Page 18 of Rarely Pure and Never Simple
After dinner,Damien found himself calm and comfortable enough to share the common room with Blaze. They'd talked through the case—the kids involved, possible motives and outcomes—and now took refuge each in his own quiet reading. To be fair,Damientook refuge. If Blaze ever needed to hide from anything, it certainly wasn't conversation.
He did, however, respect Damien's social retreat.
Too keyed up for fiction, Damien resorted to searching news sources instead, specifically for any mention of a certain variant activist. The vid of the interrupted political rally had perched firmly in Damien's imagination, and he couldn't deny a certain curiosity.ShudderMcKenziebrought up results for newscasts, vids both official and civilian, and one brief interview in which the reporter talked mainly about how brave he was to be talking to a terrorist, and only a brief few seconds of McKenzie.
Damien wrinkled his nose at the ego masquerading as a journalist, sinceterroristappeared to be a fearmongering exaggeration. While McKenzie wasn't a traditional activist with rally or march permits or a lobbying organization, his tactics were generally dramatically disruptive rather than destructive.
He rode in on his earth wave to interrupt speeches. He'd somehow managed to smuggle a glitter bomb into the vote on a piece of legislation that would have required variants to register to vote every six months. The incident that finally shocked a sputter-laugh from Damien, though, was the neon pink and green graffiti in twenty-foot high letters on the side of the Senate building—Variaphobe Chamber, then in smaller letters on the bottom right—Love,Shudder.
Blaze lifted an eyebrow at him. "What's so hilarious?"
The urge to saynothingnearly stopped his words, especially after Blaze's previous reaction to Shudder. The vehemence, theweightof his disapproval had seemed… personal. But it felt rude not to answer after laughing. "A variant protest… measure. McKenzie's. It's, ah, colorful."
"Oh, for fucking fuck's sake. Don't you have better things to do with your goddamned downtime?" Blaze snarled, tossed his PiSlice onto the sofa, and stomped off to his bedroom.
Personal. Yes.Damien had to wonder why and he couldn't stop the little niggle of hurt from Blaze's reaction. For a fleeting moment, Shudder McKenzie had made him forget about the case, about everything, and had made him smile. He'd just wanted to share that moment…
With a ghost of a sigh, he retreated to his own bedroom. Best if he tried to sleep, anyway.
Heading eastthe next morning on US 6, Damien leaned his head against the window, hoping the cool interior glass would ease his headache. It grew worse with each passing mile, which was never a good sign. The desolate landscape since Fallon didn't help.
Once little towns would have dotted the highway. Now, only the empty-eyed husks and bleached-bone frames of abandoned buildings stared out at the rare passing car. Late twenty-first century disasters had rendered so much of the interior barren. Super plagues that wiped out communities, starvation because crops were unable to withstand new fungal infestations, the series of extreme weather-related disasters tagged by some historians as the enviropocalypse, all of these had contributed in wiping out eighty percent of the continent's population. Slowly, the population had rebounded, but only in certain coastal areas and the most northern of the Midwestern cities.
Damien had once been to the sunken city of New Orleans to track a rogue water whisperer. He shuddered and huddled closer into his coat at the memory. The top spires of sunken buildings and the ghostly fingers of communications towers were all that remained, the few residents feral, shy creatures who poled about in coracles and refused to speak to him. A community more of the dead than the living, he had been unable to shake the eerie disquiet of the place ever since.
"You okay, Twitch?"
"Don't call me that," Damien murmured absently. A sudden prickle had run across his scalp. He stayed quiet and still, feeling for the tugs in his brain. "Turn. Blaze, turn right."
Blaze turned onto the county road without question, his eyes darting between the deserted, rutted road and Damien. "Are we close?"
The peak of Currant Mountain filled most of the view through the windshield, painted in purples and blues by the setting sun. The scenery was breathtaking, gorgeous in its travel-vid perfection, and Damien shivered in growing horror.
"Yes."
"Damien?" The alarm in Blaze's voice pulled him back a bit.
"Go slower."
The low rumble of Blaze's growl reached him even through the increased hum of the trail's pull. "Talk to me. You're scaring the holy hell out of me."
"Hotter. We're hotter."
"I have the feeling you're not talking about my looks."
"Blaze."
"Sorry."
Nausea climbed up Damien's sternum. The prickles on his scalp became fire ants. "Turn. Off road. Toward those rocks."
Blaze hit the maglev pad on the dash without comment and waited for that stomach-lurching moment when the wheels turned perpendicular to the frame so the powerful anti-grav magnets pointed toward the ground. While the ride was smoother than on wheels, jolts and dips still shook them as the ground rose and grew rockier.
They eased over boulders and finally through a cleft in the rock face in front of them. Evening had already reached this mini-canyon, long shadows obscuring rock formations so Blaze had to slow even more.
A hand patted Damien's shoulder and he jerked, slamming his elbow into the door. Pain from the impact lanced up his arm and whiteout panic blanketed his brain. He snarled and lashed out.
The world eased back into focus when Damien half turned in his seat, his raised fist clutched tight in Blaze's hand.
