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“Helena?” says Sarah’s voice, and Helena’s first thought is terrible: she doesn’t believe in it. Her second and third thoughts are always smarter, though, so inside of her military cell she wakes up and looks to the door and there is Sarah’s face, in the window. She looks different than Helena remembered her, so that’s how Helena knows she’s real.
“Sestra,” she says, and she is off of her cot, and she is standing at the door, and she puts her hands up against the metal of it – she knows without looking that Sarah’s hands mirror hers on the other side. “You came.”
“God, you’re here,” Sarah says. “I’ve been looking for you, I’ve been – I promise I’ve been looking.”
Behind her: a cleared throat. Helena cranes to look around Sarah and she sees Paul, standing there, back soldier-straight and gaze fixed on some point that isn’t the two of them. They’re too bright to look at, probably, she understands. “Not to ruin the moment,” he says, dry like desert-dirt, “but the clock’s ticking.”
“Right,” Sarah says. She looks at Paul like drowning. Not drowning like water poured into your throat, but drowning like love. Maybe it is love. Helena can’t tell. What she pays attention to is Sarah stepping back from the cell door so that Paul can unlock it, and then Helena is stumbling out of her cell. Her brain crouches in the dark behind bricks with all the butter she’d been saving, but that’s alright: she doesn’t need it anymore. She is outside of her cell in the dark.
Sarah is murmuring something to Paul, her hand on his arm, and then she lets go and she and Helena are hugging. Helena holds her. Sarah doesn’t smell like dirt, or vomit, or sweat, or anything else Helena smells like. She smells like soap and also like leather and exhaustion. The weight of her is a lump in Helena’s throat, she missed her.
“Sarah,” she whispers into Sarah’s shoulder, which means – of course – I love you.
“Hey, meathead,” Sarah says, which probably means the same. Her palm rubs circles against Helena’s back, like she doesn’t even notice the dried blood and dirt. She leans back, squeezes Helena’s shoulders. “Let’s get you home, alright?”
“Yes,” Helena says, and fumbles for Sarah’s hand, and grabs it. Paul’s face is flat with the ticking clock in the back of his brain; he leads them to the door, through a route that doesn’t match up with the soldierboy footsteps Helena could hear from her cell. Smart Paul. Maybe not so dirty, after all. She forgives him. Maybe.
There’s a car-that-isn’t-a-car parked in a building full of other cars, and Paul hands Sarah a set of keys. “They’ll be looking for you,” he says.
“Can you buy us time,” Sarah says as she climbs into the driver’s seat. “Any time. Anything.”
“I can try,” Paul says. He looks exhausted. Helena fastens her seatbelt tight and then says: “Paul.”
He looks at her.
“Thank you,” she says. “I’m sorry that I thought you were a bad man because you had sex with Rachel.”
Sarah coughs over the steering wheel, but she starts the car-thing and so you can’t really hear the noise at all.
“That’s…fine,” Paul says. He looks at Sarah and his eyes are drowning too. Sarah takes her hand off the keys and she watches Paul come around to her side of the car and she puts her hand on Paul’s chin and she kisses him. They kiss for a long time. Helena rummages through the glovebox and finds a pen, which is almost as good as a knife. Also she finds granola bars, which are better.
“You have to go,” Paul says. They whisper to each other in the dark and then Helena and Sarah are driving, out into the night of the desert. Helena waits until they are far away and then she throws her hands up into the air and starts laughing. The wind unwinds the sound from her mouth like ribbons and throws them out into the night air.
Sarah laughs too, looks at Helena, smiles, floors the gas and drives them out of there. “S has a contact,” she yells over the wind. “We’ve got to meet somebody in Mexico City.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Helena yells back, grabbing at the wind with her hands.
“We’ll find it,” Sarah says, and Helena knows it’s true. They drive fast and faster. Helena turns all the way around in her seat so that she can see the prison camp vanish behind her, watch the desert eat it alive. No cars are coming after them, yet. Maybe none will come. Maybe Helena will go home and shower and eat at least two donuts and everyone will say welcome home, Helena, we missed you, and then they will have a dance party, which is probably something they do all the time. Helena leans back against the seat and thinks about how this is a future she can hold and she can’t quite believe in it. But she can hold it.
She’s crying, but that’s probably just the wind. It screams around the frame of the car as they drive. Sand scratches at the wheels. The whole desert goes soft as Helena keeps crying and her eyes blur everything away.
“I didn’t think you would come for me,” she says, quiet enough that the wind takes it. Sarah hears it, though, so maybe that’s what Helena wanted the whole time.
“Of course I came for you,” she says back. “Christ, Helena. We aren’t the Proletheans, alright? This isn’t like that. You aren’t gonna get left behind anymore. We fight for each other, that’s what we do.”
I didn’t think “each other” also meant me, Helena could explain to her, but that would just make them both sad and what would be the point of it? She holds her hand out the window and the wind bites and claws and doesn’t leave a mark.
“I will fight for you also,” she says. “I am very good with knives. And also with guns.”
Sarah laughs, the sound loud and free under the huge glass dome of the night. “Believe me,” she says. “I know. Bet you didn’t even need me, huh? Bet you could have gotten out all on your own.”
“I had butter,” Helena says. Pauses. “But sestra?”
“Yeah?”
“I wanted it to be you. I wanted you to come and get me. And I am glad. That. You did.”
“Me too,” Sarah says. She lifts a hand off the steering wheel, fumbles blindly, finds Helena’s hand. (Of course she finds Helena’s hand, without even looking.) She squeezes it once, drops it, puts her hands back on the wheel. They are so far from the camp that it could never have existed. Like Helena dreamed it.
“You think they get radio out here?” Sarah says.
Helena sits bolt upright in her seat. “We can find out,” she says, and looks at Sarah. Her excitement is electricity up her spine and in her eyes and Sarah isn’t even shocked by it; she just tilts her head towards Helena, smirks, jerks her head towards the radio.
Helena grabs the radio dial and starts turning it up, higher, higher. She holds her breath and waits to hear the sound.