“...Why?”
Lyre stood there, and did not answer his fucking question. Nothing about her sparked any sort of confidence. She was skinny, filthy, and appeared high as a kite. Her dirty blonde hair looked brown with how much blood and dust was caked in it, blood was still dripping from where she’d deliberately skinned herself, and she had perfect posture, which was seriously unnerving combined with everything else. Her skin was heavily tanned, almost to the point of being burned, and she had nothing except the tattered clothes she was wearing.
Altogether, she reminded him of the methheads he’d had to fight for space under bridges, if they were a lot less twitchy and a lot more spacey.
Yeah, no, fuck this.
Spike started backing away, keeping his eyes on her, as she’d proven to be… unpredictable, to say the least. Best to treat her like a wild animal. No sudden movements, don’t show any fear, back away slowly and don’t look away.
In one swift movement, Lyre was well within his personal space, eyes boring into his from about a foot away. “Follow me,” she repeated.
Reflexively, he reached out, shoving her away, but she wasn’t fazed in the slightest. She didn’t even move, really.
“Back off,” he snapped, hurriedly stepping back and nearly tripping. “I’m not following you unless you give me a really good reason to.”
“You can go home.”
Did she know how to get out of this place? It wasn’t impossible. She’d proven to have more knowledge than she should, many times already.
“Elaborate. Prove it. Prove that you know where my home is and how I can get there.”
“We will talk to Carla.”
Carla? The name was painfully familiar, but he couldn’t place-
Mom. Carla was his mom. He’d forgotten her name, and he’d known that, but he hadn’t realized how unnatural it felt until he was reminded.
“How? How can I talk to her? How will I be able to get back to her?”
“Follow me.”
“Prove that you have a way to contact her.”
“Four-oh-five-six-two-three-four-two-eight-three.”
Her cell number.
He had her cell number, now. All he would have to do is find a signal. Find a phone that could make outgoing calls, or texts, and then he could talk to his mom again. Even if they couldn’t find him, even if he couldn’t find his family again, he could talk to her, listen to her voice, even her fucking voicemail might make it worth it.
“And you can get me to a place where I can use that number to contact her?”
“Yes.”
“...Okay. I’ll follow you.”
Immediately, she turned around, walking away and finally getting out of his face. When she turned her back, he leaned down, quietly picking up the gun she’d dropped and hiding it in his waistband under his hoodie. She was going fast. Not as fast as he’d seen her go, not even close, but his balance and coordination were being pushed to their limits trying to keep up. How she was capable of this in such an atrocious state was beyond him. Adrenaline, maybe? He wasn’t going to ask her to slow down. He could just about keep up, and asking would show weakness. If she didn’t already know she could outpace him, he didn’t want to offer that knowledge freely. Speaking of knowledge…
“Where are we right now?”
Silence. He waited a minute, in case she was gathering her thoughts, but no. No, she was off in la-la land again.
“Which way is the nearest settlement?”
Again, no response.
“Do you know anything about the robots? What are they trying to do?”
“How did you get my mom’s name and phone number?”
There was one last question, that could very easily blow up in his face if Lyre took it badly. Then again, she hadn’t had an emotional response to anything else so far.
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“Do you know what brought us here? Did you help bring us here? Do you intend to harm me?”
More goddamn silence. Oh, he really wanted to hit something right now, but there was just sand in all directions, hitting himself would be very much counterproductive, and he was pretty sure Lyre would just dodge anything he threw at her. Plus, antagonising the possibly insane girl covered in her own blood was not the best idea in this sort of situation.
“We’re in the desert.”
Oh, for fucks sake. “Ye-”
“I don’t know.”
Really? “But-”
“I asked.”
“Okay, so-”
“I can’t see backwards.”
What??? What the fuck did that even mean? Why was Lyre so goddamn difficult to get answers from? He needed to reword his questions. That had worked when he was texting her, so hopefully it would work now. And he’d also have to ask again about the stuff she hadn’t answered.
He spent a minute or two arranging his thoughts, then spoke again.
“You asked about the robots. Did you get an answer? If so, can you tell me what it was?”
“I didn’t ask about the robots.”
Spike took a few seconds to process that, and figure out how exactly it fit into the answers he’d been given before. Had she skipped- of course she’d skipped questions. Of course, because heaven forbid anything be easy for him. The reference to the desert was clearly the answer to the first question, so… she’d skipped the second, or the third, or maybe both? At this point he probably just needed to go through everything again.
“Do you know where the nearest settlement is?”
“No.”
Okay. Great. She actually answered him this time. Maybe yes-or-no questions were easier to work with.
“Do you know what the robots are doing?”
“No.”
Great. More net-zero information. So the last two questions, assuming she counted his rapid-fire last sentence as one question, she had answered.
“Who did you ask about my mom?” There wasn’t really an easy way to make that into a yes-or-no question, so he’d just have to hope for the best.
“Me.”
She… had asked herself? But if she already knew, why would she have to ask herself for an answer she already had? Evidently her source of information was accurate, but how the hell did she just… get that from nothing? This… You know what? This was not worth pursuing. There was no way he’d get any sort of comprehensible answer from this line of questioning. As long as she had the information and it was reliable, he didn’t fucking care.
On to the last questions. This time, he started with the most critical question. “Are you going to hurt me?”
“No.”
Finally. Finally, an answer that was actually, undeniably good. That was definitely a weight off his shoulders, now that he didn’t have to worry about being stabbed when he wasn’t looking. Then again, she could be lying. Or she could not intend to hurt him now, but be extremely mentally unstable to the point where that could change at any moment. So he would keep his guard up, because while that was definitely better than a ‘yes’, he still did not fucking trust her.
“Do you know how we got here?”
“I can’t see backwards.”
That… seemed like a no, but one that raised a few questions. She could be referring to literally seeing backwards, but that felt… unlikely. Did she mean she couldn’t remember, as in amnesia? Or did she think he was asking her to literally view events in the past she had not witnessed? Or did she mean something else entirely that only her screwed-up brain would describe like that?
“What do you mean by that?” Did he think this question would actually clarify anything? No, but it was a starting point, at least.
“I can’t see backwards but maybe I used to. So the answer might be behind me but I wouldn’t know.”
That… raised more questions, but it actually still felt like it was helpful. ‘Maybe I used to’ indicated that she didn’t know whether she used to or not, which implied she couldn’t remember. She could clearly physically see fine, and turn her head a normal amount, so his next best guess was memory loss.
“Are you saying you lost some of your memory?”
“Yes.”
Great. He was stuck in the desert with an amnesiac, possibly insane teenage girl who looked like she was hours from dying of sepsis, who somehow knew his mom’s phone number. For all he knew she had been stalking him and that’s how she knew.
“Are you sick?”
“Yes.”
Fuck.
“Are you sick enough that you could die? Do you need medicine or another treatment?”
“No.”
“Are you healthy enough that you can get me in contact with my mother?”
“Yes.”
Great. In that case, Lyre’s mysterious sickness that made her look like a simultaneous meth and heroin addict was officially not his problem, nor were her gruesome injuries. Unless they got infected. They were absolutely going to get infected, weren’t they. Probably some of them already were.
“Do you have antibiotics?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been using them so your wounds don’t get infected?”
“No.”
For fuck’s sake…
“Use the antibiotics. If you don’t you’ll get an infection and die.”
“I won’t because I was using them already.”
This girl was going to give him a fucking aneurysm. What the fuck sort of answer was this? One second she says she hasn’t been using them, the next second she says she has been? What was going through that drugged-up brain of hers to result in such contradictory answers?
“Are you using the antibiotics?”
“Yes.”
He threw his hands up in the air. Okay. Great. Fine. He was going to take this at face value and not question it any further, or he’d probably end up strangling Lyre out of frustration. It was good to know they had antibiotics, though. His hand looked fine for now, but if it got infected he had the option of taking some for himself. It had been a few days and it was still okay, so as long as he kept it covered things would probably be fine.
“Where are we going right now?”
“End of the plan.”
“What is at the end of the plan?” Talking to Lyre felt kind of like talking to an AI. You asked a question, it gave an unhelpful answer, and you reworded and clarified until it finally told you what you wanted to know. Thinking of it like that, rather than supposedly being a conversation with another human being, made things a bit easier.
“Food and water and shelter for tonight.”
Well, that was good enough for him. As long as she did what she had promised he didn’t really care. Although…
“How long will it be until I can talk to my mother?”
Lyre walked, posture perfect, totally silent.
“Do you know when I will be able to talk to my mother?”
“No.”
…
She had promised. She had made it clear that it would happen eventually. Maybe she didn’t have an exact timeline, because she didn’t know how long it would take to get there or to set up or whatever. Just because she didn’t have all the information didn’t mean she was wrong or lying.
Spike could follow her for a little bit longer. If it turned out she was bullshitting, he’d make her regret it, and then go off on his own again. All he’d lose is some time, and he’d already wasted a bunch already. What was a little bit more?
Lyre didn’t make conversation. Unless he was asking her questions and she was answering them, they walked in silence. It wasn’t terrible. He didn’t like talking that much, so it suited him just fine.
And so they continued, a lost boy following a waif through the desert. He followed because he had no one else to follow, nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. He followed because she had made a promise, and if the promise was fulfilled…
Maybe then, he’d escape Neverland and finally go home.