“So, what exactly am I supposed to say?” - she squints back into the shade, shuffling awkwardly on her knees. Late July sun batters the back of her neck, and she does not enjoy thinking about how many ticks crawl through the grass around her. But that’s been par for the course for a while.
The mad metal shape twists something like a shrug, avoiding movement on their strained limbs.
“Whichever makes sense to you. The dead are not picky.”
“What, you say I could just babble at them in Canadian French if I wanted to?”
“Language is secondary.”
The surface of the cross is rough and warm to the touch, inscriptions completely illegible under the cascade of burrows left behind by rains. She groans and rubs her face with the hand that isn’t occupied with the detector, which happens to be left.
“I’m really not good at this.”
“Indeed, you are not.”
The meter’s soft crackle waxes and wanes with the periodicity of a few dozen seconds, though the readout never goes below “2”. What does “2” mean? What does any readout mean, really? She does not know.
“Why don’t you do it then? You seem to know everything.”
“They would not feel kinship with one such as me. Remember, this is to offer comfort.”
“Yeah, cause our priestess was so-o-o-o good at comforting people.”
She feels the silence behind her grow grim. She curses herself.
“Someone needs to do it, and it cannot be myself,” - Kory wheezes, nigh-inaudible, from their shelter.
“Sorry.”
They beep something weak, and do not respond.
So, with a sigh, she closes her eyes, and waits for the reading to drift back into its zenith. Then, strained, she begins.
“Nameless spirit, I greet you, uh, I mean… Hello. The priestess of the Great Archer is not available this year, so I’m filling in.”
This is stupid, she thinks. Like I’m greeting a co-worker during a shift change at a dead end town NIKA.
But it works. The signal stays at maximum. She hopes that means it’s listening. And that she won’t have to repeat herself.
“Actually, she may not be here next year either… I don’t know. Either way, I tend to the graves now, including yours. I wish you, uh, a prolonged peaceful rest. And, also, here, a drink on me,” - she can’t help but giggle as she reaches for the bottle, and splashes a measure of mead at the soil on the base of the grave.
The signal spikes, then slowly peters out to barely a few ticks over the background level. She decides to take that as a sign of success, and gets up, shaking bits of dirt off her cargo pants.
“I am surprised at your insistence on drink as offering,” - Kory shuffles apart, flowing out across the dirt in preparation for further travels, - “Ornaments are comparatively hassle-free.”
“I fucking hate fiddling with wreaths and other crap like that,” - she groans, stretching, - “Possibly the worst thing to do around these parts.”
“Really? You are not half bad at it.”
“Oh, FUCK no. That shit makes me feel like I’m in some pro-lifer ad. Or on a counter-march in June in Galicia. I’d rather get stung by bees an extra ten times a year.”
She scans the clearing, but finds that the beast must had wandered off. She picks up her bag and whistles in a rising tone, hoping it had not gone far. The machine, meanwhile, struggles to get up, visibly confused at her explanation. They seem to have a hard time thinking and walking at once lately. She pushes the dread of that thought aside. One insane problem at a time is more than enough. She’ll contemplate trying to heal a robot who probably came from hell for naughty mathematicians when she’s done communing with dead road construction workers.
There comes a shuffling sound from up-slope, and a thinly-plumed head emerges from the bushes, horizontally slit eyes blinking at her inquisitively. Like usual, a faint imprint of the fear that once welcomed her into the valley rears its head, and, like usual, she squashes it down. What’s left of the demon inside that head is far more mangled than what’s left of her friend. The crooked beak is speckled with wet chips of rotten wood. It must had been digging around in dead trunks again.
“C’mon, we’re done, onto the next,” - she waves the beast close, and it listens, guided more by intonation than words. Its lanky, almost famished-looking feathered frame steps into the clearing, and gooseberry leaves remain undisturbed. Wicked claws step over the gravestone, leaving not the slightest tear in the surrounding grass, and she can see inside her bones a spark jump between it and the resting spirit, and then it spots a dragonfly somewhere ahead, and rushes past her, completely distracted once again.
She does not pick up pace until she’s sure that the machine is back to full walking capacity. Meanwhile, the six-legged vulture prances ahead of them, translucent grey spores loosing from between the feathers. They never seem to grow into anything she can see. But she’s not easily fooled. Not anymore.
“So, three burial sites down, and how many more to go?”
“Forty-five. Hundred-seventy-two if you count the old ones, but those are not so demanding.”
“Fuck’s sake, and here I thought this place was heaven for antisocial recluses!” - she spits, and from the lag in the clinking behind her infers the machine is once again thrown off their mental balance.
“You don’t need to do it all at once…”
“Said the siren to the sailor ladling water out his boat.”
The hundred legs stutter, and she is forced to slow down too, lest Kory loses sight readjusting behind them.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, not really. Just ’cause I’m pissed off doesn’t mean I’m mad.”
“What does that even mean?!”
“That means it’s whatever. Someone’s got to do it. So I’ll do it. Just don’t expect me to put up with these insufferable flicks while I’m at it. It’s normal movie week in the centipede cave.”
“That’s… fair.”
They continue down the thin path in silence, weave between waist-height boulders. Sparse pine paws play a million-round tournament of rock-paper-scissors above their heads. Frequency-modulated squirrel-packets bound along century-old axons. The vulture’s hide exhumes stochastic inevitability of repair into every surface of struggling bark. Diagnostics propagate from corpsefly to dragonfly to frog to hare to fox to corpsefly. The sun whispers. The wind glows.
A herd of deer cuts in front of them without a care, five living meat, one dry cracked timber, and wrought iron braces, and spirals of teetering grey lichen atop fading paint. Its sprawling antlers flake metal with every branch grazed. A stride away from disappearing between the great pillars of cellulose, it stops, splinter-lined cavity in its head giving her some parody of a side-eye.
“Good day to you too,” - a scoff oozes from her lips, dribbles through the ferns further down the slope, and past the radar dish swaying to its own newfound rhythm it joins with the river’s giggling.
The doll shakes its head, and strides towards the doe that fell behind waiting for it with a puzzled expression. The doe nibbles on the lichen of its neck for a moment, and both take off again, fading into the mesh-net of shadows on the forest floor, as if they were never there.