Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories by Megan Crewe Read Free Book Online Page B

absolutely?”
    He smiled against my shoulder. “I was thinking, ‘With great power there must also come great responsibility.’ But the other’s true too.”
    His voice was still teasing, but I could hear the apprehension underneath. “It’ll be okay,” I said, for both of us. “I’ll be okay.”
    “Do,” he said simply. “Please.”
    I shoved the last few items in my sack and tugged the drawstring tight. Zack loosened his hold as I turned to face him. My roommate was on gate duty for another two hours. Two hours. The last time we’d really have together in who knew how long. Even tomorrow... We hadn’t been hiding our relationship, but with the company we kept, it seemed safer to avoid public displays of affection.
    A lump rose in my throat. “Let’s not talk anymore,” I said, close enough that our noses almost touched.
    “What do you recommend we do instead?” he asked, a glint in his hazel eyes, and I pulled him into a kiss.
     
    Something it was hard to miss if you spent a lot of time with people and electronics was that the two were a lot alike. People were more complicated, sure—I’d freely admit that while I could piece together a motherboard, brain surgery was beyond me—but nevertheless made up of a fairly predictable set of systems interacting with each other following fairly predictable patterns. You pushed certain buttons, you received certain reactions. Getting along with people, or getting what you needed from them, was mostly a matter of tracing the wires until you found the right connections.
    At least, with most. A few people, like Michael, were so good at keeping what was going on in their heads hidden that it was hard to identify the connections at all. And others, like Nathan, seemed to rearrange their wiring on an hourly basis.
    Sometimes Nate was so easy I was ashamed of how nervous he made me. Like, when I’d come down to meet him in the parking lot where Michael was overseeing the loading of the industrial coolers with our first batch of the vaccines for up north into the trailer hitched to the Mercedes’ rear, I’d patted the convertible’s gleaming red hood and said, “Couldn’t ask for a sweeter ride,” and Nathan had grinned and preened his dark brown hair and said, “Then get yourself in here,” as if there’d never been any hostility between us.
    We made good time cruising along the vacant highways—the snow was long gone even in the northern states now. Nathan and I didn’t talk much, Nate preferring to blare club music from the convertible’s speakers, but he handed off the keys to let me take over driving for a few hours with only a narrow look and a warning to forget any stunts. We stopped to meet up with a group of Wardens in Pittsburgh, who refilled the tank and the jugs we were carrying and eagerly accepted one of the vaccine coolers, and continued on across the border in the fading daylight.
    As night settled in and the headlights caught on a sign announcing just a hundred more kilometers to Toronto, I was starting to think maybe Michael was even more of a genius than I’d given him credit for. Maybe sending Nathan off to run his own fiefdom was exactly what the guy needed to simmer down. If he relaxed all on his own, I could just hang back and offer my approval, no maneuvering necessary.
    Then the last song on the CD faded out, and Nathan didn’t immediately reach for a new one from the binder I suspected he’d found with the car. The last time we’d filled the tank, he’d pulled the top up, but he’d left his window down. The air washing in from outside had taken on an uncomfortable chill. I’d zipped up my jacket and tucked my hands into my pockets rather than complain. Nathan’s narrow face and hands were pale, but then, they were always pale. It was hard to tell whether he didn’t feel the cold or was making a show of how tough he was.
    “You started out up here,” he said.
    I nodded. “I was here a couple months, mostly doing the same