WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (22 page)

“How did you sleep last night?” he says. But it’s the way he says it. Right away I remember his exposed leg. The keys.

“Fine,” I say, almost too softly for him to hear. And then, the engines roar to life, drowning the conversation before it can go anywhere. Suddenly we’re moving, out and away from Resistance camp, and Maze and Garren become blurs to me, riding parallel to us but distancing their boat over the humps of water. Gala stays focused for the first bit on steering us, and then she comes and sits right next to me.

“It’s a hardening,” she says. And it’s right away that I feel her hand again, just brushing softly against me, but holding long enough that I know she wants my full attention.

“What?” I ask. For a moment I look at her, hoping, but I can’t see the beauty in her anymore. Just a face I compare to Maze’s.

“I told you before—I know. Have you already told her everything?” she says. “About how you feel?”

I nod, confused as to how she senses so much about me. My mind spins, working out some implant that must be in her too—something that lets her invade my consciousness. But I know: I must wear it on my face, in my words, when I’m near Maze. Gala has no special power, I’ve given myself away. And for some reason, I collapse on her.

“I told her everything. It didn’t matter.”

“What I meant before is, you harden to it. Part of what happens to us is learning there are some people that will never love us like that. It’s a long, slow, hardening. Nothing more, nothing less.”

I can’t tell her anything more. I just watch the tower now, and it seems so far away that I’m sure we’ll never reach it. And everything about the day is calm and beautiful. The sun splits some of the clouds, throwing a circle of flat gold on some distant stretch of the sea. All of it so tremendously beautiful.

“You’ll get there,” she says, quickly touching me again, this time her hand moving a bit over my arm.

“What do you know about where we’re going?” I ask.

Part of me wants to stay on the subject, ask her how she knows—who she’s loved, how it went—but I can’t. I have to do everything possible to make a ghost of myself to Maze now, because it’s finally cemented inside of me. And talking more about it will prevent that. Like I must silently go into what Gala says—that she’ll never want me the way I want her. And I have to harden inside. And there’s no more complicating it than that.

When Gala is finally about to get up and go steer again, I put my hand on her. Right on her leg so she can’t go anywhere.

“What do you know?”

She hesitates. “One thing I know is that you’re not the only one under her power.”

“What do you mean?”

“Garren. He’s deluding himself. I know that there’s nothing out there. Nothing at all. And he can’t handle that the Nefandus have done this to us, so he’s seeking answers where there are none. This is a mission to nowhere and for nothing just so he can get away from it.”

“You think there’s no way to the tower?”

“If we made it there, boats right up against the tower, we’d find a solid metal pole. We could look at the metal more closely, but that’s it. And I’m more convinced that we’d be dead by the time we got halfway there.”

“Maze said something about a door though—that there’s a door.” Right away I realize I’m letting it slip. Her confidence and trust in me. All of it gone.

“What?”

“A door. That’s where we’re going.”

“That’s bullshit. Did she tell him that? I don’t know why he brought me,” she says. She looks away again, and before her face turns, I think I see something of my own desperation in her. And then it just comes out, I can’t help it.

“Do you love him—I mean, did you?”

“Love, like belief, means nothing. It’s as imprecise a word as there is. There’s no value in it.”

“What I mean is—did you ever
feel
like I feel about Maze, for Garren?”

“It was different.” And then, when she’s about to go on, she just stops and steers the boat.

The way she says it, I don’t press any more. And thinking quickly that she didn’t know about the door, and that Garren has already entrusted Maze, just that quickly, with information that his own crew doesn’t have, I tell her about the tattoo. I expect everything in her reaction will show me that she already knew. Because she knows everything from a single glance—her cold glare of skepticism that culls every shred of bullshit, sees through all deception. But she doesn’t know—she recoils from me, in shock, when I say it.

“The same exact one? You’re sure?” she asks.

“I’ve seen it for years on Maze’s ankle. It’s what Garren was interested in.”

I see her starting to figure it out, to make sense of whatever she knows about Garren’s tattoo.

“What did he say about his?” I ask.

“I can’t say—not until I speak with him.”

My mind whips back to last night, whether I betrayed Maze’s trust, whether or not she even asked me to keep what Garren said private. And then I’m sure she must have, that it was just unspoken trust. But something else rises, competing with my fear: the realization that I don’t give a shit anymore. That there’s never been any real trust between me and her anyway, despite our closeness. Despite the fact that I’m the only one she could tell her theories to. I already start to envision some kind of confrontation when Gala leaves my side and returns to the front of the boat. Part of me wants to go and tell her the rest—that the tattoo might mean there’s an implant, that somehow it’s a key, a way into the tower. But I don’t. Something has cut too deeply into her. Something of the mystery of her past, her past together with him. And then, my eyes go across the water, and there she is. Looking right at me. Maze. It’s right when I catch her staring at me that she smiles. And just like that, by the force over which I am powerless, all of my anger, feigned hatred, and resentment vanishes. Just melts, so that all I can do is smile back and then look away.  

The gloom of thick clouds pushes a gentle but steady slap of wind that chills me enough to lean into the rail of the boat and close my eyes. I trace shadows of Nefandus behind my eyes, listening to the beat of the engine and the everlasting slosh of the swells. I think about how close we came to dying, our blood turned to rivers to be drunk, and the whole night plays again and again. Every few minutes my mind shifts back to Maze, to what we’re doing now. And to the fact that Gala touched me. And I touched her. And what she would let me do.

    Eventually my imagination tires me enough to fade in and out of consciousness, only opening my eyes when I feel a surge of heat. And there above, bleeding between the gray mass every time is the sun. It looks brightly at me for just an instant, relieving the chill, and then it disappears again. I crane my neck to see the tower, and there it is: a perfectly straight cut slicing from the flatness of the ocean, only the base of it really visible, the needle-nothingness of its limitless height lost to haze, and then I bring my vision back down to the metal of the boat. Gala sits on the wheel, locked in some steel fortress built of thought. My eyes move across to the other boat—Maze and Garren, side by side. They’re close enough that I see their mouths moving. Talking still, even after all this time on the boat. And when my mind spins through what secrets they must be sharing, what closeness he must be developing with her, I force my thoughts back to Gala. To how attractive she actually is, when I really think about it. Legs that are carved to climb the rocky coast, to hunt along the endless crags for anything of value, scraps of the ancient world, clues as to what belief really does to people. By the time I’m imagining the assassins, the ones sent down from the After Sky to kill the Fathers, the ones corrupted by the fortunes of the Deadlands, I decide there is nothing to do now but rest. Because my body feels exhausted still, despite the long sleep of yesterday. As if all that’s happened has been a month’s trial, not a day’s.

The first thing I notice when I wake up is the heat. The clouds are gone, and all I see above is the blue and the bright white circle of warmth. There’s no more chill. And before I can look to see it, I hear the first shout. Then another one, subdued, but laced with accusation, and then the words come softly in, but not enough of them that I know what’s being said. A quiet argument that only occasionally bleeds out.

    Sitting upright I realize there’s no hum—the engines are dead. There next to me, bobbing up and down only a foot away, is the other boat. Its silver hull dips and rises, riding soft swells. Then I see them—Garren, curled hands bracing himself against the top of the seat, looking out at the tower. Gala leans in close, trying to whisper. Forcing some conversation on—making him talk to her about something he’s trying to ignore. When I turn to see Maze in the back of the boat, she’s got her head down. Her long black hair flutters with the breeze, and her eyes are buried in something she’s holding. A paper.

    “Hey,” I say. She looks at me and smiles quickly, then glances anxiously up again at the argument. Without another word, she stands on the rail and hops over to my boat and sits next to me.

    “What’s going on?” I ask.

    She holds the paper so I can see it, and I see a long snaking line, dotted in some places, and the tiniest markings and shadings. Some of the shapes I recognize as trees, and when I see, all the way on the corner of the map—a circle, surrounded by nothing, far out in the blank half of the drawing that must represent the sea—I know it’s a map.

    “Is that the tower?” I ask, my finger striking the small circle.

    “Yeah,” she says. And again she turns, distracted as the volume of the clamor rises briefly and then dies to hushed whispers again. I look over and see Garren looking at Gala, putting his hand on her shoulder, boring deep into her, trying to calm her.

    “Why are they fighting?” I ask.

    “It’s something about the tattoo,” she says.

    “Oh,” I say, and just that quickly, it floods back into me—that I told Gala about Maze’s tattoo. But Maze smiles, like she’s happy despite the fighting, despite the fact that I spilled what she confided in me. My eyes drift down her leg, and there, her pants rolled up, I see the tip of it—the black line erupting from the curve.

    “She saw it, mine, and flipped out on him,” she says. And I know, as she stares and smiles at me, that Gala covered for me. Played it like an accidental discovery. A way to dig into him like I’ve tried to dig into Maze. And then, before I can focus on what they’re arguing about, or if Maze thinks I had something to do with it, she redirects my attention to the map.

    “Look at this line,” she says. And there, where she runs her finger away from the circle representing the tower, there’s a faint dotted line, perfectly straight except two spots where it cuts in sharp ninety-degree turns. It runs across the ocean and into the loopy curls of what must represent the coast. I ask her what it is, and before she answers, I already work through it—that it must be some sea lane, the best path to get to the tower. It’s when she tells me that I realize my guess is off in one big way.

    “It’s a tunnel,” she says.

    “Underwater?”

    “That’s what he thinks.”

    “Where’s this from?” I ask.

    “The map? He said it’s one of three they’ve found. All of them the same. The same line leading out to the circle.”

    “But where did it come from? How does he know it’s a tunnel?”

    “They steal from the Fathers too—they even kill them when they have to.”

    My mind reels back to Father Gold’s office, and then the row of hanging Fathers on the cliff. I start to wonder if it’s a lie—Garren’s theory about the After Sky assassins, that they’re the ones who really hanged them all. And instead it’s a cover because he doesn’t know how loyal we might really be after a lifetime of living in the Fatherhood.  I tell her my idea and she says no—they only kill them when something goes wrong—when a break-in gets messed up and someone, a Father, tries to follow them back to the Resistance camp. My mind pictures the ruined camp we left behind, the dead bodies drifting in the sea and the ones being pushed underground.

    I ask her again how he knows it’s a tunnel, how he could possibly know that if the Fathers, the ones he stole it from, didn’t.

    “Look at the line,” she says, and softly, her arm brushes me as she traces it again. She goes slowly, her fingers following straight, and then, when she hits one of the sharp turns, she retraces it several times until it sinks in for me.

    “Because of the angles?” I ask.

    “No boat needs—no boat
can
turn like that. And it wouldn’t need to. If you could just ride out there over the ocean, this wouldn’t make sense.”

    I offer an excuse, my first instinct, that maybe it’s just the way the ocean is, that there are dangers we don’t know about and it’s only a rough estimate of the lane a boat might take.

    “There’s this though—look,” she says. And then, she puts the paper up close to my face and points to the small symbol, right near the coast, where the line from the tower ends. It’s rough and washed out, but I can tell. It’s the tattoo. The line rising up into the half-circle, digging down into the cross of the horizon.

    “Look here,” she says when she’s convinced I’ve seen enough to believe the tiny symbol on the paper is the same as on her leg. She pushes down her sock enough so I can see the whole tattoo against her olive skin. The sun lights it perfectly and the lines are so stark that I want to trace them along her ankle. And then, without thinking, I do. My hand extends, without a moment’s hesitation of fear or anxiety, and I touch her. My finger slides along the smooth shape, and then down to the point where the line of what has to be the tower intersects with the horizon.

    “See how it widens out, how it goes under the line of the Earth,” she says, uncaring that my hand is resting on her leg. And I stare, half in a trance to be touching her, but mostly dumbfounded that I never figured out the symbol before—that it must be the tower, against the backdrop of the sky—and just as she says, where the tower hits the ground, rather than ending, it digs in below the surface of the horizon.