The particles gently released us as the storm passed and we were back on the ground. Greer’s arms had let go, and he disconnected the belt, but I didn’t dare move, fearful the storm would pick us back up. I’d have stayed there all day, but Greer shifted under me.
“It’s okay.” He rubbed my back. “You can let go.”
When I still didn’t move, he shifted his body from under the branches. I still clung to him. This world was so awful. He sat up, and finally I let go, moved away, and hugged my knees. Greer picked a black tracker about the size of a thumbnail from his shirt. He crunched it between his fingers. “Tracker storm.” His breathing was still deep. “They scan, picture, sample areas. The trackers pick up objects and carry them while they scrape DNA to send to databases. They swarm faces and take pictures. The belt and limbs kept us from tearing apart. God, it was lucky.”
“They have my DNA. They will know where we are,” I said, very much in shock.
Greer smiled. “No, they won’t, not for a few days. That smell was a codent. I covered your DNA structure. It added alleles. They’ll think you are a black bear when they look at it.”
“What about the pictures that the nanos took?”
“With that hair, they’ll be sure you’re a bear.” He playfully pulled one of my random curls. “Your face was in my shirt and mine was under my mask. Bears sleep under trees all the time. The trackers read bear DNA, and it saw black and brown. It’ll report bear. The Libratiers would have to check every life structure to figure out if it was accurately recorded. They have thousands of square miles and animals to look over. It will take days.”
He was downright jubilant by that point. “And this tree… if we hadn’t come across the tree or some structure to hold us together... that was a close call.”
I held my head in my hands. I couldn’t handle this world; it was too awful. The rain stopped, but I was cold and tired from the wet.
“Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Be happy we made it; we were lucky.”
“Lucky? Greer, this isn’t lucky. It’s a curse. I shouldn’t have left Haverhill but—”
“No, no. You saved us. If we hadn’t left Haverhill, the trackers would‘ve swallowed us up. They’re designed for towns; locked doors and windows are nothing to them. We escaped a nano storm. It’s rare to escape them, and if you hadn’t demanded to leave…” His voice trailed off.
Greer got up, ready to move on but not me. My feet felt like anvils holding me in place.
“It’s like I’ve been run-over by a train.” My hands were numb.
Greer sat down next to me. “Things come at us fast out here. You’ll get used to it.”
“No, I won’t. I won’t get used to this place. It’s hell. I think I’m in hell.” I was shaking.
“Yes, eventually it will feel better.” Greer rubbed my back again. “You’re cold.”
Cold? Cold? I remembered the last time I had been this cold. It was in that stupid cooler, back when I hadn’t seen the worst of the world. Before I met King Lothaire. Lothaire. In that moment, the past few weeks were too much. My body shook as my mind crowded with every emotion possible: fear, rage, disgust, deep sadness… but out of all of them regret was the biggest. I couldn’t stomach any more. I was alone in these woods. It didn’t matter if Greer was here. I couldn’t talk to him. I was angry about that too. My emotions flooded me, and I put my head in my hands, concentrating on the ground, the rocks, my necklace, but it was all too much for me. The shaking increased.
Greer’s hand went to my head. “You’re freezing.”
I’d have to take his word for it. I didn’t feel a thing. It was too hard for me to focus.
Greer moved his hand away and said something. It sounded like he said he’d be right back but honestly, I didn’t know for sure. I was awake but not really, more in a trance of awful than anything else.
I didn’t know how long he was gone. A minute? An hour? When he returned, he put a red hockey puck looking thing at my feet. He draped one of his shirts over my back. “We’ve got to get you warm.”
Greer’s hands took mine. He rubbed his hands over them again and again. “Geez. It’s eighty and humid. You shouldn’t be this cold.” I didn’t even bother to look at him until he pulled my hands to his mouth and blew on them. That woke me up a bit. I looked up at his face.
“You okay?” he asked, and the floodgates burst. Tears, big fat ugly tears, overcame me.
“I don’t...” Deep inhale. “… think so.” Ugliness.
Greer blew on my hands once more. Even through the tears, it felt nice and I would have kept them there if my nose wasn’t running. Embarrassed, I turned away from him.
Greer rubbed my back. “Things aren’t easy right now.”
I wiped my nose with my sleeve. “Everything is so awful. I never ever should have come.”
“It could have been worse,” he said.
“Worse! Worse? I was almost trapped in a blue stinking cloud.” I shook even harder because that wasn’t the worst part of the day. “Haverhill and that thing and the screams—” I wanted to tell him at that moment, I wanted the weight off my chest, but I couldn’t.
“Did you see something?” he asked. He took my silence as confirmation. “So that’s why you ran.”
I nodded my head but said nothing. If I said anything about it, I had a feeling I’d throw up.
Greer must have sensed not to push it. “We escaped the nano trackers. It’s rare.”
“The nanos. Yeah. That was just today. The whole thing has been so awful. I don’t even know how I got here. I didn’t want to leave with
