Nada's Escape: Fighters' lies

33.1 End

I wake with the IV needle still in my arm, pricking, the exhausted bag discarded against the wall. I pull it out with a wince, watching my blood leak absent-mindedly. The rumbling of the truck aches through my bones from the metal imprints on my shins. Still a lullaby, numbing my thoughts.

"You're alive." Penny's hand presses soft against my arm and she dabs at my blood with the hem of her shirt, delicate as a rabbit. I guess so, though I feel battered, inside and out. Empty too, like somebody's been siphoning out my insides with a straw.

I brace my hand against the metal locker-slash-seat to turn away from it, the hospital gown slipping weirdly around my legs. It's a murky cavity back here, made for soldiers' boots not the prostate forms of the ex-Seveners. Even so a chorus of hope rises within me as I survey them.

Macie's head tilts right back in repose, nostrils flared towards me, dark hair smooshed across Amy's lap. Amy's pale waves hang down in front of her face, obscuring it. There's more hair, more clasped hands and splayed limbs that I slowly tease apart and identify in the dimness.

They're all here. I hardly believe it but a smile cracks through my dry lips. We did it; we're doing it.

I crush Penny in a relieved hug, "Oh my god."

One by one, eyes crack open and blink blearily at me. Nada? Nada? Nada? You're awake, you're alive, you're okay.

"Yes, yes, yes," I whisper back around the frog in my throat, patting and hugging in that daze of the newly woken.

They're all real. I begin to crunch on a packet of wheat biscuits, babbling in a happy, nonsensically stream that no one seems inclined to stop. What I say doesn't matter really, anyway, just that I still have someone to say it to. There's an equivalent happy stream of emotions winding its way through my aching bones. Relief washes past me in overwhelming waves, bringing spots of wetness to my eyes.

"It's okay," Amy bumps her shoulder against mine. There's relief written across her cheeks, but guilt too. I swallow a gloopy wad of gluten and bash my fist against the window into the driver's cabin. Tiny shards of this reverberation run all the way up my shoulder and into my lower back.

The truck rumbles to a stop and I gingerly lower myself down the earth. My abdomen aches at every movement, but its nowhere near as bad as it should be. I yawn at the night amidst clouds of tangy orange dust. A small form rounds the passenger side of the truck, identified by Tanja's voice.

"What's going...?" She must see my face in the light reflecting away from the headlights. I muster up a smile, already tainted by the upcoming conversation. As I lever myself into the cab I feel a war of cool relief and hot flushed anger threatening to tear me in two. I don't glance at the driver's side, just stare straight into the tunnel of light through a seemingly endless night.

It doesn't look much like freedom, some inner voice whispers.

The truck shakes off the dust as it begins to move again, silence between us growing louder even than its rumbling. I can't ignore the sidelong glances for long, even if there's no foreseeable armistice between relief and anger in my chest.

"You made a terrible mistake." I say, voice bright. I see Finley's hands tighten on the wheel but that is all. "That was horribly dangerous."

I picture again the truck idling like a sitting duck in the lights of the Huntsmen's village. Finley's eyes only flicker in my peripheral vision again. Fury takes a running leap over relief in my chest and I turn to face him head on. Does he not understand me?

"You should have been caught." I growl, remembering that it only took one stupid, lucky, Huntsmen to spot a girl on the top of Seven's wall's in the dark. How could we have possibly got away with driving a truck right through their sleeping houses?

"But we weren't," Finley says, voice barely clearing level of audibility. His lips are tight, unhappy.

"Any of the of the others would have left me in a heartbeat." I retort, my own lips souring around the guilt I'd seen on Amy's face.

"And I would have regretted it!" He exclaims, voice rising. The shadows of the cab find new planes of his face to illuminate as his expression shifts, eyes scanning the road ahead. "I almost did it. I was almost as heartless as your friends."

"Smarts doesn't make you heartless. It would have been the right decision." I crunch the half empty biscuit packet in my hands.

"The right decision doesn't make you feel like..." he mutters and the end of his words are swallowed by the truck noise but I can tell by the awful twist of his lips that it's something deeply unpleasant. Looking at him now I notice the heavy, dead eyes, the blackened smudges and wrinkles around his lips. My fury fades for the moment. It's too late now, and I am grateful to be here instead of Huntstown.

"How long since you've stopped?" I ask, not forgiveness but a kind of forgetting.

"We've taken breaks every few hours." Finley replies, eyes finally meeting mine, the tired flecks in his irises only reflecting grey light. When he looks away I return my gaze to forearms, noticing with a tiny twist of discontent that the warrior mage's symbol is still there, blinking on and off after all that. Of course it is.

"We should stop, you should sleep."

He shakes his head sadly, "One more town to pass."

*****************************************************************************

It's not a town, it's a cluster of houses, sleepy and dark and a petrol station with letter board prices. There's a campsite marked on the map just beyond that. Finley edges the truck off the dirt road past a cluster of misplaced boulders. The head lights glance off a lagoon, its flat edges nibbled at by the greener sheen of lily pads.

We string a tarp between the truck and a couple of tired trees. Almost everyone is keen to sleep under no more than a mozzie net. I'm awake though, replaying every dreamy impression of last night. I crunch my way to a couple of boulders, proud to be able to pull myself up even those few feet.

I breath in the earthy smell of the lagoon and let the bok-bok croaking of its frogs wash over me. It's so strange to think that in the vast desert around us we found this oasis, even if its girded with mud and reeds. I press my palms back into the granite, feeling the rock dig in with contentment. Real.

I hear the crunch of dual footsteps behind me from the camp and am not surprised to see Macie climbing up to sit on my right. Amy jumps up to squat on my left. Someone shuts off the head lights behind us and the stars begin peeping through the darkness, one by one and more and more until the sky's a tapestry thick with glittering thread.

We don't need to speak, not with freedom barely brushing against our skin. Tomorrow we'll take turns at the wheel, learning the gears, put more lagoons between us and the desert. Between us and the Huntsmen. And that's everything.