Marley hadn’t realized exactly how out of shape they were, but pushing through overgrown meadows and trying to follow deer paths made it clear enough. They said nothing and kept going, but ahead of them, Lyric, who moved lightly and energetically, noticed and slowed down. Gia, who held Anthem’s leash and brought up the rear, didn’t seem to be having problems yet. Anthem was subdued, staying close instead of straining at the leash to explore.
No one asked where they were going, because there was no real answer to that question. They were going South, and they were keeping out of populated areas, and if they were lucky, they’d find a way to safely get out of the area.
“Does anybody else smell smoke?” Gia said, out of breath.
“I think you’re right,” Lyric said. Marley noticed it now, too, and they nodded. Lyric picked up the pace, and Marley did their best to match it.
Catching up with Lyric at the bank of a little stream soon after, they looked back to see that Gia was far behind. They waited, and when she caught up, no one said a word, but they splashed across together. From then on, Lyric went more slowly.
They avoided open areas and buildings as best they could, passing through fields of mixed crops where spindly farming robots stood motionless like slim, white trees, their long legs stopped in mid-stride, their many arms each frozen in the act of pulling a weed or plucking an insect. These robots must have been controlled through the lens network, as many robots were. When the network went offline, they had stopped in mid-motion.
Some of the buildings Marley saw had power, while others didn’t. The increasing localization of electricity generation and distribution since the turn of the century meant that in many locations, power could come from any of a number of directions and sources. Urban areas were the most susceptible to disruption, while many homes and farms and businesses in suburban and rural locations drew power from smaller, local solar, wind, and battery systems. The fact that any building nearby was out of power seemed like a bad sign. It suggested the power problem was widespread—probably a successful cyberattack.
The burning smell grew stronger. The sky was growing dark, making it harder to see where they were going. When Marley looked across a field of grass and scrub behind them, a reddish glow edged the sky under dark clouds. Another, fainter red slash glowed to the northwest. Fires? But a wildfire wouldn’t have started in two places at once, would it?
A little ahead, Lyric stepped into an open area and stopped. When Marley caught up, they saw that they’re reached a recreational trail that ran roughly northeast to southwest through the trees. Marley waited with Lyric until, after another couple of minutes, Gia and Anthem emerged from the woods.
“Do you want me to take Anthem?” Marley said, reaching for the leash. Gia shook her head.
“Anthem’s my pace dog,” she said, huffing. “That’s why I’m so fast.”
Marley glanced at Lyric. She hadn’t said anything or tried to rush them along, but her usual warmth was missing.
“Trail or woods?” Lyric said.
Gia gulped breath. “Trail?” she said.
Marley instinctively gestured for a map, waiting for a response for a couple of seconds before they remembered they’d turned their lenses off. They were tempted to turn them back on just long enough to figure out where they were, but for all they knew, that would make them a beacon if American forces had a way to track lens use and were rounding up citizens. There was no reason to think anything like that was happening, but if so, there’d be no way to know until soldiers or bots showed up and grabbed them. Marley wished they had some idea what was even possible. They’d never been interested in warfare or military technology, and there was a lot of military technology out there to know about.
They followed the path, a peaceful corridor of packed gravel through trees. They couldn’t have gone much more than a couple of hundred meters, though, before the trail bent to the right.
“I think it heads west now, maybe even northwest,” Marley said. “We should keep going south.”
They looked at Gia, as did Lyric. Gia had stopped to take a few deep breaths, bent over with one hand on her thigh, but she nodded and gave the thumbs up. They ducked through a line of trees and found themselves looking across a field of yellowing weeds to a river as wide as a four-lane highway.
“Let’s see if the trail bends south soon,” Lyric said. No one replied, but Gia and Marley followed Lyric back onto the path and trotted down it at the best pace Gia could maintain. Marley took Anthem’s leash now, and Gia didn’t have the breath to protest. Anthem whined and stuck close.
The trail showed no immediate sign of wanting to turn south. While sunlight waned, the red glow grew stronger up north, to their right. The river turned sharply south, leaving the trail. Lyric stopped to look down the the river, and she pointed at some faint lights. “I think that’s a bridge,” she said. “If we can cross, we can continue south from there, and we’ll have the river between us and ... anything that might be coming.”
To the north, a sound was growing like a torrent of water. Looking back through the trees in that direction, Marley could see a baleful, red flickering, reflected from the bottom of a sky-wide cloud.
“We’d better go,” Marley said. “We need to go now.”
They surged forward into the tall grass. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” Gia gasped as she half-ran, trying to keep up. They all scrambled over uneven, weedy ground for a short way before finding themselves at the edge of a mowed field, which they followed down to a tiny two-lane road and yes, a bridge. It was narrow and had no shoulder, but they ran to it. On the far side, trees buffered the river from civilization, but there was a road that ran south along the far bank. Directly across the bridge, there was a lighted parking lot and a low, brick building. There were vehicles there, and people. Marley heard someone shouting.
“Let’s get across fast,” Lyric said.
They ran onto the bridge and were most of the way across when a car turned sharply from the southerly road, pinning them in its headlights. It decelerated hard, its horn blaring, and Anthem barked in panic, yanking so hard on her leash that it came out of Marley’s hand. Anthem turned and and ran in the wrong direction—north, across the field.
“Anthem!” Marley shrieked, running after her. Gia ran with her, but Marley realized after only a few steps that Lyric wasn’t with them. She had tried to finish crossing the bridge, but two men got out of the car, backlit by the glare from the building beyond them. “Who’s that?” one of them demanded, coming around to the front of the vehicle.
Their heart pounding, Marley turned and ran back to Lyric. The men looked up as they arrived, grabbing Lyric’s arm. “We’re going to go check on Joe!” they shouted. Then they pulled Lyric with them past the car, shielding her from view with their body. When they reached the other side, Marley pulled Lyric after them into the trees.
“Who the fuck is Joe?” yelled one of the men.
Marley wished they had come up with something that would have made the men give up on them and Lyric entirely, but at least it had caused enough confusion to allow slipping past. Marley wasn’t used to lying in the real world, but writing fiction was a matter of expressing your truth through situations you’d made up, and Marley’s instinct in that moment had been to begin a story: Two out-of-towners are crossing a bridge at night in a war zone. What are they doing there? They’re going to see a friend, someone everyone knows. The friend’s name is Joe or Jo, which is a common and unremarkable name that could apply to any gender. Why are they going to see this person? They’re worried that Joe or Jo, who might be old or sick or just not great at taking care of themself, might need a hand. As a story, it wasn’t terrible. It was believable, and looking after a friend in need made the out-of-towners more sympathetic.
Marley dragged Lyric on and willed them both invisible. The trees on this bank of the river were just a narrow band, and on the other side of them, they had to run across a narrow road while a car—maybe the one with the two men, maybe some other car—raced down it toward them. They plunged into a stand of trees on the other side, and Marley found themself flailing through thorny brush, scratching up their arms. They wished they had worn something with sleeves. If Lyric was getting scratched too, as she probably was, she didn’t complain.
Beyond the brush, they had to cross a local highway, running parallel to the road they’d already crossed, but then they were in woods again. They pushed on by the faint red glow in the sky until the lights and sounds behind them were gone completely.
They stopped to rest, and Marley broke down in tears. Lyric slid to the ground, sitting on a bed of pine needles with her back against an eight-foot knuckle of rock. She pulled Marley over to her and gathered them into her lap, one hand on their shoulder, the other stroking their hair.
“Maybe they were just people from the town,” Marley said. “Maybe Gia and Anthem are with them now.”
“Maybe,” Lyric said. “Probably.”
Marley couldn’t stop thinking about the two men in the car. They couldn’t be soldiers, could they? Why would two soldiers be driving around in a regular car? But they’d sounded so angry.
If they were soldiers, and if they had guns and were inclined to use them, it wouldn’t help Gia to run. Historically, Marley gathered, guns had been unreliable. Sometimes they hit their target, sometimes not. There were long, bewildering sequences in old time 2D “movies” where people would shoot whole clips of bullets at each other and not hit anything. If someone was hit, an expendable character always died with the first bullet, while heroes either weren’t hit, or they were heroically and non-catastrophically hit in the shoulder or thigh.
Real guns hadn’t worked that way for decades, except for some old manual guns used by antiquarians and sport hunters. In war, computer-controlled targeting meant hitting the target almost every time.
If things were back to normal, Marley could use their lenses to find out exactly where Anthem was, either from the monitor in her collar or from the chip embedded in her back when Marley got her from the shelter. If things were back to normal, they could just message Gia and ask how she was. Probably their friend and their dog were both fine. Even if there were American soldiers there, they wouldn’t hurt a Cascadian civilian and a dog, right? There’d be no reason for it. Maybe they’d detain Gia, but they’d let her go soon enough. The only person who’d be in real danger if they went back would be Lyric. No, Lyric couldn’t go back—and if Marley went back by themself, there was no guarantee they’d find Gia or Anthem, and then they’d all be separated.
Lyric needed to get to safety, somewhere where she could stay and keep out of sight. Marley resolved to see her safely settled somewhere like that. Once she was, Marley would go back to find Gia and Anthem.
The woods ended, and Marley and Lyric followed an old dirt road bordered by trees to the west. There was hardly any traffic, and whenever a car did come along, they hid in the trees until it passed.
The fire to the north still seemed uncomfortably close. Had it come as far south as that river? Had it somehow made it across? If so, did the people at that building near the bridge have to evacuate? Were Gia and Anthem with them?
Marley’s imagination conjured a cruel image of Anthem struggling, her leash caught on a branch, the fire closing in. Forcefully, they dismissed it. There was enough trouble already without imagining more. They’d have time to be an emotional mess later.
Continuing down the road, they came on a scrapyard. Old vehicles were made long rows, many with tires or motors removed. Some had bashed windows or crumpled hoods; some were rusting; some were half-crushed.
Back among these vehicles, a small, pale light shone—nothing bigger than a lantern. They both came to a stop, looking toward the light, and were startled by a noise behind them. They turned to see an old white man in a denim shirt pushing a wheelbarrow with a tire in it. He looked them over warily, and they did the same.
“What are you doing here?” he said, not harshly. He coughed.
“We’re running from the fire,” Lyric said.
“On foot?” the man said, squinting.
“The lens net was down,” Marley said.
“Are your lenses on now? Is it back up?” he said.
Lyric shook her head. “We turned our lenses off. We don’t want to attract attention.”
“Hmm,” the man said approvingly. “Hmm. OK, come with me. I’m Burke, he/him. My wife is Sophia, she/her. You can ride with us if you want to.”
It took Marley a minute to realize why he was giving pronouns. Giving your pronouns used to be common courtesy, Marley knew, back before everyone had lenses, but all Marley’s life, they had been used to seeing pronouns literally floating over any new acquaintance’s head. Burke saying his own pronouns struck Marley as exotically quaint.
“I ...” Lyric said. Marley watched her face. Burke seemed all right, but any autonomous car was going to mean they’d be back on the network.
“It’s all right,” Burke said, grinning unexpectedly. “Come over and see what we’re cooking up.” He had gone from calculating to almost gleeful in a few moments, and Marley wondered whether he was safe and entirely right in the head, cheerfully offering rides to strangers while fleeing a war and a fire.
They glanced at Lyric again. She had the same querying expression Marley must have had. After a moment, Marley nodded, and they followed Burke back toward the little light.
Sophia turned out to be a round white woman with a cap of snowy hair. She wore brown coveralls and had a robot with her, which surprisingly was operational. The bot was shorter than Sophia, with a cylindrical body of rugged, once-white plastic and four multi-jointed arms arranged around the top of its torso. Its body was held up by four spindly legs that were jointed inward and ended in wide metal treads.
Marley pointed at the robot. “Is the network—”
“Who’s this?” Sophia asked Burke sharply.
“Hello,” said the robot. “I am Robby, human-cyborg relations.”
“Human-cyborg ... ?” said Lyric.
“Oh, that’s just a joke,” said Burke. “Robby’s a self-contained AI. Not networked, since you asked. I mean, he can be, but we had him turn it off.”
“Which is all a waste if we’ve got these two with us,” Sophia said irritably.
“Scan 'em for live connections, Robby,” Burke said.
“Sure!” Robby said. “All done. No live traffic found. They're offline.”
Sophia eyed them with new interest. “Oh?” she said. “What are you worried about?”
“I’m Lyric,” Lyric said. “Uh, she/her. Their name is Marley. We’re writers.”
“You mean you’re unemployed,” said Sophia.
“That’s a hundred percent correct,” Lyric said. “Burke said we might be able to ride with you. We’ve been on foot for a couple of hours now. Maybe we could help?”
“Either of you licensed electricians?” Sophia said, not without sarcasm. “No, just me? All right, help Burke get those tires on.”
“I had to 3-D print them at the house,” Burke said, rolling the wheelbarrow to a stack of three identical tires standing next to a pink minivan. The minivan must have been at least forty years old and was sitting up off the ground on blocks. Protruding from the dashboard inside, Marley could see a steering wheel—not even a retractable one.
“Is this a manually-driven minivan?”
“It is!” said Burke. “Perfect, isn’t it? Robby and Sophia are replacing the battery—we can’t find anything like the old one, but Sophia’s making it work. We’ll travel completely offline. It doesn’t even have an autonomous mode! Now, let me show you: we need to mount these tires on the old rims and inflate them with this thing here. Either of you ever replaced a tire?”
“I have,” Lyric said. “Not one of these old-style ones, though.”
“All goes well, we’ll be on the road in twenty minutes,” Burke said.
Burke set up Lyric to put the tires on the rims and Marley to inflate them with a battery-powered compressor. Robby chatted with Sophia about the minivan’s circuitry while he soldered connections and connected parts under her direction.
The tires took more than an hour to prepare, partly because of a damaged rim for which Marley and Lyric had to go find a replacement among the other vehicles. The battery took even longer, and it didn’t work when it was first connected, which made Marley begin to doubt their and Lyric’s decision to throw in their lot with Burke and Sophia and Robby. Still, none of the five commented on the fiercely glowing hills or the growing smell of smoke in the air.
“You did something wrong,” Sophia complained to Robby.
“As I mentioned before, the master power switch needs to be rewired,” Robby said cheerfully. “Would you like me to do it?”
“It doesn’t need to be rewired!” Sophia said. “It’s probably the connections at the terminal.”
“They do this all the time,” Burke said. “They’ll get it sorted out.”
Burke turned out to be right. After a few more minutes, Sophia snappishly agreed to take a second look at the master power switch.
“It’s just this!” she exclaimed with disgust. “OK, you can rewire it. You get the points for this one.”
“I’m ahead three thousand and forty points to four hundred and six,” Robby said, already manipulating wires and making connections so quickly, Marley could hardly follow.
“You don’t have to always give the score!” Sophia said.
Burke supervised jacking the vehicle up, two corners at a time, then removing the blocks and mounting the tires. Amazingly, when they closed the hood and Sophia pressed the start button, the van hummed to life. Marley and Lyric climbed in and went to the far back, where they cleaned years of dust and trash off the seat with an old towel they found. They sat there quietly while Burke and Sophia situated themselves in front.
The couple had a few items of luggage with them, most old and road-weary, but one of which was an aluminum briefcase that looked nearly new. Burke pushed it under the front passenger seat, his eyes on Marley and Lyric. Marley was powerfully curious to know what it was, but they held their tongue. Burke didn’t seem interested in sharing.
“We are going south?” Lyric said.
“Of course we’re going South!” said Sophia. She must have noticed her sharp tone, because she spoke more gently when she continued. “Is it all right back there? Not full of squirrel poop or anything?”
“It’s fine,” Lyric said. “Thank you so much for giving us a ride.”
“Yes, thank you,” Marley said.
“Everything’s going to Hell,” Sophia said. “Burke, get us out of here.”
“As you wish,” Burke said.
Burke took the driver’s seat, with Sophia riding shotgun. Robby climbed into the seat behind his owners and belted himself in. The minivan jolted once when Burke tried pull forward, but he adjusted something, and then it rolled out more or less the way you’d want a vehicle to do. He turned on the lights and turned onto the dirt road, turning south. Sophia sighed, and they accelerated into the night, the way ahead black, the way behind glowering red.