Book of Nadezhda and Elodie

Nadia woke first.

It was their first night alone in the forest.

For Elodie, perhaps, the woods had once been a place with names: trees, birds, trails, weather, the shifting green architecture of the natural world. For Nadia, the forest was only a vast black pressure surrounding her on every side. It had no beauty. Beauty required distance, shape, light.

The forest gave her none of those things.

It gave her wet earth beneath her hands. Cold air against her face. The sour-green scent of crushed leaves and moss. It gave her branches that had slapped her cheeks during their flight, snagged in her hair, and reached from the dark to catch at her clothes.

And it gave her insects.

Nadia could not see them, which made them worse. Every faint touch along her sleeve, every crawling itch at her neck, every tiny movement in her hair became a possible invasion. Nature, as far as Nadia was concerned, was a conspiracy of unseen legs.

She lay still and listened.

Elodie slept beside her, breathing unevenly in the leaf litter and shadow. Somewhere high above them, wind passed through the branches with the low, whispering sound of voices speaking just beyond understanding. Nadia could not tell whether it was close to dawn or still deep night. Time in the forest had become another thing without edges.

Part of her wanted to wake Elodie immediately.

They had to move. They had to find the overpass. They had to put distance between themselves and the iRobots before the machines found their trail.

But a larger and colder part of Nadia had already performed the calculation.

A blind woman and a woman recovering from a traumatic brain injury were walking alone through unfamiliar woods while an army of tireless machines hunted the living.

Capture was not merely possible.

Capture was likely.

Perhaps inevitable.

So why rush?

Why exhaust themselves with fear when the end might already be moving toward them through the trees?

Nadia hated that thought.

She hated it because it was logical.

Their backpacks lay close at hand. Both carried extra water, crackers, peanut butter, and the hard, salty comfort of Rossiyskiy cheese. Both carried a supply of Elodie’s medication, divided carefully between them in case one pack was lost or taken.

Nadia’s pack contained one additional provision.

A small bottle of Tito’s vodka.

It was American, and therefore not ideal, but it was tolerable. More importantly, it came in a bottle small enough to conceal among food and water. No one knew she had packed it.

If anyone found it, Nadia had prepared an excuse.

She was blind.

She could say she had believed it was juice.

This was, in Nadia’s opinion, an excellent explanation for many things.

At last, Elodie stirred beside her.

The movement began softly—a shift of fabric against leaves—then became a low moan of pain.

Nadia’s hands moved at once.

Marina had scored the medication bottles with a knife before they separated, carving small marks into their plastic so Nadia could distinguish one bottle from another by touch. Nadia ran her fingertips over the notches, counted them, found the correct bottle, and placed the pills in her palm.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” she said gently.

Elodie made another sound, somewhere between a groan and an answer.

“Whenever you are ready, we should get moving.”

Nadia paused, then reached cautiously toward her own hair.

“Also,” she added, “I believe a bug has decided to establish a permanent residence on my head. If you could remove it, that would be amazing.”

The forest whispered around them.

And beneath its black, indifferent branches, the two women prepared to rise and continue walking toward a future neither of them could imagine.