Thomas's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

They walked until the sun climbed high and the shadow under the ridge shrank to nothing. Thomas did not know where they were going. The land ahead was flat scrub and pale rock, one dune folding into the next. He stopped once to check their backtrail. Nothing followed. Nothing waited ahead either. Then Emmy lifted her chin. "Listen," she said. Thomas held still. Far off, thin through the heat, came a sound. Metal on metal, maybe. A engine, maybe. It was too distant to name. He crouched beside her. "That's people," he said. "Or something people made." Emmy watched his face. "We go toward it?" He thought about smoke and heat and every mistake he had made before. Then he looked at her thin shoes and the empty land behind them. "We go toward it," he said. "Slow. We stop if I say stop." They walked an hour before Thomas raised a hand and pulled Emmy down behind a low shelf of rock. Below them, in a dry basin, a small desert deer was cornered against a slab. In front of the deer stood a flower as tall as Emmy. Its petals were pink and orange, bright as a warning sign. Vines thick with thorns crawled from its base, planted in the sand like legs. At its center a wet mouth of teeth opened and closed. A vine whipped out and caught the deer's back leg. The deer screamed once. The mouth came down. Emmy did not look away. Thomas put his hand on her shoulder and held her still. "That's a maw," he whispered. "Men at the last camp talked about them. When the Vael came, some of the plants out here changed. Took on their biology. That's what you get." Emmy's eyes stayed on the mouth. "Does it hunt like they do?" "No. It waits. It grabs what walks close." He watched the vines settle. "Never walk between two big flowers. Never step over a vine you didn't see the end of." She nodded once, the way she nodded when he told her to tie her shoes. He waited until the maw folded its petals halfway and went still over the kill. Then he tapped Emmy's arm and pointed a wide path around the basin, upwind, over open sand. They moved one at a time between the low rocks, the way they had moved past the scout. When the basin was behind them, Thomas stopped and listened again. The far sound was still there. Closer now. He could hear the rhythm of it, steady, mechanical. Something running. Something built. "Still that way," Emmy said. "Still that way," he said. He shifted the red bag on his shoulder and started walking. Emmy fell in beside him. For the first time since the truck, they were moving toward something instead of away.