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.

3. II

II

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Leaving Palestine -

Refugees in Waco -

Texas Rangers ride and Preachers on their corners -

In the lands of Rapture -

A suffocated baby -

Traveled news -

A Spacian found, and his account -

Dead metal -

The Group shattered -

Gone West again -

Hair cut -

The dead and the bearer -

Across the desert -

Tu me manques, ma petite sœur -

Ran down by the Comanche -

A machine -

Near death and taunted by an automobile -

Digging a well and clawing back to life -

Cattle drovers -

The cowboy Lacey Cold -

San Angelo -

Bribing the maid -

They settle -

A town of the West -

They work jobs -

The Anglo does not know God -

They lose it all -

He dances -

Mein Junge, du könntest ewig tanzen-

Christmas Morning -

Hope -

The Padre -

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Who Would Come Other?

They traveled away from Palestine like the peoples that bore its name, ran off by those who claimed it, and when the sky bled its veil through back to what had been known, what could be considered normal, so too did their scars from a different life fade, and then they went on, further into the West, further out of the pine tree country, and into a dry land. They did not know what became of them that night, where their skin glowed and their hearts had been on fire—a phenomenon only seen in their cursed mobile suits that demanded of them as they demanded of them. It was something they knew of themselves that came only when the Permet called back to them, as they called to it; each time they controlled a machine put upon with that material so advanced that it could've been mistaken for magic. He knew more about what it meant than she did, and how her enhancements as a person were less egregious and very much homebrew, operated in hospitals that were in the Fold. He was the Human guinea pig after all, with billions in capital put into him, and he had been educated as appropriate for his condition. They only lit up like that at all when the bioharmonic frequency within them resonated closer to the natural responding frequency of the Permet in their machines, and then the Permet had connected them wider, to that place, to that lesser understood beyond that that rode feedback back to them.

They called this back and forth the Data Storm.

And on that night, they knew what it must've been, for it could be no other than what had been inside of them dormant, and they could tell no one else that they knew what it was.

Early on, they passed by burning towns that continued to burn long after they'd passed, with some residents dead in the streets and no one to tend to them except for the dogs. Their fires rose into the night and colored the dark skies orange, beckoning again for the color that had left as the shapes of their shadows danced against poisoned heaven. They were dancing in a night that had discovered its own mortality, and they created monsters that toured over them like the Titans of old. The country where there had been communities seemed abandoned where they traveled, as if the Rapture had come from that Data Storm and taken up all on Earth but them, cursed by their marks. But they were not alone for long. They came into the town of Waco a week after the red disappeared, and they were all refugees when signs of life in the form of other people appeared again. The first sign of life they saw was a Texas Ranger riding on his horse out of Waco back the way they came, and he asked them if they had seen the towns of Fairfield, Buffalo, Personville, Groesbeck, Teague, and Mexia. They don't know what towns they saw, only that there were four abandoned and two burning, and there had been dead on the street. The Ranger spat on the ground, crow's feet in his eye, and swore to God for this country. He kicked his spurs into the barrel of his horse and whipped the reins, and he had been off down the highway to take account of his homeland.

Preachers were wild in Waco; at every corner, a preacher had been there, and not always of God. Some were of news and theorizing what had been happening. Mankind did not take to the unknown well, and they searched for all the answers they could.

In one corner, it had been the Rapture, coming to collect those souls who had not accepted modernity and degeneracy, and those who remained on Earth had been sinners, and there was yet time for them to repent. In another, conspiracies of a final weapon made by Jeturk that would invalidate all others and that they had been waiting for a time to strike against all of their rivals completely Further still, others spoke that aliens had come from Alpha Centauri, that this was the first wave of their presence, and that they should all be ready to join a wider, interstellar community.

In one corner of a street alone, to hardly a crowd, a wiry woman with one eye and advanced age had predicted that the Group's over usage of Permet-based machines simply polluted space and that in a giant discharge, all Permet had disintegrated like a bubble popped.

The two of them heard her and wondered how she had come to that conclusion.

In Waco, Texas, people came from their ruined communities and spoke about how they were ruined as emergency food stores and supplies were put out, and local politicians tried to either assure them or reach out to other places to see the status of the world. The metropolises had gone dark to outside observers, even as within them fighting brewed and refugees from them came bearing a million stories of their own. Those with radio sets and communications devices were struck with not static, not a cacophony, but simply nothing. People speculated as they ate in gymnasiums or community centers, and Norea and the young man listened to it all as eventually the sky did not fall further and the world continued spinning on as bit by bit, from messenger or ranger, what had happened when the heavens dripped blood red was known, at least by its effects.

In those days of darkness, people huddled deep into their homes and shelters and stayed away from windows, as the more adventurous wandered out from their abodes and rode their horses and vehicles beneath what felt like an eternal sunset. Migrant workers with no choice still went out into the fields, and the weather and the temperature felt no different than they should have in that hot summer. A great migration took place; families long separated came back together again even across the country in reunion before the end of the world, and if the end of the world, Judgment Day, that it might have been, had been, some had gone out to the streets and laid before the world and, either by pill, asphyxiation, or bullet, put themselves to death.

They passed by an apartment complex where lived a multigenerational family, all of whom seemed already tended to by the coroner as plastic bags were tied around all of their heads sealed by rope, and the first to die had been a baby no more than three years of age with a sandwich bag that had been put to its face. The authorities all marched them out with their hats tucked in their shoulders as neighbors assisted and carted out a family of twenty to join the hundreds dead in fear of something that never came.

The fear of God existed still in those modern times, as powerful as the fear of Witches, and by the time that they came across their dozenth man espousing apparent truths of the Almighty, the two of them no longer listened.

Communities came together as was common in that world, fearful and huddled, but in numbers and each other they found strength, and with many held hands they weathered that unknown and came out the other side as the world recoiled and shook itself of primal fear, waiting to see what had been the word from the more worldly governments and then the Space Assembly League of what had happened. Local scientists and sky watchers tried to put together theories in the meantime, but there had been no reference other than obscene auroras or magnetic solar flares, and even that had not been true as computers and electronics still persisted.

A child, during a community meal at the town hall as people worried about the world, played a block stacking game on a tablet. A man, with his fingers replaced by metal and controlled by synaptic electro-impulses, was still able to maneuver his hand to spoon himself oatmeal.

Norea and the young man ate with them, and in those turbulent and uneasy times, they were not cast out from any others as community groups provided meals and restaurants took reduced payments for a while. People slept together in gyms and open squares, coming from smaller towns and villages that, in the wilds, had become consumed by that fear and burned down in the chaos.

They washed in the spray of a fire hydrant momentarily winched open by local teenagers, bivouacked in a car park where the cars that soaked up heat in the day remained warm through the night, and slept beneath them. With what little money the young man had left, they took up residence in a motel along the outside of town, where, in the distance from its back window, they saw out to a condemned ranch compound in that far distance, almost to the horizon, where men and women holding torches went there and then were never seen again.

The world did not end when what had been known now as the Blood Meridian ruled, and when it cleared, the world did not know why until half a year later, and even then, piece by piece, bit by bit, the New World and its condition were revealed.

As the two of them found custom in that land, travelers they passed by or camped with in the night brought in news from their sources, often other travelers, and they were expected to bring theirs. Although radios were still in use, they were often tuned to or dominated by radio stations maintained by the Benerit Group, with only rare frequencies in between the lines where independent broadcasters could exist. In those days, however, even the Benerit stations were a blank slate, leaving only word of mouth as the only reliable source of news as radio stations began to fill in the waves. At first they had no news to share and were given only this: that some weeks ago in the night space went completely bright and then to a deep dark red all over the world, and it remained like that for several days (of which the two of them had hid in a cave and waited, hoping, that their Permet scars would quit it before someone found them) until on the dawn of Sunday, the skies cleared.

In the first week of their time in Waco, as they ate on the steps of the town square, quietly watching people who for all of their lives had been unburdened by the curses that plagued space, not even by direct contact but by seeing it in the periphery, the mayor of the town came out and began to read from a notepad:

"It appears," he started, adjusting his glasses and addressing them from the town hall steps near them. "That somehow, what has come to pass was not in any manner a religious event, and that it was an actual phenomenon originating from Space. As says Governor McCarthy in Austin, all manner of officials from the United States Government, the Mexican Authority, the Texas Rangers, and the Duty Forces are congregating in our capital this week and putting together an inquiry to be sent to the Space Assembly League."

But yet the League had not been heard from. Benerit had not been heard from. Mobile suits that had been constant in their patrol over Texas had disappeared from the high heavens, leaving only terrestrial planes crossing the skies.

Travelers, couriers, and cargo truck drivers had brought in news from all over Texas about cities in overnight civil wars and towns burning down. The furthest traveler had said that in certain wildernesses, the curled remains of mobile suits meant only for space duty—satellites too—had been found wrecked upon the ground, still hot from when they fell. Those who had been used to watching the sky saw no more of the satellites that had been constant in the sky since the last era, and in the night there had been shooting stars when none had been scheduled. As far away in the land of China, reports had come from a cargo plane pilot who had landed at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and come home to Waco that all GPS systems had been out and that he had been flying over the Pacific when the morning dawn took a red he'd never seen before and redirected his plane from its destination to the Dakota Republic back home to Texas so that he could be with his family and knew how to because every pilot knew how to fly home. Everyone on Earth had seen the same sky and the same thing happening, and from Beijing to London to Tokyo and then Cairo, people had been witnesses and afraid.

At last, finally, a Spacian had been found, and he had walked with a limp and been brought to Waco because he wanted to find a place far away from everything simply to wait it all out.

He had been an executive in Yao Co., a Benerit Group company in its upper echelon focused on personal electronics software, and that in the week prior, following the attack on Asticassia, it had been chaos in the business world as the dreaded auditors of Cathedra had come through all of the Group's holdings to double check who had been involved, alongside the actions of that girl, daughter of Delling, and her disastrous trip to Earth.

He explained it in familiar language and terminology to the young man, and a crowd gathered around him in a cafe where he had been given coffee and hashbrowns, for he seemed to have withered away.

In the last few days before the red sky came, many Shin-Sei executives had disappeared, and one had been his friend and told him to cash in his personal and vacation days and go to Earth. He had heeded that friend's advice as he kept his head down and traveled to Earth on the commuter ways reserved for business of the group. He had been caught in one of the space elevator trams, descending to Seattle, when all at once red swept overhead and engulfed all of them, and mobile suits that had been on work duty or guarding the commerce and the cargo that came in and out of those lanes buckled, and then either imploded, exploded, or simply fell out of the sky, just as he did in a ship with at least forty other Group employees. Only the emergency systems in place had made them land in one piece; a crater was made of them in the center of Seattle as a pile of ships collapsed on each other from Space, and when he fell, he had been among the last ships to be close enough to the ground that the impact did not immediately flatten him.

Reconvening with any executive officers there from the Group, any reports they shot off, and inquiries to anyone in Space, where the managers often had been, went unanswered. The port was ruined as debris and ships fell from the sky. People died, and downtown Seattle was pelted with metal hail from an event that left the citizenry bewildered, confused, burning, and crushed.

All communication with Space had been cut, and with telescopes, several smaller space stations were seen to have totally disintegrated into debris fields where they orbited. The larger ones still remained, but they had gone silent and dark. The great Crystal Congress of the Space Assembly League is frozen on Side 1. GPS and communication satellites, which had been the backbone of modern radio technology, had been destroyed, and as people warmed up and put together the old ways, methods from before the Ad Stella centuries, they were all left in the dark.

The executive didn't stay long enough in Seattle before martial law and an emergency state were declared, not only there but in all surviving functions of the Benerit Group on Earth, which resided in the great metropolises now cut off from their benefactors in Space. The governments of the world had tried reaching out to the Crystal Congress, but when none came back, they reached out across all of Earth for any Space Assembly League members who had been planetside at the time, and so few responded, and none knew what had happened.

The executive did say that the last he knew of all the happenings in space, the League Navy had been put on alert for war, but he did not know why, and the last thing he spoke before he could not speak anymore was with words and a topic that only two in his presence, but not known, would understand:

That he had stopped by one of the rare Earth-based MS development labs on the way out of Seattle to see if a friend had been in town and that he could stay with him the night, and that when he arrived at the lab, the many engineers and scientists there had looked upon their cores of Permet dumbfounded, both integrated into frames or raw, fresh from Mercury and all facilities that did mine it in the Earth Sphere. The Permet had now just been like its other cousins, their fetish charge wiped out to the last speck, as if they had just been like any other steel, any other metal bent into shape for Man's industry.

With eyes that spoke of actual surprise and actual worry, the young man and Norea Du Noc looked at each other and then left the executive and the diner. They came to a shaded alleyway and sat and thought deeply about all the mobile suits of the world, all of the Witches out there that might be, and all the powers that were now lost. The war she ran from, the one she knew as righteous, and then the war that he had been built for, was now over: the participants gone to a degree that no conventional force could take.

On the day they left Waco, an Earth Garrison Force unit from the Benerit Group had come into town with flatbed trucks carrying the unmistakable shape of mobile suits and several armed APCs. The town held its breath at the sight of Spanish soldiers. The leader of the group, a lowly lieutenant from L2 Side 2, went to the mayor and did not demand but begged instead and revealed they were refugees themselves too. They had been from a base in Oklahoma whose command had splintered, as had the soldiers and the squadrons there. They splintered because, with the generals and commanders lost in contact in Space, leaving them on Earth, the officers there struggled about what to do: continue the mission of patrols, seeking out the Dawn of Fold cells that they had been instructed since the attack on Plant Quetta to hunt down by whatever means necessary, or stop and go to the nearest strongholds of the Benerit Group to reconvene and form a larger element. Others still said to stay put and negotiate with the communities around them, but those who knew that Earthians had no love for them protested, especially since their force multipliers, their now cumbersome mobile suits, which still powered on and could operate but moved like unwieldy puppets, were useless for now. Eventually, New York City's Benerit branch got in touch and told them to pack up and go to the eastern coast and await redeployment in light of the emergency situation. A day after that, Seattle's branch reached out and said the same, except to come to Seattle instead. Upon informing either branch of their contradicting orders, they each offered the force in Oklahoma's final ultimatum at risk of "repossession and termination".

The soldiers there saw where that wind had been blowing, and it had put more fear in them than the red sky above.

The lieutenant's group went south as the base broke out in gunfire, avoiding the larger cities, and decided that Waco would be where they stopped on condition that they could hunker there. In return, they would protect the town.

"Protect us from what?" Asked the mayor.

"Other loose assets." The lieutenant said Because force was all the Group and its splinters had left to offer.

They left the town in the morning with five American dollars left between them. In her time alone, she had set upon other vagrants like her who had thought to use that now-destroyed Mennonite church as a shelter. She had hid in the rafters and in the floorboards and waited till they slept to pick at their pockets, and if they woke, she had beat them senseless and ejected them. She had found some money of her own, and during their time in Waco, they spent it carefully.

They found themselves the rudiments of outfits and supplies that were more fitting of the days they found themselves in: better socks, better fitting boots, backpacks meant for travel, and jackets for the nights, among other things; they layered themselves for a long road ahead that had no distinct end; and the last thing they bought had been the hats that defined that part of the world: two, one in black who had been so sharp in its crown that it seemed flat up top, and the other, leather brown, curved in all aspects from brim to top with dimples. Norea had taken the hat in black and the young man the brown leather, and with shade upon their eyes, they walked out of the town of Waco further into the West, still bearing the clothing given to them by a nice couple in Nacogdoches, donated by corollary from their children. The young man kept his poncho.

They walked on, and west of Waco had been a combination of prairie and the cross timbers, waning in their density beneath the sun as the temperature of the Earth and all of its warming had created the conditions for savanna land to become instead a desert. Dirt and grass thinned out beneath them, and they saw instead of branches that of the bones of animals left dead in their place for decades, picked clean and bleached, reaching out like fingers of the earth. As they passed these fields of bones, they were not alone, as pickers of bone had been there, taking and digging up from their graves these skeletons for sale back in the towns around them, and Norea had known for what because she had traded out her box cutter for a small pocket knife, its handle of cow bone, crafted in Waco by an old woman who turned scrap into blade and bodies into material.

She looked for a gun as well, but knew that acquiring one would be hard, and having one would be dangerous, for when she had a hammer, everything looked like a nail.

She still wanted a gun.

They saw refugees and migrants going in the opposite direction of them to Waco, some to Dallas, or to places as far away as the Mississippi, bringing news from the western shore, each of them more fantastic yet: San Francisco had burned down again as, upon discovery that the local EGF's mobile suits were ineffectual, anarchists took to the streets and started fires within the facilities of the Group. So did the Golden Gate weep with its fog in the morning, swirling with black smoke fires. In another news tale, A carrier of a national military's navy who had been sponsored by the Group washed ashore in Coronado and seized the island and then San Diego. Las Vegas, long since dried out, became a place for executives to huddle who did not know any better, marooned in the middle of that desert fighting for scraps of water, scared of Earthians who in all reality cared little to harm them as they had internalized. The two of them brought no news of their own and instead repeated the stories of others until one day they found a well in a small community of Levita that had been abandoned and told thirsty travelers coming from the desert they were to enter soon that they could take a drink there, and those travelers thanked them graciously and they passed.

They started fires with flint and tinder, savoring the night sky in its natural color and now with a tent that the young man carried with his bag, and in the distance they saw the camp fires of others like them like firebugs lining the darkened landscape, and they ate from leaf and branch read in a book about Texas foraging and made tea of it as they ate packaged food made in bulk at cheap and still were careful in their consumption. They slept in the same tent with their supplies and bags between them in separate sleeping bags, and that was enough. There was no material need for them to tangle as they once did, and they did not speak of it.

They didn't speak of such things in the dark alone together.

They didn't speak of what had happened in the church again until they were at the edge of grassland, waiting one last night in the far cooler air of it before they would step forth into the western desert.

They both sat by the firelight as she poked at it with a stick, kindling it to go on further until she was satisfied with how it burned, and then going to her sketchbook.

She had neglected to buy a pencil of any sort to replace the one she lost, and she had been too proud to spend their money on something so extra. So she had been left to look and flip through, from the front cover to what she had last drawn, seeing the development of her skills across this one sketchbook that had been the one she carried everywhere since it had been given to her years ago by Olcott as a gift he had finally deduced she would be happy to have. There were other sketchbooks of hers, disposable ones that she spent a year at a time filling in, but this one, small, had been the one she kept always, scratched into the back of its front cover the name of Olcott wishing her a Merry Christmas, and, newer in inscription, words from Sophie saying that she had been here, even if she had long told her that she was not allowed to touch this book on consequence of pain, not that that ever dissuaded the closest thing she ever had to a sister. She thumbed through those pages and saw in each a ruined house, a corpse of an animal, a leg hanging out of a window of a destroyed APC, desiccated birds, and bugs of improving quality until, for the only time yet, she depicted the full body of a man who had died in his mobile suit's seat, burnt to a crisp. She does not draw people often, if at all, and through the years that it did depict, she saw all the death she knew, all the death she put into a book so that it did not scare her in reality as best she tried, until it came to that last year, that last month, and then now, the dead plains grass and the scrambled out shape of a man who was not dead yet, who now sit before her across the flames, looking up at the stars above, lost in their majesty. When he was done looking at the stars, he looked down at her.

As she carded through those pages, looking down upon them, her hair would again and again come unloose from their tides and bring them down in front of her vision, and he watched her use her fingers to brush them back behind her ear until he finally saw aggravation on her face and rose.

"Hey," he said.

"What?" She looked up at him.

He rummaged through his bags, and what little tools they found, they bought, and they had until he had come out with a pair of scissors meant for twine and nature, and he cocked his head at her with a smile and said, "I'm going to cut your hair, if that is quite alright with you."

She seemed shocked, taken aback, and perhaps overly so. "What?" She said again, one hand of hers put back to support her leaning, offended.

His hair had become long enough for a ponytail himself, and he had let it down, and it sprawled on his shoulders. This was one part of him that survived from where he came from. His hair grew long and fast, and even if it had not been black as it had been as a child but instead the same color as the Original, it still grew as it did.

"You cut my hair, I'll cut yours. Would you like to go first?" He flipped the scissors around to see if she had been so offended by them.

There was no practical reason for her to deny, and he had caught her right: that her hair had been getting unruly and annoying to deal with, and she held no importance to it other than that it was a part of her as her teeth, fingers, or skin had been. Caught like this and with hardly an alternative other than to keep growing long, she said nothing as she licked her teeth, curled her lips into some ball of stubbornness, and nodded, taking the scissors from him as he sat, offering his back to her by the light of the fire.

There was no ceremony here for the most part, for the longest strands that she bundled up with the web of her thumb and index finger and then snapped through once with the blades, holding now the dirty blonde hair thick with sweat and dust only to throw it into the fire. The rest had been maintenance work, putting her fingers through the man's scalp as a guide as the scissors sat upon that fleshy barrier and snipped to a quite short, albeit messy length, as neat as she could manage. Turning him over so that they faced each other, she did quick work of the winged bangs that framed either side of his face and then the one unitary bang that crossed over the center of his forehead, clearing his vision so that he looked at her and smiled at what she was doing. As she cleared his face of those covering bangs, she saw her marks on him: that clean-cut scar high on his left cheek, and then the considerable slice through his ear right above the puncture where his gone earrings had been. She stopped her snipping, the hand that held the scissors down into her lap, as they both stopped cross-legged, their knees almost touching. His face grew concerned when she stopped, only for one hand of hers to reach up and run the rim of that scar and then follow it back to his ear. He slightly leaned into the electric touch of her finger tips before she pulled away.

"Sorry." She finally apologized for it.

He smiled again, head giving a tilt in the opposite direction. "I have many scars; the ones that you left at least have character."

"Character?" She asked incredulously, an eyebrow raised and an eye squinting.

"A story, at least." He admitted, habitually bringing a hand up to brush his bangs back, that they no longer were. "I'm not muffed about it. We did a lot of things that night, didn't we?"

He stared at her lips, dry and cracked but better, and she at the curve of his smile, and they thought of each other's lips and what they had done with them.

She blushed, and it was his turn to curl his mouth so as to hold a chuckle as she looked away from him entirely. "Don't be annoying. I was just doing what I felt I had to do."

"Had to do?" He left it at that, a tease she was too smart to not take.

Of all the women and men he's exchanged lips with, hers is the only one he cares to remember, and for her, it was her first at all. Not even with Sophie, try as hard as she might.

It was her turn, and she left the scissors on his lap and then turned around, offering her back to him and all the hair that went down to her chest level. He'd never seen hair so blue and so deep from a woman of the Earth, and when he touched it for the first time, he held it so that it fell into the groves and knuckle joints of her fingers, and he had beheld it before he gathered it all up, closed his eyes, and did what felt like an indiscretion to slice through them, leaving her neck exposed. In the shadow of the light, he saw where her skin dipped with her Permet channels, normally imperceptible by the contrast of where light hooked, had made them rivers of darkness. He brought his thumb there to brush a few loose strands off, but then he kept his finger there, tracing it up and then up her spine until he got to the base of her skull, where hair had still been, and he began to work again with it.

It took no more than five minutes. She stayed quiet, closed her eyes, felt his fingers and the blade, felt the lightening of her head, and heard the slow cackle of the fire.

In the black, she saw her memories of Sophie, who had cut her hair on her own, and when she revealed what a glorious mess it had been, one of the women of the Fold took her aside and tried to fix it up, but essentially, in her protest, she gave herself a buzzcut instead. In her memories, Olcott stands over her with a razor and makes her hair neat but instead gives her the haircut that he gave his son, now dead with his mother, and he never cuts her hair again. They were all ragged and shaggy in that group until they took on a Slavic woman who had grown up in a salon, and of all the duties she performed, one of the most important aside from fighting was the way she made them all presentable and comfortable with a razor and blade to groom them.

She opened her eyes, and, with no mirror to have, the flask of Reyes was offered in its metallic sheen that was like a mirror polish, and she saw a distorted version of her new haircut, which had indeed been utilitarian and short but still had length that put it past her ears and still could be tied and voluminous if she let it out.

Quite pleased with his work, the young man had said that he was going to sleep now for the long day ahead, and she had bid him goodnight as she considered what look she may put on now, and she instead thought of his thumb and the fingerprint that left the tiniest of impressions on her skin as it roamed up it but instead brought down that indescribable feeling of the touch of another throughout her bones. She sat there, curled in her legs, until the fire did dim, and at her feet on the ground were discarded locks of hair from him and her together. She gathered up some strands in her hand and, on a whim, went to get some gum she had bought that would keep their mouths wet and clean and bit into a piece to quickly chew them. She chewed fast and hard until the gum was sticky, and then she took it out of her mouth and put it on the front of the back cover of her sketchbook. She closed the sketchbook hard until she knew it had been flattened, and then she opened it still wet and blew the strands of hair clean of dirt and put them together on that gum as glue.

She did it, put it behind her as if to forget she did it, and placed the sketchbook into her things. She went to bed with him in the tent.

In the morning, they kicked the fire cold dead, gathered up the tent, and left only the remains of the fire and their hair upon the ground as they walked with the dawn into central Texas, where the long, dry land of a desert rose from climate change.

These lands had not always been dry and rocky, but a long time ago, before their generation, the Earth had heated up and the land itself dried up in places, killing and starving those that relied on it both there in America and then in dry climates already in the world, making them near uninhabitable by Human settling. Only in Ad Stella did the technology raised for the future come back to Earth, and when the world did cool again by brute force, when the rains returned to the encroaching sands, it was only because beneath those sands lie riches and resources yet to be exploited.

There in central Texas, there was no such bounty for the Benerit Group, now scattered, now missing, and perhaps now gone in all but name.

A single, winding black tarmac highway ran through the center of it, east to west and west to east, and the two of them followed as they began to walk through the desert.

In the first hour, they passed by a traveler on that asphalt who rode on a donkey, much beleaguered as it was from a journey that had been ending and that reflected theirs that had been starting. The donkey pulled a cart behind it, and on it was a singular coffin. This man, who wore an oriental conical hat on his head and sat on the cart with the reins seemingly melted into his hand's flesh, did not see the two travelers, and he passed them with the coffin, which bore the text "Neill, Husband and Father, Dead by Tragedy. AS 62-102."

The man with the cone on his head passed them by quietly, save for the wheezing of the donkey and the wooden turns of the cart's wheel, and then he disappeared beyond the horizon.

On that first day, Norea had brought her black hat down close to her head to protect it from the beaming sun and asked the young man if he had traveled the desert before, and he hadn't, and that he never came back to Earth, and the most extreme environments he had been in were the hallways that weren't air conditioned in the Peil facilities or Asticassia. She went to spit but instead saved it.

"I traveled the Gobi Desert, once, with the Fold." Affirming her veteran skills in this department and affirming why she led then. "Don't think, don't talk; drink if you need to, because it's better to drink than not drink. No use saving it if you're going to just end up dehydrated faster." They carried hydration bladders of up to three liters each in their bags with Reyes' canteen and flash only as backup, and by the end of the third day, as they were surrounded by heat mirage and reeling, they had discovered they had each drank a third of what they had already. In the dark, the pleasant chill of the desert became a bitter cold as they set up camp, and soon, Norea had been stacking rocks into the shape of a U, and he had followed without question when he realized that those rocks that he stacked were still hot. They slept that night in those rock shapes, irradiating with residual heat in a survivable sleep. And when they awoke, Norea looked out west to more of the same, and then back, which seemed to copy what was ahead of them.

She dismayed and turned to him as they stood ready to go. "It's not too late to go back."

He considered her question, her worry, and his practical worry as well. By all accounts, it would take them two weeks to travel that desert to get to the other end. But for what? That was the unsaid question in her eyes as she furrowed at him. She would go with him, just as he would go with her. It would have been nice to know why, however.

The young man took her hand and then he spoke. "I know this might not be the best answer, but I've got a feeling that, if we can get through this, we'll be okay for a long time."

"Just a feeling, huh?" She let her hand be held. He nodded, and she considered everything that might happen to them out in that place. There would be no rescue, and there would be no way for them to signal for rescue. If it hadn't been quick by Dominicus, it would have been agonizing and slow by nature itself.

But at least it was with him.

"Screw it." She said that, and then they traveled on.

For three days and three nights they walked, and in some nights they traveled still because it felt better to them to journey in the cold than to be beaten always by the sun, but they regretted it immediately every time, for when the day rose and there had been no shade to rest under, they forced their bodies onward, forward. There was green, and there were no weeds. Around them lie the bones of animals that had perished in that place, and there had been no pickers for them. In the nights they did rest, they heard them: the lobos, the coyotes of the wilds, and in the dark they saw their yellow eyes like stars along the ground, and they drew up fire not for warmth, burning the bags of discarded meals and then the napkins and then whatever they could find, but to keep them away from them. A coyote approached them in the dark beneath those same stars, and the two of them roared and yelled back at it in their foreign tongues until it pounced between them, and then the heated blade within that torch dove into the wolf, and it cried out and whimpered away. They did not rest well.

Norea fell sick two days after that, and with their stores of water down to their last half-liter, he gave it to her, and she, in delirium, even as she walked and stumbled, spoke her mother tongue to him.

"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi."

And in his place, as she looked back at him with sweat running down her face and her body feeling very light, she saw not him, or any version of him, but instead Sophie Pulone, and she reached out to her and spoke and cried and said.

"Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas, ma sœur. Ma petite sur."

She'd never sound so beautiful, she'd never sound so sad. But at least she was alive, and she fell into the young man's arms, and they stood there and baked beneath the sun so hot that her tears never survived outside of her ducts, and then he made her move on with him. Tu me manques, she said, and she repeated it again and again until her brain could talk no longer and she shambled forward in the desert like scarecrows exiled from their fields, banished to a land where no fertile thing could ever grow.

"Tu me manques…" She said it one last time, and in the language in which she spoke, it did not exactly mean "I miss you", but rather "You are missing from me."

They walked beneath the sun and over the sand, and they followed that black line of the highway through as their tongues and their lips dried up, and they tried to squeeze the last of the water from their hydration bladders as they could until they were dry beyond all recognition, and then they were sharing the canteen, and in sharing the spittle on the lip of it, he too feared to take her delirium, but it had already claimed his mind in other manners. As they walked, the shimmering mirages in that far distance promised pools of cool water that he knew had been completely false, but he still needed to walk toward them anyway. He made sure that they had kept moving forward, along those black lines of that solitary trace of Man, putting the rim of his hat in his vision to cap the horizon before him and the road beneath it. Norea, groaning like the dead, assured him that she was still following, fighting through sickness.

Coming ahead of him, he saw it:

The wind came shuffling in from the West, and with that wind came dust, howling, and forming into its rhythm the sound of a beating heart that in itself was the music of hooves rolling together in unison. Out of the dust cloud in front of him, he saw the black mass of a thousand horses barreling toward them all in a column so wide that there had been no escape from their breadth. Blitzkrieg was only a word. Out there, they came and rode toward him, and he had been too tired and too awestruck to do anything but stand there and bear witness to the ride of centuries before. On those horses rode men of another country, mounted lancers and archers whose way of life had been so ancient that even their bones had been dust. A legion from a nation long gone to Manifest Destiny, warriors risen up out of the West with their children and their wives, silently riding for the world, and their actions spoke for them, barreling toward the young man as if their destination awaited his passing. They were all half-naked, their skin glistening in glory beneath the sun that had seemed broken by their presence, the hides of animals draped upon their horses as they sprinted. Red feathers decorated their clothing; they did fly back as if still attached to the wings of birds consecrated to themselves, and the young man had thought they were going to indeed take flight. An army of the lost, unitary in their goal as they rode and they rode, and finally they met him in the road and blew past, all passing without ever disturbing him at all. The wind whipped up only to cool him as he stood. Where he had gone to shield his eyes from the particulates of dust he needed no longer as men and women of another time, driven from their ancestor's homes, returned at once in this primordial desert from their long journey to regions belonging to the bloodiest of Histories. In their bronze skin, they were wholly natural, representing their ghost nation, as the sound of their passing was like a choral lost to Human ears. And then out of their wake walked with them in great booming, great humming, great crashing steps something the young man never thought to see again: A figure in black against the sandblasted dust clouds, emerging out of the realized fantasies of the Promethean minds of those who dared to handle fire where fire not only burned but that fire had been reviled and outlawed from the world. Towering against the sky was the machine meant for him and all those like him. It walked with it the weapons of war with its high shoulders and demon red eyes from one place to another, a giant among many that walked step by step until it towered over the young man and then looked down upon him in remembrance of what had been with it and him, or at least those in the skin of the Original, and then it went on further, holding its hands together to make a grail filled with blood, filled with oil, filled with blood of all those that came before, passed, and into where the young man came from, walking in its metal, together in step with flesh and blood of another era, another world, and at last, into mystery.

In her state, Norea said a false name, and he turned to her as she stood behind him, and beyond her had been nothing.

He blinked, and then they went on.

In the night, they heard it; they heard it real: The distant sounds of war and tracers raising up to the night to join the lights in eternity. Distant thunder, unsung wars. He put her to sleep bundled up in her sleeping bag, and he listened distantly to the ire of the Earth and the eventual fate of all Mankind happen in the far distance as jets roared above, and in that desert they hid from it. In his solitude, he looked out back east from where they came and saw the intense flickering of beam cannons and explosions that, even in their deep desert, he felt in his heart. Human nature was always predisposed to War, for he knew that War was waged because inside each Man had been at War with himself, and War itself had changed based on the battlefield, whether it be in trenches, in ruined city streets where families once lived and now died, or in the board room. Because even after a hundred years since Humanity began moving its population into space and into their second homes amongst the stars, people were born, raised, and then died. And died, more often than not, because of War.

They continued on, dying pilgrims of their own religion, finding a car abandoned on the side of that lone highway in the morning. It was his turn now to be lost in his own mind, his nose running with liquid despite his own need for fluid. They drank the last of their water from the flask, even as the metal burned the skin off their fingers. She dragged him when he did not follow, his feet stumbling, as if following a ballet that his body remembered but not controlled for. She found a car, and in it was a dead man, slumped half way out of his seat where his car had stopped. His body was very gray and had been dead for at least a month, dried to jerky if his meat were made to be edible, and she had dragged him out of his seat even as he stuck to it, and in his hands had been his keys. They were scorching to the touch, and she shrieked dryly as she picked them up, first barehanded and then grasping them over her shirt. She tried to move into the car, but she could not, not as it stank like the dead, and not as that metal box had felt of the fire she only knew when she was closest to death: when a beam weapon had pierced her suit and she felt it almost burn through the cockpit. If she sat in there, she would be burned beyond everything, even life, in a vehicle completely unusable in every measure as the plastics within it had been dragged down by gravity in their melting. She kicked the car once, and in a dull hollow, it tipped slightly, and then not.

All night, sand blew into them, attempting to shear them smooth as they curled into each other. Norea dug a hole in the ground with her bare hands and put him in there. There was grit and sand everywhere as he drew his poncho over the hole, and she brought her jacket over her head and collapsed on the ground next to him in the night.

In the morning, she rose up like a creature she had once been in that Mennonite church, shedding off what she had accumulated, and tore the blanket off of him. She momentarily feared that he had suffocated in his labored sleep, but he hadn't. She dragged him out of the hole, and his back had been wet. Wet.

She looked up as if confirming where she was. She did not notice the bush in the night nearby.

She nearly dropped him as he woke in sickness, and he had indeed collapsed on his side as he spoke weakly of her name.

At first she thought that he had pissed himself in his sleep, but as she put her head in the hole, she smelled it, and it smelled of natural dampness in the sand. She reached out with her hand, and the sand was wet to her touch. She gasped, sounding like an animal, as she dug with her hands again into the hole like a dog. Her finger nails ran ragged and then full beneath them until nearly three feet of water began to seep from the edges of her, to the point where she could barely fit her head. She tried nearly to put her head in like those wives tails of birds, but even with her tongue held all the way out, she could not get those pools of water nearly an inch deep before they came back into the sand, and she had to dig the round edges more.

"Norea… Norea…" The young man groaned as he lie with his back to the ground and his face to the sky. "I'm sorry… I'm sorry." He repeated. She heard none of it as she took off her shirt, now dry of even sweat, and put it into the hole, watching it darken further until it sponged itself full, and then slowly, slowly, there was at least a small cup of water. She reached down preciously, as if bringing out a baby from a womb, and held her shirt like a basket, the cool water blissful against her fingers. She knew she had not gone completely crazy as she beat against the idea of putting her face into the puddle she brought up by instinct alone. She looked to the young man who saved her life once and would do so again, she knew, and came to him and put his head in her lap, brought the dip of water to his face, and told him to

"Drink! Damn you! Drink!" The water came across his mouth, but he did not move but faintly moved his head back and forth as his eyes were elsewhere. She adjusted, bringing the water directly past his lips and his teeth, taking a free hand, and then massaging his throat to take in the liquid. When there had been no more water left, she had wiped the now cooler shirt fabric against his face and neck to try and bring life further back to him, and she tried desperately to rub it deep, flesh deep, as deep as those doctors had once done to him and her in the name of War. Slowly, the veil was peeled off, and he had been looking up at her face. "Water!" She half-yelled at him.

His eyes had not believed what had just happened to him, and he groaned slowly, rolling over off of her as she stumbled up, a head rush to her as she put her shirt into the hole again and waited for it to fill, which it did, and before it had been half full as the first time she brought it up to her face halfway up the hole and then she drank.

The water tasted salty and sulfuric and of her but she did not care. The young man crawled up to her and looked into what had been happening, and when he realized he had taken off his own shirt, he slowly put his shirt down there again to take another drink. The water still kept coming, and she took another gulp, giving out a satisfied breath like she had been a kid again. He put his shirt down there as well, amidst the pit of sand, and the water filled in its circumference, and before he reached for it, he looked up at her, and if they had gone insane now, they went insane of relief, temporary. They launched themselves at each other, even with their scalding bodies and the sand which they impacted on below, and held each other, laughed, and celebrated, rubbing their faces into each other and only separating to drink more.

This sandy well lasted only for five minutes, less than a dozen drinks between them, but they were full gulps and they were cool, and at last they put their shirts back on in their residual dampness and felt something more than it: there was hope yet for them.

On the morning of the next day, still ragged and desperate for further relief, the young man thought himself crazy again, for he heard the galloping of hooves where he lie in his sleeping bag, and he thought Comanche mirages had come for him.

Norea shook his shoulder to rouse him, and instead, over a berm of sand, the first drove of cattle came into view, hundreds in number, beset at their borders by the cowboys of Texas legend. They saw them first in the morning, and camp had been made impromptu for their sake around the one that she and the young man had set up.

Cattle moaned around them replacing the sand, and a singular cattle herding dog sat between the legs of the leader of the cowboys, who wore a much worn cream colored ten gallon that hid all of his hair and sat on a cooler with ice cold beer and water and ice and offered them the water that lie stinging their raw sand-blasted, heat-treated hands, and they sucked it down as another of his group stirred up a fire and brought a cast iron pan out and laid it on top. The lead cowboy had been clean-shaven, and although he was a white man, his skin too had been blasted down to an earthy sheen that spoke to years on the range. He reached out his hand and shook both of theirs, and his hand had been massive and like stone, his simple brown eyes hiding nothing. "My name is Lacey Cold." He said it once, and they remembered it. As he went to shake their hands, his thin riding jacket lifted, and they saw his leather belt and the silver revolver that sat in a crafted holster. "And by the look of you two, you ain't from around here, are you?" His voice was low and deep, like the dirt itself.

"We're from…" The young man spoke. "New Orleans." Norea nodded too, drifting her eyes on the gun and then back to his face, but Lacey Cold had already seen.

Cold sat there on his cooler as they sipped from what came from it, nodding slightly until he took out a box of matches and then a box of cigarettes from the shirt pocket of his flannel, striking the match with the skin of his thumbnail and then lighting a cigarette and putting it in his mouth. "You ain't honest either." He pulled in, puffed, and blew smoke out without trying from the corners of his mouth. "Honest people give their names up front."

The cook ignited the fire again and pulled from his pocket a flask on his own covered by a leather wrap, but instead of water or booze, a thicker liquid in the form of oil came into the pan, and when he was done, he licked the round nozzle of the flask anyway and put it back into his pocket. Soon the oil did sizzle, and another cowboy with a wet towel wrapped around his forehead came to him with a plastic bag full of what could only be described as the viscera of a breakfast massacre, and the contents were slowly brought down into the pan to be cooked.

"Cowboy casserole." The cowboy with the towel announced it to all, and then he hopped back on his horse and rounded back through the cows to where he was supposed to be.

"Now come on now what's your names?" Cold beckoned them with a tip of his head on as he smoked and the food sizzled, and the two of them sat shoulder to shoulder like caught children. They looked at each other, and then he nodded first, and then she nodded at him in understanding.

"My name is Norea." Maybe because of heatstroke, dehydration, or any number of ailments, they agreed to drop the charade and try honesty. Not that it mattered, it felt. No wanted posters bearing their names were seen, and there was no word of them being brought in on warrants. And less now did it matter, with the world having fallen apart above them and the people they ran from originally now in turmoil themselves.

"Norea." Cold repeated it with one straight nod, and then he turned to the young man. "And you?"

"I… I don't know my name." The young man answered. Cold made a clicking sound once with his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he smoked, and his face was unchanging, totally at peace with the cows in a chaotic symphony around him.

"Okay." Cold nodded at him, and that was that. The two wanderers looked at each other again, but there was nothing complicated about it. "You don't have to know your name to be someone."

Cold had told them then as their meal cooked that they had been on the trail for a week now from a town called San Angelo on the other side of that central desert and more specifically a ranch north west of the town where cattle and horses were both raised and then sent to the markets all over Texas and the Mid-West all the way down to Mexico, and right now they had started just a routine cattle drive from San Angelo across this desert and then to the meat markets of Louisiana and then back again by around mid-June.

Some of the cowboys joined them, not to partake in that single patty forming of meat and potatoes and eggs and various vegetables mixed up for efficient eating crisped over, but to watch these two out of place and nearer to death than they were to being alive take in the sustenance as the cook brought the pan to them and Norea used her knife to eat as the young man tore at the flesh of the casserole with his hands.

The cowboys all watched and asked no more questions of them as they ate and drank and drank and ate until the sun rose high overhead on a new day and they felt almost like new individuals, and then they realized what they were looking for was near.

They asked the cowboys communally questions:

Did you see the sky turn red?

"Why shucks." The cook took back the pan as they finished in it, took the scraps, and left them for the dog that had been at Cold's side. "Sure as shit we did. And none of us got any vacation days out of it, ain't we fellas?" There had been two female cowboys with that group, but they had been no different than the rest as they answered and complained. "I'm sure we're going to get some time now, yeah?" The cook looked at Cold for the first time and cracked a smile. He went into his cooler and got an ice cold beer, cracked it open, and drank it before midday, and it had been more for refreshment than anything else. If these cowboys cared for what everyone else in the world did, they did not show it, and, as they had found out, it didn't matter to them, and they went back to their business as cowboys do regardless of space or the Group.

We've got only a week left of this?

Another cowboy, older than Cold and sporting a thick gray beard and a scrunched-up face, shook his head. He had a rifle's scope sans rifle around his neck that left a red mark where it hung, but he had long since stopped caring.

"We go the way we do cause we got cattle. For you folks, even on your feet? Maybe about four days if you're quick and light. This road here splits. Take the 67 down to the south. I know it might seem like it leads back into the desert, but it doesn't; it leads right into San Angelo. Good town, good city. Modern as anything else without all the complications."

"Yeah well too modern for me." Cold interjected.

Don't all the cattle die in the desert?

Again the scope-necked man spoke up for all in his hermit voice. Sure, some do, but not enough, but we know this place better than no GPS, map, or nothing. We've got the know-how for some oases out there; we know where the dunes go high and offer shade, and we can hide in them. We do in half the time what others die in two."

"Yup, yup." The cowboys all chanted in unison.

"You go down into San Angelo you go down to Yellow Oak," One of the women spoke up, and she, who had a shotgun in her scabbard and a cleft lip that veered up her left nostril, was one of the prettier among them. "Tell 'em that Baile sent you, and that you want Bex to serve you, and that Bex will give you two drinks on me, and you buy Bex a drink too, and you spit in it without telling him, and you toast with him. You hear?" She said it in malice. "Son of a bitch, you ain't seen me off this time."

The cowboys gave short talks about their life on the trail and how they were extremely lucky they weren't dead yet and that they were tougher than they looked. All the while, Lacey Cold glanced at his watch, and when it hit an hour after he first sat down, he rose, taking the cooler to one of the cowboys, them taking the cooler back to the supply cart, and he going back to his patiently waiting auburn horse that had been by far the most powerful of the animals there. He yelled out once, like a Native war chief, and the cows all looked to him, and all the cowboys gathered onto their mounts, and before they left, they were entitled to one more liter of water from the canteens and the waterskins of the cowboys, who all in commune dipped their spouts into the young man's bladder and then went off back to work, going off to gather cattle that had wandered too far off.

Lacey Cold talked to his horse in its ears before it shook, its mane well kept and well brushed as he and it stood above all, especially the two wanderers. He looked down upon them as he trotted his horse over, and he told them to be careful, for even a journey's end was not a promise of safety in America, in Texas.

"Watch out, when you go east." Norea warned them, and then she told him of the EGF forces they saw and the fighting they heard, and Lacey Cold adjusted his hat and glanced down at his rifle that rode in a scabbard on his left side and told them that they could handle what came. If it weren't Spacians one year, he said, then it was rivals the next. He smiled, and he breathed in the air thick with animals, dust, and the West.

"There's a well in Levita, if you need it." The young man told him, and he and Lacey Cold shared a meaningful hold of eyes, and then Cold put his eyes to the horizon and told him that he knew.

He kicked his horse, and the horse bayed in a cry, sending its front legs up in the sky as it whinnied like monuments the world over depicting riders on their horses. The young man was sent back on his ass, and soon the cowboy was off with his cattle drive, with his other cowboys, off into the desert from where they came, an exchange of journeys.

Before they left their grounds, the young man had noticed that Lacey had dropped his cigarettes; on the box was a red stripe that stank of mellow tobacco and was half-full with sticks, proclaiming that their name had been "Cherry Reds". He put the cigarettes into his pack, and then they went on, and in several more days they were out of the desert into the town of San Angelo, and as they stood before a road busy with traffic that went down all roads but the one they came down, where sand had been no more and replaced with dirt and trees, and then they saw other people that were real, off to their 9-to-5s, and they came out of the desert wastes, quickly avoided, they found a tree at the edge of town, held dirty hand in dirty hand with each other, and wept at its trunk.

Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was true and real, but here they found it, at that black cherry tree at the hem of the valley they walked into, whose white flowers had sprouted alongside healthy green leaves, left alone at the edge of town as if a guard against the desert that did not creep further to it and the lands around.

They were going to be okay in San Angelo, and in San Angelo they decided to try and stay.

With their last five dollars, they came to a motel on the outskirts of San Angelo, asked for a room, and told them that this was the last five dollars that they had. The clerk at the desk looked at them as if they were crazy, then as homeless, and then turned them away, saying that all rooms had been full. They slept beneath the balcony of that two-story motel until a Mexican woman who had been a maid there whispered at them like cats, awaking them, and in broken English said that she was supposed to clean that room at the furthest corner of the motel in the morning when the washing machine was done with the sheets, and until then she couldn't do anything with the room. She shrugged, looked away, and held out her hand. They went into the room, handing the five dollars to the maid, and they slept upon sheets that had already been slept upon recently, but they did not care because there were two mattresses and running water and air conditioning, and they slept freshly cleaned and water containers filled to the brim, and they passed out until there was a knock on the door, and even then that same maid had to clean the room around them as they passed out until she had taken her broom and basically chased them out.

San Angelo had been there at the center of Texas, its beating heart an ancient trade of horses and cows that kept it permanent as global supply lines faltered and factory farming was phased out for test tube meat that too was unreachable. Mankind had needed meat, and San Angelo had made its market and prosperity against a world that had been slowly receding or leaving behind the Earth. It was a connected city, well informed and knowing of the rest of the world, and in the near three weeks that the two wanderers had spent in the desert, at least networking capabilities locally in Texas had been returned, and people talked current, informed, and in modern tongues and sensibilities, as the young man had once known them.

People rode cars or the train to get to San Angelo, but in San Angelo, they only rode horses and donkeys, and then trucks if needed for work. School had been out, and children had been out in that city, where along its southern border had been a joint base managed by the Texas Rangers and the Texas Duty Force, the successor to the United States National Guard in that area. The largest office buildings had only been as tall as the tallest of mobile suits, and San Angelo's profile along the land and the sky had been minimal as it sat on Texas, respectful of the sun and the land. People in that summer cooled themselves on the riverwalks that flowed through San Angelo like a vein, and performers filled the nights with tales of vaqueros and the country around them in the distant past. If Texas had been at war, and indeed it had been at its corners and in pockets, it would not have reached San Angelo, a pocket in that world that the two wanderers fell into.

In the summer that came, the two of them worked jobs that did not require names or ID, and the Blood Meridian came and went, and people resumed their lives as what it jostled became undone and what had been sturdy and still in the system in reality went on. She worked as a waitress for a week until she nearly punched in the face of a family that demanded servitude of her for the minimum wage of six dollars and fifty cents, and then after in a garage where she learned on the job the ins and outs of not cars, but tractors and carts; and she's not good enough at it, or rather learned too slowly, but she had once been responsible for a mobile suit, so what work she does is fine enough, and the foreman at that garage simply gave her a half-fulfilled wage for the week and then told her she was not what they needed.

He worked at a sawmill, and although he had been strong, the work is long, grueling, and dangerous, which is perhaps a misnomer for him, who had been a mobile suit pilot. When he saw a man have a gash in his arm cut in by a saw, he quit his job. He worked stacking shelves, greeting customers, selling shaved ice, and doing some of those jobs at the same time until he could not handle them anymore and instead worked at a fish farm by the lake, where he ran a knife along the scales of fish, and in their oil he saw auroras that reminded him of distant Data Storms that no longer existed, gone, and as he thought of it, he realized that this was surely a good thing.

The foreman at his job, as he sits in white linens and a face mask holding a knife but not doing his job, chastises him, and then he's back to it.

In half a summer's wages, they wish to use that money to house themselves in at least a room, and until then, they camp at that black cherry tree at the edge of town, and they are not alone. Along the rim of San Angelo are others like them who have come from far away or from the town itself, fallen on hard times, fallen without homes, and lost their jobs, but are still connected. They reach out in the night when they make fires, and for as alone as they might all be personally, they are not alone in community of their own: the wanderers, the vagrants, those whose existence is on a constant precipice: they, the bottom rung of the world, and yet they are still on that ladder, still used. The police do not tell them to go away, only to get out of sight.

Every once in a while, a recruiter from the Duty Guard or the Texas Rangers rounds that great circle of unhoused at the edge of San Angelo with a recruitment slip, and for some, when they are approached, it is not the first time they've been asked, and rarer, but not unheard of, they had taken that slip before and this is still what happened to them. A Texas Ranger came to their tent in the night and asked them both:

"Would you like to serve this country?" He was an older gentleman with a handlebar mustache in a tweed suit, a star of his authority pinned on it, well-shined boots, and a hat that had seen war.

And they both shook their heads no. They had had enough of being at the service of greater concepts and higher powers.

In August of that year, they almost had enough money to rent a small room out of a schoolmaster's house, and it had come from a series of night jobs that Norea had taken, which had put the two apart on rotating schedules: he in the day and she at night, and they only found each other in passing from bed to work, and if they missed each other in their little ways, they burdened themselves with it for a simpler life ahead.

If Norea had missed the lilt in his voice as he said her name and the way he moved his body so animatedly as if to draw the eye that made him both funny and the "worst", she did not say.

If the young man missed the way she spoke him the straight truths, complained as they both deserved to complain about it, and had been without the more mortal threats of war over her, he did not speak it.

They were now, by crucible and in likeness and in understanding, friends, at the very least.

They were now, in the course of their lives, the only ones each other had.

And in that city so privileged to be connected, it made a clearer picture for them to distract themselves further:

East of the great central desert, fighting had broken out between local militias and Benerit Group forces that had either been passing through, come to find sanctuary, or took to the local communities in the name of finding tribute, loose from their chains; the mask had slipped, and now naked to the world, the intentions of those that had served Capital and Space did the only thing they knew how to. Out there in the distance, Nacogdoches and Waco became embroiled in fighting, as did other smaller communities set upon by the raiders in all but name. From San Angelo, Texas, the Rangers and the Duty Guard were mounted up by steel, by horse, or by airplane jet and flown out to where they were needed.

Over the world, the consequences of players beyond the people's knowing had been brought to Earth as the news came down from ships sent up to space to make physical contact with what had been lost, to find out who was missing, and why Permet had been rendered inanimate. The stars were silent.

Survivors in the largest of space stations were cold and crazed, and the Earthsphere had been turned to a graveyard by way of one single event that no one had known any detail of or thought too dangerous to say out loud. A quote from a survivor, captured by the reporter Belle Reyes, uploaded to a national news service, and then translated the world over, was this: "We deserve this."

Others more concretely spoke of a massive Data storm, as the two wanderers suspected, but it summoned with it, in its wave originating from the station of Plant Quetta, a Permet score that read back to infinity and then, in a horrifying signature, a quiet zero. No one could know how far this affected them until contact could be made with the Plutonian outposts or Mercury. Only the oldest or largest stations, those with less Permet integrated into their frames, had survived with any life support at all. Stories like how a single engineer on an autonomous junker ship who had been caught between waystations filled the net sensationally as he recounted how he survived: by constant hot swapping of his normal suit, he only survived because he held his breath between them for a week before rescue came.

Ships were being sent to Plant Quetta, an investigation led not by the Benerit Group but by the nations of the world with their nascent space programs. With their long-range sensors and optical viewfinders, they could see disaster; it had been a part of the same story amidst a debris field littered less with metal but with flesh:

Everyone and everything had been dead as the remains of an unknown space station massive in size lie shattered with rock and corpses as company.

Crystal Congress, twinkling like a chandelier over Mankind's first space colony, now within its walls lay dead nine hundred members of the Space Assembly League and its staff buried with them, asphyxiated and left gathered around the situation room for some event now lost in all logs but yet required all of them to be present for.

The Silver Forest lie quiet, forever more, with its facsimiles made for a man's daughter, in the bastard image of her mother's work. As did the personal space station of the Rembrans, as did the stations and facilities of all the groups, which now fluttered like empty dioramas of an advanced civilization struck with extinction.

This is what the two had avoided. They came to Earth because that was why they lived.

The Benerit Group had been shattered, and in that shattering, it broke against itself as their fortress corporate cities stood against a world that could now stand equal with them and then against themselves. Capital meant nothing now; the mobile suits that held them were brought to heel, and there was a challenge, a war brewing and perhaps already kicked off. In that land, the American Federal government, as had nearly all governments of nations on Earth, had suddenly found itself back at the top of the chain of power. The Benerit Group in its strongholds might have threatened it, but they were not one voice and fought amongst each other as they became technological fiefdoms, cut off from their true power. History had been reset, and for the vast majority of Earthians, they did not notice. Those who had benefited from Space suddenly found themselves in an alien world without their benefactors, but they were a minority compared to the workers that were now barging down their doors. If anything, there were some there now who had been allowed to breathe.

Norea Du Noc and the young man never saw the painted ladies of Peil ever again, nor Belmeria Winston in her penance, nor Shaddiq Zenelli, who they were all in congress with. Somewhere in space, Prospera Mercury lay dead in a mask fused to her amongst all the stars, and if this had been her goal, then, they wondered, why all of the foreplay and the politicking when in the end it had been so disastrous that it seemed out of control? They never knew that woman's plan, and they suspected they never would, but all those that wore masks schemed, and they knew that she had been a party to conspiracies beyond their knowledge.

They would never see the Jeturk brothers again: Guel's pride, Lauda's struggle. They would not know what became of Delling Rembran, who in those twenty-one years of his reign had gone out not with a bang but with a whimper. The children of Earth House whom they saw in the periphery of the only Witch that mattered, whose names they did not remember except for Nika Nanura, who had been a traitor for such a childish, idyllic thing, they too were forever gone, and somewhere on that Earth their parents cried out for them in Space, and they would never return.

The sun rose over San Angelo two weeks before their first security deposit was due for the room, and the young man decided to take the day off from the fish farm, returning back to their camp at the tree holding in his hand a nice paper-wrapped package bought in a store that had been a patron of the sawmill he quit, for he knew its existence because one of his duties was collecting the scraps for usage in small boutiques like the one he went in. He held it in his hands behind him as he came up to the camp, and he had seen her as she always had been after her work at night. She had told him that she had been a night janitor at the local grocery store, and because it had been a night job, she had been paid very well for it. With those increased funds paid out by hand and in cold, hard American greenbacks, they had shown the schoolmaster, and he had considered them hard workers, even though they were homeless, and assured them that if they had the money when the room had been made open, it would be rented to them.

"Norea~!" He sang her voice as he saw her slumped in her tangle on top of her sleeping bag. "I'd like to show you something if you don't mind waking for me."

He sat on his legs by her side and awaited with gumption and eagerness for her to, as he would anticipate, groan, to look at him messy-haired and groggy and probably aggravated, but the package in his hand had been one that had been perfect for her, and he would not hear it.

She did not move.

He said her name again, this time quieter.

And then again.

And before he went one more step where he would reach out and touch her shoulder, she coughed greatly, and then out of her mouth came red splotches like clouds upon the floor of their tent.

She finally turned over, and as blood had been at the corners of her mouth, she told him she was sorry.

The package had dropped to the floor, and in his hands instead, he had taken her up, and blood came from her mouth down onto her chin and shirt, and whatever had happened to her, he didn't care, only to fix and make right what it was. He ran into the streets of San Angelo like a man on fire, holding this limp woman in his arms as residents looked at him run as fast as he did, not crying for help but obviously in need of it. He ran for near two miles straight, rigid and bleeding in his arms, until he had arrived at San Angelo's central hospital through its front doors to its crystal white lobby, wheezed in his breathing, and fell to his knees on the tile.

The doctor that attended to them was an older man, Doctor Hale Candy, who had come down from Seattle in his practice and now attended there. Norea had been taken from him, and in an hour she had been put to an ultrasound and rigged up with fluid bags, and in her robes did he see in her midsection a giant dark bruise that, with a long needle implement, penetrated her skin to get into her guts, and out had been the red that had accrued inside of her, festering like bloat.

"Internal bleeding." Hale Candy said once, motioning for the young man, his leg bouncing up in anxiety as Norea lay in a bed in the ward next to the copies of the x-rays. He knew nothing of what it meant, but Doctor Candy had then risen up, closed the curtains around her, and sat silently by as Norea breathed weakly.

"I'm sixty years old." He started, speaking right to the young man, who realized very quickly that as Candy spoke, he was not speaking just of Norea. "In those sixty years, I lived through five wars on this continent and heard of at least a dozen more in my lifetime. I've seen entire cities swallowed alive by fires so large that they suffocated the innocent where they tried to hide because they ate up all the air around them. I've seen entire armies crushed by walking machines that are powered by magic metal, who had no chance to protect themselves against them. I've seen death all my life, and I've tried my best to stop it. But I could not stop anything, not when across from me stood Witches." He said it with his teeth, and this old man with his bald head and great glasses with old eyes burned in his irises at him, and the fear the young man felt for Norea had now become a different fear altogether. "She's a Witch." He whispered an accusation. "The other staff here might not know how to tell, but I do. I've seen them before when they were torn from their Gundams."

Norea stirred weakly as that word was spoken, but she was not lucid.

"Please," the young man begged. "She's no longer a Witch, and we're just trying to find a good, decent life to live. Just tell me what's wrong with her and what I can do."

Doctor Candy leaned back in his chair, jaw tight. "What's wrong with her is wrong all the way through her." They sat like that for a while until the doctor found it within himself to keep explaining to him that this was the ward of a Witch. Outside of that curtained section, machines that monitored the heart had been steady in their beat. "She's been fighting recently. The bleeds we found in her abdominal cavity are common with blunt force trauma, especially in areas where people are often struck with blows." Proof enough to him, and news to the young man.

"How recent?" He asked urgently.

"Based on how much blood that we were able to extract? Someone of her size? No more than six hours, maybe eight. Last night."

She hadn't been attacked at their camp, and if she had been, the assailants hadn't taken anything. He already knew that. Had she been attacked at her job and simply left to go home battered and bruised? Had this been a common thing, and only now did it get bad? The young man curled his fist, and his nails nearly bit his palm bloody. If he had not been there for her, then who would?

"My best friend," Candy started again, a finger raised and pointed at her as she lay there, and all of that rage in him had been kept quiet, for he was holding this secret now, a secret held over him. "I saw him disintegrated by a beam weapon, fired from the weapon of a witch. There was nothing I could do for him; all of my training, all that I know about the Human body... I can't put together a man from dust, and even then I tried. What terrible, terrible power do witches have?" He looked at the young man, leaning in. "It took all in me as we did the procedure to not slit her throat."

And the young man could not fight, not here, not against this man. He could do nothing, not as a man, not as a witch, not as Norea had been there weak.

"Please. Don't tell anyone." He begged; he had been off the chair and on his knees, and suddenly he had been oh so tired. He, who had once been accustomed to fortune, even if borrowed and not really his, and who had thought he had gotten used to a life of squalor and poverty in those months now that he had been on Earth, felt powerless now in all ways that even the desert that almost took his life could not impart. The desert did not care who died in it, but this Doctor, used to saving lives, had chosen now that he might kill her. "Please." The young man bowed his head and held his hands in clasped exaltation. "Everything I have just... Her things and clothes had been delivered next to him on a tray, and he had opened his own simple wallet and then hers, and he had put the bills together, and it had been nearly eighty hundred and sixty American dollars. They had no more.

"A charity case too. Hmph." Doctor Candy snorted.

He was a soldier in a war that had ended in bloodletting over twenty years ago, and although he did not bear the crest of Cathedra or Dominicus, this man had been a soldier too.

They left the hospital that day, Norea again in the young man's arms as the scarlet dusk of the big sky turned to a cool night, and in her hospital gown, he had put her back where he had found her. The Doctor had pocketed all their money for himself and writ away the operation as charity indeed, with one warning: if he had heard that there had been even a hint of a Witch in San Angelo, he would call the police on them, and he would be the one to incise her body because that's all Witches were good for.

He missed work for several days and then promptly terminated as he stayed by her side and nursed her back awake, cleaning up any residual blood she would cough up onto herself and then feeding her what food they had gathered. On the day when they were supposed to be meeting with their new landlord, that opportunity had passed and been given to another, as Norea Du Noc woke, groaning, and by her side in restless vigil had been the young man who fretted about her and told her not to get up and simply put his own sleeping bag in a roll and put it behind her head.

"I'm sorry." She said it again, and he had not wanted to hear that. He wanted to hear what had happened to her, and she did not mistake that near his hand lay the only weapon that they had: the bone handle knife.

She looked away, but he did not let this be, as gingerly he had taken that hand, clammy but warm, and brought it to her cheek, feeling the barely perceptible ridges put there by their curse. He did not pull her face toward him. He only touched her there, her skin thin and sickly, and let her dictate where she was to look. He only wanted to touch her to let her know that he cared. She closed her eyes to his warmth, even in the Texas day, and then she turned over and told him weakly what became of her.

In the bottom of the supermarket she had overheard while at the Yellow Oak bar trying to find more employment, there had been a large storehouse built when San Angelo had been before electricity and before refrigeration had been common, and in that stony bottom interior now left unused save for the long term storage of things that were long forgotten by the management of the supermarket, there had been a particular arrangement started years in the past where no original member remained save an old woman who wore her lipstick thick and her fingernails long and painted as she counted money that foretold the weighing of the fighting between men and women. All races, all breeds Men from as far away as Somalia and as close as next door arranged themselves in a ring below where mothers bought their groceries and returned to a more primal nature where they fought with fists, with their legs, and with their teeth, and she had been drawn to it both for gain and then for satiation of a long-buried thing.

She had gone into that basement for a month now and emerged a victor of fights that put men stupid on the ground, for many underestimated what she could do for her size. Her knuckles had been worn down, bitten through, and cut by the teeth of her enemy as she swiped across their faces. She was fast, lithe, and nimble, and for what beatings she took, it was never enough to put her down until recently. Those nights ago, before he had found her coughing blood, a Mexican from the state of Sinaloa bearing tattoos of a creed came to see the fighting and decided that he would challenge this new up-and-coming woman who no man or woman could totally beat.

A fight was arranged for at least half a year's rent for her if she won, and then sexual servicing if she had lost, as per the rules, when the other was not willing to put down or match the money put down. The woman who ran the pit had rooms with barely any privacy made for that fulfillment, and she had watched all business in that kingdom of her own. The Sinaloan did not regard what he could take from Norea with any seriousness, for he said it plainly, and that he had wanted to fight her because he, like the Doctor, knew that she had been in some ways of the Bruja, and she remembered that word and grew uneasily as the ring closed around her, and she put up her fist, and they began to fight.

He was an average-sized man, but his black ink had made him seem so much larger, like birds displaying their wings before predators, facing them down, but he did not need them to subterfuge, as on his flesh in between those dark lines had been the scars of his business, and as he moved shirtless, he had moved as if one of her own sketches had been brought to life, and now he was seeking vengeance against her for continuing their deaths into eternity for as long as they survived in her book.

The tattoos he wore as he spoke in the fight, speaking despite his engagement, were those of Death, and he told her before they truly initiated that Death was but another God and this was his Sunday.

He moved in the shadows of that dimly lit space, and Norea, in her quickness, found someone swifter too despite his size against her, and when he had landed the first blow, it had been to the back of her skull that sent her stumbling into the ring made of spectators who pushed her back through. In that concussion, his black ink became himself.

"Anglos are godless," he said as he walked the rim of the world beneath a lightbulb that had not been changed for two hundred years. "For all that they are spiritual and have done much in the way of their faith, they have no gods that are real."

She put up her fists and charged at him, and as she dug into the man's waist to try and get him onto his back, he spun quickly with her attached so that her feet had been off the ground like that of a helicopter's rotors, seizing her legs from their back and holding her up like a fish.

"I know God better than any of them, because my God is fruitful, present, and can be worked with." He did not slam her, for if he had, he might've killed her; instead, she had been dropped to the floor, and before she could try to level herself and get to her feet, his bare leg came into her midsection in a strike that stole her breath. "Men of God who bear the Cross cannot work in the magics that they say, and instead they do the work that they mistake for their god but is instead of an entirely different god. And that god is Death, who owns War."

And for men who bore that cross, he understood that when they wanted to try and apply their beliefs to reality, they often fell into violence anyway.

He continued kicking her as he spoke, and none there moved as they saw this frail child of a woman take the heel of the man's foot into her appendix, again and again, as if each strike had been his word, and he spoke much. He spoke much of death and said that in his dealings, he had given men and women drugs that brought them closer to it and sometimes let them stay with it forever. He spoke in Spanish, which less people understood there, and in his speech she heard as her body shut down from the pain that of colors, diablo, orating to the crowd that he had been blessing them all by what he was doing, and as communion he offered her body as with his foot he turned her over onto her back, and at one last time he rose his foot and drove it into her stomach, like a stake, and the blood that came out, propelled from the pain that of colors, diablo, orating to the crowd that he had been blessing them all by what he was doing, and as communion he offered her body as with his foot he turned her over onto her back, and at one last time he rose his foot and drove it into her stomach, like a stake, and the blood that came out, propelled from between her teeth, had been offered to all.

None partook.

She had lost that fight, and it had been the last fight of the day as many there thought her dead. Shuffling out from that basement half-naked and wholly horrified, the Sinaloan instead, when offered a token of his earnings from the bets made by the lady, took her instead, and when Norea had come battered and bloodied, with great puddles of blood that came from the corner of her mouth, she had heard those beastly sounds echoed in stone and in wood, and she crawled out of that basement into the night of San Angelo.

"Don't shut your eyes…. Don't shut your eyes." She said to herself, and she had found an incline behind the parking lot, which she rolled herself onto, the angle letting her slide to her feet slowly as she could not stand straight. "Don't shut your eyes." Came words from her, but they did not sound like her as much as they sounded like her petite sur, who in all reality might have been older than her, but as the rest of the Fold treated them, so had been assumed.

She walked back to the tent, leaning on anything the entire way. She leaned on a sign post; she leaned on buildings and trash cans. She leaned on another homeless vagrant like herself, who, when he saw her struggling, said nothing and became an object, too scared of this bloody woman to try anything at all. She made it back within sight of their tent beneath that tree and saw him slumped over, and it had still been too early for her to come back, so instead she leaned in the shadows looking at him, this man who had done so much for her and she so much for him, and she who was no doubt about to ruin everything because she saw a brutal way of gain as they wanted their fair and honest life. Perhaps more than that—and she could never admit it—she wanted to scratch that itch. That feeling that rode those canals of her skin that now had been absent of their purpose for all time, mechanically, and beyond, for all that the Spacian class had now been eradicated nearly whole, their fundamental truth remained: that she had been made to fight, and like the bulls of that country, she needed to fight, because if she did not fight she would become weaker, lose herself, and then barrel toward that one fear of hers that the young man had so truly understood, because he saw it in himself as well: that she would die. And yet all the same, she felt on the precipice of death, and she was afraid, but she could not go to him because it might worry him.

She stayed in the shadows until the morning, fighting still with herself to stay awake, to keep her eyes open, and to keep spitting the fluid as it came up from her guts out of her mouth that stained her teeth.

The Young Man awoke, and he had been confused about why he woke up to an empty tent, but he did not linger long as he simply got his bottle of water from a public fountain, brushed his teeth, accrued his daily, and then went off. She watched him go, and he was happy with his life that he so much tried to share with her, to make with her, and she knew that she made a mistake and wanted to go into that goodnight forever regardless of her fears. She did not want to deal with the shame.

She went into the tent, crumpling over, bent at an awkward angle, neither straight nor fetal, and fell dark.

Doctor Candy, as he told him last in disappointment, said that if the young man had not brought the Witch to him, she would've been dead in a day.

The girl lay with her stomach exposed, and in that dark shape that had been put upon her, it had been more horrible than any scientist, procedure, or doctor working in service to a curse could ever do. She could not take her eyes from it as she finished her explanation, and he could not take his eyes from her as they swelled wetly.

And with his hand that had been at her cheek, he brought it down to her stomach and let it lay there as if he could divine better what he could do for her. She did not wince, and when he had gone to move it, she reached up with her hands and kept it there, for it provided her great comfort.

They did not get the room, and she could not work, and he did not have a job to go back to at the fish farm. They became destitute again, even more than they had been, dragged back to nothing, dragged back to the soup kitchens of which he had gone solitary, and split what he had been given back to her as she lay healing as mid-August turned to September, and rain came to Texas that pelted San Angelo.

In that rain, the Texas Ranger who had been often seen trying to recruit those like him came again, his large hat and waxed jacket covering him from the rain, and in that cold and wet world, he knew that some would take his offer again, but as he approached the tent instead, inside, he saw a woman near naked, a bloody splotch upon her stomach, as a young man lay passed out from exhaustion, wet in his clothes, from trying to find a job again that did not come. The Texas Ranger said nothing, went unnoticed, and disappeared into the storm.

As murmurings of a wet autumn and then a cold Winter were spoken by newspapers in their weather sections, the young man walked through San Angelo. Norea had healed enough to feed herself, to stand at least, and to be left alone for the days, and he had spent his time further looking for work.

He worked as a sweeper with day wages; he picked weeds from fields and yards; and she, on her own, stumbling again without his knowledge, did all she was able to do and handed out pamphlets on street corners for one business or project or another in a weak voice for dollars a day. She returned, and when she had revealed that she had been back to work, he had nearly snapped, and they, for the first time since that Mennonite church at the end of the world, fought for moments in words until those words became sharp and cut them both down again. The scar on his cheek and ear became sore, and upon realizing what had happened, she brought her hands to the markings on her, and they both wept together in the night.

On a dewy September night, in the year Ad Stella 122, half a year after they came down from Space, flight, and fighting from Asticassia, the young man stopped before a music store that had been closed, and inside had been instruments and implements for instruments that shone and had been well taken care of, and at his current rate of income, he could not afford to save for fifty years of menial work. And he looked into the glass of Faust's Music Hall, its doors locked, and he wondered how much one such violin, one such guitar, or one such string of bow could fetch if he sold it. There had been a rock on the ground, and he looked at it long and hard, wrapped up in his worn clothes, hungry and tired, and then at that well-sheened glass. He stood there for a long time. People passed onto their lives, and then he thought of the rock no more and realized he had been hearing music—classical music that continued to play from speakers attached to the building in ambient tones.

The music of San Angelo had been country, as befitted that place, and it had been a language all knew and spoke to all who listened of life on that plain and of the events, and it had been historical in its sound. But this music was not, and had been familiar to him, and spoke to him and called to him, an orchestration that beckoned him of skills that were never called on to him but that he had attained because he wanted to. In the hole that Peil had locked him up in with his others, they were allowed little free time, little leisure, little for them in the fear that they might become something entirely other than the Original, but what time he did have, he chose something that kept him moving, something that could be studied, something that could be worked toward.

In his heavy, worn, and not ideal boots, he brought one foot forward and the other back as if crossed in a letter, and he had been so weak that he was like an animal recognizing sound, and that sound was music, and it called upon him with strength and grace. His arms rolled out as if wings, and then in a curving motion, he came in, as if gathering the air into his lungs, and then the young man began to dance.

He danced to piano, he danced to a lone violin; he was accustomed to dancing alone because there had been none other for him out there, so he believed. He brought himself onto his toes, and with his stubbornness, his boots did not shape out of wear or out of power. He looked up to the night full of stars; he had shifted so that the awning of that brick and mortar store shielded him, and the street lamps put their light upon him as the music played on in classical melodies that blocked out the rest of the world, and he, given this chance, given this song, was able to let it all drop from his bones, and he danced. He danced in silence, for with his training, his body made no noise as the sidewalk below him barely made the sound of his boot scuffing. He closed his eyes, and he was nowhere at all, letting his body be free, feeling his body, not the copy of the Original's, but his true body beneath doing in music, in song, and in art alone. He hit his solitary positions as his body flowed within its square, kept hostage by music that he had been long accorded to, and of all he did in Asticassia, the two things he had done for himself were that he ran away from his duties and then that he joined the ballet club.

He was moving in double time as the music became faster, faster, faster, going through each of his appointed steps because this might have been the last time he could've touched upon something totally whole, totally his, totally in his mind, which brought him peace because he liked dancing. As the shrill of the violins rose from the world, so too did the exaltations of his movements, as if in each pulse he had become wider and wider, and his eyes remained closed, but he had never been in danger of bumping into the store, going off the sidewalk, or shifting into people if people were there and present. It didn't matter because as he danced, he had been himself in such a simple concept that he had been free from everything, even Earth's Gravity. In one last move before the song ended, he summoned up his feet in a flourish, jumping, leaving the Earth again for but one second as his legs straightened along one straight line before the Earth took him back, and in one perfect moment he was weightless and perfect in movement, and then he came back down flat on his feet.

He opened his eyes, head held down, and before him on the sidewalk had been a dollar and fifty cents, the dollar held down by two quarters. The lights from the lamps were blocked as he was stood before a large man who had only come up to his waist, and on top of that body so massive that he mistook him for a mobile suit sat a head so clean of hair or dirt that it had been pure white, beset only by the holes of his nostrils and two black pig's eyes. He had no eyebrows; he had no ridge to his face, as if he had grown up and been old as a baby; his lips were thick even as they sucked upon a cigar; with small hands printed in his pocket, he looked down upon the young man, and he made no move to stop him from bending down and picking up what had been offered to him.

"You could dance forever, kid." He said it in a voice that sounded like it came from the orchestras that played and then died, leaving only the wind. The young man looked up at him as he judged, and there was an offering there that he saw between them that he could take, and he really might know what forever was—bathed in smoke.

"I might."

"What is your name, son?" asked the judge.

But he had none to give.

The money dropped from the young man's hands as a wave of fear came over him like many hands from the underworld below, like ants upon his skin, and then he left that storefront and the hulking man behind, standing beneath the street lamp that had illuminated him so perfectly, now turned back onto an Other, never saying another word, watching him go into the night.

On Christmas morning, snow had come to San Angelo, and the two wanderers had been eating in a church community hall after morning mass, for they had nowhere to go and they were still very cold and very hungry, and what gear they had bought long ago in Waco had been ill-suited and worn down. They sat there eating their mash potato, turkey, stuffing, and cranberry pie as the first whole, good, real meal in over a month, and they were once again skin and bones, weathered and tired, and what had been a nice, handsome face carved into perfection on the young man now had been beset by deep lines and dark circles beneath his eyes. Her lips had been dry and cracked and beset by small little scars, and her fingernails began to be bitten. She had healed and was able to walk and go, but she had still been beset by an ache that felt now permanent. They sat measuredly and slowly, for if they finished their meals, they were expected to leave so that the charity here could afford the others that needed food and temporary warmth, because as Texas saw a new year coming, a new world had already been put in place, and those that suffered for it came to San Angelo as they did.

They came bearing news and rumors, as was the tradition of travelers as always, and they spoke of skirmishes on the plains as if in the plays of Cowboys and Indians there had now been Rangers and Americans versus Benerit Aliens.

The two of them paid no heed to these stories.

They ate quietly as Christmas had been there, and they found work—tired and grueling work—as seasonal holiday workers in stores all over towns that left them now spent, and at the end, as the final festive holiday came and went and left them sipping hot cider and eating warm food. They had come far, and they knew they had longer to go, and maybe they would fall further back still, but those were matters for the new year.

Right now, they could rest where they were, and as is the tradition of men, descended as he was, he had drawn from his coat a paper-wrapped package overdue its giving.

"Hey," he said, and she looked up from her meal, half-lidded. In the room, the minister continued to preach anecdotal stories of God's love, and all those gathered around him to listen beneath a small wooden, haltered cross with Christ on it, while others simply ate and left. They had regarded each other completely, no matter how they were. "Merry Christmas."

He had never had a Christmas before. He had known the date of it, known what it was and what it meant, and all the whimsy that it had supposed to represent to the young and old and what Christian values that had been of it truly, stripped down for the mass market appeal, but he had never celebrated or given reason to celebrate, and as snow fell outside, he figured he would start. Her half-lidded eyes widened further.

"I-" She stammered, licking her lips. "You didn't need to." Her words faltered in a dry voice before she swallowed. In that moment, she so desperately wished to give him a name, for in her he believed sat his true one, but she had none to summon up and could not think of one that meant it all. She wanted to say his name, but she couldn't as he dipped his head in one direction, his hair cut short as had been hers by once again their own cutting, and he looked bashful about it.

"I was going to give you this after we got settled in town, but that had been before, you know."

She knew. He held the paper package no bigger than the size of an eating utensil, the shape of a box, and in her hand it felt so delicate, delicate that if she moved her pads along it, she heard it crumple. It was real. This had been a gift from him to her.

"You've done so much, too much. I don't need this."

"Oh, it's nothing." He again, in his bashful, quiet tone, leaned his head to his side until it nearly touched the head of the chair. "If you open that, you'll really see that it didn't cost too much, but, you know, I think that you might've liked it. Nothing's changed about it."

Of all the holidays she celebrated with the Fold, she celebrated many, for all men, all women, of many creeds made up their ranks, and if they had been Humans of Earth, they decided at least for those days of the year that they should at least live and enjoy those holidays like they had been Humans of Earth. Olcott, handing out presents as leader in their camp, made one year in an apartment block in the Crimea as Alik from Bosnia sat arms crossed and looking cross, for he had been a Muslim, but he did so only in jest as the younger children pulled on his beard and said that he would be a good Santa Claus. In other years, Shepard, a Briton who had joined the group as a spy and who had been in many ways a wife to Olcott, brought with her back from her missions from Paris and Moscow many chocolates and pastries for Christmas, and all partook, especially Sophie Pulone, who stuffed her mouth with hazelnut chocolate croissants and beckoned Norea to do so as well, which she denied and denied until only one remained and then none, and when Norea had spoken privately to Sophie that night, maybe she did want to see what one tasted like, Sophie had pulled one wrapped in a napkin and told her sister, her big sister, Merry Christmas.

He looked at her with one hand backward, covering his mouth, the anticipation giving an innocent sheen to his eyes. She did not want it to falter. So she took the package and pushed away her paper plate to clear the space in front of her, and as he held his other hand to his jacket, she knew that he was hiding something else, and if it had been so, she was going to kill him with that plastic knife that she used to carve up her turkey breast.

She unwrapped the paper package quietly so as not to draw attention to herself and so as not to ruin it because she wanted to save it, and as she unwrapped it, she found a small gift box that was also plain and the same pulp grain color as the paper it came with. She opened the box, taking its cover and letting the undercarriage fall out from beneath it in a small puff, and before her, held by a fiber bed of lush softness, was an implement. She thought it was a pen at first; its body was mostly polished of the same black berry wood that they found a place to rest beneath in those months in San Angelo. Its color had seemed fresh and alive and light, the vascular patterns of trees in their rings still alive even in its pattern, beset by a silver plating that held it together along its midsection and then to its tip. She picked up the implement and noticed that at its point had been an empty chamber, and she knew it had been a mechanical pencil, one that weighed in her hand so rightly and perfectly that if the world had been a mystery, she felt that she could use that implement to shade in, to create all images in the world to be more perfect than memory, and then find the answers that all Men sought in it. Beneath the implement in its box had been a vial of long, thick, and plentiful lead pieces, and suddenly, she realized what he had planned for as she looked from pencil to him, and his knowing smile held out to her her sketchbook.

Since they crossed that desert, she had found no time for it, and she had damned herself internally for ever forgetting it and her trade; for what it contained within it, if she lost it, she would have lost herself, but here the young man held it out for her, and it had been well wiped down on its cover and freshened.

"I noticed that you hadn't had time and that we might've been coming up to a place that might allow such things." Maybe they still wouldn't have time yet, but there had been time now, and Norea, for all her pain and all her misgivings, looked from implement to book and then to him, and she took the book to her and flipped it open backward where there had been their hair with their gum still there, and if the boy made a coy face at her about it, she did little to chastise him or feel the need to cover her blush about it. She took the vial and carefully plucked one long and perfect piece of lead from it, unscrewed the mechanical pencil, deposited it into its chamber, and then pressed upon a brass metal back to load it. On an empty spread of two pages near the end of her book, she along the top held one long line like a distant horizon to see how it felt to stroke, and it felt perfect as she brought in its margins below the long line the writing of her own name, Norea Du Noc, and it felt divine.

And then upon that horizon it fell wet with rain, but only one drop, and as the young man had been happy to look at those lines carved into paper, he saw that drop and looked up to her face, looking at her, and she did not cry anymore.

On New Year's Eve, even as it had been dark and they went about the business of starting a fire on the edge of town, a rim of homeless marking their way with cookfires all the same for warmth and for meals, she had presented him with the first sketch she had made with her new implement. It was ripped from her book cleanly, so that it might not join what else had marked it, but it had been made, and as they sat shoulder to shoulder before that fire beneath a tree receded back to body alone, in that breathing light he saw himself. In the pictures they had taken of all the Original's clones at the end of their process, they were pictures that he could not tell himself from the dozens of others, and in that, he had finally become lost in who he was in exchange for becoming a reflection to be used. And after that, he did not care for pictures because all the ones of him had been of someone else. But here in those drawn lines, so realistic and yet so full of another style known as illustration, he had finally, truly, recognized it as himself: A young man who sat at the trunk of a tree, as he rested some days, was an image ingrained in her memory, for it had been clearly of the summer that had passed. He was resting his hat against his knees in jeans, a white linen shirt unbuttoned at the top, leaving the smooth of his chest peeking out. He had still been shaved in most places, for he liked it like that, but his hair above had been bundled up and cut as short and neat as they could manage, and although the only color there had been black, he knew that the color he wore now was a healthy dirty that had been treated by the sun, as was his skin growing darker too. In candid, he smiled at something beyond the frame, and of the last thing he looked at in that sketch for fear of what he might see, he finally found his face, and he saw something entirely new to him: that it was his face. Not that of the Original, and although there would've been similarities doubtlessly, and there would now forever be similarities, now along the curves and beset by the sum of his flesh and his eyes belonged differences once thought impossible. Some differences are tragic, some are quiet and handsome to his benefit, and some are unable to be articulated, like the tilt of his jaw, the set of his eyes, or the curvature of his smile. But in the end, he believed in what Norea drew—that that had been his face; that in this sketch and drawing, that had been him.

She did not know what name to call him, but she knew who he was, and in that, she could begin to see who she was.

On New Year's Eve she delivered him that present and then they sat looking at distant fireworks silently in appreciation that they had somehow made it to a new year, but on Christmas morning before, presented now with what she will draw him in and with, all she could do was lean her face in and put her forehead against his and in their warmth interstate with a full meal, apples and their sweetness on their breath, they were together as they had been and reaffirmed a promise of new lives to have, or to share, and if there were any absolute truth in the world that had treated them cruelly and would treat them cruelly yet, who had cursed them to the marks on their skin, here now it had been that there was no end to hope in their unrelenting tenderness.

There was no end to hope.

---

I see a reflection in his icy eye.

I was scared, and then he found me.

I was alone, in the dark, and the world had been so quiet.

Everyone…

Everyone was gone.

He found me.

I couldn't save anyone.

I ruined it all.

But then he came, and that he had saved her.

He tells me that I could've been like a daughter to him.

And that whatever happened, happened because no one understood, and that he had seen this all before.

He tells me that he will keep her safe,

And that is enough for me now.

He's just like Mom.

And I love my Mom.