Stars, Hide your Fires

by BlueWay

Norea Du Noc lives, and the Fifth follows. Escaping to Earth from Asticassia amidst a meteor shower they find themselves in a mythical heartland of a world left behind by Capital, Ad Stella 122. Stars, Hide your Fires, traces their fortunes, their fate, and their destiny as they wander through the American West like the settlers before them, generations ago.

2. I

"The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs."

Blood Meridian; or, the Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy
1985

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I

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Descended from Christ's Followers -

Arrival from Space -

Nacogdoches -

The mosque -

A soup kitchen -

What was left behind -

Aren 't you happy to be alive? -

Definition -

The Home where children once had been -

Days of walking, days of wandering -

Origins -

Woken by a bull -

A man from somewhere else offers them shelter from the storm -

A nightmare of Solomon and the response -

Your shadow tells a story -

She runs away -

He loses her -

Eaten alive -

Palestine -

He begins to search -

Mistaken for a whore -

Offering denied -

Reverend Bancuo -

The bruised Mexican and the blood-stained implement -

A fight -

A bloodletting -

He offers himself -

Blood Meridian -

Burning of the temple -

Escape -

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Prodigal Sun

He was born on these lands a lifetime ago. On this Earth, old and beaten and left behind, his roots had remained in that place, planted by the Mennonites, eternal generations ago, who crossed the great Atlantic into the New World and, by the grace of Christ and his Apostles, went further and deeper into that land, bearing His truth: That one could not proclaim the faith without first knowing who they were, before accepting by baptism the unifying act that connected all of that ancient confession. For their interpretation of scripture, those who believed in the same God Almighty went to them, the Anabaptists, and waged war against them because of the cardinal sin of deviating from their course and believing in the will of Men to decide the finality of their own decisions to believe.

This young man, a lost man descended from Christ's followers, had been a long way from them, and even returning to the land of Fredonia, he felt no closer to the knowledge that might have come from their heritage. His heritage had not been direct, however. His heritage had been of them, not direct in correlation, not pure in its nature, in such parables that had been summed up in what had been an American Manifest Destiny. The Mennonites came to the West, and they, the White Man, did as they did as enshrined in History.

Above, the stars were wild, but he could not tell the stars from their rivals, put there by Man, put there by people who could not even be called humans, and those that gave him his face, a life, that he took from them now in turn too.

Above, those stars were wild, and he had come from them back to where he had once been, a lifetime ago.

It was the only place he could go, and he knew where to go. His new skin had not known the sun, the wind, the salt of the Earth that blew in gusts across the plains of Comancheria, whistling with distant songs from another era that told stories of dead warriors, lost wars, and the coming of a new age and world that had no consideration for the old and the sick and the red. He thought he heard them—those words, buried deep within his memory and the memory of his blood—but when he looked back within himself, there had been no child that had learned them. All that he had been was that which he had been made into: Skin that was pale and pliant, befitting a child who had not known what the true nature of the Earth was after centuries of its exploitation and then finally, its abandonment by that new class of people known as Spacian.

He's not big, barely a man in all physicality, more a creature formed up out of belief and cells, standing at five foot and then near eight inches. A polite look made of him; he is neither a white man nor an ethnic man in those lands but looks as if a race of something entirely other; whose entire form seemed wholly incompatible with where he found himself. He walks with structure, even if weakly, a heavy rag that had once been a discarded blanket over his shoulders disguising a uniform that belonged to a school not of that Earth. If his shoulders used to be held high, they were now slanted in his movement. His body had forgotten the pull of Gravity.

The woman he walked with had been much displeased with their situation, the soles of their shoes now so flattened that the leather of them had been thin like skin itself, for they felt every rock and gritstone beneath them. But, despite being a long way from whatever the closest thing she could consider home was, she had been at least alive enough to feel anything at all.

She's thin and lithe, shorter than the young man, at least by a head, but more sturdy for it. Her hair is wild and a burning blue that clashed with the sky above when it had been present, for that's what she was and had been: a woman at war and always fighting. Her wrists taut, her knuckles and hands are hardened over like shells; she has used her hands for labors beyond right knowing. Her face is ambivalent, it does not move; it is like stone in its feminine and pretty look as the young like hers tend to, but when it does morph it morphs into a crude anger.

On both of their faces are lines that are barely perceptible, but they are lines like fingerprints put there by large beings now lost to all recognition. Scars to them, some new, some recent, some buried beneath flesh and bone, and some not scars at all but hidden away in the psyche of themselves. Somewhere far away within the dilapidated ruins of the city of New Orleans, where none remained save for the survivors of some devastating proxy war now decades old and yet not gone, was where they had landed. It was not a maneuver by choice, but it had been one in unison with nature as they fell from the heavens amidst the burning of distant astrology, streaks of light, myriad in their number, as they each bore the name and joined the dance of the Lyrids, fighting down those who followed and killing those who led.

They came to the Earth in fire, on fire, onto the Mississippi River Delta, where the machines that carried them all from space to the ground groaned one last time together and in unison and then sank into the Earth, never to be seen again.

Thorn nearly took the woman with it, but she had been dragged, screaming, from its metallic Space out into the only world she ever knew: ruined, but hers.

They continued to run, hiding from the sun and what horrible eyes could be born in it, trying to go west, to the place where the sun died each day and where they could move afoot away from their immediate adversaries. They ran from the sun, from their lives, from the world that had been and the world that had been promised to them. They walked the Earth silently for a week, not saying a word to each other and communicating only in the gesture of hands, the language of fingers, and faces as they stomped across the West, toward the mythical West on that North American continent where the modern world had come and never released Humanity of itself. In the bones of that world, they scrambled across metal landscapes pasted upon a nature that only now, centuries later, had begun to take back, drawing back with its vines and its own hands, these implements and machines that had been taken from the ground, now brought back by rust, time, and rain.

Huddled together in the cellar of a jazz club abandoned for decades, where metal and glass had long since been scavenged, they hid from a storm that could never, in all of Man's devising, be created. The world was howling their names, swirling in debris and destruction over a land already ruined, waves battering and nearly drowning them where they sheltered in that place at the edge of Caddo Land, where the bayous rose up into the heart beckoned by that storm as if reminding all those who lived away from the coast that nature would always reclaim what had been it by birth rite, screaming.

The young man sat between two storms, and of one he hid from, the other he held as they shrank in that dark, and he had hoped, as he had begged for her no more than a week ago, that they should go elsewhere and find meaning in all things there, but most importantly in their lives. Storms were named after people, and that nameless, timeless night he had been beholden to storms in their entirety, wet and ruining the world.

They survived that night, just barely, emerging from that dark place within the crucible of the Earth entirely torn up and not knowing why they lived.

As he scavenged for food of any kind, the young woman sat upon the rooftop of a car long made brown and skeletal, took out her book, and began to do as she always had: document this world with her eye and with her pencil. She was economical in her strokes upon those worn blank pages until the world had been within her book. She closed it, crushing the lead that had been sacrificed in its creation—the image of destruction.

They needed to go west.

When they first spoke together outside of the primordial grunting of attention and response, she demanded why:

"Because I was born there."

She looked at him on the edge of the world, ruined again, with great questions.

"You haven't told me yet." She grounded low. "Your name." She seemed so small to ask, as if in that moment of great upheaval, when she was convinced to go on, he had not fulfilled his part.

His mouth had parted, and his face had cleared as if it had been wiped of the memory of the last week, as if he had been back in that place, back in that war for her life that was circumspect of the war between entities and businesses that he was made for. Indeed, he had forgotten in the mess of things, in the disasters that came and the fighting that followed them out of Asticassia. She knew a name for him, but that was not who he was, no more than the clouds could be defined by their shapes alone.

"I don't know it." He admitted it, talking to the wind between them. "I think I don't know it. No one used it before they gave me his."

"Of course you know your own name. You have one regardless, don't you?"

"I think I never knew how to speak it."

"What?"

He looked out to the West, and he had been bastardizing it even there.

"You have to remember at least how it's spelled, right?"

Not every language has its own characters or even its own speakers.

He shook his head as the sun died in the West, a blood-red color like that seeping from a corpse. She saw his face and saw the pain of it, and she saw how he, the supposed Spacian, who had everything for the troubles of the Earthian, had been missing that one fundamental thing that even she had.

Her name was Norea Du Noc. Born in the French region, where one hundred years ago Europe itself burned over as its populations tried to become the first among their supposed equals to reach space and start an old project all over again: that of empire, but they had done nothing but burn themselves out, for Capital had gone there first.

They ate berries and scraps, he and she, and when darkness covered the land and the stars returned, they moved from shadow to shadow and went on.

She had been more practical in their pacing. If they were sought out, they could not tell. The hurricane that had come immediately after they came to land had done as much to hide them as much as it did to almost kill them, and if there were searches to be they wanted no part in it.

In the night amongst ruined wilds, they saw cookfires in the dark from places inside buildings, small communities they stayed far away from, blinkering lights from motor vehicles traversing the still passable roadways of that continent. The branches, the grass, and the jagged metal of the wet world grabbed at their limbs in the dark, lit only by moonlight above. Darker than Space above the Earth, she was blackened in shadow. She was the one who led, used to following these unseen trails by feeling and instinct alone. She had much experience using night as a cover from those stars above and all those who called those stars neighbors. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same, and if all remained the same, she knew how this would end. The bitterness in her heart remained, and as much as she realized that there could have been a better world out there, a better life, the overwhelming reality was that she could not make it so. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

She did not know, and living those past few days did not illuminate more about her place.

In an old linen factory, they trudged through, its product left to rot. He sees her face, and he sees that same conflict. That same fear. That same unknowing anxiety and disgust at life and its turmoil

He stopped, and she had noticed his footsteps stop behind her. She turned.

He was digging through a pallet, barehanded, drawing away sopping wet fibers laid out again and again, stitched together by seamstresses in that factory now gone for years. Dirt and bugs became unraveled in it, grime beneath his fingertips, and great bellowing gusts of wind came from the dispersion of ruined dark blankets and towels laid out landing with plops upon concrete ground.

"What are you doing?" she asked, going to him slowly as he scrounged.

"Trying to keep warm." He answered bluntly.

She was better off. Her jacket had been thick and meant for field use, the fur collared hood a necessity of the eastern frontiers where she had come from in the night. He had only the uniform of Asticassia, down to his shorts. He rummaged in the old containers, finding discarded and disintegrating article after article until, after a while, he found a gray sheet that had been meant for a child, a baby. It was gray in color, not too soft, and plain. He had brought it along his shoulders, tying it around his neck, and he stood like that before her, and on her face, she did not seem there.

"What's wrong?"

"What are we doing?" We, the royal we, the we that came into their parts here, now, alive together with a whole mess of trouble "What happens now?"

"What do you mean?"

"We're on Earth again, on a continent; I don't think either of us really knows, and for all that, we can assume those Spacians are still hunting us." The locations changed, as did their direct context, but the overarching truths of the world did not budge. People had been dead. She was alive, and she didn't quite want to be, and although they might have shaken off the enemy, nothing was promised for tomorrow. She didn't want to be alive, and yet she was afraid of death. Those two feelings were what kept her breathing in a cold swirl in her mind and in her body, and she did not know what was or what could be. Tomorrow was unknown. "I want to know." To keep the fear at bay, for he, even now, seemed to have that knowledge.

But he didn't. Not of the material reality that they would find tomorrow. Not any of that. What he could promise was what he had promised over Asticassia, holding her by way of a mobile suit. Now he would do so again, holding her, touch to touch, flesh to flesh. He walked over to her, and she did not move. "I don't know what is in tomorrow. I don't know about the next hour, what we're going to eat next, or when we can sleep soundly. I have, maybe, an idea; it's very vague, I admit, about what we're doing, but I know it feels right, and if there's anything that is assured," he stopped. He pulled his blanket-turned poncho tighter to him but brought his arms under and up in front of him. "I told you, and I mean it truly. More than anything I've ever said, or what I've ever been. I will be with you. Let me help you find out what you need, where you have to be, how to live—everything. Please. Norea." He spoke softly, but his words each demanded a piece of himself, which he freely gave to her. "One day at a time. One step at a time. We put everything behind us, and then we go on." And he reached for it now as he did then, but not in urgency but in waiting for permission. He did not want to lunge at her. He waited for her to bridge the distance, and she did, stepping forward. His hands, newly wet and dirty, touched upon her black shirt at her arms, and his thumbs rode circles into them as he hunched, looked at her, eye to eye, and tried his best to assure her that of all his intentions, they were all, in the end, for her.

He wanted to see her through.

She knew it.

They moved on.

In the spring of the year of Ad Stella 122, Norea Du Noc and the young man walked into the town of Nacogdoches. They dressed together still in the same clothes that had been on them almost a month ago in New Orleans, and it showed beneath their own scavenging: the blanket-made poncho, jackets left to the wayside that had shrunk in one corner but been too big in the other, their hands bandaged up by dry cloth, and their lips dry and cracked, the same as their skin, which had been beaten down by the sun above. They are wanderers; they do not avoid the company of others, fleeting as they were, passing by them for their own ends. They pass in the night and share the fire's grace and sometimes food. A hunter, a nameless traveler, a man wishing to return to Appalachia so he may die where his family had been known to do so. They do not talk about themselves. They do not need to.

Even with generosity and scavenging luck, they are thin, their eyes sunken in; their possessions are few, if anything, past a sketchbook and a mechanical pencil and the clothes that they wear. Only by the rain above in the day in which they sleep do they not die of dehydration, the sound making them scramble for any implement and sometimes just going out into the rain themselves and opening their mouths to it. He knows better, and perhaps it surprises her, that he does not simply sip from every stream and every pond they come across.

He too was born on Earth, and he too knew what she fought for.

In that century, the federal organization of the world beneath nations and city states devolved in light of Capital. What became the norm had become the distant used-to-be and in-name-only, and if they walked in the land of what had been the United States of America, then they did not notice as much as they rode into a country whose only civilization came in spots, and of what bonds there were, they had been for pragmatic reasons, economic reasons, and not those of ancient culture or politics. Even when Mankind went to Space, the world became very, very small. There in that dry country that bordered the arid West and the eastern states, there remained pot marks of war—nameless conflicts that came of greed, of hatred, of race, of animals, of water, and of the world. destroyed mobile suit, a dilapidated tank, and holes in the ground where artillery had done their deadly business have now grown back over. They were skeletal remnants of what had been to make the world the way it was, and they were sour memories that had faded into the white noise.

This town had been the first outcropping of consistent light for miles; for the towns of that country, where people huddled together by resource or hidden altogether, they were not civilization, and when they came to the Earth, they might have thought themselves coming up into a different Earth altogether that had regressed far more than even they knew. The stars above dimmed by streetlight, the sound of more consistent car traffic as they followed the more regularly used highway, American dreams passed by in headlights illuminating them harshly for seconds of the time along the road until they came to an overpass that went before the border of the town, and even in the dark of night they saw a place humming in its own midnight. In the dark silhouette, no error could be found; there was no war that came, just the abstract idea of a town, the oldest of all in that place called Texas.

Behind them, trucks rolled by, and their wake billowed their clothes in the intolerable chill of the night, trees reaching up like ground-borne clouds, masking the shape of the land and the buildings that resided as residents walked along in whatever activities brought them through into the night. There they came not because of any particular reason, for when the young man said he had been born of that land, he meant in the larger abstract, but rather just because it had been a place, a landmark, proof that the world was real and they were real in it.

Norea had never been on this side of the world, but it had been the same here as it had been in the coastal Balkans, the Ukrainian suburbs, and even metropolitan Berlin. All these images of places people lived in had been fleeting, shedding light on those that left them behind. Nacogdoches was just another place on Earth.

She wondered if anyone in this town, which came out before them like a reflection of the stars above them, and perhaps in that whole state, had been to Space. She wondered if she had been tainted now that she had been there. They stood there for a long time along the concrete half-wall of that overpass, the world moving behind them in steel and in trucks, the wind each time threatening to take them.

"You're going to have to take my name." She tells him lowly. "Any name."

"You pick one, then. Better you than anyone." He breathed in the air, and he could feel his hair ebb in the flow—long, down to the root, a dirty blonde and not the black he was born with.

"You should pick one yourself if you're not using the one your mother named you." She didn't hide the fact that she had been annoyed by it. "Can't you even guess at all?"

He really did try, and he had been trying for days and weeks as their bodies did the bare minimum in their overland travel to keep his mind somewhat stimulated outside of returning to an animal.

It was part of the training, the regiment, and the absolute checklist of lines that he had to follow or else he would be dispensed with and made even worse than nothing. Any thought or inclination toward what had been in his past had to be more than buried; they had to be made non-existent.

He never really was good at following plans, but he had made it work, and in the end, it meant nothing. The damage had been done, however, and at the tip of his memory had been the fizzling, the pinch of pain, and the primal fear of knowledge within him that had long since burned away.

He opened his mouth as if to let his subconscious say what he could not fully articulate, but nothing more came out. "No." He answered simply, turning to her. They were both shivering beneath their tattered clothes. "Come on. There must be some place here for us."

They went into the town together, and he led. They looked like pilgrims from the ancient past making their journey to the great Salt Lake, but they had no hand cart, no mule, no animal, and no bags—just themselves, shuffling forward. Brick and brick buildings were numerous in that place, and indeed, it was only brick that survived more than glass and steel for whatever war might have come to the town. Trucks nearly two centuries old rolled off with their tools and their hands in the back, and those many men with their canvas jackets and hats that had been so familiar to those of their type passed them by and tipped their brims at them in greeting or to hide their gazes from them. The two of them only knew their wretchedness when they passed by a storefront window, their own ghosts staring back at them.

They were creatures of the Earth entirely, brown, dirtied, and beaten, but alive at least.

"How many nights for you, like this?" He spoke to the reflection of the storefront closed, curtains drawn. It was a cobbler, and his soles hurt even more. He spoke to her history, fighter that she was; a young soldier he imagined was used to this pain, this throbbing dark ache, and the stench.

"Too many," she says swiftly. "It's why we stayed near Greece the most, sometimes Malaysia, sometimes Palestine." Always moving. Always trying to find a place to hide, to strike, and, at last, to live away from the eyes of those above. Always move in the night; always rest under cover; go to the ground; and move with the birds, the clouds, and the weather. Their life was not their own in those days. "Warmer there."

"We'll go back there some day. If that is what you want."

"Someday…"

Those places, enshrined by lead and charcoal upon pulp She held her sketchbook closer to her, and if there was any warmth to it, she tried to take it all, but in her sketchbook had in aggregate only been the dead and the dying.

They walked on, their footsteps so light they had wondered if they were walking at all and not already dead: ghosts in their own bodies left in limbo, and if that had been the case they did not question it, but only by the way that those open windows of apartments and homes of people yet to go to sleep looked out and saw them, only to darken and close off, did they know they were alive. They were hungry, but it was a hunger they were not unfamiliar with. Each of them had been children of the Earth and all that it had meant. Days of hunger, days of begging—it brought him into his life as much as it brought her own before her. She chose to fight and he to sublimate out of the same genesis of condition the world over.

The town was dark, and the wind was the language of the Earth flowing over it as trees becked and bowed in slight shimmies, leaves ruffling only to remind them that they could be as easily fragile as those green blades. Horses—so many horses muffled in their nightly murmuring—had been present in backyards and in up-front stables in a world that had to regress to find more sufficient, efficient solutions. Gas wasn't always available. The last oil wells on Earth were now so deep, or gone entirely, that those who drove at all did so at great cost. Fusion and electric vehicles, and indeed many modern amenities, were not yet common outside of the great port and Space elevator cities. North America had been bracketed by two: One in New York City and the other in Seattle, and here, mid-country, the two of them had wanted flight from them and how Space seemed to seep back onto Earth like a poison.

Only there, without ownership and withering away, were they finally brought back to where they came from. They became children again, born of Earth and its tragedy and history, and for that they were cold and hungry. With their unusual intelligence, they now knew better the cause of their strife. The dark forests of trees left unchecked between suburban buildings rose above them, blocking the stars above.

It's still the same hunger, the same pain, and the same cold.

At his back, her hand balls a fistful of that dirty cloth over his shoulders, bringing her close to him, and he stays still on that back road before houses.

They don't say anything for it; they don't move again for a while as the young man tries his best to draw what warmth within him outside of himself to her, and she does her best to share it back. Nothing happens.

A car down the street rounds the corner. Black and white, with great red and blue bulbs atop it. They move on quickly.

At a church of his preferred denomination, they are turned away by a woman who states that city ordinances do not allow the homeless to house themselves in places like this. At another, Christian all the same, the head of the denomination, tired at that midnight hour, sorrowfully blesses them both but cannot accept more, for as he opens the doors to his parish, on each bench before the bleeding Christ there had already been men, women, and children bundled end to end in rest. They go on. A synagogue, too, sends them away. Lutherans and their place of worship say that it isn't policy and they must go or else. Each time they are rejected, the cold seeps in more.

They would return to the overpass, at least if nothing else came forth.

And nothing else did.

They had spent many nights now sleeping rough and wretched; this was just one more night.

As they passed, however, doors opened off of Center Road on the way out, and in those doors, a man beckoned. He was a man dressed in simple robes, albeit he wore jeans beneath them; his skin was dark, and his beard was great and gray. In both of his hands were small paper cups, steaming in his big hands.

The two of them froze, not understanding what they saw at first until the man walked out of his building and stopped mid-street. No one else in that town seemed to be awake at that time.

Norea, in her worldly knowledge, knew better. She uncurled the hand that had been at the back of the young man's blanket and approached the man, an Imam. He had emerged out of a simple white building, indistinguishable save for its color and unremarkable, but the doors had been open at least. "As-salamu alaykum."

"Wa ʿalaykumu s-salam." The Imam spoke with the voice of that country. "Please, you and your compadre can have this." The cups swirled, and the smell was familiar: green tea. They were a godsend in her hands as she took each of them, and the young man had slowly crept up. "Drink it here, and if you want, we have cots open."

Norea handed off a cup to the young man, still without a name, and he took it, quietly thanking the Imam, who smiled upon them both. "In the morning, we run a soup kitchen in our parking lot, and after that, we have a few volunteers who offer their homes for showers." The Imam offered further They needed that. They needed it all. Where are you two from?"

They cannot say their truth, and if it feels wrong to lie to a holy man, but they both had worse sins upon them. "New Orleans." The young man asks for Norea, and she accepts. "We're coming from New Orleans." And before that? A state-of-the art academy where hunger and miracles were daily, and it had all turned itself asunder by the arrival of Witches.

The Imam's eyes widened slowly, and he took it as a final answer from cursed names that they had no knowledge of their weight. "Ah. No wonder." They stood there in the street and drank the nourishment of the tea. It burned their throats on the way down, but it made them feel alive again, brewing warmth in their bellies.

They learned later that New Orleans had been host to a massacre: a private military company that had been in charge of transportation of a stockpile of Permet had been caught in a hurricane so terrible that it destroyed the city, and when they came to recover it from the convoy destroyed, they found people there, according to their testimony, looting it. The mercenaries turned what was left of New Orleans inside out, rounding up people, turning over pockets, hands, and entire homes, often with the permission of death or, at least, a gun, in their search for the material. At the end of it, New Orleans banded together and attacked the mercenaries, and when the sun rose after that night of fighting, three thousand people lay dead and the city was abandoned.

Every place had its ghost stories; every place was haunted by its own past. Even there, even here, wherever people had gone and gone "Thank you." Norea bowed her head once, and the young man emulated her. They went into the mosque and followed. It was not a grand example, but it had been recently built, serving its purpose not by design but rather by what it was co-opted for. Though barren, it was not unkind; there were a great many shoes left at the portal that had been slipped off onto its wide floor. The minbar was modest in its steps, created of wood as it divided up the main chamber in two with cots on either end. Men and women of all colors and all creeds Young and old, sick and unlucky. Men on one end, women on the other. All had been long asleep, and those empty cots on either end were beckoning.

They stood frozen, and after a while, the Imam turned in confusion. It was the young man, frozen, and Norea remained with him.

"We're dirty, sir. I am at least." It felt wrong stepping into that place as they were, the drippings of the country on them. If nothing else, Asticassia's dust itself perhaps still remained woven into their fabric, and how they ruined that place and brought war to the students there, whose only crime was the fortunes of their birth, Norea agreed, putting her eyes away from the floor with those many shoes and socks, but could not admit it out loud. The Imam looked at them again once before stepping over and back to them, taking his large hands and putting them upon the young man's shoulder, grasping his blanket slowly before unwrapping it from him. As the article spun, the dust came off of it, and the man's white robes were still dirtied as he looked to Norea and gestured for anything of her own. She had nothing to give. The Imam, patting the bundle in his arms, stepped back onto the raised floor of the mosque proper and took that dust with him.

"I'll see if I can clean this. Please, stay. You seem like you've come a long way."

They slept at opposite ends of the mosque from each other, he in the corner of the rows designated for the men, and she sandwiched between two other cots of two women who rested so tiredly they seemed dead, one of them dressed in the army fatigues of a long-deposed army. Blankets that shone like metal foil had been provided to them, along with a simple pillow. People snored, but it was blissful white noise in that warm place, bundled together as vagrants accepted in the light of God, not too often prayed for in that country. The young man kept glancing down between his legs to see if Norea had still been there, and she had, and he had kept checking until sleep took him mercilessly.

In his sleep, he saw himself in this country, storybook mirages of what he might have become had it not been for the weakness of himself, alone in that world. His mother may have given him a name, but he had no mother or father to speak of. He knew who he was, for the image of who he had been still remained. In that dream, he was riding on a donkey, a tattered donkey, across a prairie. The clothes he wore were perhaps not nice, but useful and fit for the life he had lived in that dream yet. When he came to a stream, he unsaddled the donkey, kicking his feet over its back and putting himself on dry ground as well. The donkey nuzzled his side, and he led it with the reins to the water of the stream, and in that stream he saw himself. He saw a version of himself that lived from the age he was born to the age he was now. Had his skin always been so brown? His eyes are so deep and black. He crouched down to divine further details of this unknown man that might have resided within him in the dream, but for all that he wanted to know, he brought his face up to the water of the stream, and then he dipped his head into it.

He woke, not with a startle but simply with the relief that he had been warm and that he had been alive another day.

He looked between his legs, and Norea had still been curled up on her cot.

In their travels so far, it was always one or the other that forced the other to awaken. Most of the time it was her, but sometimes it was him, tearing each other from a welcoming darkness where nothing was required of them. Today, it's the same story, however.

The man that slept beside him was an older man with great scars that started at the center of his forehead all the way down across his eye and to his neck. He coughed once, getting the young man's attention. "You best help square up the place; it's almost morning prayers."

"Huh?"

"Morning prayers. These Muslims pray more than some people eat; hell, more than I eat at least."

Norea had been roused awake by a hand, but that had been a mistake. She seized up out of the blanket, teeth bared like fangs, both her fists closed as she snapped in her covers. The woman that woke her was to advise her of the same thing, but she spoke no more as the great adrenaline that rushed through Norea was like a crack in that room that paused it before motion began again. Fear had been in the woman's eyes as she tried to draw her hand away, and Norea had let her go.

She was up and awake, once again wondering why she had been.

Across that modest prayer room, the young man looked at her, and she settled herself.

The Muslims all started to pile in quietly after, almost an hour before the dawning of the world, and those that had been in need in the night passed and shuffled by exchanging places as the Imam emerged from his own quarters with fresh clothing, going through the organized crowd who had known so rightly their place on the carpeted floor in a grid-like pattern, facing to the east. In that direction, like a conductor, the Imam had gone to that place in the room appointed, and together the men and women who were of that country and yet could not be differentiated from those of other faiths save for the women who wore their coverings all looked to a place beyond all of them and spoke words of a different language normally left unheard and completely absent from Space itself. In humble recitation, the words of the Takbir were heard as people crossed their arms across each other and said in expression Allahu Akbar, God is great, greater than all. In harmonic unison, those who knew that they were alive had given their thanks, their respect, and their graces as they had to a Prophet not often cared for in the land of Texas.

These words are not unfamiliar to Norea, not as those homeless who needed meals awaited outside and heard their recitation from beyond those walls. In many countries, she had heard these words spoken in the shadow of Spacian mobile suits and Spacian oppressors, and no doubt nothing had changed, not with how it all turned out.

She had gone to Space on a mission, one that had the chance to bring it all down, and for their efforts...

They passed by many graveyards on the way here. Some were formal, some were full, and some were made by nothing but mounds and mounds of honored and dishonored dead from conflicts and the trials of life that remained. Portals to some other place, where all the gods were and paradise was accessible for all who needed it.

In these words of Islamic rite and passage, she could imagine, maybe, hearing the voices of the dead.

She tried to listen for the daughter of a seamstress dead in her own grave after childbirth and the father who never had been because of a shootout with Cathedra officers of the peace. She tried to listen for others like her, for the Witch, who was training up for a continuing war with her. She tried to listen for the young woman, like her, dead of her capabilities, but all she heard were hymns.

After the service, the Muslims all came back out after quick and polite morning greetings, extensions of a community still existing. Old and young. Men and women Husbands, wives, and families

In the year Ad Stella 83, there had been a war that ravaged its way through Texas between its national guard and the cartel raiders coming up from Mexico, and in that war that was waged in the traditional method, both sides became alike in casualties as the Benerit Group and its Earth Garrison Force came to intervene just because the fighting had finally reached a final highway bridging New York City to Seattle. They came swiftly, and they left the dead behind and the warning that if trade was stopped, no more could be living in that country.

Those that remained had lived simple, normal lives in spite of everything. They came by walking, by horse, and some by communal car, listing on their sides the street name by which they shared. They were not rich people, but they were people who had been full in their situation, and as services ended, Zakat was fulfilled. Those who knew of this service for the homeless and the poor lined themselves along the sidewalk in front of the mosque as the rest of the world woke up.

Norea and the young man fell into line as well, and the great pots came out, and the smell of food, of sustenance, came out, as in that line the huddled masses saw relief soon for their hungers. That same tea smell filled the air. Horses whinnied, fed grain from a lone volunteer who dragged a sack of oats to each of their mouths in a parking lot that had been more animal than machine. Many lines like this exist for both of them: for her in the recent past and for him in the distant past. Those who bore the symbolism of doves and red crosses and ivy and hands within hands had tried their best in a world undone to put it right again, but nothing could be made right in a world where profit had been the god of those in power and Capital saw little use for the charity given. And yet charity was still had by those not attached to the powerful but rather attached to God, to their own hearts, and to the belief of good. The line shuffled forward step by step until at last they found themselves served by adherents of that place, and the Imam had been there as well, barely in any clothing at all that could identify him as a father of that parish. When the young man approached, he was offered two things: a tray filled with a bowl of hot cereal dusted with cinnamon, an apple, orange juice, and rolls of sliced turkey meat. The other had been his blanket, clean and shining, on his shoulders again.

"Thank you." The young man spoke breathlessly. The Imam nodded and smiled, and he moved on.

They sat on the curb as they ate their meal, the most full and complete in weeks. The hunter they met shared his meats, dried and curled, but still fulfilling in the night. Before them, the sun rose in gray light, beset by clouds. They ate quickly, Norea more savage than anything as she devoured. Hunger truly rose and was put away as soon as it had an outlet, and she had taken in all that had been offered to her, and when she was done, she nearly threw the tray down onto the ground and held her head in her hands. The young man ate as he had been trained, even as the tray sat on his knees as others joined him at their sides. He appreciated this food in a way he had never before, save for that first day when he bore his new face and was offered a banquet—a taste of his new life to come.

She rubbed her face over and over with her dirty hands, as if trying to squash some darkness beneath her flesh that lay at the precipice of her skull, but she could not. Still the same. Everything was still the same. Breadlines, soup kitchens, and needless poverty, which she had not only been witness to but a part of

For her short time out in Space, masquerading as children of privilege, she saw food so available and food so wasted that no one could consume them all before they were tossed out.

Needless suffering, needless hunger

The stars that lay low overhead had now begun to twinkle as morning came.

"Did you leave anything behind?" The young man asked her after a while, leaving only his orange juice to sip on. She looked up from her hands, and her face was so red and wet and silent.

She answered. "What do you mean?"

"Back on Asticassia, or even with your friends." The young man stepped on tumultuous ground. She had her sketchbook. That's all she needed. She shook her head. "We could try to get back to them if that is what you want. If you think that would help,

It was a very easy thought. On every continent, there had been cells of the organization that trained her and raised her. Separated by necessity but together in cause. The Dawn of Fold was born again and again after defeat because their cause had been righteous. It would've been so easy to go back to them, to try and find Olcott, and to begin the path of her life all over again.

But it wouldn't have been the same. Not without Sophie.

If she wanted to live, after all, she couldn't go back to them. Not now. "No. It's too dangerous." She tilted her head as she tucked her legs into her arms and looked at him and his unnaturally pale green eyes. "We're on our own."

And yet hadn't that been the dream?

The young man drank his juice, looking around himself. "I don't think so. Not really."

A man adherent to the Mosque had found an old acquaintance, a friend even, as he saw along the wall of the building and ate his breakfast. The Muslim man sat by the homeless, and he spoke and asked if he was doing okay and that he hadn't touched liquor since he had last seen him. The homeless man shuffled uncomfortably, and that had been the answer, but the Muslim sought him no less and offered him companionship with a pat of his shoulder. A woman serves a child, no older than eleven, slipping a single wrapped piece of candy onto her tray as well. A veteran of the war keeps back his tears as he looks upon the apple he had been given, and then upon biting it once, he weeps, for there had been no greater and more perfect apple there than the one he held in his hand, and it had been beautiful.

"I want to tell you that I came from this." The young man spoke into his drink, and she listened. "I'm from this country, and I wasn't well off. My parents were always gone; I never knew them. I was on my own as soon as I could leave the house, and maybe that's what happened. I don't remember." He didn't remember the specifics, only the vague impressions and concepts of a boy who left home to feed himself. He did not know the home; he did not know the parents, who for at least maybe a decade tried to incubate in them a new generation and yet could not for the world around them. He remembered hunger, at least, eternal grit and dirt, the sun above, and those so bothered by themselves they could not spare change for a child. He remembers hearing about war in distant counties and hearing about men dead in alleys he had walked through only hours before. He heard people decry the names of those they thought were to blame for the world around them: Grassley, Jeturk, Peil, and Benerit. They cursed them up so much that when a man claiming to represent one of them came to him in the night as he slept on the cold plains of forever land, he sought what was familiar and came into a holding pattern to what he could be and did be for a while. He was the fifth one in line, and he hoped to be the last, but he did not know that truly.

"For almost ten years, I've been like this. I've been like this longer than I was myself." He spoke aloud, and those around him did not listen, save for her. "They keep us ready, on a space station in the asteroid belt so far away from everything. There was at least a dozen of us when I was chosen to take number four's place. They kept us there, and we'd observe everything that he'd do every day; we'd watch him from all the cameras on him. We'd reenact scenes of his daily life. Not completely necessary, but it was a good habit, for the most important thing was making sure that we were in place and in position to further the company line."

They told them—all of them did—that he had been so different from the Fourth, but it was no matter, because the reason for that change had made silly sense in the form of her—the Witch from Mercury.

He never got to apologize to her for his forwardness, but that was just one of many things left behind that he did not need to follow up on again. What was left was left, and he had still been alive, and that was what had been important.

The sun rose in the east, rising in a milky smear that, despite its mildew color, delivered warmth all the same.

"Are you happy to be alive?" Norea asked him, seeing his profile and the dirt and sweat that had set into the pores of his skin, once very well taken care of. It was a neutral question, but her words had been acid and venom. She wasn't quite sure, or she couldn't quite believe how pliant and at ease he seemed then and there.

"With you?" He tilted his head back to take in the sun's warmth in the morning dew before he rolled his head to look upon her. "Of course."

"Tch." She looked away to avoid what he could not miss.

"And how about you? Are you happy?"

"I'm wondering if this isn't just some mistake. If I wasn't supposed to-" She hung on the word, that horrible, horrible word, "die, when you said those annoying things to me."

Whatever could be said, he finds none more true than this, and she deserved nothing more than the truth. "I'm glad you didn't."

"Stop talking."

He smiled his soft smile back at her, and that was that.

The breakfast service concluded, and the Imam came to him, a husband and wife pair of middle age behind him at a distance as he joined the two on the curb. "Normally, I do gradually speak of my mission here, to bring people into the light of Islam, but, from the look of you two, I think that there are more fundamental questions yet that you need answers for." He spoke with a voice accented by all the land around them, and if there was dissonance there, it would have been more whimsical and curious in nature. "You're always welcome to sleep nights here; I cannot provide for you entirely in the day, but I pray to Allah that whatever darkness that you find yourselves in, that you are strong enough to see your way through it."

"Thank you, but I think we'll be moving on from here soon." Norea answered quickly.

"Oh?" She offered no explanation to the Imam, but the young man did.

"We just have a lot to put behind us."

"Where are you going then?"

"There's no place in particular. What matters is what's behind us."

The Imam nodded, thinking of it for a moment. The three of them sat there on the curb now alone as the others had gone off for their activities for the day or were met by volunteers who took them in their care and walked off deeper into the town. The husband and wife that the Imam came with waited patiently, and their eyes could be felt on the two vagrants backs.

"I understand." The Imam finally said, running his hands down from his beard to on top of his knees. "I do."

He spoke of the country of his birth, a kingdom of Mesopotamia risen in those last hundred years that still rejected all forms of religion and persecuted those that did believe because in that world, the only God that could possibly be was the connection of man to business, and only then, when that bond was impermeable and absolute, could other beliefs, no matter how granular, be allowed. He had been a salaryman who worked in offices looking at digital boxes and numbers in support of a larger company, which itself was just an auxiliary logistical organization for one aspect of the Benerit Group's Earth activities. There was no soul in that work, and all men had souls to balm, to connect with, to expand, and to make known their own nature through how they lived, he explained. So he found through family and through hidden history how exactly to find himself: in adherence to the belief of the last modern religion, and how he lost himself in his life as all young men had been centered himself in service to the greatest purpose he had ever known, and more than that, sought in the crucible of faith what had particularly happened to him so as to balm the souls of those around him and to help all who needed help in the name of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and his messenger on Earth.

He could not do this in his own country, though, for the enemies of the people came to him and nearly killed him for it. He ran a long way, halfway across the world, until he found a place in his heart where he felt the world behind him no longer mattered and instead the life in front of him had been offered.

He came to the town of Nacogdoches, and he remained there to this day, speaking this truth:

He said that if men did not know who they were, they could find themselves, if not in God, in each other, for he knew that not all who walked on Earth were aware of or willing to accept powers greater than themselves.

"We define ourselves through other people." The Imam had known, and if people's relationships with each other were the only way that they could know themselves, then all people deserved to be treated with kindness and charity.

"But what if other people are merely your reflection?" The young man asked.

The Imam sat silently in consideration as his hands moved from his knees to holding each other. "Then there are other people to be with, obviously." He said it so easily. He rose, and that had called upon Norea and the young man to rise too with him. "This is Jackson and Erica; they're good neighbors to us here." They were not Muslims; they were white and Christian, and typical of that land, they were in their Sunday clothes, smiling, taking them all in. Jackson was a tall man with broad shoulders, missing his pinky finger, while Erica had only come up to his chest, her hair had been cut short, and her elbows were well tanned. Erica approached them, offering her hand, not caring for the dirt and grime that the two carried on their palms.

"Hello, how about you two come back with the husband and me?" We've got a hot shower for you waiting." She held onto Norea's hand as she spoke in that western drawl.

As time went on, a good number of the homeless were there with their own families who offered. After a moment of hesitation, the two went with them, but before they walked out of view of the mosque, the young man looked back, and the Imam had been waiting on the sidewalk in front of his place, watching them both go off until the young man's feet slid him out of view forever.

"The Imam's a great kind of guy. He makes an awfully unique type of chili every Thanksgiving. I think he puts something like lamb instead of beef in there, with chickpeas too. I can't wrap my head around it, but man, does it taste something fierce?" Jackson had spoken well of him as the four of them walked into the suburbs. "I think that chili alone convinced about a dozen families to help out the mosque. We ain't the same, but we serve the same purpose, at least."

No matter how many times these two adults had done this, they did not seem bothered by them, haggard as they were and quiet as they were.

"What are your names?" Erica asked.

Just as she had asked him to take a name, she realized that it would've been good for her to take one on as well. In her scramble, she chose one. "Milly."

The Young Man gave one. "Everette." A random name, a name that fit this face

The start of a long line of names for him, just another. For her, it was her first after her own.

They came to their house a short walk from the mosque, a double wide, a small lawn, and a truck there bearing the bumper stickers of politicians that have since long done their campaigns and lost for it. It was a nice home in its light blue. "We do things oriental style." Said Erica, wiping her shoes off at the door and taking them off completely as they entered their living room.

"Thank you for this." The young man said, putting his shoes aside—work boots that had seen much wear—that they were the color of dirt. "It's been almost a month since we showered last."

Spring rains brought something close, but it brought them further from clean than closer, and then cold and miserable.

"Oh, don't mention it, hun'. Just paying it forward, especially with two youngins like you." Erica bent down, and her blonde hair became disheveled. Jackson had gone off to the corner of their kitchen, putting some coffee on.

"I don't know why they insist on getting up so early, but hell. Is what it is."

"Our bathroom is down the hall to the right; use the blue towels, and... Is that all the clothes you have?" Erica had given them all a good once-over. The young man took off his blanket-turned-poncho, folding it up and putting it on the floor in a patch of it that had been clean. They didn't answer; the shame of what was to come was building. Erica only smiled and nodded her head. She went into the double-wide, and closets were opened; dresser drawers were filed through.

On those walls of their home, clean and homely but without excess, were physical memories of a life lived that the two vagrants could never know or understand, as distant to them as Asticassia was to them now, and perhaps even more so. Pictures on the wall plated by glass of those who had lived here: Jackson and Erica, young, and then older, and then as they were now, beset by candids and locals of distant places that they had gone and, in the newer examples, images of children. Their children. two: a boy and a girl.

Norea and the young man stared, unsure of when to go and who would go first to wash. Jackson saw them as the coffee poured from an old pot into an older mug. "Our kids—we sent 'em off to school nearer the coast. I spent ten years, even before they were born, saving up to get them to a good school near the coast. Davie, my son, wants to be a mobile suit pilot." Chills down their spine. "Sign up with Benerit Group, too; that's what he wants." Jackson was neutral, but there was still a hint of pride that came with him fondly shaking his head. "He wants to be a part of their reclamation services."

The arm of the Group that had dealt with the Earth itself and dressing down the ruins for whatever useful material More than once, the Reclaimers of the Earth had often been just scouts for the Benerit security forces, Cathedra, on the movements of those who would resist them there on Earth. Norea soured. "He shouldn't." She said it harshly. "Work with the Group, that is." She tried to cover it up.

Jackson chuckled once. "You know, I think I know what you're getting at." He took his cup of coffee and sipped at it as he went to the fridge and got out a misshapen loaf of bread, then took some cheese and cut meat aside along with a cutting board. His hair had been thinning in the light of the morning, which phased in like color soaking into paper. In the living room, a rack was held above the television, empty. "The Group doesn't bother us out here a lot; in fact, not a lot bothers us here, but my boy, he went out on his own some days and looked out and saw the Old Quarter of town, where the bombings that happened here when I was a kid blew that place to the high hells. Maybe he got it in his head, and I don't know how, that he'd go get one of those mobile suits or whatever and, in their bigness, just start sweeping up. God knows that this town doesn't have the money to clean up all the remains from the old wars."

"And your daughter?" The young man asked. "What is she in school for?"

"Vet." Jackson answered at once. "She wants to come back too and start treating horses because that's how most people go around in this country. I don't care for them. They're all mean beasts, no matter how much you train them up. I like walking, and based on your shoes, you do too, maybe not out of your choice."

He started assembling sandwiches made of square bread, meat, and cheese, and his wife emerged back out of the double-wide, holding in her hands a bundle of clothing, each with jeans, and pressed them both into their grasps. Norea had immediately tried to protest, but Erica wouldn't have it, instead taking her by her shoulders and taking her to the bathroom, saying that they didn't mind, not at all, and that these clothes had not fit their children for a while and that they probably bought new ones out on the coast that were far better than what they could get there, and if there was any protest to be had, there would be none heard for what they were doing were as natural as anything else, and she went on and on, ending that if they had been in their position, if Norea and the young man had been the volunteers to the mosque, they would do the same for them.

A soft and warm rain came from the shower head, and Norea had only the time necessary to wash herself down. Water itself, running water no less, was never in short supply in her travels, and especially not something to waste. At her feet at the bottom of the white tub of the shower, muck and brown water ran until five minutes later, she had scrubbed herself down and looked something close to normal. She didn't want to leave the shower, despite the novelty of modern plumbing and cleanliness, but she did eventually, finding herself in a clouded mirror, stepping out, looking back, wisps of steam around her that framed her face. She looked at herself for a long time. She tried to imagine herself now as a ghost haunting herself, indistinct in image in that hazy glass, but eventually the steam condensed, and all that she was left with, as it had always been, was just herself.

She stepped out. "You brush your teeth?" Erica leaned her head to speak into the hall as she was busy chatting up the young man, who stood there so politely before the gallery of their pictures taken about the past and of her children, David and Lana, who were so smart and deserved better than that town. She missed her children very much, but they were off trying to make their lot in life better, even if, in all respects, the life they came from was good, homely, right, and loving. That pursuit of always being better was what led all the way up to the stars.

It was children, children, who always thought of themselves as the generation of their family to go to Space if they were not already there.

"No." She said, wearing her clothes that smelled of a different girl but fit her well enough and were not dainty, feminine, or fragile. She wore a flannel, with a simple cotton shirt beneath it, and then jeans that she had to roll the hem of up twice to fit fully in.

"Brush your teeth." Erica said it like the mother that she was. "Use the red brush."

Norea didn't remember her mother, but like all the loves in her life, or the love that should have been, family, they were gone, completely so. Not missing or yet to be found. But dead. Taken. always done by Spacians. She brushed her teeth, and she brushed them so hard that when she looked at the bristles, they had been slightly bent ajar. She emerged out of the bathroom with freshly brushed teeth to a very pleased-looking Erica, who just as quickly ushered the young man to take her place and then took Norea's clothes. Norea had taken back the green jacket, which, as dirty as it was, was meant for it. "I know this might be a lot to ask, but can you dispose of these clothes?" Her simple black shirt and denim shorts, and her underwear. "Burn them, or anything; I just think it's for the best."

Erica had passed the clothing through her hands and looked down on them, seeing how heavy they were with sweat and the world they had weathered. "These don't look too far gone, but... okay. If that's what you want, Milly."

The young man didn't take any longer, emerging freshly washed and brushed, which brought color back to him. He had been given a Henley that was only slightly too big for him, and the jeans were all the same, slightly oversized and long, but adjusted by rolling.

"We usually take in other adults, not people like you... Poor youngins."

The young man could feel his skin clean and almost breathe on its own from the wash of proper soap and proper drying.

Jackson went on as he spoke, wrapping the sandwiches in tin foil. "I always read stories about the last era, before Permet, before everyone started moving to Space. You read in books from the time on how towns like these were full of life, simple, and easy, and you could hear about the world and the rest of the country just by logging online or listening to a radio station that wasn't run by corporate media. Grocery stores were always full, and everyone had cars to drive around in. I think I would've liked to see my kids grow up in that type of world, but here we are." He shrugged. "You two got someplace to go? To do? You don't do drugs or nothing?"

Faint lines on their skin, covered up by the recent hydration, showed what drugs had been done to them. To be able to use Permet at any level, a certain treatment was needed, which included a cocktail that eventually spurred the body on to produce its own tolerances to the devices that were required of it. The drugs they used were now so far out of reach and not of the type of pleasure or recreation they once enjoyed. They shook their heads in unison.

"Just fallen on hard times, huh?"

"Yeah." The young man said "We're not staying in town long." In fact, when they left, the silent agreement was that they were to start going west.

"Why?" Erica asked, concerned. "Nacogdoches may not be too bustling, but I'm sure there are a few shops around that could use sweepers, or people need their horses taken care of, or...

"It's not about opportunities or anything like that. We just need to keep going. Put as much distance between where we came from and here."

There was silence in the room. Norea rubbed her arm in her new clothes, and as comfortable and clean as they were, they did not feel like they were meant for her, despite what everyone said.

"You running from someone, son?" Jackson asked with a seriousness that betrayed their kindness.

"No." He lied. "Well, maybe from myself, but that's neither here nor there. It's not your concern anyhow."

Norea said nothing more than a nod to confirm as the two adults looked at her as if she held the same beliefs. And she did. They had to keep moving. "We're eighteen, both of us." He spoke. "Our own decision." He went to his ears, and hanging off of his lobes were two items that he had been long used to but now stuck out in the day. He had meant to take them off in the shower, but here was good; here was better. Erica looked at him with cautious curiosity as he swiped at each of his ears and let her see what had come of it: His ear rings. They were sharp prisms, silver and platinum, a gift from the Original for all those that would sacrifice in his name. They were expensive articles befitting his opulence, and perhaps the most expensive item about him that hadn't been the many operations that turned him from what he was to what he had assumed the image of He palmed them in his hand before offering it to them, shiny and glinting. "Please take this as our thanks. They should be worth something."

The two adults looked at the glassy shapes in his hand with some mystification. Their wedding bands together had been gold or brass, shined to a sheen; simple. Erica wore no jewelry, and Jackson wore no watch. In this land, there had been no consideration for what was glittering.

"Why, it ain't ours to take." Erica said it quietly, aghast. Norea, all the while, had canted her head to look down upon the young man. "That's yours, and what we're doing, we're doing because it's the right thing to do."

"No, I insist."

"But that's yours, son." Jackson rounded the counter of his kitchen with two small packages of sandwiches in his hand. He spoke with such falsehood that the young man needed to rectify it.

"It never meant anything to me. It was just another pretty thing. Please, just take it."

Erica seemed in such quiet sorrow, that she had done such a nice thing and thought nothing of it in her deeds of offering her home to the needy, to the young, and here they were trying to make a big deal of it, and if that were so, it tore at all involved, but it was what needed to happen. He needed to leave everything behind completely. So completely.

"I can't…"

"Then give it to the mosque, or give it to charity, or even consider it as repayment for the clothes." He didn't want it, not at all, and for whatever Norea thought, she did not protest as her hand rose without her permission to grab his shoulder and to squeeze. "I'd rather not have these on the road, too. If you know what I mean."

The young man offered the items again, and he would not take his hand away; Erica could only cup her hand and have them fall into it. "We didn't steal it." Norea finally clarified. "It's not stolen. Just it's…-" She wasn't good with words, so she stopped trying.

"I see." Jackson said at once as Erica looked down upon them. He moved forward, and in exchange, he received two sandwiches. "Well, suppose they can't hurt; we'll see what it brings, and we'll pay it forward. Maybe old Noelle will like it, isn't that right, Eri?" He rubbed his wife's back as she held the earrings and then curled them inward, brightening at the thought that they could provide their daughter with someone so nice that Christmas.

"Yes." She said it once, nodding. "Thank you, you two. Milly and Everette."

In the weeks to come, with travelers that would pass them by, they would choose different names. They would never pick the same ones twice, and so for each person, there existed an encounter with a person entirely real only to them, bearing names that belonged to them and had been alive only in that memory of the encounter. They would never be called Milly or Everette again, nor William or Macy or Garfield or May or Barret or Ana, but in those moments where those names were summoned up, they had been what they were. In times they were alone to come, they would always be "Norea" or, on his part, "Hey" or "You" or some other sound that grabbed his attention, but never the Original's. Never use that name again.

They held their sandwiches for the road in their hands, and they bid farewell to Erica and Jackson Barr, and as they walked freshly clean, freshly clothed, their shoes still worn down thin, Norea had given him just that slightest of side-eyes, of displeasure.

"Say what's on your mind."

"You should've saved the ear rings for us. We have nothing."

"We wouldn't be able to." They stood at a crosswalk; horses and cars, less so, intermingled in lines as the town woke up fully and morning commutes started. Up above the distant sounds of a prop plane intersected contrails, further up, of subflight systems that on top of them rode mobile suits. So distant, so out of touch, like gods of old living in the sky. "Something like that, if we go to a simple broker, they will assume that it was stolen."

"Someone would've bought it."

A horse passed them by with its rider across the intersection in front of an old tractor out of the ancient past, its brown coat like chocolate as its rider wore his wide-brimmed hat despite the cloudiness of the day, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth as he led a cart along, the cart filled with cages, their contents feathery and cawing and pecking out of them. Those many beasts within were being carted off to their deaths in some market in one part of town, so packed together that they were one creature altogether the same and yet not singing and cawing as birds were supposed to in the morning.

There were no working traffic lights, just common sense and courtesy, as on those four roads that intersected in the middle of the town, people went and passed each other one at a time, and those that walked, for there were many. They were, together, no different in color and nature than those homeless, and maybe they were, but in that town in the middle of America that had been raked back and forth by the world, as all towns in every country seemed to have been at that point in History, they were tired of it. They were tired in the morning, tired of their work, but they lived simple lives that were unaffected by words so arcane and concepts so frightening that the longer that the two of them had been without them, the more mystical and crazy they appeared.

Witches.

Permet.

Enhanced Persons.

Dawn of Fold.

Gundam.

A whiny Ford truck passed in front of them, and when it did, a half-dozen people surrounding them moved across the street in unison, bundled up for their early morning commutes to their jobs. They stood there and let them go, holding their sandwiches close to them.

Eventually they moved on, and by night they were out of Nacogdoches, off further still into the West.

Now came days of walking; now came days of begging and scavenging.

As they continued their journey into a land so written in modern history, they found nothing modern about it. They walked the Earth like nomads of old, because they were in their entirety, by definition, nomads—those without homes and those without families—and the young man among them had nothing to his name because he had no name. They walked, starting in the prairies of east Texas, where along highways of varying life and commerce they traveled in the day and saw designators on those vehicles from so far away that they knew that the world no longer had its hidden places, even across oceans and even across Space itself. In the night, they kept near the concrete for what heat it retained and then slept in storm drainage pipes beneath them, the rumbling of vehicles rocking them asleep in violent vibrato that they, pilots both, had long since been used to. When they had become sick of that, they walked off into those long grassland prairies where the grass had gone from verdant green to dry yellow, coming to their chest. There were no animals there that would confront them or be seen, save for the birds above. They found streams gunked up with trash, remnants of great rivers that had once been drained. They sift through the trash, and the man finds boots that fit him so well that, despite their wear, they are better suited for the world than his flats. She finds a box cutter in a trashy mess; a river is dead because of an explosive crater that diverted it into dust and nothing, piling into a concave boil.

Those nights they sleep together beneath the stars, and there is at least something beautiful about it and the stars above until they realize those stars move at artificial angles and that the stars are outnumbered by satellites and stations. She's smaller than him, able to curl into him for warmth, and they do not say anything about it. The grass curls around him, and the blanket too. When they wake up, they part and see the dawn of a new day in every color, from burning to dying.

They find an APC, the markings of an old corporation now defunct and destroyed, scars from high explosives upon its armor and hull, and, inside, the dead. Skeletons left here for more than a decade, still in their uniforms, as their jawbones held open free from sinew and joint, leaving them screaming for eternity or disturbance, whatever came first. They slept with the dead that night in the box that had been heated all day, and it was a comfortable sleep as they lay on the floor amidst cleared debris and those long gone. They pull the uniforms off the skeletons to see what could be used and find that one has his bag still there, made of a material not so easily burned. The young man takes it.

Other nights they find failed homesteads, abandoned homes solitary in those lands and left to rot beneath dust and nothingness, bleached windows and board planks welcoming them into these dilapidated shacks, a gross image, perhaps an ugly promise, of the future of all homes there, even the volunteers Erica and Jackson. They sit at a wooden table left behind as sunlight streams in.

An old can of salted meat that Norea tears open unkindly with her box cutter is shared between them. They find two cups in the house and wish for water that doesn't come. They take the cups.

She takes out her sketchbook as she sits and chews the toughness, and she sketches the world around them and what had become of this homestead, no bigger than several dorm rooms in Asticassia and yet plenty big for a family who sought to till these lands. She draws, scratching her point in between creaking.

"I was a Native American." The young man says, finally." His hair is long now, but it is tied into a ponytail with a tie made of long grass. Hers is close behind, but she does nothing for it. She barely tips her head up as she lets her pencil take in the world around her. "I was. I am. Okay, and that's not completely true." He corrects. "I'm half. Half Native, half Mennonite." In his dreams, he keeps seeing the smear of his old face—of what he was and what could've been. It's never enough. He can't make out any feature or definitive shape, for his face and body have been molded to fill in and grow as the Original had, but he knows at least the overarching fact of himself.

"I don't know what that is: Mennonite." She tried the word on her tongue and did it the first time, annoyed that he would assume that she knew the word for the men and women that were unique to that part of the world only. "Does it mean you're white?"

"White too, I guess. I think."

"You're all halves of something, aren't you?"

"Mm." He grew distant, still looking out that window. "I think I came from a tribe of people west, no, north, of here."

"You aim to rejoin them?"

"No." He says fast, sorting his new bag and seeing what trash he has picked up that might be useful. Plastic bags, crushed soda cans, and a discarded lighter with the faintest amount of liquid still sloshing in its clear container "I'm with you now, remember?"

"Mm."

After a while of working, she turns over his book to offer to show him what she had sketched out, which was in essence a copy of what she had looked at, looking out. There was only one missing element: himself.

"Oh?"

She doesn't explain. Her mechanical pencil's stores are getting shorter and shorter within themselves. "You're too complicated." He huffs out once as he stands over her, his hand respectfully on the back of her chair and not her back entirely. "Do you not know your name still?"

"Is it that important to you?"

"It nearly killed me, so yes. It is." She sounds like it's something she's owed, and it's something he'd be very willing to give up, but he had nothing to give her. At least not yet. He rounded back across the table and leaned the chair back in mannerisms that he has forgotten are his own or the Original's, the chair's rear legs a hinge to a lean. He shrugs.

"My name. It's like a dream of a dream. I know it's there, and I'm trying to see it, but if I reach out," He raised his hand toward the light of the sun behind her, filtering in through broken glass and faded shades. "It just…" He fades away, as all dreams do. "It'll come to me."

She folds her book up and puts it back within an inner pocket of her flannel, staring right at him. "Do you know how I know my own name?"

He shook his head, still leaning back in his chair. She brought her legs up onto the chair, tucking them in with herself again. "Olcott." That man had been a father and lost everything. Despite who he had been and all the distrust that could be sown, no one doubted him because of it. "When he found me, my name was hanging from a sign around my neck. I was very young. Maybe five, when he and Dawn of Fold took me in.

"They told me they found me wandering the ruins of Toulon." Her voice dipped, her neutral accent picking up that old country sound. "And that I told them that my parents were dead." She doesn't remember any of this, and in the end, it didn't matter. "It was almost the same with..." Her eyes were distant, and she saw someone else there. "Sophie."

"Sophie…" The young man said the name of her companion, now taken by what all of them were at hazard of—a curse, as long as there had been a particular kind of mobile suit. She fell to it in battle against a woman so anomalous in her nature that she was more than what stood before the people that confronted her. "Where was she from?"

"Monaco. Not too far from me." Her voice, usually so harsh, had grown soft, airy, and at ease. The young man wanted to hear more of it. "I like to think that if the world was not like it was, we still would've met."

She had been picked up first by Olcott, and in that short time she had been the solitary child amongst their group, now newly formed, and he, having lost his son. He was reluctant to take on another child such as he, and so what distance he had put between himself and her, this child, had made her lonely, for none in the early days of Dawn of Fold knew how to care for a child. "I was lonely. They tried to keep me by at all times; they showed me how everything was, fed me, and tried to get me toys, but... I was lonely. Lonely still. That is, until she came."

When Sophie Pulone came into the group, it was like another adoption for variety's sake. This fiery child no younger than Norea, who spoke almost with the energy and knowingness far older than she was, who had taken all the stuffed animals that Norea never cared for, had been like, in the simplest terms, a sister conjured up out of thin air, just for her.

"I should've looked for it when we escaped. I should've looked for that Gundam." Her hands made fists, and the young man had not wanted it so. "I should've destroyed it when I had the chance."

"Norea…" He said it, not in warning but in presence. "It's behind us now."

"So is she." Her hands balled tighter once more, and then they laxed, unfolding up on the table empty until he had reached across to touch upon one, move his thumb beneath it to her knuckles, hold it, and squeeze it once. "Sophie…" She said her name again because it needed to be said again. Who would remember her? Who would take care of her memory? If it was not spoken by her, then who else?

People die twice in life: once when they are in the grave and once more, in this final death, when their name is spoken for the last time. For as long as she spoke the name of the one she knew she had loved more in that life than anything or anyone else, she had put off her final death longer and longer still.

"Sophie." The young man repeated it, and she was glad that it was not her voice alone. "As long as we live, so will she, in a way, no?" He smiled, tilted his head, and drew his hand away after one last reassuring pressure. Suddenly, his hand felt empty, which he hadn't noticed before.

"Yeah…"

In the morning, they woke on the dusty old mattress left in that place, sleeping on top of his poncho, curled together because, at that point, it had been natural but still unspoken, still unsaid. It wasn't the time to question that, or for it to be questioned at all. He stuffed those faded shades from the windows into his bag and found a bucket along the perimeter of the shack, a dilapidated well not more than a few minutes' walk away. He tied the bucket to the shades after ripping it in half, making a long rope of it, sending the bucket down until he had heard water splash, and then hauling it back up, praying that his knot could hold, and it did, only for him to accidentally tip the bucket over as it crested and lose what contained within it.

Norea watched from a distance as he tried again, and they drank from the bucket before putting water into their gathered plastic bags, zipping them tight when they could, and then they went on.

A week later, they walked among pinewoods, offering shade on flatland.

Now they talked about their journey together. At first, they noticed shadows to follow, berries, fruit, and ruins, and then generally, if not great conversations, then small ones, random ones, meaningless ones. At first, it was just to remember that language was still within them and that their communication was more than gestures and grunts. Then it became a connection. Because of their voices, their words, and how they sounded to each other. They walked the sun up and then followed it down into the west, and they made camp for the first time, gathering wood into a circle. She took the charge, expertly arranging tinder and wood into a pattern so as to make it burn all night, and she had taken a newspaper found blowing along like tumbleweed and lit it on fire with the lighter. For the first night since the mosque, they did not huddle together, and yet even with the fire, it had been cold again someplace within them.

"When do we stop?" she asked across the flame.

"When we want to. I'm sure it'll feel right."

"And what if we never feel that way?"

"I don't want to think that it might come to that." He said this with the fire between them. "Just until we get to a place where it feels right to start again. And when that happens, we can make ourselves proper and get set." He thought for a while. "You don't always have to be with me, you know. You're not stuck.

"No." She stirred, and it came out far more pronounced than she meant. "No," she said again.

Whatever it meant, it meant to the young man, right now, that he would speak no further on that idea that they could part. Maybe it would've been easier, maybe it would've been smarter, for maybe in their run they made themselves criminals, and known criminals at that. But it didn't matter. Together was alright with him, and he had made her that promise anyway, if she needed it, to go to those places with her, in her sketchbook, if that was where she needed to be.

"I can't promise that it's what's best for you."

He didn't know if she heard it, but she didn't respond, turning over as the flames crackled.

They said nothing until morning, and the stars above retreated back into the sky.

In her dreams, she dreamed as she had all her life: death, a forever war that she had waged against those that left not only her but all that had been kind to her behind on Earth in squalor and suffering. Sometimes she has her Gundam, sometimes just a gun, or her bare hands, and she sees the faces of all her enemies and all her obstacles, and she commits such terrible violence upon them that she gouges out the eyes of all witnesses so as to spare them of what she has done. How easy killing was, by hand, by machine, or by bullet. It didn't matter. She had, since her birth, had a taste for violence that germinated within her from a tragedy she was not even old enough to remember. Violence and loss had been her teachers, her mentors, and her parental figures. She cultivated the propensity that, when all was taken away from her, what remained was a fire that would burn the whole world down. In her dreams, as she slept, she glowed with starlight, and had the young man been awake, he would've seen it between the licks of flames separating them, but he was not, lost in his own dreamworld where he saw himself again and would never see that figure completely.

They were woken in the morning by great breathing. The fire had gone out, and in its wake, something had touched the young man's side that had been warm and wet. He opened his eyes with a start, and when he rolled over, he was shadowed by a great, four-legged beast. His mind had not seen it fully in its entirety before he had yelled, rolling through ash and using tinder that came up in a great cloud of gray wisps. He screamed when he had rolled into Norea, and she, for her credit, sprang into right standing, the box cutter in her hand, as the young man scrambled at her feet to stand as well.

The beast that roused them both looked at them calmly, and what the young man had thought was a bear coming to maul him was a different beast altogether, wild and loose.

It was not dangerous.

A great wild cattle had found them in the night, a bov with its horns long and out and well worn, ears flopping as its emotionless face stared at the two of them, more curious of them than they of it. The young man patted himself down from the dust cloud he kicked up, and the cattle looked at him. It was the color of smooth khaki, and its fur was wild and knotted, giving the impression of softness. Its tongue darted out once to lick the circumference of its mouth, and it continued to sit and stare as they both let the adrenaline drain themselves out, Norea holding the box cutter out to it as if it were a predator, ready to attack, ready to pounce.

It started groaning, deep within its chest, before all at once it bellowed a great single note of animal sound that echoed out into the world as its signal to start the day. The sun rose behind them, and the animal, deciding it had seen enough of them, turned off and away, its tail wafting left and right as it went off and disappeared into the dawn between the pinewoods.

On the trail again west, they walked where no soul had been save for them. They had walked back in time to a place where seemingly no Man had ever been and now became as like their ancestors had been: walking this New World all over in search of something within themselves. Manifest Destiny was a phrase buried by time, for once it had been historical and thus studied, brought to bear by critique that spoke of the imperialist, racial ambitions of the people that lived there on that continent to expand, no matter the cost to the land or to those that lived there before the white, "learned" man came. Genocides followed in that term, a term that had died in its practice when they from the eastern shore reached the western coast and learned that even holy mandates had been mortal, for there was a limit to that world that those travelers had thought there couldn't possibly be. In the west, on California shores, the ancient American had found that his destiny was finite, and so the term Manifest Destiny was retired unless brought up in the name of war and further conquering and then heard no longer until the first years of Ad Stella and the new frontier that could be followed up into Space. Manifest Destiny returned, and no one wanted to speak of it, for they knew what it meant.

There was always a hunger there in their stomachs, and the dirt at the hem of their jeans rode up and further up until they found ponds and small streams to wash their hands, their faces, and what parts of their bodies they could. The hunger could be ignored until it had them seeking the grass for sustenance, and what little fruit they found they devoured like animals. They wagered their lives on mushrooms on the ground and on dewberries that seemed so ripe and untouched that it seemed like a trick. They grew thin, and their skin hardened after much peeling and redness. The young man had made a hat out of the remains of the shades strung by wired branches, and she drew a hood made of trashed fibers, carpet squares meant for sampling and now turned into a hiding veil from the sun, much like the mosque they had left long ago. They saw more of the country every day, as they were on the border of pinewood country. Only in aircraft above and mobile suits further above that were they reminded that Man indeed was at all.

Animals cry all night, and they make a fire every day when reminded that next time, it might be a cow that finds them.

He loses his hats in the wind kicked up, for the remarkably good, if not hot, weather they've been having has given way to wind that at first came as relief and then as a harbinger of a storm. It starts at noon, and as evening approaches, the wind kicks up the land itself as storms of dust follow in their wake, and they run ahead of it, trying to beat nature in its own race to encompass all that the storm-colored sky encroached on. As they ran, the light drained from the world, and before it went out completely, both of them reached out for each other and held each other by the hand in their escape from something worse than mobile suits, something worse than Man.

Distant thunder came down as if from distant battlefields, and their eyes drew to one bubble of brightness in the distance of the prairie that they ran through, and as they approached in their desperate tracking, they found a metal box on wheels: an RV, and outside of it, a man hammering with an iron implement spokes into the ground that drew up from cable to the structure of it. Solitary, his skin fair and hair curled red, he heard them approaching before they emerged out of the darkness to the window light that shone from within the RV. He was a young man, older than them, and before they asked, he had allowed them.

"Get in! This storm is about to blow anything not nailed down away!" He didn't speak like a man of the West. He too was a traveler, and as travelers often do, he offered shelter and assistance without question. The two tried to utter thanks, but the wind had smothered all words, even in that incline to which the man had brought his RV. He came in quickly after them, locking the door and shutting all the windows tight as the world battered around them and the RV shook like some roller coaster through damnation. They didn't let go of each other's hands as, at one last precaution, the traveler hopped into the driver's seat and yanked the emergency brake on.

The RV was large for one man but cramped for three. There was a booth, at least in the center, meant for meals, opposite a small kitchenette. The traveler, wiping grass and dirt off of him, now wet by hailstone-sized rain drops, breathed out deeply as if to equalize the air he had just been forced to swallow. He had sweet brown eyes that seemed younger than he had been, broad shoulders, and a round face. "You're lucky," he told him, and even his voice was handsome. "If you were out there, you would've needed to dig with your own hands a hole to shelter in." He held his hand out. "Name's Reyes."

"Washington." The young man offered

"Cecil." Norea gave.

They each exchanged hands as Ray let his leather jacket fall from his shoulders and tossed it off to the passenger seat, only to spur on another commotion. "Not nice! Not nice!" a robotic, higher voice. Jumping out of the seat had been a Haro. "Amuro! Not nice!" The electronic ball of a contraption spoke his first name.

Reyes had shot his green ball a look before giving it a sharp sound of his mouth out of his own annoyance. "You need a wash anyway." The Haro spat back, but in the end extended arms from its head flaps and laid the jacket out on the head of the seat before returning back to its own idleness.

The storm that came around them was strong, but the RV held, with Reyes going to each corner, disappearing into the back of the RV, and double checking every seal and window before deciding, at last, they were safe.

"Storms like this," he started, pulling up on the opposite end of the booth across from the two. "We don't see them that often up in Montana, where I live." Far beyond them, lightning flared, illuminating even the windows brighter than the RV. He seemed distant when the flashes came, the storm pelting too hard for any real conversation in the meantime. So, they sat in quiet communion, praying that what had been happening now that had made the world completely inky and pitch black around them was to be the worst of it.

The two of them sat, thigh to thigh, and the warmth between them settled all as Reyes bit his thumb and chewed its tip, glancing from table to outside and then back and forth again for nearly half an hour until at last the storm settled down and didn't shake the RV around them.

He took a good look at the two of them. The same look that all who came across them did in judgment and impression.

Hey, have you two had dinner yet?"

They hadn't had dinner in at least a week. "No." The young man answered.

Well, you're in luck. I've got some food to spare." He rose, not to the fridge but to a drawer beneath it and drawn out was an unusual surplus: brown bags bearing the letters MRE.

Norea recognized it immediately; her hand darted to the young man's knee and squeezed it once, wearily. They were EGF-issued. As they sat and were now waist level with Reyes, at five o'clock on his waist, he rode in his waistband a Grassley Defense Systems sidearm, a ten millimeter short cartridge. They both saw it. He looked back, and they both drew their gazes away, but not fast enough.

"Oh," his face shrank up. "Sorry." He tried to tuck the gun further out of sight. I'm a driver with the Garrison Force. Before that, I was on space duty." On his dashboard was a photo of him in a pilot suit, and on his arm was a blonde woman that he had held by her waist in celebration, or at least in posing. In the background, it could not be mistaken: it was a mobile suit in the colors of Cathedra's enforcement group. Dominicus is black, more purple, but still striking. "Me and my…" He paused as he sat back down with three packets of food, as if he were hesitating on saying the next word. "Wife, we have a nice place up near Missoula. It's nice there, not like anything they tell us up in Space about the Earth."

He was a Spacian, through and through, and more than that, a man who could be, and perhaps very well was, an enemy.

With a knife he had taken out of his pocket, he had done two things: slice across the tops of the packets and make Norea grab onto the young man's knee harder.

"Are you…" The young man started. "Are you still active?"

"Only on weekends." Reyes happily nodded. "I spend most of my time traveling around the country, especially when Belle is off reporting."

That name he spoke meant different things to the young man, but he put it away as, in return, his own wandered to Norea's knee and squeezed once in reassurance. That this man, though bearing the heart of the enemy, had been no more of a threat to them than any other person. She stopped squeezing, and she brought her hands up slowly to take one of the meal packages and start sorting them out. She knew all too well how to eat them.

"Now, Washington, was it? What're you two doing out here?"

"Traveling." The young man answered. "Same as you, I suppose."

"You pack light, and you don't look too prepared for this. You look like skin and bones, even." Reyes had been blunt as he and Norea took out the self-heating containers packaged in all MREs and set them safely aside as they activated the internal heaters that brought a packet of water in them to a boil, cooking the meals in short order. Three glasses were brought out, and each of them was filled with water as paper packets were ripped, and three vitamin drinks were made and dispersed. The two vagrants took them down fast, unable to hide their desire, unable to hide from this man who saw that they were not in any good way.

"I know that people on Earth aren't well off; if you're, uh, like that, just let me know. There is no shame in it at all. Some of my best friends in the force still joined because they wanted more opportunities."

The young man smiled as Norea kept her hands busy, unable to look at Reyes, this man, who within him contained all others like him. "Thank you for this, then."

"Now if you're all going somewhere, I'd be glad to take you along if it's eastbound."

"Sorry," the young man said, shaking his head. "We're going in the opposite direction. We think we're better off that way anyway."

"Sure. I guess." The steam within the plastic wraps of the containers fogged up. But there's a lot of savanna out there, hot and dry. You've got to be careful and not get stuck out."

Out of those packets had been utensils, napkins, packets of gum, and even cigarettes and toiletries. They were in the packets meant for the meals and morale of troops on the front, wherever they may be, and, more specifically, meant for those on Earth where campaigns had been expected and not in space, where security actions lasted no more than a few hours. Even the largest Martian territories or the sprawling lunar cities would've, in absolute war, been no larger than the campaign to take a city. Reyes claimed none of it, breaking the moist towelettes from their plastic coverings and washing his hands as they followed, only then extending to their faces until those white sheets became darker and dirty and then discarded.

"You're not from around here, are you?" He spoke to Norea.

"No." She avoided his gaze, stuck between the young man and the window, which, battered by water, left streams as their only visual from the dark world outside.

"We're from further out east. We're coming from..." He couldn't say New Orleans, for even if their Gundams were buried there by re-entry, they would be easy enough to find, and if it was discovered Gundams had been on that continent, no doubt Reyes would be alerted in a briefing from his unit, and then he would think, if he was told, that he had come across two travelers out of place in that world and there would be a far more visible lead there that would lead to their capture and, more likely, death. So the young man thought of another past. The last time he had been on Earth, he thought he was going to leave it forever. "New York City." He said it in its entirety. That's where the transport that delivered him from Earth had flown out from, along the Space lanes and the elevators.

"City folk." Reyes decided. "No wonder."

The young man reached up to the table and slightly moved his hand over Norea's. "We're just trying to get away from that type of life, and we kind of do," he smiled sweetly, tilting his body innocently. "Let's say we might've come in over our heads."

This mode of him is closer to the Original than he'd like to admit, but it was useful, and it always had been, especially since he had come into the place of the Fourth.

In those years, he never knew what had happened to the Second or the Third, and when the Fourth came along in his insulated persona, nothing seemed to matter of how he acted in his years in Asticassia, so he had been as he was until his final days, when he began to lose it beyond his bounds. His arrival as the Fifth would've been, to the hopes of the project he had been signed on for life in exchange for luxury and ease, a return to form and baseline. He took this face on often with the girl on the couch, with Shaddiq Zenelli, who belonged to the family that ran the manufacturers of the pistol in that room right now. If they were fooled, then it was working, and if not, there had been greater conspiracies amidst them all than even he.

He looked now deviated from what he should, and his hair that had once been prim and proper and long in their own style were now on their own, his bangs kept at bay by constant brushing behind his ear and his hair tied behind his head. The color of his hair was darkening in the sun, and if he could be mistaken for the Original before, as was the intention, he could not now save for a passing, striking resemblance. The Original did not sport a fuzz before his lower face nor dirty himself like he did. The Original would never be seen on Earth and be in its squalor.

"We lost our supplies while fording over a river; our bag broke open, and we just lost everything but what was on our backs." Norea suddenly said it, and she said it with so much truth, for in her past she had seen it happen. Careless, or perhaps rushed, river crossings where vehicles had to be left behind and an escape had to be made. "We saved for years to go on this trip. All gone." She shrugged, unbothered, as she flipped her hand up so her palm touched his. "Well, almost all gone." It was her feign of domesticity, of familiarity, that despite their situation, they still were strong because of each other.

He squeezed back and smiled. "We were looking for a new start anyway."

The packets with their meals ballooned but were not yet ready as a smirk on Reyes face emerged. "You're going to end up dead with that type of attitude."

Details within that RV were revealed in light and in idle glances. Medals, more photos, tools and machines that spoke to a man who tinkered constantly, and wires that hang from exposed panels on the fridge held by a magnet, Reyes stood as a taller man, a blonde man with shades, rested his elbow on his shoulder, and leaned upon him. They both wore the same piloting suit as they stood in some astral hangar and gave the camera thumbs up, standing in front of a wrecked machine, on a well-worn pen marking: 101, Vanadis. Scrap metal lined glass cubes everywhere, tokens of victory, of which Reyes had many. As amiable and friendly as he seemed, this man had been a killer for Capital.

He gestured outside. "In Space, there's nothing like this. Out there, it's all nothing except for rock or debris from the first corporate wars or the space stations we've made. Here, though, on Earth? The higher powers still exist." He was a man of engineering, a man of logical sciences, and yet even he spoke like this in the storm that engulfed all around them. He knew why these storms were formed; he knew the collision of air masses of different temperature properties caused the formation of clouds and convection currents along the borders of fronts that swirled together until it all thundered up and came down upon the land so potently there. But all those seemed to fall away when he had been more than a witness and instead a bearer of these forces of nature. "I've seen things out in Space you wouldn't believe, but all of that pales in comparison to..." Thunder and lightning distant on the plain, booming, are previews of a distant reckoning as horrible yet as the promised judgment at the end of days. "When I came to Earth for the first time as a man and heard thunder and lightning, I thought it was all over. I've never felt fear like that. Never since, never before. Not against an enemy, because at least I could fight the enemy. But this? You can't fight this. You can't fight something that's been going on for as long as this planet's been." He spoke of a fear put there by God, inherent to all men.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" Norea said. Surprisingly, Reyes agreed. "There's only one thing that can destroy the Earth. She spoke from some hidden repository of knowledge that came with her and her life. "The Earth itself."

It was true. Reyes offered no rebuttal.

The wind around them moaned as rain pelted them in waves.

Nothing they could do, for all the wickedness of their weapons and what those weapons did to Man, could ever replicate the terribleness of what the Earth could storm up from its ferment made long ago when it had been of molten rock at its creation a million million years ago. For what Mankind did in polluting the Earth now and how, by Human sensibilities, they had heated the Earth up, dried up its seas and rivers, polluted its grasslands, and killed and extincted the other inhabitants, it was just a blip of what could be rendered back upon them.

After a while, Reyes reached out to the three containers and split them open, steam coming up like the smoke of a fire, revealing each of their contents.

They ate in silence their rice, topped with three compressed food bars representing beef and vegetables, a glucose biscuit, and a bar of pure nutritional supplement that, all together, could be crumpled into the steaming white rice below. Norea had opted to eat them whole, while the young man and Reyes took the time to break them down into rice to eat. It was a needed meal—a full and fulfilling one, as was the purpose of MREs.

When they were done he from the fridge drew out another wrapped item of food. The cellophane crumpled. "We'll break into three." It was a dark chocolate bar. Hershey. In portions and sections, Reyes was a good host as he handed off the cold chocolate for each of them to break down into. "Being on Earth... you know, compared to Spacians, some people here have nothing, and yet they're so willing to give, to help each other out. Yet up there in Space?" Reyes left it all unsaid. Those who had everything to give and yet did not "Taught me better to be here on Earth. My wife's of the Earth, you know. My better half, even if we don't always get along well,"

They ate the chocolate, and Norea did not remember the last time she had had it.

"Sorry to hear that." The young man expressed his sympathies.

"Don't be. You two are, what, dating? You're still young but hear it from me: if your partner doesn't at least butt heads a little, then it's not really a true relationship... or so I tell myself, that is." He tried to amuse himself, but there was no applause as the two of them gave each other a knowing, sardonic look. They wouldn't fuss over assumed relations.

They cleaned up; there were no scraps left, for it was all taken in. Reyes told them to keep the utensils and the toiletries, and indeed, the young man pushed them into his bag. The storm wasn't going to let up soon, if not until the morning, as reported by the automated radio station that they all had keyed into via Haro. They were welcome to stay the night on the cushions or the floor, and he apologized that he hadn't gotten the RV with the lay-flat booth, but they both didn't mind and thanked him for it. They'd slept rougher nights in worse places.

Before he turned into the night, however, Norea had called out to him as he stood in the small doorway that separated the RV into two, his bedroom in the back with sheets and clothes strewn all over messily. "Why did you come to the Earth, Spacian?" She asked, and there had been an edge to her words that if she meant it, she meant it by natural instinct alone, for all her life. Reyes considered it for a second before unhooking his gun and its holster from his waistband. Norea seized up, and the young man saw the place on her shoulder he would spring to grab if she lunged. She didn't. Reyes had simply been setting his gun for the day, considering it as if it had been the question manifest in reality.

"Well," he said, turning over. "I might consider myself a Spacian, but I was born on Earth. Baja California out more westward, but I grew up in Space out in Lagrange Point 3 with my dad. Mom stayed on Earth. So there's always been a part of me that wanted to come back here for her." But that wasn't the whole answer. Not at all. Not as he lingered and finally spoke, biting on his thumb before sucking in his lips to say. "I suppose something was calling me to come back to Earth that wasn't my mother, but it was like her, I guess. Not in a way that made sense, I know. I lived well up there, and I'd be throwing it all away by going from my old unit that was on space duty to some backwater unit here on Earth, but..." He stopped, he closed his eyes, and he balled his hand at his chest. On that finger was a silver band. "I guess it was just a matter of my soul searching for something here."

The subconscious had been more ancient than language, and if it was his soul that brought Reyes back to the Earth, then it was gravity that took him in.

She knew this feeling too. All too well. When she left the embrace of Earth for the first time, she wanted nothing more than to complete her mission and return to its embrace. As battered and as full of turmoil as it had been, Earth was everything. Earth had been the cradle by which only the inhuman could abandon, and all those in Space therefore had been.

Goodnight, Cecil, Washington." Reyes nodded at them both, and then he shut the door.

They slept together that night sitting in the booth, and he had been a passable mattress as she laid upon him and he, using his blanket, covered them both.

In the dark of night, with the RV's lights off, Norea came to a dark figure standing over her, a shadow made physical. Moonlight outside provided just enough light to create a shape of definition. The bare details of this figure revealed themselves to her: a tall man, whose eyes bore shades that were blacker still than the night, and all of the holes in space where light could not yet go. This man who stood over her looked down on her, and of his form exuded a great pressure, a pressure she had only felt at the upper ranges of Permet Scores, and in that border she knew what had been there, for it took Sophie into death, and all at once as this shrouded man stood over her, she saw her End. She struggled to move, but the Fifth had wrapped her arms around her in the night, and his arms were locked, and she had been trapped as the shadowed man exuded that pressure. It penetrated her, through her skin, her bones, to her core, into her lungs, which made her lungs smaller and smaller and her throat tighter and tighter, so that when she decided to scream, she could no longer as panic rose in her that she was about to be submitted to death in a way so horrible yet that she would've taken her box cutter and slit her own throat for her own mercy.

She was not just being put to death; she was being sacrificed to this man she could not see clearly, whose black hole eyes and onyx shades bore into her and dissolved her from the inside out until she was nothing but the used-up char of a fire that burned itself out, too soon, to nothing.

And then she woke up.

Arms still held her tight, and in her ears had been a voice strained and silent. "Norea! Norea!" The young man tried to settle her, for she had been thrashing in her sleep. She kicked and kicked until her minds aligned: that of the waking and that of the nightmare. In his grip, she found and turned, and within her jacket, she brought out the box cutter, her thumb sliding the blade up until the broad end of it pushed against his right jugular vein. Her eyes were wild, and her breaths were words: Kill, kill, kill.

She mounted him, blade to the young man's neck, as he stared up at her eyes like wide circlets of milk beset by the green yolk. He could not speak. The rusty blade pricked harshly at his skin.

"Who are you? Who are you?" She strained in her voice that was hoarse and desperate, and he had heard this once before: holding her in their holding room in the Grassley house as the traitor looked at them both with her broken wing.

They were like that for a long time, his legs over the booth and hinged down to the floor as she sat on his midsection, both her hands holding the handle of the box cutter and putting pressure on it. No one moved, and both were fearful. He felt every point of contact with her from his neck down his body, and it all had been in degrees of warming, heat, and fire.

The door in the back opened and was obscured by the seat backing. Reyes did not see the blade to the young man's neck or the scared look on his face. In his morning grogginess, Reyes did not see anything until his vision cleared and he saw simply Cecil mounting Washington, right in front of him, in his own motorhome. That brought him awake more than the coffee he was planning to make, and it made him annoyed. He really wanted coffee.

"Hey." He said it sternly, wiping his hand down his face in his own underwear and tank top. "I said you could sleep here, not wherever this is."

Norea brought her hand back, and the young man breathed again, both of them coming to a halt. Her eyes were still wild, but the appearance of a man uninitiated in the terror had settled her for a second as the young man rose, flushed and disheveled but apologetic all the same as he realized what it looked like. Her box cutter had been tucked into her sleeve, hidden away.

"Sorry. We thought you were asleep." He excused himself, but it was no excuse as Reyes raised an eyebrow with a disapproving look on his face and then mentioned it no more.

They had breakfast of the same type of MREs, and they showered outdoors. A swing-out shower head from the water tank hung externally as they all took turns using it. As they finished up, Reyes had put on his driving clothes again and, after punching in a series of coordinates into his Haro, who served as a mobile GPS for him at shotgun, took the rest of the MREs out of his container and handed them to them as he sat in the driver's seat, window open, sunglasses on that Norea twitched at the sight of.

"I've gotta wean off this stuff, so, uh, here, take this. I'll see what I can find in the next town over." He handed them over through the window. "Are you sure you don't want to come east with me? It's a long way out west to... much of anything."

The young man took the bag with meals that would, if they were smart, last them weeks given splitting and careful partitioning. He shook his head. "That's not where we're really headed."

Reyes sniffed the air. The morning around them had been fresh and clear after the storm, even as nature on the ground seemed disheveled. "Yeah. Alright." He nodded. "Go refill your bottles with the water tank in the back and smack the car when you're all settled."

"We don't have any."

"Huh?"

"Bottles."

Reyes stared at them for a long time, and eventually he had gotten out of the driver's seat and rummaged back in the RV before emerging again at the window to the driver's seat, an old army canteen and then a metal flask given over, one that still had, based on the tinny sound, just a tiny bit of scotch still in it. "You guys really are lost, huh?"

The young man thanked him again for his generosity, and they went and filled the containers. When they were done, he smacked the back of the car. At last, Amuro Reyes had leaned out of his window entirely so as to talk to them better, not opening the door, and was ready to go. "Hey!" He cried out over the engine idling. "If you're ever up by Missoula, Montana, ask around for me, or go find a manor in the town's east! If I'm not there, tell the guy at the gate that you're friends of mine that I met on vacation. Show Belle or one of the servants that canteen! They'll know."

"Right!" The young man waved back at the rear of the RV, and Reyes waved back as he set himself back into the cabin, and the RV had rolled back on and forward, swinging around them and out the way they came, following tracks made there from when he first hunkered down for that previous night.

"Take care of yourselves!" Reyes yelled out again, and of all that lived on Earth, he had been proof that this country did something to people, no matter their origin or their circumstances. They watched his vehicle go on and then disappear behind the curve of a hill off to the east.

Norea stood rigidly; she still held the box cutter in her hand. She had been silent all morning, avoiding the gazes of all, even that of the picture on Reye's refrigerator.

He turned to face her. "What was that about? This morning?"

She did not raise her face to look at him. She asked him a question in the same line as that which had started everything, and yet this one came not of understanding but of fear, that in his body he inhabited not himself but something truly other. She gripped her knife tighter, but nothing came of it as the young man took in a fresh, new breath and reached to touch her arm. She repelled him away, and that was that.

They moved on, walking west as they had said they would, and she was now behind him.

With the sun at their backs, her shadow alone was what reminded him that he had not been alone; their black shapes, hers and his, stretched out for miles ahead of them. It beat down on them in waves on that prairie and then on the savanna, whose grass rose up like scribbles of an infinite scratch that went flat as far as the eyes could see. He sipped preciously from the flask, for he had given her the canteen, but even then he did not hear her sip from it. Walking in a straight line, following the predicted course of the sun in its path there, as it had been since the beginning of all things. Their shadows told a story. They told a story of a man and a woman out of place, who belonged to a world other, whose dust they raised had been disturbed for the first time in decades by Man, and as they walked, the grass bowed to them not in full reverence but in mocking. There had been a king and queen of the Earth on top of that food chain, and for what of their kingdom? Scraps, given clothes, horrible deeds, horrible memories Their shadows passed over the shapes of the grass, and their forms were vivisected in the forever moving art mirage that was nothing but blackness, who showed the shape of Man but not what wholly contained within it, try as the young man might to look at Norea's shadow and try to find what had happened to her, what she had seen in the night. But the shadows and their secrets did not betray their eternal covenant with nature, and eventually they disappeared as the sun came directly over them.

He turns back to her when the shadows disappear. "Norea, please-"

"I don't want to talk about it." she demanded.

"That wasn't nothing back there." He felt the grit of rust on that blade, and he knew how much it would've hurt for it to pierce his skin and slice a vein. There were many blades in that world, and he had been sliced upon by hundreds of them in his formation, but of all who held the blades, he would not have minded if it had been hers that ended him. He would've at least liked to know why. Death to the world and its enemies he wouldn't abide by, but by her? There were worse fates.

She stayed quiet and unyielding, and they went on.

Eventually their shadows returned, coming behind them, and their sweat was tolerable in that they cooled it beneath the poncho and made a shawl. She didn't let go of the box cutter, even as its metal heated during the day. By night, her hand had been entirely red from the pressure of her grip and the burn. He made dinner out of an MRE of rehydrated meat and flatbread. One, alone, split between them.

He had reached out across the fire in an offering of the sandwich he made to her and all that the MRE came with, and she did not take it, frozen in firelight as he, with his outstretched hand, bore the fire until he could no longer and pulled back.

"Norea." He called her name quietly, but she did not respond as she curled into herself and turned away, her back to the flame as she flopped over in the night.

He ate his food, but it did not fill him as he wanted, so he left it out for her and went to sleep himself, hiding from the stars in the light of the fire that went on.

When he awoke, the scratching of her pencil woke him. He heard her across the burnt-out fire but did not move as he lay on his side, and he waited there until she had stopped, rose up, and then went away as she had in their mornings to do her business in nature.

She left her implement and her sketchbook behind, and when he heard her disappear, he rose. The food had been eaten. He crouched down and picked up her sketchbook again with her mechanical pencil, and he saw that there had been no lead in it when he shook it. It was expended. He opened the sketchbook to its last used page, a scant dozen and a half pages remaining out of a book of at least eighty, and saw the scene shown from where she had sat in the night and then the day: dried and dying grass around them, the errant bones and branches picked up and thrown by distant winds to where they lay now. As they lay, the grass rose over them like emaciated trees in an alien world, and that had been translated to the paper as he looked. In the foreground is the dead fire, and in the background are those lines that rose above them all. The subject had been something in his place. If there had been a shape to what might've been him, sleeping with his back to her, there had been none save for a mothball of errant, chaotic lines that created a fissure in that drawn world of black lines where lead had shattered, and then only the point of the leadless implement bore into the paper, leaving indentation there and for all pages to follow.

There was no place for him there.

He didn't hear her approach; he only felt her arms come around him to cinch his arms, which made the sketchbook and pencil tumble out to the dirt below, and he pivoted back until the momentum carried him onto the ground and out of the clearing that they had found to set camp in. He was thrown into the brush, and it was a miracle his neck hadn't been broken by it as he landed on his shoulder. Norea stood over him, collecting her things and staring down on him.

"I told you!" She screamed, and what birds hid in the grass flew up and around them, rising like volume itself.

"Norea!" The young man cried out as he beat through the pain, trying to stand but unable to do so in his scramble. "Please, tell me what's wrong! What happened!?"

"Always the same, always the same—nothing changes!" She yelled; she vibrated, arms coming around her as if her very matter was in conflict with itself. "Nothing will change!" She cried, and with her sketchbook, she fled in the grass, into the west. He got up as she took flight into the dry grasslands that grew taller than the both of them. The color of her seen between strands had been what he tried to grab onto in sight, his feet almost failing him as he followed, calling her name, calling to her that whatever it was they could've faced together, but she had been crying in her rush, and no Human language came from her other than pain as her fleeting blue disappeared into the khaki tan of dead leaves and dead grass, and for as hard as the young man ran, he could not catch up to her.

She was gone from his world entirely, as at once his legs gave out beneath him and he remained surrounded by that encompassing spread of grass. He cried out for her, using her real name and her full name. The shadows covered him. She did not respond; she was not there. There was no sun yet, and there was no dawn despite the light. The birds that flew had returned to the Earth in their hidden places. A wind was shearing through those blades, as if carrying her further and further away. He cried out one last time till his voice was hoarse, and then nothing in that inexplicable world

After a while, he sat where he fell, bringing his own knees to him, closing his eyes as if, when he opened them again, she would be there. She wasn't. He sat there for a long time, and after a while, the sun did rise on the world as a reminder that forward was still as it was: spoken to his predecessor and all that listened by a Witch who believed it as gospel from her mother. He had gone forward, and here he had lost all instead.

That Mercurian bumpkin was always a fool.

He rose, finally at last, staring in the direction where she had fled one last time, imparting it into memory and for intention, and went back where he came.

He thought he had lost the camp entirely as he went in reverse, the slight worry that he now had been without what meager supplies and food that they had collected in their time on Earth, but eventually he found it, the fire still smoldering, only to be kicked dead by dirt and dust, and the pack that he had left still there as a makeshift pillow. He hauled it up on his shoulders, and then he went after her again.

He traveled for days in that unending wilderness beneath heat and dust, no cover from the sun above save for another hat, which he had made up of grass and paper blown from distant parts; on the letterhead of it nearly disintegrated already the news of the city of Las Vegas, thirty years ago, providing his brim.

He slept in the dust and awoke in the dust like an animal, not making fire or camp out of fear that time could be taken from him. He thought he saw her tracks, but he did not see her except once: Out in that distance, the wavering ebbs and flows of the earth had been blue, with a sliver of it in the far distance where he saw a speck of her. He, as a modern man, knew what it had been: a mirage. He wanted to believe in it but could not. He did not drink from the canteen. The canteen was for her. He did not eat. He wanted to eat with her.

One morning he woke up in the dirt, and his left arm had been on fire, but not by flame. What had been soft, intangible movements that frittered against his skin became all at once a writhing mass, and as he woke, he screamed again, going to his flask and taking what water lay in there meagerly and dumped it upon his arm.

He saw what it was. It was not a flame. It was a colony of ants that made a living thing of his arm, covering its surface entirely until he felt them deeper than skin; he felt them in the canals of his flesh that had been there for the interaction of Permet.

He shrieked, flailing and sending black dots wild as ants in the lower layers held on with their jaws to his flesh. He threw off his shirt, using the broad end of the flask to swipe away at the ants like a demon shoveling demon snow. Beneath his arm had been red, and ants now went from his arm to the rest of his body as he stripped his clothes off in entirety and danced amongst the savanna in echoed ghosts, bastard panic of the image of his ancestors upon that plain. The virginal moon that had not yet died in the sky as the sun rose in the east faced it down, sharing the same heavens as it uncommonly did, and both sun and moon bore witness to a man dancing as his body was consumed by the littlest of creatures. He was dancing and yelling in pain in a language he did not know until he exorcised those tiny demons from him.

His breathing did not calm until the wind returned to him, blowing across his body, or rather, the body of the Original, in a soothing cool as if the world had been apologizing. His arm had been red, and in it bled little streams; the topography of his arms at their designed and artificial angles provided them a path to flow, and down his arm had been rivers made in the memory of markers where he had been welded to the machines of Space.

His clothes were recovered, as was his bag, and he did not put on his clothes again until he was far away. He walked naked in that land until the savanna did drop before him, ancient power lines guiding his way, and on top of a hill he found himself before the town of Palestine.

Like Nacogdoches before, it had been a town touched by recent and ancient wars, but it was no surprise to anyone in that community because of what it was named for. He walked into town, rimmed by a circular motorway, and found it bustling in the noontime. People were going about their day in their simple lives, and if he looked vagrant still, he looked at least the same now as others, with his dirty blonde hair matted down to dull, his skin browned over, and it itself matted with the world. Men tipped their broad hats to him, this fellow of the Earth, and women greeted him. They had cellphones here—hints of more modern living. An old-generation mobile worker with a monocle walked stiffly across the town, bearing dirt in his hands and back. More cars on the street The impression that this had been just a regular town would have risen had it not been for the fact that, miles in any direction, the dilapidated and ruined world surrounded the thread of highways that connected town to town and then to the distant cities of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio.

He found a bench in a public park, and he looked at people as they passed, enjoying their day or living their lives. A child had eaten a cone of ice and syrup, and he studied its blue.

Across the way, a policeman had been eying him, and he made himself scarce as he walked the town of Palestine, surrounding himself with a community he had not been a part of until at night he came to a tavern. Working men had been at the tables as he entered, like a figure from some distant past with his worn-down poncho. He ducked his head and moved to the bar. The barman there spoke to him without looking. "What'll it be?"

"Sorry, I don't have money."

"Then what're you doing here, kid?"

"I want to ask a question of you, if that is alright."

"It ain't the old West kid; I ain't that type of barkeep."

"Please." He said it with urgency. He wrapped his hands around himself and looked at the barkeep, and in his face he hoped that he had imparted that he had come from distant lands and that he was in desperate need of help, and it pained him to even ask. And in his face, the barkeep saw his own son. The barkeep's face twisted once and then stopped in front of him.

"What do you want?"

He asked for the locations of homeless shelters, churches, holy places, and anywhere else where people could find food if they were poor or needy. He asked if it was not unusual to see people like him roll into town, and the barkeep said that it wasn't, because Palestine was like any other place in that part of the country where cities and towns were run like states bordered off from the wild, strung together by ancient bonds or pragmatic necessity like water or connections to other more powerful and modern places. People came here to find new starts, or, at least, to die and wither warmly from handouts from people who, themselves, were not the most comfortable or well fed but were living true to God and themselves. They even had an Amazon warehouse where the more well-to-do residents could order knick-knacks shipped in from China or Mexico. Living in towns like that was convenient then, like the American way of life that once existed before Ad Stella. He asked about the town and the country around it, and when the bartender seemed about fed up with the young man, he finally asked if there had been news of a girl about his age, with blue hair and fire in her eye and a resting bitch face that was nice after a while, after you knew her.

He shook his head and had heard nothing of the like, and absentmindedly, without even knowing it, he slid a glass of water with cold ice in front of the young man to distract him otherwise and went away to other, paying customers.

All that he remembered was that his memory was good and he had been, on his own merits, a good student in Asticassia. He remembered it all because Norea perhaps depended on him for it.

After a while at the bar in consideration, nothing but a glass of water whose ice had melted entirely in minutes holding his gaze as his mind worked out, he made plans to comb the town, to keep asking and to keep searching for her at all hours, as long as he could. The world was big, and he was only one man. If he could not find her now or soon, then he would never find Norea Du Noc again.

A man came up to him in his deep thought—an older man. "You from around here, boy?" The young man looked over and shook his head in the negative. I've got some place for you to lay."

Sitting as he was, thin and lithe, with the face he had, alone at the bar, he was mistaken for a prostitute. The implication was thick in the air and thick in the man's eyes.

"That'd be quite nice, actually." The young man spoke agreeably, affably, and innocently.

They went out the front, and the patron had led him to his vehicle, and when nothing was done there and they drove out to an apartment complex in Palestine, he walked up those stairs to the third floor, and the patron who opened the door let the young man see how he lived, which was not in any exemplary way. The room smelled of masculine features and sweat, but that was all the young man needed to smell as he saw a shoe rack that only held one type of shoe size.

"Now how about you make yourself comfortable, and we'll ride out the night, and I'll make it worth your time?" The man's belt buckle was fiddled with by both his hands, but before he turned, the Young Man cocked his legs and held the flask that had been in his pocket tight, thwacking it hard against the back of the man's skull with the strength given to him. All those like him had strength like this by necessity. His bones and his muscles had survived as they did living rough because they had been grafted and assured that, as an investment, he could survive what may come. The metal flask bounced with a hard thud against the man's skull in the back, and he fell face first as the young man kicked the door closed behind him and mounted the man on his back. The patron's head turned over as his eyes were wild, and for one last time, the young man brought his flask down on his head and went still.

He sat there for a while, the flask held up, waiting to see if a third strike was needed.

The patron breathed, but he did so shallowly as his mouth drooled onto his floor.

This was from the Original. Whoever he had been could not have been so bold to try this—to try and assault a man in his own home or else face rape otherwise. He carried his gifts as cursed as they were to him.

He stood up over the man, vindicating the abandoned life that he sought to leave behind, but he cared little for it and what it meant as he crouched down again and patted down the man's pockets. His name was Dick Brown, according to his license. He took his whole wallet to thumb through, a sheaf of twenty green American bills in it with a few coins of various denominations. He took his watch, the leather band oily with the man that wore it and the black face of it untouched beneath worn glass. He shuffled through the rest of the apartment—one bedroom and one bath. He tied the man's hands with rope he found in the bedroom and knew that it was not his first time coming back with a sordid affair, tying him to the bed in cruel irony as the young man then took a shower quickly before going into his kitchen, putting bread into his bag and then a thing of peanut butter, along with various other canned goods, fish and crackers, and a bottle of oil. He refilled his flask, dumping both the canteen and flask out and refilling them. He heard the man stirring painfully, but after that, silence again. He went into his fridge and found a glass bottle of milk.

It was the last thing he took in its entirety, and in the night he sipped on the cold bottle until he walked to the other side of town, the last dregs of the white liquid at the very bottom of the bottle by the time he sat in that shrouded alleyway in the mechanical refuse of a quiet bowling alley. He went to drink it when a small black animal was in her peripheral, looking at him with glassy orbs the color of himself.

It was a vagrant cat like himself, with a black coat and mildew-green eyes.

He didn't move, afraid of what he would do to scare it away. Cars in their midnight runs, and then the clop of horses was heard from beyond the alley but never seen, the cat staring at him as if a silent jury.

At last, he did move, taking the bottle from near his lips and then over, away from him, tipping it over until its contents spilled out in a white puddle on the ground.

He inched away further from it until his back was against an opposite wall. He waited, holding the empty bottle in his hand, until it cramped.

The cat never emerged from its darkness. The milk that he spilled dried up on the black concrete and was taken back into the Earth.

He slept.

How he had ended up as the Fifth was a story he put together, piece by piece, which became clearer than that dream version of him, now back in the country that was his own.

There was little doubt now to him that he had once been a half-white Native American child, born on a reservation not too far away from there but that existed no longer, bought up by one of the over one hundred Benerit Group holdings that specialized in resource collection after some of the Reclamation Service and their Reclaimers found valuable metals there. His parents were not present; they were working jobs to try and stay alive as he was left at a squalid home alone. There was a school he went to, and he remembered that one day men in fine clothing bearing the universal symbol of aid and the eagle markings of Peil Technologies came to administer inoculations to all of them. It was on that day that he had decided that they would find him and know what he was: compatible. He doesn't remember if he was given a choice, if they took him in the night, off the street, or even if he had been sold or that he had been asked, but in the end it didn't matter. He was led into a van by starlight and brought all the way to the eastern shore, where he had never seen the ocean before save for in faded pictures, and then immediately after, brought into space, barely literate. The years that followed were hard. Education first, sitting with other children like him, different faces, different voices, but yet the same shape as if God had copied all but their heads, their hairs, and what lay inside of them. Many teachers issued many punishments, outlining that they were to speak in a certain way and were to understand the world through a frame as designated to them. They were to be perfect students and capable learners.

Most of all, finally, they told them what they were there for: to be a doppelgänger of the Original.

For how comfortable their lives could be—bellies full, warm beds, nice clothes—all, in totality, said yes.

As the years went by, the class that had maybe been thirty strong in his recollection became twenty, and then down to fifteen, and then, at last, at his thirteenth year alive, seven. He did not think too hard about what had happened to the dropouts.

He forgot because of the pain when they started shifting, molding them and their bodies into form, but it had been done early, before even memory had been fully grasped by any of the children there, before they could be in a place to remember their true selves if truth could be prescribed to flesh and bone. Those scientists, all of them, from the painted elder ladies to her, Belmeria Winston, and all her own baggage she carried, had taken and divested their origins from them until they were not only separate but entirely eviscerated in their memories that left nothing, not even the absence. In all the world, there could never have been children more horrifying than those who were brought up so civilized, so primly, and so barbaric in their ferment that if anyone else wished to shape their hearts by their own will, they would find themselves immersed in horrible realization and revelation that even the innocent were not holy from ancient temptations that were summed up, in a word, as a Deal.

He dreamed that night, not of himself but of a girl. A girl he knew. A scene he lived He screamed up at her, grasping the controls of that devil machine: "Come with me!"

If she didn't know how to live, he wanted to search for it with her.

If she was scared, he wanted to be by her side.

If she didn't want to run, they would go to the origin of her sketches.

She was allowed to live.

He was allowed to live.

He lived to prove it.

And in this dream, she looked at him through metal and war, and she told him his real name.

And then she died, blasted with light through her heart, so bright that it disintegrated her and all memory of her.

He woke up in that alleyway still holding the glass bottle, and as he knew where he was and that he was still alive, the fleeting memory of the dream slid out from him like a sieve until he was left with nothing but the fact that it had happened, and she had told him who he was, but he was not able to keep it. The glass bottle was thrown, exploding against the opposite wall, and a cat skittered away in the morning dawn.

In the day he walked Palestine, and the town's police force did not seem overly concerned with him because, as he had thought, no man was to call over petty theft that came out of an attempted midnight tryst with a partner of dubious nature. He saw people go to office buildings and warehouses where goods made from cheap labor the world over were bundled up into vans and sent out into Palestine and the larger area. He saw service people and cooks barter with farmers, for that country had been full of it, for produce and goods for the menus of the day, and with his taken money he went into a dinner and bought some eggs and some coffee, and he sat there and ate them, dipping some bread into the broken yolk as a news channel from space had been played. This had been a recording, not live, so the news as it came had been late. This recording spoke of where he came from, for no one cared what happened on Earth: The attack on Asticassia had still been fresh when this was recorded, with the anchor woman speaking summaries, broad points, and details of the attack that he had been amongst, and he had tried to stop it. A massacre by the dreaded Gundam by an unknown assailant, vague details about what and why, and only that the Benerit Group had been to blame, and the Space Assembly League demanded answers from the new president: Miroine Rembran, who had been missing since an attack during a delegation between Spacians and Earthians, broken by fire, broken by that one machine that altered all their lives forever: that machine that came from Shin Sei, that machine that came from Mercury.

He ate his breakfast and then left before he listened more to the life he left. He did not hear of the list of missing executives, and Prospera Mercury was among them.

He looked for her everywhere in Palestine during the day and the night until his body could go no more and he slept, sometimes in alleys, beneath bridges and buildings hiding from rightful occupants, sometimes in quarter houses so full of itinerant workers that no one checked to see if he belonged with them in their stacked cots, piled up like slaves crossing the Atlantic until summoned again for labor. He asked for her by description, by emotion, by feeling.

He asked a homeless man if he had seen a woman with deep blue hair who was smaller than him, who was unkind, but he knew her heart had been kinder than that, and who carried a book with her that held all her life.

The homeless man didn't know, and he held out his hand for alms. He gave it

He looked in the corners of the world in that large town, and he had decided, or else he would go insane himself, that this was the place that she had come because, as he learned, there was no town closer, save for the city of Waco further in the same direction, and that had made no sense.

Loneliness had never been more present in his heart. Yearning echoed within him. What was the life he could've found worth if she had not been there, if she had not found her own?

One night he passed by the town's square, where there had been a hanging taking place and where local law had dictated above what remnants and scraps of national law had been. Three men had been accused of stealing from the food silos of the town that kept the stocks of stores filled and the business of capitalism going in that place. They stole food because they were hungry; they all cried out, but in that world there was crime, and in that land crime was dealt with handily as a minister spoke both in English and then in Spanish about their final rites.

The man in the center, who had been a thin man, the rope around his neck strung out so tight that the band of it had sprouted another rope altogether, cried out not to hang him but to hang the men he kept the food in there for pricing to send to space, and how grain cordoned away for the excesses of Spacians was grain that was stolen from the mouths of the truly hungry on Earth. Some in attendance nodded and agreed. The men hung anyway, the rope snapping with the weight of the convicted, their great choking and dying covered by distant thunder.

A unit from the Earth Garrison Force stopped by on a routine presence patrol on another day. A single mobile suit colored in camouflage as it suited the land stood as armored vehicles circled around, and the local police chief met with them and told them that there had been no new disturbances. The captain of the mobile suit, who stepped out from its belly onto his hand and spoke with the police chief, exchanged long words that none could hear but them, and as he watched from his corner, he eyed not them but all other corners. She could be there, waiting, reverting back to herself, waiting to strike at the Spacians and all those who served them. She did not appear, and the EGF force went on.

A revival was held in a distant part of town that intersected with fields of wheat and other hardy crops, where workers went out with their hands to tend them. The tent was put up, offering a nice cold punch that even he partook in in exchange for his ear as the reverend cried out to God beyond the fabric.

The young man never stopped looking for her, even now in that crowd of workers taking a break, darting across heads. She hadn't been there. He sipped from the punch, tangy yet sweet and refreshing, poured from a helper's pitcher, and he listened to the Reverend Bancuo, who had come all the way from the Scottish Highlands to preach the Word.

"Neighbors, my brothers and sisters in Christ," his voice spoke with the bombast afforded to him by his foreign lilt, and it commanded all in that space spread out with plastic chairs. "Though we live in times where Man walks on Mars and that a Bible put there by an expedition sanctioned by the Papal now sits in orbit among Jupiter as a testament to the sound of the Word, I do pay all you heed that we on Earth have perhaps the most pure frontier, if not the most important frontier.

"I speak, of course, of the frontier of the soul. Ecclesiastes said himself that he would, and I quote, "Set my mind to seek and explore wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven. It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with." And that means that for all that we shall go in this space and then perhaps even further beyond the Earth Sphere, to whatever galaxies and star systems lay beyond this one that our children's children's children perhaps would see, a thousand generations away, they would find nothing there that would truly fill out our obligation, our affliction, of completing that task as put upon Ecclesiastes, as it is put on all men." The Reverend Bancuo pointed to nearly everyone in the tent, and yet his finger skipped over the young man. "Benerit, though I have great respect for them," the Reverend lightened in jest, "In their donations to my own parish, my own home back in Culloden, they spend too much time in Space.

"Does anyone here know why they were made?" He asked all within the canvas tent's reach.

A man in front of the crowd spoke. "To hunt Gundams." In that place of holy scripture, he said that word of damnation, and the crowd recoiled, but he was forgiven by the Reverend.

"Nae, lad." He shook his head. "Though that might be part of their duties and the course of their actions, their real goal, and I know it to be true, is that they hunt Witches."

He put power behind that word as if cursing the curse itself: Witches.

The young man never forgot where he had been, and he felt small and wished to be invisible there as he sipped his punch. It would've been a bad idea to leave now, to draw attention to himself.

"Witches." The Reverend Bancuo said again in nodding, his eyes wide, so wide as if to take in all in that dark tent. "Now they might say that all Witches are dead, but I don't quite believe that. No. Have you heard? The madness? An entire school was brought into a senseless war because, so I hear, there were Witches there. Eighty-nine babies are dead, and a hundred more are injured beyond all recognition. And do you know why?"

The crowd collectively shook their heads.

"Because in these twenty-one years since Cathedra did their work, they had forgotten that Witches could be anywhere, and more than that, within anyone." He was holding onto his lectern, but the book of God fell from it in his preaching. "Here, on Earth, of course, as always, for in all this Kingdom of God, only God himself can know what is all in it at one time, but I mean more from where I started!" He started shouting. "There are Witches in that last great frontier that we, in our idleness, have invited, and they have gone ahead to those far borders, waiting for us! I say that they are because when we go far enough away in the other direction, they remind us and tempt us that we are going in the wrong direction. Those devils wish to be challenged, and I say, I say, that we will!"

A loud round of agreements had occurred, with those who sat becoming signatories to a crusade in a war that had gone far longer than Man's reckoning.

"Space!" The Reverend Bancuo yelled out, picking up his holy book and yelling toward them even in the day, past the tent, "Do not tempt us no more! Instead, let us turn inward and find these Witches that lay on the frontier of our souls, where God has made that battlefield that the righteous will walk to, fight on, and emerge on the other end because we do so in his Will, in his Light! All Witches will join the Devil in hellfire damnation!"

Wherever he went, History would always follow him.

As rapturous cries for action swept over the Earthians, the young man stepped out of the sermon.

"It's some good punch, huh?" A young woman asked him as he emerged.

The day before he decided to leave Palestine, he sat in another diner eating buttered toast, having scoured all over the boundaries of that world and not finding Norea Du Noc. He asked for her everywhere, and by the time he had been asking, when he came into one particular halfway house, the lady at the front desk had already given him an answer to his query: she wasn't there.

But then a miracle

He sat eating his toast alone on the counter as he developed a taste for coffee at fifty cents a pour when, down the counter, a man spoke Spanish to the waitress. "Me puedo tener agua con hielo?"

"Speak English." The waitress barked at him.

"Water and ice, please."

"Alrighty then."

His face had been red and his eyes blackened, even more so than his skin; his mustache was splotchy with dried blood; and his hat had been taken off and put on his knee. The waitress was disinterested as she slid her glass to him and went to attend to others, her pad for ordering and a pencil left on the counter. The young man looked at the bruised man, and the bruised man, even with his eyes puffed up, saw him. He raised his glass of water to sip from it as if toasting their eye catch, and then put it against his eye and groaned.

The young man rode several seats over and closer, and he saw a once-white patch of gauze where his shoulder had been too. This man had been in a fight in the last few hours.

He began to explain without question, his other hand free of the glass, making obscene movements as if he could paint the scene in the air.

"I was working for Senor Samson on seeing what buildings and properties around here could be renovated. There's a church, south east of here, just outta town, where the old Mennonites once were." He spit blood into the glass and drank it all up again before putting it up against his eyes. "I thought no one was in there, but this crazy puta jumped on me when I entered a church. She was so wild, I thought she was an animal at first. Something like La Llorona." He put the water down, and from his shirt pocket, he drew with a mechanical pencil.

It was her mechanical pencil.

He feared the worst.

"She stabbed me with this. That bruja." He had been disgusted by it, even when blunt pieces of blood and flesh had been curled into the plastic and its ridges. "I tell you, I'm going back. I'm going to raise up a posse."

He grabbed the mechanical pencil and had been out the door before he could pay, his feet in flight faster than when he had lost her out of town.

He ran back east from where he had first come into Palestine and looked for, out of town, along old dirt roads more trodden by horses until he came to a dilapidated white building whose crown stood above even the trees of that area, beset on all sides by hills and uneven land that hosted crosses in the numeral of hundreds, graveyard land around a church whose congregation had long ago turned to dust. He rammed through those front doors of pinewood, only to surround himself with pinewood walls and pinewood pews that had been bent in shape and form, some incomplete and used for firewood. In the center of that church lay a black hole where fires had burned, and as he stood before the portal to that church, his eyes leading from the center to the path up, there stood in all definitions what the world had warned of, what had caused the world to be this way by those who had triumphed over History. Before a great haltered Christ that hung in unease from above the altar stood a woman, something in the shape of a human, whose unruly hair cascaded unevenly down the blackened shape of her in a day that came to an alien dusk around them. Stained glass created blue and orange shapes where dying light threw itself through, and one such radical shape was put upon her. On the face of the altar had been a drawing made of blood, taken from the man that came here early in the morning, and in those strokes made by fingers, splinter and all, had been the massacred mutant of her own face.

"Norea!"

His voice echoed with a holy sound in that broken place, and she, whoever it was, looked at him. This church had been burned once before in the past, and black marks had been left everywhere. His sound broke the dust and charcoal, and the world quivered.

She stepped down from the altar where she stood, but her movement had been unnatural, not of Man but of ghosts, of creatures that came not from the mortal plane but from the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, and if there was any fear that the young man felt seeing her again as she moved, skipping time in movements unable to be fully recollected, he did not fear it as she flew to him, and then her hands had been upon him, her nails sharp and ragged, and she was a blur in darkness.

She screamed, clawing at his face and his heart with hands and fingers as, in between frantic swipes, more trained and controlled strikes came that beat against his nose as they wrestled on the floor, sending his back to the floorboard and creating an instrument of wood. He held onto consciousness as he stood up and took her with him, grasping at her face, then her neck, and putting her on her back before she pivoted her head back again and sent it forward, her forward blunting the space between his eyes.

"Norea!" He screamed again. She was attacking him, and he did all in his power to not match her, blow for blow, until he had been on his back again amidst a clatter of nails and old wood, and a pew broke beneath them. He brought his legs up to her midsection and launched into the dark ash that was collecting where her fires were made. His face was wet with her sweat, his own spit, and then blood from his nose, dripping down his chin to his feet below.

He let the bag fall from his shoulders, and in his hand was her implement, which she had been missing.

She rose, and before she steadied herself, the mechanical pencil blunted against her forehead, tumbling until it hung onto the collar of her shirt and then into her hands, bloodied and empty. If it were wet again, maybe she could make strokes with the blood in place of lead. He approached her slowly, hands out.

"I don't know why you ran away, but... His voice caught the words in his throat, and they came up in half a cough and half a wheeze. "I've been so lonely."

Her eyes went wider, and the pen in her hand joined a box cutter that was drawn in the other. He backpedaled, squaring his feet as he tasted his own blood on his lips. She charged again with yelling, shouting, chaos, sound, and fury. He caught the pen in the web of his right hand as he, with his longer arms, was able to get the hand holding the box cutter by the wrist, but her body did not stop, sending them both to the floor again as the splinters became myriad, stabbing into his back.

"It's me, Norea!" He wished he could say his name. How he wished he could tell it to her truly. The hand that caught the pen was bleeding, but he whipped the pen away to some corner of the church as she bared down to him, much like that morning in Reyes' RV. "I don't know what you saw differently in me, but!" He brought his bloody hand over to hers as she tried to force the box cutter down over his heart, sending it askew, only to send it deep into his shoulder. He screamed, twisting his shoulder and then rolling her onto her own back. "I don't know who I am, Norea! But I know that whatever this is, this isn't you!"

"You don't know who I am!" She spoke words to him for the first time as she bucked beneath him. "You should have never looked for me!"

With the strength of those bound by Permet, she twisted an arm around his midsection, even as he bled onto her.

"I'm going to kill you, Spacian!"

Elan Ceres was a Spacian through and through, and he was made in his image. Of those words that Norea screamed up at him, it was not just a promise; it was a warning, and then he understood. But Elan Ceres was not this young man. He let her twist him around for the final time, and he lay limp against the floor as she sat on him and brought the box cutter back. She noticed that before she plunged the knife down onto his face, he had already been slack. Before the stroke had been finished in its downward movement, she diverted it, and the blade had come around to his cheek, through his ear, and then down into the floor. In her momentum, in her movement, her forehead fell upon his, and she panted, and she breathed, and she bled herself from her blows, and in warped light, he kept his eyes open to see either his death or Norea. Her breathing had been fast, then slow, and then desperate as her effort gave out and her own body went lax on top of him, their faces pressed upon each other like pieces of a puzzle coming to fit. Her lips had been dry as they passed over his skin, painfully so to even him, and as her lips passed over the wetness of his face from sweat or blood, her lips grabbed onto those globs and filled themselves in, and there was relief, even if morbid, in them. Her body dictated her movements, an animal brain for someone so close to the beasts she sounded like then.

She brought her face to his and, with her lips, began to lick those lines of red that came down from his nose and around his mouth, her tongue intruding along his lines until they were not intruders anymore, and the young man tasted her own iron as their faces brushed together, and from his angle on his back, he had been enticed to the blood of her, canting his face so as to partake. Their tongues newly wettened, seeking further satiation in that dry world that seemed so intent on taking them with it by each other's actions. It was relief, and relief they sought as their mouths canted upon each other until they found themselves smeared red and tired. His bloody hands rose from their limpness as if he were possessed by a doll and brought them around her midsection, and she, with nothing she could press her lips to, tried to wipe his skin of his own blood, but it ran, and it ran forever, but it was at least proof he was alive.

He leaned back, and she had been crying again as they pulled away, deep and fundamental wheezing in her lungs as tears rolled over dried, dirty, and bloodied skin.

"I'm going to kill you." She whispered. She tasted like blood, and he tasted like blood, and together they invoked and made a pact with some undiscovered markings on the floor in that holy space as Christ looked down upon them, ready to collapse. She said it also, so quietly with her newly wettened lips. "I saw it. I can't explain it, but I saw it, and I know it. That's how these things always end. Spacians and Earthians."

"I'm of Earth too." He told her, holding her wrists at his side as he lay with her on top, as if he would let go and lose her again, this time forever. "I came from this," he said.

"No." She balled her fists. "Don't say that. You're not. You're something else now."

He sat there and thought, and then he came up with an answer. "We're something else. A new type of something." He had declared instead, and in all things, "Whatever that is, we can do it together."

"I'm going to kill you." She warned again, but they fell on ears that denied it, even as one ear bled from a notch made. "I can't—don't put me in that situation."

He rose up from the floor, and she now sat in his lap as he ducked his head down and put it to her chest, burying his forehead in it. "You know my name." He muffled into her, speaking to her heart. "I don't know how, but you do, and I can't know it until you say it, Norea Du Noc." When he rose, the liquid on his face was more of tears than blood; his tears. "I need you for everything. To know who I am and what type of life I can live. And if it's not a life that is able to be there to find your meaning, then it's not a life I want at all."

She looked at him as those eyes of his burned with emotion, and she felt more than he had felt in all of his years alive. She, this ruined woman, and he, this never-man, said, "You should escape. The life that I might find might... He would accept none of this.

"If you find life in killing me," The box cutter is in his hand, and it's back in hers, and it burns all over. "Do it. Norea. If that is the way of things. Me, for your life."

"No…" She denied it, and the box cutter fell back to the floor.

"This life was never mine to begin with."

---

I see them.

Those lights are binary stars whose gravity orbits around themselves until a final circulation.

They're so far away from here.

The other daughter lay on the cold floor as many red eyes looked down upon her, and Mom stood proud and crazed, assured of her victory.

Another mother of men lay next to her, sucking blood in her lungs where there should be air.

I take my sister into me as she lies on a broken sword. Another clone of me

I brought her back to where she came from. Not the best way. The only way A woven path barely holding together.

Light itself has been taken in by those who bent nature to their will, and soon it will be unleashed.

Another tells me he knows at least who one of those distant stars is because he's much like him.

Another tells me that she definitely knows the light. It is her family out there, and she is so happy she still exists in the world.

Of all the lights now, these are the ones that will be left.

We were wrong. We were all so wrong.

Mom. I see it:

An Axis.

History is about to swing upon it.

Maybe if you never wore that mask, you would've seen it.

But it's too late now.

Stars. Hide your fires.

I know where the end will come from.

Suletta, I'm sorry.

I'm leaving you again.

---

They sat there for a long time wrapped up in each other, the lushness of his hair and her hair coming together in slight clean and ruined blues as they each canted themselves to press into each other's necks, softness and perfume made of them intermingling. Again and again she warned him of what was to come, and he whispered, I don't care, I don't care, and she buried her face into him so as not to cry out. The sun did set on that world, but it was okay, at least for a little while. He told her that if she had killed him, at least it meant that he had been with her to the very end. He told her, and then she broke so wholly that she had heard his words and trusted him finally.

"Don't leave me again. Don't leave me alone." She breathed into his skin, burying her face in him and his blood.

"I won't. I promise." She shuddered as he answered, as he promised something that might've been impossible, but he meant it, and she knew it. She held him tight, and just for now that promise had been whole.

The rumblings of horses and trucks outside that arrived and then idled, leaving a mongrel mechanical purring with blinding lights unkind to the corners and cracks of that dilapidated building,

He knew who it was.

"Stay here," he told her, and in the headlights that he emerged into from the thick doors of the church, he stood before a posse of at least twenty men who did not expect him. Of them had been the bruised man from the diner, at the front, and upon a horse, behind him, had been the Reverend Bancuo, on a black horse, which he rode. "Whatever you're looking for, it isn't here."

He emerged like a martyr, his blood still fresh and smeared all over him.

"Mijo," the bruised man said in concern, and in his hand was a breach-loaded shotgun of at least twelve gauge. "La bruja alla te ha arruinado."

"Did you already finish the job, lad?" Reverend Bancuo asked across his horse, with the Bible in one hand and a semi-automatic pistol in the other. "Did you kill the Witch that intrudes on these holy grounds?"

Men all stood armed with rifles, pistols, shotguns, blades, or clubs, and one man held the Holy Cross itself in his hand as a silver pistol rode the other.

They came, ready to kill, ready to do as their moral order called on them to do.

"A Witch?"

"Si." The bruised man said, "La bruja."

"She's not a Witch. She's just lost. Same as I am."

"No, mijo. She's a Witch. Who else would be in there? To take a place in the house of God like that?"

"Step aside; you do not know what she is." Reverend Bancuo swept the arm with his book across as if anointing everything in front of him. "This land has known much pain from witches of all types."

"I know what she is, and she's not a This was not the truth of what he was going to say, so he chose something else: "She's not a bad person. She's just scared! Scared to be alone!"

She peered out from her corner, hidden in the shadow cast by his headlight.

"Let me take her away from this pace, where no harm will come from her or to her. You have my word."

"In your name?" The Reverend asked. He could not answer, for she stood on nothing at all, and if he did, he was sure they would not take it. "If she were just a girl, then of course. But she is not just a girl." Reverend Bancuo proclaimed, feeding story after story, not only from the bruised man but to those that had encountered her before in that time: this being that haunted this place that a denomination of Christ once had been. "She is a Witch."

"You don't know that."

"I reckon so, lad, and I reckon right."

The men of that country had been a hardy lot, a resilient lot, built up from a forever frontier both in eternity as spoken by the Reverend and then in actuality as the world rubber banded through its ages. They were the men he had seen all over that country in his time here, from the homeless to those with places for them and families, and in each of them resided a spirit that could not be broken because those that had been left behind had been broken in them. They are known as fixers of cattle, of cowboys, vaqueros, family men, and frontier peoples who had come to this country and made a place here, no matter what peoples had been there before and no matter what creed they brought either in slavery, war, or imperialism. The people that in the distant past had colonized the land of Texas survived until now, and here the young man stood before their descendants who had suffered much for times they had no part in, holding guns, and going back to what they didn't know else wise: that there was righteousness in this world and it acted through them, and that hunting witches was what they needed to do to maintain themselves. Each an innocent man, each a gun at the side of higher powers.

Justice spoke through in the least of things, no matter the color of that justice.

The bruised man stepped forward, and the young man stood at the door, a boy to them.

He stopped. He looked to his side at his compatriots and then at the Reverend Bancuo, who said nothing but nodded. "Move aside, mijo." He said it again, and the young man recognized the word. "It wasn't just me she hurt; it wasn't just me she terrorized."

"I'm not your son." Said the descendant of Mennonites, said the descendant of the nermernuh, the common people as known in the language of the Comanche. With blood smeared on his face, he became twice over his ancestor's child standing before that church, in war paint of himself, and knowing what was behind him, he would go to war even if it was a lost cause. History repeats itself again and again in bloodlines and in farce.

The bruised man reached out to him fully, and when his arm came into range, he took it and, with great strength, yanked the man forward on his weak side. The shotgun he held clattered down before him as he brought his knee into him, only to kick him back.

The man sputtered, falling to the ground before the rest of the group as they stared on in ire.

He bent down for the shotgun, and in every corner, guns were cocked. "Don't do it." Said the Reverend. "Men have died for better in this country and in the name of greater things." He froze there half bent, the shotgun left untouched as he slowly rose again, and the man he kicked slumped on his back once as his compatriots dragged him up.

"Te voy a matar." He ground, and it sounded familiar to the young man as, from his belt, he drew a long knife. The posse stood watching. "Pick it up." He offered it to the young man, still bent as if he could do it, as if he knew that by picking it up there was a way out of this situation. "Pick it up!"

The messenger of the Christian God watched from horseback, along with three other riders with long guns drawn and held up or held like staffs to the sky.

The young man again slowly went to bend down, but as he did, guns rose once again in the posse, and out from the back, she emerged.

"No! Please don't!" Norea went to his back and stood with him. "Take me! Take me. Don't hurt him! He has to live!"

"There she is." Said a gunman.

"Step asides." Said the Reverend Bancuo one more time, and he too had held his gun out. "She here is guilty of far more than you know. Children are at risk because of her. Innocent children. If not here, then everywhere. It is our God-given duty to deal with her as she stands."

There was no doubt that she had been guilty of murder. Of murder of the innocent, of children from where they came. But the young man knew where she came from. It was his world, too. She wanted to go, for if he had been so eager to give his life for hers, then it was only right to go the other way. And neither wanted them to go into that absolution. They held onto each other, as they had in the storm—all storms—and in the bright light of their headlights, the world had all boiled down to the then and the there.

"They're both Witches." Said a man on a horse, his lever action 30-30 gleaming in wait. "Let's just clock both of them."

With his voice to preach, the Reverend spoke up to all, in volume, to cover what may happen and what should happen. "IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST, OUR GOD AND LORD, STRENGTHENED BY THE INTERCESSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN MARY, MOTHER OF GOD, OF BLESSED MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL,"

"Sounds like a good idea; I can't be too sure."

"They're just kids."

"I'm going to kill you!"

"OF THE BLESSED APOSTLES PETER AND PAUL AND ALL THE SAINTS AND POWERFUL IN THE HOLY AUTHORITY OF OUR MINISTRY, WE CONFIDENTLY UNDERTAKE TO REPULSE THE ATTACKS AND DECEITS OF THE DEVIL. GOD ARISES; HIS ENEMIES ARE SCATTERED AND THOSE WHO HATE HIM FLEE BEFORE HIM."

"We should hang them! Hang them! Like them Spacians, we did!"

"AS SMOKE IS DRIVEN AWAY, SO ARE THEY DRIVEN; AS WAX MELTS BEFORE THE FIRE, SO THE WICKED PERISH AT THE PRESENCE OF GOD."

And with each word they approached, and with each word the world closed, and with each word the two Witches held each other tighter, naked to the world, until all at once they came for her with arms reaching out, and she looked at him, and she started to say goodbye.

He kicked up with his feet the shotgun and used it as a bar to push them all back, tumbling over themselves. As the great mass of waves cried out in crumble, he summoned within himself his pain and a voice not spoken in years, and he cried out in dialectic with the Reverend:

"Stop! Just stop!" And so the young man yelled, and in his shrill cry, something wholly Other had been there waiting, listening to him, as it had for a million years. He screamed, and the stars did listen, for up above in blinding light, all his blessings had found their way back to him, for he, as a Witch, wished it. At first, the sky did brighten, and at midnight, when it was high noon, that alien sky turned bright white, the lights of every astral being blocked out by its shine. The world froze. A picture of it being taken as all Space came in one unitary color and froze. With his arms outstretched, flatly beckoning them in to do as he said, that is what the world obeyed with powers that coursed through him and through her. Not by some abstract force, even if that may be present now, but in something real, something in reality, that as the white light illuminated all, for nothing could hide from it, so too did the ridges of his skin begin to shine. They shined along his veins, along the vents made there in scarring, by incisions, and by usage ordained to him by a birth; him and her, who too shined along her skin those Permet rivers that coursed through them, and they did not know why. The posse that came had been frozen between his hands, their skin glowing brightly, and then Space above turned fire.

She looked out across those that stared at them as monsters, and if now she was anything, she was as they believed her to be, and she hissed, bearing her teeth and making them scream and see the wrath of monsters.

"By God!" Reverend Bancuo screamed, his hand held up to block the brightness from burning his eyes. "God Almighty!"

Some of the posse had begun to scream and back pedal, and all those who stood still in their boots with the fear of the holy were propelled when the unholy came.

The sky above, in bright light for what could've been forever, began to turn, to darken, to shift. Here in their blood, the tracings of light along the skin of the Witches began to burn differently, and what had been white and pure soaked in what had been in their skin, and if it had been they who turned the sky dark, horrifying red, or the sky who turned their skin to the color that they had been washed with, none knew for certain. Space did turn from black to ivory white, and now, like a blood meridian, the moon above is like a wafer of communion dipped in the true blood of God's son.

And now in the stars, distant pops of light

Calamity had come. The end of the world was brought here because of this.

An avatar of whatever powers were there walked forward in the shape of the young man, and with his arms dripping red and his skin glistening neon, from his hands to his face, in designs that could be construed as primeval, he kept his arms raised, and he beckoned once: "Leave!"

A man dropped his gun as he spoke of the apocalypse, and it went off. The horses were not gun-broken, and they began to buck wildly and run. The Reverend Bancuo, in horror, in awe, and in the horrible realization that the End Times were real, had been thrown off his horse, and in his last moments, the black horse he rode came back down onto his face with a steel hoof and left his brains in the mud as he held out his arms, the good book, and a gun on either side of him as if he had been crucified without a cross.

Men started running away, screaming, speaking, and begging for forgiveness as the bruised man and just a handful remained, and in all their choosing to do, they chose what Norea had promised the young man and what Earthians did.

He picked up his shotgun, and she cried out.

The young man ducked, for the name she screamed was not heard clearly, but it was a sound for him, of him, as buckshot fired wide and above his head and blew a part of the door frame as he flinched, and he and her ran back into the church as Man, panicked and unknowing of what was happening, began to shoot into the church.

The young man scooped up his bag, and Norea grabbed his hand, the two neon reds intersecting upon the channels in their skin as gunfire was plentiful and wild, but none of the posse dared to step into that place. A gunshot careened into the figure of Christ upon his cross, and in a great spark it ignited errant straw around it, the great commotion of the halter falling upon olden wooden ground, kicking up ancient dust and ancient graves beneath there. The world was red, red in everything, tainted. Norea cared not as she kept her head down, leading the young man to the back of the church where preparations for service were made, and then out a back entrance as the church on its ground caught fire, and the gunfire was unending as scared men destroyed the church, hoping they had still been in it. The old Mennonite church, one hundred years into its destruction, finally caved in that night, but when it did, it did so alone, except for the ghosts of the dead around it; those that did the deed were long gone, huddled with their families as they rode out what might have seemed the end of all.

The entire world woke up to see the sky change from its natural color to something horrifying, and it did not change back. Not for hours, not for days, and as all the sins of Mankind were thought to be about to be judged in every person on Earth, all contact with Space had been lost, and soon the stars did fall myriad in their vectors from profitable paths to destruction in dust and nothingness in the atmosphere.

Their scars did pulse with the night in their color, and animals and bugs ran with them in their flight away from all Men scared of Witches. They galloped alongside them, recognizing the two as not humans, not completely, and they ran without regard because now and forever they were truly free. They ran in the dark of that night and the red of the day; they ran into the West, putting behind them all that the world around them now had to deal with for their plight. Everywhere on Earth, as in Jeddah, Babylon, Jerusalem, and the West, a red birthmark christened the world.

In his movement, the young man looked to his left and right, and he saw children—the same child, copied again and again, flying with them into the night—and he had known these children in a moment he had put behind him for fear and for the greatest pain he had ever felt in his life. They flew in formation with him in a maneuver so familiar, so deadly, and they all looked upon him and her, and if she saw them too, she said nothing as they ran forward, forever forward. He didn't understand then, and he did not understand now under gunfire, save for the conditions of everything around him:

A Data Storm like no other and the last one in all history

In his panting, it returned through his heart, his muscles contracting and releasing at split-second turns as his very lungs breathed for air that they could not get enough of. He fell to the ground, clasping his heart, and a coven of children swirled around him one last time as Norea yelled for him, circling back around as she joined that circle despite being blind to it. His markings flared brighter than the world, and he had gone into that light one more time.

Norea knew nothing of what had happened, and in their flight, she thought he had been shot. She reached down, scooping him into her arms, and she continued to run until the moon had gone down and the sun was up in a gore-colored sky, huddling in a cave along a cliffside boundary, adorned in the markings of ancient hunters.

Around them, sirens did raise, and Hell had broken loose in the far distance, and they continued both glowing on into another day and another night where the red did not go away.

No one could escape the chaos of the world except two.

Only them.

Only those who knew and had been put upon by the curse long before

Eventually, the sky became gray and eventually returned to its blue, and then the night was black, but when the first new dawn rose, it rose upon the advent of history, after calamity.

Everyone, without distinction, came across their new lives and the world to come.

In a cave outside of Waco, Texas, the young man woke to her holding onto him in a crying-out embrace, and then he never wanted to sleep again.