I have to get out of here. I have to start walking. The longer I stay, the greater the chance that I will be present if the Goblins decide to return. I can’t risk that. I am too beat up. I would be taken like Malik and Khoury and dismembered.
I walk back to the crash and search the vehicle for my pack. I strap it on, fit my hat to my head to keep the sun off, grab every bit of food and water I can find and jam them in a second pack, then step away. Should I take a weapon? I look for one but cannot find either spitfire. They were all we had. I am reduced to relying on my long knife and my wits. Scant protection against almost everything. Nevertheless, they will have to do.
Gear in hand, I set out on foot across the wastelands, heading away in the direction that still continues to tug at me, even now—away from the Goblins, away from death at their hands.
I do not look back.
I begin to cry shortly after—for my dead friends and our lost opportunity, for the unfairness of a world that has taken them, and for my inability to change any of it. Why Humans are hunted and imprisoned is obvious—we are there to provide labor and sustenance for the Goblins. But how did this come about in the first place? How did we Humans come to be so disdained and marginalized that subjugating us like cattle became our future?
I walk until I quit thinking about any of it and the tears evaporate from my face, and then I walk some more. I have a long way to go to reach anything at all. I expected this, but the reality is daunting. I walk all day, stopping only to eat a bit of food and drink a little water. By nightfall nothing has changed. I am beginning to wonder if it ever will—even if only enough to give me some encouragement to keep going.
I am still following my crazy compulsion to move in this direction, but what if I am wrong? What if the Goblins come after me once again, or if they just stumble on me while in pursuit of something or someone else? There won’t be any hiding from them out here in the daylight. There won’t be any chance of being overlooked, as I was last night. The consequences are carved on the stone surface of my heart, and I cannot pretend they aren’t.
My thoughts wander. Poor Tommy. I liked him so much. He was smart and quick-witted. For him to have been killed so suddenly, so randomly, still shocks me. Losing JoJo and Wince and Barris and Breck feels no less soul deadening. And probably Khoury and Malik, too, by now. All dead. And all for nothing. Escape was our only chance, and we all believed it possible. We were wrong. We were fools.
By the close of the third day, I am exhausted and depressed. I will die out here soon. How can I survive in the heat, making this endless trek? I am so alone. Not a rabbit or a burrow creature to be seen. Not even a bird, save rarely. This place is a graveyard waiting to add me to its number. I lie bundled in my jacket, in the clothes Barris salvaged and remade from scraps Wince found, and I stare at the sky. The boots were stolen from the Goblin supply room—cut down and modified to fit our smaller feet. Mine are already starting to come apart at the seams, loosening from the heat and stress.
But it is my mind that worries me most. I am beginning to lose the ability to focus. I am having hallucinations, imagining things that aren’t there. I have a fever and nothing with which to treat it. I close my eyes and catalog what I know about myself in an effort to ward off what I fear is coming.
My full name is Auris Afton Grieg. I am nineteen, or close to it. I have no brothers and sisters. My parents are lost to me—probably dead. I have long dark hair, and my skin is a soft olive color. I am strong for someone so small. I stand only six inches over five feet, but I can work hard all day. I am stubborn and determined. I am told I have a nice laugh and a good singing voice. I am slender and athletic; my parents used to hike me into the mountains when there were still mountains. And still parents—because I know I had them once, even if I can’t recall them.
I don’t remember where I came from—names, places, locations, anything. I have no idea where in the larger world I used to live or in how many different places. I remember houses and trees and parks and buildings. I remember towns. I went to school, but I don’t remember anything about it.
A few things I can recall. I know I was deeply loved by my mother and father, and I have a strong sense of that love enfolding me as I grew. I remember hearing about the Goblins without ever actually seeing one; they were rumors, phantoms, creatures used to frighten children who were disobedient. Not that my parents ever used such threats. Friends told me; I had friends before, though I recall nothing specific about them.
The larger world in which I grew? A blank. Any history of its peoples and its governments? Nothing.
There are dreams sometimes—harsh, bitter, ugly dreams of what I think is my life from before my imprisonment, moments when terrible things happened to me—but I can never remember the particulars. They refuse to linger beyond slumber…save one. That one will not be banished, even though I wish it would. In the dream, dark figures surround my parents—faceless ghosts that reach for them, hands grasping. My mother screams. My father shouts in fury. Someone is bleeding. But their attackers persist. Their intentions are clear: My parents will die. I never see it happen, but I know it is inevitable. Why this one persists when all the others are as ephemeral as my memories, I cannot say.
On the nights this dream comes, I wake drenched in sweat, shaking and wishing so hard I could stop.
In the beginning of my imprisonment I talked about the dream with Tommy, but Tommy thought you could dismiss such things by simply willing them away. Once I knew that, I quit mentioning it. His memories were strong and sure; he could not identify with my lack. He liked to think of me as strong and certain, and I liked thinking of myself that way as well. It was best, I decided, to keep my fears and uncertainties to myself. So I had learned to do just that, even though it left me feeling very alone. I was different from the others, and I knew it. I was one of them, yet not.
And now with Tommy and the others gone, there is no one left to talk to anyway.
But I am a survivor. I survived what killed all my friends. I will not let it kill me.
* * *
—
After another week of my forced march, I am no longer sure that anything I remember or have forgotten matters. I can barely walk; my entire body is a mass of aches and failing joints. My clothes are in shreds and my boots are falling apart—by now bound together by strips of my clothing torn into rags. I am forced to rest more often. My food and water are dangerously low. It has stayed hot the entire time, and the sun’s heat is slowly draining my life away. I am not sure how much longer I can go on.
And still the wastelands stretch away, an endless expanse that disappears into the horizon as if dropping off the end of the world. Where are all the people and cities and forests and mountains I remember? Have they all disappeared in some sort of cataclysmic event? Are these empty flats all that remain? Worse, have I perhaps been mistaken in choosing to walk in this direction?
The dream about my parents returns twice—the same dream, the same sense of the inevitable, the same lingering horror when I wake. The distant past, I tell myself. A lost part of my life, a nightmare that no longer has any real relevance. Yet it persists.