Damage & Decay

Epilogue

SUNSET HOLLOW

They waked in silence, side by side, heading southeast. Miles fell away behind them. They passed another gas station, where Armin greeted another monk. They didn't linger, though. The day was burning away.

Eren's hand was still wrapped in tape. One of his knuckles was cracked and his wrist was sprained, but in the two weeks since the fight at the camp, he'd healed quickly. Armin looked like an Egyptian mummy. Doc Gurijala had pulled forty-one shotgun pellets out of him, and there were at least ten that he couldn't reach without doing more harm than good. Armin told him to leave them.

Mikasa was healing, too, although more slowly. When Charlie had punch her in the stomach, he'd clopped her rib cage and broken three bones. She was staying with Levi Ackerman's family. They had the room, and Levi's aunt was a nurse. If Mikasa was impressed by the town and all it had to offer, she didn't know it. And getting her to part with her spear nearly caused a minor war at the Ackerman residence.

Eren was surprised to see that Nix and Mikasa were bonding, and the two girls spent hours sitting apart from Eren and Levi, heads bowed together, talking. Nix never told him what they talked about.

One night, while walking back from Levi's, Eren said, "I'm trying to see things from her perspective. She must not know where she belongs."

"She belongs with us," said Nix.

"Even if we leave? Wouldn't she better off staying her with the Ackermans or the Kirsches?"

Nix shook her head. "Would they understand what she's been through, Eren?"

"Do we? Nix . . . we don't even really know her."

She shrugged and brushed a curly strand of red hair from her face. "Maybe not. But we know her better than anyone else."

They went home. Nix slept in Eren's room; Eren camped out on the couch. The couch was uncomfortable, but he really didn't care.

Marco came to see them, but he was weak and fragile. Even with a head injury, he was able to see how things were between Eren and Nix. Eren braced himself for Marco to be angry, but he too had been changed by what had happened. He nodded thoughtfully, and went home.

It all seemed like a thousand years ago. Gameland was still out there, and now they knew where. However, if Eren thought that hearing Mikasa's story would change the people in town or spark them into action, he was disappointed. They were shocked, they were sympathetic . . . but they said that it was too far away. That it wasn't their concern. That it was too dangerous to mount a raid on it. After a couple of days they even stopped talking about it.

"It's just like everything beyond the fence," Eren complained. "They act like it's all happening on a different planet."

"To them it is," said Nix. "My mom told them about the first Gameland, and they didn't do anything then, either."

Nothing would be done, and that was the ugliest truth.

But when he said this to Armin, his brother's eyes became distant, and he changed the subject. Each day, however, he spent at least an hour in his workroom making bullets, and he had maps pinned to the walls.

Eren, Nix, and Armin spent every evening talking about things. Not about the fight or the dreadful things each of them had been forced to do. No. They talked about the jumbo jet. Armin had seen it too. He'd watched it fly out of the east and then turn slowly over the mountains and fly back.

"What do you think is out there?" Eren asked Nix one night after Armin went to bed. "Out where the jet went?"

"I don't know. It wont be my islands," she said. "It'll be something . . . different. Something that isn't here."