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The road out of the city is choked with rubble in places and clear in others, no logic to it that you can find. At times you find yourself wishing you still had the cleaver, but the garden knife does a decent enough job at hacking through the smaller clumps of bramble and debris. When you hit a stretch that's truly impassable you go around, doubling back to the cleared paths you'd been avoiding, joining the sweating, shambling throng of people leaving the city in a daze, human and Cursed in all their monstrous forms, then breaking away again as soon as the obstacle's behind you.
They don't look at you with suspicion; once a child even smiles at you and begins to laugh. This surprises you at first until you touch your face and remember you'd left your hockey mask behind — funny, how in a world where the grotesque has gone commonplace and boring, people still gave you the side-eye for a mask that was ordinary long before the Visit — and that you're wearing the paper mask, with its childlike crayon drawings.
The knife, the mask. Everything else you left behind in the apartment that used to be Sam's — that still is, maybe, if he still has the capacity to hold one thing in mind instead of everything at once, long enough to consider it his. Not on purpose. You weren’t making a statement or anything, you just couldn't think of anything that was worth the effort of carrying it.
Five days of walking. Then ten. You keep waiting for the freedom to make you happy. It doesn’t, particularly. It feels kind of like the last pass you’ll ever make through a room you used to live in after the furniture’s all gone, the wide open space newly alien and ominous and not really meaning anything to you anymore.
You pass through a stretch of highway where the asphalt has buckled up in long ridges, grass already forcing its way through the cracks. Somewhere off to your left a stand of what used to be trees has been cleared into neat, geometric piles, the wood stacked with a precision that can’t be the work of weather or chance. You don’t think much of it. Work crews, probably. People rebuilding.
It isn’t until you’re a mile past it that something needles at the back of your skull. A wrongness you just can’t place. You don’t turn around to check; tell yourself there’s nothing to check. By evening you’ve found a patch of dead ground off the shoulder of the road, gray and packed hard. You crouch and dig at it with the knife, because you don't own a trowel anymore, and when that proves to be slow and frustrating going you dig into it with your bare hands.
The soil comes up in clumps. Underneath it’s darker. You don’t have seeds, you didn’t think that far ahead. Didn't think much past the frantic need to get away, from these people who know what you are, who have a good idea of what you've done. The Visitor is gone now, and their need for your protection went with it. You didn't ask before you left.
You sit back on your heels anyway and look at the little wound you’ve made in the earth, and something in your chest, long-clenched, loosens by a fraction of an inch. Tomorrow maybe you’ll find something to put in it.
Three weeks out. Calluses starting on your palms in new places, and a coffee tin full of seeds you traded a stranger a can opener for. Each day the endless wandering.
You’ve stopped flinching at the cleared trees. There’s a lot of them once you know to look. Whole towns half-rebuilt overnight, debris stacked in piles too even to be anything but him. You’ve been avoiding him. Not on purpose. Maybe a little bit on purpose. This town’s got him running through the middle of it, a dark limb thick as a bus shoved up against a collapsed storefront, holding the whole facade up while a crew of maybe six people clear brick out from underneath. Nobody pays him much mind. A kid is sitting on top of him like he’s a bench, eating a sandwich, legs kicking lazily against his trunk.
For a while you stand across the street with your hands in your pockets. The crew talks idly to him as they work. A woman sets her bag of mulch down at the base of him and, wiping the sweat from her brow, begins to tell him about her sister. Not with a real start or end, the same mindless way you’d chatter on in the direction of a dog or a headstone. He doesn’t say anything back that you can hear, but the limb shifts, slow, and she nods like it was an answer to something.
You think about how many of him there must be right now, doing this. Thousands of conversations. Thousands of lost souls in search of company, and some part of him attending to each one of them, listening. You wonder how he does it; what it must be like from the inside.
When you changed you didn't let yourself feel it. You saw that spiraling glint of teeth once in a dark window, then never again, kept them securely under the mask, imagining when you accidentally brushed the new points of them with your tongue in the dark that they were someone else’s, a weapon you just happened to be borrowing for the time being. You found quickly enough that your new and alien body was acceptable enough to live in so long as you didn’t have to look at it, so long as you could keep yourself busy enough — with your garden and then with the astronomers’ whole absurd scheme — not to think about it. But at least there had been a you the whole time to keep busy. The general state of your body, the edge where you ended and the world began, was still familiar, even if the inside of it had gone strange. He didn’t even get to keep that. You don’t know how he stands it. But the world is still here, he hasn’t crashed down on top of it or choked the whole thing quiet, so he must be doing it somehow.
You cross the street. Up close the limb doesn’t look like Sam at all, no more than a fallen tree can ever really looks like a person. You put your hand flat against it. The texture is familiar from the rooftop, surprisingly soft and a little rubbery, and it’s warm. You hadn’t really expected it to be warm.
“You’re an idiot, you know that,” you say. “Growing yourself out into traffic like this.”
Nothing happens for a second. Then a low whistle, barely audible, more felt than heard, threads up through your hand into your arm. You don’t know what it means. You’re not sure it means anything, to anyone else standing here. But something surfaces in you anyway. It’s not words, nothing so clean as that, just a kind of recognition, warm and a little sheepish. It feels like the face he used to make, coming home and meeting your eyes. Guilty and pleased with himself both.
“Yeah,” you say. “That’s what I thought.”
The limb doesn’t move again. You stay a while longer than you mean to, hand still on the bark of him, watching the crew work.
You find him again two towns over. Again at a crumbling gas station a little ways down the interstate. You start to check for him, instinctive, how you used to check a room for exits whenever you walked in.
You’ve given up trying to track which limb is which. It seems kind of useless, like trying to name the branches of a tree. You wonder sometimes if he knows it’s you standing there and not some stranger, but you never ask. You’re not sure you want the answer either way.
A length of him sits coiled around a water tower outside a town you passed through mostly for the shade. You sit at the base of him with your knees drawn up, your tin of seeds beside you, still full.
“I used to garden for a woman on Rue Fontaine,” you say to the water tower. “Before. She had this rose bush that kept dying and blaming me for it. Wasn’t the roses’ fault. And it wasn’t mine either. Some things just don’t take, I guess.”
Nothing. Then a low whistle, and under it something vaguely question-shaped.
“No,” you say. “I’m not talking about that.”
He breathes, steady, against your side.
You dig your thumbnail into the dirt beside you, not planting anything, just needing something to do with your hands while you think. “They were fine when I left. You already know that. They'll be fine.” You don’t look up at him. "They didn't need me staying."
The whistle again, softer this time, and the feeling that doesn’t feel like judgement but also doesn’t really feel like agreement. More like the pointed absence of either. Like a hand resting flat on your back without trying to move you anywhere. You don’t know if he understands, or if it’s just you deciding to read it that way.
“I don't think we would have gotten to know each other,” you say. “The old me. And the old you. The you before all this.” The whistle shifts. Something that might almost be a laugh if he had the anatomy for it. The distinct, absurd sense of being disagreed with.
“Hm,” you say. “Maybe not.”
You sit for a while, the sun dragging the shadow of the water tower slow across the ground.
He knew you for two weeks. A stranger who showed up at his door with a knife and asked for a place to sleep. That’s all. And somehow it’s still easier to talk to him than it ever was to anyone who really knew you. Maybe that’s his whole point now. Everyone gets to say whatever the thing is they can’t say anywhere else.
Before you leave you press your palm flat to the water tower’s cold metal skin, where it’s wrapped in him, saying nothing. The answering whistle is quiet enough you could tell yourself you imagined it, if you wanted to. Maybe you do.
You’ve kept the coffee tin full a while now, sparing seeds from it at intervals and refilling it whenever you can. Sometime around the second month you realize you haven’t planted a single one on purpose. All on accident. Wherever you happen to stop, wherever the ground looks like it needs it. You never go back to check what came up. You do go back to check on him, though, when you can.
He’s holding a bridge together at the boundary line of a small school, cables of him threaded through the steel like he’d grown the thing rather than rebuilt it. You sit at the base of him same as always. This time you start to dig.
The ground here’s better than most of what you’ve worked. Soft from a creek nearby, dark all the way down. You go in with both hands and clear a space about the size of a dinner plate, right up against where he meets the earth, close enough that when you’re done your knuckles are pressed into the meat of him.
“Don’t get used to it,” you say, opening the tin. “This isn’t for you.”
An amused whistle answers you, and you scowl at the bridge like it can see your face. For all you know, it can.
“It’s for the ground,” you say. “The ground happens to be yours right now. That’s all.”
You put in what you’ve got, a handful of small, round seeds traded off a woman with a cart three towns back who swore they’d grow in anything. You press the dirt over them with the flat of your palm, and sit back on your heels.
“I’m not going to keep track of it,” you say. “I want that clear. I’m not staying to water it.”
The whistle again. Something patient in it. Like it already knew that, and didn’t need you to say it.
“I just-“ You stop. Start again. “I don’t know if you know it’s me. Every time. Or if you’re just being kind to because that’s what you do now, to everyone. What you did. I guess.”
For a long moment there’s nothing. Maybe you asked the wrong thing, or asked it wrong, or asked something too big to answer with a whistle.
Then it comes. The sound is quiet and focused, and under it that same unmistakable, sheepish warmth you felt the first time you saw him. The one that means you’re an idiot, you know that. The one that’s only ever answered you.
You leave your hand on the dirt a little longer than you mean to before you get up and go.
Two years on and you’re still moving, still no fixed address, coffee tin long since replaced with a proper canvas roll of seed packets you keep meticulously sorted. You don’t need to find him anymore. It used to be that you had to to actively hunt down whichever limb was nearest; these days he’s there, just as the horizon is there, whenever you stop long enough to notice.
A hillside of him has grown up thick through what used to be an orchard, half-buried under decades of leaf litter. You climb it without asking, settle into the crook where two limbs meet. You don’t say hello. You haven’t in a long while. It isn’t necessary anymore, and you like that it isn’t.
“There was a woman two towns back growing peonies in a bathtub,” you tell him, working a knot out of your bootlace. “I didn’t tell her she was doing it wrong.”
He whistles easy and immediate and teasingly fond.
“Don’t,” you say. You’ve stopped needing to guess, trying to understand him. “I know what that one means. I was nice about it.”
Something skeptical. You swat at the bark like you could actually hurt him, which you couldn’t, which he knows, which is probably why he lets you. You’ve noticed, this past year, that the pauses between you have gotten longer and easier both. You’ll sit there in silence for an hour or more some days, just sitting, working seed packets loose from their creases, and it never feels like something’s missing.
“I’m heading south again,” you say eventually. “The valley. Soil's ash heavy. Might take something interesting.”
The answer feels, unmistakably, like I’ll be there too, because he will be.
“Yeah,” you say, standing, brushing leaf litter off your knees. “I know.”
You don’t say goodbye either. You just start walking, and somewhere under your boots, and over the next hill, and every hill after that, he’s already there, waiting for you to catch up.