Valen’s legs shook too
much for him to continue, they lay down in tall grass, not
touching.

***

In the morning, the sky was a slick,
fish-scale sort of gray, and the air was frigid. They had pressed
close during the night, and now they wound their arms around each
other without seeming to think.

Ice fragments in their breath—both men
thawed by a raw, lapping heat. Bode’s skin began to color, and hair
fell over his eyes in sweat-fused tendrils. They kissed. Slow,
soft; Valen’s lips brushing Bode’s gently, creating just an edge of
pain. Stopped to watch the dawn gather overhead, the weak, watery
light gaining strength until the sky became silver. Bode imagined
each cloud he exhaled infused the sky with more light.

“
He’s dead,” he whispered,
more to himself than to Valen.

“
I’m sorry,” Valen
said.

“
I’ve ever seen anyone die
before.”

Valen was silent a moment. “Kilroy said you
were a murderer.”

Bode felt something less than guilt.
Something more like a hollow misfortune. He rolled onto his back.
The sun glinted behind white wisps of cloud. “Yes,” he said, and
the word was a relief, a surrender. He waited for Valen’s
recrimination.

“
So?” Valen
asked.

Bode turned his head. “So. I killed
someone.” The grass prickled his cheek, made him feel like
sneezing. “But I didn’t see him die.”

Valen didn’t ask any more questions.

A thought occurred to Bode. “Did you have to
watch people get killed? Did they…make you do that, as part of
training or anything, at the No Returns? Or at the Hydra Arena, did
you see—”

“
I saw my mother go,” Valen
interrupted. “That’s the only time.”

“
Oh.” Bode got slowly to
his feet, head suddenly aching. “No. No, that’s
terrible.”

Valen sat up. Brushed damp grass from LJ’s
bloodstained shirt, then stood. “We should get going.”

They walked, and eventually Bode’s curiosity
got the better of him again. “Do you miss her? Or did they teach
you not to?”

“
I miss her.” Valen was
still limping, but not as badly as yesterday. He cleared his throat
and said gruffly, “They say it’s unusual nowadays for parents and
children to be so close. But she taught me to fight. To know what I
believe in, what I want from the world. And to demand it. She could
say the most cliché things—‘Never give up,’ ‘Never settle for
less’—and mean them.”

Bode watched a large white bird fly
overhead. He wished his own mother had believed in something. That
they could have been close.

Valen went on. “I’ve never
met anyone as averse to injustice as she was. I was going to fight
alongside her. I was never really sure for what.” He sidestepped a
prickly, violet plant. “To
feel
so strongly is a risk, I suppose. Opens you up to
a lot of pain.”