APATHETIC AND HERE, I…
No!…
He had been right in thinking that another sandstorm was to break up soon… but he hadn’t foreseen that ’soon’ would mean ‘in the next minutes’. A loud crack of thunder boomed above the dunes all of a sudden, preventing him to properly hear what the Soldier was saying on the other side of the line. During the time he had spent scanning the different channels, he had never stopped wondering if he was committing a mistake or not; yet he had to admit… he had to admit that he had been quite surprised. The man simply wouldn’t stop until he found her. Maybe he could… maybe he could begin to like him a little, now. Maybe. If they went out of this alive…
At least for her.
Her.
Her.
Why did he have to be always so… angry when it came to the both of them. He knew. He knew that he could never be more to her than a ghost from the past, a node of feelings she would clutch at, and it wasn’t out of necessity either - she truly loved him. But she needed something else, too. Someone else. Someone who was alive. Someone who could do more for her than simply look at death slowly creeping around, circling around her like one of these hungry Nepal vultures. Someone to protect her when she couldn’t do it herself anymore, someone she could rely on, someone whose means would still be stronger than his. He had learnt to phase with the grid all the time, but without the grid, he was nothing. Nothing else than a ghost trying to force her body to move when she was already too far away to hear his desperate screams.
“Try ta make it ta S…!” were the last words he had heard before the radio had died for good this time, and he had all of a sudden felt more down than he ever had in these hours of trouble. What an irony, once again. He had been talking to the man he disliked the most, yet this man was the only one he could trust–he was sure that her other friends were looking for her too, and would have been ready to do the same for her, but the storm… the storm, the distance, the already half-broken radio… Cratty had been the only one he had managed to reach, to talk to, in the hopes that the radio’s weakening signal would last enough to allow him to triangulate their position. And he realized, to his own surprise, that in a way, he had… sort of enjoyed these few minutes of actually speaking to him, without Jen’s feelings clouding his perception of events this time. When had she said… these words to him? “Ya could be friends… I’m sure ya could… if only… if only he wasn’t…”
If only I wasn’t such a fool. If only I could accept that she has the right to live, without having to bear with me all the time! If only I could at last manage to die properly, this time.
But the radio was dead now.
He had told him they were in the north, yet he wasn’t even sure of this. When she had escaped… when he had managed to take control during these last minutes of haziness, all their eyes upon her, smiling, maughing at the state in which she was sliding, mocking her, delighting over all that she was experiencing… the craft had been waiting outside, as expected–she had programmed it to act this way, after all, always following her from a safe distance, in case an emergency case were to occur–but he hadn’t been able to do much more than forcing her body in it and turn on the automatic pilot-control once they had been high enough in the sky. It had been the desert then, and one looking like the wide one in the north… the Wasteland plains, very likely, as they hadn’t had travelled very long from the Grid exit to where they had detained her. But he wasn’t completely certain. When the aircraft had been taken in the sudden storm, her already unable to understand what was happening around her, he had done his best to stabilize it and land in a safe place… but the red sky and burning wind had simply destroyed the stabilizers, sent the plane in an erratic flying loop, and caused the accident that had left her… them… lost.
Sandstorms were so common here, you could never trust the landmarks, ever changing, ever moving with the dunes…
He was so tired… so tired that he couldn’t keep his control anymore. She collapsed again, eyes half-open, on the command panel, and he stayed there, unmoving, looking at the invading darkness. Another louc crack, another strike of thunder over the plains. Had they headed west, east or north? Would Cratty ever find them, with the few information he had been able to give him?… Without map… without a term or a wristpad to calculate the coordinates… without any recognizable landmark around… he had done his best. Which, in fact, wasn’t a lot.
Hurry up… Soldier… he silently prayed, knowing, though, that the storm would cover all tracks and all sight of the craft, burying it deeper, and maybe even break what was left of it under the assaults of the fiery wind.
Hurry up… please… For her… I can’t do it anymore… I can’t…
A sparkle of willpower exploded in him again. He couldn’t leave her! He had to do something! He had to… to force her to walk, even in the sandstorm… to find a better shelter… The patrollers wouldn’t be mad enough to go outside with such a weather raging around. He needed to take one of the stims… at least one that could regenerate part of her nanobots… heal her… whatever… what did she have in store in the plane… all in case of an ‘emergency’?… They had taken the only backpack she had been carrying at the time, and her gun, but they didn’t know there was a plane… they didn’t… She’d die in the desert if she went out… she’d have died even if in perfect physical condition… but if the violent wind ripped off some parts of the aircraft… if the sand achieved to collapse in the inside… burying her… she’d die as well…
Jen… Jen-chan… Hear m…
His thoughts snapped again, throwing him back into the darkness of her own mind, and he simply gave up.
He was so tired now…
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