Scarred Horizon

The first thing I noticed was the blood on her knuckles.

Not fresh. Dried to a rust-brown crust, cracked like old paint across the ridges of her fingers. She was holding a coil of copper wire in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other, and she didn't look up when I pushed through the door of the trading post. Just kept working, stripping the wire with quick, practiced twists of her wrist.

I hadn't seen her in three years.

"Alisya."

She didn't flinch. Didn't stop. The pliers bit through copper with a clean snip, and she dropped the stripped wire into a canvas sack at her feet before reaching for the next length.

"You're blocking my light," she said.

That was it. That was the greeting. Three years, and she gave me the same flat tone she'd use to tell a merchant his batteries were counterfeit. I stepped to the side, and the afternoon sun from the doorway fell across her workbench again. Dust motes swirled in the beam. The air smelled like solder and old rubber, the particular stink of a place where people traded the bones of the old world for the chance to see another morning.

I should have left. That would have been the smart thing. But I'd spent three years learning that smart things and right things don't always share a bed.

"You're still here," I said.

"Where else would I be?"

"Could've gone north. Heard the settlements past the river are taking people in."

She laughed. It wasn't a warm sound. More like a cough she'd been holding in. "Settlements past the river are taking people in and working them to death in the same breath. I'll pass."

I watched her hands. The scar that ran from her left temple down to her jaw caught the light when she turned her head, pale against her skin. I knew that scar. I knew how she'd gotten it. I knew the exact sound she made when it happened, that sharp intake of breath she tried to swallow, the way she'd refused to let me carry her even with her leg torn open and blood soaking through her jeans.

She was still wearing the same jacket. Patched at the elbows now, and the left shoulder had a new tear she hadn't bothered to fix. Her hair was shorter than I remembered. Cropped close to her skull like she'd taken a knife to it in a hurry.

"You look like hell," I said.

"Thanks."

"I mean it. When's the last time you ate something that wasn't jerky and spite?"

She finally looked up. Grey eyes, flat and cold as a winter sky. They used to soften when they landed on me. That was a long time ago.

"What do you want, Kael?"

There it was. My name in her mouth like a piece of gristle she was trying to work loose from her teeth. I felt it somewhere below my ribs, a dull ache I'd been carrying so long I'd almost forgotten it had a source.

"I want to talk."

"About what?"

"About what happened."

She set the pliers down. Slow, deliberate. Like she was giving herself time to decide whether to throw them at my head or just walk out. I'd seen her do both to people who deserved it less.

"Nothing happened," she said. "That's the whole point, isn't it? Nothing happened, and then you were gone."

"That's not fair."

"Fair." She said the word like it tasted bad. "You want to talk about fair. Okay. Let's talk about fair. You left in the middle of the night without a word. You took the rifle. You took the maps. You left me with a dead radio and a broken generator and a note that said, and I'm quoting here, 'I have to go.' That's it. That's all you gave me."

I remembered the note. I'd written it seven times. Every version was worse than the last. In the end I'd gone with the shortest one because I couldn't stand to look at my own handwriting for another minute.

"I couldn't stay," I said.

"You couldn't stay." She nodded, like she was filing the words away for later. "And now you can. Is that it? You've come back because you can finally stay. And I'm supposed to, what, be grateful?"

"I'm not asking for grateful."

"Good. Because you're not getting it."

She turned back to her wire. Snip. Strip. Drop. The rhythm of it was almost hypnotic, and I stood there in the doorway like an idiot, watching her hands move, watching the muscle in her jaw twitch every time she bit down on whatever she was holding back.

The trading post was mostly empty. A few scavengers at the far end, haggling over a crate of salvaged batteries. The owner, a fat man named Dorsey who'd been running this place since before the collapse, was asleep behind his counter with a shotgun across his lap. Nobody paid us any attention. In this world, other people's business was only interesting if it ended in gunfire.

"I found something," I said.

"I don't care."

"A cache. West side, under the old transit station. Medical supplies, mostly. Antibiotics, bandages, a few surgical kits. Maybe more underneath. I couldn't get through the collapse without help."

That got her attention. Not the way I wanted. Her hands stopped moving, and she looked at me with something that wasn't quite interest and wasn't quite anger. Something in between. Something calculating.

"You came back because you need a partner," she said.

"I came back because I need you."

The words hung there. I hadn't planned them. They just fell out of my mouth, and once they were out I couldn't take them back. Alisya stared at me. The scar on her face seemed to stand out sharper in the silence.

"You don't get to say that," she said quietly. "You don't get to walk in here after three years and say things like that."

"I know."

"Do you? Because it doesn't seem like it."

She stood up. The stool scraped against the concrete floor, and she slung the canvas sack over her shoulder. For a second I thought she was going to leave. Just walk past me and out the door and back into whatever life she'd built without me. And I would have let her. That's the thing I want to be clear about. I would have let her go.

But she stopped. Right in front of me. Close enough that I could smell the solder on her hands and the woodsmoke in her hair. She was shorter than I remembered. Or maybe I'd just gotten used to standing taller.

"Why did you leave?" she asked.

And there it was. The question I'd been running from for three years, standing in front of me in a patched jacket with blood on her knuckles. I could have lied. I was good at lying. I'd lied to warlords and traders and men who wanted to put a bullet in my skull. But I couldn't lie to her. I never could.

"Because I was scared," I said. "Because I loved you so much it felt like drowning, and I didn't know how to breathe."

She didn't move. Didn't blink. The afternoon light caught the edge of her jaw, and for just a moment, just one, I saw something flicker behind those grey eyes. Something soft. Something that had been buried a long time.

Then it was gone.

"You're an idiot," she said.

"I know."

"A goddamn idiot."

"I know."

She shook her head. But she didn't walk away. She stood there, close enough to touch, and I didn't touch her because I didn't have the right. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

"The cache," she said finally. "What's the catch?"

I almost smiled. Almost. "The catch is there's a faction camped on the east entrance. Twelve, maybe fifteen men. Armed."

"And you want to go in anyway."

"I want to go in with you."

She looked at me for a long time. Long enough that Dorsey woke up, looked at us, and went back to sleep. Long enough that the sun shifted and the light on her face changed from gold to amber. Long enough that I started to think she was going to say no.

"Fine," she said.

She pushed past me and out the door, and I stood there for a second, breathing in the dust and the solder and the faint trace of her, before I followed.