I, Cassandra

57 | RYAN MADDOX

I scan for signs of the pod's heartbeat. Nothing. Disappointment slices through me like a hot knife.

'That's where I found this,' he pats the safe. 'And, here we are. Again.'

Relief washes through me. I wait. It feels like he needs a moment. Like he's reliving the memory of finding the safe, and it means something to him. After a lengthy silence, he lets out a deep exhalation.

'It seems like it was only yesterday when I found this,' he says, touching the side of Miro's mangled safe. 'But it wasn't. I've been carrying this for thirteen months now.' He turns his gaze up to the sky, its strange constellations muted by the moon's light. 'This summer will mark two years. . . Time just loses all meaning in this place, doesn't it?'

I nod, and think of the five years I spent excavating the area where I believed Blue's pod would be, at the madness of my hope, the pure, blind stupidity of it. Amadi doesn't see me acknowledge his words, his gaze unseeing, still wandering the paths of his past. I prefer it this way, the silent companionship of our lonely experiences. Two refugees lost to a world that feels like a dream. We stand for a while longer, and just be, under stars scrambled by time, and a world reborn without us, and remember.

'Well,' he says after a while. 'Let's go see if that pod is still active.'

And with every beat of my nano-powered existence, I hope it is. And that it's her. Blue.

'Please,' I breathe to the distance as Amadi searches for a way down. 'Let it be you.'

Amadi cuts a sharp look at me, the whites of his eyes a little too bright in the moonlight. He must have the hearing of a bat.

'I hope it's whoever you need it to be, too.' He mutters as he rubs the back of his hand against his eyes. 'Otherwise,' he continues as he lowers himself down into the ravine, 'we will have walked all this way for fucking nothing.'

It's another fourteen hours of arduous slog through a boggy marsh infested with tiny insects. It's hell, and my temper frays. I take it out on the knee-high prickly grass, and the swarms of insects, attacking both with a vengeance that is futile and only makes me angrier. Amadi says nothing, just presses on, grim, the safe cradled against his chest. At last, we reach the end of the marsh and drag ourselves up onto drier land. In the distance, a cluster of trees breaks the monotony of the landscape.

Amadi lurches to a halt and nods at the thicket. 'It was in there.'

A quick glance is all it takes for me to see it resting in the middle of the spindly trees, as if they grew around it, to protect it, or worship it. Amadi shifts the weight of the safe in his grip, looks down at his feet, says nothing. In the empty reach of the eternal darkness, the pod's silence roars. No bleat of light calls to us to announce the cargo of life within.

I have prepared for this, Amadi had said it was on its side. Even so, it feels empty. I press on, alone. I need to know. I can't help myself. I will it not to be her pod.

But with every step I take, I sense it's her pod. It calls to me like a lodestone. The memory of when I lay her down more than ten thousand years ago returns. The slight weight of her in my arms, the way her eyes touched mine as she spoke her last words to me, soft, and trusting.

See you on the other side.

I haul the pod over and push the vines aside. The panel is silent. My eyes slide further down. Please. Let it not be—

G-II-0493.

A void opens inside me. I let myself fall into it. Silence engulfs me. It's over. She's gone. Numb, I press my fist against the lid, and brace myself. None of my training can prepare me for this, to find her lifeless, and lost to me, forever. My jaw so tight it aches, I haul the lid up and look down.

An empty pod glares back at me.

I stand and turn full circle, unseeing, as panic wrestles my mind to the ground. I don't know if she's alive, or dead, or on the brink of dying of hunger. This is worse than trying to find her pod. A thousand million times worse. She could be anywhere. She will think she's alone, she will believe I didn't come for her, or that I didn't survive all this. And it hits me, with all the force of a star collapsing into a black hole. I wasn't there.

I. Wasn't. There.

'Blue!' I bellow into the day made into night. Anguish claws at me, tears me into shreds. To be so close to where she was and to have lost her. It's unbearable. 'Blue!' I shout with all the force of my once-military voice, fuelled by fear, dread, and the ache of my love, burned to hell.

In the distance, a startled rush erupts from the marsh, what sounds like hundreds of leathery wings against the air. Then, nothing.

I look up, wracked with hopelessness. Through the sparse tufts of the treetops, the stars continue their relentless slide across the heavens, even though it's the middle of the day. How the fuck will I ever find her in this endless, overgrown wilderness? I won't. It's impossible. She will die and this place will bury her in its vines. I know I will never find her again.

I close my eyes and in the constellation of my mind, my pole star dies.