Awake

Epilogue - Rain

There was work to do. Babies had been born and wounds had been healed and lives had been saved and lost in the time since Miriam had come back to life. There was little to nothing to eat and the ground was hard to sleep on. The sun was tortuous in the day and the night was cold.

Part of Miriam thought longingly of prepared food three times a day, of as much coffee as she wanted, of soft mattresses and the privacy of her own room, of a blind and legless boy with a clever mind and a smile like the sunrise. But the rest of her was falling back into the old rhythm, back into being Mother Miriam, back into suffering and loving and being loved in return.

Dreams are better than reality but Miriam would never have exchanged the two. She had her children back, and they were safe. She could protect again. She could care again. She wouldn't starve, not while Rafe had anything to do with it. Everything was going to be alright.

"It's a good omen," she decided.

"What is?" Rafe asked, having retreated to the shelter of the canvas roof.

Miriam pointed, "Rain."

Sandy was neck-deep in the river when the downpour began. He had insisted on teaching Cass to swim, though it was a slower process he thought than even his own learning had been. The boy simply couldn't get the hang of it.

"No!" Sandy cried, as Cass spluttered beneath the surface again. "Look, I'll help you."

Cass glared at him but did as he was told.

"Here," Sandy placed his hands under Cass's back, holding him up. "Pretend the water's a mattress. Let it support you."

Very slowly, Sandy removed his hands and Cass was floating, his head back in the water, light as a leaf. It was then that the drops began to spatter down, shattering the surface of the river into a crazed web of spreading spirals and sending Cass choking down beneath the surface again.

"Don't panic!" Sandy dragged him up to the surface. "It's not dangerous!"

Cass shivered, flinching away from every raindrop that landed on his skin. Sandy let him stagger to the side of the river and crawl out, hiding beneath the comparative shelter of the trees. Sandy stayed in the water, raising his arms up to the sky.

"It's not dangerous," he called. "It's perfectly normal."

"What is it?" Cass shouted, in response. "It's horrible."

Sandy laughed, "Rain!"

Nigs was stiff and sore from his still-healing knife wound as he made his way slowly down the stairs. It was the first day that he'd been allowed out of bed and his mother insisted upon fussing over him at every opportunity, about which Nigs was yet to have any complaints.

The small cottage kitchen was cosy, smelling of baking bread. There was a small vase of flowers on the table. Upstairs, in Nigs's own slope-ceilinged bedroom, there were more flowers, a perfect bunch of wildflowers brought to him by Sarah, the girl he knew he would one day marry. It had been good to see her.

Nigs couldn't get enough of it, drinking it all in: the smells, the sounds, the textures; the gingham curtains in the window, the saucepans gleaming on their rack, the little jars of herbs behind the stove. The wooden chair scraped against the slate flooring as he dragged it back and sat down.

"How are you feeling?" his mother asked. "Well enough for lunch?"

"I should think so," Nigs said, sincerely. "I'm starving."

"You always are," his mother rolled her eyes. "There's a letter for you. Came this morning."

Nigs's eyes lit up. "It did? Where is it?"

She knocked it across the table to him and he eagerly seized the battered envelope with its smudged handwriting and bent corners. He brought it to his nose and breathed in the smell of salt.

"It's from your brother, I reckon," his mother told him. "Nobody else would be writing to you from abroad."

Nigs went to tear the envelope open when he stopped, arrested, by the sound of hammering on the roof.

"What is that?" he asked.

"What?" his mother frowned at him. "Oh. The rain. Looks to be a storm brewing up. That won't do my geraniums any favours."

But Nigs was past caring about geraniums. He abandoned the precious letter from his brother and ran to the door, ignoring the stabbing pains in his chest. He threw the door open and stepped out, bare foot, into the tiny box of a front garden beyond, overflowing with pink geraniums.

The rain beat down on his head and hands, froze his feet and fingers, turned the view of the sea to a hazy blur. It battered into the dry ground with as much aggression as it could muster and Nigs could almost hear the thirsty earth guzzling it down. He threw his arms wide, watched it fall.

Exultantly, he cried, "Rain!"

Ebb was on his own when it first began to fall. He was still too badly injured to be of much use building houses in the new settlements so he had taken to solitary walks, exploring, moving as best he could on his crutches. He liked the silence. He liked having time for his own thoughts.

Since the three had gone to sleep again, the bond that had held the six sleepers and their revolutionary council together had broken away. Carmen was off doing her own thing by the sea. Sandy was working with his medic friends still, and consulting a scholar named Tae about making a better chair for Puck. Natalia was busy acclimatising herself to the world.

Nobody had time for Ebb. Perhaps it was better that way. One day soon, he was sure, he would find a job to do. He would go to them and take whatever work was offered, with some complaint but not too much, and he would try, for the first time in his life. Try to be a good person. Try to be considerate. Try, perhaps, years in the future, to win Sandy back.

Or maybe not. Maybe he would continue like this, this blissful solitude, this whimsical self-discovery, walking alone through the trees and living off the berries he trusted not to poison him and the animals he trapped himself. Maybe he'd become a children's story, of the mysterious man in the woods who would lure them away and eat them, something made to frighten them, a tale built almost on truth.

There are worse ways to survive.

When the heavens opened and the rain poured down, Ebb stopped still. It had been so long, in either life, since he had stood outside in the rain. It was cold, and his clothes clung to him, and some of his provisions would be spoiled. But it could be worse, could be so much worse.

Ebb turned his face upwards and closed his eyes, letting the raindrops splash on his eyelids, cling to his eyelashes, kiss his mouth, run their miniature rivers down his cheeks. It felt almost as though they were washing him away, cleaning him out, baptising him in his new life.

Ebb whispered, "Rain."