Blaze

29. Descent

I am told to take four.

The commanding voice is a shallow whisper in the corner of my mind, and it comes out smoothly, sliding over ice.

Alaina's presence has faded, though her words persist. (It's like the words and their meaning are so strong they've erased their messenger.)

He is dead.

It takes me too long to rearrange the syllables in my mind; once I manage, they settle into a careful numbness. I don't react. (My face feels too heavy to arrange into an expression.) It stays blank, while my thoughts slow, turn mechanical. I don't react.

Yes. He is dead.

I've always known this.

The cold feeling spreads, from my head down to my chest and to my hands and feet, a numbness, a quiet, a pause. I'm a solid block. Chiseled stone.

It takes me another too-long moment to remember Austin (though it's with the same strange cold detachment as all my other thoughts). He's back there dreaming up ways of saving us within three days. He's here because of Ismael. I'm here because of Dad.

The first warm image: his eyes, clear and slightly wet, blinking away his dirty hair as if it were a bug.

The second warm image: him kneeling down for Mother, whispering, gentle, grey-skinned in the dark, musky house.

The third warm image (this one I imagine instead of recollecting): his head bent toward the tent cloth, my change of clothes folded in his lap, smiling as if I'd simply locked myself in the bathroom, at home. Smiling like he understands (he's wet the bed quite often), and he doesn't mind having the tables turned.

Smiling like it doesn't matter at all what nightmare this is since we'll have each other.

The cold solidifies into sharp prickles in my chest. My hands tremble due to the invasive feeling. I breathe a quick shallow breath and it hides away again.

Now there's just the cold.

The Captain is inside my head, telling me in a clipped fashion that we'll be going out raiding today, and I am to take four. He sounds the way an eavesdropper sounds when they reveal themselves without shame. (A small part of my mind wonders how it is the spoils of the last raid were depleted so soon.) I ask him if Alaina will accompany me; his reply is short and breath-erasing.

Just you and I.

I can't muster the anger I should be feeling toward him, the one I nearly burst with earlier. All I can muster is a molasses nod, where my neck strains with the effort. I should be afraid that he wants to see me, considering Austin's boldness, but even fear is a useless weight in this moment. I could despair at the news Alaina dropped on me, despair at explaining it to Austin (God, I have to tell Austin!), and generally draw in on myself until I start dying like Mother.

But there is nothing. I feel nothing but the echo of an echo of prickling pain—something vague and undefined. I ignore it.

I am nothing.

---

"Auz." He springs into sight at my call, the remnants of a frown on his forehead, his clear eyes clouded.

God.

I revel in the coldness, I let it bask me. It doesn't feel good, but I don't need it to. I need it to feel better.

"I'm going away with some of the others. I'll be back by nightfall."

He seems nervous. "Are you sure?"

Now he's worried about me? Now he sees the danger?

If only I could laugh. As it is, I manage a slight upturning of my lips he probably mistakes for an involuntary twitch. "No."

"That's not what I mean," he says, looking at me right in the hole between my eyes, like he needs to pin me in place with his gaze or I'll squirm away. He's probably right. "I mean, are you sure you want to go?"

Leave it to Austin—or Jackie—to ask such an obvious question.

"No," I say.

"Then why," he says, "are you going?"

I thought you knew what this place was? "It's not a matter of choice. The Captain wants me to go, so I'll go." Suddenly the idea of yelling, of scaring him straight, is incredibly appealing. I hate his slowly widening eyes, how blue and clear they are, and the harsh cut of hair that almost convinced me he knows how the world works.

That strange surprising anger falls over his eyes again. He's not screaming. He doesn't need to be.

"Don't. Don't think this means I don't know. What I'm saying is, you have a choice. You know you do. You always have a choice, no matter what. It won't matter to the people you kill that you were only following orders, or that you were scared, and don't think it'll matter to me either. Stop, stop giving up. Stop thinking this is where everything ends."

"I thought you came here to help me," I mutter.

"I did," he says. "I'm thinking. I have a plan." For now, he has the energy to speak.

He came to destroy you! a voice yells within me.

He might have heard that. He calms down then, almost seems apologetic. He deflates: first his eyes lose their protuberance, then his mouth shrinks, then his hands turn smaller. It's not enough. Not enough, not enough.

Do you want to know why I've given up, Austin? Because Dad's dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. 

"Dead," I whisper.

"Cam—"

I revel in the cold. I welcome it.

"I want to kill them, Auz," I say. "I want to."

There is no expression on his face, and no voice in his voice. Or is that me, reflected on his skin like a hologram from a learning cube?

"Do you like it?" he asks. And it is me, asking questions I don't want to answer.

"I don't know. I think I will, eventually."

The feeling of flying, of floating above everything and everyone. Killing is just a minor sacrifice, a minor blip compared to that freedom.

"I want to like it," I say.

---

He meets me at the ledge, clad in a bird-suit that weighs down his tread and scars his face.

You will like it, he says. He doesn't look at me. He's looking beyond the ledge, at the carpet of forest and the dying planned after we cross it.

It's not a question. It's a statement of fact.

And he's right.