Earth, After ✔️

Day Four

There was no such thing as a proper goodbye. But their water was gone. Their food was low. They needed shelter. And the only thing stronger than Raina's grief over losing Perry was the absolute need to stop it from happening to the others.

The headache swelled, pulsing in her head, each movement jarring her. The sun ate into her eyes and her skin blistered, her thin underclothes unable to shield her. They trudged on. Still no water.

"Over there," Rance said, pointing to a cluster of trees, the beginnings of a small forest.

"I can't make it," Ava panted, dropping to her knees. "I can't."

"You've made it this far," Arleigh said, crouching down in front of her. "It's just a few more steps. We'll wait out the day in the shade."

"I need water," she whined.

"We're all thirsty," Finn said. "We have none."

"Ava," Raina began, but Kieran shook his head.

"I'll carry you there," he said.

"But you're injured--"

"And she has heat stroke," Kieran said as Ava trembled.

They made their way into the shade, clustering under the thickest of it and dropping to the ground. There they remained, swallowing against sticky throats as the sun fell out of the sky, tumbling into evening. Raina could not get Perry out of her mind. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw his face, the look in his eye, that last look, that suffering--

"Hey," Rance said. He settled in beside her, stretching out his body alongside hers. "Don't think."

"You know me better than that."

He lay in silence for a moment, the two of them staring at the shadows stretching through the branches above them. Raina took a shaky breath. Perry.

"You know, before this, I kept telling myself that when I got older and tired of flying, I'd become an artist."

Raina turned to him. "What?"

He smiled, a wilted thing, a slight crook of the mouth as his eyes stared both at her and faraway, back into his memories. "Since I was little I've always wanted to do it."

"I never took you for that kind of person," Raina said. "All these years I've known you..."

"What did you want to do?" Rance asked. "Was this it? Storm chasing?"

Raina shrugged. "My ship's been in my family since the first days in the sky. My father gifted her to me two years ago, and I know he wanted me to take over the business in a few more." Thoughts of family filtered into her mind, and her face fell, the sunset reminding her of her brother's rosy cheeks.

"What would you do, if you could?" Rance pressed, fighting to keep her mind away from the threshold of pain above which she dangled, held aloft only by his voice.

Raina thought for a moment. "A historian."

His shock appeared even greater than hers. He barely restrained a laugh. "Why would you ever want to know about what we were before? Look where we are!"

Raina stared out from their copse of trees. "Since we were little we've seen and heard and dreamed about the effects of the old world. I want to know what led us here. All of human history is a pattern of the same mistakes, growing in scale until the planet gave in. I just... I want to know what it was like. To lead us here. To pollute their own air, choke their seas full of waste. Because they knew what they were doing. I just..." She turned her head to face him, swallowing against the sandpaper in her throat. "What led us so far into greed that we literally consumed the earth, until it had no choice but to strike back?"

"Human nature," Rance said.

"Yes, but it's so much more. Some groups didn't do it. The ones who took over, who conquered--what would it have been like if they hadn't? If all the... the contingency of history had stacked up differently?"

"I guess," he said. "But what-ifs aren't worth much, after everything we've gone through."

She cracked a smile and rolled her eyes. "Even so. We know what happened. We know why it happened. But I want to learn how it happened."

"I can save you some time: we're horrible people."

Raina laughed--actually laughed. "And yet... and yet, we're not."

Her words felt warm against her tongue as they slipped into the air, the humidity lingering to ease the cold autumn night down to sleep. She watched those words swirl above her, slip between the branches and rise to the stars, reaching for them with the same yearning that seized her chest, a momentary distraction from Perry and her thirst and her fear that was worth a million ships.

"Funny," Rance said, "how we never imagined these things about each other."

"There's a lot to learn when you're dying," Raina said. He laughed.

From the other side of the copse came a rustle as Ava moved, her words weak and halted but crystal clear. "I always wanted to take care of children," she said. "My parents had five kids, and I was the youngest. I saw the way my older siblings took care of each other and me, and I want to mean as much to someone as they did to me. I want to be that important in someone's life."

"I have two brothers," Finn said quietly, hesitantly, as if he did not know if he was welcome. "Jack and Aldridge. They're a bunch older than me. Always better at everything. I started flying 'cause they told me I was a coward."

Slowly, the circle sat up. Her crew shared pieces of themselves they had never bothered to learn of each other, shreds of hope that maybe one day, they would make it back to those lives. Raina wondered what Perry's dream had been. Or Adox's. Or Erin's.

As night fell and the darkness outside their trees grew until it seeped onto their very skin, black as pitch, they all lay down. Raina's eyes followed the traces of moonlight on the branches above, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze.

"When I was six," Maeve said quietly, so softly that Raina almost thought she had imagined it, "I wanted to be a pilot. I dreamed of the old Earth and their fighter planes, of breaking the sound barrier, of hitting the stratosphere."

Ever so slightly, Raina lifted her head.

Maeve sat, knees tucked in, staring out at the blackness with nobody to hear her. "I'd thought storm chasing was close enough, but I guess no one can get what they really want. Not anymore."

There was a rustling as Maeve lay back down, and she fell silent. Her words rang in Raina's ears until sleep finally found her. She dreamt of kids and planes and art, of a place of hope and happiness, where people were able to be the greatest versions of themselves in a world that still had room for them. Her tears dried before she woke up, and she did not even know she'd cried.