Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

of the problem.” She held Naoto a little closer. “Something’s wrong.”

I called Kat.

For the first time since we’d met, she didn’t answer.

I followed my clients among the tents and shacks while they haplessly tried to flag down a ride, but the old woman was right. No one was going to take us farther inland, and no one was staying here.

As we walked, I couldn’t stop looking up between the last frayed and flapping tarps. It was always there now, in the edge of my vision or in the static noise under my eyelids: the thin ghost of that vast and terrible attention, looking down on me, invisible yet perceptible. By now I was almost used to it. Meanwhile the sun crawled across the dust-streaked sky and painted Greenglass Mountain the color of molten iron, and its shadows traced a city already stripped down to its bones. Everything but the latrines and slag pits was being carted off on a rig or strapped to the roof of a cargo truck. A steady flow of traffic crawled away over the western horizon while we watched, hopeless and impotent, from the lee of a rusted-through storage tank.

“We made it so far,” Danae said distantly.

“We’re fucked,” Naoto groaned. He had a ragged cloth draped over his head for shade, but the backs of his hands were sunburned to blistering from holding it up.

I felt a twinge of duty to reassure my clients, but I couldn’t disagree with his assessment. By dawn there would be no one else left here. Depending on the course of the war, it might be weeks before anyone passed through again. The Medusas were likely already on their way in search of us; if we evaded them, that left dehydration and starvation; beyond that, the radiotoxicity of the mountain itself. Looming over all these threats was the nebulous, nearly unimaginable possibility that the war in the ocean would never reach any truce or surrender; that a few days from now, the Gray would arrive here in a tidal wave of shining ooze, to strip our bodies down to their base molecular components and use us as fuel for its inexorable expansion over the rest of the Earth.

All the same, there was a strange peace here. The wind drew spirals in the compacted dust where the makeshift city had stood. Wisps of clouds crossed the sky in intricate patterns, on their way to somewhere else.

“This is all my fault,” Danae muttered. “If I’d left Bloom even one day sooner, we would’ve reached Redhill by now.”

“One day sooner wasn’t a good time either,” Naoto said. He’d been staring down at a footprint for half an hour, watching the blowing dust slowly erase it from the landscape. He looked up at Danae and me in turn and asked, “There are some things Gray avoids, right? Isn’t it repelled by radiation?”

My clients turned to me for an answer. I glanced distractedly up from my shard—I was still trying to call Kat—and answered, “Most strains avoid gamma radiation in excess of around 200 millisieverts per hour. Too much risk of mutating its own replication pattern.”

“What are you thinking?” Danae asked him.

Naoto rubbed his head and cringed. He took a deep breath and then heaved himself to his feet. “Come on. Follow me.”

We walked through what was left of the encampment, down the main central road that climbed the mountain itself and disappeared into the crook of its eroded peaks. We passed the last merchant as she was packing up, and Naoto ducked into her tent and emerged a minute later with several cans of spray paint in emergency colors.

“What did you barter?” Danae asked.

“Nothing,” he answered. “In this place it’s customary to grant small wishes to the doomed.”

A kilometer uphill along the washboard road, we reached the tunnel mouth itself. The last of its faded warnings, chiseled in weatherproof stone in a hundred different languages, were strewn around like pieces of a struck-down Babel tower. The great repository’s wrenched-open bunker doors had been leaned against the hillside like a pair of ten-meter-tall concrete tablets, sun-bleached and blank.

Naoto motioned at my dosimeter, and I answered his implicit question with a nod: if the Gray came here, the storm surge of nanobots would form a shore a few meters down the slope and stop there. Not that it would do us any good; we could stand here for two hours at the most before the first symptoms of acute radiation syndrome set in.

He pumped a paint cannister and tossed it to Danae. He turned a second can in his hand looked back at me, deciding.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Maybe we’re all going to die here, or in some Medusan prison cell,” he said. “Maybe we’ll miraculously make it to Redhill, in spite of everything—and I’ll have no need of self-expression anymore.”

She frowned.

“Either way,” he continued, “this will be the last mural I’ll ever paint. Hell—if Gray Day really is coming, this may be the last thing anyone will ever paint. But I want you to lead.”

“Me?” She stared at the empty slab. “Lead how? What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Draw the first stroke. Lay down the basic shapes. I’ll fill in details and embellish as you go.”

“I don’t know what to start with.” She knitted her brows and looked at her feet. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because painting takes muscle memory. Hand-eye coordination. I don’t have those things in this body.”

Naoto nodded. “Then just . . . paint words instead. Whatever comes to mind. Whatever message you want to leave here for the alien beings who might stumble upon this dead planet someday.”

He stood back to give her space, and his expression was grave when he held out a spray can for me to take: really offering me his trust, for what I realized was the first time. Everything until now had been desperation.

Danae sprayed the first stroke in electric blue. She was slow and methodical, giving Naoto plenty of time