Chapter 25
Miri met us in the desert outside the city.
Cerberus led us to her. She’d come off the mound where I’d left her.
I watched, holding my side and trying to breathe shallowly against bruised ribs.
She hugged her mother and brother. Their reunion was as emotional as it was brief. Before I knew it, they turned to me.
“We go, Traveler,” Miri said. “To safety.”
I followed them as they set out across the desert.
We walked for hours. I lost track of time.
Iron Maiden was unresponsive. The helmet, aside from the spiderweb of cracks, was transparent, and the exoskeleton contributed strength to my every motion, but the suit computer didn’t respond to my questions.
I felt a pang of loss. The suit computer hadn’t been with me long, but it’d had a voice, and it had made the jump forward with me.
It had been the closest thing to a friend I’d had out here, a companion whose value I hadn’t realized until it was gone.
And Lyle had given it to me.
We stopped in a low valley formed by a long-dried riverbed. There were no buildings or structures for cover, but we were not silhouetted against the horizon.
“Hard to find here,” Miri said when I asked why we didn’t try to find a building. We sat in a four-person circle.
“Cerberus watches over us,” Lily said. She nodded to the darkness where I assumed Cerberus was patrolling.
I didn’t have the night vision enhancement any longer, so I couldn’t see the mechanical dog.
But it was comforting knowing it was out there.
My great-great-grandson had done a good job building it.
Miri produced more of the terrible jerky for everyone to eat and passed around a canteen of bitter water.
I took off the helmet and nibbled at my piece of jerky and did my best to keep the swallows of water in my stomach.
Lily and Case looked at me with open interest, their pupils large in the starlight.
I gave Case a tight smile. He was the same age as Lyle had been, nearly three weeks ago.
As I looked at him, I realized Lyle was right.
I hadn’t accepted this reality. I was, at least subconsciously, expecting to wake up and roll over and put my arm around Amy.
Breathe in the scent of her pomegranate shampoo.
Case looked away from my eyes. He’d yet to say a single word.
We sat, eating, listening to the emptiness around us.
I didn’t hear insects or animals. No flapping of the wings of birds or bats, no animals moving about in the dark.
I began to drift. I felt disconnected from myself.
Not in the way I felt back in Lyle’s Second Device, but like my head was going to float into the night without my body.
My leg and chest throbbed from the bullet hits, and my back and arms ached from lifting the concrete, but it all seemed distant. I wanted to sleep.
Lily’s halting, whispering voice brought me back with a lurch. “Traveler?”
I blinked. Lily sat across from me, Miri on her right, Case on her left. Their faces were pale and hard to see in the starlight. “Yes?”
“You have seen much.”
“I suppose.”
“And you have much more, to be seen?”
“I guess so.”
“You are real.”
“What?”
Lily blushed. Miri watched without comment. Case had his head against Lily and had fallen asleep.
“What I mean … You are as the Word…” She looked at Miri.
“We are of the Word,” Miri said. “But we did not know, for certain.”
“You didn’t know if what Lyle said in the Word was true. You didn’t really know if I’d be at that bunker, did you?”
“No. We did not.”
“But you came anyway.”
“We are of the Word,” Lily said, her voice soft but stern.
Miri’s eyes found mine in the darkness. I thought about telling Lily what I had told Miri—what I’d made Miri promise. But I read caution in Miri’s eyes. “Is the rest of the world like this?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the destroyed city.
“Maybe? We do not know. It is here, for us, this way.”
“How long has this, this ‘Last War,’ been going on?”
“Many years. Life challenges. But we have us, together. And we have the Word.”
Again, I felt Miri’s eyes on me in the darkness, and I thought I understood her a little better. “Lily. Miri.” I looked back and forth between them. “Can you tell me about the Word? The Word of the Traveler, I mean?”
Lily’s eyes sparkled, and she leaned forward. “Of course! You would want this.” She swept her cloth-wrapped hands in a fast arc, a motion the meaning of which I didn’t grasp. “What Lyle son of Scott wrote, it is become truth. Religion. The Word. It is not largest of religions, but big.”
“Okay.”
“Of its middle, of course, is you, the Traveler. Your travels, what it means to be the Traveler.”
“And what did Lyle claim it all meant?”
“The Word says you are chosen as witness. The witness, to the End. Not only the end of us, of humans, or even of Earth. The end of everything, of the universe. Your duty, the Traveler’s duty, is to see this end, to bear witness.
To bring pieces of all of us, from each moment, forward.
To experience everything, in singular days, in fragments, as you travel to the end point.
You will travel, and with you, your experience travels to that End. ”
“Why?” They wouldn’t know. They couldn’t know.
Lyle hadn’t known. It was happening to me and I sure as hell didn’t know.
But the question slipped out. A part of me hoped that somehow Lyle had left something in the text, some revelation for me that he’d just neglected to tell me the last time we’d been together.
Lily smiled and rolled her shoulders. Miri’s eyes were narrow as she watched our exchange.
“We do not know,” Lily said, “and that is point, the … beauty? You as Traveler are us, everyone. A metaphor. A living metaphor for all of us. We are all of us Travelers. Living, experiencing. This is the great ‘Why.’ We come, all of us, to our own ends with our own experiences traveling with us.”
I watched her. The smile in her eyes. The confidence in her voice.
I knew she truly was “of the Word.” She believed.
Or Believed, as Lyle said, with a capital B.
My temples throbbed. I asked the next question carefully, trying to keep the heat from my words.
“So, the purpose of life is … to experience it?”
The crinkle of Lily’s smile faltered for a moment, then came back strong and full. “Sí. Sí, that is one way to speak it.”
My hands shook. I looked down. Beneath the black skinsuit and the brushed-chrome exoskeleton, my fingers trembled.
I tightened my right hand into a fist. I tried to push the feeling down.
The flare of heat. I would not let my temper rule me.
The weakened, barely functioning exoskeleton creaked.
“You know, that is the worst excuse for a meaning of life I’ve ever heard. ” My voice shook.
“I—I am sorry?”
“The meaning of life is to live. What complete horseshit. You know what that is?” The exoskeleton knuckles in my hand popped, miniature gunshots. “It’s meaningless platitudes, written by a brilliant man who was too obsessed with his pathetic excuse for a father to do something with his own life.”
“I, ah…” Lily said. “Please forgive, Traveler. I am not telling you well of the Word—”
“No, I’m sure you got it right. And it’s typical, isn’t it?
Like getting plucked out of your life and thrown forward through time and being told to make something out of it.
Find some meaning. Watch everyone you’ve ever known and loved turn to dust and you keep going.
Because you gotta make something out of it, right?
But you know what? It all doesn’t mean jack shit.
It’s all fucked.” At the last word, one of the knuckles in the exoskeleton finally snapped, breaking with a brittle crack against my hand.
I stared down at the dangling piece of broken metal, feeling my body shake, my heart pound. “Goddamnit.”
Miri leaned into Lily and whispered something in her ear. Lily nodded, still watching me, her eyes wide. Case was still asleep, and I was glad I hadn’t woken him.
The two women waited, watching me in the starlight.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It is all right,” Lily said.
“It’s nothing about you.”
“This I understand. Miri, my daughter, she tells me. It is a difficult thing you are asked to do.”
“Lily. Miri. I’m sorry.”
“It is okay. We are in understanding.”
We sat there, no one speaking. I stared down at my hand, then looked back up at them.
These two women, one older, one younger but forced to grow up fast. Survivors.
Like Lyle, weaving a story to survive the pain of his own loss.
Like Hayward, fighting for a cause that could never live up to its promise, but fighting all the same.
I took a long moment to think about my next words. “Lily. Miri. I’m proud of you.”
They blinked at me and sat back, their motions similar. Mother and daughter. Then they both smiled, or at least their eyes crinkled behind their masks.
“Thank you, Traveler,” Lily said. “This means much to us.”
They stood with me the next morning as the sky lit to the east, and as the headache began to build behind my eyes.
I might have been imagining it, but the headache felt more acute than before.
The last one had been bad, but I’d attributed that to Lyle’s Second Device and whatever it’d done to me. It hurt enough to make me squint.
Cerberus was out beyond the edge of the riverbed, patrolling. It didn’t care about seeing me off. I couldn’t blame it. I wouldn’t want to see me off, either.
“Traveler,” Lily said. She held up a thin, leather-wrapped book, clasped shut with a metal buckle. The pages inside looked worn, frayed. “Please take.”
“No, no, that’s okay—”
“Please. You take. You save me, save my son. This is your book, anyway.”
“Mine?”
“This is the Word.”
I took it gently with my gloved hands and held the book my son had written about me, for me. The cover was cracked leather. Featureless. It didn’t even say “The Word.” I swallowed. Looked up. I tucked the book into one of the pockets I had in the exterior of the suit. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Traveler,” Lily said, and she stepped back next to Case.
Miri came forward. She touched my face. Only her fingertips were exposed, and they felt cool on my cheek. “Thank you, Traveler. We were to save you, and you save us.”
“I think maybe you did save me, Miri.”
“We will miss you, Traveler.”
“Remember what we talked about.”
“I will.” Then she held her other hand out, her fingers unfurling.
In her palm was a small, leather-wrapped object in the shape of a flattened cube or square disk, perhaps an inch wide and half an inch thick.
“This…” She blushed. “This I was to give you. I—I only give you after you save my mother, save my brother. It shames me to admit. I would not have given if you hadn’t … but you did, so I do.”
I took the leather object. “What is it?”
“None know. It is from Lyle, son of Scott. Passed down. It was always in our instructions, our Word, to get this to you, to the Traveler. Protect it.”
I wanted to unwrap the object, but the headache was worsening.
Instead, I took the little disk and pushed it inside the skintight membrane of the suit at my neck, under the exoskeleton, against the upper part of my chest. The suit allowed it, adjusted around it.
Iron Maiden hadn’t responded, so I didn’t know for sure, but the disk felt safe against my skin. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Traveler,” Miri said, just as her mother had.
She stepped back, and I pulled the cracked helmet on over my head as the world
slipped
and they were gone.