Nowhere on Earth by Nick Lake

Author:Nick Lake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31

NIGHT WAS ALREADY falling, the short spring day coming to an end, and Emily and Aidan were still sitting outside the cabin. They should be on the move, they should be running away, but it was like they were in dreamland, outside of time.

She was thinking that they should probably go inside, where it was warmer, but the stars were so beautiful: splattered spangling across the sky. She was wrapped in her sweater, but the cold was sneaking in around the edges, and into her lungs.

“I’ll get us a blanket,” said Aidan. It was like he was reading her mind. He probably was, actually.

She knew she should go in, but right then, with the stars above, she found she couldn’t move. “OK,” she said.

Aidan went into the cabin and came back out. “I think he’s sleeping,” he said. “Bob, I mean.”

Like there was another he. Like there was anyone else with them.

“Good,” she said.

Aidan had brought a blanket, which he spread over them both. He was also holding Goober under his arm, the monkey’s head poking out.

Emily frowned. She was remembering the plane, when he’d gone back for it. “You really like that thing, huh?”

Aidan looked at her, puzzled. “Of course. You gave him to me.”

A firework bursting in her heart, bright splatter of colors. She’d never have believed it—what you could feel for someone so new. Someone so small.

She scooted over—there wasn’t much space on the bench, but he was small, of course, and he sat close to her. They didn’t speak for a while. He leaned against her.

She put her arm around him and was taken aback as always by the marblelike temperature, the alabaster feel of him—he was colder than a normal person, but not because he was sick; he always had been. She didn’t know if it was part of his nature, if his kind ran colder than people, if their bodies worked in a different way, or if they just came from a warmer planet. Aidan had said it was hard to explain, that not all evolutionary strategies were the same and not all environments were the same and not all life was carbon-based, or something, but he’d lost her.

She didn’t really care—what she cared about was keeping him alive. He was the one who really needed to stay warm or they would never get anywhere, he would never get home.

“We can’t stay out here much longer,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

Ahead of them, the lake was a dark mirror, reflecting the mountains and the stars; the water so still and clear that if you were spun around, you would find it difficult to know which were the real ones and which were only a trick of the light. Above, the nearly full moon glowed through a ring of cloud, a borehole, bright in the black of the sky.

An owl called from the woods nearby, maybe the same one as the previous night—the sort of lonely sound that made you feel sad but also glad of the person next to you, of the cabin behind you.

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