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The eerie silence in this room is a reminder that we are all on our own. If I were to pinpoint the most carefree week in my life—it would be the cross-country trip with Droga. It’s also the lowest I’ve ever been—the memory is an oxymoron. I got so drunk, I threw up all over myself on some dirt road next to a lone cantina, then cried on Droga’s shoulder about my mother and Adam and the accident. Felt shitty about it afterward, but Droga never said a thing.
“I got your back, bro.”
And that’s the bitter fucking reminder to not trust anyone. Those words should never be spoken. People don’t know what they mean, how much responsibility they carry. Because when they don’t deliver—they can break lives.
That’s the thing about Droga. It irritates me how stubborn he is. I want to prove my point and make him come back with his tail between his legs.
But the fucker is evasive. Why couldn’t he just let go? Four years, and he still doesn’t understand what’s important. Women never are.
I pick up the phone and check the Eastside cameras.
Come, on, Droga. I’m waiting.
No one turns his back on me.
Unless he is dead.
5
KAI
It’s onlyfifteen minutes to the Devil’s Caverns.
As soon as the boat veers into the main one, I turn on the flashlight.
The last time I was here was with Callie. This cave was the tipping point that changed the course of four years. It is doing it yet again as I idle the boat toward one of the rock landings, kill the engine, and tie the boat rope to a metal hook jammed into the rock. Then I shine the flashlight farther down the cave.
This trip at night is needed to avoid cameras. Archer is probably staring at his surveillance monitors right now like a fucking owl on the night hunt. What’s more important is the low tide. It’s the only time you can make it on foot through a maze of caves that snake underground and connect the Eastside to the shore cliffs, only one mile from the Ashlands, the trashed most eastern part of Port Mrei.
We’ve explored these caves plenty of times. Ty with his landscape kink memorized the entire length of it. And now I follow his precise map with arrows pointing the way as I walk the rocky landing along one of the cave walls.
It’s eerie, barren, hollow.
My footsteps echo through the darkness that even the flashlight can’t penetrate far enough. If you got lost here, you could spend days trying to find the way out. But when the tide is high, certain chambers get flooded. If you are in the wrong one, you’re dead. If you’re in the right one, you are lucky if you can float for hours until the tide goes down to open the passages that lead out.
But there is Ty—the genius that he hides behind his foolish smile. He made a map and put the landscape marks with descriptions of rock formations and peculiar shapes to identify every cavern.
“In case you get lost,” he said back in the workshop when he explained the map. “Don’t wanna find your body two years later.”
Ty did better than any cartographer could. He should be making blueprints for the Pentagon and shit, because two hours later, I emerge from the caves right where he said I would—the bottom of the cliffs south off the Ashlands.
I press my fingers to my lips and blow a kiss in the air. “Thanks, bro.”
Waves crash against the jagged cliffy coastline, misting me with salty water, as I climb up one of the rocks and make it to the top, about thirty feet above sea level.
The rocks here are scattered over a several-mile stretch of water. They don’t have many cameras here—no boat can get closer than a mile to the shore anyway. And as I make my way through the cliffy terrain, I know I might pass for one of the vagrants who live out here. One of the Savages. The word rubs me the wrong way.
One mile seems like forever, but the climbing and walking and ditching the cliffy parts is much slower when you can’t use the flashlight to avoid being spotted.
It’s only when I hear distant shouting and angry curses that I know I am getting close to the desert of hopelessness.
Empty cans crunching under my feet, litter, the growing stench of rotten garbage and decay—two years turned the Ashlands into the cemetery of human existence. Nestled among the paradise beaches, the still functioning town, and the rocks, this place is a reminder of human degradation and—as much as one hates authority—the lack thereof. One could blame Butcher who holds control of Port Mrei and its ghetto. But the true power is Crone, who doesn’t give a shit about the place he colonized.
It’s quite easy to navigate the island. Much harder to ditch the cameras. If there are any in the Ashlands, I doubt the patrol cares.
I am just one of many, walking through the dark, past the barely-humans crouching under the trees and grunts from inside the makeshift tents. Dark shadows are dressed in repurposed fabric or half-naked. They hunch or lie around weak bonfires that flicker across a mile of hostile land.
Who knows what they burn—hope or the remnants of others. Even the ocean breeze seems to have halted half a mile back. The thick humid air is laced with the vague trace of blooming trees, the hot swampy smell of the mangroves in the distance, and the stench of misery. I trip on garbage and ignore the voices in the dark as I walk.
