ZAC 2061: YEAR TWO
Chapter 7

The blazing desert sun beat mercilessly down upon them several days later, undeterred even by the late afternoon hour. Willow was drowsily seated on the front bench of the bandits' snail Zoid, which, she had been told, was called a Gustav, while Phoenix piloted it. Theirs was a comfortable silence, filled by the wind whistling around the Gustav's contours, and the low hum of its wheels churning doggedly through the sand.

The heat in the cockpit wasn't quite at the level of oppressive, but it was weighty nevertheless, and between that and the blinding sunlight, Willow could scarcely keep her eyes open. Phoenix, on the other hand, invigorated with a new sense of purpose, was cheerful and alert, slung rather casually in the low pilot's seat, his long limbs loosely arrayed in the limited space.

Fuzzy, he had explained as they had gathered and packed supplies for the trip, was his Zoid: a small feline species called a Helcat that specialized in optical stealth, which had been issued to him by the Imperial army when he had been enlisted. Willow continued to be amused by the Zoid's given name but opted not to comment on it. Fuzzy, at some point upon which Phoenix did not elaborate, had sustained damage, and after a long flight through the desert, had broken down, unable to go any further. With great sorrow, Phoenix had been forced to leave her behind, and struck out on his own. It was many hours later that Willow and Zeke had found him, unconscious, alone, and barely alive.

Willow couldn't fully remember where she and Zeke had gone that night, though she knew they had made it quite some distance away from Fort Zephyr. It had been about a half hour's travel northwest, but since they had alternated between galloping and walking, not to mention looping this way and that as they pleased, it was hard to say how many miles they had covered. Phoenix didn't seem especially concerned with this lack of specificity, however, and so they had packed provisions for at least a couple nights' desert wanderings, her companion whistling jovially as they worked.

Willow wiped a sheen of sweat off of her forehead now. "So how will you know when we reach the spot where we found you?"

"I kind of have this feeling that I'll just sense it. What I can remember of that place is burned into my memory, you know. The dune, the stars, everything."

Willow nodded. "I can imagine."

"I still wonder about those voices I heard sometimes. I heard them before I remember seeing Zeke looking down at me. Who could have possibly been out there with me?"

"Maybe you were just imagining them? I mean, you were hallucinating that night I brought you home. There may not have been any voices at all."

"I just can't seem to shake the feeling that they were real, though." He shook his head. "But you're right. They probably weren't."

Willow thought back to that first, difficult night, recalling the glassy eyes that could look directly at her yet not see her at all, the flailing limbs, the anguished cries. That name he'd been calling out, over and over. She peered curiously at her companion, and wondered if it were too personal a question to ask. Perhaps, if she were to ask, he would then ask prying questions of her in return, and she did not know if she was yet ready to answer them. "I guess we'll never know," she said after a moment, and Phoenix nodded.

They lapsed back into silence. Willow dipped in and out of a sort of twilit half-consciousness, the droning of the Gustav's wheels lulling her, the heat beckoning her to sleep. After a time, though, she became aware of a faint tapping sound, and when she opened her eyes, she saw Phoenix's fingers drumming busily on one side of the Zoid's control stalk. "You okay?" she queried through a yawn.

"Just thinking."

"Alright," she said, yawning again.

"Hey, look," he said suddenly at the same time that the Gustav's monitors beeped, and Willow sat bolt upright.

Just visible in the distance was a yellowish-green something. Willow squinted through the shimmering heat. "Is that a Molga?"

"Looks like."

"Should we fight it?" she asked uncertainly. "I've fought Molgas with Zeke before. I can beat it."

"It's not really doing anything, though. So far doesn't seem hostile."

The Molga just sat there, perched atop a distant dune. It was pointed in their direction, and rotated slowly to remain so as they passed by, but otherwise did not make any other move whatsoever.

"Maybe we could try to make radio contact?" Willow suggested.

Phoenix shook his head. "You seem to be really new at all of this stuff, so the short version is, that's usually not a good idea. There's a war on. We don't know who that pilot is. They don't know who we are. If they're content to leave us well enough alone, then that's good enough for me."

"Then why...why are they watching us like that?" She felt unnerved, looking at it on the Gustav's monitor, the creature vigilantly facing their direction no matter what. It was like being stared down.

"As long as they're not shooting at us, then they can watch all they like! Anyway, can you blame them? I'm used to the attention," Phoenix added, running his hand through his hair and grinning roguishly. "It's the burden of being a guy as dead sexy as I am."

Willow wanted to laugh, but the laughter felt stuck beneath the lump of fear caught in her throat, and so she watched the caterpillar Zoid on the monitor until it was too small to see and the Gustav's systems automatically switched the display back over to the usual operating status readouts. She tried not to think of Molgas and staring, but it was impossible. She shivered suddenly, curling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them, wanting to be as safe and shielded as possible from the memory of the bandits' hungry eyes. The heat in the cockpit felt like it had vanished, replaced by an air that was thin and dry and cold.

Her little action did not go unnoticed. "Hey." Phoenix looked over at her. "Are you alright?" She nodded, feeling small and miserable. "For the record," he continued, unconvinced, "I try really hard not to bombard you with questions all the time, since I know you've got your secrets and whatever. But sometimes, it seems to me...that you actually want to talk about them."

"Sometimes I do," Willow said into her knees. Her voice was nearly lost in the hum of the Gustav's wheels. She closed her eyes. What had those men wanted to do to her?

If she learned the answer, would that make her feel better?

Or worse?

"Then how about this?" He looked over at her hunched form again. "You can tell me something. Whatever you want. And I'll tell you something in return."

"Can you ask me, instead?" It would be easier to talk, she thought, if she were given a direction to go in. She picked her head up off of her knees, and tucked her hair behind her ear. "And then I ask you something?"

"Sure. And if you don't want to answer the question, then you don't have to."

"Okay." She sat up a little straighter, leaning back against her seat, although she kept her legs pulled up close.

"My first question," Phoenix said carefully, "is this: where did you get this Zoid?"

She had been expecting a question about where she had come from or from whom she was hiding, and was therefore startled. His question was both easier and more difficult than those. "You mean Zeke?" she asked, although she knew he didn't.

"No. This Gustav. I find it interesting that it's your Zoid, because I don't think you know how to pilot it. At all."

She had tried to hide this fact from him, letting him take the lead during their trip preparations, but he was, as usual, unerringly observant. The truth was, when she had opted to keep the Gustav instead of burying it like its badly damaged counterparts, she had been forced to use Zeke to awkwardly push and pull it into the hangar for storage. It would have been a lot easier to simply drive it in there, of course, but once it had been righted and she'd looked into the cockpit to ascertain how similar its controls were to her Command Wolf's, she'd found she was unable to sit in that same seat the short bald man had sat in. His sweaty palms had been on that control stalk, those same sweaty palms that had run roughly over her arms and shoulders and become entangled in her hair.

"I don't," she said finally, in answer.

"Would you like to tell me about how you got it?" Phoenix asked, his tone placid and unhurried, his hand suddenly, lightly, on her arm. She did not jerk away, though, because it was so different from how the bandits had touched her. Phoenix's touch was kind and reassuring. Stabilizing. She felt brave enough to speak, knowing he was there beside her.

"Bandits came to Fort Zephyr one night last year," she began, taking a deep breath. That was what she needed to call her home, she had found, despite knowing its real name now. It would always be Fort Zephyr to her. Phoenix did not correct her, so she continued, "They had this Gustav, and two Molgas, and two other Zoids. I don't know what they're called. Gray dinosaurs, littler than Zeke. Walked on two legs."

"Sounds like Godoses."

"Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, the bandits found Fort Zephyr and they found my food stores. I hadn't known they were there because I was all the way on the other side of the base. I was walking home and saw there was light coming from Fern's house -"

"Fern's house?"

"It's...it's the little house, at the south end of the big street, right on the edge of the desert. I named it after my sister, because she had worked in the greenhouses, and I found seeds in there one day…"

Phoenix nodded. He knew immediately which house she meant. He had seen the way she looked at it.

"One of the bandits found me and chased me and caught me and dragged me into the house where they were all at the table, all eating my food, and they tied my hands behind me and they were all looking at me in this horrible way…" Her voice sounded ragged. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see their cold expressions, but their faces were already there in her mind.

Phoenix thought he knew where this story was going, and he wasn't sure he could bear to hear what they had done to her. The Gustav began decelerating without his realizing it. "Willow," he said, the word catching in his throat.

But she couldn't stop now; the words were pouring out of her. "One of them choked me and I thought I was going to die, but then he let go and dropped me on the floor like - like I was nothing, and I sat there and waited for them to get drunk and I found this sharp spot on the hearth and I used it to saw through the ropes." She inhaled deeply, swiping the back of her fist almost violently against her eyes to brush away the tears that were forming. "I escaped and it was dark and they couldn't find me or figure out where they were going, but I could. I ran to get Zeke and before they had a chance to find where I'd gone I was attacking their Zoids, all five of them, and Zeke was strong and brave and we beat them, and the bandits tried to run back into the base but I couldn't - I couldn't let them, it was my home and I would never find them again but they would find me, I just knew they would, and so I - I shot them, Phoenix, I killed them, there were six, and I killed them all. Zeke's cannons. Boom. Gone. All gone." She impatiently smeared away the tears again, and then just sat there, panting, the story out at last. She couldn't believe she had said all of that. It was horrible to relive, even fleetingly, but there was relief to be found, too, to have told someone else, to have unburdened herself of those memories.

The Gustav had come to a halt. Willow looked ahead through the canopy's glass at the fantastic colors of the sunset-blazed horizon, all melting into one another so perfectly that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the next began. She glanced left through the glass towards the setting sun, hanging low over the far-off dunes, then slid her gaze to her right, to Phoenix. He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite read; it seemed to be many things at once. The slanting sunlight lit his hair a flaming orange.

He licked his lips, saying nothing for a moment. He seemed to be breathing hard. Then, softly, he said: "Thank you."

"For - for what?"

"Well, for having enough faith in me to tell me all of that, but moreso...thank you for saving me that night, and not just running away."

"Why would I have run away?" But she already knew the answer.

"Because why would you trust anyone, after what you've been through? Especially a man?"

She paused, thinking back to Dan. "Not all men are like that." Her memory of his kind face wavered like rippling water, his visage fading in the passage of time.

"No, they aren't." He eased the Gustav forward again, resuming their progress across the desert. "But many are. You're amazingly brave."

Willow wanted to ask him if he knew what those men had wanted from her. She felt sure he would be able to tell her. But fear choked off her words. "I - I don't really feel that brave, you know," she said instead. "I was so scared that night. And - and I'm still afraid of them now, even though they're dead." She took a shuddering breath and looked at the setting sun again. Her voice was small. "I still get nightmares about them."

"That was probably the most terrifying experience of your life," Phoenix said. Willow didn't correct him. "But you got through it. You survived. The thing is, though, that that isn't even the whole story. Do you know what the most important part of your story is, besides the survival itself?"

She shook her head.

"You survived with your kind heart intact," he said, pointing to her chest, where she could feel her heart beating resolutely inside. "You felt afraid then, and sometimes you still feel afraid even now. But you never let the fear rule you. Your heart does, just like it always has. That's why you saved me that night, even though you didn't know anything about me. Even though I could have been just like them."

Willow stared at her knees, taking this in.

"You're so much stronger than you even know," Phoenix continued, almost to himself. "Maybe someday you'll realize that."

"Thank you," she whispered, and she felt his left hand on her shoulder again, warm and gentle. And with that kind gesture, she knew she didn't want to talk about it anymore. Not because she was too afraid to continue discussing it, but because she finally felt okay enough not to. Gesturing through the canopy glass, she asked, "Do you recognize any of this place?"

Phoenix looked around them. It was the same featureless desert as ever. Except, he saw, for one particularly tall dune to the west a few miles; it stood above the sea of low rolling hills around it like a small giant. Willow was looking at it, too. "There," she said. "We found you on top of a very tall dune just like that one. That's where we saw the mirage."

"I had climbed to the top of the tallest dune I could see," he murmured, recalling. "I'd hoped to spot some kind of settlement, anything but more desert."

Phoenix steered the Gustav over to the tall dune's side, then popped the canopy glass open. A fresh desert breeze, cooling now as daylight faded, swept around them and they turned their faces towards it gratefully. "Let's camp here for the night," he said. "If this is indeed the right place, then I know the direction I came from now. It shouldn't take us long to find Fuzzy in the morning."

Willow nodded.

Wordlessly, they unpacked what items they would need for a night spent under the stars: Phoenix arranged rudimentary beds for them both out of blankets, while Willow began boiling water over a portable stove to cook rice they would add to canned beans and tomatoes. Zeke, lolling drowsily on the first of the two rolling platforms the Gustav had been towing, rested his chin on his paws and observed the goings-on with mild interest.

When supper was prepared, Willow and Phoenix sat near the stove and the pale light it cast, both thinking separately of her little cottage and the cheerful lamp on the table within. Willow wrapped one of the blankets over her shoulders to ward off the desert's night chill, and took a bite of her food. Its warmth was pleasant, and she wondered how she had gotten through those several nights so long ago now, digging endless graves in attire woefully inadequate for the temperature.

"It's your turn," Phoenix said, interrupting her thoughts. He stirred the rice mixture in his tin cup and looked up at her, waiting. He looked so handsome in the low light, and she knew what a dangerous thought this was.

Diverting her attention, she blurted with no forethought whatsoever, "Who's Heinrich?"

Phoenix's hand, and the spoon in it, froze. He looked stricken. "How do you know about Heinrich?" he asked, his voice low and nearly lost in the desert wind. He stared at her as though amazed to see her seated there across from him.

Had she made a terrible mistake? "Well," she faltered, "when you were sick that first night, you were completely out of your head. You were yelling in a language I couldn't understand - I guess it was Guylic - but you...you kept repeating that one word, 'Heinrich,' and I realized it was a name." Zeke shifted position, resting his chin on his other paw now. "You sounded so...so achingly sad." She paused, then added softly, "Remember, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

He shook his head, looking down at his supper, but when he lifted his head, she could see even in the faint light that there were tears in his green eyes. "Something tells me, you're not going to go running to report me to the army," he said, a hint of a sniffle punctuating his sentence. "Heinrich is my brother. I - I haven't seen him in five years."

"Because you were in the army?"

He nodded, setting his cup down. "I was conscripted just a couple of months after the cataclysm. In the Empire, to resist enlistment is considered treason and punishable by death. They didn't care who you left behind, because they needed able-bodied people to help clean up and protect the provincial capital, Guygalos. It's a city very far north of here." When Willow looked confused, he added, "Those paranoid idiots assumed the Republic would exploit the chaos and damage from the meteorites to press their advantage and take over. Conveniently forgetting, of course, that the Republic was in complete disarray, as well."

Willow remembered Dan's description of the devastation the meteorites had wrought in his village. "And you had to leave Heinrich behind?" she asked. "What about your parents?"

"Gone. They died during the cataclysm. They were in the barn stacking wheat and that's what got hit. Just collapsed right on top of them. That...that left only Heinrich and me. I was eighteen and just what the army was looking for. Heinrich was only six." His voice wavered. "Both parents dead and the only family he had left in the world getting shipped off to join the military."

"But how could they do that? How was he supposed to take care of himself?" Willow cried. The injustice was breathtaking.

Phoenix shrugged. He bit his lip and took a long, shaky breath. "There were lots of new orphans after the cataclysm, you know? They were sent to orphanages run by the state to be looked after. Heinrich was herded off with the rest of them, I suppose." The grief shadowing his bright face pained Willow to behold.

"You were trying to get back to him that day, weren't you?" she asked.

He nodded. "The day I left, a few of the guys in my unit were talking about some gossip they'd heard, about how bad those orphanages were. One far north from here had burned down and killed all these kids, and once I heard that, I couldn't take it anymore. I got in Fuzzy and just ran. Some soldiers were sent out after me to stop me from escaping, and they damaged her leg. But she's a trooper, you know, she knew I needed to get back home and so she lost them in a forest a few miles from my base and then kept right on going for a long, long time. When she couldn't go any further, I was forced to leave her behind." He smiled then, tears still glistening at the corners of his eyes. "Heinrich's the one who named Fuzzy, by the way. She didn't have a name at all, was just called EZ-023-4896, until I got a letter from him one day when I was in basic training, the only letter I ever got from him. He said, 'I don't know what kind of Zoid you have, but you should name it Fuzzy.' So I did."

"You need to get Fuzzy back so you can go find Heinrich and be together again," Willow said sadly, understanding it all now.

Phoenix nodded again. He looked down at his feet, food forgotten, and Willow thought he might cry. But then he looked up and smiled at her; it was a smile that said he was used to fording through the pain. "So now you know," he said softly. "You've been harboring a deserter. I don't think the Imperial army will look kindly on that fact when they come for me."

"They'll have to get through Zeke and me first," Willow retorted fiercely, jabbing her thumb into her chest.

Phoenix looked startled for a moment at such a proclamation, then laughed. "I certainly wouldn't want to go up against you two, that's for sure." Zeke growled appreciatively at the compliment, and Phoenix laughed again.

The night air was very cold now, and he noticed her starting to shiver, her meal no longer warming her. "Shall we turn in soon, then? We can get an early start tomorrow. We'll find Fuzzy before you know it."

She nodded, teeth chattering, and they gathered up their dishes and utensils and extinguished the stove.

Settled in her improvised bed, Willow stared up into the deep black cloak overhead, her chilliness somewhat soothed by the comforting presence of the stars. A few feet away, Phoenix folded his arms behind his head and let out a long sigh. "They're beautiful tonight."

"They always are," she said feelingly. Zi's two moons hovered behind them, and she tilted her head back to gaze upon their familiar orange glow. She wanted to ask him about the cataclysm, but based on the global extent of the damage, she would betray her origins if she were to express any of her ignorance of the event to him. Still, she wished she could; the subject held a horrid fascination for her. Despite learning of the meteorites almost as soon as her violent arrival on Zi, she had never stopped wondering about them. It was a disaster almost too big for her to comprehend; she, a descendant of a people whose planet had probably been completely destroyed by now, she, the sole survivor of a terrible cataclysm herself, simply could not imagine what had happened here only a few short years ago. Such devastation had surely changed who the Zoidians were as a people, not to mention forever altering the lives of individuals like Dan and Phoenix.

"May I ask a question now?" Phoenix said, rolling onto his side to face her and propping his head up on one arm. His visage was pale and comfortably familiar in the faint light.

"You just did," Willow teased. She bundled her blankets up closer to her chin, unable to warm up very much.

His eyes widened. "Maybe you've been spending too much time with me, to say something like that. Not that I can blame you for seeking out my company so much. I'm pretty great, I know." He winked at her, and she couldn't help but laugh.

"You never stop, do you?"

"Not really, no."

"Alright then, so what's your question?"

"If you could be anywhere right now, where would you want to be?"

Again, she had expected a question as to her past, and again, he had dodged. Why? Did he know how important her secrets were, how much of her and Zeke's safety hinged upon the sanctity of those secrets? Still, she answered without hesitation. "Among the stars."

His eyebrows raised, taking his little facial marking with them. "And what would you do up there?"

Be born, live for almost sixteen years with my friends and unorthodox family, read and learn and laugh and sleep and grow, she thought. But instead she said, "Listen." Somehow, she missed it up there; missed the calm, quiet darkness surrounding her ship, the asteroids and planets and stars, all silent sentinels, sailing serenely by.

"Who, or what, would you listen to?"

"The stories." She smiled up at the heavens. "The stars keep our stories, you know." She knew she wasn't making much sense, but Phoenix didn't make fun of her. Instead, he rolled onto his back again and looked up at the night sky with greater concentration, as though trying to listen from all the way down here. Zeke was looking up, too, also trying to listen, perhaps.

Willow shivered again. She was not used to being exposed for so long to the desert's night temperatures; by this hour she was usually sealed inside Zeke's cockpit, or safely ensconced in her cozy cottage.

"Are you alright?" Phoenix asked.

"Yes, I just can't seem to warm up. Do we have any other blankets?"

"I don't think we do, unless you packed some extras in a different spot than these."

"Oh." She burrowed down further, so that now only her nose and eyes were visible. Her teeth chattered.

"Oh goodness, you're a right little ice cube over there. Would it be...terribly awkward if I helped you keep warm? I'm a mite chilly, myself. I - I promise I won't do anything."

She thought about this, and realized, once again, that there were many, many things she did not understand. But she trusted him to "not do anything," whatever that was. "Okay."

There was a brief rustling sound in the darkness as he pulled all of his blankets closer, and heaped some of his on top of her. Then, very carefully, he lay himself down beside her, settling under the covers, too. "If you want, you can roll onto your side, away from me, and I'll hold you until you warm up."

She did as he suggested, and felt him shift nearer, the front of his body nestling close to the back of hers. He rested his forearm on her upper arm, his palm on the cap of her shoulder. She remembered when it had last been there, many days ago, when he had been regaining his strength and balance. His chin rested gently against the top of her head; she could feel his soft breath in her hair. The chattering of her teeth died away.

"Is this okay?"

"Yes." And it was. The extra blankets and Phoenix's body heat were warming her up nicely, and she felt comfortable and secure. And with that feeling came deep memories surfacing in her mind: of snuggling with her sisters, of Hen holding her close. And Dan, too, wrapping his arms around her, creating a space of warmth and light, just for her. It had been so long since she'd felt this way.

And there it was again: that fathomless ache for what was no more, what never would be again. Did this loneliness have no boundary?

"And are you okay?" he asked, these quiet words lightly dispelling the sadness swirling around her like a fog.

"Yes," she whispered. Because she was.

After some minutes, the rise and fall of Phoenix's chest against her upper back slowed, and his arm slung over her slackened. Yet she remained stubbornly awake, furiously blinking whenever her eyelids drooped, determined not to miss a moment.