I decide to find someone with whom to start this new, impossible pact: seeing other people. I imagine applying for permission to have sex with someone and can’t help laughing under my breath, it’s so absurd. Scanning the room, a few men catch my eye. It’s difficult because I have never in my life scoped a room for desirables.
On the edge of the dance floor is a tall man who looks about thirty, which makes him a fair bit older than me, but he has red hair and red freckles and I like that about him, so I cross the room. “Hello,” I greet him a bit awkwardly.
He turns to me, surprised, and looks a little lost for words. “Hi.”
“I’m Dual.”
“Eric.”
I nod and we turn to watch the dancers together.
“I know who you are,” he admits.
“Oh no. The brat who doesn’t work?”
“The Iron Queen. I watched you take a thousand punches and keep getting back up.”
“Yeah well, I can only blame delirious idiocy.”
“I thought it was pretty great.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Wow.”
He folds his arms, which are freckled and quite muscly, I now notice. And he has a very nice smile.
“Have you ever thought about leaving?” I ask Eric.
“To go where?”
I shrug. “Good point.”
I catch sight of Luke and oh god it hurts. But his eyes cut through the dance floor and find me on the other side and I know that he’s as unhappy as I am. Eric is saying something but I can’t hear him, because I’m watching Luke round the dance floor toward me, pushing through people to reach my side. He takes my hand and leads me away from Eric, even though the poor man is mid-sentence. Raven is watching us, and Quinn is watching us, and actually a whole lot of people are watching us, but foolishly I don’t much care.
Luke draws me into a quiet corner. I feel so flushed I can barely string a thought together. He leans his mouth close to my ear. What is he doing? “Nice slacks.”
The tension dissolves and I burst into laughter. I can’t help it. “Go away,” I wheeze. “I was having a conversation.”
“Intolerable,” he comments. “I wish I had Will’s moves.”
Will is breakdancing, and he is spectacular. Everyone has formed a circle around him. He spins on his head, and I laugh with delight. Luke chuckles softly; I can feel his breath too close to my face.
“Wanna dance?” I ask, even though I’m terrible at it.
“Screw dancing. Let’s go hunting.”
I turn and look at his face. There’s something very much alive in his eyes and his mouth. So we finish our drinks and we go hunting.
*
Luke
“What happened between you and Raven?” she asks me.
The question hangs in the quiet air between us. The dead forest is lit by the waxing gibbous moon as it moves higher in the sky. Bark and twigs crunch under Josephine’s heavy footfall. She’s extremely loud and it’s quite stressful. “Hey, girl, hold up. Try walking on the balls of your feet.”
“I know how to walk.”
“Yeah and tread earthquakes as you go.”
“Are you saying I’m fat?”
I can’t help but laugh, which was her intention.
“Are you going to answer the question?”
“Nothing happened.” She obviously doesn’t believe me, and I can’t stop thinking about Shadow’s words. “She kissed me.”
“Is that all? What about last year?”
“She got naked in front of me once. I sent her home.”
“A woman as beautiful as Raven presents her naked body to you and you say no?”
I spread my hands, feeling a bit annoyed. “I was with you.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, really. I had no interest in her. I’m not some insatiable beast who has to fuck anything that presents itself.” I pause, and when she doesn’t reply I add, “I’m not gonna beg you to believe me. I hope you know me well enough by now to see how much Raven repulses me.”
“I don’t know you at all,” she says automatically.
“Bullshit.”
A long silence. We keep to the cover of trees as much as we can, constantly on the lookout. “Clearly Raven wasn’t all that worried about the law against ‘procreation’,” Josi mutters. “How gross is that, by the way.”
“Very. And I don’t think Raven believes the rules apply to her.”
“How nice for her.” Josi pauses, then concedes, “I shouldn’t have asked, anyway. It’s none of my business.”
“Of course it’s your business.”
“Shadow climbs trees and waits for them to come. Wanna climb a tree?”
“Okay.”
We pick the largest one we can find and I hoist myself up into the branches, then turn to haul Josi up after me, which is a tad tricky with one of her hands out of action. She’s put on a bit of weight since her Skeletor days, thank god. She looks so much healthier with some meat on her bones.
We settle in branches with good views of the ground. I have my bow and arrow ready; Josi has knives she doesn’t know how to use and a broken wrist. Bring on the cannibals.
“How often do you and Shadow come out?” I ask.
“Fair bit.”
“But how do you hunt?”
“I don’t. I watch him. We mostly just sit together.”
It’s dangerous to take someone into the beyond who isn’t equipped to protect herself. Shadow should know better, but I can’t really talk. It’s strange, too, because he hates being around people, so I can’t imagine him lugging a novice along with him. I don’t know how he managed to get clearance from Quinn. I was lucky enough to find the leader of The Inferno in an obscenely good mood tonight, so he let us go with a wave of his hand. I think he was smug that I’d learned my lesson and asked him at all.
After a while Josi says, “Hey, Luke? I’ve got my question for today.”
“Okay.”
“Can you tell me about it?” She hesitates, then murmurs, “Your job. Me as your job.”
My heart clenches. “Now?”
She nods. “How did it start?”
I crack the knuckles in my hands. “I got shot on a mission. I was out for several months. When I got back I was assigned to you as punishment. I was pretty annoyed about it. You were classified as a watch op and I was a Gray. Which meant it had been a long time since I’d had to do watch ops.”
“Because they’re less important?”
“Classified lower. I surveyed you for several months before the blood moon happened that year – ”
“Surveyed me? How?”
“I set up on the roof opposite your building and watched you with binoculars. I bugged your apartment. Followed you to and from work.”
“Oh my god.”
“I reported back to the Bloods that you weren’t involved in any illegal activity, but I also specified that I was uncertain where your loyalties lay because I wanted to make sure they’d keep me on your watch.”
“Why?”
“I was obsessed with you,” I say bluntly. “Or something. I dunno. I couldn’t stop watching you.”
“Jesus.” There is horror in her voice.
“I also didn’t want anyone else taking over.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t know if you’d eventually be ordered for erasure.”
“Is that the polite term for murder?”
I don’t reply.
“Did I do anything embarrassing?”
I snort. “That’s what you’re worried about?”
“It’s one of the things,” she snaps. “How would you feel if your privacy had been profoundly violated?”
“Like crap,” I agree. “Well … you danced around in your undies a lot. That weird, pseudo ballet.”
“That was elegant,” she sniffs.
“You played George Michael on your cello and
sang loudly to it. Your voice is, in my opinion, horrific.”
“I’m well aware of how you feel about my voice.”
And then I say, because I vowed to tell her the truth, always, “You looked at your bruises a lot, and you looked lonely every time you shut your eyes, and you had the worst night terrors I’ve ever heard. I nearly broke into your apartment to wake you from them about a hundred times.”
She doesn’t reply.
“Truth is,” I tell her softly, “those were the things that made me love you, even before we’d met.”
“Stop,” she says abruptly. “I don’t want to hear any more things about me that you know.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Tell me things about you.”
“What things?”
“Real things. Embarrassing things. So we’re even. Not that that’s possible.”
I take a breath and search around in the darkness for something to tell her. “Before you brought them with us I missed my parents so much I could barely breathe,” I admit. “Which is weird, because I never used to miss them. The waste of Dave’s life keeps me awake at night. It makes me sick to imagine how he must have seen me, having the job I did. He’s in the mirror when I look at myself. It’ll be with me for the rest of my life, that shame.” I take a breath, pondering a while. “Uh … I once ate so much pasta I threw up all over the living room floor. I liked the things on my desk to be in perfect order. If someone moved something, I wouldn’t be able to do any work. I like country music about dogs and trucks and lovey-crap. And, um … fuck, for a long time I was totally scarred by this one sexual experience I had with Lou. She started crying in the middle of it, when I was … And after that for ages I thought I was terrible – or, like, that there was something wrong with me. It really messed with my head.”
It feels like a blockage in my chest has been released and everything is gushing out of me. It’s relieving and horrifying at the same time. Like being vulnerable always is, I suppose.
“Thank you,” she says. “It’s a drop to my ocean, but thank you.”
I can’t quite dredge up any sounds, so I stay quiet.
“And there’s not,” Josi adds.
“Not what?”
“Anything wrong with you.”
Oh.
“Drones,” she mutters with an air of dignified scorn. Then thinks better of it. “Or maybe she just knew you didn’t love her.”
I nod.
“Did you? Love her?”
“Not really. I don’t think so.”
“But you made love to her?”
“Uh … this feels like a trap,” I point out. “I already told you that – ”
“I wasn’t with anyone before you,” she declares. She sounds kind of angry and I have no idea what’s going on.
“I know.” We talked about this a million times.
I guess we never talked about it post-her-knowing-who-I-am. Maybe there are lots of conversations we will have to redo now that she has an entirely different perspective of me. And I’ll just have to wear that and hope she doesn’t come out the other side of them disliking me.
But all this talk is sending my mind to bad places. My eyes are resting on the long line of her pale leg and I’m remembering the first time I kissed that leg. I’m remembering a whole lot of things that are not cooperating with my self-preservation.
“Can we talk about the whipping?” I ask her, to distract myself. “Why you got so angry?”
Josi falls quiet. “I don’t really want to,” she says eventually.
“Don’t you think I deserve an explanation? Or are the random bursts of fury part of the ongoing punishment you’ll dole out to me over the rest of our lives?”
“Don’t make out like I’m the one to blame for this situation. I loved you without limits or boundaries or caveats. I loved you honestly. You betrayed that.”
I rub my eyes, feeling my heart grow sluggish. We’re moving around in circles.
And then, giving me the barest shred of hope, Josi says, “I was so angry that day, Luke. When you took my lashings. Because everything inside me turns into either anger or sadness, one way or another.”
“I …” I clear my throat. “What was inside you, then … before it turned to anger?”
A long hesitation. I don’t know if she’ll answer me. “Terror,” she murmurs finally. “The terror of losing you. Watching you suffer was unendurable.”
My heart skips like a stone thrown over the smoothest of all lakes. A hundred times, a thousand.
“Then you still … ?” My voice breaks.
“Yes, I still,” she replies calmly. “But it means nothing without trust, and I won’t trust you ever again, Luke Townsend.”
It sounds like a vow, not a fact.
*
That’s when we notice the Furies emerging beneath us, drawn undoubtedly by our voices. I curse myself for being idiotic enough to lose concentration.
I’m startled by how many there are. It has to be over a dozen. They move quietly, walking to the bottom of our tree and surrounding it. I can see their eyes as they stare up at us, their red, red eyes. A chill races across my skin as I meet one of those bloodied gazes. The Fury snarls with rage and starts climbing the tree.
I shoot an arrow into his head. But when he drops, more move to the trunk and try to scale it. A lot more than a dozen, now. Flocking to us from all sides. Shit.
“Maybe the tree wasn’t such a good idea,” Josi ventures.
“Get further up.”
I’m firing as many arrows as I can and taking down Furies with each, but I have never seen so many together before. I’m about to run out of arrows.
“Damn it,” I hear Josi mutter and look up to see her tear the cast off her arm and fling it impatiently to the ground. She starts climbing, even with her broken wrist, and then leaps from our tree into the one beside it. She scrambles around the branches and looks like she’s about to jump to the next. “Come on,” she hisses to me.
But if I follow her the Furies will too. They haven’t realized she’s moving yet. So I climb lower, drawing the long hunting knife I carry with me. Reaching down, I start swinging at the Furies, hacking them as well as I can from such an awkward angle. My knife slashes through a throat and a skull and an eye socket, downing the creatures even as they surge over each other to reach me.
When Josi is three trees away, I shout, “Run your damn butt off, girl. I’m behind you.”
And bless her, she knows there’s only a split second to do it – to go – now that I’ve shouted it and the Furies have heard. There’s no hesitating, no sentimental looks or words. She swings from a branch, drops to the ground, staggers a few steps and then is up and sprinting, black hair streaming behind her.
I launch myself into the fray and hack the shit out of the bastards. Teeth and nails scrape at me but I’m cutting and shoving my way through with blunt force until I’m free enough to dash after Josi.
The Furies follow us, feet pelting over the hard, dead earth. They’re full of rage and hungry for flesh. I hear screams leave their mouths and the wet sound of their heavy breathing, and then I feel hands at my back – they’re fast. I swing backwards and take a hand off, pressing myself forward.
Josi is up ahead. The girl can run. She shouts to alert the guards on duty and the gate swings open just a little. I see her rush inside.
I head into the mad final sprint, just as the gates are shutting. But as I reach them I feel hands grab at my feet and trip me hard to the ground. Several Furies crash onto me, weighing me down.
I hear Josi shout my name from inside the wall, and then I hear her yelling for the gates to be opened again. Several of the guards are firing rifles down into the fray, trying to help me, but there are a hell of a lot of the monsters now, and pain slices through my arms and shoulders as the creatures bite into me. I use my knife to stab upwards into any of the flesh I can find. Blood splashes onto my face but I keep slashing and hacking until I feel some of the pr
essure lift and I can bodily shove the rest off me. Scrambling to my feet, I lunge through the narrow gap in the gates and turn to guard it.
Two Furies are too quick, slipping in behind me before the gates slam shut. They both surge not at me, but at Josephine. I twist to intercept them and cut each of their throats with two slashes of my knife.
The world slows again and I try to regain my breath. The bodies look pale in the moonlight, and their blood is pooling all over the sandy ground.
Josi winces at a stitch in her side. “Goddamn. Are you okay? Is that blood yours?”
“Not much of it,” I assure her, taking a quick look at my wounds. None seem deep.
“You two alright?” one of the boys on watch calls down to us from the top of the roof. It’s Batch, and I realize I haven’t spoken to him since my return.
“Yeah, thanks, mate,” I call. “Don’t let anyone else out tonight.”
“Hell no – I’ve never seen so many at once. We’ll get as many as we can from here.” He pauses. “Good to see you back, Luke.”
I smile up at Batch, glad that whatever animosity he felt toward me last year is now gone. I like the guy, and determine to go and visit him tomorrow.
Another couple of guards come down to deal with the Fury corpses – they’ll have to be dropped over the wall. I can hear the rest of them out there, scratching to get in. Only that one gate stands between us and certain death. The sound of rifles launching their second attack explodes through the night. We’ll need to put double the guards on the wall and refortify the gate.
For now I look at Josi. We’re both still a bit breathless. She says, “Screw hunting. Let’s go dancing.”
So I grin, and we go dancing. I don’t even bother to get changed – no one cares about blood stains in the west, after all.
*
February 13th, 2066
Josephine
I wake at the crack of dawn because I’m queasy and thirsty. I’d bet good money that the entire settlement is as hung-over as I am this morning. I stumble to the bathroom to get some water, and that’s how I see it. Through the bathroom window.
Something goes very cold inside me and I am moving without being aware of the decision to do so. Barefoot, dressed only in a t-shirt and undies, I walk right out of the house and onto the main road. Fog has rolled in from the sea this morning, and walking through it is like a dream.