Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

to buy it—but I could only admit, even through the saccharine haze, that I wouldn’t have made it this far without it.

“Cursed,” I heard myself say. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s weird. Very weird.”

Standard was utterly stoic, as ever.

“The Keepers, you mean?” Naoto asked. “What do you think happened to them?”

“Sailors always used to be the world’s most superstitious people,” I said.

He squinted. “I don’t understand what that has to do with—”

“The sea used to be the great unknown!” I explained, impatiently. It was so frustrating he couldn’t simply hear my thoughts. One more of a million things that would have been infinitely easier now, if only I were whole.

“Okay,” Naoto said.

“Ships would sail off and never return,” I continued. “No one would ever learn why. Probably just sunk by storms, but it was left to the imagination, so inevitably it was all attributed to sea monsters and angels and whatnot. Now it’s all reversed: the oceans are all lit up with nodes and cities and cable and sonar, and dry land is the great unknown. Communication is spotty and whole encampments get wiped off the map without warning every storm season. Ergo, wastelanders have become the world’s most superstitious people. They have the madness of looking for a reason in everything.”

Naoto scratched his head. “So you’re saying . . . it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, that the locals say the Keeper mission is cursed.”

I chewed on my fingers in thought. “That doesn’t sound right either, does it.”

A feeling of uncomfortable cold fire tingled in my lips, fingers, and toes. I was still conscious of all the things that should have been tearing me apart—the trauma of escaping Bloom; the atrocity I’d committed by invading Serena’s mind; my concern for Naoto’s safety; my fear of the Keepers and the Medusas and whoever else was hunting me—but the drug drowned them all in an unfocused, bubbling euphoria. I was incapable of fear or regret and rendered perversely in love with everything around me: the blowing dust, the murderous sunlight, the ragged and blistered wastelanders surviving despite it all. This was a drug for young new recruits into atrocity-prone armies and brutal gangs; any teenager could ride this milky, sky-blue high through all the natural horror of a first kill, effortlessly bypassing that most basic instinct to never take a life.

I loved Naoto. I reached for that love in myself and focused hard on it; it was the only thing I knew I’d still feel once the drug wore off. I watched him stumble along in his ill-fitting second-hand clothes, increasingly frizzy braids swinging on the sandy wind, wincing hard and filling his lungs with air he must have found so shockingly thin and dry. I stopped him to ask:

“Are you really going to be okay out here?”

He pursed his lips. “I’ll have to be.”

“But just look at all this shit,” I slurred. I motioned around at things in sight: the enormous sky; a three-legged dog; a distant outhouse; a tall man in a ridiculous hat made of 150-year-old milk jugs, who frowned at us and hid his face under the wide, floppy brim.

“Come on,” Naoto said, pulling me onward again. “We just need to talk to the truck depot chief and get you a ride to Phoenix.”

“With what?” I asked. “I don’t have anything left to barter.”

He stiffened a little. “I’ll take care of it.”

“There’s something not right about the way you said that.”

He didn’t respond. I quickly lost my train of thought again.

Something strange happened as we passed through the center of the encampment. There were a lot of refugees here from the farther hinterlands: sick, wounded, dying, malnourished, swaddled in whatever random materials they could pluck from the wind. I’d expected them—but not the dozen-odd men in black and white uniforms that had gathered there with them, conspicuously silent. At the front of the group, a little girl stood and sang.

This time it was Standard who stopped to stare.

“Who are they?” he muttered, weirdly distant.

“Deserters,” Naoto said. “From the Confederacy.”

“I didn’t know there were any,” I said. “They really fled all this way rather than participate in the genocides?”

Naoto nodded. “I overheard something about them. They refused their orders. Now they’re as much fugitives as all their would-be victims.”

The deserters were joined by women and children I surmised were their families. Their heads were lowered as if in prayer, or shame. They still wore their uniforms, but the shoulders were all frayed where they’d sawed the patches and insignia off.

“She’s . . .” Standard trailed off. He was staring at the singing girl. He looked hypnotized. He muttered almost too quietly to hear, “What is that song?”

“You don’t know it?” I smiled. “You’ve really never heard ‘Amazing Grace’ before?”

He shook his head slowly.

“It’s about repentance, redemption, that kind of thing,” I said. “A slave ship captain wrote it after he had a divine experience that filled him with remorse, in the middle of a storm he thought would sink him. It didn’t used to be sung in a minor key, though. That’s recent. It used to sound happy.”

I snorted a mean laugh to myself and resisted a drug-addled urge to blurt out what I was thinking: there was no such thing as redemption. Not really. What I’d said was true, except that the ship captain had gone on trading in enslaved human beings for years after he wrote it. He’d been repenting his use of swear words, not his direct participation in one of the most heinous crimes in all human history. On my better days, I could think a song transcends its author’s intent, that it belongs to the generations that sing it after him—but today I was running for my life in the first hours of a new world war, and even high as I was, I couldn’t spare the energy.

. . . But these deserters. I kept staring at them: at the blisters on their lips; the gray dust worn deep into the black of