The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) (4 page)

“No problem.” I turn
back to land, hoping Bran will follow. Tension releases me when
takes a step without a second’s hesitation. “Anytime you want a
pointless attempt to help, you know where to find me.”

He laughs, sloshing
through the lake. Timofei is standing by the water’s edge when we
emerge, giving us a sharp look.

“Not the best time for
a swim,” he says.

“Sorry,” Bran murmurs.
“It’s entirely my fault.”

“Well—”

I don’t care what
Timofei has to say. Bran thinks his sister is dead. He doesn’t need
anyone making him feel worse. I narrow my eyes at the long haired
Guardian, giving him the darkest look I can manage as I lead Bran
away from him.

“Are you okay?”
Branwell asks, watching me from the corner of his eye.

“Yeah. Of course.”

“You could do me the
decency of not lying. Are you lying to yourself as often as you lie
to everyone else?”

I don’t say anything
because I don’t have to.

“Well.” His hand comes
down on my shoulder, anchoring me. “You needn’t lie to me. I feel a
bit of what you feel. We have both lost our sisters, but we’ll get
them back. Horatia will emerge from her depression and I will find
Bennet wherever she has ended up.”

“You don’t believe
that,” I say, repeating his words from earlier.

He kicks the damp
grass and mud sprays in front of us. Up ahead I can see Tia with
Hele and Dalmar. I don’t run to her. She isn’t the only person I
need to spend time with, I’ve realised.

A brief burst of pain
makes me jolt. I turn to my friend in shock. “Did you just poke me
in the arm?”

“You’re supposed to
thank me for attempting to make you feel better.”

“You
were trying to make
yourself
feel better.”

“You should thank me
regardless. It’s good manners.”

“Thank you, Branwell.” I aim a deadpan expression at him,
letting more and more sarcasm drip into my voice with every word.
“You made me feel so much better about myself.
Whatever
would I do without
you?”

Bran rolls his
eyes.

I smile to myself as
we walk on.

***

Branwell

18:07.
11.10.2040. The Free Lands, Southlands, Harwich.

We settle in a town
that used to be called Harwich when it was inhabited. It smells of
the sea, all bitter salt, with an underlying musty scent that
reminds me of my father’s attic. Roads are framed by narrow houses
that huddle together against powerful gusts of wind. It’s not the
most unpleasant of places, but it could be better, cleaner.
Abandoned houses litter every street, which means I don’t have to
endure another night of half-sleeping on the packed earth,
startling awake every few minutes because a breeze has crept over
my face and my paranoid mind thinks insects are crawling over me.
Still, the pervading silence is about as unnerving as the dead
coming back to life.

Eventually the chatter
of Guardians helps alleviate the eerie quiet, becoming a loud
crescendo as disagreements arise. I gather that most Guardians want
nothing but to sleep, but the council are making them work first on
clearing out cluttered buildings, making a kitchen usable, and
stocking important buildings with their supplies before they can
rest. Honour, his family, and I are somewhat separate from the main
huddle of Guardians so we escape to a quiet road without anyone
protesting.

We stumble in an
exhausted daze past terraced houses that would surely have been
picturesque in their prime. They’ve fallen into disrepair now, with
exteriors weathered and windows broken, much like everything else
we’ve seen on this unending trek. I follow Honour who follows Miya
into a tall, thin house with crumbling sage-green paint, hollow
windows, and an open doorway that gapes like a desperate mouth.

Inside I find relics
of life—an arm chair on its side, picture frames smashed on the
floor, an overturned table with tea cups and old newspapers lying
beside it. I stoop to pick up one of the broadsheets, accidentally
unseating a family of rats. I jump back with a screech, fear adding
speed to my heartbeat. Miya shoves past my arm, retrieves the
paper, and offers it to me with an exasperated glance.

Thanking her, I turn my focus to the date of the newspaper.
17
^th
of September 2015. The air tastes like dust when I suck in a
sharp breath. I’m strangled with a reminder that I’m far from my
home, that I am decades in the future in a world without hope.
Despair must show on my face because Miya slaps my arm in her
alternative to an embrace. She says, “It could be worse, you could
be dead.”

She’s right, of course. I am alive. I’m thankful for that.
Still, there’s a deep unease slumbering behind my ribs that won’t
be shifted. Wandering through these isolated towns and vast, empty
fields, along sun-cracked roads and dirt trails as old as time,
I’ve somehow managed to convince myself that nothing was amiss,
that I could have existed in any era. Being without futuristic
technology for the past week, with nothing glaringly
modern
anywhere in
sight, I’ve convinced myself I was home. But this isn’t the
nineteenth century. This isn’t my home at all.

Being stranded here
hurts even more the second time I’ve had to discover it. I wish I’d
never forgotten, wish I never had to remember all over again.

I throw the newspaper
back to the floor and weave my way around the furniture to find
Honour and the others. Miya is watching me curiously and at a loss
for conversation, I press my lips together into a reluctant smile.
She looks dumfounded, unsure how to respond. Eventually she decides
on a glare, which seems to be something Miya falls back on. A
natural state of sorts. It’s not the darkest glare I’ve seen her
turn on a person, however, which I take to mean she doesn’t wish me
true harm. I feel oddly privileged. Miya is an enigma I cannot
unravel, but what I do know is that she is brave and fierce and
loves her siblings very much. She has a great deal of my respect
for that.

I’m
so caught up in my thoughts that I stumble into a wooden table. The
kitchen is cluttered with bodies, and although everyone looks about
ready to drop there is a suspended moment of silence filled with
relief. Relief to finally
finally
be static and appreciate the simple fact that we
are all in one piece.

“There are a few bedrooms upstairs,” says Yosiah after what
must have been five minutes of comfortable, blessed silence. He
looks to Miya for permission and then frees her brother from where
he has fallen asleep in a chair, the boy looking small and fragile
in Yosiah’s arms. Miya nudges her sister until the girl takes her
hand and then the four of them clatter up the carpeted stairs in
the hallway, calling soft
goodbyes
and
see you in the
mornings
.

“Four.” Honour’s rasp
cracks the silence. He scratches the side of his head, leaving a
mess of hair sticking up above his ear. “There are four rooms.
They’ll take one, which leaves three.”

I sense his eyes on
me. Looking up, I say, “I don’t mind sleeping in the sitting room.”
The arm chair looks comfortable enough, even if it’s a little
dusty. I’d be happy to curl up and sleep anywhere.

“You won’t have to.”
He comes around the table to lean against the worktop next to me.
Heat bleeds into my arm where his shoulder touches mine. “Tia and I
will be in one, Dal and Hele in another, and you can have the
third.” He manages a weary smile. “I’ll even let you pick which
one.”

Dalmar chuckles,
shaking his head at Honour. His golden hair has been blown into
disorder by the coastal wind outside. “Who died and made you king
of the house?”

“Good question.”
Honour plucks an old, unopened letter from the counter, brushing
dust from it. “Alan Montgomery.” He smirks at Dalmar, mirth in his
eyes. “Alan Montgomery died and made me king of the house.”

Hele breezes across
the kitchen and takes the envelope from him. She fixes him with a
look of severe disapproval. “Don’t disrespect the dead, Honour
Frie.”

“Why not? They’re
dead, they don’t care.”

“I care.” She uses the
sharp end of the envelope to point at him. “And so should you. How
would you feel if someone was laughing about your sister’s
death?”

Honour hangs his head,
the cocky amusement vanishing as quickly as it came. As much as I
agree with Hele, I’m sad to see Honour’s bright personality leave
him for the downtrodden one I’ve become used to. The transformation
is so drastic, so obvious, that it adds to the ache in me. An
abrupt urge to reach out and hug him comes over me, a desire to
comfort my friend when he’s so clearly in need of it.

I hear Dalmar and Hele
say goodnight as if through ears stuffed with cotton wool. When my
attention focuses back on the wooden cabinets, grimy curtains, and
speckled floor of the here and now, Horatia has left too.

Honour is rummaging
through a cupboard stocked with paper boxes. I watch him select a
pale yellow box and turn his attention to one of the long backpacks
we’ve been carrying across the country. He gets out the little
stove we use to heat food and purify water, along with a small,
scratched canister of gas, with a hiss of triumph.

“Want a cup of tea?”
he asks, assembling the stove on the table top.

I slump into a chair
and kick off my boots. “Only if it won’t poison me.”

“It’s only tea. It might taste old and rank but it won’t kill
us.” The stove comes to life with a rumble, a ring of tiny flames
glowing orange. He sets a cracked pot of water to boil before
pulling out a chair opposite me. It fills the kitchen with a God
awful screech. “I
hope
it won’t kill us.”

“There are worse ways
to die.”

He hums in agreement,
slouching forward and resting his head on his arms. When his
eyelids flutter shut, I carefully move the stove away so he won’t
accidentally catch himself on the boiling pot.

“You don’t need to
look after me.” His voice is caught on a yawn. “I already have Hele
to fuss over me.”

“I wasn’t
fussing.”

He cracks one eye open
and gives me a look. He reminds me of a cat, baleful and sleepy.
“You were fussing.”

I take the water from
the stove, turning the gas off before we waste too much, and wage a
silent disagreement while I make the tea. There’s no cream or
sugar, so the tea tastes bland but it’s better than anticipated,
warm lemon simmering on my tongue. I push a mug across the table to
Honour but he’s dropped off, snoring softly with his mouth half
open and his cheek against the wood. So much for sharing a late
night tea.

The tea gets cooler as
I wait for Honour to wake, watching his fingers twitch at something
in a dream. I’m amazed at him falling asleep so quickly, but I find
the table top isn’t so unappealing a bed as the ground was these
past three days.

I give his shoulder a
gentle shake but he’s sleeping so deeply that he doesn’t stir. If
he were several pounds lighter I might consider carrying him
upstairs to a real bed, but I doubt I’d get through the kitchen
door with Honour in my arms before something disastrous happened. I
have a vision of knocking his head against the doorframe.

“What in the world am
I supposed to do with you?” I whisper, pillowing my head on my
arms. Before I realise what is happening, sleep has curled around
my shoulders. The kitchen and the sage-green house fritter
away.

***

Miya

00:59. 12.10.2040. The
Free Lands, Southlands, Harwich.

I’m there again—on the
train. Another version of myself stands at Yosiah’s side, her life
falling apart when she sees the resolute expression on his face.
I’m somewhere in the crowd, watching myself. I don’t want to watch.
I know what will happen.

I have to stop it.

I have to stop him
jumping. He’s not going to make it to the next train.

I wipe my sweaty palms
on my jeans and shove through the crowd of Guardians. Every scream
burns my throat as I order everyone to move, but nobody even
glances at me. I keep pushing and pushing through the bodies,
shouting myself hoarse, but the Guardians never seem to end. I’m
not getting any closer to Siah. I’m invisible and made of air. I’m
not going to make it.

I grab a hand rail and
vault myself into the air, straining to see above the river of
heads. Yosiah’s white Guardian jacket billows around him as he
hurls himself out of the train and into the darkness of the
underground tunnel beyond. The last thing I see is his dark hair,
whipping wildly with the wind of the tunnel. And then nothing. No
Siah. Just the train doors and a gap of midnight between them.

The scream that comes
from my throat is inhuman.

I slip to the floor
and my efforts to push and shove become more desperate, more
violent. I punch a guy in the stomach but he doesn’t move an inch.
I scream but he doesn’t react. I’m trapped here, rooted to the grey
plastic floor, while Yosiah dies on the train tracks. I want to go
with him, to die with him, but I can’t move.

I start to sob, and
then I’m thrown into the present.

“I’m here,” Yosiah
whispers. He crushes me against his chest.

I don’t realise that
my cries have spilled out of my dream for a while. It takes me even
longer to realise that I’m choking on Yosiah’s name with each
breath. “I’m here,” he says, again and again. “I’m here.” It takes
a hundred heartbeats for it to sink in. He’s not on the train or
dying in the tunnels. He’s here and he’s okay.