Archanza
The confidence was high. We stood around the screens with arms folded, heads high, smirks plastered across our stupid faces. Whenever I remember this moment it makes me ache. Watching the figures as they moved across the screen, flickering fish through the city rivers. How could this go wrong? It couldn't. It was flawless. Then the dam broke and the fish began to spill out the sides. Peckard and Nanda began to fidget, moving from foot to foot. I uncrossed my arms and moved closer to the screen. I could see them, suddenly turning back from the major roadway.
"Where are they going?" Hatham said.
My hands were shaking on the tabletop. Despite all our planning, all our work, all our failsafes... The plan was falling apart. Again.
The patches were patterns of yellow and pink. Tiny ducks and llamas and otters, handstitched into the fabric. I ran my fingers over the stitches, the places where blue met pink and felt a deep ache in my chest. Memories pulled themselves out like old thread.
Eeeeeee!!! You're taunting me, you're taunting me. Physics, so beautiful, so wonderful, so challenging. I gave you four years of my life, and I hope I added to your story. I hope my research takes you further. I'm sorry I'm not doing a PhD this year. I need to try this path, test these waters. But you will always be a part of everything I do. I see the world in new ways now. Studying you has made me so much better.
The tumbled out like tic tacs, rattling across the table. "Take as many as you want," she said, eyes wide with glee. "I can always get us more. Trust me on this."
A whistle, screaming almost too high to hear, at the edge of sound and being. A name from a hat, on a tiny piece of paper. You can see the blue ink. You can see the edge, torn where the holes were punched. Folded, unfolded, edges pressed tight together. Where your name should be, you see empty, soundless, moving lips. That whistle, crying out from somewhere at the back of your mind. You're moving, but your muscles are empty. This is the beginning of everything changing.
Locked. Damn. He ran his fingers around the edge of the windowframe, trying to find a weakness in the wooden frame. Something moved inside, and he froze. A light flickered on in the hallway beyond the room. He dropped to the ground, his heart racing. Nobody was meant to be home tonight! He bit his lip and hurriedly tried to formulate a Plan B.
I stepped out of the bunker into a red, alien landscape. Orange rubble spread from my feet to a distant horizon, with the rusted iron skeletons of skyscrapers jutting like compound fractures from broken stone. A murky sky bathed the world in a bloody light. Smoke bled into clouds in an indistinct haze. Even through my gas mask, I could taste the metallic dust.
There is no pressure here.
The wolf was silver, with a mane of black and eyes as yellow as dawn. Emily stepped from the porch, one bare foot at a time, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on his. She could move her feet against the frosted wood, but she couldn't move her eyes.
The wolf lay its ears back down flat. Its lips twitched for a moment, as if to snarl. Then it licked its lips and took a step backwards.
Radiant, I felt her before she entered the room. A haze of gold and yellow melted through the air, warm like the air above a candle. When she stepped through the doorframe, I smiled. The air was a mirage, rippling between us.
She found the place where she kept her treasures empty. In place of the wooden box where she kept the pieces of her heart, there was a square patch without dust. She walked to the doorway, past the empty places where his things had been, and sunk into the doorframe.
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