Utopia

Chapter Thirty - Get the Feeling

Kira had walked farther. Chasing an ambulance, she would have gone further than even the sidewalks to be by Lys' side.

But chasing, Kira had been in a body that didn't even feel the opposing force of the air. Now she shivered. Her teeth chattered, and she leaned forward to push herself through the wind. Her feet ached through the arch with each step.

She kept walking. She was a quarter of the way there when she burned through the willpower of anticipation. Before she could even think, shame curdled the lining of her stomach. Habitually, she thought, Lys. Lys would be so disappointed.

And even as she began to fall inward, even as she fell into it, she heard the whisper, perhaps.

She was a third of the way there when she realized the whisper was louder. When she realized the facility may not have been real, but perhaps was.

She had come to hate the word in their time together. The way he said it as every side of an adjudication. It had twisted everything. Had taken any sense of surety.

She was halfway there when she thought of paper folding, twisting into the stem of a flower. Kira thought of the way Lys would have held her. Folded around each other. Her hand carding through Kira's hair. Listening to the inventor's heartbeat and feeling her hand against the traveler's back.

In Lys' voice she heard, Kira, will this really help? She nearly stopped at the sound of it.

Was this any more real?

She was three-quarters of the way there when she felt Lys' hands against her shoulders. Elsie, small and quick, with her arms wrapped around Kira's waist. She felt the same stare Phil gave her when she and Lys were fighting.

She wanted to stop for them. She wanted to root herself to the sidewalk, slip beneath the concrete barrier.

What had all this been for?

Perhaps, the world was without intention, without promise. It was vast and ethereal and macrocosmic. But Kira wasn't. Kira was very, very small.

What was she doing this for? Perhaps it was as Dr. Nate said, and her struggle wasn't with the events of life, but life itself. If that were the case, she'd had so many opportunities to rectify it. She'd been alone. She'd had the tools.

Why did she persist? Even now, she could simply step into the road and end where she began. She could be with Lys.

When it was what she wanted, when there was nothing left—and now there certainly wasn't a thing left—when she was only a void, surrounded by ghosts, why did she persist?

She ached.

Headlights approached. Drew level. Left.

The retreating of the light was infinite and instantaneous. It left no time for acclimation. She stood there in the dark.

She was at the edge of tenth when she stopped. The convenience store was a florescent beacon across the way. Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty. She wasn't any good at assessing distance, but it was a paltry obstacle compared to the steps she had already taken.

Why did she persist? Why did she persist in the void, in the absence that was a presence, surrounded by so many faults and failures, when it would be so much kinder to return to the cotton? To persist where only the cotton could touch her.

Why could she not take those last few steps? Why could she not ease her own burden? It would be so much kinder to simply slip away. To never return to her parents' house. To her and Susannah's apartment. She would return to the cotton, she would return to Lys, in this time or another.