Archive of Our Own

It’s not the ending he expected. He doesn’t know what he had expected. He doesn’t know if it’s an end. Monkey hasn’t made a habit out of thinking that far ahead, and that hasn’t changed. Before, it had been because thinking ahead had seemed like a waste of time, making plans for a moment whose odds of ever coming were not good.

Now, it’s because the future is quite simply beyond his imagination. Until it happens.

The room is dark, and with the darkness he can smell them, no longer distracted by the unearthly brightness: hundred of bodies, maybe thousands, sweat and waste, confusion and fear. He can hear them murmuring. A few of them are starting to cry out, a horrible broken sound. No words.

Monkey hasn’t come this far without fear. He hasn’t come this far without rage or frustration or jagged edges of despair. But this is the first time he thinks he’s felt real terror. It’s the terror of coming to an abyss, unscalable and uncrossable, and looking down into it.

“Did I do the right thing?” Trip, her voice small and lost. He’s touching her, but she seems very far away. “Monkey... oh, God. Did I?”

There are beautiful images still burned across his retinas, there but fading fast. The last of the world that was is going away now. The people down below them, crying softly--Monkey doesn’t ever remember crying. But he thinks he might know how it feels.

“I don’t know,” he whispers.

Trip says nothing else after that.

In the end they run.

He knows Trip well enough by now. He knows that, having freed them, she’ll feel a certain responsibility for them. She’ll try to answer their questions, and she’ll try to see that their needs are provided for. She’ll bathe them with her own hands if she has to. That many people, it’ll end her. It’ll tear her heart to shreds. Monkey has never had a particularly hard time fleeing responsibility--its own kind of slavery, he thinks--but making her flee it ends up being harder than he would ever have imagined. In the end, he pulls her onto his back and he makes for the door at the end of the walkway. Trip is as limp as she can be without falling off. Her breath is coming in a hot rush against his ear, hitching with sobs. Monkey lowers his head and leaves it all behind him. Same as he’s always done, but for the arms clasped around his neck.

The space between the doorway and the cool night air is as dark and featureless as the inside of his mind is. Now. With her voice gone.

Outside, the night is very still. He looks up as he runs; the stars are coming out, hard and brilliant, illuminating the glittering hulks of the dead mechs. He thinks of the Leviathan’s power core, all the cells like little stars. How easy it had been, then, to make a hard choice.

Did I do the right thing?

Basically, he wishes he had his bike. He tells her so when they finally stop, Pyramid’s angular shape now just another jag on the horizon. She doesn’t respond. Her arms go slack and she slips away from him, dropping into the dust, her arms folded around her middle.

“I should have stayed,” she murmurs.

“And then what?” He shakes his head; the headband feels more heavy than it ever has. Maybe because it’s no good for anything anymore. “What could you have done?”

“I could’ve helped them.” She pulls away, though he isn’t reaching for her--yet. It’s like she can sense what he wants to do before he’s decided to do it. She isn’t looking at him, though. She’s staring off at the reddened horizon. Pyramid. All those sleeping minds, now awake. “Monkey, I unplugged them. I did it. I--”

“Trip,” he says, and he has no idea what he’d follow it with, standing there with the wind chill against his bare back, but she doesn’t give him a chance to come up with anything.

“I owe them an explanation,” she whispers. “I took their world away.”

Monkey looks at her, her turned back, the distant horizon, the hissing wasteland all around them. What world? “We need to get moving,” is what he says instead. They’ve done the stupid thing--he’s done the stupid thing--and come this far without water, without a vehicle, without any direction.

“‘We’?”

She sounds incredulous; he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised. All the same, it stings him like he’s been slapped, and then he does reach for her, hand heavy on her shoulder. He’s freshly struck by how much smaller than him she is. “Yeah, ‘we’. You see anyone else out here?”

“It shouldn’t be us!” She shakes him away again, swiping at him like he’s threatening her; when she finally looks at him her eyes are wide and every inch of her is trembling. She’s vibrating like a brilliant little plucked string. He hasn’t seen her look like this since the day she enslaved him. And as he thinks that, as he’s trying to decide how to navigate this confusing new ground, the ground where the option of snapping her back like a twig isn’t on the table anymore, she reaches up and grabs at the headband, clawing at it. He grapples with her, trying to pin her arms to her sides, trying to fend her off without hurting her, and only later does he realize what he’s doing now: trying to keep it. Trying to keep the fucking thing on.

He doesn’t know what the world will become when at last it comes off.

“Trip, stop it. Fucking stop.”

She doesn’t listen, and she doesn’t stop. She beats at his hands, and she’s crying, her head down and her shoulders shuddering with the force of her sobs. “You can go,” she gasps, though already her struggling is beginning to ease, her body sagging into his arms. “You can go, it’s over, it doesn’t work anymore, there’s nothing keeping you here...” She leans her head forward and he can feel her trying to get herself under control again, her breaths deep and shaking, her cheek wet against his chest. He holds onto her, and at length she’s still again. Overhead, the wind whispers sand and stars.

“Yeah, there is,” he says at last. There is.

In the carcass of a building, Monkey watches Trip sleep. The building gives them a little protection from the wind, and Trip manages to pull together enough flammable debris to make a low, greasy fire. But the structure is slowly collapsing under the weight of its own rust, and it feels precarious.

Everything does.

Monkey sits with his back against the wall, hands loose in his lap, and he thinks about learning to climb, young and completely devoid of fear, treetops and towers presenting a whole new world over his head, inviting and ripe for exploration. Tempting like low-hanging fruit. He remembers the first abortive scrambles, the surer attempts that soon followed, the rushes of adrenaline when falling seemed all but certain. He had learned to use that rush, to feed on it. Now he teeters on the edge of this--whatever this even is--and he can’t find anything to feed on. He feels tired.

Old.

In the dying firelight, Trip looks old too. Not a girl, naive and stubborn, but a careworn woman who’s seen far too much loss, her skin etched with the lines of it, furrowed brow and crow’s feet. Not the kind that come from smiling.

There aren’t many old people left in the world.

Monkey reaches out, lifts a lock of her hair away with one finger. Trip stirs, mutters; he’s momentarily worried, because sleep hadn’t come to her easily and it isn’t sitting easily now, but she goes still and quiet again, her lips slightly parted as if she means to say something that had just slipped her mind.

I keep meaning to talk to you. But there never seems to be a time.

“I know,” he breathes, leaning back and staring up at the starlight piercing through the holes in the ceiling, dawn flushing the sky to the east. “I know.”

There’s a road, and it unfurls in the daylight, a ribbon of burned, rusted-out metal stretching to the horizon. It’s choked with broken machines--none of them mechs--and impassible, but it’s a feature on an otherwise featureless landscape, so they look at it, and Monkey tries to factor it into his thinking. They need a ride. Something.

In a graveyard of wheeled things, there might be something that runs.

“I’ll do a sca--” Trip stops herself short, glancing up at Monkey and away again, teeth worrying at her lower lip. Monkey bites back a frustrated growl. If nothing else, the fucking thing had been useful as hell, at least in some places. Now it’s back to doing things the old-fashioned way.

“C’mon.” He starts forward, kicking a slab of metal out of the way with a harsh clang, leaping to the top of a broken heap and extending a hand to her. “There’s gotta be something.”

She hesitates; he’s considering swinging down and grabbing her when she raises a hand to the delicately-winged thing at her ear, lifting it down in front of her. She pops up her wrist display, does something complicated with her fingers.

The dragonfly whirs into the air, hovers for a moment or two, dances higher and higher until it’s gone. Trip snaps the display off and stares up at him, a kind of mute defiance in her gaze, as if she’s daring him to say something.

He doesn’t.

Another moment or two and she reaches for his hand. He slings her up and onto his back, leaps to the next broken mountain, the next, dust rising around them in the morning sun.

He’s beginning to feel worryingly thirsty when they finally get a break. The sun is high and absolutely merciless, beating around his head like fists of soft fire, sweat running down his face and shoulders, between his back and Trip’s body, sticking their skin together--he’s about to slide her down and beg a rest when he sees a metal crate, half-fallen and cracked open just enough to display a flash of enticing blue.

He taps her arm and she drops away from him, looking around. “What did you--”

“There.” He points, palming sweat out of his eyes. “Stay here. I’ll check it out.”

Monkey doesn’t believe in a god. He’s heard of people who do, strange old men and women in some of the settlements he’s been to, murmuring to invisible people, shaking herbs over dark fires, decorating their shelters with horrifying images of a bleeding man nailed to a slab of wood, and generally being a nuisance. The idea that there’s something out there controlling the world, something making everything happen... the closest thing he’s ever seen would have to be Pyramid. So if there is a god, if there’s anything like a god, he’s not sure he wants anything to do with it at all.

But he’s muttering under his breath as he drops down into the dust, making his cautious way toward the crate. Muttering to something out there, to anything that might be listening. Please. Wheels and an engine that runs. That’s all. Not that tall an order. Please.

The crate is newer than the rest of what’s here. It doesn’t look like it was carried here with the rest of the junk so much as it was dropped in from somewhere else, like it’s slipped from the claws of an enormous passing bird. It’s shinier, brighter, though it’s beginning to rust, its lower edges vanishing into drifts of dust. He lays a hand on the door, gives it a sharp tug.

It opens with an awful grinding squeal, and from behind him, he hears Trip’s startled yelp. But all at once, he doesn’t have the attention to spare for her. Inside the crate, fallen against one wall and obscured by a blue tarp, is... a shape. A familiar shape. A shape that makes him want to hope and afraid to do so, because of how much of a let-down it’ll be if--

He grips the tarp, pulls. Lets out a heavy breath.

It’s like his ride. It’s nothing like it. It’s the same basic shape but all chrome, still gleaming, still beautiful, and clearly put together by an expert, artistic hand rather than one driven by pragmatism and necessity. Monkey reaches out and runs faintly trembling fingers over the subtle curves of it, the graceful dip and swell.

He’s almost tempted to leave it. Almost. It’s too gorgeous to use.

But no, not really. “C’mon,” he calls, his own voice weirdly elated in his ears. “It’s okay!”

“Monkey?” The sound of her running feet, her panting. “Are you--? What is it?”

He doesn’t answer her. He’s leaning over it, thumbing the starter. It’s all for nothing if the fucking thing has no power. But it purrs to life, soft and subtle as the rest of it, a languid cat-sound. He almost laughs. First thing that’s gone right in... He’s not even sure. “Fuck,” he breathes. “Yes.”

She steps back as he guides it out of the crate. “We have to get it off the road. We’ll never get it through there.” She glances around, points to a gap between two wrecks. “Here.”

Maneuvering together, they get it off the highway. The sun is still brutal, the dust is caking his skin and mouth and the inside of his nose, but none of it seems to matter anymore. They can go. And going has pretty much always been priority number one.

Pretty much.

He pauses and looks back at her, standing there with one hand clasped around her arm, every bit as awkward as he’s ever seen her. Awkward and exhausted. Exhausted and sad.

“Monkey...” She looks off and away, but not in any particular direction. There’s no longer any way to know for sure what point on the horizon Pyramid occupies. “Where are we going?”

And isn’t that the question? And has he ever really known the answer? He swings a leg over the bike, holds out a hand to her. “We’ll worry about that when we get there.”

They leave the sun behind them.

The desert ends just when he’s afraid it might go on forever. The sun is going down at their backs, the shadows long and spindly in front of them, when the red dust begins to give way to scrubby grass, stunted trees, and at last a stream trickling its way through a slash in the ground, small but clear and smelling safe enough. They stop by it; Monkey crouches on the bank, dips in a hand, sips from his cupped palm.

If it’s going to kill them, he almost thinks it might not be a terrible way to go.

Trip kneels beside him, lifting wet hands to her face and pulling in a deep breath. “God.” She half-laughs, tilting her head back, her eyes closed. “This is so...” She trails off, looks at him with something unreadable in her gaze. “Thank you.”

He shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable. “‘S fine.”

“No, it’s not.” She manages a tiny smile, and something in the vicinity of his chest twists. He’s sure she used to smile more easily than that. “Thanks anyway.”

There’s firewood, enough to give them something to cook over, and there’s something to cook: a small furry thing too skinny and mutated to identify with any certainty, one eye milky and an extra two legs dangling uselessly from its midsection, but what meat there is tastes good enough, though it might be all hunger that gives it flavor. They eat, and in the light of the lower coals Trip strips to her skin and kneels in the creek, splashing water over her shoulders and gasping with the chill. Monkey sits with his back to her, looking down at his hands, big and callused, clumsy-looking, though he knows they aren’t always. Monkey, people called him, and much of that had been his climbing, his effortless leaps and swings, but he knows not all of it had been. Uncivilized, wild, hulking, not suitable for polite company, whatever ‘polite company’ consists of now. Monkey. Big dumb ape.

It’s not like he ever cared what the fuck they thought of him.

“I’m coming out,” Trip calls, and before he realizes what he’s doing he glances back, just the briefest flash of a view over his shoulder, and he sees the dip of her collarbones in the firelight, wet and glistening, her hair falling in a red cascade over her bare shoulders as she raises her hands to tie it back. Other things, things he doesn’t quite process in time.

Just a second and then gone again. She doesn’t say anything, and he wonders if she even noticed him looking. And she doesn’t say anything about it for the rest of the night. But for the rest of the night, he can’t quite look at her.

She takes the second watch. He hasn’t realized how tired he is, and he’s asleep barely a second after his head hits the circle of his arms, the dying coals leaving dancing purple stars on the inside of his eyelids. When he opens them again, it’s just dawn, and she’s sitting by him, looking down at him with her face shadowed and unreadable.

He turns, blinking and confused, half raised on one elbow. “What?”

“Why are you still wearing it?”

He shakes his head. He had been dreaming... he doesn’t know what about. Something, something hot and fast and much too close. “What’re you--?”

“This.” She reaches out and lays her fingers against the headband, over where he knows the light used to be. “Monkey... it’s over. You don’t have to explain why you’re staying, and I don’t even care about what happened back at Pyramid. Not now. But you’re not a slave anymore. Even if you were...” She trails off, rakes a hand back through her hair. He still can’t see her face, not clearly, but her voice is tight with frustration. “I just don’t get it. I don’t get you.” She laughs, that same humorless half-chuckle. “You were going to break my neck.”

“I was gonna do a lot of things.” He lifts a hand and closes his fingers around hers, tugging them gently away. Not letting go. He’s gotten very good, he thinks, at ignoring whatever can be safely ignored. “Trip... Look, just go with it for now. Okay?”

She looks down at their hands, fingers interlaced, large and small. Finally nods. “Okay.”

By the time the sun crests the horizon, they’re moving again, driving for it with the wind beating at their faces.

The land around them gets greener and greener, the trees rising like they’re growing as they move. It’s like coming back into the world. Monkey has never been this far west--never needed to, never any reason--and there’s no obvious reason why it should be so, but with trees around him he feels safer. Maybe it’s something as simple as a plethora of options, where before there had only been open air.

Until they get to the river. Then all the options vanish.

It’s wide, so wide that the other side is vague and hazy in the afternoon light. Clouds are rolling in; it looks and smells like rain. But they might have to worry about that later, if it even ends up being something to worry over. Monkey leans over the bike, feeling things settle and solidify in his middle, like bracing for a blow.

There’s a bridge across the river, the only one they can see. It’s high and thin, the remains of old girders and suspension cables. It looks like a stiff wind might blow it down.

“We can’t cross on that,” Trip murmurs.

Monkey snorts. “You think?”

Trip appears to ignore him. “Maybe we don’t have to cross here? Could we just head down the bank a ways? There might be someplace else.”

“Not for miles.” Monkey sighs. Really, he guesses, they don’t have to cross at all. Strictly speaking. Maybe they could just stay here. Right here, planted like the trees, since there’s nothing else keeping them moving besides sheer habit.

But habit is strong.

“Pick a direction,” he says. Trip hesitates, looking up and down the thick ribbon of water; at last she points to her right. South.

Seems like as good a choice as any.

Trip slides onto the bike behind him, arms around his waist, and as he turns them and the bike growls away across broken pavement, he thinks that maybe he’d do just about anything to keep going like this, just exactly like this, no mission and no plan and nothing to aim for but the simplicity of two arms around him, two wheels under them, and the sun to keep things straight.

But things are never that simple, and he doesn’t even see the mechs until they’ve driven into the middle of them.

It’s a stretch of narrow road through a thickening wood, idyllically green, insects dancing in the dappled sunlight, and what happens is that he allows himself to be distracted for just a moment, and a moment is all it takes. Later he realizes that it’s the headband display, that he’s become too reliant on it, too used to the advantage it had given him, and now that it’s gone he has to relearn to look and listen with the senses that have kept him alive almost from birth. The mechs are camouflaged, faded into the trees, and he doesn’t even know that they’re there until a shot explodes over his shoulder.

“Shit!” The bike skids, goes into a slide that he barely manages to control; Trip rolls off and away with a sharp cry. Somehow--he never really takes the time to figure out how he does these things--Monkey pulls out of the slide, jerks the thing upright. Trip is a few yards away, scrambling backward with her eyes wide and panicked, blood pouring down her face from a gash on her forehead.

If I die, you die.

Monkey aims the bike straight for her, guns the engine and tears forward. She turns her shocked gaze to him, her mouth open, and she has time to scream, “What the fuck are you--” before he reaches down and scoops her up around the waist, somehow managing to control the bike one-handed as she clings to him.

“Get your ass on the seat! Come on!”

She manages to situate herself just in time to lean into a hard turn; more gunfire spreads out in red streaks over their heads, and from behind them he hears an ominous rumble.

“They’re chasing us!”

“No shit,” he mutters. Back the way they came, because no other way is presenting itself, and from both sides he hears the wail and clank of more mechs, closing in, alerted by the oncoming rush of the others.

Out of the trees, the road opening up in front of them, the bridge ahead, looking as unreliable as ever. But that... if they go fast enough...

“I’m gonna go for it,” he yells, and he feels Trip’s arms tighten around him.

“Monkey, no!”

“It’ll stop ‘em, or they’ll take the whole fucking thing down!”

“We’ll go with it!”

“You got a better idea?” And it’s already too late. Momentum--and possibly madness--have them committed. The bridge deck itself is cracked and potholed, and the cables creak horribly above them as he speeds them out onto it, and he thinks that at least if they die this way, it’s reasonably painless.

And then he sees the mechs ahead. Reflexively, he brakes. He feels Trip freeze against him.

“No.”

There aren’t many of them--maybe nine or ten, clearly in sentry mode from how still they’re standing--but that’s enough. Too many to fight off at once. Too many to stun at once. And enough, possibly, to be more weight than the bridge can handle.

Monkey remembers. Old memory, not clear, but the lessons in it are ones he’s kept close. It’s good to be strong. But it’s not everything. In the end, speed is almost always what saves you.

Speed, and balls.

“Take my staff.”

Trip swallows. He hears her throat click. “Monkey--”

“Do it.” He holds his arm back for her, feels the catch release as the thing detaches. “Hit the panel in the middle and give it a shake.”

There’s a snap and a smell of ozone as it extends, warm and flashing in the corner of his vision. “I’m gonna go,” he says quietly. “You take out anything that gets close to us.”

He’s half expecting her to protest, to argue, but instead he hears her pull in a breath, feels her small frame tense against him. “Okay. Go.”

Mechs behind them, roar-screech. The bridge trembles. Monkey takes his own breath, holds it, fixes his attention on the far bank and launches them forward.

After, he doesn’t remember much in the way of details. He remembers the sound, the chaos of it, the way he hadn’t been able to separate Trip’s screams from the cries of dying mechs. The explosions of light, the sparks. The horrible moans of the bridge. The way that, rather than getting closer, the bank had seemed to recede further and further, impossibly distant. The way he had been sure, for a fraction of a fraction of a second, that they were going to die.

Then they’re across, solid ground under them, and though every instinct is demanding that he keep going, he swerves to a stop and looks back in time to see the whole thing go down with a gasp and a shiver, an enormous death rattle that extends into a long, echoing crash as it drops, piece by piece by piece. Mechs tumbling through the air like broken dolls. Long strings of splashes. Silence.

The staff snaps off. He turns in the seat; Trip is staring down at it in her hand, her brow slightly furrowed as if she’s trying to puzzle something out.

“You did it,” he says gently. He thinks he might actually be surprised.

“Yeah,” she whispers. “We did.”

“I want you to teach me to fight.”

Monkey looks up from the fire, the spitted rabbit. Actual rabbit this time, identifiably. It’s still very skinny, but it’s something of a relief to know what they’re eating. Trip is standing over him, arms folded across her chest, an ugly bruise spreading out from under the bandage on her head. He blinks at her. “You what now?”

“You heard me.” She lifts her chin, again with that stubborn defiance, though he knows it well enough by now to see the nervousness churning under it. “Today... I could’ve helped you more. Instead I was a liability. I want to learn to fight.”

Slowly, he gets to his feet, dusting off his hands on his knees. He’s trying to keep the amusement from showing too clearly, but goddamn, it’s there. “No one ever taught you.” It’s not a question--it’s clear by now, and he knows she knows it. There’s no flicker of shame when he says it, but she tilts her chin a bit more pointedly.

“My father was a pacifist. He didn’t believe in fighting.” Her mouth tightens, and while her voice is gone from his head, Monkey feels fairly sure of what she’s thinking. And look where it got him.

“Okay.” He nods, still amused... but what the hell--if Trip wants to learn, it can probably only benefit both of them. He steps forward, searching the ground, and comes up at last with a short, sturdy branch, about half the length of his staff. He strips away the remaining twigs, tosses it to her, pulls out his own staff and flicks it into extension. “Hold it like this.”

She copies the grip, frowning, unsure, but her frown eases when he nods. “Okay, good. Now, someone’s comin’ at you... this is basically how you stop ‘em. Like this. And this.” He moves slowly, swinging into the movements his muscles now know far better than his mind does, watching her as she mimics him. “No--look, keep it looser. You gotta be ready to change what you’re doing any time.”

Again, and again, and after fifteen minutes he stands back and watches her move in the firelight, and she’s a little clumsy, still very unsure, still thinking about it far too much--but there’s something there. An affinity for grace, for speed. She’s strong. She could be stronger. She swings into the last movement, brings the stick level again and looks at him, questioning.

“Good. You practice, you’ll get it.”

She smiles, her cheeks flushed with pleasure and effort. “Show me more.”

“You don’t think you wanna take it easy? After what happened today?”

“After what happened today...” She shakes her head. “Monkey, I can’t afford to take it easy.”

He supposes he sees the logic in that.

From defense to offense, move after move. They’re both out of breath by the time they stop, and the moon is high, and once again it’s a little hard to look directly at her as she twirls the stick in the light of the low fire, managing to really laugh.

“So I’m doing okay?”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Perfect.”

“I wonder if they hate me,” she whispers. Monkey lifts his head, looks up at her. Despite his weariness, he hadn’t been sleeping, though he’d been doing a fairly good imitation of it in the hopes that eventually the real thing would follow. So she had either known that he was awake... or she’s just talking.

Normal enough. He’s done that. Easy habit to fall into, alone in the wilds.

“Who?” he asks softly, though he’s already pretty sure who she means. She waves a hand, seeming unsurprised at his having spoken, and when she wipes firmly at her cheeks, it’s not so fast that he doesn’t see the tears shining there.

“You know. Them. The slaves.” She sighs and lifts her face to the starry sky, blown clear without rainfall. “Monkey... I still don’t know if I had any right. Maybe they were happy. Maybe they all would have stayed like that if they’d been given a choice. But they weren’t. I never gave them one. Just like he never did.”

Monkey sits up, rubbing drowsiness out of his eyes, trying to find words. For this particular problem, there never seem to be any. And there are other problems besides, problems that come from too much closeness, that have far too much to do with the headband he still wears.

“You can’t know, either way,” he says at last, and lays a hand on her arm. “You’re gonna drive yourself crazy thinkin’ about this.”

“I can know,” she says, and looks at him, places her hand over his, squeezes. “But I don’t think you’d let me.”

Monkey shakes his head, slow. “I can’t stop you from doing anything.”

“You can. I couldn’t ever fight you off. Without that headband, we both know you can do whatever you want to me.”

“But I wouldn’t--” He stops, frustrated. This is too much like swinging in circles. “If I was gonna do anything, I woulda done it already.”

“Would you?” Trip cocks her head, thoughtful, and this time he can’t even hazard a guess at what’s going through her mind. “Whatever. It doesn’t make any difference.” She shifts something in her hands: the stick she’d been practicing with. “Go to sleep, Monkey. I’ll get you up in a few hours.”

So he does. But it takes a while.

“We can go back to my community.” Trip looks up from burying the coals, eyes bright in the way they get when she’s made a decision. “There’s shelter there, and power. We have--we had--supplies to last weeks.”

Monkey looks over his shoulder from where he’s crouched, tinkering with the bike; one of the wheels has developed a slight wobble. He frowns. “There might also be mechs.”

Trip shakes her head. “I think we got most of them when we were there before. And I don’t think any more would’ve come.” Her face darkens, her mouth pressed into a thin line. “There wasn’t anything left to kill.”

“Okay,” Monkey says slowly. It’s an idea with some merit, he has to admit. But a place like that, empty except for the corpses... he’s not sure he can see that as a place to stay. Fucking spooky at night. “So say we go back there. Then what?”

“That’s up to you.” Trip straightens up, dusting off her hands. “What I told you before stands. There’s a place there for you. You can stay if you want. You can move on.”

Monkey looks at her for a long moment, hands slick with grease and knees aching a little. Stay. Not really in his vocabulary. It hadn’t been an offer with a lot of appeal when she had made it the first time.

So what about now?

You need to get out of this, he thinks. Fuck the headband. You need to get out while it’s still simple. And that just makes him want to laugh.

“I’ll take you back,” he says. “I’ll help you get the defenses up, get things working. After that I’m gone.”

Trip nods. “Fair enough. Thanks.”

And as she turns away, he wonders whether it’s just his imagination, or if she really looks disappointed.

It’s like he remembers. It’s like they never left. It’s more than a little eerie, spread out all over the cliffsides, picturesque as long as you don’t know about the evidence of massacre inside. Trip hops down from the bike, opens her display and scans a readout.

“Defensive systems are down again.” She closes the display, lifts her head and points. “Look. The windmill stopped.”

Monkey looks, doesn’t quite shudder. That place is the site of memories he’d just as soon leave behind, though in that it isn’t all that different from most other places he’s ever been. But she’s right: the enormous arms are stationary, though the sails are fully open.

“Maybe something jammed it.”

Monkey grunts. “Maybe.”

“Okay.” She turns to him with a rueful smile, swiping a hand down her face. “At least we don’t have to do the bridge thing again?”

“Yeah.” Monkey gives her a look, arches one eyebrow. “There’s that.”

There are no mechs that they can see, and Monkey supposes that should be a relief, but really it only makes the place quieter, deader, more lonely. Flags and curtains flapping gently in the wind, open doors creaking, ashes blowing into the air in sad little spirals. In the gathering circle, Trip sinks down onto one of the benches, hands between her knees, eyes wide. A few yards away lies the hulk of the Dog. She doesn’t look at it.

“Maybe this was a mistake.”

Monkey’s first instinct is to agree. Instead he sits down next to her, feet scuffing in the dirt. Hunched over like that, she feels twice as small as normal. “Why?”

“It’s too...” She trails off, shaking her head. “I don’t know. Too much happened here. It feels...”

“Haunted,” Monkey murmurs, and Trip nods.

Quiet, quiet for a long time. The wind whistles around their ears; despite the quiet, this is a place where the wind never seems to stop. Somehow the two coexist without getting in the way of each other. Though he tries not to, Monkey thinks about all the bodies, all the little piles of burned flesh and ashes. It must have happened so fast. Perhaps that’s a mercy.

But not a mercy to the person left behind.

“If it’s haunted,” he says at last, “maybe that’s because no one said goodbye to them the right way.”

Trip looks up at him. “What do you--” But then she stops, thinking. She looks out at the bright roofs of the village, painted into deeper brilliance by the setting sun. “Yeah,” she says. “Maybe.”

It takes them all the rest of the evening to dig the pit. By the time it’s deep and wide enough, set near the benches and the gaily flying banners, the sun is long gone and the wind is turning chill. Even so, they’re both sweating, panting a little. Trip steps to the edge of the pit, wiping sweaty strands of hair away from her face.

“When I was little, I had a bird,” she says softly. “It had a broken wing. Our healer splinted it, said it might be okay... and for a while it was. But then it couldn’t fly. And it just... stopped eating. It got sick and died. There wasn’t anything I could do.”

She folds her arms across her chest, shivers. “I’m glad you’re not staying.”

Monkey lifts his head, slowly rises out of his crouch. Suddenly--and yet maybe not so suddenly--he’s tired of this. So much back and forth. So much second-guessing. When what it comes down to, in the end, is being afraid of something he doesn’t even have the courage to look directly at, to name--and it comes down to instinct, when his instincts have already led him in one direction, made it clear, made the choice easy for him.

And here he goes, trying to make the choice all over again. Trying to make it complicated, when it’s really so simple after all.

“Are you glad for you?”

Trip doesn’t answer immediately. She doesn’t turn. She looks out over the pit they’ve dug together, a grave for her world, her frame small and pale in the twilight. “No,” she says, after a long time. “I’m not.”

He lays his hands on her shoulders, and they’re dirty but so are hers, and she’s small under his hands but he’s always been able to be careful when he has to. “What do you want, Trip?”

She lets out a long, shuddering breath, punctuated by a sound that lies somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Tomorrow we’re going to bury everyone I ever knew. Everyone I ever loved. Except Pigsy, and there isn’t any of him left to bury. Monkey...” She turns, then, though she doesn’t shrug him away. Her own hands hang loose at her sides. She just stands, and lets him touch her.

“I want you to stay.”

“That’s all you ever had to say,” he whispers. And it’s only as he says it that he realizes that it’s true.

They stay by the grave, and they don’t sleep. They sit together with no fire, no shelter, and when Trip starts to shiver again Monkey pulls her close and holds her, his arms around her slim shoulders and her head against his chest. He doesn’t know if it’s enough. He doesn’t know for sure what ‘enough’ might be. It’s something. It’s there. Maybe it can be enough for now.

At dawn, they begin. By mid-morning, there are no more ashes, and the village rests at last.

“You need to tell me why you really wanted to come back here.” Monkey executes a perfect flip around the flagpole, swings to the next one and lets himself drop down to look Trip in the eye as she passes below him. She pauses, looks at him, half smiles and lifts a hand to touch his face before she moves on. Two days later, and the windmill is operational again, but getting all the systems up and running has proven to be a tougher task than anticipated. The elements, perhaps. A lack of consistent maintenance. The battle, however brief it might have been. Or maybe just more bad luck.

And this. He hasn’t wanted to touch on it directly before now, not with so many wounds still so raw and open. But now, he doesn’t think he wants to wait any longer.

They might not have that kind of time.

“I told you why. What makes you think there’s another reason?”

He rolls his eyes, edges nimbly along a catwalk and swings down into her path, straightening. “Because there is. Trip... C’mon. I know you.”

She meets his gaze levelly. But after a moment or two she sighs. “Yeah. I guess you do.” She regards him carefully, teeth worrying at her lower lip again. “I told you, you wouldn’t let me.”

“I told you I wouldn’t stop you.”

“All right. Shit.” She sighs again, looks around the little village alley, the empty houses, the dead-eyed windows. No longer haunted. But lonely. “This place... ever since I was a child, it was so alive. We were never that big, Monkey, but we were thriving. If it weren’t for Pyramid, who knows how long we might have stayed strong?” She steps a little away, spreading out her hands like she can catch the world around her, hold onto it, make it stay just a little longer. “I can’t bring any of them back. I know that. It’s all gone. But there are other people out there, and they might need a home.”

“The slaves,” Monkey murmurs. Of course. Part of him had suspected, the same part that doesn’t want to admit that it might actually not be a terrible idea. “You’re gonna try to bring them back here.”

“I have to,” she says simply. “Whichever ones I can find. And if any of them find this place on their own, I have to make sure they can make a home here. I owe that to them. I took away the home they had.”

“But that...” He shakes his head, everything in the vicinity of his middle sinking toward his feet as the whole awful picture of it unfolds. Sometimes he thinks that it’s so horribly fitting that he would go and get tangled up with someone burdened with a real conscience. “It’s hundreds of miles away. And there might be hundreds of them. How the fuck’re you gonna get ‘em all back here?”

“Pigsy,” she says, and holds up a hand as he opens his mouth to speak again. “I know. He’s dead. But all his stuff is still there. If I can find the right parts, I can pull something together that can cover the distance and transport people back. I have to try.” Her voice softens. “You know that, Monkey. You knew it when you brought me back here.”

“Fuck,” he breathes, and rakes both hands up through his hair. This would be far less maddening if she wasn’t right so often. “Yeah. I did. Okay.”

“You don’t have to come.” She moves closer to him again, face solemn. “There would still be a place here for you. You don’t have to earn anything.”

“Fuck you, I know that,” he says, not even trying to hide the exasperation. “I just...” He turns, stalks away a few paces, and he thinks about the hard, cruel pounding in his head that would come, once, whenever he strayed too far from her.

“You just what, Monkey?”

“You know I’ll come with you,” he says quietly. And it isn’t even as hard as he had been thinking it would be. “Wherever.”

“I guess I do.” He hears her behind him, feels her hands cool against his back. He presses back against them without thinking, sighs. If he doesn't make the move now, he might not ever. Because he's at a cusp, and because if she only has to ask him for what she wants, it doesn't only work one way.

“I need you to do something for me, though. Before we go.”

“What?”

“I need you to make this work again.” He turns, takes her hands in his and lifts them to the crown of his head. Her eyes widen slightly, but she doesn’t pull away, and after a moment or two she slides a hand against the back of his neck and lowers her face, nodding their foreheads together.

“Don’t make me explain it,” he whispers. “Please.” I’m not ready.

“All right,” she says. And then, in the center of his head, so clear that he’s sure that it isn’t his imagination, Soon, though.

Soon.

The ride could be smoother, he thinks, but on balance the whole thing works astonishingly well. He kicks it into a higher gear and it roars across the landscape, massive and multi-wheeled, an unwieldy box-like thing with a high-set cab. It runs, and that’s something, and it’s enough. For now.

“How long?” She doesn’t have to call to be heard above the wind but she does anyway, the window open wide and the air playing havoc with her hair, her face into it and her eyes closed as they move west, chasing the sun.

She doesn’t quite look happy. But she might be close.

“Another day or two.”

“Good.” She’s trying to be brave, he realizes. Or working herself up to it. Revving her engines. Settling her stance for the biggest leap she might ever make. And maybe she doesn’t actually need him, and maybe she could make the crossing on her own. But he’s made a choice. Unconsciously, he lifts a hand to the headband, the metal faintly warm to the touch.

In the end it was easy. And it’s not an end at all.