He feels suddenly overcome. He has traveled all this way for this. He tests the window, toying with the idea of throwing himself out it, but finds it nailed shut.
Clark says, “Back at the Sanctuary, when we were ranging the Dead Lands, we sometimes came across animals. Sand wolves. Bears. Javelinas. Spiders. We were trained to never run. Never run. If you run, you give up your power. You face whatever it is that’s dangerous. You face it, and if you need to, you fight it.” Her voice chokes and she goes quiet a minute. “I forgot that. I ran away from what scared me. But I’m ready to face it now. I’m ready to fight by you again.”
She appears beside him. He does not look at her directly, but sidelong, and still he sees her battered face. If she is anything, she is a fighter. She’s not going to give up, not on living and not on muscling him over to her side again. “I said I’m sorry and I mean it, Lewis. I’m sorry for everything.”
“What happened to the others?”
She tells him. About the hundreds of men who charged out of the fog, who swarmed the mall and overcame their defenses, who beat them and interrogated them and crushed them onto a train. The doctor—here she clears her throat and says, “Minda”—Minda did not make it, a blow to the temple cracking her skull and making her brain swell so that she cried out visions the rest of them could not see before falling into a deep sleep she never woke from.
“I think she might have loved you, you know,” Lewis says.
“I know.”
Clark reaches for Lewis and at first he flinches from her. Her hand pauses in the air between them and then continues and she runs her fingers across his scalp, his hair now as white and stiff as a horsehair brush. “What happened to you?” she says.
“You. You happened.”
She smiles with her whole face, everything bending into an expression of warmth. “Did you ever think you’d see me again?”
“I hoped I would.”
“What’s going on in that head of yours?”
When he thinks about the Clark he grew up with and the Clark who stands beside him now, he might as well be staring at a mirror with a crack running through it. He sees a similar division in himself. While the Sanctuary brutalized them, the journey has humanized them. He is not the same man; she is not the same woman. To blame her for what she did would be to blame a hard-faced stranger. He would have never been capable of such a gesture before, but he takes her hand now and their fingers knit together.
Lewis blows out a sigh, and, like an echo, another explosion concusses the air.
More and more people appear in the streets. They appear frenzied, lost. They run one way, pause, and then run the next, like ants rushing out of a kicked hill. The sky is dirty with smoke. Maybe they are afraid. Maybe they should be afraid. Maybe they need a wall of their own.
“Somebody is fighting back,” he says.
Clark sees him, knows the potential inside him more clearly than Burr ever could. “So are we going to join them or fucking what?”
He feels a small flash of hope once more. “I thought I came here to join something. Now I understand it’s to stop something.”
“That’s the spirit.”
He leans against the window, pressing his cheek against the cold glass, fogging it with his breath, trying to see where the latest explosion has come from.
That is when the first gull swings by, a flash of white that startles Lewis back a step. It is followed by another, this one tapping at the glass, chipping it with its beak.
He looks up and sees a flock swarming the sky, so many of them that they make the yard swim with shadows. He sees, then, in the center of the lawn, Gawea staring up at him. The gulls scream and her black eyes shine and she raises a hand to him in greeting or apology. He returns the gesture, his hand flat on the glass.
Behind them, in the hallway, there are voices. Lewis cannot hear the words but recognizes them as pitched high with anger. This is followed by the thunder of a body rolling down the stairs. A second of silence passes. The knob turns and catches and shakes.
There is a bang and the door strains against its hinges. Then another that rains splinters. Then another—and the door crashes inward and Colter steps through the storm of dust and motes of plaster. He waves them forward with his prosthetic. “Come on already. Didn’t you hear me knocking?”
Chapter 58
THE STREETS ARE buzzing with people, but they are distracted by the explosions and give the four of them no more than a passing glance. Some wear necklaces linked with shells. Some have colored scars and pearls jeweling their noses and ears, forked beards or strange braids stiffened by egg whites. Lewis sees one man with no legs dragging himself along on a wheeled sled. Another with what appears to be a fleshy tail hanging out the back of his pants. So many have physical deformities of one kind or another, and so many more are brightened by sores and lumped with tumors.
Only one man calls out for them to stop. He reaches for the pistol at his belt. But his attention soon turns skyward, where he sees the birds, a white cloud of gulls, all screeching at once. Gawea sends them rushing down. Their white wings make the air appear stormed with windblown paper. Lewis throws up his hands, but none molest him. They concentrate on the man with the pistol, who vanishes into a cyclone of beaks and wings and webbed claws and eyes as black as those of the girl who commands them.