Page 173 of War

Hussain kicks a rock with his boot. “Maybe.”

He gets up and begins to walk away, but then he stops, half turning back to me. “What you did also took a lot of courage, you know.”

I release a shuddering breath. That one statement, that brief spark of approval, makes my heart hurt and gives me life all at once. We are all part of humanity. We all want to live. We should protect each other, and I tried. I failed, but at least I tried.

“I can’t stand idly by while he continues to kill,” I say, my voice breaking.

The phobos rider turns more fully to face me. “Husband and wife pitted against one another—now that’s the true war.” He backs away. “I’m interested to see who will win.”

I don’t moveback into War’s tent.

I can’t, not after my punishment. I could barely wrap my mind around being close to the horseman after he wiped out Mansoura. And now, when I tried to gut him with his sword and he killed off most of camp for the offense, it feels like the two of us have finally crossed some hard line.

It’s easy enough to move out; I simply choose one of the thousands of abandoned tents. I pick the one next to Zara, even though in her words—

“Your dead stink.”

Still, she puts up with my decaying guards who haven’t stopped guarding me. They aren’t the only dead either of us has to put up with; War’s now undead army still lingers along the outskirts of camp, the mass of them waiting for the horseman’s next orders.

Eventually I get my things back from War—a zombie drops them off at my tent’s entrance and walks away. Amongst the pile, there’s my tool kit and my half-finished arrows, the aged picture of my family, my romance novel and the dinged up coffee set that I never use. I even get the horseman’s old dagger, the one he gave to me shortly after we met.

I guess he’s no longer worried about me harming myself …

The world moves on. One day turns into two, two into four, then it’s a week, then weeks.

What’s left of camp packs itself up, moves, then resettles—packs, moves, resettles. Life takes on a kind of predictability to it. I ride with the other humans, and I live alongside them too. There are more children per adult than before, so we take turns watching them, and at night, we have them sleep in several of the larger tents.

We pass through Damanhur, then Alexandria, then Tanta and Banha, slowly making our way south through Egypt. The dead now fight and protect the camp, so the living no longer have to bloody their hands (phobos riders aside).

War never comes to visit.

There are no midnight drop-ins, there are no convincing arguments about why I should be sleeping with him. There’s no pissed off make-up sex.

He doesn’t even try to get close to my tent. The last time I saw him, he was riding back in from a raid with his phobos riders. His undead army came running in behind him, their bodies sick with decay. A few of them got blown up that day after a mishap with some explosives they’d run into in the city.

War’s eyes passed over mine, but there was no pause, no deep look, no spark of familiarity.

It’s as though our relationship never was.

The entire thing is crushing.

I’m still angry at War, but then I’vealwaysbeen angry at him. It’s him who’s decided to keep his distance. As crazy as it is, I actuallyresentthat he’s still mad, even though I understand his anger—I tried to kill him, after all. But still, there were so many times when he crossed a line with me, I assumed it went both ways.

Then again, he’s made it clear that I’m not to die, while I made it clear that Iwantedhim dead. That’s pretty difficult to come back from.

As the weeks tick by, that numbness I felt in Mansoura begins taking over me. After seeing so many deaths, the faces start to blur together. And then there’s that terrible human quality of getting comfortable with a habit. We travel, we camp, we siege, we move on. Over and over again. I might hate my reality, but at some point the abnormal becomes horribly normalized.

Maybe this is how War feels—like this is simply normal. I thought for so long that he was incapable of feeling—that his mind didn’t work like that—but I think it does. He may be a heavenly creature, but he seems to love and fight and rage and grieve just like the rest of us humans do.

God, I am so tired. So unbelievably tired. The fatigue is a physical thing, and nothing I do seems to shake it. I go to bed drained, I wake up drained, and I drag myself through the day drained.

That’s the first sign that something isn’t right. The next is my loss of appetite.

Food no longer tastes right. First it was simply the smell of meat cooking. I’d have to stay away from the center of camp, where meals were served because the smell would make me gag. I chalked it up to seeing and smelling too many dead bodies, but now I’ve lost my appetite for coffee and alcohol as well.

None of it, however, alarms me. I’ve endured so much trauma and sadness, something like this was bound to happen.

It’s not until this morning that I truly worry.