I, Cassandra

69 | CASSANDRA VALLIS

'And?' I ask.

'And nothing,' he snaps. 'She didn't wake up in time.' He cuts me a warning look. 'Are we done now?'

I meet his eyes and search for the answer in them but get nothing. His walls are high and it's clear he has zero intention of letting me find a way over them. I shrug and turn my attention back to the pod, its window glazed by an opaque layer of frost. There's no way to know who's inside, man, woman or child.

She didn't wake up in time.

She.

And then it hits me. Maybe it was Adiana. He'd said she was dead. I assumed he meant she'd died before the end, now I'm not so sure. I'm learning he uses words in ways that make me feel like something important is missing. I wonder how long he waited but I know better than to ask. Instead, I get up, wander back to the pod and pick up the sphere from where it rolled to a stop.

I find the indentation where my thumb fits and press it against it, liking the way it feels, as if it were made just for me. It's a stupid thought, but it makes me feel less alone from the world we left behind. I press against it a little harder just for something to do.

'Let's see what we can find around here to start a fire,' Amadi says. 'It's not easy but I've done it before.'

I let go of my hold on the indentation. Fire. Even though it's hot and humid, the thought of creating a fire weirdly excites me. I set the sphere down in the shade of the pod. 'So you can cook your beetles instead of eating them raw?'

Amadi laughs, short and sharp. 'Hell no. They taste a lot are worse cooked.'

'So you tried it?'

'I've tried everything,' he says with a grunt as he gets to his feet. 'It's the only way to learn.'

'Or to die,' I counter.

'Or to die,' he repeats, quiet.

And the way he says it makes me think he wouldn't mind if that happened. I know exactly how he feels. Maybe we could find something poisonous and eat it together. Then neither one of us would be left alone. I glance back at the pod and hope whoever is in there doesn't wake up in time either. I wish I had died in my pod, because waking up to this shitty, empty world sucks.

Amadi keeps time with knots on a length of vine that he adds to at the end of each 'day'. According to his vine, we have been here for three weeks but it feels longer to me. It's gotten hotter, and we nap in the shade of the trees during the hottest parts of the day. Even in this heat, the pod remains closed and frozen. A faint bleat of blue from its panel tells us something, but neither of us knows what it is. Amadi thinks it means whoever is in there is still alive. I think it's an indicator to show that its power is functioning.

'Obviously, it's functioning,' Amadi says as we clear vines and pile them up into a three-sided shelter, which turns out to be cosier than I expected. 'We don't need a light to tell us that. We can see it's working.' But he says it with a smile and it makes me laugh how he looks at me with something close to affection. Maybe he's not such a dick, after all.

Surviving alone with the last living person in the world changes you. It gets domestic, fast. Once we cleared the space and lashed together the walls, he taught me how to weave vine stems into a lattice. Over the course of four days, we crafted a roof for our shelter, woven close enough to keep out the rain, but open enough to let the smoke from the fire escape. He is smarter than I expected a pampered Alpha VII citizen would be in a place like this.

Sometimes I wonder if he's an outlier like me, but he never talks about the past or who he was. All I know is his name is Amadi and he loved a woman called Adiana who's dead. Sometimes he says her name when he's sleeping, while I lie awake on the other side of the fire and miss Ryan so much I cry. Together we deal with our grief by crafting things out of the vines. Mats to sleep on; a basket to carry the sphere in; hats to give us shade from the sun. It's slow work, especially when some of the vines have barbs and you have to pluck them off one by one. He tells me the barbed vines are the female ones. I ask him how he knows. He says because there are fewer of them.

I know what he's really trying to say: That women can hurt you, just like these barbs have hurt me. I let him have his unspoken analogy, even though I think he's wrong, and they are just different kinds of vines. Just like people, some are nice, some are shitty.

We never talk about how much it hurts to go on, or how sooner or later we're going to fuck out of total loneliness. And after that? What? Pregnancy? Labour? Birth? Raising a child . . . here? I don't know. I can't think about it. So I just harvest the vines, strip away their leaves and barbs and think of things to make that will be useful to us once whoever is in the pod wakes up and we can get back to heading south where Amadi has said he hopes to find fish or at least algae that will give us more nutrition.

Despite him giving me a bad first impression, I've learned he's very good at solving problems. He sits and thinks for a while, or draws with his finger in the soil until he works out whatever it is he can't solve in his head and then does it. The day he made fire, he produced two rocks from his pocket to create sparks. He said it took him a long time to find them, in ravines located several weeks apart. It's this kind of tenacity that's kept him alive for so long. That and his determination to open the box.

With all his new projects occupying him, Amadi has lost all interest in the sphere, so I keep it on my side of the shelter along with the other scant belongings I've crafted: my hat, my sleeping mat, and the basket I've made for the sphere. It might sound strange, but I am proud of my things, of my ability to make something useful out of almost nothing.

This morning, I wake to find my period has started, my first one in this world, and my second since leaving London. Amadi is gone, probably hunting for beetles like he does most mornings, so I strip and sit naked in the shade and let my period seep out of me into the soil. It's a warm day, but in the shade the temperature is perfect. I position myself so the heat of the sun hits my abdomen and eases my cramps. It's quiet and calm, and the heat makes me drowsy. I close my eyes, thinking to rest them just for a minute. I don't want Amadi to come back and find me like this.

I wake to a brutal strafe of a menstrual cramp, so sharp it robs me of the details of my dream of Ryan. I sit up and rub my abdomen, but it doesn't help. Amadi sits, eyes closed with his back against a tree, his legs pulled up and his arms resting on his knees, his basket beside him.