Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

They had maybe ten thousand devout followers in North America at one time.”

“Past tense?”

Kat’s chopsticks clicked. “Therein lies the weirdness: they disappeared. Every last one of them. All on the same day. And I don’t mean they just went missing, or wandered off into the wasteland, or drank poison together. I mean, according to the lore, they all literally evaporated into thin air. Sometimes right in front of people’s eyes. There’s even a video. Want to see it?”

The image in my shard was of a young man on a dusty wasteland street somewhere. He looked over his shoulder and heard or saw something outside the frame. He turned toward whoever was shooting the video and ran at them in panic, and part of a shout escaped his larynx before he blinked out of existence in mid-step. The clip looped ad infinitum.

“I mean, come on,” Kat said. “If you’re going through all the trouble to fabricate a myth like this, at least shell out for some decent special effects. Flashy lights, bendy distortion, a whooshing sound, something.”

I watched the disappearance again. I slowed it down and zoomed in, a cold feeling seeping into my guts. “You mean . . . you think this is a hoax.”

“Of course it’s a fucking hoax.” She chuckled. “People don’t just get raptured. The unwashed hinterlands turn out a lot of weird folklore.”

Frame by frame, I could see it more clearly: the way the nothingness swallowed him by degrees, back to front, so that for a microsecond only his outstretched fingers remained in the empty air—and then nothing. I thought of the empty church in Crossroads Station. The young woman who’d watched me come out, then run. I shivered at the memory of the word ‘cursed.’

“Thank you, Kat,” I sighed. “For all of this.”

There was a pause before she responded. “Don’t mention it.” Even through the vocal scrambler, I thought she sounded touched, and my heart sank; I couldn’t remember whether I’d ever thanked her for anything before.

“Where are you?” I asked.

She chuckled. “You know I can’t say that. Not even over a well-encrypted line. Not even to you.” She slurped more noodles. “I’m in nodespace, that’s where I am, and where I belong. The body is just an extraneous liability to store in a cargo container and feed and wash and keep anybody from killing. I don’t know how you stand it out there in meatspace. I could never do it.”

I wish I could see you, I thought, but only said, “I hope you’re not still in the ’Paks. That’s all I meant. I hope you’re somewhere far from the war.”

She sighed into her microphone. “Where would I go? I need a strong nodespace connection. For that I need a city. All the big cities are in the Pacific.” She paused. “And if the shit really hits the fan, I don’t think anywhere will be far from the war.”

For a long while, we just listened to each other breathe through the static.

“Hey, want to watch a movie with me?” she asked. “I dug up some more pre-collapse American cinema. Some weird old cult hits in their classic two dimensions. Big Trouble in Little China. Ever heard of it?”

I could hear the hopefulness in her voice even through the scrambler, but I sighed and said, “The last working satellite’s probably about to set.”

“I could send you the file. We couldn’t banter, but at least you could watch it on your shard and know I’m watching it too. If you want to.”

“I . . . I should try to sleep. It’s a long way to Greenglass.”

“Remember I’m watching you,” she said. “Remember you’re not alone. Never. You got that, big guy?”

I held on to her words for a moment. “Kat . . .” I started to answer, but the shard beeped. The satellite had set, leaving me alone again between the wasteland and the endless black sky.

DANAE

With the residual smells of the ocean rising from our skins and perfuming the tight and dimly lit compartment, it was as if we were right back in Bloom City. I had to focus hard on the whir of the motors, the way my teeth rattled in their sockets on the rocky terrain, just to reassure myself that the last twenty-four hours hadn’t been a dream. I looked over at Naoto, slumped against twenty cases of algae cakes, eyelids drooping, and realized what a comfort this claustrophobic space must have been to him. I reached out and clasped his hand tightly—but when he looked up, he must have seen my dread.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked groggily.

I studied him for a while before answering. “You’re still in love with me,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

He took a deep breath and nodded.

I said, “I’m worried you need things from me that I can’t give you. That our feelings are asymmetrical in a way that hurts you. I’ve always had that worry.”

He rubbed his eyes. “My feelings are my own responsibility. Not yours.”

I bit my knuckle pensively and stared at the slit window in the rear hatch of the compartment, but there was nothing out there but stars, jittering with the road.

“I’ve been a lot of people,” I said. “I’ve been many women who knew men who needed more from them than they could give. There was one in particular. Since we reached the surface, I can’t stop thinking about him.”

Naoto listened uneasily. “Who was he?”

“His name was Luther. He was a genius. I envied and admired him very deeply, and it made me insensitive to his flaws. I didn’t realize how intense his feelings for me were, or how poorly he was managing them. We were going to unify, him and I, but then everything . . . went wrong. It’s been seventy years. He must have died a long time ago, and I’ve lived so much since then, but it still keeps me up, some nights. I think he always will.” I