The Burning World (Warm Bodies #2)(95)

“It’s Sigur Rós!” Gael objects. “It’s a mopecore classic.”

Gebre shudders. They watch the boy for a reaction, but he stares blankly ahead. Gael raises the volume until the piercing falsetto threatens to crack the windshield. Gebre is shouting at him to shut down the experiment, the boy is obviously deaf, but then he cuts off in midsentence and kills the stereo.

“Hey,” he says to the boy, whispering in the ringing silence. “Are you okay?”

The boy’s face is still blank, but his shocking yellow irises are dulled behind a pool of tears. He does not answer Gebre because he is no longer in the van. He is stumbling along a walkway in a dark, echoing Library, suspended between unknowable heights and unthinkable depths, struggling to keep his eyes ahead. A few books topple out of their shelves and loose pages flutter around him, and now he’s in a restaurant, sitting across from a girl, trying to tolerate the music she has chosen. The girl looks like him, older and thinner and a little lighter-skinned, but with the same brown eyes, dark like wells that sink through all strata to the beginning of life on Earth.

He loves the girl and she loves him. They are the only remaining keepers of each other’s memory, though it’s buried deep in them both.

“Hey,” Gael says, gently wiping a tear from his cheek. “What’s wrong, love?”

The boy looks at the dampness on the man’s pale finger, the salt crystals inside it like icebergs adrift on a diluvial Earth.

“Washington, DC,” he says.

Gael and Gebre share a stunned glance.

“Is that where you were going?” Gebre asks.

The boy doesn’t respond.

“The Almanac we found in Dallas . . . ,” Gebre says to Gael under his breath. “DC was exed, wasn’t it? Exed and razed?”

“Rover,” Gael says to the boy, giving him a look of deep regret, “there’s nobody in DC, mate. It burned down a long time ago.”

The boy has no visible reaction.

“But we’re going somewhere that has a lot of people,” Gebre says with forced cheer. “People and food and work, and it’s safe there. No one will hurt us there.”

Gael tentatively reaches toward him, lays a hand on his shoulder. The boy knows Gael is afraid of his teeth and for a moment he feels the urge, but it’s not really hunger. He is beyond the control of that simple brute. When he feels the urge now, it’s just a rattling of his cage. A frenzied effort to bend the bars.

“We’re going to look after you,” Gael says, giving the boy’s shoulder a squeeze, and he and Gebre share a meaningful look. A decision. “Whatever’s happened to you, we’re going to help you heal it. Okay?”

The boy grits his teeth to stop the clicking that he can tell makes Gael nervous. He sees a moonlit balcony and a dusty airport and an old house on fire, all of it shrinking into the darkness through the rear window of a Geo coupe.

“Don’t worry, Rover,” Gebre says, trying even harder to infuse his voice with hope. “You’re going to love New York.”





I


“IT’S A MIXED POPULATION BRANCH so it’s normal for civilians to be here, but we have to assume they’re still broadcasting our capture code, so people are going to recognize us if we give them a chance. I’ll keep us out of traffic but if we do run into anyone, keep your mouths shut, heads down, no eye contact. Think of every time you’ve ever failed someone and let the shame make you invisible.”

I’m not listening. I don’t need these tips. No one avoids human interaction better than I do. No one has more shame to hide behind. As Pittsburgh’s skyline rises in front of us, Abram drones on about the resistance leaders we’re looking for, the secret conference rooms where they meet, but only a thin outer layer of me is hearing him. I am finding it hard to be here, in the present, with all its explosions and car chases and covert operations. We are trying to overthrow a despotic regime and save America, but all I can think about is the five people walking next to me, their localized conflicts, their tiny joys and pains.

Nora’s eyes are faraway, traveling inner spaces I know little about. M walks beside her with an equally distant look, perhaps continuing to excavate his apparently harmless past. The pistol looks heavy in Julie’s hand. The barrel keeps drifting away from Abram as if embarrassed, and Julie reluctantly drags it back.

“Nora,” I say under my breath, and she jolts like a sleepwalker waking up.

“Wha—sorry, what?” she mumbles. Her eyes dart to absorb her surroundings.

“Can I ask you . . . a personal question?”

“Uh . . . sure?”

“What would you do?” I keep my voice low, audible only to her and M. “If you found your mother.”

Her face clouds and she doesn’t respond.

“Would you do this?” I gesture toward Julie.

“Like I told Marcus,” she says, “I don’t have parents. I grew out of the ground.”

“Stop that,” M grunts at her.

She gives him a look that’s uncertain but primed for outrage. “Excuse me?”

“Stop bullshitting.” He somehow infuses this with tenderness. “You’re stronger than that.”

Nora blinks at him a few times, her eyes widened with undecided emotion.