Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

“Arizona.”

The name sounded strange in my ears.

She smiled drunkenly at me. “Yeah?”

“Nothing.” I cleared my throat. “Just that—it’s not called that anymore.”

“But you know where Arizona used to be, don’t you?”

I exchanged a glance with Naoto. “Yes, but that’s a very large area. Can you be any more specific?”

“Not until we get closer. When we know it’s safer. I have to protect myself. Not me, but the me. The self. Can’t let anyone find out where me is.” She snorted.

I gave up trying to parse any of that. “We can probably arrange transport via cargo truck to Camp Phoenix. Is that close to where you’re going?”

“Perfect.”

I could have tried to press her for more sensical detail, but it was enough to know our next step. For my purposes, I supposed it didn’t matter exactly where in the former American state of Arizona she wanted to go; one way or another, we were headed deep into the Holy Western Confederacy. If I still wanted to die, I’d find ample opportunities there.

Danae’s mood lightened as we moved deeper into the market. Between their existing clothes and most of Naoto’s belongings, we managed to barter for decent provisions (a box of dried algae cakes, 500 grams of surprisingly good mealworm jerky, three gallons of grade-C reclaimed water), and clothes to disguise the two of them as common wastelanders (dirty plastic shirts, hooded military coats with a dozen patched rips, some ill-fitting boots with cracked soles). Whatever drug she’d taken was at least keeping her far from catatonic—but it was clear she wasn’t entirely there with us, either.

We passed a pawn broker’s stall advertising second-hand firearms. She stopped to gawk at the wall of weaponry, festooned with flashing lights. She turned around and clutched at Naoto and I, at the shoulders of our coats, grinning almost maniacally.

“Do you have any idea how long it took people to make fusion power work right?” she demanded. “Thousands upon thousands of scientists, all around the world, for 120 years.”

Naoto pulled her in closer to him. “Easy, easy. Not so loud.”

“Don’t you get it?” she slurred. She slammed her fist on his chest. “It was supposed to save us all. The whole Earth would have limitless, carbon-free energy from seawater. No more oil wars. No need to fight over anything anymore! And instead of that, we got wave rifles: the most energy-intensive murder weapon ever invented. A hundred kilojoules packed into every shot.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay, just breathe.”

The pawn broker himself was staring at me—at my rifle, I realized, exposed by Danae’s tugs on the breast of my coat. I hid it again, too late. He whistled through his teeth and called out, “Now whose corpse did you pry that thing from?”

I wanted to hurry on, but my clients were still standing there whispering to each other, oblivious.

“Zaytsev SL-10,” the broker pressed. “Only one army I know of ever issued that weapon.” He flipped a succession of lenses back and forth over his eyes to squint at me, and then a grin flickered over his cracked lips. “You’re the genuine article, aren’t you? I don’t believe it. An honest-to-God soldier of the Free Republic.”

I muttered back, “No such place.”

“Everything okay?” Naoto asked over his shoulder; my clients had finally started walking again. I nodded and followed, but the pawn broker’s gaze burned a hole in my back all the way down the line.

The next thing that snagged Danae’s attention and refused to let go was in a salvage shop: an old American Imperial flag in a cracked glass frame, all but bleached to white threads by the unfiltered ultraviolet of the terrestrial sun.

“Sometimes it seems like memory is in the world, in the ground, the dust,” she said—to me, I thought. “In the ruins. Not in my head at all. As if our engrams are only organs for perceiving the ambient memory around us. Do you ever think that?”

I couldn’t tell if it was a rhetorical question. I waited for something salient to our tactical situation. She just kept browsing distractedly among the ancient relics.

“How are you feeling?” Naoto asked. “Danae?”

She ignored him. “We’d been living under the threat of nuclear war for a century when it finally happened. We, I mean . . . humankind, I guess. We’d always believed that would be it for us, if it ever came to that. The end of the world. Extinction.

“I saw it myself. I saw five megatons erase Boston. It wasn’t like in the movies; it was silent. So much light, but it was all perfectly quiet, like a sunrise. It took so long for the sound to reach me where I was. It must’ve only been two minutes, but it was endless. When it came . . . it was the last sound I ever heard. It made me deaf.”

The more I listened, the less I understood. The war she was talking about had happened 110 years ago. I could only assume she was speaking in some kind of metaphor, but I couldn’t parse it.

“But you survived,” Naoto murmured.

She responded, “Yes. Most people survived. Five hundred million dead worldwide, twice that injured, but the rest of us were still there. No one had expected that. No one planned for it. We were living out a future we’d never believed in, and something . . . changed, in humanity, then. Something broke.” She was staring into a case at a rusty combat knife on the moth-eaten velvet. She smiled. Tears dripped down her cheeks and splattered on the glass, but her voice was steady. “Something broke in all of us. In the heart of the world. I’ve been trying to fix it ever since. I haven’t been able to.”

Naoto leaned in close to her and said, “What about Blood Rain? What about Cruithne? You’ve saved the world twice already, remember?”

“Damage control,” she responded. “It’s never more than damage control. Even when I was whole, that was the most