***
I walked ahead of Alice, because after the meeting, she was surrounded by the other Commanders so they could all congratulate each other on jobs well done. It was a practice Alice found infuriating, because half the time, we made no progress, but it was protocol, so she always allotted a few minutes to stay behind and receive her accolades, though she never gave them.
Walking through the streets of Luna Moors was starting to feel like a new experience each time I did it, because I spent so much time away. The rocky ground there in our village, sparsely populated with grass, rose and fell and sloped and flattened, and the villagers had just learned to tread carefully over the years, lest they wished to face-plant every five minutes. Even after almost two and a half decades, my feet still found unfamiliar spots in the land to trip on. Though Luna Moors was sufficiently large—about seven thousand square feet, give or take a few—it was safe because it was isolated. The Moors that surrounded it stretched on and on, putting us hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization which was, unfortunately, Old Spirit territory in those days. In the way that the trebestia were both Shadow Village’s biggest protection and greatest threat, the Moors around us both shielded and endangered us. It kept the Old Spirits out, but most of our people had no idea how to get back to civilization, and the Moors were full of crags thousands of miles deep, caves populated by creatures the villagers spoke about like they were urban legends, and endless open space.
The other biggest shield besides the land itself was the wall of stone. It stretched all around the village, and it would have made the place look like a prison if the villagers hadn’t lined all the paths with torches and planted trees from which they could hang strings of firefly lanterns. At night, the place had the same mythical glow that I remembered from Shadow Village, and when the nights were cool (and they usually were), I could remember our time there.
Mine and Alice’s house was on the first street. It was nothing compared to the palatial estate we had lived in when were in Shadow Village, but it worked for us. The good people of Luna Moors were not the most skilled carpenters and architects, so their homes were modest cottages with one level and only a few rooms. There was no preferential treatment given to us because we were former friends of Brynna Olivier, who was a friend of the King. The people looked at things rationally: the more people in a family, the bigger the house given to the family. I liked that about them. I also loved how much that infuriated Don. He tried to hide it, because he would never outwardly disrespect those showing him hospitality. But God, when we were in private, with none of the Luna Moors folks around, he went off. He was too much of a coward to say, “I’m basically the King now” or “We are blessing them with our presence.” So instead, he just frowned and said, “Adam would never stand for this,” which, say what anyone would about the former King, but something like modest living arrangements would not have bothered him.
I unlocked the door, shivered upon crossing the threshold because sometimes, I swear, the house still smelled like Lara, and immediately moved to the fireplace to get a fire going.
The heat in front of me was nothing compared to what came through the door a second later.
“Did you honestly think that was going to work?!” She spat.
“Allie, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Don’t fucking tell me you didn’t mean anything by it!” She grabbed my arm and turned me around. I lost my footing and fell sideways onto the floor. “You have been dropping your little hints, and I have been ignoring them, because I didn’t have time for it, and because I didn’t want you to think that those hints were going to change anything, and then you pull that shit to get my attention!”
“It was not to get your attention.” I started again.
“It was to get my attention! And because you thought that by saying it in front of literally everyone, I would be forced to say, ‘Well, okay, here’s my goddamn resignation, my husband wants to stay home, so I will stay home.’ You knew how it would make me look!”
“Allie…” I reached out to grasp her hand.
“No! I told you that I would never stop! I told you that I would never back down. First, it was because I needed to kill them for what they did to Brynna, James, Penny, Nick, and Violet. Then it was for Lara. Remember her?! Do you remember what she looked like when we found her and John?! She is Tyre’s… his… Example! His ‘fallen woman.’ Do you remember her telling us that?! I picture it, what they’re doing to her, if she’s even still alive, and I don’t know if it’s her showing me, or if it is just my imagination and my guilt, and I don’t care. I need to find her, or I need to get her body back. I will keep going until I find her alive or I find her dead, and I will keep going until every person who so much as looked at Brynna, James, Penny, Nick, and Violet while they were imprisoned there, while they were getting walked out to the fucking Gallows, dies right in front of me! You forget all about them! Time has gone on, and you’ve just moved on. It doesn’t matter to you anymore!”
“Allie, how can you even say that?! I still think about them every day! I still feel that same rage I felt right after we found out!”
“And now you’re just saying exactly what I want to hear! Now you’re just lying right to my face! God, I cannot be here, Quinn! I cannot stay here! There are times, I close my eyes, and the smell in the air, it’s fucking Shadow Village all over again! I am right there, right back in time, and I come so close to convincing myself that none of it happened, that the past twenty-three years have been some fever dream or something, but then, I can feel them around me. The years. It’s fucking crazy, but I can feel the past twenty-three years around me. Everything that has happened, everything we have suffered and lost. I come so close to convincing myself that none of this has happened, but I can’t quite get there, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to feel them there again only to wake up and know they’re gone. And this house… This fucking house smells like Lara. She was here every day, and I can still smell her. I can still feel her. And any time I walk past the orchard, and I remember them taking her away… This place is haunted, Quinn. For me, this place is full of ghosts. This whole goddamn planet is haunted. We’ve seen a fraction of it, and I feel them everywhere. I can’t…” She sat down, still shaking from her anger but infinitely softer. I sat down beside her on the couch, but I did not try to take her hand or embrace her. She was still angry at me, but she also wanted to talk. She never talked anymore, and she had opened up to me back in the city about what she remembered about our family, but it was rare that she showed this softer side of herself, even to me.
“I can’t shake them. Sometimes, I think Brynna is alive out there, and she’s talking to me. She’s egging me on. Telling me if I just keep going, I’ll find her, James, Penny, Violet, and Nick, and then we’ll find Lara. If I just keep pushing, keep fighting, keep killing, keep bringing them to get killed… I just have to push harder, fight harder… It’s all bullshit, of course; she’s gone. And it’s sad, Quinn. It’s sad for so many reasons, but one of the saddest is how it has driven this wedge between us.”
“There doesn’t have to be a wedge between us, baby. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No.” She said, “You want what you want. You want to settle down. I get that. God, it’s been a quarter of a century that we’ve been fighting this war, hasn’t it?”
We both laughed, because we were totally shocked, when we thought about it. Without physical aging, it was easy to lose track of time. Without crow’s feet around our eyes, laugh-lines around our mouths, wrinkles on our cheeks, and veins poking out of our hands, it was like everything—the end of Earth, the flight through space, the landing on Pangaea, living in Don’s house, living in Shadow Village, loving and then losing our second family, and spending years hunting down those responsible—it had all happened in just a few weeks. We were so similar to how we had been, and yet we were so different. I didn’t know how the polarized sides of it could possibly exis
t simultaneously, but they did. We were the same, but we were different. Physically, we were the same. Inside, a little bit, we were the same as our teenaged selves. But then there was that maturity that grew. It was a darkness that had manifested after we had lost our loved ones. It was a darkness that every man and woman on every planet feels manifested at one point or another.
Growing older, seeing death, sadness, and hardship, grows darkness. It’s sad. It’s cynical. But it’s true. With awareness, with light, comes darkness.
“Baby…” I said, “I go where you go. Do you remember when I said that to you?”
She looked at me, her eyes full of tears. Her lips trembled as she held them together tightly, but then, a sob escaped her. It was a hard exhalation, like a curse spat not at me, not at anything in particular. Once she started, she curled over, her chest resting on her thighs, her face in her hands as she cried.
“Do you remember that, baby?” I asked her again, because my throat had locked, and a tear had fallen from my eye.
She nodded.
“I go where you go.” I told her again.
She nodded and cried harder.
“We were so young.”
“I know.” I said, and now, I wiped at my eyes, because the tears were falling a little faster.
“We were so young, Quinn.”
“I know, baby.”
“I still want the log cabin. But I don’t know when I’ll want it. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No.” I assured her, “It makes perfect sense, baby.”
“Everything got so screwed up. Everything just got broken. And I don’t even know why. All these years, I’ve wondered why, and I’ve got nothing.”
“I know, baby.”
“I mean, I believe this war is necessary. I do. You’ve seen what they do to people, and I’ve seen it. But I never thought it would be like this. When we were leaving Earth, when we were on the ship, even when we were in the tent, talking about the log cabin, I never could have imagined this. Even when Adam said that only one side would come out of this, I never thought it would go on, at this level, for twenty-five years. I never thought we’d lose Brynnie and James. They seemed so invincible. And Violet and Penny were just young, like us. I’d seen it happen a million times on Earth, on the news, but… I couldn’t imagine that two people—one of them our age, and the other, just a little girl—could die so violently. I guess I didn’t think God would be so cruel. How I could think that, I don’t know. Like I said, we saw it a million times on Earth, in all the other countries and in ours, when everything started going crazy. When everything was crazy. God, it was happening right at home. But here, I don’t know… I guess I thought things would be different.”
She cleared her throat, wiped at her eyes, and squeezed my hand, forcing a smile.
“Just ignore me. If you want to stay at home while I go out, obviously, we’ll make it work.” She told me, and I couldn’t tell if I was imagining it, but I thought her voice sounded robotic, like she was only saying what she knew would appease me. But then, if I had my choice, we would both be staying home, so if she were merely trying to appease me, she would have said that she was staying home, too.
“I’m sorry for yelling at you, and for unloading on you like that. I’m just stressed. I’m losing the faith a little bit. Obviously.”
“Don’t say that! You haven’t lost your faith this far, don’t lose it now!” I urged her, but a part of me, honestly, wished that she would. Maybe that’s unfair of me, to say that. I didn’t want her to lose her faith in her version of God, but that’s not what she was talking about. She was talking about her faith in the mission, in her ability to ever find Lara or the Lapsarian. Ever the pessimist, I knew there was no end in sight, and that there would probably never be an end. On Earth, people had fought and died for centuries over imagined slights, or because of fundamental differences. The Old Spirits would never be gone, the same way that the Red Anarchy would never be gone. If we were to kill every Old Spirit, we would miss at least one or two, and then those one or two would swear vengeance, they would believe every terrible thing they had ever heard about us “savages,” and then, somehow, someway, they would gather one or two more dissenters, and then, the whole conflict would begin anew. It was a vicious cycle that never ended. But Alice, ever the optimist, even when she was roundly depressed and rightly pissed off, saw an end. She saw us winning. She saw us bringing those who had killed our family to justice. She saw a harmonious balance between the two sides. She saw an end.
“I won’t.” She told me, “I won’t lose my faith. Know why? Because it’s actually reversed, Quinn. My faith won’t let go of me. Every time I think it’s gone, it comes back stronger. Every time I just want to let go of it all and give up, something pulls me back. Some days, I think it would be easier if I just stopped, but then I think about Lara. And even if Lara is gone, if I stopped now, I would always wonder how many lives I could have saved if I had just kept going. I’d always wonder if it would have ended had I just kept going. Anyway.” She stood up, breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly.
“I’m hungry. Where do you want to go get dinner?”