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"I think I won't be here," Andy says once. "By the time you know what you most wish you could ask. But you should go ahead with anything you come up with, meanwhile." It's very, very late at night, and they've let the fire die down to nothing. Nile's face and feet are cold. The stars are piercing and uncountable.
Nile isn't sure if Andy means that she already knows what Nile is going to want to ask, in which case, why can't she just tell her now, or if she means that Nile will surely want to know something but there's no way now to know what it's going to be.
"Do we all ask the same thing?" Nile asks. She's thinking of the first scenario, this mysterious question that apparently can't be explained to her yet. "Will one of them be able to tell me?"
Joe and Nicky are asleep, one long bundle in the dark. Booker is somewhere in the world where the rest of them are not.
"Mm," Andy says, which isn't enlightening. She pokes the ashes of the fire with a stick; they obligingly flicker red before dimming back into nothing. "Old questions," she says, after another moment. "Maybe new answers."
"Okay," Nile says, because what else can she say? It's very late, and in a minute she yawns, and she and Andy go and tuck themselves around Joe and Nicky like the parentheses around an equation, Nile's cold face pressed into Joe's warm, broad back.
*
They leave civilization like this: they are on a train, and then they get off the train, and then they split up at the train station. Andy and Nicky will try to hitchhike, Nile and Joe will board the bus already idling in front of the station in a haze of black exhaust. Joe handles the money and the tickets - Nile could manage with pantomime, but this way she can listen and try to remember a few words for next time.
"No one will stop for four adults around here," Nicky had explained. "Even two men together is bad. But people notice four strangers together on the bus, and we'd rather not be noticed, so either we wait for the next one, or we try to catch a ride."
"And more people will stop for them than us," Joe had added. It was easy enough for Nile to guess what that was about. At some point she wants to ask Joe if, like, the entire last thousand years have been racist as fuck, or if he remembers times and places before all that got started. But it feels weird to bring up out of nowhere, just, hey, how's that been, so she hasn't, yet.
The bus is not crowded, and once they get going, the smoke mostly streams out behind the bus instead of surrounding it. Nile watches out the window as the town turns into fields and the fields turn into scrubby hillsides. The bus winds its way up into what are clearly, now, mountains, the road narrowing until it seems like there are treetops right outside Nile's window, and she has to remind herself that if they roll over the edge, and down and down, she will (probably) survive, although the grandmothers and sullen young men on the bus with them will not.
They get off the bus at a place only saved from being the middle of nowhere by the junction of a dirt track with the bus route. The old women look out the window at them suspiciously as they shoulder their packs. Joe has a large camera meant to make their presence here plausible - they are journalists, they are sight-seers, trekkers, some kind of innocuous foreign weirdos. The dirt track, Joe says, leads down to a village where, conceivably, someone could be heading without raising red flags. They are not; they are going the other way, just far enough from the road that Andy and Nicky won't be sure they are there until their ride is gone and they can all reunite. And then, further up and further away, vanishing out of the world's sight.
*
Nile obviously has survival experience - she is a Marine - but it's different to be out in the wilderness with Andy and Nicky and Joe. At first, when they go up the mountain, it's like any training, any mission - you go out, you come back. There's an away with a toward pointing the other direction, sometimes multiple layers, a temporary camp, a base camp, increasing degrees of safety and comfort eventually leading back to some place that is home. She doesn't know what the toward would be (another safe house? Copley?) but she assumes at first that the rest of them do.
There isn't any one single thing that makes her reevaluate. They walk, they stop. They find a spot where the hills spread out underneath them and admire the view. Joe and Nicky screw around with the camera, giving each other impenetrable prompts ("now pose like Munich", Joe says, which, what? Nicky cocks his hips) but never, as far as Nile can tell, actually taking any photographs. Andy forages for bits of wild food to supplement their rations, coming back to the trail (there is, barely, a trail sometimes - a goat track, maybe) with eggs or roots or sharp oniony greens. They camp and they walk further and Nile watches Andy choose their path and at some point she becomes convinced that Andy doesn't have a towards or an away, not like Nile had been thinking. Andy, Nile suspects, is just... here, wandering around living an unhoused life because that's what suits her this week. This week? This month? This year? Nobody has mentioned a timeline to Nile. There's the question of supplies, but that's more of an amenity than a necessity, for three of them.
("We don't actually have to eat," Nicky had explained. "But it's better. If you don't you'll be slow and tired - "
"And cranky," Joe interrupted.
"Right. But since you don't really need it, it's more about what makes the body feel like you're eating. Food that tastes good, or a full belly now and then.")
Andy does have to eat, and Nile worries about that - if centuries of habit are saying she just needs some snacks, is she really going to pay attention to eating enough? But Nile, very recently, knew how to eat enough, and so if she tries to eat more or less what Andy is eating, she should be able to tell if it really adds up.
She's a little worried Andy will be bothered, if she realizes what Nile is doing, but in fact she seems to be pleased, or at least she nods approvingly when Nile follows her and copies her grazing.
"This is one of the things we're out here for," Andy says, the day they catch a speckled brown bird and wring its neck. Nile guts it, under Andy's direction; Andy cuts the liver in half and they eat it raw, warm like the inside of a mouth and coppery like a bitten lip. They make a fire early that day to roast the meat, after Andy has plucked one lateral half and Nile the second half much more slowly.
"I'm not new to this," Nile answers. It isn't entirely clear to her how much Andy knows about the specifics of her Marine training. Maybe she's read up, or had Copley explain; maybe she knows all about it from the general osmosis of being in the mercenary world since before the Corps was born. Or maybe she doesn't care at all, except about whatever Nile actually demonstrates in front of her.
"Comparatively," Andy says, and Nile certainly can't argue with that. Andy adjusts the spit, turning the bird's other side toward the coals. "It's good to be sure you'll be fine out here, for when you need to leave a place behind." She nods at Joe and Nicky, who are sprawled together playing something involving dice, murmuring in a language Nile doesn't know. "City boys," Andy says. "At heart. Born inside walls. They'll have to learn too."
"Wait," Nile says, eyes narrowing. "Are you older than walls?" Didn't, like, cave people make houses out of mammoth bones? Nile is pretty sure she remembers reading something about that once. "You can't be older than walls."
"There were walls," Andy says, smiling a little. "Doesn't mean I was born in them."
"Huh," Nile says, conversationally. It feels too personal to ask whether that means women gave birth in tents, or just out in the open, or what. "So, wait, what do you mean, they'll have to learn? Haven't they already?" Nicky and Joe are like a thousand years old; Nile would have thought they'd had plenty of time to learn anything Andy wanted to teach.
"Some," Andy says. She raises her voice: "Joe, what would you tell Nile about mushrooms?"
Joe looks up from the dice game and makes a face. "Dying won't even help," he says. "Fuck mushrooms." He makes a resentful spitting sound. Nicky pats him on the arm.
"So that put everyone off for awhile," Andy says. Nile winces.
"So, we're not, like... immune," she asks slowly.
"Poisons are a mixed bag," Andy says. "Some we seem to be able to clear right away - which isn't good either, if it makes you think something is safe to feed people - but some we just have to wait out, and whether you die or not doesn't get it over faster."
Nile's been through the gas chamber in Marine training, and she recalls the general outline of the explanation about tear agents vs blister agents vs nerve agents. If she wants to, she supposes, she can study enough biochemistry to understand the differences between what effects them and what doesn't. Andy could have studied it - just because she's older than (the oldest university, the concept of science, possibly the concept of education) doesn't mean modern ideas are beyond her.
Nile looks at her. Andy is staring at their roasting bird. The red glow of the coals reflects in her eyes. There must be thousands of things Andy could have done, but she's still always been one person, and the long winding thread of her life could only run through one place at a time.
Nile thinks that she, also, may choose to prioritize other things than knowledge.
*
They walk. They hike. They trek. March. Ruck. Hump. Ramble. It's pleasant walking, by Nile's standards, by Marine standards - her pack is light, the pace is slow, they stop whenever anybody wants to stop, and - apparently - her feet don't get blisters any more?? Nicky sometimes juggles pine cones as they walk, or small rocks, and sometimes Joe will throw another one in, laughing if it messes him up or grinning proudly if he incorporates it and keeps it going. They have bits of ongoing arguments, rehashing for Nile's benefit, or just because they like to revisit them.
"But horses are so much more flexible than motorbikes."
"But when you go places where bad things are happening, bad things happen to your horse, and it's sad."
"Is this still a question? Horses will be around long after engines."
"She's biased, she domesticated the horse," this last stage-whispered to Nile, who can't tell whether it's a fact or an old joke.
There is a new ongoing argument over which languages Nile should start learning first - leading contenders include Mandarin ("might as well dive on that tonal grenade ASAP"), Arabic ("if you read Pashto, you basically already know the alphabet"), Swahili ("but if you start with Arabic, you'll recognize the loan words") and "the third language is actually easier the more fluent you are in the second one, so improve your Pashto first." Technically Nile took three years of French, in junior high and high school, so Pashto was already third when the Corps sent her to language school, but she wouldn't trust her French in the field.
"Let's improve your French, then," Nicky says encouragingly. "French gets you further than Swahili where English doesn't, anyways." And after that it's all marcher and arrêter. Des œufs and les champignons. Let's not eat les champignons, we don't want to poison Joe again. Andy is less diligent than Nicky and Joe about sticking to French, but so much of Andy's conversation - her teaching - goes without words at all. Her head, tilting toward some patch of plants she's going to go and glean. Her finger, pointing, tracing the flight of a bird. Her hand over Nile's hand, you do it like this, the snare, the plucking, the flint and steel.
At night, their heads close together, picking out constellations and navigational stars.
*
They've been going up, but also down; around shoulders, but also over saddles and along ravines, weaving through the terrain in ways that might be planned or might be opportunistic, Nile still isn't sure. Sometimes there are the ghosts of old trails, when she can look ahead and see how the trees aren't there that should be, how the hills themselves have been cut into. Once or twice they've seen the ruin of what could have been a wall, crumbling back into green growth - a pasture, a house, a town, Nile has no idea, and no one else volunteers one. Sometimes they find goat droppings, but Nile thinks Andy steers them away from anything fresh. They are not out here to be seen, or met. When they veer uphill, or downhill, they might be avoiding a person; they might be avoiding a feature in the land; they might just be going where Andy wants to go.
The day they climb to the top of a mountain they've been skirting, the sun is bright, and Nile has been enjoying it, enjoying the contrast with the shade of trees, the exertion of climbing, the power of her own body.
She doesn't realize they're summiting until they're almost there, although the trees get shorter and shorter, and the path that Andy chooses has more loose rock and more parts where they have to use their hands. There are higher peaks behind her, snowcapped and forbidding. There is snow here, in the overhangs and crevices, but not where the sun strikes, where the wind whips along bare rock. Nile has to turn around and look back to understand the shape of where they are and where they're going.
Oh, she thinks. She's always liked a good hike to the top of something, and apparently that's something that the rest of the party still finds worth doing too. They scramble up the last quarter-mile and then they're stepping up to where there is no more up left to go. Standing on the roof.
Places they've walked slope down all around them - Nile doesn't think they've been aiming here, this is just a side-jaunt in a meandering path - but she can see better now how the terrain fits together. The literal lay of the land. Further off, the real mountains are looking down, telling her that all she's gone up is a hill, but Nile has always known in her chest that the mountain you're on is the tallest mountain in the world. She could beat any one of them, she thinks. All of them, one by one in a string. Why not? She has time.
"I love this," Joe yells, head thrown back, arms open wide. He calls something out in a language Nile doesn't speak yet, a long phrase. Poetry, or a prayer, maybe. Nicky is watching fondly; he bumps his shoulder against Nile's, sharing his affection.
"Have you been here before?" Nile asks.
"Awhile ago," Nicky says. "Andy likes it. Although there used to be more snow."
Andy is sitting on the ground, sipping from a Nalgene and gnawing on an energy bar. Human practicality, in the absence of superhuman endurance; Nile remembers those habits. Eat, drink, sleep whenever you can, as soon as you can. She's not sure if she's already forgetting or if it's always been too exciting to rest right away when she finishes a climb.
Nile sits down next to Andy, drinks from her own water. "Does this place have a name?"
"Several," Andy says. She gestures vaguely at the mountains around them. "Sometimes there was a lot more ice," she says. "It was a different kind of place." She looks at Nile. "Maybe you'll come see how different it gets, later."
Not fair, Nile thinks, but she smiles at Andy, and turns up her face to the sun.
*
"So, in London, they make a club, and it becomes fashionable. Who can get to the top of this mountain, that mountain. They're all focused on the Alps, because, of course, that's next door, relatively - "
"- and Europe is the center of the universe - "
"- but one night we're talking, and, ah, maybe drinking - "
"You were definitely drinking," Andy puts in.
"We thought, we've seen much better mountains. Let's go climb one of those, and the next time we run into one of these explorers, we'll know we've stood far above them."
"And through the subsequent weeks of travel time, nobody rethought this," Andy says. Her voice is very dry.
"Booker was excited," Joe says, awkward around the name. Our little brother wanted to!, Nile hears. "He was having a hard time."
"So," Nicky goes on. "We get all our gear, and we find a local who can show us around up there - he didn't want to leave us, but we snuck away - "
Nile can't help but look over at Andy, who is rolling her eyes.
"And we're going up, but we're all getting dizzy, we've got these headaches, we're starting to get confused."
"Because you had severe altitude sickness," Andy says.
"We didn't know," Nicky says. "Joe and I are from sea-level people! Booker thought he already knew the worst the cold could do! So, we're staggering around, and eventually we're just all - crawling around, probably in circles, I don't know how long we were up there - "
"Long," Joe says.
"Long," Nicky agrees. He's laughing a lot more than Nile thinks this kind-of-horrifying story deserves. "We don't even know if we made it to the top. But finally we manage to kick off this massive avalanche, which to our great fortune carries us back down far enough that a few more brain cells wake up and we realize we should get back down to where the air has air in it."
"And that's how you might have been the first foreigners on Mount Everest," Nile says dubiously. That was the claim, at the start of the story.
"That's how," Joe says. "Just us, before the camps, and all the garbage. We had to dig out of the avalanche. Lots of broken bones. I don't recommend it." He's smiling softly at Nicky, though; this is somehow a good memory. But then, Nile's had her share of hangovers; sometimes you just have to damn the consequences.
"Andy's always been sorry she didn't come with us," Nicky says, teasing.
"Andy has never been sorry," Andy says, shaking her head. "But I'm glad I didn't have to come retrieve you."
Silence, all at once; too close, suddenly, to something nobody wants to talk about. The person Andy couldn't find.
"I can never believe you spent all that time in India earlier and didn't hear about the Buddha until so much later," Nicky says, latching on to geography as a direction out.
Andy shrugs; this is, Nile thinks, familiar. Another one of the ongoing conversations. "Never met Gautama, never met the Nazarene, never met the Messenger," she says. "Never saw the whole New World, until it already had invaders all over it."
"Never saw the Beatles," Joe suggests.
"Never went to the moon," Nicky adds.
Nile is sitting in the wilderness with thousand-year-old immortals, and they're basically playing immortal "never have I ever".
"You don't want to go to the moon," Joe says. "What if something breaks, and now you're stuck up there. You can't avalanche back down from the moon."
"I know," Nicky says. "I liked the idea that people were going to keep going. Maybe once there was a base up there, and regular flights."
"I did like that idea," Joe says, wistful. He picks up Nicky's hand and kisses his knuckles. "We will have to make our happiness here on Earth."
Nicky leans in, whispers something in his ear, and Joe smiles, sweet and private.
"Did it seem totally crazy when people went to the moon?" Nile asks, turning towards Andy, away from the moment that doesn't involve them. "Like, the moon's been there for thousands of years, and now it's a place?"
"Go back far enough, and the world was infinite," Andy says. She spreads her hands out wide. "And then -" she makes them into a ball, like she's packing a snowball. "I don't know if it can happen the other way. The moon can just be a legend, that won't even take that long. I don't know if someday - " She splays her hands out again, continents drifting apart, the snowball disintegrating.
"Hmm," Nile says. "I never..." she tries to think of something good, something distracting, something better than thinking about what Andy is maybe saying.
"I never wrote a memoir," Nile says. "Always thought I might, once I got out. Brag on my team a little. But I guess not."
"Tell us a story," Nicky suggests. Nile looks at them - Nicky, Joe, even Andy all look interested.
"Okay," Nile says. This one time, in Afghanistan - "So I'd only been in country for a couple of days," she starts, and her audience nods along.
*
They run out of energy bars, and beef jerky, and instant coffee, and rice. Nile's feet (apparently) don't get blisters any more, but she finds herself thinking longingly of clean socks, and washing her spare pairs in a stream cannot approach the luxury of machine washing. And the thing is, she's familiar with this - missing a bed, missing showers, missing toilet paper, television, wifi, strangers, choices, solitude - but how does she do it without a clock, without a calendar? When does she get to go on libo? Never: she is on libo, she is completely free, she could walk out of these mountains any time she wants, except that Andy is here, and she is staying to be close to Andy. To all of them.
She might think she's being hazed, except that nobody else has coffee or wet wipes left either. She tries to imagine a life without walls, where nobody has beds, or showers, or lights. Maybe the nearest coffee is a thousand-mile walk to the south. Maybe the nearest jerky is a goat and some kind of drying rack. If she told Andy, hey, I need to stop to cure some meat, I need to reinvent nitrates and all that other stuff the organic lunchmeat says it doesn't have, how long could that take, a couple of years? a couple of decades?
The world without walls is like an avalanche, down and down and down a mountain that Nile hadn't even known she was born on top of. And Andy: eyes calm, hands steady, who knows the world with and without ice.
*
The second night, a day's walk away from roads, and buses, and people, Joe makes a fire, and, out of nowhere, Nicky starts singing.
He does it without explanation, or introduction, head up but not looking at anyone in particular. The words aren't English, and Nile doesn't recognize the tune. It sounds sad, in a sweet way. At the end of the verse, what sounds like a verse, he starts over - the same words again, Nile thinks - and this time, after a moment, Joe joins in, singing the same thing, but delayed. A round. Nile isn't sure she's ever personally sung a round, besides "Row Row Row Your Boat" the year her grade got music enrichment in elementary school, thirty little kids stumbling along and the music teacher desperately thwacking a table trying to keep time.
Joe and Nicky don't seem to have trouble keeping time; maybe it helps that they're watching each other, now, eyes locked across the brightly-burning campfire. Nile looks over at Andy - when in doubt, check in with Andy - and is just in time to see her open her mouth and join in too. Joe and Nicky's heads whip around and they both sit up a little taller, smiling around the words they're still singing. The three voices braid together, looping around and around.
Nile has always had a good ear - it was part of what had gotten her tapped for language school. The song isn't very long, and they're repeating it over and over. She could join in pretty easily, she thinks. She might get tangled if she tried to be her own part, but she could definitely join in with Andy. Andy's voice is a little thinner than the mens'. It would sound good, with two of them. But maybe the singing isn't a thing to be jumped into. It's always safest to stay quiet and listen, so Nile listens, until they all three sing the last line together, and smile at each other, and Nicky gets out the cookpot and starts to fill it with rice and lentils and spices tapped out carefully from a days-of-the-week pill organizer, a little bit of Wed, a little bit of Sat.
The next night it happens again, Andy starting the fire, Joe starting a song. A different song, this time, faster and sort of bouncy, verses and a chorus, Joe clinking along with his knife on his water bottle.
"So," Nile says, when they're done. "This is a thing. Campfire songs."
Nicky and Joe exchange a quick glance. Andy doesn't even blink.
"Everyone used to sing more," Joe says. "Well, not everyone, sometimes people even ban it. But mostly."
"The world was much bigger," Nicky adds. "It used to take a long time going, to go anywhere. Only so many things to do."
"Not just that," Andy says. She twists around to rummage in her pack. "Travels well. Never gets old. Aha."
The thing she pulls out is a rod, with holes: a flute, bamboo maybe, about the length of the white plastic recorder Nile had tried out in elementary-school music enrichment. Andy puts it to her lips, and the sound that comes out is high, delicate, trilling, nothing like the screechy recorder tones Nile recalls.
"Oh," Joe says, across the fire. Nile looks, and he actually has his hand pressed to his heart. Nicky nudges him, which Nile can translate as "don't make a big deal about it", and they start looking in their own packs.
Joe pulls out a sort of blobby ray-gun shape with holes in it, and Nicky a largeish egg with holes, which both turn out to also be blowing instruments, each with their own slightly different sound. The three sound good together, sharing Andy's tune, taking turns taking it and changing little pieces of it, flipping them over and adding flutters and curls.
"So... not just singing," Nile says, when they've stopped again, and Andy has stepped away from the fire, looking out at the night. "You've all got... a thing."
"Sometimes several," Nicky says. "Small stuff. You can't go lugging an oud or something around, it's too big."
"And it just gets smashed," Joe says mournfully, stowing the ray-gun flute away in his pack again. "Waste of a good instrument."
"But you could play one," Nile says.
Joe shrugs. "We can play a lot of things," he says. "Once you know a little, you can figure it out."
"Except harmonica," Nicky says, shaking his head. "Booker can," he elaborates. "I sound like I'm wheezing to death." Joe catches Nile's eye and makes another fake-sad face, nodding.
"Does he play all these instruments too?" Nile asks.
"Harmonica on the road," Nicky says. "Piano when we have a house with a piano. You would be surprised how many old buildings these days have a piano somewhere."
"They're all out of tune," Joe says. His fake-sad face is getting quite a workout. Maybe he's actually sad. Maybe centuries of out-of-tune pianos is a heavier burden than Nile can imagine. "But so much range."
"So," Nile says, and stops, and then finishes it. "I don't play anything."
"Someday, when you're bored," Joe answers, like that was a complete question. "Ask me, and whatever we have, I'll teach you, if you want."
"If you walk across Asia, and you practice every night, you'll be getting somewhere by the end," Nicky says.
"Wait," Nile says. She can't tell at all whether he's basing that on personal experience, or just using it as a time reference, or suggesting a plan. "Are we going to walk across Asia? Is that likely?" Is that what they're doing now, does their routeless route go all the way across Asia?
"Oh, eventually," Nicky says, shrugging, in a way that at least makes it sound like that's not the current agenda.
*
The question of Nile's music education, subcategory joining the band, feels settled, or at least safely delayed. Someday, when she's bored, she can start learning the blob flute or the piano or whatever, but it isn't, like, a test, or a requirement. Just an option.
The question of joining in with the singing, on the other hand, is still open and unresolved. It's not like the singing is constant, but it's routine. Sometimes Joe and Nicky will sing something while walking, which gives Nile nostalgia flashbacks to Marine running cadences. Sometimes Andy will start humming something while she's cracking nuts or digging out roots, mumbling half the words. Nile has no idea whether she's hearing millennia-old hymns to forgotten gods, or, like, something Andy heard on the radio last year. With instruments it might be more obvious, but reduced to one human voice, Nile has no idea what clues an expert would listen for to guess about places and times. Nile had listened to music in Pashto, at language school - she had made herself a workout playlist - so she isn't completely new to songs that don't follow American rules. (Whether that's church music rules or classic hip-hop rules or whatever. She couldn't tell you what the rules are, but there are ways music works, in America, and plenty of Andy's... doesn't.) Some of what they sing she's not sure she could follow along with. But plenty of it she could, the songs that sound like something she might have sung in church, or pop songs she almost recognizes. One night Joe starts a French lullaby, another round, that gets stuck in Nile's head to the extent that she keeps humming it to herself the next day, until Nicky catches her eye while she's doing it and she stops like he just caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.
She isn't sure why, exactly, it feels fraught to join in. Maybe if she had that first night, or the second night, jumping in before it had time to get weird. Sometimes she makes little bargains - she'll definitely join in if they sing something in English, or they repeat something they already sang, or if Andy looks lonely when Joe and Nicky are gazing at each other again. None of those things have happened, though, and Nile has no idea how soon they might. Nicky and Joe are still doing the language-immersion thing and avoiding English, and with a thousand-year repertoire, they can probably go awhile without repeats. And Andy looks sad about plenty of things, but only ever fond about Joe and Nicky. So maybe none of those are the right condition.
It's not like Nile isn't enjoying listening in the meantime, though. It's nice, flute and flutes, flute and voices, voice and voices. One night Nicky digs something else out of his pack, a weird U of metal with a bar that makes crazy sproinging noises when he holds it to his mouth and plucks it. Joe's flute playing gets as raucous as one flute can get, and Andy puts down her flute entirely and sings words that Nile strongly suspects are obscene. Nile laughs and applauds, while the fire throws sparks up into the dark.
*
The weather has been kind, all the way from the train station to the mountain-top detour. Well, it's been kind to them; Nile doesn't know how hot or dry it's supposed to be around here, at this time of year. Maybe crops are dying and bugs and tree diseases are spreading out of their normal zones and all the other invisible disasters you read about. But for her, it's great. The only thing better than hiking dry is sleeping dry. The mountains are windy but even the wind has felt pretty friendly, without the dust or the bite that would make it an enemy. Clouds roll in, but they've been rolling out again.
The day after the day down from the mountain, their weather luck runs out with the instant coffee. Clouds roll in that are darker, that mean business; the temperature drops. The little birds cluster, quiet but frantic, exploding from the ground in groups and then settling too fast. They're not in bad terrain for a storm - not in a ravine, where there could be flash floods, not on a peak, where there could be lightning. They happen to be in dense enough trees that they should get some protection from the rain. Or, well, not "happen" to be. Andy has clearly steered them here. Andy picks a spot for them to camp, earlier in the day than normal, and they all get to work, digging a quick trench across the uphill side, setting up a fire to burn low and steady, spreading and hanging tarps.
Their gear, taken as a group, is a bit of an odd mix. Joe and Nicky have, between them, a large wool blanket and a self-inflating air mattress, the latter of which they sometimes pick up and carry with them away from the night's campsite for awhile, because apparently a thousand years of soldiering doesn't mean you don't still appreciate the little things like something cushy under your back. Or knees. Or whatever, Nile doesn't need to know. Nile herself has a proper sleeping bag, which she manages to get Andy to use about a third of the time. Andy has tarps. Andy has tarps like someone who's been waiting six thousand years for silnylon: ground tarps, rain tarps, a sleeping tarp to wrap up in.
By the time the rain starts spattering down through the trees, they have a nice little shelter made, tarps above and below, the fire in a shallow pit at one end where it hopefully won't throw any sparks up onto the nylon. It's well-built from the standpoint of using what they have - peaked roof, angled sides, oriented with the wind - but it's also small. They can just all fit sitting up if they bundle their bodies into the middle, packs on their laps, and fit their arms and legs together like puzzle pieces. Without discussion, they've crowded Andy into the center-most spot, facing the fire, and the other three bracketed around her. Nile has ended up with tarp close enough to her face that she can move it if she blows hard, but she's under cover, even her boots. (Even if she doesn't get blisters any more, nobody likes wet boots.)
"Ugh," Joe says. "I hear a mosquito."
Bugs don't seem to like Nile very much any more, like something about her body is now different enough that bugs can tell and stay away. She's pretty sure the same is true for Joe and Nicky as well. Bugs even don't seem to like Andy either, like thousands of years of not tasting right have left her permanently unappetizing. Still, being trapped in a small space with that mosquito whine in your ear is inherently stressful, Nile thinks, as she too hears it, until she feels Andy move behind her shoulder and the whine is silenced.
"Thanks," Joe grunts. There is another little jostle that is probably Nicky kissing his forehead or something. Maybe a hand-kiss, Joe's elbow stretched across Andy's face.
For awhile, there isn't much to do besides sit. Nobody seems inclined to sing, or even talk much, with their mouths so close to each other's ears. Nicky still has a little dried fruit in his pack, smashed and solidified, which he pries apart to share around. (The lion's share to Andy, of course.) Nile gets two apricots and a date and chews contentedly on those. When they're gone, she wraps her arms a little tighter around her pack, tips her head down, and eases herself into a doze, feeling the warmth of the others at her back.
Eventually, she falls deeply enough asleep to dream. She's in another tent, but this one is made out of animal hides and tree branches. A certain Drill Instructor is in her face asking her how she's ever going to be a Marine if she can't make her own gun. Her dream-self says "sir yes sir" but what she's holding in her lap are three heavy rounded stones, like from the bed of a river, and another layer of herself is thinking that it doesn't make sense, it's not possible...
She blinks back awake, a moment of automatic preparatory waiting, listening for whether she needs to leap to her feet or can drift back to sleep. "...another two hours," Andy is saying. Nicky mumbles something Nile can't catch over the tapping of the rain and the occasional hissing of the fire when rain blows onto the coals. "Sure, the patterns," Andy says. "But the clouds?"
Nile doesn't quite go back to sleep, but she doesn't sit up, either. She's fallen a little further forward and the top of her head is brushing against the tarp. Her braids are getting damp from condensation. She shifts a little, drawing her head back toward her spine, feeling the stiffness of joints that want to stretch.
"...Year Without a Summer," Nicky is saying.
"...like ten of those," Andy says. "I hate famines." She sighs; Nile can feel the heave of Andy's back behind her shoulder. "At least the damn volcano dust used to settle in a few years."
"Small comfort," Nicky says. Then, after a moment, "No, you're right, it did help to remember that."
"It always seems like the end of the world," Andy says. "The generation when all the cities fell, when the Sea Peoples came, that was my measuring-rod through so much."
"It's hard to even imagine," Nicky says. And Nile... maybe doesn't want to be hearing this, or thinking about it. Can't somebody sing something? Let's get out the flutes, that's much better than thinking.
"I feel like I'm abandoning you," Andy says, voice so low Nile can hardly hear it. "The night before the battle."
"No, no," Nicky murmurs. "You will carry us through it." There's a shifting behind Nile, two very old friends drawing a little closer, tipping their heads together, waiting out the storm. Nile leans back against them, tells herself to doze again. It's almost exactly two hours later that the rain finally stops.
*
Everything smells different after the rain, and all the leaves seem to hang at new angles. Streambeds that were nothing before are flowing now; streams that might have been a jump or a quick look for a stepping-stone in the middle are road-wide and look strong enough to take Nile off her feet. Andy leads them down along one until they come to a broader, calmer place. She sits down and starts taking off her shoes, and Nile thinks they're going to ford it, but then everyone starts stripping off their pants??
"Fishing!" Joe says, seeing Nile's dubious expression. He's holding a plastic net bag that Nile recognizes; there had been oranges in it the day they rode the bus. Andy, naked to the waist, is already wading in with nothing but a knife. Nicky, similarly armed and undressed, is heading a little downstream. Nile's sense of modesty has become fairly situational since joining the Marines, so she isn't really bothered by this, but it's very... abrupt. They had bathed in a pond, days ago, but they had taken turns, girls and then boys, like that still mattered. (Or maybe it had been "give the couple some privacy", much more necessary.)
"If you want to catch fish, nothing beats a good net," Joe says cheerfully to Nile. "Of course I don't have a good net, so let's see how I do with a terrible one." He's opted to keep his underwear on. He winces and shivers as he steps into the water.
Nile doesn't have fishhooks, or a net; she vaguely recalls something about making a fish trap out of your parachute, but she doesn't have a parachute. (And has never been to jump school.) She doubts very much that she can spear a fish with a knife. Andy wasn't born knowing it either, she tells herself firmly, and gets her boots and socks and pants off. (Underwear left on, as long as that seems to be an option.)
The water is, in fact, icy, and Nile does not at any point make contact with a fish, but Andy grins at her as she stabs them and tosses them to the bank, so it's not a terrible exercise in all. Nile gives up, gets her pants back on, and starts cleaning the catch so far, which seems like a more useful assignment than standing around in the water. Nicky, who has been trying to keep up with Andy on fish-count but keeps falling further behind, eventually loses his footing and falls all the way in. Joe, predictably, leaps out, bundles him in their blanket, and starts building a fire.
Andy helps Nile clean the last of the fish. They skewer the two biggest ones from mouth to tail, and split a branch to clamp all the little ones into a row. The fire is smoky; they've all been grabbing dry sticks and leaves when they spot them, dead branches hanging under trees, half-rotted wood from inside a fallen log, whatever they can stuff in their packs, but there's been a little drizzle here and there, and the world is pretty unavoidably damp. Joe joins Nicky inside the blanket once the fire gets going, wrapped around him like he thought the blanket wasn't doing a good enough job.
Nile contemplates the fish, still a little giddy from the cold water, the sudden splash Nicky had made, one pale bare leg flailing.
"Do you ever wonder if there could be other immortals?" she asks. "Not, like, people, but, like. Animals, or fish. What if there were fish who had just been out there swimming since forever, and they wouldn't even know they were different."
Joe looks fascinated, and thoughtful. "Fish don't dream, so we wouldn't dream of them, and they wouldn't dream of us."
"Do fish dream?" Nicky asks. He looks a little disturbed.
"I wouldn't think so," Joe says.
Nile is still thinking about fish. There have been fish for a long time... she thinks she recalls a little cousin telling her, vehemently, that sharks were four hundred million years old. What if there were fish that were really ancient, what if there were fish that just... never died, what if they just kept swimming down in the ocean, not knowing when they were swimming between continents that used to be joined, that had split and inexorably separated to let the waters in. Fish whose siblings were now in rocks on the walls of the Field Museum, who might have felt the wave rush past when an asteroid ended the time of the dinosaurs.
"Why would fish be immortal," Nicky says, extremely dubious.
"Booker would say why are any of us," Andy says. She smiles. "Someone should tell him about the fish."
"He'll say it could explain cryptids," Joe says. "The Brosno dragon. Mokele-mbembe. Immortal dinosaurs."
"Would dinosaurs dream?" Nicky asks. "Horses dream. We would dream of an immortal horse."
Andy smiles again, and takes the branch of little fish off the fire, popping out two for herself and passing it over to Nile. The fish are hot and smoky and juicy, a little muddy. Nile eats slowly until Andy says she's stuffed and then falls on what's left with Joe and Nicky; they're delicious.
Booker will not get to eat these fish; whatever Andy thinks Joe and Nicky still need to learn, Booker isn't here learning it. Nile will have to learn well enough to help carry him, when they meet in a hundred years.
*
When Andy falls, the incline isn't notably steep, or the footing suspiciously rough. They're traversing a slope, the long skirt of a mountain, crossing a big open, grassy swath, the scar of some old landslide like the swipe of a giant finger. There are rocky outcroppings here and there, and fresher disruptions, areas of naked scree, but the path that Andy is finding or inventing has been picking its way around those, stringing together little manageably-flat sections with occasional precarious connections. Maybe the ground is still a little muddy, or something has come loose in the rain; Nile doesn't see what happens, only that Andy is suddenly sliding away, down from a fresh gouge in the earth, terrifyingly fast down the mountainside, until she comes to a stop on one of the rocky outcroppings with a loud, sickening crack.
Nile once threw herself off a building. Horribly, she can remember the sound they made when they hit. It was... worse. But that cracking noise leaves Nile momentarily paralyzed. The whole thing has happened too fast for anyone to react; there's the three of them, in a line, and now there's Andy, below. Maybe 30 feet down.
"Andy!" Joe calls, but Nile is already plunging down herself. She can heal, if she trips, if she tumbles all the way down the whole damn mountain. She skids down next to Andy, who is gasping a little; Nile is scared to touch her, to move her, but then Andy is lifting her own head and struggling up to a sitting position, and Nile gives her her hand to help her lever herself up.
"Andy," Nile says. "Are you - " She wants to feel up and down Andy's arms and legs: where is the break, that is so thankfully not in her neck?
"I'm fine," Andy says. "Nile, I'm fine."
"I heard - "
"Yeah," Andy says. "I think - "
And then she's twisting, squirming out of her pack, trapped under her; reaching in, and pulling out... her flute, which has snapped and split.
"Oh," Nile says. Not a bone. No fragile and irreplaceable part of Andy. But precious. "Oh," she says. "Your flute".
"Hey," Andy says. "Let's get back up there." She waves to Nicky and Joe, who are hanging back, waiting for a cue from Nile, maybe. "I'm okay!" Andy calls. Joe and Nicky nod, relief evident.
The way back up is steep enough that they have to use their hands; Nile slips down to her knees a couple of times. Joe gives them each a hand up to the ostensible trail, the little navigable ribbon of hillside marginally friendlier than the rest of it, and then turns back to Andy, touching her shoulder, tipping their foreheads together.
"Maybe we shouldn't be out here," he murmurs.
"Pfft," Andy says. "Things happen everywhere."
Meanwhile Nicky, at the end of the line, is impatient, has crowded close to Nile. He can't easily get around her, the footing simply isn't wide enough, but as Andy lifts her head from Joe's, Nicky reaches past Nile, and Andy reaches past Joe, and they touch fingertips.
Andy steps back a little once Nicky has been acknowledged. "Okay, I slid down a hill," she says, making a little "what do you want me to do about it" gesture. "Landed on my pack. Flute bought it. But I'm fine."
Nile expects a reaction - of course it's more important that Andy is fine, but the flutes are important, right? Andy's flute got a clutch-your-heart reaction from Joe when it first came out. But Joe and Nicky's nods look like small sympathy, not big.
"Oof," Joe says, as if to underscore this.
"But," Nile says, before she can stop herself. "The music - you guys care about it, right?"
"Very much," Andy says. "But I've had. I don't know. Hundreds of flutes. I'll buy another one, or I'll make another one, or I'll buy something else, or I'll make something else. Or I'll steal one of theirs."
Nicky makes a little agreeable noise, like he'll hand over whatever she wants right now. Nile hadn't thought of the flute as being something Andy might know how to make. She nods. Andy and Joe start talking about something - something about lap harps - as Andy turns and starts to pick her way across the mountainside again.
Now that Nile is thinking about it, it makes sense that Andy wouldn't want to be dependent on finding a flute maker when she needed another flute. It wouldn't surprise Nile if at least one of them knows how to make the egg flutes, too, if they could get clay.
Booker probably doesn't know how to make harmonicas. Or pianos. That feels significant, that... unreadiness, that reliance on the world of manufactured things. Booker had been born almost as close to the top of the mountain as Nile; it must be as hard for him as for her, to be looking down that terrifying far side. Even Joe and Nicky are city boys, Nile remembers Andy saying, but not as much as Booker, they couldn't be.
They've finally gotten across the old landslide, and are back under trees, and the better footing of a barely-there trail. A place where the mountain remembers travelers.
Booker got overwhelmed, Nile thinks. Nile wants to keep her balance. It seems like there's a good question here: what is she relying on? Wilderness survival was always about survival, but as weird as it still is to think about it, survival isn't the issue any more. Food to make the body feel like it's eating, Nile thinks. Fire, for warmth, and light, and just to watch it. Walking, staying dry in the rain - there are long-term problems here, tarps and boots, although maybe if she doesn't get blisters any more she doesn't really need boots. Maybe Andy or Joe or Nicky knows how to make shoes, or straw mats to huddle under, or whatever was the cutting-edge medieval solutions to these problems.
None of this is quite what she meant to think about. It's so easy to just be a body in the wilderness, to think about comfort, if she doesn't have to think about survival, but Andy didn't bring her out here to only think about how to be a body. I want you to be fine out here, Andy had said, or something like that, and Nile thinks she meant the future as much as she meant the wilderness, or the horror of the overlap.
She needs to know that her family is okay, even if she can't see them. She needs the work, whether it's Copley finding them something, or just finding a chance herself, to know that she's helping someone. Not a gun, despite that weird dream. To be with her team, to go places, to have things to do. Languages. Dice games. Singing along. Nothing she isn't already doing, in fact; just to be with Andy and Joe and Nicky and someday Booker, around a million campfires, one by one.
*
"I think we'll head out of the mountains soon," Andy says, by the fire. They've stopped for the night in a suspiciously flat place; there are already stones in a loose circle, although there is grass growing inside. Someone else has camped here, or maybe lived here, or just made this place better for camping.
"You think?" Joe says.
"Okay, we will head out of the mountains soon," Andy says. "Not because I slipped a couple feet in the mud. Maybe a little bit because I want bread."
Everyone makes the same glazed-over face for a moment, thinking about bread. Andy is eating a sort of salad made from spruce tips and some greens that smell vaguely like licorice, with a (very small) raw egg cracked over the top. Nicky is also chewing on spruce tips. Nile had tried them, but the combination of citrus and pine made her think of cleaning products. Bread would be great. Maybe a cheeseburger. Pizza. A kebab is a lot more likely, in whatever town they're heading for... a kebab, and some flatbread, actually sounds pretty fantastic right now...
"Bread and then head back out?" Joe asks. "Or..."
Andy shrugs. "Turquoise Coast? Crete? Malta?" Malta is some kind of reference; Joe and Nicky look at each other with soft little smiles. "I want to check in with Copley and maybe do some sword drills with Nile and maybe sleep in a big fluffy tourist bed while pretty young people bring me drinks." She is sitting on the air mattress, wrapped in Nile's sleeping bag; they had all gently bullied her until she had accepted the comforts they had.
"We didn't have to come out here," Nicky says, wry.
"No, we did," Andy says. "I wanted this too, and it was important."
"But we're done?" Joe asks.
Andy looks at Nile. Nile shrugs.
"Sword drills and drinks," Nile says. "Yeah, I can be done." Andy grins.
That night when Andy starts singing, Nile jumps in with her, as soon as she thinks she has the tune; why not, they're leaving the mountains soon, better sing while she can. Nicky smiles, and Joe gives her a little pat on the shoulder.
*
They come back to civilization like this: they find a spot where the hills spread out underneath them, and there's a road wandering through. They walk down to the road, Joe and Nicky letting Andy and Nile go on ahead, passing time behind them in whatever Joe-and-Nicky way. Andy and Nile walk along the road for awhile, passed by a couple of vans and a motorbike, and are eventually offered a ride in the back of a truck with some indifferent sheep. They ride down through pastures and some orchards to the edge of a town with peeling paint, three churches (that Nile spots), some kind of factory, and a bus station.
Nile doesn't feel great about the idea of boarding the bus while, honestly, smelling like weeks in the backcountry, and so Andy asks some questions and steers them around until they've found, in order, a thrift shop and a tiny hostel. The shower is lukewarm and basically Disneyland, and then, with clean T-shirts on, they obviously have to get a kebab and a beer from the place next to the hostel. After all that they end up on the same bus as Nicky and Joe. "But with plausible deniability," Andy whispers. Joe and Nicky scrupulously ignore them, with maybe the slightest hint of a stink-eye; everyone else on the bus is busily ignoring Joe and Nicky, who didn't take the time for showers, in a "maybe if we don't look at them we won't smell them" kind of way. Some overgrown children boarding the bus after Nile and Andy sit down in front of them and turn around to hang over the seats at them; they get about three words into something about two women alone and Andy gives them a look so withering that they turn back around, sit down, and pass the entire bus ride in silence.
They have plans to regroup in the city where they're heading; at some point Nile wants to look at a map and figure out how the whole thing fits together, the train, the bus, the road, the distance in between. She knows about how many miles it felt like. The names of some of the mountains, and the stars that rose above them. Maybe she'll draw a map, or ask Andy what maps were like when civilization was just getting started, or maybe she won't, looking ahead to ocean views, shopping, windows, doors, noise. A toward after all, at least for now.
**
**
Much, much later, when so much has drowned or burned or blown away, is still drowning, and burning, and blowing away, when four of them arriving on four horses is enough to make them superheroes, or targets, or sometimes legends, when brave children ask if they've really seen distant lands, Nile thinks about what she wishes she could ask Andy.
How far back down, how far backward, have we fallen?, she wishes she could ask. Is this what the world was like when you were young? Or are we still somehow going forward? Now that we're all, everyone, in the wilderness?
Old questions, she imagines Andy saying. Maybe new answers. Keep going.