Chapter 34

While I had so many more questions, I knew it wasn't the time to expect detailed answers. It'd been a shock, but for the umpteenth time the statement, "We can talk about it later," crept back up from within rather than without.

I went with the easiest question we had time for: "Why are you telling me all of this now?"

Sam retreated inward to reflect on her response. "You're exhausted, hungry, and confused," she said quietly. "I can't offer anything to solve most of that—I don't have anything to give you. But I can apologize for how I acted and at least explain what little I do know. When Rob told me who you really were, it hit hard. He used to use you and your mother as a lesson in how to understand bad things happen to good people. He and your mother were close when they were children—you know that, right? Whatever I said or did before, if I'm treating you differently now, it's because Rob made me understand you're more like us than I first realized."

It had been the most she'd shared vocally since I'd known her, which, amazingly enough, only amounted to a few short hours.

Crazy....

Aloud, I voiced another question: "Us?"

"Rob, Frank, and Oli." She said. Each name settled in the air with its own gravity. Drawn lines between past loyalties and whatever led to the present. The list, more than anything, pulled a lot of motivations into focus: hers and Rob's.

“Yours can be a future you choose…” I murmured to myself. Rob had said those words back at his Pod, and they landed like stone. Anchored, reliable, something for the lost to navigate by. Sam’s account peeled back the layers of Rob’s fury, revealing the shape of his rage when he discovered I'd been steered straight into McCreed’s game. Somehow, it made Sam’s edges feel less opaque. I saw her a bit clearer.

I felt like I understood Sam just a bit more.

"No choice," she said as she stood and adjusted her sling. The rifle sat flat and ready against her side.

"No choice." I repeated back. It felt right, and she'd smiled at me then. A genuine, if bittersweet, glimpse into a past tinged with sadness that gelded an inner drive I could only marvel at.

She didn’t linger.

Pressed for time by threats that loomed, she slipped away, but not before I was concealed. In fast order, she'd buried me in what she called "deadfall," which was something I had to take at face value, as I'd never heard the term used before. It sounded so mysterious and morbid, surely some sort of super secret spy reference for death and defiance. To my dissatisfaction, deadfall turned out just to be a fancy name for branches and fistfuls of leaves from the ground.

Honestly? I was a little bummed about it, but it mimicked the natural growth almost perfectly. Scraps had been arranged into a rough half-circle around me; the gaps were filled with heaps of the fallen leaves in a very deliberate way. Even up close it was difficult to perceive a difference between it and the rest of the treeline, and tucked inside, it felt more like a hidden burrow. The entryway gave a clear line of sight toward the greenspace's distant infrastructure, toward the direction a majority of the flares had lit the sky from.

Strategically placed, my pack acted as a very decent visual obstruction. Even more so once Sam constructed a makeshift blind to blend it into the surrounding shrubbery. It felt like being in a blanket fort when she'd had me lie down inside of it, and so I waited and observed, unseen and hidden.

My disguise acted like an invisible shield, perched just before the drop-off line of the embankment.

No, not just a disguise or cover...Camouflage! Like from the old war documentaries.

It was a struggle to keep myself from humming. The theme song from the older docuseries about the Global War was stuck in my head: a classical piece with some embellishments to make it seem urgent and action-packed, with strings, drums, and even a cannon to punctuate. With the pack positioned as it was, muted in color by the layers of mud smeared over its surface and covered by a blind made of deadfall, mud, and dirt, I was effectively entrenched from sight and sense so long as I made minimal noise; she made a point of repeating it as she’d pieced the blind together.

Thoughts of the conversation between Sam and me drifted through my mind like the heavy fog that had rolled across the greenspace like a slithering cloud. The world appeared shrouded in a thick, ghostly mist. Shapes, colors, and sounds were muted; a monochromatic palette where the trees and Stacks loomed like shadowy figures in the dark.

Moisture hung heavily in the muddled air. Fog was bad for infrared. When conditions were like this, with scattered waves that brought up no shortage of trouble at the Port, we had to throw the loaders into "line" mode by hand. Optical was affected too; the fog could throw them both into a haze.

It was the perfect cover.

I'd been left to my own devices some time ago, but I was brought back to the present by the gurgle of my stomach. With a glance, I read my chrono:

0621

The sun would rise soon…

All was quiet. The silence held. It felt like the world had paused just beyond perception, a scene steeped in stillness. A surreal atmosphere, both enchanting and unsettling. "A little TOO quiet..." as people always seemed to say.

Just before something bad was about to happen.

I chided myself silently.

Foxholes and concealment, Price. Just another game. Hiding's easy. It's the wait that'll screw you over. Inside the blind, I swear time slowed. My breath hung visibly in the chilled air and synced with the slow drip of moisture that gathered on the branches.

Speaking of foxholes.

Too bad mine hadn't shielded me from the bombshell Sam had dropped about my father's identity. That'd left a crater so wide it could've physically caught the rain that set the view ahead awash. My biological father was not just someone my mother had sought to escape; he was someone she'd needed help in order to do so and had done it desperately. My eyes and psyche were still raw from the realization of what the world might really be like outside my previously monotonous, drone-like existence in the Stacks.

Around me the stillness pressed in. No movement, no sound, just the weight of a quiet so complete it felt like a cage. It felt as if the earth, still cold from the bitter night, was waiting for the sun to stir it to life. The air was crisp, almost brittle, as it bit at the exposed skin of my face. I felt an intense sensation of complete isolation, even stronger than earlier in the evening when I'd realized Dora had left and I had no one else to turn to.

You weren’t really isolated; I just felt that way. I'd been wrong then, so I hoped I was wrong now, too.

An invisible bubble seemed to amplify my feeling of discomfort at not being able to walk, stand, or run. I fought to keep myself steady. It wasn’t emptiness. It was a pause. A breath, held by the landscape. In that hush, I could feel every detail: the cool damp of the ground beneath me, the faint scent of mineral-rich soil, and the distant shimmer of dew clinging to the leaf edges around me.

The brush bit at me as I adjusted my pose; each prickled leaf was a reminder of how little comfort isolation provided me. I felt a flash of annoyance. The rifle and sling snagged a stubborn branch pinned beneath my right thigh and caused the blind to shake perceptibly. I had to be more vigilant. My old adversary, hunger, wasn't doing me any favors as it gnawed at whatever patience I had left.

I was antsy.

Kid me would've dreamed for a moment like this, I thought wryly, as I tried to take my mind off my present situation. As an adult? I had a different opinion. I was at a weird middle ground where my body wanted to stop motion because I was exhausted, but my mind screamed to move. It resulted in an odd, claustrophobic sensation I really didn't like.

I continued to wait and sighed inwardly for what felt like the hundredth time. Slowly and methodically I forced my eyes to pass over the same line of trees. The same rain-soaked view of the greenspace clearing and changes in elevation.

It was mind-numbing.

My joints ached.

The first flare challenge had gone up some time ago; uh...I honestly had no certainty when.

My nose was runny, and my shoulders were burning from holding my head up for too long. Worst of all, I developed an itch I couldn't seem to reach between my shoulder blades.

This sucks. I said to myself inside my own head. Which was very weird when I thought and spoke it in thought at the same time. I wondered if this was what going insane felt like. Talking to yourself without really talking to yourself...

I remained in silence, suffering it a while longer, until my mind unexpectedly surfaced a title: the enigmatic Four Thirty-Three.

Back in 1952—mid-twentieth century, though how I managed to retain that date is beyond me—a composer named John Cage stirred up the art world with a piece many considered radical. It was called "4'33"," and it was avant-garde in every sense. That term, pulled from older tongues, once meant ‘advance guard’ or ‘vanguard,’ and in the artistic realm, it referred to those at the bleeding edge of innovation and technique.

4'33" was silence. Exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds of it...except it wasn't.

It was supposed to represent a chance for a listener to focus on the ambient sounds around them. Each performance was a unique experience shaped by the moment itself. No two performances of the piece were meant to be the same, and that was kind of the point. The audience became part of the art simply by listening. Within my hidey-hole behind my pack, the fog and burrow gave all sound a muffled quality. A low thrum seemed to surround me like a white noise, but I hadn't realized it before now. Water droplets collected on the leaves in front of me as I listened to the thunder while it rumbled in the distance. The sounds of nature.

It was calm, too calm if you asked me, but I stayed in the moment as I absorbed the atmosphere circumambient to my position, like a sponge as it lay within the deepest point of a bowl. The world was around me. Without me. I could actually see and hear it if I tried. I'd always been too busy to do it otherwise. Ironically or not, there was no better time than the present to listen, so I closed my eyes and did so.

My lungs burned with the first biting intake of a long, slow breath. I could hear the wind. Sense the shadows where the light wasn't. Taste the fog! It had its own scent on mornings like this. If the petrichor of the Stacks was sour, this had the same earthy odor, yet not. It was "atmospheric," for lack of a better term. The state of not being chained by the likes of gravity was my romantic take on what made it unique and in the moment. Being unrestrained was what appealed to me.

Greatly.

I continued, so absorbed in the moment I was ecstatic when the chatter of my mind finally stilled for what felt like a microsecond of quiet, blessed relief.

The sound of a twig snapping was what jolted me back awake.

Yep. I thought as the cold sensation of dread overcame me, Pretty sure I fell asleep...