Part eight
The seventy miles between the border (ill-defined as it is) of City Two, and the welcome sign for City Three are largely uneventful.
At Leah's prompting, Ry tells us another story of his time aboard the train, but we both get the sense that the memories are painful for him, so once he's finished we ask him nothing further. He takes the opportunity to head to the shade at the back of the bus, to try and grab a little sleep before the arrival of the next test.
This leaves Leah and I alone near the front.
We talk some. It's a little strained at first, but we quickly fall back into our previous flow.
We play some tic tac toe in the dust on the back of a seat. We talk about Courtney and my life back home. I ask her about hers. I ask her more about her family life. She reiterates that she doesn't get on with her brothers and sisters, that her parents don't appreciate her. I ask her how come I've never seen her at school. She tells me that she goes somewhere different. I ask her what she wants to be when she's older. She says anything that will allow her travel and freedom.
…Her answers are vague. By themselves, not vague enough to be suspicious, but together, they tell me a great deal.
She *is* hiding something.
…Don't think that I haven't realized this, reader.
I am aware, and I have logged the risk.
But I have made my choice. I can *choose* to remain friends with her, this girl who has in all likelihood *saved my life*; a girl who has shown me nothing but kindness… or I can cast her aside, on the twisted and poisonous word of METATRO, and my own ill-informed doubts. It will do me no good to alienate myself or to turn her away from me in a place like this, but even with all that stuff in mind, my choice *isn't* a tactical one. It's a personal one.
…I just miss talking to people, okay? I miss being listened to and valued. I miss someone actually giving a damn. I miss physical contact that isn't a passing shove in the corridor.
I'm only human, after all.
We talk a little bit about the young woman at the very beginning, the sleeping girl who was taken from the bus.
"Do you think she might still be alive, Leah?"
She shrugs. "I hope so. It's totally possible. It didn't look like the machine hurt her as it took her away".
I consider.
"Asleep… A girl sleeping at the back of the bus…"
I'm so close. I have so many pieces of the puzzle, I can feel it… I just… I just can't quite seem to fit them all together…
"What do you think it all means, Leah? There's something yet to be revealed, I can feel it. We couldn't wake her up…" I think back. "I fell asleep on the bus too. I was sleeping for over an hour, and that *never* happens. I don't sleep on public transport. And you were asleep too, weren't you? You woke up and that guy was next to you?"
Leah nods.
"Is falling asleep on buses something that you do often?"
"No, it isn't".
"So what does it *mean*? What aren't we seeing?"
"I don't know", she says sadly, looking out through the window.
*She's lying.*
I'm not going to press the issue… But hell, I hope it's for a good reason. I really, really hope it's for a damned good reason.
*I'm trusting you, Leah. Please, don't let me down. Not you too. I don't think my heart can take it.*
I follow her gaze through the cracked and dusty glass.
Something steams in the distance.
It's too far away to tell what it is, but the thing is dark and clustered against the horizon; thin smoke wafting up and into the air.
Ruin and desolation. Everywhere you look.
We pass by the faded sign for City Three, and with a sudden grunt, Ry awakes from some grim dream; his leg twitching as his eyes snap open.
He takes in a breath and stretches his back, then runs a hand over his face. Leah and I watch quietly as he rises to a stand and clambers up onto a nearby seat, grabbing the lip of the torn ceiling of the bus, and hoisting himself up onto the roof. He climbs over and lays down on the metal, then he crosses his hands behind his head and looks up to the sky.
Leah nudges me.
"You should join him", she says, and I think she might be right. I walk down the aisle and do as he did, albeit a little more clumsily. Seat to seat, then up to the roof with a grunt. When Ry sees what I'm attempting he turns and reaches out a hand to help me up. The wind catches in my hair, but, it's actually kind of nice up here. Relatively speaking, of course. It feels slightly cooler than it did down there in the body of the bus.
I lay down beside him and we look up at the sky, orange and ominous. The low, red sun wavers far in the distance.
"This place used to be beautiful", Ry murmurs eventually. "I'm sure of it. At the Axis-Mundi I was given a glimpse through the eyes of the Operators. I was given the smallest of tastes for their vision, and misguided as it was, it *was* beautiful, Yaz".
Something appears to our right, far out in the scorched black sands. It's an enormous, monstrous wheel, massive and half-buried in the desert. As it passes us by a faint and faded flickering light, dim red in color, sparks in and out of life around the wheel's edge.
"I mean just look at that. That thing out there. What do you think it was? What was its purpose? Maybe it's the only surviving piece of something much, much larger, some magical piece of technology…. And hell, how big even is this place?"
He sighs.
"I really don't know what the true purpose was for this world. But it was never meant to be anything sinister, I'm sure of it. The machines call it 'Yomi', now; though whether this is some sick joke from their programmers, or a concept they have created themselves… I do not know. And I don't know which option is the more unsettling".
I gather my courage, and ask Ry a question I've been dreading.
"Ry… at the very beginning, the first time the buzzer came on, there was another girl on our bus. She was sleeping, and we weren't able to stop her being taken by the machines. Do you… Do you know what might have happened to her?"
Ry meets my gaze, but shakes his head.
"*The first test*… I've ridden the bus a whole load, Yaz. Sometimes there are sleeping passengers, sometimes there aren't. I don't know their deal. But I do know that the first test holds some kind of immense importance".
I say nothing. This isn't the answer I was hoping for, but on the other hand I'm also a little relieved that he didn't say, for instance, that she was going to be ripped to pieces by a horde of angry machines.
"You know I think I even saw one once, in the Axis-Mundi", he says. "A sleeping human. Through a panel of clouded glass… But I was never sure, and my searches yielded nothing".
"How did you manage that, Ry? How did you get off the bus? Did you just jump? Were you okay?"
"There's been moments in my travels when the bus has slowed; I *have* jumped out, yes…" he pauses. "But you should know, Yaz, the bus *does* stop. At the Axis-Mundi, the bus comes to a stop, for a little while".
"It STOPS?" I stare at him.
"Yes. But if you get out, then you have to return before it departs. Because if you miss it, Yaz, then you *miss it*. It won't wait, and it won't turn back. And there's no telling how long you might be waiting for another to come along".
I have so many more questions for him.
I want to hear him tell me about what he found in the Axis-Mundi. About Kristie, a girl he loved so much that he asked her to *marry* him. About his theories and thoughts and ideas. About how he means to fix the issue of our newly disparate ages. About what he means to do when he returns home, and how he plans to readjust to the world we call home after his many years away.
…But these questions will have to wait, because at that moment the buzzer sounds, and my stomach lurches with dreadful anticipation. I know that if I were to turn around and look back into the bus, I would see the orange bulb by the ceiling, alight and bright. I can't hear the crackling speaker from up here, but I know it must be mumbling at this very moment.
"Fuck", Ry jumps up and looks around. "The marker I used the last time; it's gone, I'm sorry, I should have been ready". He twists and cups his hands around his mouth, shouting down into the bus to Leah: "DON'T MOVE, ALRIGHT? STAY PERFECTLY STILL, AS STILL AS YOU CAN! DON'T SPEAK, DON'T REACT, DON'T RESPOND".
He turns to me. "You can go back down, if you like, into the bus. There might still be time. Or you can stay up here with me if you prefer. Just remain still, okay? This test is on movement. On reaction. Just stay as still as you're able to until I say, alright?"
"Alright, I'll stay up here. I won't screw up this time, I promise".
He laughs, and the sound is painfully bittersweet. He knocks me on the arm. "You didn't screw up. You're so much more competent than you give yourself credit for".
A sudden urge to apologize to him overcomes me, and the words are out before I can stop them. "I'm- I'm sorry about our argument, Ry. The one that started all this. I'm sorry about what I said. You know I'd never mean to hurt your feelings, don't you? I just hold you in such a high regard, I always have-"
He cuts me off, gently. "It's okay, Yaz. I'm sorry too, and I'm the one with greater cause. I'm so sorry, for everything, and I hope one day you'll forgive me. But for now", he puts a finger to his lips and lays back. "Be brave, stay still, stay strong".
"Okay… I will".
At first I am shaking.
There is a low droning in the air, carried by the wind, and the awful anticipation only rises and rises. But I focus my mind, I draw on every ounce of will I can muster, and I force myself still. Silent and still, on the ceiling of this accursed bus.
The droning grows louder.
And there is the sound of shattering glass from below.
*Leah.*
But I don't move. My gaze remains fixed on the sky.
Waiting.
Waiting.
And something hovers into the corner of my vision. Loud, and close, and angry.
It takes the form of a massive, almost man-sized mechanical wasp, built entirely from a scratched, gray-black metal. The wasp's torso leads into a human-like metal skull; eyeless and grinning. In place of a stinger, at the base of its rusted metal abdomen, is an enormous, sharpened scythe. Like a reaper.
It hangs in the air just above my chest as the nightmarish droning swarms my ears. A second of these monsters appears in my line of sight, and it hovers steadily behind its brother, moving from side to side.
"*Yaz…*" my brother whispers, and I almost turn to him. I almost turn to see what it is that he needs to say.
…But it's not him.
The voice comes from above, not beside.
It's a distortion, a trick of the wasp.
So I remain still, sweating and drenched in an ice-cold, primal fear as the wasps drone from place to place all around.
"*Go on, Yaz. Turn to me. Ask me for my help. If you are not strong enough to resist them, it's okay. You've been so strong for so long… It's okay to allow others in for help. Have you forgotten how to let people in?"*
*It's not him,* I keep telling myself. *The voice is a trick. Don't fall for it.*
The great wasp hovers closer. A string of Japanese text and a short serial number become clear on the largest plate of its thorax: '**DEUTERON- 7:20**', it reads. Gears turn and grind below, and from its myriad mechanisms unfurls a disturbingly human arm. It reaches out, its metal fingers mere inches above my face.
*You can't get me, wasp. I will not move. I will not move.*
For a long, long minute the machine hovers in place. Black against the orange sky. Waiting, and watching.
Then mercifully, it pulls back.
For a moment I am flooded with hope.
*This is it*, I think. *I passed the test*. *We both did.*
But the wasp above me adjusts its position. At the edge of my line of sight, it hovers itself over my brother, scythe sharp and glinting orange in the dusty, dusky light…
…And it strikes down hard, to the sound of a terrible scream.
"RYAN!" I cry out in panic, sitting right up and scrambling to his side, heart pounding like a frenzied hammer in my chest-
\-But Ryan is fine.
Aside from his eyes, which stare at me in shock and surprise, his entire body remains safely rigid. The scythe of the wasp did not strike into him at all. It only scraped the metal of the bus's ceiling to his side.
The scream was just another trick. And I realize to my dismay that once again, I have failed.
The eyeless skull of the wasp swivels to face me at once.
*Gotcha*, it might as well be saying.
And it is here that all hell breaks loose.
In a motion I did not think possible; a movement of absolute liquid speed, Ryan spins on the spot as he rises to a stand. His satchel whips round, the silver buttons and the cross on his neck all reflecting the surrounding light in electric flashes, and before I can even process, his gun is in his hand. His tattered brown coat is caught in the wind and billows up behind us, back down the path of the road, and his eyes burn with lightning focus and intensity as the hammer of the revolver slams backwards again and again.
The droning mechanical wasp headed right towards me is blasted off-course with a bullet through the head, and another through its chest sees it fail catastrophically and spiral down to the road with a burst of oily flame.
The wasps go to Ry, now.
I could help him, my bladed magnet is in my belt-
"DON'T MOVE!" he commands in a voice like thunder as the wasps descend, casting him dark in their shadows.
He fires again, and again and again, each bullet hitting its mark, and the wasps sputter and crash down all around; one of them strikes the side of bus and takes a shower of glass along with it, before being crushed with a crunch beneath the wheel.
Ry draws his magnet-blade like a sword and pulls two of the wasps together, slamming the end of the weapon into the head of the first and dragging it round in an arc to collide with the body of the second. A crash and a further flurry of sparks and together they careen through the air and join the wreckages of their brothers in the wastes.
There's only one wasp left now, that I can see. A dark and apocalyptic blight on the sky, hanging as a mechanical monstrosity in the air in Ryan's blind spot.
We hear a whisper, my brother and I. It's the voice of a woman I do not recognize.
"…*Why did you leave me behind, Ryan? You know that I would never have left you behind".*
"Kristie?" Ry asks, in a voice that breaks my heart.
He turns to look for a woman that is not there.
And the scythe of the wasp strikes down, plunges directly into his back, and out through the front of his chest.
The world around me slows as Ry looks down to the blood-thickened blade protruding from his torso.
The droning of the wasp grows louder, into a gleeful frenzy. Its wing has been clipped and it struggles to fly, but it doesn't care. It has its prize.
The gun drops from Ryan's hand and I watch in slow motion as it tumbles through the air; it hits the edge of the bus and falls slowly away and out of sight.
"Yaz…" Ry murmurs as his eyes go dark… he tries to say something else as well, something about the first test… but his words fail him, and together with the wasp he collapses from his position.
With the graceless fall of a corpse he slips from the roof of the bus, and there is nothing I can do but watch. Watch as the life leaves his body, and together with his killer, they crash down hard to the dust of the road, with a burst of flame, a spout of oil, and a torrent of terrible, deep-red blood.
And still I can only watch.
I watch as my brother disappears gradually from sight. His long journey has at last come to an end.
As a wreck, upon the road.