The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(106)

So it seems we’ll say good-bye to our country. To our continent. To everything and everyone we’ve known. We’ll let our cities burn in fanaticism and drown in oppression, leave our homes half-built to be ruined by rain and rats. We will pile all our memories onto this vast barge of land and we will watch the whole mess sink.

As I sit contemplating this, an unfamiliar voice interrupts my thoughts.

“New,” Audrey says.

Julie jumps to her feet. She flattens against the wall, eyes as wide as they can go. Her mother is looking at her. Not just allowing her glassy stare to drift across her but looking at her.

“What?” Julie says in a trembling whisper.

“N-new . . . Y-york.”

Julie blinks away a tear. “Mom?”

Audrey looks around the cabin. She makes brief eye contact with each of us. Then she slumps over and stares at the floor, wheezing softly.

“Audrey?” Julie drops to her knees in front of her mother, clutching the air as she resists the urge to touch her. “Audrey Arnaldsdóttir?” She risks a quick caress of her mother’s cold cheek, a quick smile through the tears. “Do you . . . do you remember me, Mom? Your daughter? Julie?”

Audrey releases a low groan and continues to examine the carpet.

“Doesn’t happen that fast,” M grunts.

Julie’s eyes dart toward him, instinctively igniting into anger, but he continues.

“Small stuff comes first. Places. Things. It’s a while before we can handle . . . people.”

“But . . . it’s her, right?” Julie says. “She’s remembering where she lived?”

M shrugs. “First thing that came back to me . . . Cream of Wheat cereal. Next thing . . . apartment in Seattle.”

For the first time since the blood-soaked day they met, Julie smiles at M.

“It was just parroting,” Abram says. His arms are folded, his posture skeptical, but his slightly widened eyes betray him. “I said ‘New York’ and it said it back. They do that sometimes.”

“Brook . . . lyn,” Audrey sighs at the floor.

Abram’s eyes widen further.

“Mom,” Julie says, shaking her head in giddy disbelief. “Mom, are you there? Do you remember?” She leans close and grabs Audrey’s shoulders, trying to make eye contact. “You met Dad on a flight. John Grigio. You fell in love. You moved to Brooklyn. You performed your poems at his band’s shows and worked at the library and signed up for every local play you could find.”

“Easy,” M says under his breath. “Too much at once . . . not good.”

Julie seems unaware of anyone but the woman in front of her. She has caught Audrey’s gaze and bobs her head to maintain it as Audrey’s eyes try to escape.

“You were still young when you had me, Mom. You and Dad knew you weren’t ready, you were just a couple of broke artists in a studio apartment in an abandoned corner of New York, and you argued about it for weeks. Dad said it was wrong to bring a child into this fucked-up world, you said it was wrong not to. You said the kid you’d make was exactly what this fucked-up world needed.”

Julie laughs and wipes at her eyes. Audrey’s have stopped darting and have settled on the floor. Julie bends low, trying to catch them again. “You were my age, Mom. I just turned twenty. Can you wish me happy birthday?”

Audrey hunches inward, making soft, inscrutable noises. Then she shoots to her feet and rips off her lab coat, tossing it away like it’s on fire. She stands naked in the middle of the empty cabin, the hopeless ruin of her body on full display.

“Oh, Jules . . . ,” Nora murmurs sadly.

Julie looks up at her mother, freshly stricken by the sight. The tears in her eyes have never really dried, they’ve just ebbed and flowed, and now they’re flowing again.

Audrey looks down at the gaping hole in her side. She passes a hand through it. Her exposed lung inflates, and a mournful howl escapes her slack mouth.

“Mom,” Julie whimpers, a meaningless, ineffectual noise. “Mom, please.”

Abram shakes his head and returns to the cockpit. The impossibility of Julie’s Icelandic hopes is too obvious for comment. No matter what science-fiction utopia we may find there, her mother is going to die.

I notice Sprout peeking through the gap in the curtain. She hesitates. She watches Julie for a moment before following her father.

“On our left,” Abram announces over the PA in a tired drone, “as far away as possible, you’ll see Axiom corporate headquarters, aka Branch 1, aka New York City. If you’d like to be distracted from sad thoughts, feel free to be frightened now.”

Julie is beyond any comfort I can give. A clumsy pat on the back won’t help and may hurt. I can’t begin to imagine what she needs right now, so I decide to give her space.

I push through the curtain and wander up the aisle, watching New York through the windows. The high-rises resemble a grove of burnt trees in the hazy distance. The setting sun reflects off them like fire. We are many miles away, safe above the glittering Atlantic, but I can feel eyes on me. Scopes and targeting lasers. Perhaps a new LOTUS segment calling for us to be shot down with a less-than-subtle montage of famous plane crashes. None of this will matter. We are beyond their reach, and soon we’ll be outside their world altogether, removed from their savage ecosystem.