2

Dawn broke rosy and beautiful the day Alexander’s mother shot Alexander’s father. Perfect weather for a swim, which incidentally is where the trouble began. She tried to drown the patriarch of the house, but Mr. Cole pulled her down with him. She’d managed to claw her way out of the pool, though her husband still drew breath, which is when Mrs. Cole decided on the pistol.

Now Alexander received a brand new gaming console the night before, and hadn’t taken his headphones off since he’d set the thing up. The shot that killed his father sounded no different from the shots currently unloading from his virtual space-blaster. 

Alexander wouldn’t discover the murder until dinnertime, when he made his way down the stairs to see the marble foyer stained with blood, his father’s body on the Persian runner, and his mother sipping coffee at the table. 

Cole relatives took him in, of course, after his mother went to prison, but he never got to speak with her again. Alexander lay awake long into the night, wondering how he’d phrase the question, and if she even had an answer that could satisfy. Did his father deserve to die? What made her do it? Why does anyone kill anyone? 

A few birthdays passed before Alexander exhausted all the family willing to take him in. 

“Prices going up, you know how it is.” He did not.

“Running out of room what with the baby on the way.” He would have slept on the couch.

“Just trying to focus on the family right now.” Alexander thought he was family. 

Really, if Trinity hadn’t quite literally tripped over him the night they met, Alexander was prepared to kill himself—save the world some trouble. And then, of course, he met Marley. Companionship is a hell of a thing, and he’d never become friends faster with anyone in his life. Private school lended itself better to networking, not emotional bonds. Alexander needed a friend more than he really knew, and so the Universe, in her infinite wisdom, blessed him with a brilliant ray of sunshine named Marley Kate Bailey. 

He thought about her often—was she okay? Had she been eating? Did she need a jacket? If he pulled those flowers up from the creekside, would they bring the smile to her face? She smiled easily. That didn’t stop him from seeking it out.

But Alexander was not in love. No sir. Messy, complicated thing that made you kill your spouse—that’s love. He felt something different for Marley and her crooked front tooth and her wild blonde hair. What exactly that feeling was, he had no idea. Too many times, he attempted to broach the subject with charming James, or wise Sailor, or, when he felt especially confused, practical Trinity. The words choked themselves out in his throat every time. 

And so, he made sure Marley had enough food from their stores. He carried a second, smaller jacket that would fit around her shoulders. He pulled flowers from the creekside, bound them with his left shoelace, and put them on her cot, waiting with a rolling stomach and pounding heart for the moment she returned from foraging or fishing or gallivanting about the woods, saw them, shrieked, and tossed her arms around his neck.

And he told himself he did not love her.

“Where are you taking them tomorrow?” Trinity asked absently, scrubbing potatoes with a wire brush that had seen better days. Water rivered down her arm, softly reflecting moonlight until it dripped off her elbow. 

Sailor held his hands together, keeping the sides of his pinkies touching as he let them fall open—book.

“Oh, the bookstore. That’ll be good for them, thank you.”

He nodded and swiped a potato from her lap, positioning it under his knife. 

“Hey, can you at least rinse that thing? I saw you drawing in the dirt with it earlier,” Trinity grumbled, and, a bit to her surprise, he smiled, dunking the blade into the running water by his foot. Sailor raised it up and flicked it towards her face, showering her in tiny droplets. “You little shit.” She nudged him with her hand. “Just cut these before I waterboard you.”

That particular threat carried next to no weight, due to its’ commonality in her vernacular, and Sailor waved her off, face still lit with the rare spark of joy.

“Uh-huh. Thanks for helping,” Trinity said sincerely.

He nodded, and they sat together in a peaceful silence for a good long while.

“I don’t think I could do any of this without you.”

Sailor raised his eyes to look at her, still deftly skinning the vegetables in his pile.

Trinity heaved a sigh, putting her tools down to lean back against the stump behind her. “We didn’t have much stability, I guess, growing up. Marley and I. You’re…constant.” She flicked dark irises towards him. “I feel like I can depend on you. And that’s important to me.”

He nodded as his hands slowed their work. 

She opened her mouth to speak more, but fell silent as she saw his fingers lift to his chin, making the sign for thank you. 

Trinity flashed a small smile. “No problem.”

Sailor turned from the waist, leaning back behind himself to take hold of the notepad. After a moment of scribbling, he handed it over to her.

I appreciate you saying so. 

When she looked up again, his arms opened. After a breath of hesitation that even she couldn’t justify, Trinity leaned over her small mountain of diced potatoes and hugged him. 

Sailor’s hands pressed against her shoulder blades and hers reached under his arms and up his back. 

They sat that way for a while, and she breathed in tandem with the rise and fall of his shoulders. 

Trinity peeled herself away from him, shaking her head to clear it of the cobwebs of sleep, at least for the moment. “I don’t think I have anymore potato skinning in me.”

Sailor shook his head in agreement, then put a hand on her knee. She looked to meet his gaze, but he scrawled quickly in the journal.

What was it that you grabbed at the convenience store that made us almost get caught?

Trinity’s face broke into a smile and she rifled through her pack until the small plush wolf grazed her hand, and she tugged it out to show him. “It’s for Marley. I think she’s gonna love it.”

Sailor nodded approvingly, taking the soft prize in his marred hands and giving it a careful lookover. He tapped her knee twice, in multiple successions. 

Yes, yes, yes.

Trinity grinned, quite pleased with herself. “I thought so.”

Give to her, he signed slowly.

“Well yeah, I will. I just…” She looked at him, and tried very hard not to notice that his eyes mirrored the color of the moonlight. “Yeah. I will. Let me know before you take the kids out tomorrow, okay?”

He closed his eyes and dipped his head. The word ‘gentleman’ crossed her mind at the sight of him, and not for the first time. 

Feeling bolder than she had in a while, Trinity covered his hand with her own, the pressure causing warmth to flow outward from her knee. “Who were you, before you came to us?” Her breath left along with her words, and Trinity had to gulp to get her air back. 

Sailor’s fingers disappeared from their place on her leg and he stood up, his knife falling softly to the river-side earth. Goodnight Trinity, he signed.

Cold evening air raise goosebumps on her skin where his hand had been. She didn’t move for a long while.

“Well, when I become king, we won’t have any of this ‘taxes’ junk,” Marley huffed, which Trinity knew to mean she was quite put up with schooling for the day.

Unfortunately, that was not an option. The sun had barely crested the horizon, and the rambunctious sprite still had math and a science report, and those couldn’t happen until after history. “Contribution from your people is necessary for a society to function. And you wouldn’t be king, you’d be president.”

Marley scowled. “Why couldn’t I be king?”

“Because you aren’t a dictator, and would be elected by popular vote.”

“Says who?”

“Your big sister, that’s who. I’m not raising a fascist,” Trinity sighed, flipping to the next page of the beaten-up textbook. “Tell me why the Early Americans revolted.”

“Well, you couldn’t be king anyway,” James’ voice said from the doorway. “You’re a girl. You’d be the queen.”

Marley rolled from her stomach to her back and grinned floppily at him. “Hi,” she said, drawling out the word. 

“Or Empress, maybe. Empress Marley, you like that?” He sat next to her, a gravity well on her small bed, returning her grin with an easy smile of his own as the pale-skinned girl nodded vigorously, tasting the title on her tongue.

“I’m trying to teach here,” Trinity grumbled, rolling towards him and muttering into the blanket. “She needs to know how the American Colonies revolted and heralded the end of Imperialism.”

“I don’t care about all that dusty stuff,” Marley groaned, curling into James’ stomach. “Besides,” she continued as she stretched her body from nose to toes, “I wanna hear about the end of the world again.” She looked up at James hopefully.

“Sailor has a day planned for you, actually. Go put your shoes on,” Trinity said, giving up on education entirely and shooing her little sister off the bed. “And the world didn’t end.” She shot a loaded gaze at the boy in her tent as Marley squealed with excitement and bulleted out into the sunlight. 

James finished her thought. “Not for us, anyway.”

The herald of the end times came as a complete surprise to most people. Not James, though. He watched the poor girl’s birth.

Many suspected disease, or war, or drought, or even the return of a long-forgotten god would bring the fire down from the sky and send the sinful to the depths. The beginning of the end actually started with a child. Or an infant, rather. 

Little Demoinesa Reagan entered the world without a fuss, without a single cry. Instead, she sang. 

The hospital ward went silent as the grave, surgeons’ hands stock-still, tendrils of life quivering in their forceps, nurses halfway through administering IV drips barely loosing a breath, receptionists and waiting patients freezing where they sat, their senses wholly consumed by the eerie, haunting, transcendental song that emanated from the labor and delivery wing. 

She didn’t stop singing until James’ mother, her mother, pressed the babe to her chest and cleared the room with a screech for privacy.

That would not last.

Within days, more reports of singing children began to sweep the nation, then the continent, then stories from across the oceans - otherworldly voices from the lips of newborns. 

The government had a field day. Little Demoinesa Reagan, carted off by state-sponsored scientists with cotton in their ears and dollar signs in their eyes, with the hundred or so barely weeks-old babies like her, with their piercing eyes and soul-enchanting melodies. James watched them take his precious sister with clenched fists and restrained shoulders, his uncle and brothers holding him back from the felony he so desperately wanted to commit. 

“Nothing we can do, son,” they said. “No sense fighting it,” they said, their eyes glazed over by the Blessed Song.

The world fell soon after. These children, blessed with angelic chords in their throats, became more precious than gold. And they grew quickly - too quickly. Little Desmoinesa Reagan, not so little after a year of life and several feet of height, became a teenager - or a broken facsimile of one - far too hastily, and so did her harmonic kin. They were studied and sold and studied some more, property of the state, fated only to open their mouths and let loose their spine-coiling song, articulating words and sounds no human should be physically capable of, but entirely unable to speak, even, it was postulated, to each other. All alone, in a barren and inescapable world of beautiful sounds. 

The rich bought them from the state. Used them to entertain at parties. Recordings of their enchanting melodies leaked to the public, and it drove many to utter madness. Panic spread - would someone’s newborn be next? Be wrong? Traded for dollars like cattle? Pregnancy plummeted. Mutilations mounted. 

However, some made it their personal mission to try as hard as they could to produce a Blessed Child for themselves. Women were raped at new and untold rates. They rose up and fought back, some roaming in gangs and castrating any man they found, regardless of age or intent. Young girls traded to the highest bidder at first blood. Wombs of those already having borne one of these angels on earth auctioned off for the chance at a million-dollar baby.

It was entirely random, of course. Blood type, skin color, gene sequence, conditions of the pregnancy, family history, medical affliction, none of it mattered. Blessed Children could be found at any corner of the world in any sort of squalor or splendor.

The press did not find James’ family to be an attractive one for ‘Patient Zero’s Humble Beginnings’, as it were, and so quickly moved on to the next of the Blessed Children with Blessed Song. The offers for Mrs. Reagan’s womb and eggs or Mr. Reagan’s bodily fluids eventually ceased as well. James’ mother faded into her bedsheets, unable to cope with what she had been reduced to in this new, harrowing world, unable to rectify the monstrous two-year-old Desmoinesa standing at five feet tall next to the president on national television. James’ father drank and drank until he tossed it all back up, then he picked up another bottle and took another drink, cursing his own organs and the careless spend that had ushered terrors untold into the world.

His brothers turned to religion. “These Children will save us! In the Good Book it says to let the little children approach the hand of God, and he will bless them beyond belief.”

James watched their religion turn, predictably, in his opinion, towards thinly-veiled lobbying for child sacrifices. Like-minded fanatics began to petition the government, but given the choice between God’s favor or the American dollar, their pleas for divine placation fell on deaf, greed-filled hearts. Predictably, in his opinion.

James had no tears left to spare on the sheer insanity of it all, and so he could only laugh, and felt his mind fracture as he watched his family lose themselves to utter madness. 

Sailor found him and his drugs on the edge of a bridge somewhere in Old Chicagotown. Sailor stayed his hand when the needle neared vein, and then shattered the devil-filled bottle against the pavement a hundred feet below. Sailor then took every punch James threw at him, and then every insult, and every scream that echoed after that, until James had nothing left to spit out. 

Panting, James looked up wearily at the dark, silent, scarred man, and closed his eyes in relief when his savior’s fist sent him into the only dreamless sleep he’d had in months.

When James awoke, he heard not the creakings of the public trains or the ambulance cries, but birdsong and the flow of water. He blinked hard in the warm sunlight, stretched creaking bones and dry joints and took in his surroundings. 

A stream flowed calmly a handful of yards away, over some exposed roots and smooth, shining rocks. Grass, soft and thick, and not the concrete streets of hell, rose slowly from where his face had pressed into it, and swathed the area they were in. Sailor, though James wouldn’t know this was his name until later, sat back to a tree, writing slowly and methodically in a tattered, fabric-bound journal. A bag of apples lay overturned next to him. James drooled onto the ground at the sight of fresh, real fruit. Trees spread over them, dappling the sunlight to the forest floor. A child’s laughter echoed, and Sailor’s head snapped up, his ice-blue gaze fixed on James,  holding up a scrap of torn paper between dark fingers. 

Promise you won’t lose your shit. Again.

It was not a question, and so James had no choice but to nod. He reached tentatively for one of the glittering crimson treasures, and the older boy did not stop him, so he took two and devoured them.

Sailor’s eyes did not waver, and when James finished, juice dripping from his lips and fingers, he stood and gestured forward, in the direction of the laughter and the gentle voice of a woman that James could hear so clearly, now that he wasn’t starving. 

Sweat it out with us. Then you can decide where in the world your place is.

Another scrawled note. James gulped. He didn’t want to sweat it out, he wanted euphoria to slither into his bloodstream until he couldn’t hear the infernal Blessed Song echoed through his skull anymore.

But again, this was not a question, and the man before him did not seem the type to take kindly to refusals. And James was so tired.

So he met Trinity, and then Marley and Alexander. James learned Sailor’s name and how to read the hand signs. He thrashed and cried out for his liquid dopamine in his sleep while they rotated watch over him. He ran miles and miles with Trinity at his heels until his only desire was for food and water. He taught Alexander how to tie off the makeshift raft and pack the coolers to preserve their meat and milk for more nights at a time. He stole books and sweets for Marley from the nearby town. And James hoped he found his place in the world.