Vagabond (6 page)

“Don’t they realize how dangerous it is?”
 

“You have to stop thinking like a—“

“A Citizen? I would, but there are just some things not worth the risk, Xavi. That’s dangerous. You have to see that.”
 

“Regardless. This is one of the few times you need to be blunt out here. It’s not exactly something you want someone to misunderstand.”
 

I never had to be direct about the topic, since Xavi had always been with me. This was the first time I’d sleep without his warmth, and it was terrifying. I didn’t even have room to feel compassion for they boy’s confusion. “What’s forking?” he asked, and I knew I should have been easier on him.
 

I just lacked the energy. “Use your imagination,” I spat.
 

He blushed. “They do that out here? Without permits?”

“They do. I don’t.”
 

His fear was useful. Fresh out of a Colony, he’d be too scared to touch a girl without the proper documents. He had that vibe about him, but, then again, he had blown up an entire freaking train. Who knew what he was capable of? “Don’t they realize how dangerous it is? The diseases they can create? The—“ His voice was losing that scratchy edge to it as he ran the gambit of all the questions I had once asked. It was returning to his original husky sound with every sip of water he took. Even in his indignation, there was an edge of sultry to it, and it unnerved me. The voice felt familiar in ways I couldn’t pinpoint.
 

Instead of answering his fears, I let it be. I laid down so that my back was towards him, and when sleep came, it came hard.
 

“Why not feet to face?” I kept looking for a loophole around it, but I was running out of energy. The rain was melodic, and the harder I fought it, the more my eyes wanted to droop like wilted flowers.
 

“You never know who kicks at night,” Xavi answered.
 

This made me laugh. “Doesn’t a sleeping bag stop that?”
 

He was already facing the wall of the tent, showing his back to me. “Sometimes it only traps feet together, and a face gets a double whammy. But give it a shot if you like.”
 

The rain didn’t wake me up, because it wasn’t one of those hard ones. It was the drippy kind. It traveled the pathways of leaves and plinked through the branches above.
 

I knew we should have taken turns to keep watch, but I also knew we were both too tired. If the Militia found us, they found us. We were careful and made it pretty far, but, if they fell for none of my tricks, I didn’t have any more up my sleeve to throw them off unless I got rest.
 

I woke in a groggy daze. I was in a safe cocoon of arms, and I didn’t feel like opening my eyes. It was too peaceful with the drip-drip of rain and the warmth of Xavi’s arms. I turned my body into his neck, but the smell was off. It was too clean, and the skin was too smooth. Xavi’s skin wore the roughness of the tracks. I forced my eyes opened and gasped. I tried to push my body out from under the boy’s, but his arm was deadweight and he was dead asleep.
 

“Excuse me,” I said, nudging his chest.
 

He was just as disoriented as he woke, and let out a little yelp before backing away. For a second, our eyes were millimeters apart, and the blue-greens marbling in and out of each other were a little too perfect.

Then realization and distance gained momentum, and his skin no longer touched mine. I was free of him.
 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he whispered.
 

“It’s okay,” I said, and it surprised me to mean it.
 

Since Randolf showed up, Xavi kept his distance from me, and it allowed for Randolf and me to become close. He reminded me so much of Daddy, with his easy laughter and calculated wit, and I learned so much from him since Xavi wouldn’t give me the time of day. It amazed me how Xavi changed under the eyes of others. Wary. Friendly. Cautious. Sharing. Secretive. The contradictions were woven so deep in everything he said and did. That moment under the canopy had run out of steam, and it never returned. It was like he realized how I felt about him had changed, and it made him uncomfortable in ways he’d never been around me. I even think it’s why he encouraged Randolf to stick around a bit longer.
 

The world had become colder than cold. So cold it burned. Xavi got the tent set up with fumbling, cold fingers while Randolf had his up in no time. He bent down to help Xavi since I was too full of shivers to even move. I couldn’t figure out how Randolf didn’t even have minor shakes. “It’d be warmer if we cuddle-puddle,” Randolf suggested. Xavi looked truly apologetic when he declined on my behalf, and I tried not to look relieved. As well as I was getting to know our new friend, it still made the idea of sharing a tent uncomfortable.

“No worries! I’m not even cold, you yellow-bellied newbies,” he joked.
 

Over the months, Randolf had proven to be all kinds of wonderful. He never pushed, and he always understood. “It’s the Bond of the Vagabond,” he explained once. “Never take offense. Even if someone is robbing you blind, it’s usually nothing personal. Survival is a funny thing, and we all react differently to it. Some react to fear and forget to be human and humane, but that doesn’t mean they have malicious intentions. People have different boundaries, and I promise to respect yours, hon.” And he did. He never made me feel bad for feeling uncomfortable.
 

Sleep wasn’t coming. I’d stopped even trying.
 

“I know yo-you won’t like this, but yo-you-you’re going to get hypo-therm-ermia if we—“ Xavi said. Both our lips bordered on the color blue, and even his dark skin had turned pale. “Don’t free-ee-eeze on me,” he whispered as he began to strip down. I was too cold to be shocked— too cold to help. He fumbled with zippers and buttons until we were in our underwear, then, he zipped himself into my bag, piled his blanket on top of us, and shoved our clothes inside the bottom of the bag. “They’ll be-ee warmer tomorr-ow,” he explained, not that I was listening. I just focused on how warm his cold arms were, as if I could feel the blood, hot under his icy skin. He was smooth and rough. Callused and perfect.
 
I felt a subtle kind of warm, and my teeth slowed to an unobtrusive chatter. “Yo-ou okay?” His breath was hot and cold on my ear, and I pulled my face into his neck to smell the pine in the crevices of his skin. I nodded. I was okay. And we settled into sleep with our legs intwined like climbing ivy.
 
 
 

It made sense now. I knew what it was like to need the warmth of a stranger— that weird necessity that was only about survival and not about awkward implications. Survival was intimate in a different way— a purer way, and personal space took on new meanings in this world. No matter how much I distrusted someone, I could always trust in their warmth. I didn’t know this boy’s name, but, when it came down to it, his heat was universal. We all have in us an energy that can light fires in the coldest of situations.
 

I knew it now, but I didn’t know it then.
 

I wish I had.
 

Xavi helped me re-dress. He tugged the beanie cap over my tangled hair and pulled up the hood of my jacket. It was all so surgical that I didn’t think to blush. A part of me wanted it to be different— wanted a reason to blush— wanted him to look at me like he did under the canopy that day we met Randolf, but that was so far gone it wasn’t worth thinking about.
 

“Randolf? You awake?” he yelled out to the other tent as he unzipped ours. It wasn’t snowing anymore, but the air suggested it may as well have been. The cold front had been unexpected and terrifying, and luck had not been on our side. Train after train had passed us by— none of them slow enough to hitch onto. But I felt hopeful about today. Today had to be different. I could just feel it.
   

I stepped out into the sting after Xavi, and wished we were still wrapped up in the sleeping bags. “Randolf! Rise and shine, buddy. Let’s get out of this hell-hole before it gets worse,” Xavi continued.
 

But silence dripped off the old man’s tent like blood running cold.
 

“Randolf?” Xavi asked, but I knew without needing to know.
 

I didn’t want to see, but I watched anyways, as Xavi unzipped Randolf’s tent.
 

Later, when Xavi began to dig through Randolf’s pack, I protested. We could at least leave his things be. Besides, what if he woke up? But I knew that was just a fantasy. Death looked blank in ways life did not. “It’s the Bond of the Vagabond,” Xavi answered my thoughts. “He’d want you to have it.”
 

I held the pack in my hands and felt a volley of shivers that had nothing to do with the cold. I knew Randolf wouldn’t have taken offense. He’d have wanted me to take it so that I had one instead of none. We took his synth-e-down vest too. It was entirely too big on me, but I wore it like a memory. His boots were too small for Xavi, so we left those. There was money in his pocket, and Xavi also took his belt. “Can never have too many of these. Good for strapping things together,” he explained as he began to pull Randolf from the tent. The old man was too heavy, and I had to help carry him. The weight of his body was different— like life existed only to add a bit of buoyancy to a body.
 

He must have died in his sleep, because his eyes were closed. He almost looked peaceful as we set him up under the tree.
 

“I should have known,” Xavi whispered. “He’d stopped shivering. I should have known that was a bad sign and not a good one! Hypothermia.”

Seeing Xavi cry poured molten hot guilt into my veins. It pounded against me harder than the cold, and I searched for any excuse not to break down as Xavi packed up.
 

Xavi inventoried what was left of Randolf: things that could never add up completely to who Randolf was. A tent to trade. An extra sleeping bag. Money. Food. A compass. A water purifier.
 

And the picture. A little girl and a small woman. Names were written under each face. Lilly. Margaret. I knew they too were dead. Xavi put the picture in Randolf’s breast pocket before folding up his jacket.
 
“Some of this’ll be bulky to carry, but it will help keep us warm until we can trade it,” Xavi explained.
 

Then, he knelt down next to Randolf and said something into his ear. I didn’t know what he whispered. I didn’t know what else I could say.
 

We left Randolf sitting under the tree as if he were taking a nap— peaceful in ways I’d never seen him before.
 

And I walked away— carrying a burden I’d never known before.
 

The boy was startled. He crammed his body into the corner of my small tent, and looked like a trapped animal— exactly how I looked often enough not too long ago. “I’m so, so sorry,” he whispered again. His eyes darted back and forth, as if by simply touching a girl, he’d sent out some invisible beacon and the Militia would find us.
 

“I’m pretty sure we have bigger worries. I’m sorry I turned into you. I thought you were someone else.”
 

At that his eyes went wide and the colors bent inside of them. “You?
You
sleep like this often?”

“Pretty much every night.” I was starting to see why Xavi’d found me so entertaining during those first months. This guy’s reactions were priceless.
 

“With who?”

And there it was. Who? A great question, because as far as he knew, I was alone, and he was right. “Doesn’t matter. He’s gone.” Admitting it in words was hard. It made if final. Real. And I took the words like medicine to the heart. I acted calloused, because this stranger needed to see me that way. He needed to know that he’d be wise not to mess with or depend on me. He needed to believe that I needed no one.
 

I needed to believe it too.
 

Being ditched is a long process… and a short one. Denial makes it go on longer than needed, and I clung to what was no longer there. It made me despise, want, and disbelieve the truth, even when it was right there in the open.
 

The others had left without Legs.
 

Legs.
 

That’s all I could see in my head when I thought of her or looked at her.
 

The next few nights, Xavi insisted I sleep in the tent while he kept watch. “We’re near the Rebels, and it’s not safe here. You get some sleep, Niko.”
 

So, the first night, I did.
 

The second night, I heard her giggles.
 

The third night, I heard the moans and sighs.
 

The fourth day, they started laying out the rest of the hints.
 

But I didn’t believe any of it. I wasn’t a Vagabond at heart. I didn’t know what it meant to move on. I didn’t know how to un-suture my heart when I had tethered it to another.
 

So my denial forced them to have the awkward conversation. They spelled it all out for me, and I picked up the hints then.
 

“You can come if you want,” translated to, “Go. Go. Go.”
 

Chapter Five

The world was soggy and droopy, but the rain had stopped somewhere during the waning day. Bits and pieces of blue dappled sky poked through the trees, and I knew it’d be beautiful for the rest of the day.
 

What wasn’t beautiful was my stomach as it twisted in hunger. At first, I waited to eat until after I deconstructed camp. Xavi warned, once,
“A tent once lost, is gone forever, but you can always eat on the run.”
The boy attempted to help but only managed to get in my way. His stomach growled loudly, and I clenched my jaw in guilty annoyance. When my pack was ready to go, I still didn’t eat, because after I mentally calculated the measly provisions I had left, I was reminded I didn’t have enough to share. It was still days upon days from the next Colony on foot if I couldn’t catch another train, and why should I go hungry for the boy who’d only caused me trouble? It’d be best to ditch him and then eat.