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“Chim?ra,” Henri says.
“What?”
“Chim?ra. Animals on Lorien that could change their shape. They were called Chim?ra.”
“Is that what Hadley was?” I ask, remembering back to the vision I had a few weeks ago, the vision of playing in the yard of my elders’ home when I was lifted in the air by the man wearing a silver and blue suit.
Henri smiles. “You remember Hadley?”
I nod. “I’ve seen him the way that I’ve seen everything else.”
“You’re having the visions even when we’re not training?”
“Sometimes.”
“How often?”
“Henri, who cares about the visions? Why were they loading animals into a rocket? What was a baby doing with them, or was it even a baby? Where did they go? What purpose could they possibly have had?”
Henri thinks about it a moment. He shifts the weight of his body to his right leg. “Probably the same purpose we had. Think about it, John. How else could animals repopulate Lorien? They too would have to go to some sort of sanctuary. Everything was wiped out. Not just the people, but also the animals, and all plant life. Maybe the bundle was just another animal. A fragile one, or maybe a young one.”
“Well, where would they go? What other sanctuary exists besides Earth?”
“I think they went to one of the space stations. A rocket with Loric fuel would have been able to make it that far. Maybe they thought the invasion would be short-lived, and they thought they could wait it out. I mean, they would have been able to live on the space station for as long as their supplies lasted.”
“There are space stations close to Lorien?”
“Yes, two of them. Well, therewere two of them. I know for sure the larger of the two was destroyed at the same time as the invasion. We lost contact with it less than two minutes after the first bomb fell.”
“Why didn’t you mention that before, when I first told you about the rocket?”
“I had assumed that it was empty, that it went up in the air as a decoy. And I think that if one space station was destroyed, then the other was as well. Their trip, unfortunately, was probably done in vain, whatever their goal was.”
“But what if they came back when their supplies ran out? Do you think they could survive on Lorien?” I ask in desperation. I already know the answer, already know what Henri will say, but I ask anyway in order to hold on to some sort of hope that we aren’t alone in all this. That maybe, somewhere far away, there are others like us, waiting, monitoring the planet so that they, too, might one day return and we won’t be alone when we go back.
“No. There is no water there now. You saw that for yourself. Nothing but a barren wasteland. And nothing can survive without water.”
I sigh and scoot back down into the bed. I drop my head onto the pillow. What’s the point in arguing?
Henri is right and I know it. I saw it for myself. If the globes that he pulled from the Chest are to be trusted, then Lorien is nothing more than wasteland, a dump. The planet still lives but on the surface there is nothing. No water. No plants. No life. Nothing but dirt and rocks and the rubble of the civilization that once existed.
“Did you see anything else?” Henri asks.
“I saw us on the day we left. All of us at the airship right before we took off.”
“It was a sad day.”
I nod. Henri crosses his arms and gazes out the window, lost in thought. I take a deep breath. “Where was your family during it all?” I ask.
My lights have been off for a good two or three minutes, but I can see the whites of Henri’s eyes staring back at me.
“Not with me, not on that day,” he says.
We are both silent for a time and then Henri shifts his weight.
“Well, I better get back to bed,” he says, bringing an end to the conversation. “Get some sleep.”
After he leaves I lie there thinking of the animals, of the rocket, of Henri’s family and how I’m sure he never got the chance to say good-bye to them. I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep. I never can when the images visit me, when I feel Henri’s sadness. It must be a thought constantly on his mind, as it would be for anyone who left under the same circumstances, leaving the only home you’ve ever known, all the while knowing you will never see the people you love again.
I grab my cell phone and text Sarah. I always text her when I can’t sleep, or she texts me if it’s the other way around. Then we’ll talk for as long as it takes to become tired. She calls me twenty seconds after I hit the send button.
“Hey, you,” I answer.
“You can’t sleep?”
“No.”
“What’s the matter?” she asks. She yawns on the other end of the line.
“Was just missing you is all. Been lying in bed staring at the ceiling for like an hour now.”
“You’re silly. You saw me like six hours ago.”
“I wish you were still here,” I say. She moans. I can hear her smile through the darkness. I roll to my side and hold the phone between my ear and the pillow.
“Well, I wish I was still there, too.”
We talk for twenty minutes. The last half of the call is both of us just lying there listening to the other breathe. I feel better after having talked to Sarah, but I find it even harder to fall back asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
FOR ONCE, SINCE WE ARRIVED IN OHIO, THINGSseem to slow for a time. School ends quietly and for winter break we have eleven days off. Sam and his mother spend most of it visiting his aunt in Illinois. Sarah stays home. We spend Christmas together. We kiss when the ball drops at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Despite the snow and the cold, or maybe even in retaliation against it, we go for long walks through the woods behind my house, holding hands, kissing, breathing in the chilly air beneath the low gray skies of winter. We spend more and more time together. Not a day passes during that whole break that we don’t see each other at least once.
We walk hand in hand beneath an umbrella of white from the snow piled atop the tree branches overhead. She has her camera with her and occasionally stops to take pictures. Most of the snow on the ground lies undisturbed aside from the tracks we have made on the walk out. We follow them back now, Bernie Kosar in the lead, darting in and out of the brambles, chasing rabbits into small groves and thickets of thorny bush, chasing squirrels up trees. Sarah wears a pair of black earmuffs. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are red with the cold, making her eyes look bluer. I stare at her.
“What?” she asks, smiling.
“Just admiring the view.”
She rolls her eyes at me. For the most part the woods are dense aside from sporadic clearings we continually stumble upon. I’m not sure how far in any one direction the woods extend, but in all of our walks we have yet to reach their end.
“I bet it’s beautiful here in the summer,” Sarah says. “We can probably picnic in the clearings.”
An ache forms in my chest. Summer is still five months away and if Henri and I are here in May, we will have made it seven months in Ohio. That is very nearly the longest we have ever stayed in one place.
“Yeah,” I agree.
Sarah looks at me. “What?”
I look at her questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘what?’”
“That wasn’t very convincing,” she says. A mess of crows fly by overhead, squawking noisily.
“I just wish it was summer now.”
“Me too. I can’t believe we have to go back to school tomorrow.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me.”
We enter another clearing, larger than the others, an almost perfect circle a hundred feet in diameter.
Sarah lets go of my hand, runs into the middle of it, and drops into the snow, laughing. She rolls to her back and begins making a snow angel. I drop beside her and do the same. The tips of our fingers just barely touch while we make the wings. We get up.