Quantum state, p.17
Quantum State, page 17
“No, we can't go back! We have to see what's out here, what MAQS is hiding!” I shout in a plea, desperate for him not to ask me again, to tempt me to turn around and forget this crazy plan. The fog thickens and feels heavier over me, like a hundred too many blankets at bedtime. I drop to my knees and cry out in exhausted pain. “We can rest here, just until the fog clears, and then we'll head on.” I'm not sure I even believe me.
“Don't give up! The fog stings!” Esfir yells, and I can hear him rubbing his skin like he can somehow relieve himself of the sharp pain. “Cover your face in your hands. Keep your head to your legs. Protect your face!” he warns just as a slap of fog feels like a thorn bush against my cheeks.
“ARGH!” I scream in agony and toss my head between my legs to cover my eyes with my hands.
“Just stay still. It'll pass,” he says reassuringly.
I listen to Esfir, to my rock, though he doesn't know anything more about this world than I do, and if fog here lingers for days, we could be stuck. We could die out here. After hours, I start to feel like a prisoner, but to this world now—the one outside—and I wonder if I've just led us into another nightmare.
State of Desolation
I'm not sure how long we're under the fog, cowering like we never have before, because this time our lives depend on it. The sting of the smoke slaps my back and tickles my sides. A strange twisted delivery of pain and pleasure as if to further confuse me—or consume me whole.
I stretch my arms forward for Esfir, my hands like aimless nets thrown into a sea, desperate to catch just one fish to fill a starving belly, but still coming up empty handed. In between my fingers, the wetness of the fog plays with me, reminding me of the wetness of Julian's mouth when he gnaws on my thumb before bedtime, when I sometimes give him his milk, and then I miss him. I miss all of them that I'll be leaving behind out here.
“Esfir?” I call out to him, my head low to my legs, trying to keep away whatever dangers the fog brings.
“Just stay still, Masha, until the fog abates,” I hear him shout ahead, not too far from me. But that could be hours. Even days! He's close enough to reach, to touch. I feel it.
So, I stretch my hands again, a tangled web of tentacles reaching toward my friend, as I scoot along the ground—over pebbles—on my knees, with my head still bent toward my body and my bones aching and my bottom sore. The fog is unforgiving, unmerciful as I push along, the hard ground scratching me at every inch. My lips sting of a scorpion's bite, at least the pain I've imagined from watching them kill on television. Creatures of the imagination, surely, designed to scare you from venturing outside Cherni, but I can't help but think of the scorpion now.
“Be careful.” he pleas.
“I'm almost there, Esfir.” And feel the fabric of his tunic, the length of his back, as his voice gets closer and closer. “Esfir!” I push myself further, then grab on to his clothing and finally wrap my arms around his waist, and maybe feel safe for the first time out here.
He turns around and pulls me closer into him, his calloused hands covering my head as he leans into my neck. “Stay here. Don't move!” he chides me for my earlier insubordination.
Then, we grow quiet, still, and waiting. Waiting for the fog to disappear, for the sting to stop. We wait awhile, hours maybe, before the fog is thin enough for us to stand. At first, balance is hard and we are uncertain of where we are. So, I fumble forward until Esfir catches me.
“You alright?!” he yells again, this time sympathetic.
“Yeah, I think so,” I reply. “What was that?”
He shakes his head, his red tousles in clearer view, and I'm so glad to see him. “I don't know, but this environment is not like ours, not like Cherni.”
“This is what Kir meant when he said we would never make it out here!”
“You want to go back?” He pauses, waiting for my reply to this temptation. “No judgement if you do. I'll support you whatever you decide.” His words are crackly, like sandpaper in all this dry heat, and I wonder if all his asking is because he really wants to head back. I can't blame him if he does. Only a madman would do this. I guess he really is mad for me.
I reply firmly, “No, I said I will find out what's out here, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.”
“Then I'm coming with you.” He stays close, his fingers nabbing my arm.
We take a few steps forward, away from Cherni, from the wall, and my mind circles with more questions than answers as we pass valleys of black and blood-colored fluid, mounds of stained dirt, and find it harder and harder to just feel good. The heat is more exhausting than the journey itself, and my legs grow more sore with each step.
“What do you think happened out here?”
Esfir turns to me. “Maybe a drought? Or maybe the bots are digging up the land?”
“For what? What is all this red color?”
“I don't know.”
I cough, the air getting to me.
“But it tastes like—” His tongue sticks out between his lips. “—sulfur.”
I sigh, my chest feeling even heavier as I contemplate our possible demise out here.
“Why don't we head that way?” Esfir points to a large hill ahead. “Looks like it might have some cover we can take when night falls.”
“Okay,” I agree, eyeing the ledge that might hide a cave? The ground grows sticky, like glue or mud, and I lift my legs up, my feet slipping out of their shoes, my sandals clinging to the ground. “Damnit. I'm losing my sandals.”
Esfir flips around, and squats to peel my shoes off the ground, the sapping smell stuck to the sole of my shoes, then he looks to himself. “So am I.”
“How are we going to get there?”
“I guess we carry our shoes,” Esfir replies, and hands me mine.
My feet feel funny, as if the ground is tickling me with a hundred tongues. I almost laugh, except that my chest is too tight and my skin too worn. The sun beats down on us like a scalding faucet of water. I was burned once that way. I was only six.
Mama laid me in the bathtub and turned on the faucet, except the water wasn't lukewarm, it burned so bad. Mama screamed and lifted me up out of the tub before shutting off the water, and then she cooled my bottom with butter from the fridge. We aren't supposed to have hot water in our houses. MAQS said it was a fluke accident and told everyone in Cherni it would be fixed. The water system was shut off, but not before five people were burned that day. We haven't had scalding water since. I guess MAQS fixed the problem.
I follow behind Esfir, letting him take the brunt of the sun rays, except that my back still feels dangerously close to being sunburned. After twenty more yards, I can't take it anymore.
“I see mud to our right!” I yell to Esfir. “We can protect our bodies from the sun!”
Esfir's face lights up and we dart east, toward the moist dirt. We dive into it face first, our stomachs gliding over the ground as laughter finally cracks from our tired throats. I let my belly soak in the mud and notice a reservoir of water just a few yards away, with water seeping into the ground. I roll onto my back and rub the mud all over my body before patting my face.
I point to the reservoir before we head there and squat next to the coveted H2O. “We'd better drink up. Who know if there'll be water past the hill?” Esfir points out and I lower my head dejectedly.
“If there isn't any water past the hill, we won't get very far.”
“I know,” Esfir says, as if he'd sacrifice anything, even his own life, for my plan of escape.
I slurp the water. “Then, why are you with me? Letting me drag you along, when you could die out here?” I say this almost angrily, like he shouldn't want to come with me, to be my friend, to endanger his own life.
Esfir answers with a ting, “Because I know you won't turn back until you're ready, and I won't let you do this alone, die out here—alone.”
My chest rises a few times, my eyes softening on him. “I won't make you, make us, go further than the hill if we don't see water there. We can turn back then.”
Esfir nods. “Okay.”
I think Esfir's relieved. Relieved that I've come to some kind of sense. Relieved that he won't die out here needlessly with me at his side.
After we drink enough, we plod in heavy mud prints back toward the muddy hole and suddenly Esfir pushes me in with a dry chuckle. My body is already soaked, but now even more so as I roll around, lay on my back with my head flung…and then I see my chance. I whip my leg underneath Esfir, his legs buckling as he falls head first over me. I laugh, a good, strong laugh, a much-needed laugh, as his hands brace him upward on either side of me and his lips are covered in mud.
Our muddy lips touch and his arms embrace me, swallow me whole, and of anything and everything out here that could take me, I don't regret that it's him now. He leans back, lifting me up, letting me fall into him, and we sway like that, like two birch trees whose legs have taken root in the mud beneath us, and forget—if just for a moment—that if we don't move fast, the Earth here could kill us.
Esfir helps me up with an outstretched hand before we orient ourselves again toward the hill, the marker that will determine if we have a place to sleep for the night, if we will have water to allow us to venture farther.
I stay close to Esfir, sometimes to his side and sometimes behind him, but am never far. “Maybe MAQS is trying to make Cherni bigger? Maybe she's draining the life of this land to supply Cherni with enough resources?”
Esfir looks skyward and scratches his head. “What I don't understand is why the sun is so much stronger out here, outside of Cherni. Why the land here is so…desolate.”
“Maybe the lands have been neglected or abused for too long by bots and, like you said, a drought finished the job?”
“But that still doesn't explain why we aren't affected by the heat inside of Cherni.”
My feet tickle again as I pull one stuck foot from out of the ground after another. “If the Cylindrical can create water, is the source for all of Cherni's irrigation and water needs, then maybe it's the Cylindrical protecting Cherni?”
“You mean like a counter-balance to the sun?”
I shrug, unsure of the chemistry. “I don't know, I didn't do well in science, remember, you did, but we do know that Kir said the Cylindrical is life, that the Cylindrical is supposed to protect our atmosphere. That's what all the newspapers say, anyway.”
“So, you believe the papers now?”
“I don't know, but maybe…maybe it makes sense.”
Esfir turns to glance at me. “You could be right.” Then, he chuckles with a shake of his head.
“What?”
“Just…if that's true, it's good we didn't blow up the Cylindrical, is all.”
“Yeah.”
We move forward in haste, knowing our time is short. The heat of the sun only has a few more hours before darkness will engulf us, and we have even less of an idea of what to expect when that happens. The morning hasn't been too welcoming, and at night we won't be able to see much, and so I don't talk to Esfir as we push through the sappy ground, an unforgiving Earth that makes movement much harder and slower.
Finally, about twenty yards from the hill we scan the environment for anything threatening. I lean over a boulder and take in a deep breath as my hand falls over a hard bone. I scream as the roughness prickles my palm and my eyes widen in fear. Esfir steps towards me, his eyes a frantic circle. Below the boulder is a human skeleton, and we both jerk backward, when Esfir suddenly slips into a pit of wet sand. “Masha!” he shouts as I turn to him, and he panics, pushing his body upward, which only pulls him further into the loose sand, causing his left leg to slip in as well.
I watch him for a few seconds, stunned, as his body slips further into the wet pit and his hands flail in his reach towards me. “Masha!” he shouts desperately, and finally I wake and dart to his side to extend my hand to him, holding his, and we clasp them together.
My eyes search around me for a branch, a log, a rope, but there is nothing in this vast emptiness. “I'm going to get you out, we're going to get out of this!” I yell as my hand squeezes tighter. “Just hold on.”
He squirms, his body sinking further, now up to his belly. “Don't leave!”
“Don't move. You'll make it worse!”
But he panics, the mud encasing him like a glove, and he kicks his legs as he sinks further to his chest. “Help me, Masha!”
I almost slip in, my foot suddenly bracing me at the edge. “Stop moving! Stop!” I shout again, and he nods as if he's finally heard me.
“I'm sinking. I can't get out!”
I reach my other hand to him, as I squat for better balance. “I know, but moving is making it worse!”
“Then what do I do?” His face drains of color, his voice breaks, and I'm out of ideas.
“Just be still. We wait, and be still.”
When he stops moving, the sinking lessens and he calms, and his blinking slows. “Don't leave me.”
“I won't. Just try floating, like you're in water. I'm going to find something to pull you out.”
“No, no.” Esfir shakes his head. “Don't go.”
“Don't move! Not even your head, not even an inch. Lean on your back. I've seen something on TV about this and tried it in my tub once. Let the density of the sand lift you. I'll be back quick. I'll be back with something to pull you out,” I assure him before I squeeze one last time and finally let go of his hand. “It's the only way.” My voice cracks.
I race back in the direction that we came from, where I know it was safe. I saw large rocks over there, rocks that could be used as a bridge he could climb onto to help pull himself out of the sinking sand. My body shakes from heat, from exhaustion, from fear, as I frantically search for rocks, rocks, rocks.
I find a red-and-beige rock the size of my fist, and pull it into my tunic, which I hold like a sack in front of me. Then, I find two more of larger size, and then finally find a fourth which is as big as my foot.
I must have been gone only a minute, and then turn around to dart back to where I left Esfir, but it's hard to see him from way back here, behind a boulder and mounds of dirt and thick air. I don't see him at all. By the time I reach the wet sand, I know I don't see him. He's gone.
“Esfir! Esfir!” I fall to my knees, my hands pushing through the thick sinking sand as tears stream down my cheeks, and my face is hot red. “Esfir?!”
But I don't see him, feel him. Anywhere. Tears pour like a leaky faucet that I can't turn off. My eyes fixate on the sand in front of me, my shaky hands over the pit sinking, sinking, sinking. My hand sinks as I imagine how far Esfir fell into the monster that devoured him.
“Esfir!”
Then, I hear him call to me. “Masha!”
My head jerks right, and from behind another large boulder, I see his muddy frame come into view. “Esfir!” I lunged at him, grabbing him into my chest and squeeze hard, too hard. “How'd you…?”
Suddenly, I see the man behind him; perhaps he was there all along and I missed him. “I rescued him,” Kir says.
“Kir!” I let go of Esfir as my attention falls to him. “How?”
“I thought you two would get yourselves into trouble.” Kir lays his hand over the boulder. “After I heard about your breakout at the jailhouse, I figured you two would make your way out here.” He looks around. “What else does Cherni have to offer you but jail time?”
I step toward him. “Then, why don't you join us?” I beg. “We could use someone like you out here. You've been out here, seen things.” I speak in broken sobs, still relieved to have Esfir with me.
“No, out here is only death.” He looks in the direction of the district. “There is a revolution going on inside Cherni. I need to be there. You—” he rests his hand over my shoulder “—need to be there too.”
I shake my head. “But we'll never get inside town hall. Never get into the underground again.” I step backward, the sun hitting my face. “Even if we did, MAQS is protected by bots. We'll never make it to her.”
“Says the girl who got KLI's key, broke into town hall, and found her way into the underground.”
“I had Kazimir's help, and I still failed,” I say firmly. “Just like Mama.”
Kir's face grows tight, his jaws clenching. “No, not like Mama. You are still free. Your mama would want you to do everything you can, not give up at the slightest problem.”
“It's not a slight problem. There's no way!” I scream, desperate. The last person I want to quit on this is me.
Kir's face lights up, a glimmer in his eye maybe brighter than the sun scorching me. “But there is a way.”
My ears perk.
“We have a legion of people willing to fight with us now.”
“Citizens who don't know how to fight? A lot of good that will do against a quantum machine!”
Kir shakes his head. “No, you don't understand. I broke into Calypso Tower and freed the prisoners while you were breaking out of the jailhouse.”
“What?! How?!”
“I told you, I've been sneaking around at night since I knew your Mama. I know my way around and through Dead Zones. Even MAQS' extra security couldn't spot me.”
“But how'd you break into the tower?” I ask.
“The systems are similar to the Cylindrical. Plus, I know my way around electronics. Knowledge MAQS keeps forbidden from districts, but I taught myself.”
“We've taught ourselves a few things too.” I remark, referring to Esfir's cosmology studies and my ability to steal books out of the Pod's trunks. Still, nothing compared to what Kir has done. But he is ten years older than us.
Kir continues. “We have weapons, too. Your mama had me hide them in case we ever needed them, before…” Kir points to Cherni and doesn't finish his train of thought. “The weapons aren't much, but they're something. They're all we could get. We've got to go back and end this today. Before MAQS throws the prisoners back into the tower and we have no one with real fighting experience on our side.”
I look to Esfir, whose forlorn expression tells me all I need. “I almost died out here, Masha,” Esfir says. “Look at us. We're covered in mud and have no water or food. How long are we really going to survive out here?”
