Chapter 5

Sorry I haven't posted this in a few days. I'm about 7000 words behind... AAH! This chapter is currently more than half my word count. Oh wow.
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“Rise and shine, Green Eyes.” She snapped awake. At first she couldn’t remember where she was, or whose voice she heard through the thin walls of the tent. She pulled the blanket farther over her shoulders and groaned. He chuckled. “Come on. The ocean’s calling. If you don’t get up now we’ll never get there before one, and we want to be able to get back before sunset.”
She rolled over onto her back and opened her eyes. The sun was making leafy patterns on her brown tarp roof. “Fine,” she moaned, crawling toward the door of the tent. She peaked her head out first.
“Not a morning person?”
“Not even close,” she replied, ruffling her hair between her fingers. It was greasy and tangled. What she wouldn’t give for a bath…
He laughed again. “Me either. Or at least I wasn’t until I joined the army. Gets drummed out of you pretty quick when you have to be up at the crack of dawn for drill every morning.”
She walked sleepily to the fire pit, where Patrick handed her a piece of meat. Real, hot meat. She took an eager bite. It was a little gamey, but the flavor was delicious. “What is this?”
“Rabbit. Shot it while you were still asleep.”
She almost choked. “Rabbit? As in bunny rabbit?”
“Yeah, what’s the problem?”
“People eat bunny rabbits?”
“Probably not where you come from, no, but when it’s shoot the bunny or starve your best bet is to shoot the bunny.”
He had a point. She took another bite. It was good enough to overcome her initial disgust.
“So how far away is this ocean thing?”
“Quite a ways. It’ll take us a good five hours, but it’s worth it. Trust me. And we walked a lot further than that yesterday. You can take it.”
She nodded as she finished up her rabbit. He was getting his backpack ready.
“Shall we go?” She licked her lips and nodded.
For the first two hours or so they walked in silence. She almost enjoyed the comfortable quiet. It was non-threatening. However, when he finally spoke, that didn’t bother her either.
“Tell me something about yourself.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “Like what?”
“Anything. We just might as well get to know each other.”
She took time to think, then said, “I love coffee. Nearly nobody else in the city drank it, but my grandmother did. She got me started on it.”
He raised his eyebrows in approval. “So you’re a little old fashioned too, are you? Nice.”
“Your turn.”
“I’m kind of a neat freak.”
Piper thought of the clutter in her room at home and laughed. “And that’s where the similarities end.”
He smiled. The scar under his eye wasn’t nearly as visible when he smiled. “Your turn.”
“I get cold really easily. Even when the sun’s out.”
“Aren’t you glad I made you take the tent, then?”
“Yeah, I guess I am. I’ve got a question. Don’t be offended or anything, but how did you get your scar?”
He looked down and she wondered if she’d touched a nerve. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I understand.”
“No, it’s fine. I got it the day my dad died. Bullet ricocheted off the wall and just skimmed my face. I’m lucky it didn’t go through my head. By all accounts I should be dead.”
She nodded. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—“
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
There was a long silence, the first awkward one she had experienced around him. At last he broke it. “Your turn.”
She smiled. “I’m deaf in one ear because I fell out of a tree. Granted it was a synthetic one, but still. It was a long way down. I should be dead too. We should start a club.” She realized what she’d said and gasped. “Not that yours is the same as falling out of a tree, I didn’t mean that.”
He smiled slightly. “No worries, I knew you didn’t. It’s fine.”
Another pause hung in the air. She laughed.
“Your turn.”
“When I was a really little kid, I was obsessed with Peter Pan. I had the hat and everything.”
“Who’s Peter Pan?”
He looked at her in disbelief. “Oh, I forgot. In your world Peter Pan doesn’t exist. Good grief, no old school Disney movies.”
Piper wasn’t sure what a Disney or a movie was, but she liked the sound of it.
The conversation went on for hours, stretching to cover everything from family situations to little quirks. Piper confided everything to him, talked about Branson, talked about Nana, talked about her life before the bombing. She almost questioned her incessant trust; she wasn’t used to opening up to people so much. However, other than Patrick, she was completely alone in the world. Who else did she have to confide in?
She could hardly believe her eyes when she looked up to find the sun hovering in the zenith of the sky. It was noon or later; they had to be getting close. The trees began to scatter and fade into the distance, and the ground became softer and softer.
“Close your eyes,” he said suddenly. “You have to get the full effect.” She smiled in amusement and followed his order. “Keep coming,” he said. She stumbled over a rock, but he caught her arm before she lost her balance. “This way.” He let go of her arm. “Alright… open.”
There was blue. Shifting, turbulent blue for as far as her eyes could see. The ground beneath her feet was thin and powdery. She leaned over and clutched some in her hand, and it slipped through her fingers. The sun played happily the water, creating twinkling daylight stars in the reflection. Piper only had one word:
“Wow.”
He grinned at her over his shoulder. “Yeah. Worth it?”
“Definitely.” She returned the smile. He started to walk toward the waterline, and she followed eagerly, in case he had something else to show her. When he crouched by the surface, she copied him. He extended a finger toward the water.
“Now if you look real close there…”
She hunched over the water eagerly, but jumped back as the cold water hit her face. He laughed as she brushed the water off her face.
“Oh, sure, right now you’re laughing,” she said, not at all pleased. Without warning she seized his shoulders and pushed him backwards into the chilly foam, cackling like a maniac. Her mirth, however, was shortlived, as he grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the water after him.
She was terrified. The water swirled over her head, twisting and distorting the graying sky overhead. It burned in her nostrils, and she could taste the salt drying and chapping her lips on contact. Finally, in a moment of panic, her head found the surface, and her lungs the air.
“Ha,” he said once she had overcome her disorientation. “Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“Are you crazy? I’m scared of water!”
“Well you should have thought of that before you pushed me in, now shouldn’t you?”
She tried to be mad at him, to hate him like she had so easily just twenty-four hours ago, but she couldn’t force herself to do it. Something inside her had shifted in the past day. Patrick was still wrong about a lot of things, no doubt, but something about him held an irresistible fascination for her. He made her think more than anybody else she had ever met in her life, except perhaps for Nana. So she didn’t retaliate, didn’t accuse him of trying to kill her, didn’t storm out of the water in a fit. She merely swept her hand across the cool surface of the water, shooting a gleeful wave into his face. She laughed. Hard. For the first time in the last day, for the first time in her new life, she was truly happy.
CRASH.
The noise didn’t sound like any other bomb she had ever heard, but it frightened her nonetheless. She jumped in fright and involuntarily grabbed Patrick’s shoulder.
“Afraid of thunder?”
“What’s thunder?”
“Man, they must just keep the weather out all together, huh? Thunder is, well… to tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure what it is. It’s a sound that comes with lightning.”
“What’s lightning?” He rubbed his hand over his face again. It seemed to be a habit of his when he was particularly exasperated.
“You have to know about electricity, right? Nationals obsess over it.”
She nodded. She knew everything there was to know about electricity. Since more than half the population of her city became electricians, an entire class on the subject was required to graduate secondary school.
“Lightning is electricity, but it comes out of the clouds. And it usually only comes with…”
Before he could get the word out, she saw it: a brilliant flash of light across the now cloudy sky. It only lasted about a second, disappearing as quickly as it came. Almost instantaneously, a drop hit Piper’s nose.
“Rain.”
Another drop of water fell. Then another. Then another. A cascade of water was falling from nowhere, and it didn’t seem to be phasing Patrick at all.
“We oughta get out of the water,” he said. “Don’t want to get electrocuted.”
“Is this another season thing?” she shouted over the sound of the drops hitting the larger body of water. Patrick nodded. “Well, it’s not just fall. It can come in just about any season except winter around here. But it is a weather thing.” He stopped and stared at her for a minute. “Unbelievable. You’ve never seen rain before.”
She shook her head, crossing her arms in an attempt to keep warm.
“You want my jacket?”
She shook her head. “You’ll freeze.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well I do. Keep it. Really, I’m fine,” she refused.
“Is this just another knock on chivalry?”
“No, I just don’t want you to get pneumonia and die. You’re my only way to get food.” She laughed and scuffed the sand with her foot.
“Brat,” he said, but he was smiling too. “You know what pneumonia is, but you’ve never seen rain. Unbelievable.”
“Is this where the ocean comes from?”
“What, rain?”
She nodded, and he just laughed.
“What? There’s no stupid questions, right?”
“Nah, it’s not that, there’s just… so much you don’t know. Don’t think that’s your fault, but it’s kind of incredible. I guess in a weird way the ocean does come from the rain, but not the way you’re thinking. There’s this thing called the water cycle… it’s hard to explain. But when it gets hot some of the water goes back into the clouds and falls as rain so it can go back up into the clouds again. If that makes any sense. I’m no science teacher.”
She didn’t really get it, but she pretended she did.
“They don’t even teach you the water in your schools? You’d think with their obsession with progress they’d focus as much on science as they could.” He paused for a minute thoughtfully, then kept going. “I think I get it, though. They only teach you about the things it’s easy to harness and use for yourselves. There’s not much they can do about rain… so they pretend it doesn’t exist. Like the past.”
“I want to see the book,” she said abruptly.
“What?”
“The book, the Apocalypse Journals, whatever it is you prefer to call them. I want to see it for myself.”
He raised his eyebrows, looking almost impressed. “Wow. I didn’t think we’d made that much progress. Unfortunately, I don’t have the Journals.”
“Who does?”
“Base.”
“And why can’t we go to base?”
He refrained from answering for what seemed like forever. “It’s a long story.”
She decided to let it go for now. He’d been so open with her today already that she felt she’d lose trust by asking for more.
“Maybe someday I’ll get to see them,” she said, and left it at that. She looked up into the clouds that were dumping their contents onto the earth below. On an impulse, she stuck out her tongue, attempting to catch the droplets on her tongue. Patrick started to laugh.
“See, that’s what all the normal kids do. You’re a natural.”
She giggled. “I like rain. It’s nice.” She flung her head back again, finally managing to catch a raindrop. It tasted salty, just like the water in the ocean had. The water cycle. He couldn’t be lying about that. Patrick hadn’t somehow fabricated the grandeur of the ocean before her, or made water fall from the sky by magic. Not only was he not crazy, he knew more about the world than anybody else she knew. Perhaps the Backwinders weren’t quite as backwards as she’d always assumed.
Branson would kill you if he knew you were thinking like that, she thought herself. Branson and Dad both. She didn’t like the thought, or the conflicting feeling it created in the depths of her mind. Branson and her father were fighting, risking their lives, trying to prevent the spread of the very ideas that were entering her mind at this moment. Dad would disown her if she knew she was traipsing all over the wilderness with a Backwinder boy.
It’s not traipsing, she justified. It’s survival. Big difference. This thought sat much better in Piper’s mind, so she welcomed it to stay. It pushed the conflict to the back of her head, and brought out Piper’s original point: she wasn’t a National or a Backwinder. Not anymore. She was a girl facing the world, and that’s all there was to it. If Patrick could help her do that, then so be it.
“What’re you thinking about?” The boy’s voice broke through her self reflection and brought her back to the present. He was eyeing her again, giving her that feeling that he already knew exactly what she was thinking. She didn’t find the feeling so repulsive as she had the day before.
“It’s a long story,” she replied.
“Fair enough.” The rain began to slow from a heavy downpour to a slight trickle. No longer assaulted by the water, Piper began to notice how truly soaked she was. Either he had the same thought, or he really could read her mind.
“I’m sorry, I should have thought to bring something to keep us dry.”
She rolled her eyes. “How quickly he forgets. Who pulled me all the way under the water?”
He raised his arms in upset. “Who pushed me in the first place?”
“Touché.”
“Ha.”
She gave him a wayside glance. “Fine, kid, you win this one.”
“We should get back to camp. I don’t know how long we’ve been here and we don’t want to be out after dark.”
“How come?”
“Wild animals, patrols, all kinds of things. It’s just not a good idea.”
“And the wild animals can’t get us inside the camp?” She stopped short. “Wait. What patrols?”
“National patrols. What other kind of patrol would I mean?”
“You mean they march right through here?”
“I’m not sure. They never have before, but they tell us to be ready for that during drill. If they were to come through I definitely wouldn’t want to be in their way. One look at my uniform and I’m history.”
“History?”
“It’s—“
“Never mind, you can tell me later. If they came through, what do you think the odds are they’d know where my brother and dad were?”
“I bet they have intense databases for that kind of thing, but you’re with me. You’d be in just as much danger. They’d take you for a spy in a second, especially since you don’t have a National uniform. They have no reason to believe you’re not a Memorist.”
“But there’s a chance, isn’t there?”
“Not a reasonable one. Don’t go looking for them, Piper. Please. Promise me you won’t go looking.” He’d called her Piper. Not Green Eyes. Piper.
“Fine. I promise,” she said after a lot of deliberation. “I don’t see why it really matters to you. I’m just another mouth to feed, remember?” She didn’t know why she felt like making him feel guilty, but she did.
“Come on, Green Eyes, you know that’s not what I think. I don’t drag myself all the way to the ocean for another mouth to feed.”
“Then what do you think?”
He looked her straight in the eye. It was a different look than she’d gotten before. It was neither angry nor tender, and she didn’t have a clue how to read it. “I don’t really know,” he said, with a little lilt in his voice. He began walking back toward the tree line.