Departure(46)

“I’m all right.” I sit up. “Just a little banged up.”

He sets a bottle of water on the floor and holds out his hand, waiting to drop something. I extend a cupped hand, half expecting him to yell “Psych!” and punch me in the face. I suppose it would make us even—or closer to even, at least.

To my surprise, two small pills drop into my hand. “Aspirin,” he says.

I wash them down with the water. Figure it’s a fifty-fifty chance they’re cyanide. Given the full-body pain right now, I’ll roll the dice. “The others?”

“They have Harper for sure—saw them carrying her off after the first ship came down. Not sure about Yul or Sabrina.”

Harper’s alive. “Where are we?”

“The back room of a small chemist’s across the street from Titan Hall.”

He reads the shock on my face. “Only option. I couldn’t carry you far. Between the smoke, the battle, and the darkness, I don’t think they saw us slip away. They probably think we’re under the rubble somewhere.”

“How long have I been out?”

“Four hours. Figured they would have found us by now, but there’ve been no signs of them. A few ships flying over—that’s it.”

What to do now? To me, there’s only one play.

“Listen, Nick,” Grayson says, his voice quieter. “On the plane . . . I was in a state. My dad had just told me he was giving away his fortune and cutting me out of his will, leaving me with nothing. He was putting me out on the street so I could finally, in his words, ‘learn to fend for myself.’”

Harper told me as much, but I stay silent. It feels like this is something Grayson needs to say.

“Imagine every assumption you lived your life under instantly changing, your whole life upside down, uncertain, for the first time. It felt like a total betrayal, the rug pulled out from under me just like that. I was scared. I felt double-crossed by the person I had depended on my entire life. It seemed like just a whim, a little game he wanted to play: see if his coddled son could cut it in the real world, starting from scratch at age thirty-one. I thought it was cruel not to tell me when I was in school, or just after, when I could have changed my life and taken a different path, before I developed all my . . . habits.”

He waits, but I’m not quite sure what to say. The awkwardness builds. Finally I say, “It’s never too late to change your life.”

“That shit might sell T-shirts, but it doesn’t help me.” His voice is bitter, a brief flashback to the Grayson I met on the plane. He pauses. “Sorry. It’s just that . . . changing is a hell of a lot harder when you’re older, especially after you’ve come to expect and . . . depend on certain things.”

“That’s true.”

“I should have snapped out of it after the crash, but I was still so . . . upside down.”

Incredible. He really has changed this quickly. I have to admit, when he first started up with his story and explanation—apology?—I half expected it to end with a joke on me, accompanied by that classic Grayson Shaw sneer and nasty laugh. But I don’t see either now, just humility and a longing for understanding and forgiveness.

I don’t think it’s the battle outside Titan Hall that changed Grayson, but what he saw inside: that panel that detailed the Grayson Shaw affair. I think seeing what his decision in 2014 led to, what he became, has given him some perspective. I wonder what the world would be like if we could all glimpse our future before every major decision. Maybe that’s what stories are for: so we can learn from people living similar lives, with similar troubles.

“Don’t worry about it. Look, we’ve all done things we’re not proud of at some point. Just part of being human. What counts is what we do right now.”

The air slowly flows out of Grayson, and he glances around at the candlelit storage room. “What are we going to do right now?”

“Now we’re going to go on the offensive.”





To his credit, Grayson just nods after hearing my plan. Skepticism and worry are clear on his face, but his only question is, “How do we get there?”

We agree that the Podway would be unsafe. I have an idea, but I wonder if this particular transportation technology is still in use, over three hundred years after it was invented. It requires no fuel, has no electronics, and can do about thirty miles an hour, depending on the operator and terrain. It can operate in urban, rural, or off-road environments with no preexisting infrastructure, which Planet Earth happens to be fresh out of at the moment. It’s perfect . . . if we can find it.

It’s still dark when we make our way out of the narrow chemist’s. We hurry down the street, away from the charred, smoldering remains of Titan Hall.

We don’t spot what we seek on the next street, nor the one after that. Finally I see a shop that might suffice. Grayson and I climb in through a shattered plate glass window. The technology has changed a bit, but it’s still basically the same. And there’s no learning curve.

Once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget.





We rode until the first rays of sunrise, stopping only to duck out of cover when we heard an airship in the distance and to gather food. We spotted an apple orchard a short ways outside London, and now we sit in an interior office of a large, dilapidated warehouse, eating apples and trying to stay warm.