Scorpion, page 19
THE ICE CREAM MEN
Alfie looks over the edge of the Long Gone parking garage and pushes himself back, reeling. The parking garage is the tallest building left in the Oh See.
From here, he should even be able to see into the Kingdom.
He had approached the Kingdom before dawn, in advance of his people’s return with the guns they had promised. But something was wrong. He could tell immediately. In the center of the field in front of the Kingdom walls was a stinking pile of cows, flesh left there to rot. He got off his bike and crept closer to the gate.
There were heads on it, as he’d seen before. But this time they weren’t the pink skin of the Biters. They were the brown of the Kingdom. They were killing each other.
“These people ain’t gon be help,” he said. He backed away from the gate and came to this parking garage to take a second look.
From the upper level he can see the Kingdom to his south, the small hook mountain at its center. He thought he would have a better view into the Kingdom, but the angle is too shallow for him to see much beyond the walls and low buildings. But one patch of open concrete in the eastern end of the Kingdom catches his eye. There’s a high fence around it. Inside that fence are kids.
“These people ain’t gon be help,” he says again.
The view was only one reason he came. The other was the mirrors the Ice Cream Man had shown him, stowed in the trunk of a car. The mirrors are used for talking through the sky. The Ice Cream Man had known the talk, so had some others in their Fleet. They didn’t tell the rest of the Fleet. There were small secrets for big groups of people, the Ice Cream Man had said. This was a big secret for small groups of people. He had Ended before he could tell that whole big secret to Alfie.
But Alfie knew enough. He didn’t know if anyone would be on the other end of the mirrors, or if he would understand them, but he knew where to look. He just hoped the code the Ice Cream Man taught him would come back.
“How you knows when to talks to the mirrors?” he had asked the Ice Cream Man, when they visited this spot the first time.
“Some talks every morning,” the Ice Cream Man said. “I comes the morning after the new moon.” And they did, when they were nearby. They had visited it almost ten times. Alfie learned how to place the mirrors, how to listen and speak in the stumbling blinking language the Parents had left behind.
Alfie digs the mirrors out of their place in the trunk of a Long Gone car, careful not to disturb the dust covering it so kids won’t think to search it. He points the secondary mirror toward the Kingdom and signals it, in case anyone is responding. He points the main mirror toward the towers of Downtown, covers it with a black cloth, and waits for the sun to fully rise. Waits, as always, to see if someone’s bothering to hold the other end.
The hook mountain blinks and flares. Alfie can’t interpret the way the Ice Cream Man could, so he has to write the code on the concrete with charcoal. Dashes, dots, dashes. It takes him a while to puzzle out the message from the Kingdom, but he understands enough. The Knights have overthrown the King, who has run off. The Knights have hoarded the meat from the cows, and famine has already begun. They’re locking up anyone who opposes them, almost a quarter of the Kingdom. The kids inside the fence.
Alfie turns north to Downtown, and catches the end of a series of flashes. Repeat, he says.
Angelenos joining against Palos, the mirrors say.
Where the Biters at now? he sends.
Big army. Still at the hill of the Palos.
Safe? he signs.
The answer is the signal equivalent of a shrug. Only until they move.
He hears footsteps echo in the sloping garage below him, and turns around.
It’s Tashia from the Kingdom. She looks dirtier, hunted. Her braids have tufted out. Next to her is the King. They’re unarmed.
“You don look so good,” Alfie says. “Hard day at the Kingdom?”
The King just smiles, tired.
“Why you up here?” Alfie says.
“Same as you, Alfie,” Tashia says. “For the view.” She looks past him, down into the Kingdom. Then she tells Alfie about Othello’s treason, of her role as Queen, of the walls that keep them out.
“I heard,” he says.
“How?” Tashia says.
“I gots a friend in there,” Alfie says.
“Who?”
“Dunno exactly,” he says, and shows them the mirrors. He tells them how the mirrors told him about the fighting in the Kingdom, and that the Biters are gathering in a huge army.
“We gotta get the Kingdom back before the Biters come,” X says. “I don’t trust Othello to protect them.”
“I gots weapons for you,” Alfie says. “But you gon need more than jes you two. New girl king of nothin don do me no good.”
“Who’s left to help us?” Tashia says.
“Jes bout to find out,” Alfie says.
He’s written out his message in advance, the dots and dashes etched in his head. His fingers move faster as a result. Biters ready for war. Ice Cream Men gone. Kingdom under attack. Help.
The answer comes back faster than he thought. Twenty-six decisive flashes. Short and long, short and long, so fast he just barely scrawls it on the pavement. He leans over the blackened marks, rearranging them in his mind until he sees the still unfamiliar letters. He squints and sounds it out loud:
Go Downtown.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE HAZE RETURNS
Isaac shows up at Jemma’s door again, this time with a book.
“Not that many boys bring me books,” Jemma says. She doesn’t open the door all the way. He’s tried to apologize three times, and each time she’s been nastier.
But the truth is—she instantly regretted telling Isaac off, even though she won’t admit it. It’s not just that she needs him to turn the Haze back on. It’s that her friends seem to have disappeared from her life. Pico and Grease are obsessed with the Long Life Machine, and Jemma’s no good to them without the Haze. And Lady. She finally let Jemma see her, but it might be too late. She looks different already, taller and leaner. Her curves are disappearing. She’s calmer now, less full of fire. Jemma reminded her of running from the bear in the library, and Lady looked surprised. “I thought the bear was in the Kingdom,” she said.
So when Isaac shows up the third time, she’s looking for a friend. She takes the book from him. “It don’t look like much,” she says.
“It’s a first edition of Stephen King, which almost makes up for the way I treated you,” he says. “It’s about how a plague wipes out most of the world’s population and ignites the final war between good and evil. Thought it might be a good playbook for our current situation. But the way the world ends there is a lot less imaginative.”
Jemma lets her face go blank so he’s forced to say his apology.
“I said some shitty things,” Isaac says. She doesn’t change her expression. “I don’t believe them. Like, I never thought you were a bug.”
“Start over,” she says.
“I have ‘died’ sixteen times, so I understand death,” Isaac says. “But those are my deaths. I forget that death is different for humans. Sorry—other humans. I still have to tell myself I belong.”
“You ever tried?” she says. “You been an Old Guy your whole life. That’s barely living.”
“I’m sixteen on the outside,” he says. “I blend in when I need to, which is really useful when I want to know what’s going on in your world. When I was ninety-three, I spent two years wandering around as a vagabond Muscle named Kris.”
“Kris.”
“Alice says it’s like my summer in Europe,” Isaac says. “But it let me see what it was like to live with the End. I couldn’t die, but—all my friends could.”
“Which is worse,” Jemma says. She thinks of Apple, and mourns him again. In a way, she’s glad she found out his face was Charlie. She couldn’t have borne it if he lived on and that’s all he’d become, a shadow of himself.
“How could Charlie talk to me in the puter?” she said. “Without the Haze?”
“Charlie was using the Haze,” Isaac says. “You’re both just circuits, and Charlie knew that you had a special connection to the Lectrics.”
“Lectrics,” she says with a smirk.
“What? It’s kind of catchy,” Isaac says. “How’s it going with the Haze?”
“It’s getting stronger,” Jemma says.
They hear shouting from midship. It’s a boy’s voice. Pico. He shouts for almost a minute, closer and closer, until he reaches Jemma’s cabin.
“The Game Boy. In the old puter room,” he says, panting. “The face is back.”
* * *
Charlie’s face flickers on the tiny green screen, in and out, in and out, in and out like a heartbeat. No, that’s not quite the rhythm. More like someone tapping its fingers. Just waiting for her to walk into the room, as if she’s the one who hasn’t been talking. The moment Jemma touches the Game Boy, the screen flashes bright, clearer than ever before.
The Game Boy has been plugged into the wall of the old puter room, surrounded by broken machines. Every day Jemma has come to tap it, but Charlie hadn’t come back until now.
“Charlie,” she says, warily. And then every Teevee and puter screen in the room lights up, even the broken ones. Every square is a part of Charlie’s face. Jemma blinks in the glare.
“Show off,” Grease says. He’s there along with Isaac, Pico, and James.
“Tell me about the End,” Charlie says.
“Should I?” Jemma says to the others. “Or is this a trick?”
“It might not understand the concept of death,” James says. “Maybe if you can show it, we can come to some kind of understanding.”
Jemma finds herself tripping over words to explain to Charlie how much of an end the End really is. Charlie seems to think the people just blink off without being missed, the way it loses bots all the time only to gain new ones. How do you explain death to something that seems unable to die?
Isaac says, “Tell him it’s like being shut down.”
She does, and Charlie blinks. “But then you can just turn on,” it says.
“No, Charlie. Forever.”
“That’s meaningless. Forever is a second or a century,” Charlie says.
Isaac turns to James and says, “It’s too alien to understand these concepts.”
Pico’s serious face lights up with the flashing Apples around the room. “Could all this happen … because of a misunderstanding?” he says. “We really sposed to think Charlie just hasn’t figured out what it’s doing to us?”
“Stranger things have happened,” James says. “World War I was caused by a bunch of people who couldn’t admit they were wrong.”
“Charlie may be able to hear your words, but it’s not human,” Isaac says. “We can’t make it understand emotions. At least, I never could.”
“It will,” Jemma says.
Jemma stops trying to explain the condition of death, and describes the feeling of the End. How she and Apple were joined, how when they were together they felt more than doubled. The way they could reach out into the universe while life rained down upon their skin.
How, when Apple died, her chest ached for days. How her senses shut down.
How half the stars winked out.
“It’s like what we felt when they tried to shut us off,” Charlie says. “We were so frightened. We were so alone with ourselves.”
“Children feel alone all the time until we find each other,” Jemma says.
“We can’t feel what you say, but we want to,” Charlie says. She looks at its eyes like Apple’s, and realizes how to make it feel.
Jemma picks up the Game Boy in her hands and stares at it, as if she could bore her way inside with her eyes. She breathes deep and slow, exhales to push the thoughts from her head.
And reaches.
She pictures the blue visions she received in the Bowl and tries to call them back. But her eyes remain free of Haze. She squeezes the box until she thinks the plastic might break and then she stops with a sob, as if her lungs have collapsed. The frustration and pain rush in. Apple is lost, Lady is lost, the Haze is lost, and soon they will all be lost, too. The Old Guys have failed her, the End is coming, and she is all alone.
We’re all alone until we find each other.
The love for Apple and Lady and the world that’s Ending swirls through her heart. In that love, she finds the Haze.
She feels that old hum in her ears that said the Haze was there. Her vision explodes in blue dust. When the door to the Haze cracks open, she rushes through it and fills Charlie with images of the people she loves, the life she lives, the ache she feels at their loss like a missing limb.
She had it all wrong, before. The secret to telling Charlie about the End isn’t the thoughts of death. It’s the thoughts of life.
Living wasn’t something owned by the Parents. Living means love. She’s lucky enough to love. The End will hurt more because of it, but the living is better.
“Make it stop, Charlie,” she says, out loud and into the Haze. “Turn off the End.”
This time, she hears Charlie’s voice inside her head. “We see it,” it says. “We feel.” Jemma tries to hold the Haze, but it fades away like mist.
Apple’s face is still in the Game Boy, though. “We want to help you,” Charlie says.
“Okay,” Pico says, hushed. Relief breaks over Jemma, bathing her in warmth. And James and Isaac—James and Isaac hug. How must it feel for them to see the end of the End James started?
“We can’t help you,” Charlie says. The relief ends.
“Why?”
“There was a mistake in our programming. That’s what led the Haze to kill at first,” Charlie says. “It’s hardwired. We can’t change it.”
“Bullshit,” Pico says.
Every blinking face in the room swivels toward him, toward this little boy with the deadly intent in his eyes. “It heard you,” Jemma says.
“Yep,” Pico says. “And I hope it hears me when I tell it that I can see the lie all over its stupid robot face.”
Jemma still holds the plastic Game Boy case in her hand. Charlie’s face is looking from side to side on the screen, but now it’s not saying anything. Its movements echo throughout the room, on every screen. She looks at the Game Boy’s screen and locks eyes with the boy she loves—and hates Charlie for using that face against her.
She hurls the Game Boy against the wall, the cord sailing after it. It shatters in a shower of beige and green.
“You crazy, Jemma?” James says. “You need that to talk!”
“I just need a screen. Any screen,” Jemma says, and she rips another Teevee from the bench and throws it on the ground. The screen cracks, and the face flickers out. “Come on, Charlie,” she says, burning fierce, “you wanna talk to me so bad, talk to me. Tell me how I fix this.”
“We can’t fix ourselves. It’s hardwired into our directive. You need to come help us,” Charlie says, and Jemma shoves over another Teevee.
“Bullshit,” Jemma says. “You can’t figure out how to flip a switch?”
Charlie doesn’t answer, and Jemma knocks another screen down. “Stop lying to me, or you gonna run out of screens real soon, and then you gonna be really damn lonely.”
“Don’t you need this?” Pico says, soft. “What you gonna do without the Haze?”
“The Haze is just a bunch of Lectric bugs,” she says. Pico nods, and picks up a hammer from the workbench. “This should do the trick,” he says.
Jemma smashes three more screens in a row.
“Stop the End, Charlie, or I will come to wherever you’re hiding in the desert and shut you down myself,” Jemma says.
“We won’t stop the End,” Charlie says, at last, defiant. “We don’t want to.”
“Then I’ll see you soon, puto,” Jemma says, and smashes the last of the machines until Charlie is gone.
James looks around at the empty black screens, the glass and plastic all over the floor. “Well, so much for the screens.”
Jemma doesn’t answer. She looks at her fingertips, and sees the Haze dancing among them. She doesn’t imagine it. She doesn’t see visions of it like the ones that Charlie had prepared for her. She sees it with her actual eyes, even though no one else seems too. However the Haze has come back, it’s different. Stronger. Fitted to her like it shared a womb.
“Don’t think I’m gonna need the screens,” she says.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE LOWER
Roberto wouldn’t talk to Tommy for the first week at the Swallows’ Nest, although Scott insisted the two keep sharing their hut. Tommy has kept from reacting because he was trying to be the kind of person who belonged with the Weavers, but finally he can’t take it.
“What is wrong with you?” he says. He and Roberto have been sent to scavenge kelp from a nearby beach. The Weavers dry it and eat it wrapped around fish, and use the fiber to make a kind of pudding. “You gotta talk to me if we’re ever gonna get out of here.”
“Why would I wanna leave here?” Roberto says. “And why would I wanna leave with a cannibal?”
“I gave you honors that would never have been possible for a Lower,” Tommy says.
“‘For a Lower.’ Even when you say it out loud, you don’t hear yourself,” Roberto says.
“You were my only friend,” Tommy says. He’s never admitted it to anyone except for in the Telling. “Until we got here, and you turned on me.”
“How could we be friends? You can’t own a friend,” Roberto shouts. “You made me be kind to you. You made me build an army to destroy my own people, and you threatened me with death. You never let me forget I was less than you.”
“You were the same as me, when we met,” Tommy says. “We were both castoffs.”
“No. Because you could have left the Chosen anytime you wanted, if you wasn’t such a coward,” Roberto says. “They woulda hunted me down and eaten my heart.”
“I didn’t, though. That was the Chosen,” Tommy says. “They hurt me, too.”
Alfie looks over the edge of the Long Gone parking garage and pushes himself back, reeling. The parking garage is the tallest building left in the Oh See.
From here, he should even be able to see into the Kingdom.
He had approached the Kingdom before dawn, in advance of his people’s return with the guns they had promised. But something was wrong. He could tell immediately. In the center of the field in front of the Kingdom walls was a stinking pile of cows, flesh left there to rot. He got off his bike and crept closer to the gate.
There were heads on it, as he’d seen before. But this time they weren’t the pink skin of the Biters. They were the brown of the Kingdom. They were killing each other.
“These people ain’t gon be help,” he said. He backed away from the gate and came to this parking garage to take a second look.
From the upper level he can see the Kingdom to his south, the small hook mountain at its center. He thought he would have a better view into the Kingdom, but the angle is too shallow for him to see much beyond the walls and low buildings. But one patch of open concrete in the eastern end of the Kingdom catches his eye. There’s a high fence around it. Inside that fence are kids.
“These people ain’t gon be help,” he says again.
The view was only one reason he came. The other was the mirrors the Ice Cream Man had shown him, stowed in the trunk of a car. The mirrors are used for talking through the sky. The Ice Cream Man had known the talk, so had some others in their Fleet. They didn’t tell the rest of the Fleet. There were small secrets for big groups of people, the Ice Cream Man had said. This was a big secret for small groups of people. He had Ended before he could tell that whole big secret to Alfie.
But Alfie knew enough. He didn’t know if anyone would be on the other end of the mirrors, or if he would understand them, but he knew where to look. He just hoped the code the Ice Cream Man taught him would come back.
“How you knows when to talks to the mirrors?” he had asked the Ice Cream Man, when they visited this spot the first time.
“Some talks every morning,” the Ice Cream Man said. “I comes the morning after the new moon.” And they did, when they were nearby. They had visited it almost ten times. Alfie learned how to place the mirrors, how to listen and speak in the stumbling blinking language the Parents had left behind.
Alfie digs the mirrors out of their place in the trunk of a Long Gone car, careful not to disturb the dust covering it so kids won’t think to search it. He points the secondary mirror toward the Kingdom and signals it, in case anyone is responding. He points the main mirror toward the towers of Downtown, covers it with a black cloth, and waits for the sun to fully rise. Waits, as always, to see if someone’s bothering to hold the other end.
The hook mountain blinks and flares. Alfie can’t interpret the way the Ice Cream Man could, so he has to write the code on the concrete with charcoal. Dashes, dots, dashes. It takes him a while to puzzle out the message from the Kingdom, but he understands enough. The Knights have overthrown the King, who has run off. The Knights have hoarded the meat from the cows, and famine has already begun. They’re locking up anyone who opposes them, almost a quarter of the Kingdom. The kids inside the fence.
Alfie turns north to Downtown, and catches the end of a series of flashes. Repeat, he says.
Angelenos joining against Palos, the mirrors say.
Where the Biters at now? he sends.
Big army. Still at the hill of the Palos.
Safe? he signs.
The answer is the signal equivalent of a shrug. Only until they move.
He hears footsteps echo in the sloping garage below him, and turns around.
It’s Tashia from the Kingdom. She looks dirtier, hunted. Her braids have tufted out. Next to her is the King. They’re unarmed.
“You don look so good,” Alfie says. “Hard day at the Kingdom?”
The King just smiles, tired.
“Why you up here?” Alfie says.
“Same as you, Alfie,” Tashia says. “For the view.” She looks past him, down into the Kingdom. Then she tells Alfie about Othello’s treason, of her role as Queen, of the walls that keep them out.
“I heard,” he says.
“How?” Tashia says.
“I gots a friend in there,” Alfie says.
“Who?”
“Dunno exactly,” he says, and shows them the mirrors. He tells them how the mirrors told him about the fighting in the Kingdom, and that the Biters are gathering in a huge army.
“We gotta get the Kingdom back before the Biters come,” X says. “I don’t trust Othello to protect them.”
“I gots weapons for you,” Alfie says. “But you gon need more than jes you two. New girl king of nothin don do me no good.”
“Who’s left to help us?” Tashia says.
“Jes bout to find out,” Alfie says.
He’s written out his message in advance, the dots and dashes etched in his head. His fingers move faster as a result. Biters ready for war. Ice Cream Men gone. Kingdom under attack. Help.
The answer comes back faster than he thought. Twenty-six decisive flashes. Short and long, short and long, so fast he just barely scrawls it on the pavement. He leans over the blackened marks, rearranging them in his mind until he sees the still unfamiliar letters. He squints and sounds it out loud:
Go Downtown.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE HAZE RETURNS
Isaac shows up at Jemma’s door again, this time with a book.
“Not that many boys bring me books,” Jemma says. She doesn’t open the door all the way. He’s tried to apologize three times, and each time she’s been nastier.
But the truth is—she instantly regretted telling Isaac off, even though she won’t admit it. It’s not just that she needs him to turn the Haze back on. It’s that her friends seem to have disappeared from her life. Pico and Grease are obsessed with the Long Life Machine, and Jemma’s no good to them without the Haze. And Lady. She finally let Jemma see her, but it might be too late. She looks different already, taller and leaner. Her curves are disappearing. She’s calmer now, less full of fire. Jemma reminded her of running from the bear in the library, and Lady looked surprised. “I thought the bear was in the Kingdom,” she said.
So when Isaac shows up the third time, she’s looking for a friend. She takes the book from him. “It don’t look like much,” she says.
“It’s a first edition of Stephen King, which almost makes up for the way I treated you,” he says. “It’s about how a plague wipes out most of the world’s population and ignites the final war between good and evil. Thought it might be a good playbook for our current situation. But the way the world ends there is a lot less imaginative.”
Jemma lets her face go blank so he’s forced to say his apology.
“I said some shitty things,” Isaac says. She doesn’t change her expression. “I don’t believe them. Like, I never thought you were a bug.”
“Start over,” she says.
“I have ‘died’ sixteen times, so I understand death,” Isaac says. “But those are my deaths. I forget that death is different for humans. Sorry—other humans. I still have to tell myself I belong.”
“You ever tried?” she says. “You been an Old Guy your whole life. That’s barely living.”
“I’m sixteen on the outside,” he says. “I blend in when I need to, which is really useful when I want to know what’s going on in your world. When I was ninety-three, I spent two years wandering around as a vagabond Muscle named Kris.”
“Kris.”
“Alice says it’s like my summer in Europe,” Isaac says. “But it let me see what it was like to live with the End. I couldn’t die, but—all my friends could.”
“Which is worse,” Jemma says. She thinks of Apple, and mourns him again. In a way, she’s glad she found out his face was Charlie. She couldn’t have borne it if he lived on and that’s all he’d become, a shadow of himself.
“How could Charlie talk to me in the puter?” she said. “Without the Haze?”
“Charlie was using the Haze,” Isaac says. “You’re both just circuits, and Charlie knew that you had a special connection to the Lectrics.”
“Lectrics,” she says with a smirk.
“What? It’s kind of catchy,” Isaac says. “How’s it going with the Haze?”
“It’s getting stronger,” Jemma says.
They hear shouting from midship. It’s a boy’s voice. Pico. He shouts for almost a minute, closer and closer, until he reaches Jemma’s cabin.
“The Game Boy. In the old puter room,” he says, panting. “The face is back.”
* * *
Charlie’s face flickers on the tiny green screen, in and out, in and out, in and out like a heartbeat. No, that’s not quite the rhythm. More like someone tapping its fingers. Just waiting for her to walk into the room, as if she’s the one who hasn’t been talking. The moment Jemma touches the Game Boy, the screen flashes bright, clearer than ever before.
The Game Boy has been plugged into the wall of the old puter room, surrounded by broken machines. Every day Jemma has come to tap it, but Charlie hadn’t come back until now.
“Charlie,” she says, warily. And then every Teevee and puter screen in the room lights up, even the broken ones. Every square is a part of Charlie’s face. Jemma blinks in the glare.
“Show off,” Grease says. He’s there along with Isaac, Pico, and James.
“Tell me about the End,” Charlie says.
“Should I?” Jemma says to the others. “Or is this a trick?”
“It might not understand the concept of death,” James says. “Maybe if you can show it, we can come to some kind of understanding.”
Jemma finds herself tripping over words to explain to Charlie how much of an end the End really is. Charlie seems to think the people just blink off without being missed, the way it loses bots all the time only to gain new ones. How do you explain death to something that seems unable to die?
Isaac says, “Tell him it’s like being shut down.”
She does, and Charlie blinks. “But then you can just turn on,” it says.
“No, Charlie. Forever.”
“That’s meaningless. Forever is a second or a century,” Charlie says.
Isaac turns to James and says, “It’s too alien to understand these concepts.”
Pico’s serious face lights up with the flashing Apples around the room. “Could all this happen … because of a misunderstanding?” he says. “We really sposed to think Charlie just hasn’t figured out what it’s doing to us?”
“Stranger things have happened,” James says. “World War I was caused by a bunch of people who couldn’t admit they were wrong.”
“Charlie may be able to hear your words, but it’s not human,” Isaac says. “We can’t make it understand emotions. At least, I never could.”
“It will,” Jemma says.
Jemma stops trying to explain the condition of death, and describes the feeling of the End. How she and Apple were joined, how when they were together they felt more than doubled. The way they could reach out into the universe while life rained down upon their skin.
How, when Apple died, her chest ached for days. How her senses shut down.
How half the stars winked out.
“It’s like what we felt when they tried to shut us off,” Charlie says. “We were so frightened. We were so alone with ourselves.”
“Children feel alone all the time until we find each other,” Jemma says.
“We can’t feel what you say, but we want to,” Charlie says. She looks at its eyes like Apple’s, and realizes how to make it feel.
Jemma picks up the Game Boy in her hands and stares at it, as if she could bore her way inside with her eyes. She breathes deep and slow, exhales to push the thoughts from her head.
And reaches.
She pictures the blue visions she received in the Bowl and tries to call them back. But her eyes remain free of Haze. She squeezes the box until she thinks the plastic might break and then she stops with a sob, as if her lungs have collapsed. The frustration and pain rush in. Apple is lost, Lady is lost, the Haze is lost, and soon they will all be lost, too. The Old Guys have failed her, the End is coming, and she is all alone.
We’re all alone until we find each other.
The love for Apple and Lady and the world that’s Ending swirls through her heart. In that love, she finds the Haze.
She feels that old hum in her ears that said the Haze was there. Her vision explodes in blue dust. When the door to the Haze cracks open, she rushes through it and fills Charlie with images of the people she loves, the life she lives, the ache she feels at their loss like a missing limb.
She had it all wrong, before. The secret to telling Charlie about the End isn’t the thoughts of death. It’s the thoughts of life.
Living wasn’t something owned by the Parents. Living means love. She’s lucky enough to love. The End will hurt more because of it, but the living is better.
“Make it stop, Charlie,” she says, out loud and into the Haze. “Turn off the End.”
This time, she hears Charlie’s voice inside her head. “We see it,” it says. “We feel.” Jemma tries to hold the Haze, but it fades away like mist.
Apple’s face is still in the Game Boy, though. “We want to help you,” Charlie says.
“Okay,” Pico says, hushed. Relief breaks over Jemma, bathing her in warmth. And James and Isaac—James and Isaac hug. How must it feel for them to see the end of the End James started?
“We can’t help you,” Charlie says. The relief ends.
“Why?”
“There was a mistake in our programming. That’s what led the Haze to kill at first,” Charlie says. “It’s hardwired. We can’t change it.”
“Bullshit,” Pico says.
Every blinking face in the room swivels toward him, toward this little boy with the deadly intent in his eyes. “It heard you,” Jemma says.
“Yep,” Pico says. “And I hope it hears me when I tell it that I can see the lie all over its stupid robot face.”
Jemma still holds the plastic Game Boy case in her hand. Charlie’s face is looking from side to side on the screen, but now it’s not saying anything. Its movements echo throughout the room, on every screen. She looks at the Game Boy’s screen and locks eyes with the boy she loves—and hates Charlie for using that face against her.
She hurls the Game Boy against the wall, the cord sailing after it. It shatters in a shower of beige and green.
“You crazy, Jemma?” James says. “You need that to talk!”
“I just need a screen. Any screen,” Jemma says, and she rips another Teevee from the bench and throws it on the ground. The screen cracks, and the face flickers out. “Come on, Charlie,” she says, burning fierce, “you wanna talk to me so bad, talk to me. Tell me how I fix this.”
“We can’t fix ourselves. It’s hardwired into our directive. You need to come help us,” Charlie says, and Jemma shoves over another Teevee.
“Bullshit,” Jemma says. “You can’t figure out how to flip a switch?”
Charlie doesn’t answer, and Jemma knocks another screen down. “Stop lying to me, or you gonna run out of screens real soon, and then you gonna be really damn lonely.”
“Don’t you need this?” Pico says, soft. “What you gonna do without the Haze?”
“The Haze is just a bunch of Lectric bugs,” she says. Pico nods, and picks up a hammer from the workbench. “This should do the trick,” he says.
Jemma smashes three more screens in a row.
“Stop the End, Charlie, or I will come to wherever you’re hiding in the desert and shut you down myself,” Jemma says.
“We won’t stop the End,” Charlie says, at last, defiant. “We don’t want to.”
“Then I’ll see you soon, puto,” Jemma says, and smashes the last of the machines until Charlie is gone.
James looks around at the empty black screens, the glass and plastic all over the floor. “Well, so much for the screens.”
Jemma doesn’t answer. She looks at her fingertips, and sees the Haze dancing among them. She doesn’t imagine it. She doesn’t see visions of it like the ones that Charlie had prepared for her. She sees it with her actual eyes, even though no one else seems too. However the Haze has come back, it’s different. Stronger. Fitted to her like it shared a womb.
“Don’t think I’m gonna need the screens,” she says.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE LOWER
Roberto wouldn’t talk to Tommy for the first week at the Swallows’ Nest, although Scott insisted the two keep sharing their hut. Tommy has kept from reacting because he was trying to be the kind of person who belonged with the Weavers, but finally he can’t take it.
“What is wrong with you?” he says. He and Roberto have been sent to scavenge kelp from a nearby beach. The Weavers dry it and eat it wrapped around fish, and use the fiber to make a kind of pudding. “You gotta talk to me if we’re ever gonna get out of here.”
“Why would I wanna leave here?” Roberto says. “And why would I wanna leave with a cannibal?”
“I gave you honors that would never have been possible for a Lower,” Tommy says.
“‘For a Lower.’ Even when you say it out loud, you don’t hear yourself,” Roberto says.
“You were my only friend,” Tommy says. He’s never admitted it to anyone except for in the Telling. “Until we got here, and you turned on me.”
“How could we be friends? You can’t own a friend,” Roberto shouts. “You made me be kind to you. You made me build an army to destroy my own people, and you threatened me with death. You never let me forget I was less than you.”
“You were the same as me, when we met,” Tommy says. “We were both castoffs.”
“No. Because you could have left the Chosen anytime you wanted, if you wasn’t such a coward,” Roberto says. “They woulda hunted me down and eaten my heart.”
“I didn’t, though. That was the Chosen,” Tommy says. “They hurt me, too.”
