My footsteps were a slow crunch, crunch across the brittle ground.
“He was just a deluded old lunatic, after all,” I murmured to myself. A strange shudder rocked my chest, and a hoarse coughing ripped its way up my throat. The stream of gravelly coughs rattled on, but it wasn’t until I felt my eyes pricking for tears that couldn’t come that I realized I was laughing.
“There was… never… ever… anything out here!” I gasped between spasms of hysteria. I staggered forward as though I were drunk, my footprints trailing unevenly behind me.
No. Melanie uncurled from her misery to defend the faith she still clung to. I got it wrong or something. My fault.
I laughed at her now. The sound was sucked away by the scorching wind.
Wait, wait, she thought, trying to pull my attention from the joke of it all. You don’t think… I mean, do you think that maybe they tried this?
Her unexpected fear caught me midlaugh. I choked on the hot air, my chest throbbing from my fit of morbid hysteria. By the time I could breathe again, all trace of my black humor was gone. Instinctively, my eyes swept the desert void, looking for some evidence that I was not the first to waste my life this way. The plain was impossibly vast, but I couldn’t halt my frantic search for… remains.
No, of course not. Melanie was already comforting herself. Jared’s too smart. He would never come out here unprepared like we did. He’d never put Jamie in danger.
I’m sure you’re right, I told her, wanting to believe it as much as she did. I’m sure no one else in the whole universe could be this stupid. Besides, he probably never came to look. He probably never figured it out. Wish you hadn’t.
My feet kept moving. I was barely aware of the action. It meant so little in the face of the distance ahead. And even if we were magically transported to the very base of the mesa, what then? I was absolutely positive there was nothing there. No one waited at the mesa to save us.
“We’re going to die,” I said. I was surprised that there was no fear in my rasping voice. This was just a fact like any other. The sun is hot. The desert is dry. We are going to die.
Yes. She was calm, too. This, death, was easier to accept than that our efforts had been guided by insanity.
“That doesn’t bother you?”
She thought for a moment before answering.
At least I died trying. And I won. I never gave them away. I never hurt them. I did my best to find them. I tried to keep my promise.… I die for them.
I counted nineteen steps before I could respond. Nineteen sluggish, futile crunches across the sand.
“Then what am I dying for?” I wondered, the pricking feeling returning in my desiccated tear ducts. “I guess it’s because I lost, then, right? Is that why?”
I counted thirty-four crunches before she had an answer to my question.
No, she thought slowly. It doesn’t feel that way to me. I think… Well, I think that maybe… you’re dying to be human. There was almost a smile in her thought as she heard the silly double meaning to the phrase. After all the planets and all the hosts you’ve left behind, you’ve finally found the place and the body you’d die for. I think you’ve found your home, Wanderer.
Ten crunches.
I didn’t have the energy to open my lips anymore. Too bad I didn’t get to stay here longer, then.
I wasn’t sure about her answer. Maybe she was trying to make me feel better. A sop for dragging her out here to die. She had won; she had never disappeared.
My steps began to falter. My muscles screamed out to me for mercy, as if I had any means to soothe them. I think I would have stopped right there, but Melanie was, as always, tougher than I.
I could feel her now, not just in my head but in my limbs. My stride lengthened; the path I made was straighter. By sheer force of will, she dragged my half-dead carcass toward the impossible goal.
There was an unexpected joy to the pointless struggle. Just as I could feel her, she could feel my body. Our body, now; my weakness ceded control to her. She gloried in the freedom of moving our arms and legs forward, no matter how useless such a motion was. It was bliss simply because she could again. Even the pain of the slow death we had begun dimmed in comparison.
What do you think is out there? she asked me as we marched on toward the end. What will you see, after we’re dead?
Nothing. The word was empty and hard and sure. There’s a reason we call it the final death.
The souls have no belief in an afterlife?
We have so many lives. Anything more would be… too much to expect. We die a little death every time we leave a host. We live again in another. When I die here, that will be the end.
There was a long pause while our feet moved more and more slowly.