Heartward

“You’re staring again.”

“Hmm?” Kormeu was only half paying attention, absentmindedly twisting a copper wire around a magnet- though, of course, electricity no longer flowed through the coil.

“Hey,” Rish gently snapped a finger, snapping the other girl out of it. “My eyes are up here, y’know.”

Kormeu blinked. “My bad.” She looked away awkwardly and straightened up. “What can I say, that’s the closest I can get to your heart.”

“Right, I’m sure you were just looking at the locket,” replied Rish teasingly.

The brunette rolled her eyes at that, but didn’t deign to reply, choosing instead to walk over to the pathetic fire that was their only heat source. “How the hell did our ancestors figure out how to make fire? Rub some sticks together and suddenly you have combustion? Doesn’t seem intuitive at all. Now, electricity, I can understand. Stick a magnet through a coil and watch the electrons dance!”

“Like you even know what electricity looks like,” scoffed Rish, grabbing a small log and punting it into the fire. “Score!” Unfortunately, the impact immediately smothered the flame.

Kormeu turned to stare at her. “That took me like, twenty minutes.” Rish, to her credit, had the decency to look abashed; however, her impish grin, infectious as it was, soon caught on, and soon the two of them burst out in laughter, filling the cold, empty forest for a brief moment.

After the laughter faded, they both sighed, the chill of the night finally setting in. “Guess we could always, uh, huddle for warmth,” Rish offered, only half-joking.

The other girl returned to the relative shelter of the tent, rubbing her hands together. “Beats going to Modephons and taking our chances with the slack-jaws.”

“True,” said Rish, blowing out a frosty cloud. “Still, though, having a roof over our head, three square meals a day… we’ve seen worse fates out here, haven’t we?”

“Rather die free than live like a Modey,” replied Kormeu, wrapping a thin blanket around herself and tossing the other one to her companion, who grabbed it with an appreciative smile, although her expression was still thoughtful.

“Still, I wouldn’t mind taking a quick peek one day. Grass is always greener, y’know? I mean, you’ve always wanted to see electricity up close, right? They actually have it there!”

Kormeu didn’t meet her eyes, choosing instead to stare at the heart-shaped locket around her neck. “We’ve talked about this, Rish. Those people may have the goods, but they’re not really living, are they? Just because their power grids and reactors somehow work, just because they have light bulbs that light up at night so their children can-” her voice caught for a split second, but she swallowed it down. “It’s not worth it. We can live without electricity. Hell, we can even live without plumbing!”

“Truly, the worst casualty of the Shutoff,” intoned Rish. “Not being able to- what’s the word? Plush?”

“Flush, like the poker hand,” said Kormeu listlessly. “Either way, we’re not going.”

Rish frowned, her hand coming up to touch the silver and bronze heart that gently swayed from her neck. “I just want to see what it’s like, that’s all.”

The other girl shook her head. “There are just some things that aren’t worth losing, no matter what you gain.” She stopped and stared again at the locket, somehow glinting in the near-darkness. “You ever gonna tell me what’s in there?”

“Depends,” answered Rish. “You ever gonna let me in on the decision-making process?”

“That’s not what I…” Kormeu faltered, unsure of what to say.

Both girls grew silent, and the only sound was the slight rustle of the tent from the evening wind.

Finally, Kormeu awkwardly cleared her throat. “Well, I guess we should try to sleep this chill off. See you in the morning.” She wrapped the blanket tighter around herself and went to lay down on her makeshift bed.

Rish watched her for a few moments, her expression clouded. Her grip around the locket tightened.

The cool breeze from the east tickled Kormeu as she began to stir. She was usually able to sleep through the various non-extinct animal noises, but the air itself always seemed to know how to rouse her.

Kormeu sat up groggily, but soon became alert when she realized that Rish wasn’t in her spot. For that matter, her bedding, while messy, was less shambolic than usual. Kormeu’s chest tightened, and she cautiously walked outside the tent, retrieving her knife from its sheath on her leg and brandishing it. They always told each other where they were going, whether it be for voiding their bowels or dealing with a particularly frustrating period cramp in privacy. That was the rule, and they had sworn to keep it. The only other option was that Rish was somehow coerced to leave by something or someone else, so Kormeu kept on her guard, ignoring her disgruntled bladder.

“Rish?” she called, fighting to keep herself from shrieking her companion’s name. Calmness was key right now, so she couldn’t afford to lose her wits. “This can’t be about last night,” she muttered to herself. “Rish, please tell me you didn’t piss off and run away. You know neither of us can make it on our own.”

Her heart racing, Kormeu did a perimeter check, looking for active threats- yet the forest seemed as relatively uneventful as usual. After assessing her own safety, the girl finally gave in to her bodily needs, which cleared her mind as well as her body.

Kormeu returned to the task at hand, searching for something, anything that would clue her in. Eventually, she found a set of tracks that she recognized to be Rish. Yet, try as she might, Kormeu couldn’t find any other tracks. In fact, the only other thing she noticed was a smell that she couldn’t identify. Faint though it was, it still had a sharpness to it, like the smell after a thunderstorm. Shrugging it off, Kormeu downed her half-empty canteen of water, shouldered her pack, and began to follow Rish’s tracks.

If there was one silver lining, it was that Kormeu had time to think without having to engage in one of Rish’s philosophical discussions about humanity and its relation to energy. ‘How do you think we’re going to build ourselves back to civilization without oil?’ Rish would ask, or her favorite topic: ‘What do you think caused the Shutoff?’

‘I don’t know,’ was Kormeu’s usual answer to both, but after repeated prompting, she would always sigh and say: ‘Maybe we’ll get the use of energy back when we deserve it.’

But did a place like Modephons merit its usage of energy? Did the industries of old, with their pollution and apathy, deserve to be able to run a magnet through a coil and enjoy the resultant electricity?

Kormeu chuckled. “See, Rish? Even without you and your mystery locket, I find ways to argue with myself.”

After another couple of hours of tracking through the empty forest, she saw a clearing up ahead. However, it proved to be an optical illusion, which she quickly discovered before falling off what suddenly became a cliffside.

The girl blinked at the sight, shadowing her eyes and squinting out at the view below her. An uncountable amount of glinting buildings sprawled out as far as the eye could see, and she gasped in disbelief.

“That’s-that’s impossible! Modephons shouldn’t even be in this direction!”

“Of course it is,” came a voice. Kormeu looked down at her chest, staring in confusion at the heart-shaped locked that hung from her neck. “Now why don’t you go ahead and open me up?”

“I-I can’t do that,” said Kormeu, her eyes welling up with tears for some odd reason. “You’re Rish’s, not mine.”

“Yes, you can!” urged the locket, though it was Rish’s voice. “Open me, you can do it! I believe in you!”

“NO!” Kormeu screamed, her head suddenly swimming with a rush of dizziness.

Suddenly, she found herself in a room, though there was something preventing her from moving. She tried to flex her arms, and found that she couldn’t. Though the room was dimly lit, she could barely make out a door to her right, and she thought she saw some moving shadows next to it- though that could’ve just been her addled mind.

“Hello?” Kormeu asked, her voice beginning to tremble. “Rish? Anyone?”

The door slid opened, and two men entered, conversing as they approached her.

“We’re definitely getting close, she’s actually filling in a lot of details about her past.”

“Not the one detail we need, though. Surgo is getting tired of what he considers to be a waste of power.”

“Who are you people?!” Kormeu yelled, causing the two of them to jump and regard her. “Where’s Rish?”

“Six feet under, like the rest of your damn people,” snarled the second man, but the first one placed a pacifying hand on his shoulder. “She doesn’t remember any of that, you’re not being fair.”

“This is why I never come down here!” The second man replied, quite nastily. “You’re starting to grow attached to her, aren’t you?”

“Not at all,” replied the first man evenly. “I just think you’re directing your negativity to the wrong place. Why don’t you go and give Surgo my word that we’ll have the information shortly, alright?”

The second man huffed as he left, and soon it was just Kormeu and the man.

“Sorry about him, he’s been a bit wound up, lately,” the man explained as he drew some sort of device from his pocket and began to type into it. “You know, I always wonder why you end up in Modephons, no matter how many simulations we run. I’m no psychologist, but I wonder if it has anything to do with your time in our facility. A mental embodiment of freedom versus bondage, so-to-speak.”

“Where am I?!” cried Kormeu, though traces of memories were beginning to flow back to her. “Am I in Modephons? Did you kidnap Rish too?”

He looked at her sadly. “I’m afraid my colleague was telling the truth in that regard. From what we know, your friend Rish passed away quite a while ago, I’m sorry to say. Also, this may seem random, but I did have a question: Were you imagining Rish’s hand tightening around the locket after you had already gone to sleep? Or was that more of a descriptive detail that the simulation came up with to reflect your emotions?”

Kormeu, of course, hadn’t heard a word he said. Rish was dead? This was all wrong, all wrong; yet, she somehow knew that this was the truth. “That’s right…you want to know…about the locket.”

The man smiled apologetically. “That last little bit at the end- the locket talking to you- I guess you could call it my last-ditch attempt to find out.”

“You…you want to know how to open it,” Kormeu said bitterly. “You think I repressed my memories, and you’re trying to reach them.”

“That’s our best guess,” confirmed the man, pressing a few more buttons on his device. “That Shutoff scenario your mind always creates- that’s almost the reality today. Inside that locket is the key to infinite energy, a way to save us from our self-inflicted hell.”

“What…is it?” asked Kormeu.

“Why don’t you tell us?” asked the man, pressing one last button.

>Simulation #32:

>Begin.

“Hey!” Kormeu laughed as she got a face full of lake water. Rish tried to look innocent, but Kormeu responded with a splash of her own.

Rish chuckled, and then turned wistful, her locket gleaming in the pale sunlight. “I wish we could stay in this moment forever.”

Kormeu snorted. “You’d probably die of hypothermia.”

Rish smirked. “It’d be worth it, though.”

Kormeu wiped away a tear, though she didn’t know why she was crying. “Yes, it would.”