Prologue
THERE WAS A certain feeling about it all. The journey, each day dragging longer and more dangerous. The surroundings, so hopeless and deserted except for the occasional animal or human scavenger. What was left. Who was left. It made her feel like the world had already ended. That maybe there was no point in travelling so far, risking it all, wasting the little time she had left, when she should be back home, maybe underground. . . she should be writing more detailed entries in her journal, recording every little thing she could, because her mind would erase it by sunrise. Even if it didn’t matter, in the end. She was already beginning to forget, everyone was. She scribbled her goal in the faded blue lines of her journal over and over again; the direction the compass was pointing toward last, where she planned to go, what she planned to do, what she planned to say. Yet when morning crawled across cracked pavement and slithered through ancient trees and hollow buildings, she sat with her back on a sturdy trunk of oak, the book in her hands, and let tears drop and splatter over the quick scribbles of ink inside because that was all they seemed to be. Scribbles. Completely senseless words and shapes she couldn’t understand despite how hard she wracked her mind. She nearly tore out her bright blonde hair, desperate, her bony fingers entangled in the almost transparent strands. She had to understand. She had to remember. After a few hours of mental torture, something that she read in her notebook clicked in her brain, resurrecting the memories deep within her skull, drowning her in relief. She could keep going. She could continue.
Writing to trigger thought and memory was apparently not her own, original idea. The remaining population of humanity had all attempted to keep their entire lifetimes in their head. They painted names on the walls of their broken homes, the names of their children, their loved ones, or their lovers. They tried to keep pictures in their wallets, some still holding the green, useless bills they once called currency, but even with these efforts all they ever received upon looking at them was a sad, confusing sense of déjà vu. Others thought it more important to remember what had happened to the planet they called home instead. To their cities, their people. What had they done to deserve such punishment? Those who still knew the answer to this question felt obligated to remind themselves and others to remember, remember what they had done. What He had done. They wrote:
REMEMBER THE STIR
repeatedly, scratched in brick walls with stone, or dripping in spray paint. They drew the symbols—three circles in a horizontal line, the one on the left filled in, the other two hollow—to remind themselves that it still wasn’t over. “TWO MORE TO GO,” said the dribbling graffiti outside what used to be a well-known coffee shop. Dread and fear seemed to be the only proper feelings humanity had left. Two more to go. Not unless she could stop it.
She held the compass in her hand and clutched it like a lifeline. Her lifeline. The boy’s lifeline. Humanity’s lifeline. If she could just last long enough to get there. . .
But she knew, deep within, that she would not make it. She wanted to. She needed to. But she wouldn’t. She knew it, but wished she didn’t. Pretended that she didn’t. She wrote in that damned journal like she would always be there to open it the next day. She liked to think that she trekked through the wreckage as if she had all the energy in the world, as if she weren’t starving to death at all, as if her destination were right around the corner.
Winter was coming.
She noticed this as she sat in front of the fire she had started inside a rusty garbage can, deep within a city that didn’t belong to her or seemingly anybody else. Perhaps it had been evacuated. She began to shiver against the warmth of the flame, hit by the type of wind that foretold future low temperatures. Her breath was escaping her dry, cracking lips like smoke, twirling and joining the fire’s and disappearing into the stars above, when she felt something soft curl onto her lap. She was startled to see it was a stranger. The boy had long and wavy dirty blonde hair. He was small and thin, a navy-blue sweater complimenting his light, filthy skin. He hugged her and yawned sleepily, his eyes closed, eyelashes glinting and flickering in front of the fire like gold. For a second, she almost pushed him off in panic. Who was he? She couldn’t remember. . .
But he wasn’t dangerous, she concluded. He couldn’t be. The boy looked so innocent, laying there on her legs, arms around her and held tight. Had this boy been with her this whole time? He looked young, neither a small child or a teenager, about eleven or twelve. A terrifying thought shuddered through her like cold water. This boy. . . without her, he’d be alone. And she suspected that she wouldn’t be with him for much longer. She needed to do something about that. He would need company after she was gone. A companion. A guardian.
At that moment, she knew that this boy was important. Crucial. She thought about snatching her notebook from her bag and see if there was more information on him inside, to know more about him. But she was so tired, so cold. And he was so warm. As she began to drift away into slumber, just a few hours before she would awaken again at dawn, she smiled, for she was remembering the color of his eyes.
