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“Maybe it’s me. ”
“We don’t know that—”
“Certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Gene,” she says, and when I don’t look up to meet her gaze she touches my chin lightly, tilts my head to her. “He loved you. You were precious to him. We can’t go jumping to these conclusions. ”
“It adds up, though, doesn’t it?”
She shakes her head, her eyes never wavering from mine. “We don’t know that. There’s a dozen different ways to interpret his movements. And we’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt. ”
I stare into the distance. “I want to find him more than ever,” I whisper.
“I know, Gene,” she says. “I know. ”
For ten minutes, we watch a scrim of clouds drift across the blue sky. A gentle breeze blows, rustling the tree leaves. Sissy’s stomach rumbles with hunger.
“Wish I had my daggers,” she says. “What I wouldn’t do for some barbequed game. ” Her fingers absentmindedly stroke her waist where she usually sheathed her daggers.
“We still got our guns. ”
She shakes her head. “No good. Dagger’s the way to go. Clean, efficient. ”
“You really think you’d have energy to go chasing prairie dogs? And then make fire?”
She spits a seed out of her mouth. “Good point there. ” She spits out another seed, this time with distance.
I spit out a seed from my mouth. It sails only a couple of feet away.
“You’re going to have do better than that if you want to beat me,” Sissy says, a small grin on her face.
“I haven’t even begun,” I say, and take another bite. “Game on. ” I spit out a seed. Despite rising high up into the air, it falls less than halfway to Sissy’s seed.
“That’s just pathetic, Gene,” she says, laughing. She slaps the grass. “Even Ben could have done better than that. When he was, like, three. ”
“Hey, this is my first time, okay! I haven’t had years of training like you guys!”
She laughs again, in her usual deep-throated manner. “If Epap were here, he’d totally school you. Nobody was better than him. That boy could spit farther than he could throw. ”
We both laugh. But the mention of his name is a painful reminder of reality. Our laughter fades away, the brief moment of lightness over.
“He never had a chance, did he?” she says quietly after a minute. “We never had a chance. Of saving him. I think we both knew that from the get-go. We were clinging to a hope that was more fantasy than reality. ”
“Sometimes fantasy is all you have. ”
She is silent. I know what is turning in her mind, the words before she even gives voice to them. “And what about saving David?” she finally says. “Going back to the Palace to rescue him—is that fantasy, too?”
It is. I realize that now. Even if we h
ad been able to kill Ashley June and been able to return unscathed to the Palace, the Ruler would never have released us, his promise notwithstanding.
Sissy curls her toes into the grass, turning her digits white. “The whole time we were underwater in the fountain pool, I kept thinking of David. That he was in exactly the same situation, submerged in water. But how much worse off he was. Because he was alone. ” She turns her eyes to me. “I won’t leave him there. ”
“Sissy,” I say reluctantly. “We both know it’s suicide to return to the Palace. We’ll surely die. ”
“Then we die,” she says quickly with a flash of anger. She stands up, walks a few paces away, her back to me.
I stand. Softly, I utter words I know she will be repulsed by. “Maybe we should accept what can’t be changed. ”
“What do you mean by that?” she says without turning around.
“You and me, Sissy. We have horses. We can go anywhere. Nobody knows we’re alive. Not the Palace, not the metropolis. They all think we’re dead. ”
She pauses. I expect her to lash out with objections. But she has not spoken.
“We make our own world, Sissy. Away from everyone, everything. Go far, far, far away, never to be found again. Start afresh. Just you and me. ”
She stands very still. A desert breeze blows through her hair.
“But we can’t go back to the Palace,” I say. “Even if we were somehow able to escape from there, they’d never stop coming after us. Not the duskers, not the Originators. Once they know we’re still alive, we’ll be hunted forever. ”
And still, she does not speak.
“I’m just trying to be honest with you,” I say.
“Have you, Gene?” She turns around now, and her eyes are moist. But these are not tears of sadness or resignation but something else I can’t quite identify. “Have you been completely honest with me?”
