“Yeah. Let me rephrase what I said. I really do not freaking want to know what this means. Actually, this whole thing is really scaring the crap out of me. We need to find Lilah and—”
“We need to look inside that plane.”
He smiled at her. “You’re actually nuts, aren’t you? The desert sun’s baked your brains and—”
Nix just looked at him. Benny felt suddenly detached from the moment. Here was Nix, the girl he loved, the girl he’d risked his life for, the girl he’d left his home for. Nix, with her wild red hair and explosions of freckles and brilliant green eyes. Nix, who had a scar on her face that Benny actually thought looked sexy. Nix, who was everything to him. But she was also the Nix he did not know. The girl he’d come to know less and less ever since they’d seen that jet.
This Nix laughed less often. This Nix was less kind, less . . .
Soft?
He considered that word and its implications.
Soft could mean weak, or it could mean gentle, open, receptive. The Nix he’d known all his life was soft, but was she ever weak? No, absolutely not. Not before and not after the jet. Okay, then what about the other meaning of soft? Was this new Nix gentle?
Mos
tly no. Life had been so hard on her that she had become hardened.
Was she open?
Again, mostly no. Where once they could spend hours discussing or even debating points as trivial and varied as the species of a butterfly or the politics of the Nine Towns, this new Nix seldom let him inside her thoughts.
Was this Nix receptive?
That was the hardest call. She seemed open to new experiences, and would readily listen to advice or information about the best ways to do things, the best routes, safety in the Ruin, all sorts of things. But that was only receptivity along the lines of a file cabinet—information was stored, but Benny had no idea of how it was being processed.
Was this the Nix he’d fallen in love with?
No. That Nix was gone. If not forever, then at least for now. There was hardly any trace of her left.
That left a final and dreadful question. One that he had been debating for a couple of weeks now.
Was he in love with this Nix?
Benny searched and searched inside his head and heart, and he just simply did not know. The only consolation was that he didn’t understand this Nix. Maybe when he did, things would get better.
He knew that Nix had always wanted to leave Mountainside. He and Chong both considered her a visionary; she had big, but practical, dreams about going beyond the fence line to make a new home out here in the Ruin. But that was before her mother was murdered and Nix was abducted. It was before Nix had been forced to fight in the zombie pits at Gameland, where she’d encountered the reanimated zombie of Charlie Pink-eye. It was before Tom died.
After all those things, Nix had changed.
Now, standing in front of the crashed plane, with proof of ugliness and madness out here in the Ruin, Benny looked into those emerald eyes and did not see anyone he recognized.
All this, all these jumbled thoughts, crashed through his mind in the space of a second or two. Most of the thoughts were rehashes of issues that had been hanging unresolved on the walls of his brain.
Benny turned away from her stare, unable to look into her eyes any longer. The Nix he knew was not there, and he didn’t want this new Nix to see the agony that must be in his own eyes.
He walked to the base of the T-bars and looked up at the zoms.
He cleared his throat. “I think they were the pilots,” he said.
“Why?”
“The uniforms. There were pictures in some of the books.”
“Should we . . . quiet them?”
Benny looked up at the dead, who looked down at him with empty eyes and hungry mouths. Their hands pawed at the air, gray hands opening and closing on nothing.