Archive of Our Own

Well, Iʼd know that you’d offer
Would reveal it, though it’s soft and flat
Won’t repeat it, cull and coffer’s that
For the soffit, hang this homeward
Pry it open with your love
Sending lost and alone standing offers

--Bon Iver, “Beth/Rest”


When the wind blows against the slanted walls of the Pyramid, it sounds like mourning.

In the first days after the world had gone dark, that mourning had been loosed outside and in, both places echoes of each other. Confusion and terror and grief and an awful, helpless rage had coalesced into one sound, hundreds of voices into one voice, rising into the black apex of the building to meet the external cries of the wind. A funereal wailing. On the central catwalk over them all: a mummified Morrigan crow watching over a sea of lost souls.

Weep, children, for the death of the world.

Now it’s quiet inside. There isn’t very much to say, here in the darkness.

Long before they reach it, Monkey is seeing the desert in his dreams.

Monkey never dreams in fiction, and he never dreams the future. Monkey’s dreams have always been an endless, ruthless retread of the past, always the things he can’t change or fix or stop. Like his mind is reminding him: It doesn’t matter how much you swing or leap or flip--or fly. Some things catch you. Some things back you into corners and the only way out is through. Someday no level of acrobatics will be enough.

Someday something will kill you.

He might write it off as simple masochism if he weren’t pretty sure that it’s kept him alive.

In his dreams, the megamechs are coming for them again, giant crawling horrors, eyeless and brainless and hungry for killing. In his dreams he’s diving for the ground again with Trip a barely-there weight in his arms, too exhausted and terrified to fight him anymore. In his dreams he’s trying to shelter her with his own body as the Leviathan shatters over their heads with a sound like the sky cracking open. It feels like the end of the world. Now he knows he had expected exactly that. But in his dreams all nows are now, all times are now, and all of it is completely inevitable.

He saves Trip because he must. He runs away with her because he can.

Now--really now, now in the sense of the word that he can work with--he opens his eyes into faint twilight and the roar of the carrier underneath the thin pallet on which he’s been sleeping. There’s a threadbare sheet hung between the cab and the small living space behind it, and it’s partially pulled aside; through the opening he can see the red flash of Trip’s hair, her slender hands on the controls as she drives.

They’re both riding a monster across the wastes. It’s not the Leviathan--it has no firepower. But it feels immense all the same, inevitable in the same way Monkey’s dreams are.

They must be getting close. For the moment he stays on the pallet, staring up at the dark ceiling, and considers.

It’s been at least a week. Maybe more like two. Time is funny, especially out here, and with little in the way of routine the days all bleed into one another. Their passage has been marked by the changes in the landscape rather than the sun: the trees getting scrubbier and sparser, the ground dry and cracked, and then at last just the hissing dust and the wind. A lot of nothing.

He never wanted to come back here. There’s no cover.

But she’s here. And now--he lifts his fingers to the metal band at the crown of his head, the faint warmth and the barely perceptible hum of it. He’s given up his right to choose. Given it freely and with no hesitation. Not for the first time, he almost laughs. If he could go back in time--maybe back in his dreams. Show this to the version of himself that had threatened to break her neck. Fucking hilarious.

Yeah. Sure.

Monkey sits up and grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“Monkey?” They’re distant enough and the sounds of the wind and the carrier are loud enough that the comm system in the headband has kicked in, and her voice echoes, soft and familiar, out of the very center of his head. “You up?”

You know I am, he thinks with mild amusement, stretching stiff limbs and not quite wincing as his spine lets out a crunch. He wasn’t built for this, being so sedentary for so long. There’s nowhere here to move. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Yeah, be up there in a sec.”

A little further in the back is a make-shift bathroom, a tank of faintly stale water, and he splashes some of it onto his face and neck and palms some into his mouth, washing the sleep away. Sleep and dust; it seems to get into everything out here, especially with the cab windows open--they could close them, but then the place would get progressively hotter and stuffier, and the walls would close in on him ever more tightly.

The dust is bearable. But it’s still obnoxious.

This is also familiar.

He palms the water away and moves back up toward the front and the cab, hands still damp, sleep still clinging like the dust. Trip is driving like she always does: hard focus, set jaw, eyes slightly narrowed, as though it’s taking everything she has for someone so small and slight to control something so immense.

Trip is a needle, Monkey thinks. She feels like a needle. Slip and she’ll hurt you, even if she doesn’t mean it. Even if the hurt is small. She’s sharp and she doesn’t bend. She just passes right through.

“Hey,” he murmurs, sinking down into the seat beside her. She doesn’t look at him, but he sees one corner of her mouth curl upward. Distracted.

“Hey, yourself.”

“How long?”

He doesn’t need to clarify the question. For two days now, there hasn’t been a lot else on either of their minds. She half-shrugs, a twitch of one bare shoulder. “By dawn, maybe.”

Dawn. Another night of driving. Trip’s face is looking pinched and tired and has for days, despite her focus, despite the hard set in her eyes--those eyes have dark hollows under them now. Monkey looks out at the flat dry waste in front of them, leans over and lays a hand on her forearm. He feels her twitch again, almost imperceptibly.

“I can take over.”

She glances at him, manages a more pronounced smile and shakes her head. “I’m okay.”

“You’re tired,” he persists. “You’re gonna need to stay on top of things when we get there.” Unspoken but clear between them as a written banner hung on the windshield: If she’s tired now, what they find when they read the corpse of Pyramid could drive her beyond exhaustion. And Monkey will carry her as much as he can, but there’s only so much that he can do.

Only so much she’ll let him do.

They’re driving into the setting sun--it’s practically set already, just a sullen red line on a straight horizon, the ground a black ocean of nothingness and the sky pale where it isn’t veined crimson. Like sick flesh. Trip stares out at it and Monkey stares too, wondering what this is that’s between them now, which he has wondered many times since they set out from the mountains and to which he still has no satisfying answer.

Slavery--but he asked for it. Friendship--but so uneasy. Companionship--of a silent kind. Protection--for whom?

And she is so determined to not need him when circumstances don’t force her into it.

At last she sighs, dips her head slightly and looks at him again. “You’re just going to sit there until I give in, aren’t you?” Her face is weary and resigned, heavy in shadow, but then she smiles again, thin but clear, and some of the clouds blow aside. “All right. Let me have another hour or so.”

Monkey nods, satisfied. With that much, at least.

He had been sort of surprised that the carrier had run at all. He’s still surprised, every time he opens his eyes to find that it hasn’t yet fallen to pieces.

Monkey is good with his hands, with everything that hands do. He’s good at moving and doing so quickly and nimbly, moving up and down and from side to side using only his hands in ways that most people would be unable to with any appendage they cared to try. He’s good at fighting, with weapons and without them, and when he has no weapons he can make them, or find things to use in that way. He’s good at building, at working with machines, at making broken things run again and pulling fragments of nothing together into something that he can use. He learned very early that his hands were shapers of reality--that they could mold and alter, pull apart and piece together; that if he was unsatisfied with the world as it was, he could do small things to change it. Because of his hands.

But the carrier is so big. And it’s meant for something so big. A huge windowed cargo bay on rollers, tanks of water for drinking and washing, stores of dried food and bedding from Trip’s settlement. It’s crude. Uncomfortable. If people are sick or injured, he’s not sure what they’ll do besides hope for the best.

But it runs. It runs because of his hands.

His hands and Trip’s heart.

It’s like their child, he thinks, and doesn’t feel the ripple of humor that he expects to.

Since the first days, most of them have not ventured outside.

Birth is confusion; everything is new, everything must be learned. Rebirth operates on the same principle. Some of them remember fragments of their lives from before, but they are in the minority--the majority has lost themselves in a world of offices and schools and mortgages and cars and vacations and credit cards and mowing the lawn, walking the dog, making the bed, making dinner, making love, making life.

Now they live in a sea of death. A few of them, in the first few days, simply went insane. It seemed easiest. The rest sit and lie and moan and weep and try to make sense of it.

Of the few who made their way outside, half have not returned. No one else wants to go to look for them.

The Pyramid is a tomb for the world, and like its ancient predecessors it contains supplies for an afterlife that was never meant to end. There are stores of water in the depths of the building, and tanks of a sludge that a few of the more mentally-present ones have identified as a kind of nutrient-rich material on which they must all have been fed. It tastes wretched, and no one wants to speculate about what it might consist of, but as they get hungrier the taste and the provenance seem to matter less and less. They crowd around the tank chamber, dark as the rest of the place, though less cavernous. They eat, they drink, the return to where they have been. They sit and stare dully into the dimness and wait for dreams, which are echoes of what they’ve all lost.

Where are we? When is this? What has happened?

The ones who know mostly keep silent. Perhaps it’s better if they don’t say. Perhaps a limbo of ignorance is better than a hell of knowing.

Monkey drives. Trip sleeps.

She does it back in the little living area, behind the ragged curtain, and Monkey pushes the massive thing on through the deep night. It shouldn’t be quiet--and in fact it isn’t quiet, he knows on some level--but at this time of the night all noise seems hushed and dampened, and looking out at the flat waste ahead of them, lit dull silver with starlight, he could swear he hears crickets.

There are no crickets, of course. Out here, there’s nothing.

Except the corpse of Pyramid.

He’s wanting this to be over, he’s finding. The journey, the task itself--he’s not sure where some lines end and others begin. The boundaries have gone soft-- along with himself , he thinks grimly--and he’s out of place and he’s not sure why and at the same time...

At the same time this is the only place he wants to be.

Except when they arrive at Pyramid. He knows enough to know to fear that moment. When he had run away from it, run with her, there had been a reason behind the running.

He looks up through the upper edge of the window; with nothing but flat nothing ahead of him, he can let his attention wander a little, and staring ahead for mile after mile is more tiring than anything else. He looks up at the stars--did they use to twinkle? Is there a snatch of a song somewhere in the dimmer, darker halls of his memory that describes such a thing? He barely remembers his mother; he has no idea if she ever sang to him. But he looks up at these stars and they don’t twinkle at all. They just shine, distant and cold.

The power cells had twinkled, he remembers. Not even so much a twinkle as a gentle winking in and out. Like an eye. Like many eyes, watching them.

And all he had seen were hers.

You heard what I just said. Turn it back on.

That part... that had been so much easier than he had thought it would be.

I remember. They learn to hate the words. It doesn’t take them very long. The millionth time one hears a phrase, it’s hated; it might be that a loving couple would be at each other’s throats given a long enough time together, after the millionth iteration of I love you. Which would not, of course, make it any less true.

I remember. One says it, another one tackles, there is scuffling and screaming and the dull sound of blows. Then silence in the darkness, except for the sound of muffled sobs.

I remember. Well, then stop it.

And if only it were that easy.

Monkey knows they’re almost there when he sees the bodies.

They’re massive, bigger even than he had remembered, and at first he mistakes them for hills--they’re half covered by blowing sand, and in another few weeks they might disappear altogether. But now they lie half-revealed, glistening in the dull morning sun, the sand hissing against their giant metal joints. There’s one, the closest one and somehow also the biggest, and Monkey stares at it as they draw closer and tries to fathom how he did it, how he managed to bring that monster down. At the time, he hadn’t thought about it. It had just been a thing that needed doing.

He doesn’t like the look of it. It looks like it might rise up and try to land one final, fatal stab with that wicked stinger.

Beyond it like the others, in pieces: claws, heads with mandibles spread wide as if in locked a grinding death-scream, tails each with stingers as wicked as the first, many-legged bodies lying in broken segments. These, at least, don’t unsettle him as much.

But then there it is, and he feels something clench at the top of his throat.

The Leviathan.

It lies in the same scattered pieces that the other mechs do, shattered, half dull glitter and half blackened scorch marks. It is at once more and less like the body of something that had once been alive; Monkey wonders how much of that has to do with the fact that the remains of Pigsy are in there, somewhere, crushed and burned with the rest of it.

He hasn’t really grieved. But then, he’s still not entirely sure what grieving is.

A touch at his shoulder, barely there and then gone again. The sound of an indrawn breath. “Monkey?”

He half turns; he’s not surprised. She must have known, even if she had been asleep. She must have been able to feel it through his eyes.

“We’re...” she starts, and then trails off, her gaze moving across the wreckage in front of them. One hand moves up toward her throat, slow and unconscious. “It felt like a dream before now,” she says softly. “It all happened so fast. But now it’s real.”

“Maybe another hour,” he says. He’s watching her out of the periphery of his vision, but he doesn’t entirely want to be doing so. It feels like a kind of invasion. It feels like he’s seeing too much. “Maybe less. Not sure.”

She sinks down into the seat next to him, hands clasped around each other in her lap. “I wonder what he’d think of this now. Us coming back.” She huffs out a quiet laugh, ducking her head briefly. “He probably wouldn’t be surprised. He knew me.”

“Knew you were this crazy?” It’s meant as a gentle jab, though a large part of him also think it’s true. But then, it’s a truth he’s had time to get comfortable with.

“He might’ve called it crazy.” She smiles, faint and sad. “I think he would’ve liked it, though.”

“Seemed like he liked crazy.”

“You knew him. He was easy to get to know quickly.”

There’s something about the way she says it that he can’t parse. Like there’s more behind it, things she’s saying without saying. He glances at her and then away again, and he can’t decide which is harder to look at now: the broken corpse of the Leviathan or the more essential brokenness behind her eyes.

So what the fuck are they even doing here, anyway?

But then it’s there on the horizon, a little broken line, a point where the ground juts up into the sky. He has to squint to see it, and he does so instinctively, his hands tightening on the controls. It’s glistening faintly, a flashing glint that’s there and gone again just as quickly, leaving a purple spot in his vision. Like an attack. The last weak blow it can strike now.

“It’s there.” She isn’t asking a question. He can see her leaning forward in the periphery of his vision. He can’t make out her expression. There might not be one to make out. “You can see it, can’t you.”

He grunts, non-committal--knowing that it’s stupid to be so. “Could be. Could just be more mech shit.”

“No, you saw it.” She rakes a hand through her hair, red strands falling back around her shoulders like little crimson snakes. “Soon, then.” Then, very softly, so softly that he’s sure he wasn’t meant to hear it, “Oh my God.”

They can barely hear the rumble over the constant scream of the wind outside. But they do hear it. One by one, they lift their heads.

Wretched as they are, most of them are still beyond terror.

So this might be a new thing. They work themselves over with numb fingers. They wait, and try to remember what it feels like to be human, and try to forget that they ever knew such a thing.

The cab is high, at least ten feet above the ground, but Trip bats away Monkey’s hand when he offers it and clambers out through the large side window, dropping awkwardly to the ground and rolling into the dust. He watches her for a moment or two before he swings down himself. There was a time--and not too long ago--when he would have grudgingly insisted that she accept his help, and at that time she would have taken it without too much resistance. Not now.

The headband is back on. But Monkey understands that a great many other things will never be like they were before.

She’s on her feet by the time he gets to her, dusting herself off absently--all her attention fixed ahead and upward. Pyramid is even more massive than Monkey remembers it being, in memory filtered through the haze of shock and exhaustion. Now he sees it more clearly, and it looms over them both, the side facing them thrown into deep shadow, the sun flaring over one perfectly straight and slanted edge.

This close, it doesn’t appear to gleam. It doesn’t look new or shiny or pristine at all. It looks like a tomb. A thing for dead things, built by the dead, kept by the dead.

He knows it’s too late to turn around. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t still want to.

“Now what?” he asks, pulling his gaze away long enough to look at her. She doesn’t look back at him. Her head is tilted, the lines of her neck thrown into sharp relief, and he finds himself thinking--again--how deceptively fragile she looks. How easy it would be to break her. Knowing, instead, that it would be the hardest thing that anyone might ever try to do.

“We go inside,” she says simply, reaches out and touches his arm. She knows where he is without having to look at him. Fingers close around his wrist. Proprietary. Ownership is a more complicated thing than he ever imagined.

“C’mon.”

The door opens around them like a mouth. Monkey stares up at it--large but utterly plain, a short ramp upward and then a tall rectangle of darkness, and he realizes that it doesn’t look familiar to him. They must have come in this way--he sees no other way they could have come--but he doesn’t remember it. The period between leaping from the Leviathan and stepping into the clean obscenity of Pyramid that first time is a total blur to him.

And this is painfully clear.

“What if they’re all dead?” trip’s voice is barely a whisper next to him. He looks at her--staring into the darkness, her arms wrapped around her middle as though she’s in pain, her face tight with weariness and fear. “Monkey... I can’t take it again.”

And he knows what she means. Another pile of bodies. And these ones, yes, her fault, whatever he might try to tell her.

He moves without thinking, slides an arm around her shoulders and turns her to him, and he doesn’t feel the resistance he’s expecting. Entering Pyramid might be a blur, but he remembers something else so clearly: He remembers sitting with her beside the pit she dug to serve as a grave for her whole world, sitting with her and holding her, feeling her breathing against him. Living.

Marveling at how that had been so much more than enough.

“We gotta go in,” he murmurs, glancing back at the dark slit in Pyramid’s glassy face. We.You, and so: me.

He feels her nod, hears her let out a rough, coughing laugh, and then she’s pulling away from him, moving forward into the dark.

And of course he’s following her.

The first thing that he notices is the smell.

The world outside Pyramid is dry and lifeless; there is no scent but hot dust. Inside, in the dark, the stench of the place hits him like an open hand to the face--he’s smelled things like it before and he recognizes it instantly, but he doesn’t think he’s ever encountered it in such terrible intensity.

Unwashed bodies. Shit. Terror. Despair. But not rotting flesh, not that he can tell.

Not dead, then. At least not all of them.

But if it weren’t for the smell, he might assume that they were. There’s an eerie silence in the place, a lack of sound and movement that seems to echo off the distant, unseen ceiling of the chamber, and though the darkness isn’t total and though his eyes are beginning to adjust, all he sees on the floor below them are indistinct shapes that might or might not be bodies.

He finds himself holding his breath. It’s not just the smell. It’s a tug from the primitive animal side of his brain, the side that runs on split-second reflex and instinct, the side that’s kept him alive for this long. There is a spirit here, and he’s afraid to disturb it.

And of course, Trip isn’t.

“Hello?” she calls, her voice vibrating into the dark, stronger and more sure than he knows she feels. Abruptly he’s proud of her; if she can sound like that now, if she can fake strength until real strength makes itself available, they might yet all be all right.

Of course there’s no answer. But all at once the stillness is even more total, complete in a way that makes him understand that before, there had been all kinds of things that he was hearing without knowing it: breathing, heartbeats, the thrum of blood in miles of veins.

They’re listening. He can hear them doing it.

Then they start to move.

It’s a rustling, shuffling sound, and Monkey thinks of dead leaves stirred by wind. Without planning the movement, he steps closer to Trip, ready to flick his staff into being. They have to be starving and weak, he thinks. They have to pose little threat, if any at all. But he also knows too much about desperation. About the awful strength that desperation can lend.

How would they get up onto the catwalk? From which direction would they come? He doesn’t even know. He curses inwardly--he should have established that the second they walked into this place.

“Monkey--” Trip’s hand on his shoulder, hesitant, nervous. She’s better at fighting, she’s been practicing, but she still has no weapon of her own, and he curses himself again. He should fix that.

All this fucking responsibility. And now he can’t even say that he didn’t ask for it.

“Stick close.”

“Who’s there?” The voice is still below them, trembling, unreadable otherwise. Hard to say if the trembling is physical weakness, lack of use, or emotion. “Who are you?”

“We’re friends,” Trip says, pulling free of Monkey’s restraining arm and stepping closer to the edge of the catwalk, ignoring Monkey’s angry hiss. She bends and peers down into the dimness. “We’re here to help you.”

A laugh, rough and sour, perhaps from someone else. It’s difficult to say. “‘Help’ us? And how’re you gonna do that? Can you send us back?” The sound of someone spitting, something that might be a sob. “I lost my fucking family in there.”

“I never had a family.” Another voice, further away, flat and dead. “It was all a lie.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say that.”

“Why the fuck does it matter what I say?”

Now the sound of bodies shifting, moving. Monkey takes a step closer to the edge, looks down. Shapes in the dark. He can’t make out faces. There’s a blur of quicker movement and the sound of flesh impacting flesh, a rough grunt.

“Stop it!”

“Kill each other,” comes another flat voice. Or perhaps it’s the same one. “Do the world a favor.” More impacts, blow after blow, the sound of something heavy falling, hard breathing. A murmur running around the room. Someone breaking into weeping with the sharpness and suddenness of glass breaking.

“Monkey.” Trip turns to face him; he sees the quick gleam of her eyes in the dimness, huge and round and shocked. Her voice is a tight hiss. “What do I do? What the fuck do I do?”

He doesn’t think. He speaks. “Stay here.”

And then he’s moving.

Monkey rarely moves into any position without some thought toward how he’ll move out of it again. No space is entered without some kind of escape route clearly picked out. He survives by moving; he only stays alive because he doesn’t stop. Trip represents a departure from that, an element of stasis, but even if that’s so, it’s only a center around which the rest of his world keeps spinning. But a step out of the normal path makes each subsequent one easier. He knows this. So when he grips the edge of the catwalk and flings himself down into the reeking shadows, it isn’t with any thought about how he’ll get back up.

Is it for her? He could have grabbed her and run again. Or he could have pulled her back from the edge and let them kill each other. It would make the whole thing that much simpler.

He’ll puzzle over the ethical ramifications later. His feet slam into the floor, bodies slithering away from him, cries of surprise and rage. A split second of stillness. He still can’t see them clearly.

But he can feel them when they start to come for him.

They come from all directions. He feels it as a compression of the air, a hot, stinking wave pushing toward him in a tightening circle. He almost laughs; they’ve been living like this for weeks, mostly likely alternating between dull lethargy and clawing at each other’s throats. And now he’s given them something new: something to unite against. Distantly, he hears Trip cry a warning.

He echoes it with a shout that starts in the core of his middle and barrels out through the top of his throat, and at the same instant he grips his staff two-handed and swings it out in a wide circle, crackling with blue fire, a stunning charge.

It doesn’t connect. But he feels them all falter. For the briefest of instants he sees them: dirty, clothes torn, faces gaunt, some of them still half-masked, most of them still wearing their headbands. There’s something like a red glow just above his vision.

They must be able to see his.

“Back the fuck off,” he growls, staff out. He turns, slow, knees bent into a low center of gravity and ready to spring away in any direction. “Enough of this shit. We can’t help you if this is what you’re gonna do.”

“Help,” one of them spits again, the scorn fine and thin. “You fucking idiot. It’s too late to help us. Look at us.”

And Monkey does look.

Down here, off the catwalk, it’s still dim and thick with shadows, but he can see more clearly. He can see over their heads, hundreds of people stretching off into the dark. Standing, sitting, hunched, curled on their sides. He can feel all the hollow, blank stares that he can’t see. He could hurt them--beat their skulls in, and many of them wouldn’t fight back, and some of them would thank him.

He remembers the glimpse he’d been given. The world as it was. Clean and whole and beautiful. Safe. The kind of world where children weren’t just a bad joke. He thinks about that, and he hates Pyramid with an intensity and a viciousness that he hasn’t felt before.

For not being here anymore, as much as for doing all this in the first place.

Did I do the right thing?

“You wanna think that way,” he breathes, turning in a slow circle, “fine. I can’t stop you. But we got food. Water. We can take you somewhere better than this, if you want that. Of if you wanna stay here and wallow in this, that’s fine too. Up to you.”

There’s a long silence. Monkey waits it out. Over his head, in his head, he can hear Trip breathing.

“We can take you somewhere else!” He pushes his voice out into the darkness, letting it echo. “If you’re hungry, thirsty, we got food and water for you. We got a better place than this. If you wanna come with us!”

“Why the fuck should we trust you?” The same scornful voice--less scornful now. But thin and wary. Monkey turns toward it--toward her. Her voice is rough, perhaps from underuse, but in the dimness he can see her eyes, pits of exhaustion in a pale face. He meets her gaze, holds it.

“Can’t give you a reason,” he says finally. “But your alternative is this.” He sweeps his staff around in a slow arc. All of this.

He doesn’t say more. He figures he shouldn’t need to. What  he’s said is what there is.

There’s another long silence. He sinks into it, wraps it around himself. It isn’t complete--it’s broken by the sound and the feel of Trip above him, the tip of a submerged rock above the surface of the water. He lets it center him.

“I’ll come with you,” says a soft voice from behind him. He turns. Another woman, smaller, thinner, her mask entirely pulled away from her face, her hair short-cropped and tousled beneath and above her headband. Like the first woman, she looks impossibly tired. Unlike that first woman, that tiredness lends an open quality to her face. She no longer has the energy to shut herself off. She looks and feels trusting simply because there is nothing else now for her to do.

Monkey nods. Another murmur runs around the circle--murmurs of assent. Some of it is tired and open, some of it is tired and wary, and much of it is simply exhausted.

But it still feels like a victory.

He turns back to the first woman. She meets his gaze evenly. Nods, once.

Monkey lifts his head toward the catwalk that he can barely see, the woman he can only feel. “All right,” he says, knowing she’ll hear him. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

Helping people is like a gateway drug. You do it once and suddenly it’s hard to stop. This is why, before Trip, he had tried to avoid it. This is why Trip still makes him afraid.

He finds a column supporting one end of the catwalk and swings up it, but not before finding another entrance--the one the others had left through, the one that mechs had probably used. None here now, but going in and out this way still makes him uneasy. The carrier can’t possibly hold everyone, but he drives it close and they load the people they can, most of them staggering, some of them stumbling, weeping silently, blinking in the light. Monkey no longer notices the smell.

“We’ll come back,” Trip says to the ones who are left. The reluctant ones, the ones who have elected to stay--perhaps out of altruism. Monkey knows that she would like to believe this. He’s not sure he does. “I promise, we’ll come back for you.”

Before they leave for the final time, he looks back and up at the central column, looming in the shadows. He can’t see Pyramid’s slumped, dead form. He’s abruptly glad of that. And it’s better that none of them see it as well. Better that none of them wonder too much about what happened.

None of the people in the carrier seem relieved to be there, with clean water and rations and blankets to wrap themselves in--though of course they make use of all of these things. They’re silent, moving generally in isolation even as they’re packed together, several hundred deep. In the end, after showing them where things are and offering them a few increasingly awkward assurances, Monkey swings back up the ladder and into the cab at the top of the carrier, pausing for a few seconds and watching Trip as she drives them back east again.

He had made her let him take point. He hadn’t needed to try very hard. She’s not weakening, but he can feel how unsure she is.

“They’re settled,” he says at last, moving forward and leaning against the back of the other seat. “Much as they can be anyway.”

She doesn’t look up at him. “How do they feel?”

“How the hell should I know?” He doesn’t mean to snap, but it comes out that way all the same, sharpened by weariness and directionless frustration. “Tired. Hungry. Probably pretty pissed off.”

He feels rather than hears her wince and pull away from him, and he’s instantly sorry, even as part of him is more annoyed at her for having the audacity to be hurt by this. He waits for her to speak, but she doesn’t, and then he doesn’t, and then there’s nothing at all as the dusk rolls on into night outside.

It was easier when it was only them and death. He hates this, but that doesn’t make it less true. They had a path and an object, even if the object kept moving, even when the path wasn’t always clear, and as long as they kept moving forward they could be sure that they were doing something right.

He reaches up and touches the headband. It’s warm. It vibrates gently under his fingertips. It feels alive, separate from him and yet part of him, wound so tightly into his brain that he’ll never be free of it.

He still doesn’t know how much of this is what he wants and how much is what he needs.

“They don’t know it was you,” he says at last, putting into words the thing they’ve both been circling since they stepped into the darkness. “They won’t know. They got no way to know.”

“Unless I tell them.”

He looks at her, sharp and sudden, leaning heavily over the back of the seat. Night is rising ahead of them. “You’d do that?”

“Maybe.” She lets out a long sigh. “Can I lie to them, Monkey? Again? Haven’t they been lied to enough?”

“It’s not the same as lying,” he persists, even as he knows it’s total bullshit. “What the fuck good does it do them to know?”

“What do you remember about your parents, Monkey?”

It’s such a sudden subject change that it stuns him into silence, staring at her, every muscle tensed as if he might be about to dodge. It’s only after he starts to search his memory that he realizes that he’s going to attempt to answer her question, obeying her implicit command--and he’s not even sure the commands work that way. If she told him to tell her the truth...

But he doesn’t know that he couldn’t.

“Almost nothing,” he says. “Told you. They died when I was little.”

“But you do remember a little.”

He sighs. Exasperation is easier than what he’s really feeling, which is something akin to panic. He doesn’t want to go back here. Here is a place he would prefer to not go. He doesn’t remember the mech attack itself, something for which he feels a horrible kind of gratitude--he doesn’t have to watch the highlight reel of his parents being burned to ashes, even in his dreams. But he remembers how big and strong his father’s hands were. How like his own. He remembers the wiry strength of his mother as she pulled him up onto her back and carried him across streams, through thick mud, as she told him to hang onto her while she leaped from ledge to ledge across a chasm of stone. He remembers his father singing in the dark in the ruined foundations of a house that they found in the center of a field, shelter enough for a clear night.

He remembers that he was loved, and that’s bad enough.

“I remember a little.”

“And what if you didn’t remember anything? How would you feel?”

“It’d be easier,” he blurts out, the words pushing out of him like solid things. He hates them, and for an instant he hates her for making him say them.

And he can’t blame this on the headband.

She looks at him, small and calm. Wiry strong. “Would it?”

He says nothing. It takes all of his strength to keep the flood of words back--because he doesn’t even know what words they are, what order they’ll come out in--what he’ll say without meaning to.

“They need to know their own history,” Trip says softly, turning back to the dark ground ahead of them. “It’s all any of us have in the end.”

He wonders if she really believes that. He wonders if he does, too.

They tell stories about her. He sits and listens to them in the light of flickering lanterns running on dying batteries as the carrier rumbles on underneath them. Monkey is a known quantity--they are all familiar with him by now, and as such he isn’t much worth remarking on. But Trip has continued to keep her distance, even as the mountains draw closer and closer and the ground under them softens and greens. With that distance has come a kind of awe, an almost mythical status. Monkey crouches in the dimness, changing the dressing on one of their legs, and listens to a circle of them talk about her hair-- reddest thing we ever saw that wasn’t blood-- and the calmness of her face, the way she seemed bigger than her modest size.

Monkey listens to this in silence. When he’s done he climbs back up into the cab and takes the wheel from her without a word, half watching behind the seats as she crawls onto the pallet, curls up, falls asleep in what seems like seconds.

With the driving, with the people, they spend so little time in the same space together. Really together.

He isn’t entirely sure if he’s allowed to miss her like this.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. They were supposed to get to Pyramid and there would be a clear path forward, answers, some kind of solution that would give her peace and him freedom.

And now neither of them has either thing.

He doesn’t know exactly what he wanted, when he told her to make the headband work again. He just knows that it wasn’t this.

“Home,” Trip whispers, standing behind him, one hand on his arm. Then she has the sense of irony to laugh.

The way into the settlement is opened, but there’s no way they can get the carrier through it. It’s parked, a big dark hulk in the dawn light, its massive cargo bay open. Inside, countless eyes are blinking in the light. Staring. Bodies unfolding themselves and venturing slowly down the ramp. Despite the rations they’re all still painfully skinny, genderless because of it, muscles atrophied and faces flat as though they’re still re-learning how to have feelings and to show them. How to live in their bodies again.

Monkey wonders what it means for them that he still isn’t sure how to do just that.

“Looks just like we left it,” he grunts. He’s not about to get all dewy-eyed over the place. Not now, not in front of her, certainly not in front of them.

But the sun is breaking through a gap in the mountain peaks like a bright knife. The hand on his arm tightens. After a second or two he covers it with his own.

It’s a process. It takes time. It takes work and patience--more of both than he ever thought he’d have to give. The power has been turned off--by them this time--and weather-related wear and tear to one of the turbines means they can’t get it going immediately. But while Trip slides up to her elbows in grease, Monkey plays matchmaker with houses--something he immediately despises, but he bites back all the frustration. He doesn’t snap. He doesn’t hit anyone when they complain. He manages to be gentle with the quiet, sad-eyed ones, of which there are very many. He does what she tells him. He wonders if she has the attention to spare to be proud of him.

By late afternoon he’s moved too far from her and the buzzing pain in his head forces him back.

It’s a feature that it occurs to him to wonder if she might be able to lessen or remove.

Then he pushes the idea away and doesn’t think of it again.

The sun is going down and she slumps in its red light, leaning back against the scrap metal base of the windmill. Sometime in the afternoon she was successful and now lights glow dimly in the settlement, like fireflies that don’t quite want to commit to anything. Figures move against their light. It’s enough for now; he can sense that she’s willing to let it be, even if she’s not satisfied.

Her hands and forearms and face are smudged with dark grease. He reaches out and rubs away an especially dark smear from the corner of her mouth--tugging her lips upward in a facsimile of a smile.

Then she gives him a real one.

“We did good today.”

He grunts and sinks down onto the grass, one leg stretched out and aching gently. “It’s something.”

“It’s a lot.” He looks up at her and catches another smile, smaller and more awkward and somehow even more genuine. “It actually went better than I thought it would.”

“Not all of ‘em are okay.” It feels like something that has to be said. But is it really that kind of honesty? Or something else? It feels like it has a mean edge. It feels like it might have teeth. “It’s gonna take a lot more work before they are.”

“I know.” She sinks down beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and not for anything like the first time, he’s very aware of how small she is against him. “But it’s a start.”

A start. Of what? Beginnings are so delicate.

But this doesn’t feel quite like that.

She curls up on the windmill’s maintenance platform. It’s not the place he would have imagined she’d select for sleeping, with the wind and the chill, but she’s huddled under a blanket, her limbs tucked in close to her small body, and before she let the weariness take her, she laid on her back and pointed out the shapes in the stars, told him their names.

He still doesn’t see those shapes. Only cold points of light.

Now he sits and watches her. How long has he spent watching her sleep, all told? Days? Weeks? How long have they been together?

What does together consist of?

Trip stirs in her sleep, mutters something he can’t make out. Below her, the settlement is glowing with soft light but otherwise might as well be abandoned. In the houses of dead people, other people who are trying to learn how to live again are sleeping the sleep of the utterly exhausted. And what Monkey can find it in himself to be thankful for is that at least it’s quiet.

The wind smells like rain and dust and Monkey breathes it in. Trip stirs more fitfully, lets out a soft cry, and Monkey shifts closer to her, reaches for her and tugs her halfway into his lap. It’s done without calculation, without much thought at all; it’s the work of instinct at this point, and instinct is always what he’s been able to trust most completely. He works gentle fingers through her hair--his hands so big next to the delicacy of her face--and she stills.

This is enough, he thinks, and then, out of a kind of tired hysteria, I don’t really have to share you with them. They can’t know you like this. They can’t be with you like I can.

And what the fuck does that mean?

Trip sleeps. At some point Monkey follows her down.

The first fight breaks out three days later. Weeks in a cramped carrier and no major fights to speak of, and now that they’re here and there’s room and food and water and good air to breathe, there’s fighting. Monkey wonders if, perversely, it’s actually a good sign, if it means that they’re getting their feet back under them to the point where they can launch themselves at each other.

Before they were dead-eyed. No will. No fire.

It doesn’t mean that he enjoys any part of this.

“That’s fucking enough, ” he snarls, shoving two of them apart--an older man with graying hair and a younger man and woman, both with scarred faces, both with the same bleached hair and eyes. Brother and sister, he thinks he remembers. Not like it matters much. There’s a crackle and a smell of ozone as he flicks his staff open and turns in a slow semicircle.

“That there was our cloth,” the woman hisses back. “And he--”

“And there’s enough for all of us,” says Trip from behind him. All of them still; all of them look at her. There’s that feeling of awe, instant, expected. They all feel it with her. It’s gotten to the point where it makes Monkey’s stomach clench.

“None of us should need to steal. Right?” She steps closer, arms folded across her chest, looking around the three combatants and the small group of onlookers. “I don’t care who did what, who started it, who’s guilty. But I don’t want to see things like this. Not here.” She sighs and the corner of her mouth twists--weary exasperation. “Work it out.”

Silence. She turns and walks away again, out toward one of the cliffs. Monkey’s gaze follows her; he knows his isn’t the only one. But he wonders if they see what he sees. The set of her shoulders. The strain in it, how she’s trying to keep them squared and her head high.

He flicks his staff closed again. The crowd is beginning to disperse. The old man and the younger man and woman are coming together, muttering sullenly. Working it out.

He finds her seated on the edge of the cliff, her legs swinging into nothing below her, and for a moment she looks exactly like the awkward, frightened girl he first remembers, and something wrenches in his chest.

“Hey.”

She looks up at him, palming at her face, and he’s not surprised to see the tracks of tears on her cheeks. “Hi.”

“There’s gonna be more of that.” It’s not comforting, he doesn’t want to say it, but they’ve come too far to not be direct. “It doesn’t matter if there’s enough to go ‘round. They’ll fight. It’s what people do.”

“I know,” she whispers, and lowers her head again. “Monkey. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

He drops into a crouch behind her, lays a hand on her shoulder. Touching her these days is coming easier and easier. Sometimes he thinks that not touching her is where it gets difficult. “You got us all this far.”

“And how much further do we have to go?” She leans back against him, smoothly and with no preamble to it, and with the same smoothness he curls an arm around her. “I’m not a leader. I’m not strong.”

“Bullshit.”

“Not like my father.”

“Your father’s dead,” Monkey says. It’s cold, hard, final--like death. He almost feels bad about it. But Trip only nods and wipes at her cheeks. Wind toys with the strands of her hair, pulling them through drying trails of moisture. Water and salt, Monkey thinks. With enough of both you might do anything. You might make an ocean.

“Don’t you just want to run?”

The setting sun turns her hair to the color of blood. Monkey is tired, weary to the point of dropping, but he can’t tear his eyes away from her now. Ten minutes ago he swung back up to the windmill’s platform, where he had known she would be, carrying blankets under one arm. Then there had been silence. Now there’s her speaking and he’s not sure how to answer.

Yes should be correct. Yes should be what he answers without thinking, and concern for her feelings shouldn’t enter into it; he knows without having to ask that she wants the truth from him. That she’d command it if she had to.

So when he doesn’t say yes, yes I do, it can’t be because he wants to spare her something.

“I’d turn the headband off and let you go, if it was what you wanted.”

“Don’t say that,” he says finally. In his own ears, he sounds angry--quietly, tightly so. Like he’s been threatened with something. Like he has to defend himself. Like he might be reduced to pleading if things got bad enough. “Don’t ever fucking say that again.”

She never does.

Later, thinking back, he’s not sure when they started sharing a bed. It’s not a bed in any proper sense of the word, anyway, and it’s not as though they really started with any clear delineation, any line in the world over which they stepped, where before one thing had not been true and after it always was.

They’ve been together for so long. Everything is a kind of evolution. Things mutate. Some of the mutations are beneficial and allow the line to continue.

Every morning he wakes up curled against her, around her, her head tucked under his chin and his broad hand against her back. Together they’re a warm little center in a world of distant chill.

He has a hard time seeing this as anything other than a beneficial development. Even when part of him whispers warnings.

Things settle. They fall into a routine. It’s been Monkey’s long experience that the world trends toward chaos, that entropy is as reliable a law as anything else, but Trip seems to be surrounded by exceptions, to drag them out of thin air--to be a walking exception to every rule in and of herself. And in her world, everything trends toward order. At least for now.

Some people seem to remember--from the life they had in Pyramid or the life they had before it--about growing things and tending fields. Some people remember about machines and fixing them. Some people remember about clothing, sewing and mending. Some people remember fighting and defense. A couple of people remember some medicine. Those who know instruct those who don’t. Knowledge is gradually spread around, filling cracks like a slowly flowing liquid. Everything evens out. Somehow there’s enough to go around.

And one morning they wake up and there’s a community, bloomed overnight like some kind of strange flower. They all regard it with mild, blinking surprise and then go about the day’s work.

Life, it seems, goes on.

Trip executes a graceful turn, swings Monkey’s staff through the air in an equally graceful arc, takes the arm off the stuffed practice dummy he’s set up for this purpose. He stands to the side, watching her, keeping his face carefully impassive; obvious reaction will damage her focus. In the moment of defense or attack she can’t worry about what he thinks of her. In the end his opinion means nothing anyway.

There’s something about how she moves, Monkey has decided. His movements are controlled, hard and powerful and violent in a measured kind of way; in that, he supposes, there’s probably a kind of grace. But Trip fights like a dancer. She’s elegant. There’s joy in it, for her. Spins, kicks, thrusts and swings of the staff--they almost look as if they weren’t meant to injure at all, that they wouldn’t hurt when the blows land. It’s deceptive.

It’ll stand her well against human opponents. Mechs care nothing for grace.

She turns to him, flushed and panting, her hair hanging loose around her face. She smiles, bright and--for the moment--uncomplicated, and something in his chest clenches and releases again. He nods.

“You’re getting better.”

“Every day,” she says, and palms sweat away from her forehead, snapping the staff closed with a brisk shake of her wrist. “I love it.”

“You love it now. You’ve never killed anyone that way.”

“Mechs,” Trip says, shooting Monkey a look and pushing past him to where a bucket of water and a cup are waiting for her. She stands and drinks deeply, water slipping around the edges of the cup and flowing down over her collarbones, darkening her shirt.

“Mechs aren’t people,” Monkey says softly. “You know that.”

“I know.” Trip tosses him the staff and he catches it; she turns away from him, reaching up to pull the loose strands of her hair back into their knot.

“You’re always going to see me as that scared little girl, aren’t you.” It’s not a question. But he feels compelled to answer her honestly.

“Sorta, yeah.”

She laughs thinly, shakes her head, and before he can offer any additional explanation or apology she’s launching herself at him, flying through the air with a speed and a precision that’s entrancing to watch. And he is entranced. He might have been able to dodge it otherwise. As it is he barely gets his hands up to defend himself before she slams into him, more power than her slight frame would suggest she’s capable of employing, knocking him back. He stumbles, still groping for a response--words or movement--and she kicks his legs out from under him and he goes down onto his back with her on top of him, straddling.

And everything is very still.

They’re on a stretch of ground far distant from the settlement’s center and it’s getting on to evening, many people home already, and as far as he knows they’re alone--but even if they were surrounded by a crowd of onlookers he’s not sure he would notice or care. He stares up at her, both of them motionless, and the setting sun is at her back, setting fire to her hair. Her skin is wet bronze. Her eyes are the blue heart of a flame.

Goddess, Monkey thinks, without knowing for sure what the word even means. Except that it means this. Her.

She leans forward. Very close. “I’m not a scared little girl,” she whispers. “Look at me.”

It’s a command. He couldn’t disobey her even if he wanted to. And part of him--now--wants to disobey her very, very badly. He looks at her and it’s a kind of torture the existence of which he hadn’t fully understood.

Look at me.

Abruptly she lifts herself away from him, turning, shaking her shoulders loose. Slowly Monkey sits up. He feels vaguely dizzy. He wonders if the headband is malfunctioning and knows that everything would be so much simpler if he could blame it all on that.

“I’m not a scared little girl,” she says again, not looking at him. And she’s not. He knows it. He’s seen it: strength beyond what he could have imagined in her, a kind of selfless fierceness he hadn’t believed possible. Beyond them in the distance is the world they’ve built together--a little clot of life and color clinging to high rocks. Surviving. Because of her. Because she destroys worlds and rebuilds them again. Goddess.

“I know,” he whispers, and only then does she favor him with a smile, and when she does he starts to understand what it might mean to worship something.

He doesn’t come to her while there’s any daylight. He comes to her after it’s dark, after the shadows will hide him. He’s lingered close by--the pain forces him to do so and at last he swings up to the windmill’s platform and the nest they’ve made for the nights when there is no rain.

He hasn’t heard her call him. But she’s been calling to him for hours. It’s not the headband. It’s his blood, his marrow, the thud of his heart.

She’s sitting there when he lands on his feet, silhouetted against the quarter moon. She doesn’t turn. Her shoulders are bare and they might be made of marble, milk, clouds. Insubstantial. Cool. Or so solid that it might hurt him.

Monkey, she whispers, and his name is a command.

This might as well be the first time for either of them, the first time in the entire world. They might as well be alone. The first people, the last. She’s a pool of living moonlight and this time she spills herself out beneath him, arching, shuddering when he’s inside her. He feels too big for her; he’s afraid there’s pain. When she touches him it’s like pressing his bare skin against ice so cold it burns.

Monkey.

He can’t speak. Her mouth swallows up anything he might say. He doesn’t even know if he can call these kisses, these ravenous things, teeth against his lips, surging into something desperate and then back into softness. There are all kinds of commands that have nothing to do with words: her fingers digging into his back, her legs hooked around the backs of his straining thighs, the rolling waves of her hips. She’s dragging him into her, hurling them both toward hot, crashing darkness. He turns his face into the sweaty hollow of her neck and lets go.

And then she’s still moving, moving them, wild and panting and crying out. Icy to burning. Erasing the line between the two. He holds them together and lets her scorch him.

When she kisses him again it’s a command to sleep. So he does.

“I used to want children,” she murmurs. She’s sitting up, one of the blankets wrapped around her shoulders, staring to the east. The sun isn’t yet showing; the horizon is faintly rosy, like the surface of her skin where the blood runs close. Soon the world below them will start stirring, waking up, moving and working and living.

He pushes himself up behind her, lays a hand against the back of her neck. He’s already been awake for hours, watching her.

“You still want ‘em?”

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t turn but leans back against him in a movement so familiar and so easy that for an instant it hurts him in an entirely new and unexpected way. “What do people want when they want children, Monkey?”

“I don’t know.” He’s never known. In a world like this it’s always struck him as a wildly foolish instinct.

And yet here they both are.

“I think,” Trip says softly, “that they want to change the world. Some part of them. They want to make a piece of it that’s new but that’s also them. The two of them. Something that might stay. And I think... that they don’t want to be alone.” She’s silent again, and finally she turns, reaching up and curling her arm around his neck, turning her face against his chest. And like that, without meaning to, he’s holding her and she fits so well.

“I’m sending some people out tomorrow,” she says. “To find others. Bring them here.” He feels her smile against him, the part of her lips like a kiss.

“I don’t have to want children anymore.”

It doesn’t matter how much you swing or leap or flip--or fly. Some things catch you. Some things back you into corners and the only way out is through. Someday no level of acrobatics will be enough.

Someday something will kill you.

And he’s not afraid of that now.

-end-