The End and Other Beginnings

by Veronica Roth

  Like he was wearing digital skin.

  “Hands off, buddy,” Lacey said. “I can take it from here.”

  She went to the sink and started washing her hands. Eon stepped back, showing his palms.

  “What kind of name is Eon?” she said.

  “What kind of name is Lacey?” he replied. “Are you a doily?”

  Atleigh laughed softly. Lacey wasn’t amused. She turned back to Atleigh, who had peeled her blood-soaked tank top away from the wound, showing a pale stretch of side. Eon was arranging the contents of the first-aid kit in order of what Lacey would need: antiseptic and cotton balls, butterfly bandages, gauze, and medical tape.

  “Eon was helping Mom out with a case when . . . you know,” Atleigh said. “He’s in the business.”

  “Yeah?” Lacey squeezed some antiseptic on a cotton ball. “And why, exactly, is he wearing skin?”

  She stuck the cotton ball up against Atleigh’s wound, not so gently. Atleigh cursed, and Lacey eased up a little, wiping the scratch clean. It was deep, but not deep enough to need stitches, thank God. Lacey wasn’t good at those.

  She looked at Atleigh, and then at Eon, eyebrows raised.

  “You weren’t kidding,” Eon said. “She’s got good eyes.”

  “Always has,” Atleigh said. “Lace—”

  “I like to get to know people before I let them see me naked,” Eon said to Lacey, leaning into the counter. “I’ve known your family for two years, Lacey. You think you’re the first one to notice I’m wearing this?”

  He had a point, Lacey thought. Mom and Atleigh wouldn’t have let him stick around if he was the dangerous kind of ET. She bent down low to apply the butterfly bandage, tugging the two edges of Atleigh’s skin together as close as she could manage.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “No big,” he said. “I know it’s suspicious behavior.”

  He was a lot to take in at once. His cheekbones alone were head-turning. And then there were his dark, expressive eyes, and, when he took off his leather jacket . . .

  Lacey forced herself to focus on positioning the gauze over the wound. Eon had torn off strips of medical tape and stuck them to the edge of the counter for her to use. He was rummaging in the freezer for some ice.

  “I’ll get you a shirt,” she said to Atleigh.

  She went into the bedroom to root around in Atleigh’s bag for something clean, and when she turned back, she saw Eon helping Atleigh up, his hand pressing to the small of her back to hold her upright. He held a dish towel full of ice to her cheek, and Atleigh rolled her eyes at him.

  The way he looked at her, it was like he didn’t care if anyone else in the world existed. But that didn’t bother Lacey so much as the way Atleigh looked back—her eyes catching on every movement he made.

  “It wasn’t just a job, obviously,” Atleigh said.

  Lacey sat on the couch, her arms folded. Eon was on the floor, cross-legged, his big toe poking out of one of his socks. The socks had little dinosaurs on them.

  “Yeah,” Lacey said. “I figured.”

  “I’ve been tracking Mom’s killer,” Atleigh said. “He’s a leech scout. I went to ask the woman who runs a skin bar around here about him.” A “skin bar” was a place where an ET—or a human, but not many bothered—could buy digital skin without the authorities finding out. “Only I guess I should have known that a woman running a skin bar who knows things about leech scouts would probably be a leech herself.”

  “And you, what?” Lacey said to Eon. “Just happened to be there?”

  “I was finishing the job. Chloe’s last job,” Eon said. Atleigh couldn’t remember when she’d last seen him this casual, sitting around in his dinosaur socks and a T-shirt. She absolutely did not notice how his bicep strained against the fabric of said T-shirt, at all. “Following the same trail Atleigh was, just three minutes later.”

  “Where were you when she died?” Lacey said, her voice sounding a little thick.

  “We got two different locations for where the scout might be,” Eon said. “I went with Atleigh to one, and Chloe went alone to the other.”

  Something gnawed at Atleigh’s stomach. She and Eon had gone all cavalier to some pile of rubble in the middle of nowhere, thinking they would take the leech by surprise. And there had been no one there. Nothing.

  And if they hadn’t split up . . . if they hadn’t believed Chloe when she said she could handle it on her own . . .

  No woulda-coulda-shouldas, Mom had always said. There was no looking back when you did what they did. It just drove you nuts. That was where the Spinners had come in, because you didn’t get to decide to be born, or when, or how long you lived, or when you died. You had to leave that up to the women with the thread.

  “You can’t think that way,” Lacey said. “I wasn’t there either, At. And who knows, if you had gone, maybe it’d be your urn in the back seat, and Mom wishing she could unravel time, instead.”

  “Yeah.” Atleigh blinked away tears, and brought the ice up to her cheek again to distract herself. “Well anyway, the trail’s gone cold, and I’m not sure we’ll ever find that leech asshole.”

  “Well.” Eon picked at the toe of his sock. “That trail is cold.”

  Lacey and Atleigh both stared at him.

  “Okay, it’s possible I only came to Nashville because I knew you would come to Nashville,” Eon said to Atleigh. “Really, I was on my way to Durham, and I thought you might want to come along.”

  “Durham,” Atleigh said. “The entire eastern seaboard at his fingertips, and that piece of shit goes to Durham?”

  “I hear they have good barbecue,” Eon said, shrugging.

  Atleigh cradled a mug of tea to her chest. It was a cool night, but somehow still muggy, like she was taking a bite of something every time she breathed in. She sat on the front steps, her knees drawn up as close to her chest as the wound in her side would allow.

  “Hey,” Eon said. He sat down next to her on the step. He had a blanket wrapped around him. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Not since Mom.”

  Her mom had introduced her to him a year ago. It had been winter, so his black coat had been longer, and he had looked like someone out of The Matrix, combat boots and all. He had been watching a French cartoon on his laptop, eating Cap’n Crunch out of the box. She had noticed the flickering right away, but Mom said he was all right, so she didn’t question him. And he was easy to like, anyway. Teeming over with enthusiasm about every human thing he could get his hands on—not just cartoons, but any TV show he watched, and books, movies, music, art, everything. He got so hooked on The Bachelor that year that he cried at the finale. He liked speaking French better than English, he said, because he got to use his nose more. He loved hitting his funny bone. He was so much that by the time she heard the story of what he was, it was too hard to tease one thing out of the knot of him that she didn’t bother to try.

  “Humans have a lot of truly useless sayings about grief,” he said. “Something about time healing, and her being in a better place—I find myself cycling through them again and again, in lieu of other words.”

  “Your people don’t have anything to say about grief?” she said.

  “Depends on which bodies we’ve joined with,” he said. “We don’t always have verbal language. But here?” He shook his head. “No, we don’t have words.”

  “I didn’t mean to put you in a weird spot with my sister,” Atleigh said. “I wasn’t sure how to handle it when she asked you what you were.”

  Eon shrugged. “We don’t have time to waste on that particular story right now.”

  “Yeah.” Atleigh set her mug aside. “You handled it well, though.”

  “Atleigh,” he said softly.

  Something about his tone made her look at him—and really look at him, without a joke at the ready, without her eyes skipping around his face searching for some easier place to land.

  Then he shrugged, and the skin fe
ll away. Beneath it he was the same—focused brown eyes, stick-out ears, full mouth, Adam’s apple that bobbed when he was nervous. But glinting at the back of his neck was his other body, the silver streak of the leech.

  He was not stifling a human host. Her mother had assured her of that, and so had he. His kind was at war with itself over the planet Earth and its inhabitants—some believed in taking what they could find, that other beings were prey and subsuming their consciousnesses was nothing. And some believed that the only body that ought to be occupied was one that had already lost its host. The boy who had been in Eon’s body, once, was named Danny. Daniel Goo, on life support in a hospital in New York City, no brain waves, just a beating heart in a body.

  She tilted her head, trying to get a better look. He bent his head forward, so she could see the silver in the moonlight. The leech’s body was narrow, about the length of her hand, and pressed against the back of his neck—but it didn’t look like it was clinging to his skin, it looked like it had grown into his skin. Small tendrils stretched up, under his hairline and into his skull, and down, under the collar of his shirt where she couldn’t see what became of them. But she knew they were wrapped around his spinal cord, binding the two bodies together irrevocably.

  “Do you feel it?” she said.

  “The way you feel your arm in its socket, maybe,” he said.

  She lifted her hand, and it quivered like a flame in the wind. She had been killing leeches her entire life. Even now, her instincts told her to do it, to cut this thing free of its human host. But no, she told herself—this was Eon. She touched the back of his neck, running her fingers over the silver streak there. It felt hard and smooth, like a shell. His breaths pulsed out, and he closed his eyes.

  “Do you have a name for your own kind, at least?” she said softly. “A better one than ‘leech,’ I mean.”

  She took her hand away, and he looked at her again, intently, as he always did, like she warranted every ounce of his attention.

  “Symbios,” he replied. “We call ourselves ‘symbios.’”

  “Nice word,” she said. She was breathless. She licked her lips. “I’m gonna do something stupid.”

  Atleigh kissed him softly. And it was the breaking of a dam, the bursting of a bubble—whatever thin skin had kept them contained, ripped apart. He buried his hands in her hair, his mouth opening, and she let herself touch him, put her hands on his arms, his chest. As good as she imagined; no, better, warmer, kinder—

  “Get away from her,” a cold, hard voice said from the doorway.

  They broke apart. Lacey stood behind them in her school-issued pajamas—which were plain gray, of course, with black stripes at the seams—and a needleknife in her hand. She was staring at the silver on the back of Eon’s neck.

  “Lace,” Atleigh said. She stood so Eon was behind her, blocking him.

  “If you say ‘It’s not what you think,’ I will punch you,” Lacey said, her voice trembling. “He’s a leech, and you’re making out with him.”

  “It’s different. There’s nobody else in there, just him,” Atleigh said.

  “I don’t care,” Lacey said. “You make me feel terrible about leaving you, when this is what you’ve been doing without me? Cozying up to one of them?”

  “I haven’t ‘been doing’ this; this is the first—” Atleigh scowled. “You know what? Yeah, I kept living my life, and you weren’t there, so don’t charge in with your judgment now, because it’s a little late!”

  “Yeah? Well I may have left so I could make something more of my life than this shitty perpetual road trip,” Lacey said, eyes narrowed. “But at least I didn’t betray everything that we are by sucking face with a goddamn parasite!”

  Atleigh felt heavy, suddenly, and so tired she could hardly stand upright.

  “If something more than this shitty road trip is what you want, then you’d better get back to school, don’t you think?” she said. She brushed past Lacey on her way into the house, and grabbed the car keys, which she then thrust into her sister’s hands.

  “Eon’s got a car, we’ll take care of the leech scout,” she said. “Just park the Volvo at the Peoria station. Leave the keys in it, nobody’ll steal it.”

  “Fine,” Lacey said. Her eyes filled with tears. “Good.”

  All the heat had gone out of them at once, it seemed like. Lacey pocketed the keys and started packing up her things. Eon stayed in the kitchen, with Atleigh’s empty mug, not looking at either of them. Atleigh waited on the porch to see Lacey leave.

  “What do we do about Mom’s ashes?” Atleigh said stiffly. Lacey had her bag in one hand, the car keys in the other.

  “You’re the one she told about how to handle them,” Lacey said. “You should be the one to scatter them.”

  And she left.

  The ride to Durham was quiet. Eight hours of the roar of Eon’s car engine and the low mutter of talk radio and the heat of the sun through the windshield. Atleigh spent half of it asleep, leaned up against the door with her head on a balled-up shirt. Her face throbbed from the hit she’d taken the day before, and there was a shiner on her cheek. She didn’t wear much makeup, but she made an exception after the looks she got at the first rest stop, dabbing and powdering until the bruise all but disappeared.

  She didn’t know what to say to Eon. She felt like she ought to apologize. Lacey had called him a parasite, after all, and that probably wasn’t sitting well with him. But she was so full of hurt herself, she didn’t know how to find the words. So she just stayed in the quiet, huddled around the ache in her chest, which she told herself was because of the fight with Riley, and not the sudden absence of Lacey.

  She perked up when Eon got off the highway. That meant they were getting somewhere.

  “He goes by Soldier,” Eon said.

  “Creative.”

  “Most of them are.” Eon quirked his eyebrows. “But his host’s name is Sean Larson, and you won’t catch him answering to anything else in public. He works in the leech screening office, clearing a path for undetected infiltration.”

  “So he makes sure some leeches can get into government positions without anybody noticing what they are,” she said. “Like the guy running the metal detector at the airport.”

  “Yeah, basically.”

  “You ever wonder how we can possibly win this?” Atleigh said, looking out the passenger window at the redbrick buildings they passed. “This is some Hydra shit. Cut off one head and two more grow in its place.”

  Eon shrugged. “Your thinking is very . . . final. We win, or we lose. We beat them, or we fail.” He glanced at her. “Your sister is with you, or she’s betrayed you.”

  “Some things are final,” Atleigh said, thinking of the urn in the back seat. “Dead or alive, those are pretty discrete categories.”

  “All I’m saying is, maybe this isn’t one of those situations,” Eon said. “Maybe we don’t beat them or fail. Maybe we just spend our lives chopping the thing’s heads off, no matter how many grow back. Maybe the important thing isn’t results, but the ongoing fight that started before us and will continue after us.”

  Atleigh grunted, even though what she really wanted to do was reach across the center console and twist her fingers between his.

  “So,” she said. “Sean.”

  “Sean,” Eon repeated, allowing for the change of subject. “I’ve got an address. Eight fifty-four Small Pine Boulevard.”

  Atleigh hesitated.

  “Eon,” she said. “How did you get an address?”

  He looked at her sideways. “I did some things that weren’t nice.”

  “Oh.” She frowned at him. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” he said firmly. “It was Chloe.”

  Eon parked down the road from the entrance to Hidden Lakes, marked by a wood sign with the name carved into it in cursive. It wasn’t hard to spot the guard from across the road, hunched over a small tablet to watch something—it looked like a soap opera, Atleigh decided, as
they crept across the road. He was a lacertaform (called “lacies” for short, which had always gotten on Lacey’s nerves), so he was gray-green, lizard-like, with an extra pair of arms. Still humanoid, though, so he could sit in a regular chair and look at a screen with a human range of color perception.

  Eon and Atleigh bent low, almost in unison, when they drew closer, and moved in short bursts, so close to the little guard station that Atleigh’s shoulder scraped the bricks.

  She felt like a teenager. Or, really, she felt like what she imagined teenagers felt when they crept out of their parents’ houses to greet a handle of vodka in the woods, or to feel their way across each other’s bodies in a parking lot somewhere. Atleigh hadn’t been that kind of teenager, and mostly, she didn’t miss it. It couldn’t offer her the same sense of purpose that she felt now, and that was what drove Atleigh when she got tired of the car seat, or the unfamiliar beds, or the thick silver blood that collected under her fingernails.

  But Lacey had never had that drive, Atleigh realized. She had come along for the ride, and she had even gotten good at spotting leeches or following leads, but it wasn’t where her heart was. Atleigh didn’t know where Lacey’s heart was. And maybe that was the real problem—not that Lacey wasn’t the same as her, but that Atleigh didn’t know what Lacey really was.

  Once they were past the front gate, they found themselves on the side of a straight, neat road lined with houses. There was an island in the middle of the road packed with manicured bushes and flowers. All the houses looked pretty much the same, each of them a muted shade of gray, brown, or white, with a different assemblage of windows and doors, but the same siding, the same central front door, the same two-car garage. There was something nice about the consistency, Atleigh thought, though she wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone. This was a place to disappear in.

  Atleigh pulled up a map of the place on her phone and walking directions to 854 Small Pine Boulevard. It wasn’t a long walk. Atleigh sort of wished it were, so she could get herself together—her breaths were coming fast and shallow, and she couldn’t seem to slow them down.

  “You know,” Eon said, “we don’t have to do this.”