Bricked
They tell her to go home. To take care of herself. Spend time with friends.
You'll be fine, they say.
It's impossible to believe them, but she tries.
She sits in the car for a while, her head on the steering wheel. On the radio, a news anchor sounds breathless as he talks about Mars. Those words of wonder pass her by unheard and she's lost. So lost. She turns the radio off. Digs her phone out and sits it down on her knee. Stares at it, her fingers itching to call someone, but she can't think of anyone.
She turns it off instead and drives.
When she wakes, the world has long forgotten her.
Nicole couldn't see much. A whole lot of dirty greens and browns swam behind a muddy sheen of white and whenever she blinked, sharp pain lanced from the back of her eyes to pulse through her skull.
Couldn't hear much either, except a shrill whistle and the pounding of her heart against her ears, and every inch of her pinched. Her skin felt too tight. Her bones thrummed. And yet, at the core of it all, lodged somewhere between her stomach and her heart, sat a tight knot of heat. Like she'd swallowed a sun. A sun that held her together — and she was convinced that if she spat it out, she'd fall apart.
Which was horribly weird and so Nicole concluded she'd lost her mind and that she'd be throwing up soon, even if she couldn't remember drinking near enough. Or at all.
Just…
Hands balled into fists and pressed into something hard and grainy, she clawed for the memory flitting by.
…thinking, who'll feed the dog?
A whiff of grass and rust tickled her nose, but what she tasted were brine and blood. Her stomach turned.
"Guardian?"
Nicole blinked again, more frantically this time, until the fog in her eyes lifted and she saw the earth against her knuckles and the grass creeping in around her.
"Eyes up, Guardian."
The voice, accompanied by soft whirrs and clicks, was persistent. It sounded like a man talking through a speaker somewhere. Somewhere close. A touch of air brushed her cheek.
She looked up. Squinted. The bright blue sky tried to burn her eyes from their sockets and so at first she thought the thing floating in front of her was a mirage. A small, twisted afterimage dancing in her vision. Made of… triangle… things. With a… bright blue eye? The eye seemed to squint back at her. The triangles clicked. Moved.
Panic slammed into her. Hard. It came with a rush of water. Enveloped her, flushed the warmth from her. Choked her. And she drowned.
Hundreds upon hundreds of years too late, Nicole screamed.
His Guardian scrambled back. Away from him. She knocked into the old helicopter, halfway tipping into it with her legs still kicking and then she— uh— found a rock.
And chucked it at him.
Almost hit him, too! A tiny, confused spark of pride spluttered somewhere in his processing core — even as he barely rolled out of the rock's trajectory.
"Oh dear." He stabilised himself, darted after her, and scanned through all manners of scripts collected by other Ghosts. The ones who'd found their Guardians already and had managed to get them not to— throw more rocks.
"Get away from me!" she shouted and here came the second rock.
He bobbed under that one too and stopped midair in the open side of the helicopter. She'd fled all the way into it, far back as she could manage. Sharp shadows wrapped around her as she sat there hugging her knees to her chest. Her shoulders jerked with how quickly she was breathing in and out.
Oh no.
"You're safe, Guardian." He inched forward. Just a little. "Even if all of this must be terribly confusing," he added and sunk lower. Closer.
Her eyes fixed on him. Wide. Terrified. Tears welled in them and his core pinched painfully.
This was perfectly normal, right? Had to be. He hesitated, his shell rolling a breath of an inch from left to right.
"I'm a Ghost," he started, which made her eyes snap open even wider, so he added, quickly, "I'm your Ghost. And I'm here to help you. See, you've been, ah, dead for a long, long time. But now you're not anymore, obviously, because I've brought you back." His voice tipped over slightly and he shimmied closer. "The Traveler brought you back. Its light did. Just wait until you see it, it's— it's— wait, let me show you." He tilted to the side and, with a click and an excited beep, projected a shimmering image inside the dark belly of the helicopter: the Traveler, its silver-white mass perched above the wide sprawl of the city.
His Guardian made a small noise.
"I've been looking for you for so long, you can't imagine. And now I can't wait to take you there," he blurted. "Home. Take you home, to the Traveler and to the city. They call it the Last City—" The image shifted to show the towering walls, then the streets filled with colour and life. "Or humanities last bastion, doesn't that sound grand? It's grand. Totally. Grand. And it will all make sense there, I promise. You'll understand why I brought you back. Why my light chose you, Guardian."
"Nicole," she said, her voice raw and choked.
Ghost froze. The image winked out and he twisted around, his eye cutting to her. She'd squeezed her knees together tightly and pulled them even closer to her chest.
"What?" he asked and stared.
Was it frowning?
This is a joke. This is a joke, looped in her mind. This is a JOKE.
Nicole chewed on her bottom lip, and, yeah, the thing frowned. Small sections of it folded down around its eye as it hovered in the air, reminding her of a bird caught on camera, except it was a… a… robot? Drone? Not a bird. And it talked. Talked nonsense.
Anytime now and she'd wake up. Had to. Wake up. A weight so heavy she could barely breathe pulled her lungs down.
"Nicole," she repeated. "My name is Nicole."
The thing— the Ghost —fell a few inches before catching itself and bouncing back up. "Oh no. No. That's not right. You can't know your name. You can't remember. Can... can you? You're not supposed to—"
"Of course I fucking remember," she spat.
It recoiled.
Then, inching closer again, it asked: "What eeeexactly do you remember?"
Nicole stared at it. It stared back. And when she got up and stumbled for the light, her head reeling so badly she wouldn't have been surprised if it'd screwed itself right off her neck, it darted out of her way.
She needed air. More air. There wasn't enough in here, but when she half-tripped out into the open, there wasn't near enough out here, either. So she walked. Grass, tall enough to brush her hips, tickled her wrists and bare forearms. The light clawed at her eyes. And with every step, she picked up speed.
She knew the flat top of the hill she was on. Knew the woods on that slope behind her, where she'd spent her childhood swinging sticks at invisible, but very evil, knights who'd risen from the graveyard at its base. The same graveyard she'd bolted out of just now—
Same one she'd risen from.
"Guardian!" the Ghost called after her. "Wait— where— wait!" It swung around in front of her, impossibly fast, the back of it turning in a wild circle. "Where are you going?"
Wordless, Nicole kept going. Hopped what'd been a tall, spiked fence once but was now no more than an awkwardly bent, rusted memory, and staggered into broken streets.
Under her feet, grass and shrubs grew from wide cracks in the asphalt. When she almost tripped over a chunk of road, the Ghost flitted to her side.
"Carefu—"
She swung an arm, blindly batting at it. Him. Him?
"Hey," it— he —complained and dashed back out of range. "I… I don't know what went wrong, I swear. But if you'll just let me take you back to the city we can figure this out. We'll talk to the Speaker and he'll know what to do."
What to do? What to do with what? She half ran, half staggered, through a home she'd left a few hours ago and that now lay in ruins. And still, she hoped she'd wake. Wake in an ambulance maybe or a hospital bed and not here, between the decayed walls of the tea store and the cinema with its one still standing sign, the letters and colours on it washed out.
"Guardian…."
The supermarket. Gone. Bus stop. Gone. Gas station? Good as, too. Deer bolted out of the trees and bushes that'd claimed it, their hooves smacking against the ground with dull little thuds. A flock of pigeons took to the skies, and Nicole kept going. She crossed a wide intersection, looking both ways to find nothing but decay and drooping traffic lights, and, at a jog that made her lungs burn, headed for where a four-story house ought to be.
He'd messed up.
How had he messed up though? Ghost shrunk in on himself. How did you get the one thing you were made for wrong? How was that even possible?
She stopped in front of the ruins of a house sheared off at about ceiling height of its second floor. The rubble of its missing walls lay scattered, and his Guardian climbed over them. Her breathing was laboured and mostly made of gasps, and as he carefully followed through the blown-out front door, she'd had to stop to steady herself against a wall, her torso folded forward.
He hovered behind her, his shell turning around itself uselessly. Come on. Say something, he thought, but couldn't yank anything remotely useful from his databases.
One deep breath later and she headed up a flight of broken stairs that popped loudly under her step, shaking off chips of concrete from their base. But they held. Once up, she crept around a wide-open gap in the floor at the top, hopped over the one after that, and then froze in front of an empty doorway.
His Guardian stood there, staring, her throat and jaw working quietly. Then her shoulders fell. Like someone had cut a string that'd kept her upright. And with a quiet whine trapped in her chest, she slunk inside.
When he tried to follow, a mangled brick almost clocked him straight in the eye. He bobbed out under it and twisted around to watch it smack into a wall.
His front plates turned a few degrees. Where did she keep finding those?
And what was he supposed to do now? Ghost inched up along the wall until his shell poked out over what was left of the ceiling. Below, she wandered the two rooms where the floor hadn't given out entirely, her steps small and slow. It was a pattern he recognised: someone who was looking for something. Searching. Much like he'd been. For so long.
Except he had found what he'd been looking for and she wasn't going to, was she?
Eventually, after countless rounds of back and forth over crushed furniture, she ducked into a corner, right under where the ceiling had slanted at a sharp angle. She slumped down. Pushed herself far back as she could… and sat there.
She'd traded the helicopter for what'd probably once been her home.
Ghost soon realized that his Guardian was very good at sitting still. For hours, she hardly moved and hadn't said a single word. She'd cried though. On and off. Quietly, for the most part. Easy to miss. It took until the sun finally set and the moon came up that she finally shifted enough to lay down on the floor.
The dirty, hard, cold floor.
Didn't take long and she started shivering. Weak shivers, he noticed, with barely enough strength left in her to make them count.
Guardians froze to death just like anyone else did. Starved, too.
But his? His wasn't going to, and so Ghost abandoned his perch and slowly slipped into the room.
Her eyes tracked him as he approached and she squirmed backwards. Away from him. Again. If he'd not known better, he'd have thought his core cracked. Or maybe it did. A little.
"I'm sorry," he said, quietly. So quiet, he wasn't sure she'd heard him.
She looked away, her eyes fixed on the floor now, as if not looking at him meant he'd vanish. Maybe right along with all of this.
. . .
And it could. He could make it go away. All he had to do was leave. She'd die again and that'd be it and— no, that wasn't going to happen.
Stubborn, his light pushed outwards, past his expanding shell and swept through the frigid air, and because he was a Ghost and Ghosts didn't own blankets or hot cocoa, he shared that, instead.
Admittedly, that confused noise his Guardian made? And how her eyes cut back to him and how she stopped shivering all of a sudden? Yeah, that. That was just a little satisfying.
A smidgen.
A tiny, tiny, bit.
Though not quite as much as how she loosened her grip on the brick she'd clutched. Which he'd definitely and absolutely noticed and wouldn't have gotten smacked out of the air with.
Totally not.
Ghost sunk a little lower still, pulled his shell back together, the soft click oddly loud in the otherwise perfect silence, and settled in the air above her shoulder. And when she didn't smack him right away he decided this was where he'd stay.