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“He’s awake,” said a voice, and he turned to his right to see Nix and Chong standing there. Their faces wore identical expressions, which were equal parts concern and relief. There were wet tear tracks cut through the road dust on Nix’s cheeks. They overlaid older tear tracks, as if she had been crying off and on for a long time.
“Say something,” said Chong. “Do you know your name?”
“Of course I know my name,” said Benny. His voice sounded like it belonged to an old man who’d spent his entire life chain-smoking cigarettes. He coughed to clear his throat. “I know my name.”
Better.
“Well . . . ,” said Chong, “what is it?”
“Thomas Imura,” Benny said. He saw their expressions sharpen into unfiltered anxiety. “Wait. No. I . . . I, um, don’t know why I said that. My name’s Benny. Benny Imura. Tom is . . . no . . . Tom was my brother.”
Nix looked marginally relieved; Chong not so much.
“What town do you live in?”
Benny had to think about that. “Mountainside? No . . . that burned down. I mean we burned it down. We, um, live in . . . Reclamation?” It came out as a question.
Chong sighed. “Okay. Here’s a hard one to find out if you remember everything. Was Tom your only brother?”
“Yes. Wait . . . no. He was the only brother I ever knew, but I had another half brother. Sam. He was a lot older than me. I never met him. He was a soldier and I think he died during First Night. Not in California; back in Pennsylvania. He called Tom and told him what was happening. Told him to get home to Mom and Dad.”
“He remembers,” said Nix. She touched his cheek again.
He tried to sit up, messed it up badly, and had to wait for Nix and Chong to each take an arm and help him do it. “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch,” he said.
He swung his legs over the edge of what he realized was a desk. The room did a wild and sickening dance around him and he had to hold on to the desktop to keep from sliding onto the floor. His stomach tried real hard to do a backflip, and it took a lot of what little strength he had not to throw up everything he’d ever eaten in his entire life.
Nix poured water from a canteen into a small plastic cup and offered it to him.
“There is no way I can drink that,” he said. Then he took the cup and drank all of it. And two more cupfuls. The room stopped doing its dance, and his stomach grudgingly and slowly settled down.
Benny looked around.
“Are we . . . ? I mean . . . where are we?”
“What do you remember?” asked Nix, taking and holding one of his hands. Her fingers were cold. The room was cold too, but Benny knew that her hands always got icy when she was scared.
It took Benny a long time to figure that out. His body hurt, but nothing seemed to actually be broken. He touched h
is stomach and felt deep bruising in his abdomen, and some tender spots between his ribs. His chest burned, but the sternum seemed to be all there. When he touched his head, it was like doing an inventory of all the ways the individual parts could hurt. Gums, teeth, the hinge of his jaw, cheekbones, all around his eyes, his brow, the top of his head, and his nose. The only things that didn’t hurt were his ears and his hair.
“I . . . I remember stopping on the road,” he said, then glanced around. “I don’t remember this place. Where are we? And what happened?”
“Do you remember the fight in the field outside the prison?” asked Nix.
Benny stared at her. “Um. No. That sounds like something I should remember, though. I mean . . . prison? What prison is—?”
Before he could finish, Nix leaned in to kiss him. It was very, very nice, and it made him not care much about his aches.
Chong seemed to become interested in the pattern of the wallpaper. “Oh, look,” he said as if holding a conversation with someone, “wildflowers. How interesting. Very detailed.”
Nix stopped kissing Benny but ignored Chong. She held Benny’s face in both hands and whispered, “Don’t you ever, ever—ever—do that again.”
“But what did I do?” Benny gasped.
“You almost died, you idiot,” she growled. “And you’re not allowed.”
Then she kissed him again.
