The sun’s light was bright against the black road. Shards of light glimmered yellow, orange and violet. Gold lit up the lingering clouds, the new leaves on the trees were still glossy from the rain. Blossoms budded, birds chirped, a single engine rumbled as crumbling tarmac crunched under four oversized tyres. Euan had held up his end of the bargain. His hope lay in a slim possibility that Nick had been able to see his side completed too.
As they drove, the anticipation developed into a wretched plume of sawdust inside him.
Knight was in the driver’s seat of the truck that took them to a fate unknown. The cab was awash in expectant sentiment. It hung heavy in the air, infiltrated the lungs, hunched the shoulders and kept their thoughts voiceless. As the light bloomed over the landscape, dark hands gripped the wheel, fingers danced and stretched before they gripped it again. The leather groaned.
Euan asked, ‘How did you bring her back?’
Knight kept his gaze forward, but Euan saw the quirk in his lips. ‘She brought herself back. Something about taking control as we fled the explosion changed her, or maybe it was losing her father. She roared at them when they tried to take us. Roared, like a lioness. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed she had that much power still left in her body. Before we left, I told her that I loved her. For the first time since she was captured, I could see she believed it.’
Euan nodded, allowed the small seed of hope to grow in his heart. He tapped his fingers against his knee.
Knight asked, ‘What are you going to do if it’s too late?’
The breath Euan took was long. The exhale drawn out. He didn’t take his gaze from the white line that stretched out before them. He knew what he would do.
‘If I’m too late, they’ll simply die sooner.’
Knight’s response was instant. ‘You can’t kill everyone, McKay.’
Euan didn’t reply. His fists were clenched again, he loosened them, shook them out. He was tired. Exhausted. But he would not sleep until he saw this done.
Beside him, Knight gripped the steering wheel and the silence in the cab stretched and folded over itself until it was thick and nauseating. Euan glanced out the side window.
Scrub, intermittent trees. The warehouses of tin, concrete and blue-board were becoming more frequent. Hidden by nature, they stood as silent sentries to industry. This was what humanity should be fighting for. Regeneration. To take what was destroyed and erect it again. To find those that still lived who retained the skill to build, to repair, to create. Instead, they squabbled like animals for scraps of a meagre carcass. Weapons, fuel, women.
Euan didn’t care that he was now part of the systematic problem.
He needed Kira. He needed Nick. In all of this, everything, without them, this world, his life, pointless. What did he care if the world read books or burned them if his two rays of sunshine weren’t in it with him?
Inside him, a battle raged. There was violence, there was hope, there was fear. Three opposing angles that jockeyed for prominence in his heart. He needed Nick and Kira’s guidance to pull himself out of the swamp his boots were stuck in.
He couldn’t do this on his own. His soul could not bear it alone. All he wanted was refuge; all he got was torment.
The trees thinned, so did the vegetation. Tar, cement and wire began to take prominence. Knight tapped his fingers in a rhythm known only to him.
Then, a flash of white-gold.
Euan blinked and frowned.
He sat back into his seat, the vinyl squeaked. The crease in his brow remained and his eye never left the landscape.
But his body would not relent. His heart beat to a wild tempo, his fingertips prickled. There was a metallic tang on the tip of his tongue.
His hands wanted to press the glass, his nose close in on the window. He considered that his desperate wishes had come to fruition. He’d been so focused on their rescue and subsequent reuniting that his mind had conjured up images of feral blonde women roaming the landscape. Ghosts that were just figments, unreal. He tapped the window with a knuckle while the kick of adrenaline produced a melody of longing in his veins.
Until he saw it again. A brilliant halo of wild, platinum blonde hair as it ducked between two burned out cars.
‘Stop the truck.’
He was out of the door with his feet on the tarmac before the engine had slowed, the cries from Knight were in his ear, but he ignored them.
It could be exhaustion, it could be insanity. It could be his mind was finally giving out and going to dust. It was a reckless concept, an impossible theory. Maybe it was a resurgence of a memory from a time she had dashed in the forest after him and Nick, when he had roared to run, to flee the tiny blonde sun-sprite that had shadowed them through the trees.
There was no way that it could be true. But something intrinsic inside him whispered words to say that it was.
He ran in the direction he had last seen the flash of white. His long legs ate up the distance. Pain, fatigue, confusion, all distractions were gone. They had evaporated in the presence of a single, frivolous, impossible hope.
Her name was on his lips, only loud enough for the nearby birds to hear. He might
