“What?!” DNA shouted, rushing back to the truck.
“Force,” I said, grasping the car window. “Wait, wait, why?!”
“Because I sent the command! In five minutes. It’ll stay down for exactly four minutes. That’s enough time to send a bunch of those damn soldiers to a flying death or trap them where they can’t come after you. You’ll have a head start. But you need to get moving!”
“Will you be all right?”
“No!” Dolapo shouted. “We’ll be—”
“This car’s weighted to withstand the winds,” he said, but the look on his face didn’t convince her. “We’ll be okay. We always are. Everyone knows to go underground if they hear sirens. And the shelters are all over, it’s hard to be far from one. Some of the soldiers will try to follow people in; there are going to be fights.”
We moved back as he wildly turned the car around. He stopped and waved to us. “Make all this count, AO. Go!” he said. “Before you can’t.” Then he and Dolapo were off, sending up a huge wake of dust.
I turned to DNA. “I don’t . . . people are going to die! I can’t have that on my conscience. The Hour Glass is run by an AI; Maybe I can—”
“Don’t, AO!” DNA said, his eyes wild. He grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me to his face. “Are you trying to kill yourself? I’ve been wondering this for a while now!”
“I’m not,” I said, staring at him. My dead arm nearly slipped out of the sling. “I just—”
“Did you already forget yesterday!”
The dust from Force’s car still floated around us. The sirens blared. It had been a week since the morning I’d left my apartment to go and buy ingredients for a quiet dinner.
I grabbed my hair and sighed loudly. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
I tied my locks back, covering the silver nodule in the middle of my head as he held up the anti-aejej and turned it on. I could feel it immediately, and it was much stronger than the one DNA owned and had left behind at Force and Dolapo’s place. I shivered, feeling a staticky itch in the back of my throat that tasted like the smell of those sheets of fabric softener my mother liked to use.
“What happens now?” I asked. “What if someone is outside without protection?”
“Like Force said, it’s happened before,” he said. “That’s why there are sirens. People know how to not just survive, but live here.”
We were facing away from the border, so we saw it happen. It was like a great beast pausing for a moment to admire the meal it was about to enjoy and then swallowing it in one gulp. When the anti-aejej was on, because it was early afternoon of the day, you could see sunlight peeking through the top of the dome, the storm blustering over its surface. We were far enough from all the Hour Glass villages with their buildings and outdoor communal dwellings, so the moment the anti-aejej went off we were able to watch the dust and wind attack. It was like watching the end of the world.
We rushed to the border. We were going to die out there.
CHAPTER 20
Anti-Aejej
We didn’t feel the blast of the wind, but it was like moving from life into death in a tiny bubble. We huddled together as we moved, shuffling farther and farther from the safe danger of the Hour Glass. Behind us was the Hour Glass, a place that had been a safe space, with atmosphere and sanity before we’d arrived. Now it was momentarily a chaos of brown red violent undulating shadow. But there were no shelters where we were going. The reality of it all overwhelmed me, and I fell to my knees, breathing heavily. DNA grabbed my arm.
“Get up,” he shouted. “Get up!! They’ll realize soon. We have to get as far as we can!”
“They won’t come,” I gasped. “Easy to let us die out here.”
It wasn’t completely still in our anti-aejej’s protection. There was a soft breeze and the air smelled almost sooty, as if it were waiting for even the slightest reason to burst into flame. I coughed, digging my hand into the soft sand. Why was the sand warm? I let him help me up. He grasped my dead arm and when he let go, I felt so weighed down. The dead arm was so so heavy. “Okay,” I said. We started moving again.
It was like being on another planet. Maybe Mars during one of its planet consuming storms, or better yet, Jupiter. Witnessing the fury and chaos up so close that you could touch it. If I reached through the barrier of the anti-aejej with my flesh and bone hand, would I pull it back in as only bone? At least it would match my other arm, I thought.
We walked and walked. At some point, DNA started singing a song in Pulaar, his voice travelling no farther than to the edge of the force field two feet in front of us. It bounced back and travelled two feet behind us and bounced back to our left and right. Nowhere to go.
But his voice was sweet and I shut my eyes as we walked, and I listened. And behind my eyes, I could see that we were truly stranded for miles and miles and miles, unless we turned back. We could not turn back. And then we heard the beeping.
“What is that?” DNA asked. I could barely hear him, but I didn’t really have to. We’d been quiet for two hours. I don’t know what was going through his head. He’d stopped singing. Neither of us had taken even a gulp of the one bottle of water we had. We weren’t thirsty.
I couldn’t answer at first. I needed to stay with it for a moment. I took a deep breath, feeling my blood pressure wanting to rise. I reached out to them and was quickly told, there was no way to wirelessly charge the anti-aejej because it was too old, it hadn’t been upgraded with the compatibility. There was no way to squeeze out more energy from its dying battery, either, because it had gone beyond its emergency stores an hour ago. I stopped walking.
“We’re doomed.”
“Goddammit, there’s no sunlight here, otherwise, it would charge,” DNA said. “It was supposed to last a LOT longer than this!”
“Force didn’t account for the fact that they lose energy when you don’t recharge them often. When’s the last time he left the Hour Glass? These old ones are such shit.” I sighed again. I was so tired and hungry and all my muscles ached.
The anti-aejej beeped again.
“I want to say he should have known better,” he sighed and shook his head, looking at the anti-aejej in his hands. The screen was blank except for the green flashing dot that indicated it was working but not for long. “All too fast. All too fast.”
I coughed and rubbed my face. “Think, think, think,” I muttered. But there was nothing. We had nothing. Nothing but my bottle of water. Nothing but ourselves. We were going to die. As if to confirm this, the anti-aejej beeped again, and this time a number appeared on its small screen. Fifteen. We had fifteen minutes. We grasped each other’s hands and looked deep into each other’s eyes.
“You were great back there,” he said. “I don’t think the company will ever be viewed the same way.”