Chapter 8

Hey there. :)
So I decided a couple days ago that rather than kill myself trying to write 19,000 words in 4 days, I would just PROMISE myself that I would indeed finish and just do it at my own pace. This is already a huge accomplishment for me (the longest thing I've written previously was only 16,000 words or so... as of right now this is over 31,000), so I'm proud regardless, especially considering I started six days late. So yeah. Happy reading.
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Piper looked up at the tree to see Patrick’s brown eyes staring down at her, a look of pain on his face. Her mouth slammed shut, as if on hinges. She looked down in embarrassment, stroking the kitten’s fur to hide her blush. “Sorry,” she said, her voice bubbly from trying to stifle a laugh. “Did I wake you up? Or is my singing just that bad?
He wasn’t wearing his hat. His hair was redder than she thought. His face expressionless, he replied, “Your singing is just that bad.”
She let the laugh go and threw a twig in his direction. She missed. His face broke into a grin. “Nah, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Just brought back fond memories.”
She wanted to ask what fond memories, but she could tell from the way his face reverted back to seriousness that he didn’t much care to talk about it.
“So, what’s for breakfast?” she asked. “I would have tried to get something, but I didn’t even know where to begin.”
“The cat,” he groaned, burrowing back into his sleeping bag. The cat hissed at him. Piper threw another twig at him.
“Hey now. That’s my cat. Get your own cat and you can eat him.” She looked down at the little ball of fur, who was still hissing and spitting ferociously. “Cool it, kid,” she said to the cat. It turned to look at her, his screwed up eyes becoming wide and docile.
“Easy for you to say, he likes you,” Patrick said.
“Maybe that’s because I didn’t try to leave him out in the cold to starve.” She ran a hand down the cat’s long gray back. “Isn’t that right, Whiskers?”
“Whiskers? You can’t seriously be naming the cat Whiskers.”
“And why not?” She stood up and put her hands on her hips in an exasperated habit. “He’s my cat, I can name him whatever I want.”
“But Whiskers?”
“What’s wrong with Whiskers?”
“One: EVERY cat is named Whiskers. Two: how’s a guy supposed to feel manly with a name like Whiskers?”
Piper laughed. “Well, what do you suggest, Mr. Hypercritical?”
“I don’t know. Something like Jefferson or Lincoln or Washington. Good strong name.”
They sounded like Backwinder names, but as she looked down at the cat’s squashed face and his sharp yellow eyes, he kind of looked like a Lincoln. “All right,” she sighed in defeat. “Lincoln it is.” The cat, as though aware that the matter had been settled and being satisfied with the outcome, went back to pouncing at a grasshopper on the ground.
“Blue!”
The scratchy voice came out of nowhere. Patrick jumped with a start at the sound of his last name, nearly falling out of the tree as he scrambled down its trunk and toward his backpack.
“BLUE! Answer your commanding officer!” The voice was overshadowed in static, making it even more frightening to Piper than it would have been clearly. It was a Backwinder commander, possibly the man responsible for her mother and brother’s deaths. She shuddered.
So he wasn’t a deserter. Any deserter would know to leave his walkie-talkie behind, especially knowing it could contain a tracking device in it. She opened her mouth to scream at him, realizing he was a spy, that he had been setting her up all along, but his actions stayed her words. She thought Patrick had rushed to answer the walkie-talkie hidden in his pack, but instead he was standing in front of the pack in a pathetic effort to conceal the voice within.
“I can hear it, Patrick, okay? Just answer it.”
“I’m not going to if it’s going to make you—“
“Don’t be stupid, Patrick. They’ll come looking for you if you don’t.”
He stared her straight in the eyes, and she tried her best to keep up a unified front. She couldn’t show any weakness or let on how scared she was…
She got the sense he knew exactly what was going through her mind, but he clicked the button on the receiver anyway. She held her breath, not wanting to betray any superfluous sign of life. If they didn’t know she existed, maybe there wouldn’t be a problem.
“Yes, sir.”
“You were due back at camp two days ago. Report.”
“A distraction, sir.”
“Specify.”
There was a long pause.
“Sympathy for another living thing, sir.”
“This is the army, Blue. We’re fighting a war. If you’re not back to camp by nightfall there will be serious repercussions.”
“Yes, sir.”
The other line clicked off abruptly, leaving nothing but static in its wake. He just looked at her, and she stared back in sheer terror.
“You have to leave me behind, don’t you?”
He said nothing for a long time, finally shifting his gaze from her face to the ground. At last he spoke. “No. That’s not an option. We’ll figure something out.”
“What is there to figure out? I’m a National girl, I can’t just waltz into a camp full of Backwinder—I mean Memorist—men! Even if I was a Memorist I wouldn’t be allowed in there.”
“There’s a women’s regiment not too far away.”
“Are you crazy? I can’t fight for your side!”
The stark differences between them slapped her in the face. Her feeling hadn’t gone away, but at the moment it was eating away at her insides, leaving her in agony. She couldn’t explain the attachment to this boy that had formed inside her in the last few days, but she knew she didn’t want it broken. Not yet.
“Look, the Sergeant’s not as bad as he sounds. I’m sure if we just explained to him—“
“He’d have me shot on the spot. No one’s going to trust me there, Patrick! They’d be idiots if they did. I could easily be a spy.” He shot her a guarded, pointed look, and she hurried to clarify herself. “I’m not, you know that, but they don’t know that.”
“Do I really know that?”
“Don’t you think they’d at least arm a spy? I have nothing. No armor, no nothing. If I was of any value to the National army you’d be able to tell.”
“What if that’s what you want me to think?”
She grabbed his arm in exasperation. “Look at me, Patrick.” She looked him dead in the face, focusing every ounce of energy into her eyes, trying to convey her sincerity with all the strength she could muster. “I’m not lying. You know I’m not.”
He relaxed under her grasp, and she could tell he believed her. She let go.
“What do you want to do, Green Eyes? You must have some kind of plan if you’re objecting to mine so much.”
She wanted to shoot back with a surefire idea, but she had none. Unwilling to admit defeat aloud, she merely looked at her feet.
“Alright, then I guess my plan is our best bet. We’ll go to camp, see the Sergeant, and try to work something out. And if they try to lay a finger on you, I’ll shoot ‘em before they can say National. Deal?”
She laughed. “Yeah, right. They’d shoot you in a second.”
“I know that.” She looked for the smile on her face, but there wasn’t one. He was dead serious. And it scared her. Why was he willing to go to such great lengths to keep her safe?
Gauging his expression, she warily took his hand and shook it. “Deal.”
“We better get a move on if we’re going to get there before the sun sets.”
Piper nodded wordlessly. “How far away is it?”
“Closer than the ocean, but we slept late today.” He looked her in the eye again. “I am sorry, Piper. I didn’t expect this to happen.”
“What did you expect, then?” she said, finding an unexpected harshness in her voice. “If you weren’t a deserter—“
“I was a deserter. It’s a long story.”
“How long can it be? You’re smart enough to know that unless you left your intercom somewhere they’d be able to get in touch with you. Just what exactly were you planning on happening?”
He looked away for the first time since they’d started speaking. She moved to try to catch his gaze, but he avoided her as though she had knives where her eyes should have been. She wasn’t willing to give this up so easily as some of his other secrets. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve heard that one before. For real this time.”
“I wasn’t lying when I told you I didn’t know where we were going, and I’m not lying now. I don’t know. Leaving was an idiotic idea.”
“You’re right, it probably was. And I’m probably going to get myself killed because of you.”
She didn’t like the pained look that filled his eyes. She wanted him to shoot back a harsh word, to retaliate, anything, just to prove her theories. But he did no such thing. He merely looked at her with that look in his eyes that told her she was picking a nonexistent fight. It filled her with such a great sense of guilt that she could not bring herself to keep going.
“But I’d have died if you just left me there, so I guess in the end it can’t really be your fault,” she finally conceded, alleviating some of the hurt from his expression.
“Look, I’m not going to get you killed, okay? Can’t you trust me enough to believe that?” His face broke into a sheepish smile. “Plus, we don’t kill our prisoners. At the very worst you’ll just be imprisoned for the rest of your life.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, that helps so much.” But his smile was contagious, and she couldn’t resist when she felt it sweeping across her face as well.
“So do you trust me?”
It was a difficult question. Everybody she’d ever trusted had disappeared from her life in a puff of smoke. How could she trust someone to keep her safe when she wasn’t even sure if she could keep herself safe?
But he’d saved her life once. That gave her some confidence that he could do it again if need be. And he’d trusted her, only moments ago, even without any good reason to do so. At this point, she owed it to him.
“Yeah, I trust you.”
“Do we have to shake on it again or can I believe you this time?”
She smiled slightly, embarrassed at her own inconsistency. “No, we’re good.”
“Alright. That settles it then. I’ll pack up the tent and we’ll go.”
They finally got on the road at what Piper assumed was about ten o’clock in the morning. Once again she tried to pick up the cat, but he refused her arms. An independent little thing, he preferred to assert his independence by keeping a slight distance at all times, but he never let the pair of them out of his sight. She watched the kitten plod along happily, his feet bouncing on the gravel path, and envied his lack of want or worry. As far as he knew he wasn’t heading to his death… Piper couldn’t be so sure.
She found the strange world that surrounded her much more unfamiliar on the way to base. She wondered why her beautiful orange and red leaves had begun to fall from the trees; she was sure some unseen evil, held captive by the cool breeze, was frightening them right off of their branches. She hugged her arms across her chest in an effort to keep warm. She needed to find new clothes somewhere—the wind played with the hole in the shoulder of her shirt, chilling her to the bone.
They didn’t speak for most of the way, whether out of apprehension or exhaustion. The quiet made her uneasy; she had grown so used to conversation. She had always been so quiet in the past, but something about Patrick brought her out of her shell and made her want to talk about anything and everything. She hugged herself a little tighter, trying to fill in the hollowness, but she found that external motions could do nothing for internal problems. Finally he said something, and she felt a few of the empty spaces filling themselves in.
“Tell me something about yourself.”
She laughed. “Quite the conversationalist, aren’t you? Hmm… I can’t sing.”
“So I noticed.”
“Hey now, I doubt you can sing any better.” At this he shrugged his shoulders in defeat. “Your turn.”
“I can’t think of anything.”
“Well don’t look at me! Tell me a secret.”
“Don’t have any.”
She gave him a wayside look. “That, my friend, is a lie.”
“What did you just say?”
“That’s a lie.”
“No, the other part.”
She was confused until she realized it herself. She’d called him her friend. “Are we friends, then?” He gave her an interested look.
“I suppose so. Allies, at the very least.”
“I don’t like that. Allies sounds like we’re at war.”
She laughed at the incredulous statement. “Welcome to the twenty-second century, kid. We’ve been at war for the last twelve years.”
“But still. Allies makes it feel like it’s a friendship of necessity.”
“Well, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. Do you think we’d be friends without the war?”
“Well, if it weren’t for the war—“
“I know you wouldn’t know me, but let’s say you did. We’d be friends, wouldn’t we?”
She thought about how easy it was to talk to him, how much she had told him about herself that she’d never told anybody else. And she nodded.
“Then I think we’re friends now. Allies isn’t strong enough a word.”
She couldn’t help but smile a little bit. She’d never been good at making friends, so this felt like an accomplishment.
Before she could get another word out, Patrick stopped beside a gigantic tree. It was almost as big as some of the buildings in Piper’s city, and as thick of ten of her. A gnarled knot stood at the base, looking like the door to some kind of fairy tree. Patrick kicked the knot, and a clang rang through the surrounding trees, nearly startling her out of her skin.
“This is it,” said Patrick.