It was the ninth day after our departure from the BDEC when the news arrived. I had only just returned from the embrace of Earth. My body had to be carried in one of the halftracks, hurled limply onto the back of a large pile of crates, so understandably I woke up sore and miserable. Almost immediately after hopping off the halftrack’s bed, I was met by a pack of excited, joyous Blueroser soldiers.
“Did one of your commanding officers bite it?” I groaned. “Or did you just spot a particularly interesting rock formation?”
“We weren’t lost after all!” one of them shouted.
“Do you suppose there’ll be enough water to let us wash all the fucking dust off?”
“There had better be. If not, we’re going to have to make the water do double-duty!”
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Even if there is enough water for us to bathe,” said one soldier, “we need to make sure that Justice here doesn’t get any of it. Don’t want her getting up to anything that’ll make the rest of us sick.”
“Fuck off!” said the soldier who I had to assume was named Justice. “You were all thinking the same thing!”
I slammed my hands together as hard as I could, and didn’t stop clapping until all of the soldiers had shut the fuck up. “What are you three talking about? What happened?”
“We found the oasis! Falt-rider came back just a bit ago, she was hollering about how we found the oasis!”
Despite everything, that did actually raise my spirits. It wasn’t that we were low on water: the expedition had only left the banks of the river five days earlier. It wasn’t even the promise of potentially getting to wash off, though that would be very nice. Finding the oasis meant that we weren’t completely lost.
We’d run into a dust storm two days earlier, you see. It was almost a miracle that I’d never run into one during any of my earlier travels through the Desolation. It had arrived right around midday, visible at first as a huge uprising on the horizon, as though a range of hills or small mountains had decided to start rushing towards us. The airship, acting as spotter, had just enough time to warn the main body of the expedition to hunker down before it was forced to retreat.
We’d spent the entire rest of the day trying to protect ourselves from the endless scraping wind and blinding dust. The tents weren’t quite good enough to keep themselves airtight, despite Laura’s best efforts; however, the wind was fairly consistent, so there was another way. We lined up all the tents and all the halftracks into a single massive wall and sheltered behind that. It felt like being a small rodent, sheltering against a tree root to stop from being blown away. The storm hadn’t stopped when I slipped away and woke back up on Earth.
Despite everything, however, the expedition was moving again by the time I returned to Selene late the next morning. Nobody had died, and there’d only been a few injuries. As for serious problems, however, there were two: the first was that we had absolutely no idea where the airship had gone off to. It was over the horizon, at minimum, and considering it had nowhere to shelter other than “outside the storm entirely” could’ve been stranded hundreds of miles away for all we knew. The second problem was that everything was covered in dust, which included our landmarks. With nothing more than the crudest of maps and a basic compass to navigate with, the burying of landmarks under windblown sand meant we couldn’t be sure if we were going in the right direction.
But the map we had included an oasis, and our route had been designed such that the oasis would be roughly halfway between the original base camp and our approximate destination. Thus the excitement when we found the oasis at last: its presence meant that we were back to knowing with certainty where we were.
The sheer excitement of certainty, combined with the possibility of rest, relaxation, and bathing, spurred on the soldiers and the halftrack drivers, and over the course of that last day we absolutely plowed through the terrain. Normally it would have taken well into the afternoon for the expedition to catch up to its own vanguard, but we made it to within a mile of the oasis before the sun had even reached its apex. Then the expedition stopped, realizing that there was something the scouts had missed: the oasis wasn’t empty.
Laura and I crawled on our stomachs to the top of a dune just to see what was happening and confirm it with our own eyes. My eyes aren’t actually that great, though, so we ended up passing a pair of binoculars back and forth.
“Green uniforms,” I confirmed. “And I think I see a few wolves, too. And… something else. I can’t quite tell what, but some of the people down there don’t look like anything I’ve seen from Tersine before.”
“Lemme have a look,” Laura said. I gave her the binoculars, and while she looked down them she asked, “do you suppose we outnumber them?”
“Oh, handily. I imagine it would maybe be possible to fit the entire expedition in there, but it would be absolutely packed. Considering they’re pretty spread out and still only have that one quarter occupied? There’s probably ten Bluerosers for every one of them.”
That was the other thing; it wasn’t just an ordinary oasis. The Forebearers had taken advantage of the water, present in the form of a small and shallow pool about the size of two suburban houses next to each other, to build a small town. A neat grid pattern of sandstone structures sat in total ruin, roofs caved in and streets piled up with sand. A smaller version of the town where Laura and I had encountered Tersine and found our copy of the map to Primary Control. The mixed band of werewolves, Cassandran soldiers, and our mystery third party had set up camp right by the water’s edge.
“Any sign of how they got there?”
“Nope. Not even any signs they intend to be staying long: no tents, no draft animals, nothing. They do have some sort of big machine sitting up by the water’s edge, though.”
“They do? Let me have a look at it, maybe I can identify.”
For obvious reasons, Lady Halflance had been rather furious that the cavalry vanguard hadn’t informed anyone about the enemy garrison sitting directly in our path. There had been a screaming argument about it, which had been very amusing. The defense was, of course, that there hadn’t been anyone there when they’d first found the oasis, and they had no idea how anybody had shown up there.
I looked through the binoculars. As Laura had said, there was a machine sitting by the edge of the water. It looked almost like a boiler, but not quite. As I looked even closer, though, I suddenly saw the power unit attached to the side, and the metal pipe sticking into the oasis pool itself, and I got it.
“It’s a pump. They’re sucking up a ton of the water into a big tank, for… some reason. Drinking?”
“Presumably.How the fuck do they plan on getting it out of here? It’s a massive water tank, ten tons at least, and they don’t have anything to move it with!”
That question continued to worry me, even as Laura and I retreated from the dune, even as the others prepared to ambush the Cassandran garrison. With me leading the charge, it went off mostly without a hitch; oh, sure, we didn’t achieve perfect surprise, but we got pretty close. The Cassandran soldiers were still rushing to take cover when the Bluerosers opened fire, and I found myself on a hillside outside of the ruined village neck-deep in werewolves, but it was nothing unfamiliar. Hell, having a dozen girls with rifles at my back meant the werewolf fight was positively easy by my standards.
What the fuck had my life become? What the fuck was I turning into? God, had I become some kind of psycho mercenary killer all of a sudden? One of the werewolves had a necklace on her, a cool-looking rock with a hole drilled through it, hanging on a bit of string. Were they people? Was I killing people just to stop someone else from killing more people?
The rock shook me. Shook me to my core. And the time that the werewolf had seemingly let me attack Tersine, right before I got captured on the airship. Those thoughts, plus the sheer amount of violence I’d been doing… it was one of those moments where, like, you suddenly become really aware of your own self, your own flesh, like you’re watching yourself in third person and going “what the fuck is this piece of shit.” While the soldiers—I was working with the literal army, just another sign of how far I’d fallen—cleared out the oasis and got to celebrating, I found a scattered stone and collapsed down onto it, dejected.
Didn’t even get the chance to mope for long, either, because that mystery about how the Cassandran garrison was planning on taking their water tank back was quickly resolved. It was the airship. Obviously. Someone saw it off in the distance, heading towards the oasis at first and then rapidly turning around once it was close enough to distinguish us from the troops it had left behind.
Which meant that Tersine and the Cassandrans absolutely knew we were here. That, apparently, left Lady Halflance with something of a choice to make; whether to stay at the oasis and risk a counterattack, move out into the desert as soon as possible and hope to evade, or dig in and get ready to crush the opposition from a prepared position. Supposedly it took her hours to decide, which provided a convenient compromise for everyone: Halflance had time to think, and all of the soldiers had a chance to rest while she decided.
I couch all of this in words like “supposedly” and “apparently” because, of course, I wasn’t there for any of it. Earth-side woke me up early that day, thanks to a car accident taking place half a block down from my apartment. Police sirens aren’t good for restful sleep. I didn’t particularly care, of course. Everything was going to shit.
It’s hard to even explain what exactly had gone wrong. The rock on the string was definitely a part of it, that surge of doubt hitting me right in the heart. From there, it had cascaded into a million other doubts, doubts about violence and the pointlessness of revenge and other such things I’ve already enumerated. But there’s an element of it that’s impossible to convey so briefly: fatigue. By that point I had been veering back and forth between the two worlds, the two lives, for months, and I was tired of it. Tired not just of the constant yanking away from where I wanted to be, but tired of being angry about it!
It was a weekend. I spent the day mostly in bed, far from sleepy but unwilling to get up for anything more than the most essential tasks. Yasmin didn’t bother me about it, and for that I was thankful. There was this social media app that I was really starting to get into, that allowed me to talk to people without going anywhere, and I used that to get into arguments about video game characters just to feel something. Then the day ended.
When I returned, Laura was there, cuddling up against me and ready to fill me in on everything that had happened, how long her mother had spent using her as a sounding board, et cetera. She had eventually decided that the best choice would be to dig in and let the Cassandrans come to us, and for two reasons. Firstly, we had tried attacking onto Tersine’s turf again and again, and it inevitably ended with her outwitting us and kicking our asses. The second reason was the airship: as I had learned the hard way, getting caught in the open by that thing’s cannons was a death sentence. Digging in would mean, hopefully, having some measure of defense against the artillery fire.
I volunteered to help dig a trench, on the sole condition that I be allowed to do it all on my own. Even my Selenian body isn’t all that strong: the difference is that it doesn’t get tired, not even after hours spent digging out dirt and sand with a shovel. That rhythmic, physical activity helped me to clear my head, banish some of that ugly malaise and think about the future. What did I actually want to do once this was all over?
I knew that wherever I went, it was going to have to be somewhere that Laura was going too; I wasn’t going to leave her. Maybe it could be just the two of us on the run, trying to make our own way in the world. A skilled archaeologist and an immortal could surely get something done, and it would be an exhilarating contrast to my life on Earth and the stagnation of the last few months on Selene. Or maybe she and I would settle down in New Alderburg, take on new names—or maybe just she would take mine—and live as intellectuals, a doctor of archaeology and a doctor of electromagnetovitalics. Whatever happened, there was going to be no more violence, no more working with police and soldiers; this war was no longer any of my concern.
I stood at the edge of my assigned section of trench, comparing what I’d dug up to the instructions I’d been given, and finding the image before me satisfactory. Leaving the pick sitting by the side of the trench, I went off in search of Laura so that we could discuss everything I’d been thinking of, preferably in private. Eventually I found her outside of the oasis, a mile or so off, surveying the surrounding terrain. Once again her experience with the Desolation was coming in handy.
I offered to help her, and she rightfully pointed out that I would have no idea how to do that, being as I wasn’t a surveyor and didn’t have any experience in the Desolation. So then I begged not to be forced to sit around in the camp waiting for her, and ended up holding a bunch of her gear for most of the afternoon.
It was with an hour or less before I was forced to wake up back on Earth that I finally had a moment—just a moment, supper was about to be served—to actually talk to Laura.
“Alright, Shortcake, spill it,” Laura said. “C’mon, you’ve been doing everything short of humping my leg for the last two hours.”
“I was just thinking…what do you want to do after this? Once Tersine is defeated, where do we go?”
“Well, back to New Alderburg, right?”
“Right…” I shrugged. “I’ll sign up for the university, you’ll finish your PhD and I’ll get mine eventually, and then… How are we going to keep your mother from interfering?”
“Emma. Come on now. My mother doesn’t even know I’m in New Alderburg, and she hasn’t tried looking in almost four years now, she’s not going to…Oh fuck.”
Laura’s expression sank. She must have come to the same realization I’d had. “Yeah. She has to know by now, right?”
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, I’m such an idiot, I should never have come back here.”
I grabbed her by the shoulders, pressing my face into Laura’s chest. “That’s not true. You did what you had to in order to beat Tersine. Plus, it means I haven’t had to do all this alone.”
“Everything I’ve built in New Alderburg was based on–on–on her not knowing where I was or what I was doing. If she decides to try to force me back, I’m done for.”
What I wanted to do was bring up the discussion I’d had, the way that I’d managed to break through Lady Halflance’s shell, even if only for a moment. Fortunately for everyone involved, I’d learned a thing or two about keeping my mouth shut. “I think I can fix her” was the absolute last thing that Laura wanted to hear.
“We could always run away again. Run somewhere else. Just the two of us.”
Laura grinned a nervous rictus. “That’d be a hell of a thing. Vagrant archaeologist, will unearth potsherds for spare change.”
“Well, it’s either that or kill your mom. But I feel like that would make it worse. Maybe I’ll just scare her, make some threats about what’ll happen if she ever tries interfering.”
“That would be nice,” Laura said. “Cloudy-heads would never let me hear the end of it, though.”
That was the end of that conversation. Laura pulled me into a kiss, and it wasn’t long after that before we ran off to eat our daily allotment of rehydrated soup, hard bread, and canned, salty meat. We murmured to one another about moving to the Miranian Principalities after we were both done with university, somewhere that Lady Halflance would surely not be able to follow, while I faded away.
It was an ordinary Sunday on Earth, though substantially less miserable than the day before. I cleaned the apartment a little, tried out a new nerve-healing salt bath that was supposed to help, allowed myself to relax. When I woke up on Selene once more, we were under siege.