Where by Kit Reed Page B

great mess of stuff you know about, useless facts rattling around inside your head.
    Is this place where we landed even real life, or is this the first level of a new, harder game I might not win? Yes, I am weirded out. And freezing. In another minute parts of me will start to break off like ice chunks in an avalanche. I can’t stay out but I don’t want to go in.
    I just want this to be over, OK?
    If I was ever Hydra Destroyer, that’s done. I’m nobody but me, stupid Ned Poulnot, unarmed and unaided out here in the enormousness, shivering in my pathetic layers of scrubs, alone.
    And then I’m not.
    Alone. I mean.
    There’s a guy! He comes sliding down the inside of the barrier dune like a cross-country skier, easy on his feet and bone upright. He lands at the tippy end of the access road and gets up smiling and ’od damn, he walks toward me like the Thief that used to turn up in the old Xbox games and steal all your treasures while you were slaying the Avenger or recharging your Vector Belt, except he’s half-whistling through his teeth the way you do— what is that tune? I hear him coming and this, at least, is kind of great. I saw him first. I know the tune!
    I think it goes, “I’m just a lonesome traveler…” It stops.
    Should I be scared? Hell if I know. He doesn’t come on like one of us, from Kraven island, but I almost know who he is. He walks tall, not all cold and hunched over like me. As if he found a way to ditch the scrubs and get a real outfit, unless.
    I don’t know unless what, all I know is: tall guy walking fast, wrapped up in, is that a cape? Shuh, it’s just a tarp that he ripped off something, but it’s black. So are the jeans and thick hoodie— black boots, and that’s cool, but it’s also disturbing. How is he not shivering in the white scrubs like the rest of us?
    â€œFuck,” he says, but not from close enough to scare me or near enough that I can make out his face. “What are you doing out here?”
    â€œWho are you?”
    He sort of laughs. “Me, scouting the perimeter like I was dead alone out here.”
    â€œSee anything?”
    â€œNothing that would help.”
    â€œWho are you?”
    â€œFriend of the family.”
    â€œYeah, right.” I like him, I hate him, I don’t know how I feel except frustrated because he isn’t saying, and even more pissed because I can’t figure him out. “Really. Who are you?”
    â€œWell, hell, who the fuck are you?”
    â€œNone of your business.” By then I have him in my sights. If I was Hydra right now, I would … but I’m not, he’s six foot something and I’m only almost fourteen. I show all my teeth like Father does when he’s pissed off. “What are you doing here?”
    He goes inside himself and comes back out with my answer, not his. “Oh. You’re the Poulnot kid.”
    â€œWho says?”
    â€œLittle bird.”
    â€œFuck that shit.”
    He just laughs. I’m meeting up with my first friend in this off-world new world and he sounds like all those smartass TV people up there making television in New York. “Hello, Ned Poulnot, pleased to meet you.” He sticks out his hand.
    Like I’m about to shake. “Hello, whatever the hell your name is.”
    â€œSteele. Rawson Steele.”
    Ohmygod. Oh. My. God. Everything I heard, all the ugly stuff people said about him back in Kraventown. Did he bring down the attack of the Big Whatever that yanked us out of our lives? Bad shit from deep inside backs up in my throat and like to strangles me. You! That guy, stalking our personal property like a prospector, did they erase us so he could get what he wants?
    â€œWhat were you…” I want to say, doing on Kraven island? but I can’t. I go, “What are you doing here?”
    He sees the big question simmering, I’m like to explode and he puts up