***
Forcing myself to remain conscious for the previous day and a half had taken its toll on me. I collapsed into another deep sleep despite my body's fight to remain awake. I couldn't stand to see what I had seen again. As I drifted off, I prayed that my chilling nightmare would be kept at bay by James's strong, comforting presence.
The dream never reemerged. I can thank him for that, because every time I began to see that darkness, I heard his voice telling me that everything was alright, and it faded. Within an hour or so, I heard another male voice, this one amplified to a point that it jerked me out of my mercifully serene sleep.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are level.”
I rubbed my eyes and turned over to look at James, who was still lying beside me on the cot.
“How was the take-off?”
He laughed softly.
“Awful, as I expected.”
“I figured as much.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why don't you try to sleep?”
“I can't. Not now.”
“Your body is going to crash sooner or later. You might as well just sleep now while everyone else does the same.”
He smiled slightly and sat up. I was alarmed by his appearance now that I was studying him closely. His eyes were surrounded by dark circles, and their lids were starting to swell slightly. A day and a half ago, he had been somewhat toned and almost healthy, but now, he was beginning to take on a sunken-in appearance that would have distressed any medical professional. I believed myself to be the most detrimentally afflicted by our mad dash to the ship, but the stress of the journey had taken the highest toll on him.
As though he had read my mind, he said softly, “You look as bad as I do.”
“Well, thank you so much for pointing that out.”
I wasn't angry at the suggestion that I was looking less than my already lackluster best; I just had no other retort. That was the most convincing evidence that I was still feeling the effects of the sleepless days.
“Do you know where my glasses went?” I asked as I looked around for a bedside table where he might have placed them. Instead of a table, though, I found that they were safely stowed in the breast-pocket of his button-up shirt.
“You might have to clean them. During the take-off, I was sweating so much that they're probably soaked.” He looked at me and said in a deadpan, emotionless voice, “Sorry.”
I found myself covering my mouth as I chuckled softly. His mouth cracked into a small, crooked grin.
“You think I'm kidding, but I couldn't be more serious.”
“That is so very gross.”
His smile grew.
“I really am sorry, all joking aside. Let me see them.”
I handed them over and watched as he cleaned the lenses on the end of his shirt.
“You only slept for an hour.” He informed me.
“I know. But I slept for quite a while when I was under the influence of that drug.”
I looked over at Penny, Maura, Violet, and Elijah, all of whom were still sleeping peacefully.
“Don't worry about them.” James said. He breathed on the lenses and wiped them again. “The doctors said that if anything was going to happen, it would have happened by now.”
I nodded and stood up, my legs feeling heavier than usual. Every step was like attempting to stride quickly through waist-deep water. I almost felt like I was succumbing to some high fever as the malaise made itself known so strongly. I put my hand to my head and sat back down.
I was momentarily stunned to find myself on the verge of tears.
“Lay back down, sweetheart.” James told me, but I shook my head. When I had moved my hands away, my eyes had traveled to the far end of the room, where I could hear someone sobbing. One of the doctors was covering a middle-aged man with a sheet. A woman, presumably his wife, was standing beside him, crying into her hands.
“What am I going to tell the kids?” She asked no one in particular.
James and I stared at her, neither of us sure exactly how to proceed. I had never been skilled at consoling people, as outpourings of emotion made me literally squirm in discomfort. I looked at James finally to find that his eyes were traveling through the huge, heavily-populated room.
“Ten other people.”
He was right; ten other people were covered with sheets. Ten families were going to be grieving the loss of their loved ones before we had reached Pangaea. Ten families were going to rue the day they had decided to come aboard the ship to escape the end of our world. It would have been easier to just die together, they would say. That's what I would have said, if I had lost anyone.
Ten families. And that was only on our floor.
“They chose to come. They knew the risks.” I said softly to James.
He only nodded in response and grasped my shoulder.
“I want to go somewhere else, James. I cannot bear to see this.”
He nodded again and followed me as I strode across the room. I reached out to grasp a nonexistent handle on the door only to jump back in surprise when it slid open on its own. As we walked past the sobbing woman, we averted our eyes.
There was a loud humming in the hallway. Our way was illuminated only slightly by the dim overhead lights. We walked side by side, neither of us having the energy to keep up a quick pace or engage in conversation.
We climbed a flight of stairs and walked past a door marked “Housing Compartment 3.” There must have been another room full of sleeping survivors on the floor from which we had just come up. Finally, after several more flights of stairs and several more housing compartments, we reached a door that read “Atrium.” When James opened it for me, I was unprepared for the sight that was suddenly before my eyes.
It was exactly like a cruise ship. The floor was marble, and the walls were painted a cheerful blue. There were two staircases leading to an upper level that looped around the entire circular room. At the far end of the vast, open space, there were several sofas arranged around one spectacular floor to ceiling window.
One thing that had always befuddled me was the fact that while gazing out of the window of a moving plane, I could never tell that we were going several hundred miles per hour. Now, we were hurtling through space at a rate ten times the velocity of a simple airplane, and yet we were gliding along almost effortlessly. As James and I stood looking out of that window, we could barely tell we were moving at all.
The nerd in me was awakened as we stared at the lights outside the window. I suppose that space has weather as distinguishable as Earth's did, but in space, the clouds are not dingy and gray the way ours looked when rain is coming. Light purples and blues were the norm, as they say, up there. The stars twinkled in the distance around us; we were still not close enough to touch them.
People were starting to emerge from their housing chambers to explore. A collective gasp of several onlookers sounded behind us, but James and I were scarcely aware of it. The view outside the window was something no man had yet seen, and there we were, the first of the civilians on board to see it.
As people started pushing to get a look out of the window (a child actually pushed through my legs to get in front of me, the little heathen) James grasped my hand and pulled me away. But as we walked, we craned our necks to continue looking, hypnotized by the rare, mystifying beauty of that scene outside.
Large crowds always made me nervous, and the atrium was slowly filling to the brim with people. Though the room was exceptionally large, the walls seemed to shrink, closing in on us and giving little time to escape. Luckily, we pushed through another door and found ourselves walking through a wide corridor. Tables adorned with potted plants and decorative vases were spaced evenly apart along both walls.
“Seems a bit strange, doesn't it?” I asked James after a moment as we continued to stroll along with our hands clasped together.
“What?”
“This was a means to an end, correct?”
“Means to an end of what?” He sta
mmered for a moment. “What are you even talking about right now, woman?”
I smiled, and he did, too.
“You must be exhausted, because after two days of conversing, I know that if you were feeling your best, you would have picked up exactly what I was talking about the moment I said it. But since you don't seem to be grasping it, let me explain myself further.”
Normally, I spoke so quickly that a less intelligent person would find themselves lost after just a few words. But with my body so heavily weighed down by the same exhaustion that I was accusing James of succumbing to, I spoke so slowly an eavesdropper might have assumed I was intoxicated.
“This ship was meant to transport a large group of people from Earth to Pangaea. That was its only purpose. And yet...”
“Let me stop you now, because I know that you're getting ready for one of your monologues.”
“Please do because quite frankly, I am too exhausted to continue but very interested in the answer you are going to supply to my query.”
“How are you even still forming sentences like that?”
If I had not been so tired, I never, even under threat of bodily harm, would have said what I said next.
“Because you are holding my hand, and despite my fatigue, I am still over-analyzing what that might mean. As a result, I am attempting to scare you off.”
We stopped, both needing to rest on one of the loveseats at the end of the hall. He was looking at me, but my eyes were darting around, searching for anything else to focus on. In fact, if one of the breathtakingly hideous Reapers were to be standing in the hallway with us, I would sooner look at it than at James's handsome face in that moment.
My eyes burnt at the sight of the clashing colors of paint on one of the aforementioned decorative vases. I had always hated green and yellow together, and if the painter of that particular vase had walked by me, I would have allowed myself just a single outburst of strong feeling in order to promptly slap him in the face for creating such an atrocity.
Those are the things that I thought about when I was avoiding a particularly unpleasant emotion.
Another moment of that heavy silence was going to kill me faster than the heart attack I had experienced earlier.
“Are we sitting because we're tired, or because you want to have a heart-to-heart? Because, though I am tired, I will force myself to run if you begin a conversation on feelings. I don't like them. I have no use for the ones I have, and that is why they remain repressed, always. And...”
“You are so strange, Brynna.”
I looked at him finally. I had looked at him, even into his eyes, many times before, but I had never noticed them to be so brilliant. Violet was jealous of the fact that Penny and I were the only children with blue eyes, and I had always joked that we were special, as we possessed the recessive gene, and she and Elijah were boringly plain, because they possessed the dominant. Penny and I would always be the unique ones, and they would always be ordinary. A part of me wasn't kidding. But James's eyes, though I had originally thought them to be the same dark brown as most other people's, were deeper and more beautiful than I had ever cared to notice before.
No, my rationality screamed at me, Stop looking at him. He's a man, which makes him dangerous, and you do not need human contact. You do not need human contact.
“You are quite possibly the strangest person I have ever met.”
There was another long moment of silence, and I closed my eyes, shaking my head slightly as I said, “I don't even know what you want me to say to that.”
“You don't have to say anything. I know that's new for you.”
“Are you being condescending right now?”
“That did sound condescending. You're right. What I mean is that I know it's hard for you to always come up with something to say for yourself and the people you care for. If you don't know what to say, you don't have to say anything. I won't be offended.”
I looked at him now, smiling slightly, before nodding. I had never allowed myself to remain quiet on anything. At first, I spoke to avoid being overlooked. Then, I spoke to defend my sisters and brother. After that, I spoke to scare people away. It was exhausting to live without a moment of quiet.
“Of course,” He smiled again, “If you do have something to say, I love hearing it. You might drive me absolutely insane sometimes with it, but that doesn't mean I don't want to hear it. Plus, I know that you're going to make it heard whether I like it or not. You'll make it heard whether anyone likes it or not.”
“I will.” I replied, with a very slight laugh.
“Wow. I am so used to the scowl that I am shocked to see you laugh.”
“You've seen me laugh before.”
“You always cover your mouth when you laugh but that time you didn't.”
“So it seems I am not the only one who analyzes everyone with whom I come in contact.”
“No. If I'm going to be honest, I am fascinated by you. You're just,” His brows furrowed slightly in genuine awe and slight confusion, “Strange.”
“Should I be offended by that?”
“No. Definitely not. It's cool, actually. I mean that. It's kind of amazing.” He shook his head back and forth quickly for a second and then said, “I am very tired. I would never be saying all of these things if I weren’t so tired.”
“I'm tired, too.” I looked at him again. “James, I should be telling you that we need to put distance between us. I should be telling you that this is all wrong. You're older than me, and I'm not the easiest person to get along with. I hurt people, sometimes on purpose. Every person I have ever known has been hurt profoundly by me at some point. I have let them move closer to me at times just so I could push them away later. Violet, Maura, and Elijah will never recover from what I put them all through, just by being who I am.” I stopped talking because the exertion was beginning to wear on me. It wasn't just the act of speaking that was weighing me down faster than I could fathom but the actual words. What I was saying had never been admitted out loud, but the words spilled out of me, sensing that this was their first and last chance to be heard. I finished the rambling admittance with what was the most candid, most painful confession of all:
“It’s true what they say about me. I am a toxic human being.”
He reached out, put his hand on my face, and leaned closer to me. Our eyes stayed locked together, and his other hand stayed wrapped around mine.
“You're not.” He said softly, “You're one of the best people I know.”
I couldn't help but laugh bitterly.
“You must be exhausted...”
“I am. But that doesn't mean I'm not right. Do you want distance between us? Tell me, and you'll have it.”
I leaned forward, my eyes closed now, and pressed my forehead to his. My hands rested on either side of his neck, and I felt his grasping my face still. There, in that moment, I knew that I had to face the unknown. I had to carry every burden of my family in order to keep our lives moving. It was a task too great and too terrifying to realize suddenly, but I did. In response to his question, I shook my head.
As we faced what was ahead, I knew, more surely than I had known anything else in my life, that though my logical brain was telling me that he must be pushed away, my heart was begging me to keep him. I needed James Maxwell more than I had ever allowed myself to need another human being in the entire span of my existence.
The thought of having him anywhere else but by my side was one that I could not bear. So, I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face there, still shaking my head. As usual, I tried to pull away immediately but was able to stop myself.
I needed him. The thought made my heart flutter, but it also made me sick.