The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(81)

She seems to be crumpling inward, imploding under her confusion, and I’m searching for something to ease the tension when a sharp scream cuts through it.

Sprout is staring over her shoulder at the collapsed remains of an antique movie theater, her good eye wide with alarm.

Abram’s rifle slides over his shoulder and into his hands and he scans the surrounding buildings, darting from opening to opening with a practiced efficiency. “What is it, baby? What’d you see?”

“That building,” she says. “It changed.”

“What do you mean it changed?”

“I don’t know,” she says, frowning in concentration. “It was . . . different.”

“Different how? Did you see something move? Baby, this is important, if you saw—”

“It wasn’t broken.” Her frown warms with a hint of wonder. “It was pretty.”

This seems to put some kind of tag on the moment for Abram and he relaxes. He holsters his rifle. He resumes walking. Sprout glances back over her shoulder a few more times, then falls into step behind her father.

“Is she okay?” Nora asks with raised eyebrows.

“She has vision problems,” Abram says. “Sometimes she sees things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Things that aren’t there.”

I watch the girl’s face as she climbs car after car, clinging to her father’s arm like it’s a mountaineering rope. Every few minutes, her eye widens on something in the ruins around us, but she keeps whatever she sees to herself.

“What happened to her?” I hear myself asking.

“Nothing,” Abram says, shooting me a dark look. “She was born with it.”

I stare at the places where Sprout stares, squinting into the ripples of heat rising from the sun-baked concrete. She notices what I’m doing and a look passes between us, eerily nuanced given our gulf of age. She shuts her eye, and at first I think she’s winking at me, but then she scampers over the next car with her eye still shut, not noticeably hindered by her apparent blindness.

She glances back, taps the daisy on her eye patch, and flashes me a gap-toothed grin. My spine tingles.





WE


DO YOU KNOW THE FUTURE? Is there a future? What will you do? Can you even do anything?

The boy asks us questions, knowing we won’t answer. He skims the spines of our volumes, searching the endless stacks, but we are not sorted and cannot be checked out. We must be read all at once.

What’s it for? Why remember all this? What can we do with it?

His anger ebbs and flows as he traverses mile after mile of silent highway, his leathery feet dragging through dead leaves and trash. Momentary spikes of rage sink back into grim contemplation. We understand these feelings. We watch them fill the pages of his books and so many books around them.

Are you only good people? he asks us in the bleak mumble that often follows his spikes. Or are you everyone?

Leaves and beer cans swirl around his ankles in a sudden gust of wind.

Are you Mom and Dad?

No answer comes for the boy, though we wish we could give one. We would like to help him because he sees us and talks to us and can very nearly read us, and some pages of his books line the highest shelves. But we are many, and it takes many to make us move.

Another city. The carpet of trash deepens. A broken bottle penetrates his foot’s callus and cuts into live tissue. A few drops of lukewarm blood ooze out, dark but not black. He feels no pain. His mind is far away, occupying other worlds, and it has no time for the needs of his body. He does not hear the van approaching behind him. He does not hear the man calling to him. He does not realize his sphere of solitude has been punctured until the man is kneeling in front of him.

“Are you okay?” the man asks him. “Where are your parents?”

The boy looks at the man through the shadowy gloom of his sunglasses. The man’s eyes are round with surprise and concern. His face is thin and brown with a short beard of fuzzy tufts. He is waiting for an answer.

The boy shrugs.

“Are you alone, mate?” another man asks, and the boy looks at the van. A rusty old Volkswagen camper, crammed full of bags and boxes, food and guns. The man’s head pokes out of the passenger window. This one’s face is pale, his hair yellow and shaggy, his eyes big and green. The boy wants to take off these smothering sunglasses to get a better view of these eyes, but he leaves them on. Even in his otherworldly state, he is capable of learning. It’s what he’s here to do.

The green-eyed man steps out of the van and kneels down next to the brown-eyed man. His arms are tattooed with spirals of numbers. He reaches out and touches the boy’s face. The boy feels the instinct surge into his jaw, electrifying his teeth with unnatural hardness, but he forces it back down.

“You’re so cold,” the green-eyed man says. “Are you sick?”

“Cold?” the brown-eyed man says warily.

“Not that cold, Geb.”

“Can I take these off for a second?” the brown-eyed man says, reaching for the sunglasses.

The boy steps back and shakes his head violently.

“Okay, okay,” the man says, holding his hands up. “You need to look cool, I get it.”

The green-eyed man smiles. His eyes are gentle. “What’s your name, mate?”