Evolution

dove under, and came back up to see Anna’s face, her black hair framed around her pale face, her hazel eyes looking into mine. It was good to just be with her, with no pressure or pain.

The air was warm, yet not too warm, and the late afternoon sun was a couple of handbreadths above the blue line of the sea. Everything was calming and beautiful.

We returned to the beach, and laid down to dry off. About half a mile away, Samuel was walking with Makara, trying to get her some light exercise. She said she had needed it, or she would go crazy in the clinic bed. Julian spoke with Ashton atop a twisted rock formation jutting out into the sea, against which wave after wave crashed.

Everything about the day was perfect. I wish life were always like this — more about peace than fighting.

“Do you think this is what people did before?” Anna asked.

I smiled. “They would be crazy if they didn’t.

A large, cold wave came. Anna laughed as the water lapped at our feet.

For some reason, my thoughts turned to love and friendship. To people who had never experienced those things, they seemed scary. That’s how I felt I once was — closed off and reserved, rarely talking to anyone, except for maybe Khloe and my dad. But once you have loved, you can’t imagine living without it. I know, because I have lived both sides. It was sad that my entire life had to be burned away. I wished it could have happened in a way that didn’t cause so much pain, to myself and to others. But I had found these people: Samuel, Makara, and Anna; even Ashton and Julian. It was a good, warm feeling that was all too rare in this world.

Perhaps it was rare in the Old World, too.

“Even if we’ve done some crazy and suicidal things that I will never, ever want to do again,” I said. “I’m glad we’ve met, Anna. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

“Even with the Bunker?”

Anna had hit on something. It was hard to let go of that. The ghosts of my father and Khloe would always haunt me, in a way. But after almost three months, I knew I would never be the same person. I remembered what Samuel had told me in Skyhome: that I was going to change and become who I was always meant to be. I didn’t know when that was going to happen. I didn’t know if that was already happening. All I knew was that I had changed a lot. I had seen too much. I had loved too much.

“No, I don’t regret anything. Because without that, I would have never met you.”

Anna smiled, but said nothing as we continued watching the ocean. Gilgamesh hulked above on our right, the ship’s thick, blue water lines going out of its sides and into the sea. The water would be desalinated and filtered once inside the ship, and then converted into the deuterium and tritium needed to fuel the fusion reactor. The process took a while, and ironically, it almost took almost as much energy to create those two wily isotopes of hydrogen than we got out of fusing them. Which meant that we were stuck here for the next two days until both canisters of isotopes were completely filled.

Which was completely fine with me. It gave us a much needed break, and a chance for Makara to heal. Maybe it gave everyone else a chance to heal.

“So,” Anna said, “why did you come back for me?”

I turned to look at her. Her long, black hair was still wet from our swim in the ocean earlier. I could see the salt and sand clinging to her hair. She looked at me with her warm, hazel eyes. She was so beautiful that it was hard to find words.

“We all came back for you.”

“But it was your idea.”

I smiled. “How do you know that?”

She turned away, whipping her hair around flirtatiously. “You just told me.”

I turned on my side. “Told you? How?”

“I can just tell.”

“That doesn’t explain anything.”

Anna shook her head. “Apparently, you’ve never heard of this thing called women’s intuition.”

I laughed. “Alright. You got me there.”

It was quiet for a moment before she spoke again.

“You haven’t answered my question yet.”

Well, there was no getting out of this one.

“I came back for you because…”

She turned to me, her eyes telling me she didn’t want a joke, which is what I was tempted to do. Being serious is always hard for a guy to do for some reason. At least, that’s how it was for me. If you really want to be serious, you have to mean it, or else you risk hurting the girl. And hurting Anna was the last thing I wanted to do.

“…I came back because…of a personal reason. And that’s all I’m going to say for now.”

She smiled, but said nothing more. I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or not. Still, I felt like my answer was lame. The three words I wanted to say were somehow the hardest to say of all. It’s a guy thing, I guess.

“That’s cool, I guess,” she said.

I turned to face her. She was looking at the sea.

“You were going to say something to me, in the arena,” she said. “When we thought those guards were going to kill us. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.”

“I was going to say…”

Anna leaned forward. Those eyes again. I knew, looking at them, that she had never looked at anyone else like that before. It both exhilarated and terrified me.

“How about I just show you what I wanted to say?”

I leaned forward to kiss her. Her face was so close to mine. We paused, right before our lips touched. When they did, I felt a surge of energy run throughout me. I moved my lips against hers gently, and she kissed me back. I reached my hand to touch her face. We stayed like that for a while, and it was the most wonderful thing I had felt in a long time. It was something I had been wanting to do for a while, something I had even dreamed about.

After another moment, I pulled away, my eyes still closed.

When I opened them, she was looking at me. And smiling.

“So, that’s how you feel?”

I nodded. “Damn straight I do.”

Anna laughed, and nestled against me. Together, we watched the waves and the sun fall, casting the sky and sea in light pink and orange. It was too perfect, and even if I knew such perfection wasn’t meant to be in a world so fallen as ours, that didn’t take away from its beauty. It only made it more beautiful.

* * *

It took two days, but we found New America. It was on the Texas coast, as Julian had said, about fifty miles south of Houston — a small, non-walled village in the center of a thick stand of trees not too far from a brown, winding river. On its western side were farms, growing rows of green produce. To the east were the apocalyptic ruins of a massive industrial complex, once silvery towers and tanks shattered and ruined. It could not have been a safe spot to pick the founding of a new city, but I guess home remained home to people, no matter how bad it got.

If anything, it was hundreds of miles from any Blights, which probably went a long way to explain how the town still existed after so many years. But for a town called New America, it was humble. There couldn’t have been more than two hundred people living there, judging from the couple dozen or so buildings it consisted of.

We landed in a field to the south of the town, not even trying to hide the spaceship. Julian walked outside into the warm, muggy air, and we followed him from behind. The sky was mostly clear, though tinted with red. The meteor fallout was not as thick as in the Wasteland, but this land still carried wispy traces of it. The people came out of the wooden buildings, one by one — ragged, dirty, thin, their eyes wide. It was such a stark contrast to the Empire, and it was a sign of how far we had fallen, how low America had been made by Ragnarok. Isolated as it was, it was a surprise this community had survived for so long. And yet, they had survived.

As we walked forward, Julian in the lead, several goats crossed our path. Weeds and tall grass grew thick,