Chapter Two
The thing he remembers the most about the first couple of years after the escape is the cold. To this day he isn't sure how long he wandered in the snow; he remembers only that after a while every tree looked the same as the one before it and the periods of light and darkness moved too quickly for him to discern between them. He remembers a light in the distance, a cabin nestled in a thick grove of trees, the feeling of his body against the rough wooden walls and then letting go to a darkness far more tangible than the others. He woke up in a warm bed and a deep, kind voice told him he'd been asleep for three days.
"You're a hell of a fighter, you know that?" Krit sat up, startled. "Don't worry youngster," an old man with a long white beard reassured him, "Whatever you're running from sure as hell won't find you here." The old man smiled then, and as Krit smiled back, he wondered if he'd ever seen any of the men at Manticore smile that way. "Now you go on back to sleep. You'll be safe here as long as you want to be." Krit stayed with him for three more years until, during the worst blizzard of the century, the old man passed away in his sleep. The thirteen year old X5 buried him with sadness and a prayer, packed his clothes and the old man's books, and went looking for his siblings.
It still amazed him the way his dreams brought him back to Manticore. While he slept his mind replayed every event, both real and imaginary, that had made his childhood terrifying. For six months, he shared an apartment with Syl, sleeping on the couch that she'd somehow managed to make a serviceable, even comfortable bed. They cared for one another, that much was obvious, but after years of being alone they'd built walls around themselves that weren't easy to demolish. He remembers the night he'd discovered that he wasn't the only one with nightmares. Zack had always been the strong one, he was in charge and part of his responsibility was keeping a brave face. He made Krit feel as if he were weakest of the twelve, the perennial little brother that everyone had to defend. But that night he heard her cries through the wall and the illusion dissipated. Next to Zack, no one kept a stiff upper lip quite like Syl, but that night her dreams had betrayed her. In his mind he can still see her they way she was that night, fists clenching the sheets while tears slid silently down her face.
"Syl?" he murmured, "Are you okay?" She relaxed her fists and nodded. He turned to leave, but she grabbed his hand.
"Please don't leave," she whispered. Wordlessly he crawled in beside her and smoothed the hair out of her eyes. Honey blonde, just like he'd always remembered it. They fell asleep almost instantly, the darkness of their past forgotten in the warmth of their intertwined hands. Forever afterwards, as both friends and lovers, it was an unspoken rule that one would not go to sleep without the other beside him. Late at night, with the sound of the city beneath them, Krit would keep the nightmares at bay by whispering the poetry and stories the old man had recited to him throughout the years.
She smiles at him now, chattering incoherently about this and that through a mouthful of food and he can barely see the angry little girl from Manticore. This is his Syl, the girl who loves pizza and dirt biking, the girl who survived Manticore in more ways than one. She slaps at him animatedly, nudging him for the sarcastic, deadpan remark that often follows and he finds that this might be the only protocol he enjoys. That's thing about his relationship with Syl, he can see her from across a crowded, smoke filled room and know that he's the only one she's looking at.