Paragon ✓

X. Mountains Beyond Mountains

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes." – DH Lawrence

Fleet-footed and frightened, Katia was flying through blackened woods. The only sounds were her breath and Holden's, her pounding heart and his, their soft footfalls on the fallen leaves. The guns were long behind them. After an hour, their furious pace had slowed to a run. After another hour, it was a light jog. They'd gone perhaps twenty miles when they finally stopped to walk. It was her who'd been pushing the pace, and he who had to stop.

He looked pale in the darkness, and his hands covered his belly. She remembered how little he'd eaten at dinner, and a pang of guilt struck her.

"Let's find some food," she suggested.

"I wasn't supposed to chew," he mumbled distractedly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two energy bars, handing one to her. "I always keep extra on me."

"Do you get messed up when you don't eat?"

He nodded, staring at his bar. "Very."

Katia watched him as he chewed in silence, not touching her own bar. She would save it for him. "We'll need to find more food then," she noted.

He nodded again. He swallowed the last of his food, pulled out his compass and studied it. Quite suddenly, he grunted and threw it against a tree. It shattered. "Of course they gave us broken compasses."

She stopped walking. "It's not the compasses, Holden."

He stopped as well, turning to wait for a better explanation.

She handed him her compass. "Walk away from me, slowly, and wait until the needle stops. And don't throw it against the tree."

He cocked a brow dubiously, but did as she said without retort. One hundred feet away, he pointed, slightly diagonal to the direction they'd been running. "That's north."

She came near to him, and he watched her and the compass with increasing interest. "That's why Frankie and Colton could never find you," he realized. "You don't have a normal magnetic field."

"Not me," she countered. "Us."

He shook his head. "I've been around them all my life. I've never interfered with their abilities, and they've always found me when I was lost. They could never find you."

"Because you were always with them when you looked for me," she answered impatiently. She headed north, and gestured for him to follow. "It's us together."

"It is?" he asked, catching up.

"Magnets." She pointed her finger in the air and spun it around. "When north and south comes together, it causes their respective electrons to spin with increasing energy. All DNA has a polar orientation, similar to how magnets work. Somehow, our DNA is oriented in a way that it causes some sort of magnetic flux when we're near each other."

He screwed up his face. "So you think this... increased spin energy is what's making us stronger."

"I think so."

He was quiet for some time, and they walked along at a lumbering pace. They'd travelled twenty-two miles, Katia estimated. She calculated how much of that was in the northwester direction, and came to the despondent conclusion that they had travelled well off-path. Holden pulled out another energy bar, and she decided to eat the one he'd given her. She hoped he'd brought several dozen.