by Tahereh Mafi
Months, really.
Years.
Some days, no matter how far back I go, I can’t seem to find the good times. Some days, the occasional happiness I’ve known feels like a bizarre dream. An error. Hyperreal and unfocused, the colors too bright and the sounds too strong.
Figments of my imagination.
It was just days ago that clarity came to me, bearing gifts. Just days ago that the worst seemed behind me, that the world seemed full of potential, that my body was stronger than ever, my mind fuller, sharper, more capable than I’d ever known it.
But now
But now
But now I feel like I’m clinging to the blurring edges of sanity, that elusive, fair-weather friend always breaking my heart.
Aaron pulls me close and I melt into him, grateful for his warmth, for the steadiness of his arms around me. I take a deep, shuddering breath and let it all go, exhaling against him. I inhale the rich, heady scent of his skin, the faint aroma of gardenias he somehow carries with him always. Seconds pass in perfect silence and we listen to each other breathe.
Slowly, my heart rate steadies.
The tears dry up. The fears take five. Terror is distracted by a passing butterfly and sadness takes a nap.
For a little while it’s just me and him and us and everything is untarnished, untouched by darkness.
I knew I loved Warner Aaron before all this—before we were captured by The Reestablishment, before we were ripped apart, before we learned of our shared history—but that love was new, green, its depths uncharted, untested. In that brief, glimmering window during which the gaping holes in my memory felt fully accounted for, things between us changed. Everything between us changed. Even now, even with the noise in my head, I feel it.
Here.
This.
My bones against his bones. This is my home.
I feel him suddenly stiffen and I pull back, concerned. I can’t see much of him in this perfect darkness, but I feel the delicate rise of goose bumps along his arms when he says, “What are you thinking about?”
My eyes widen, comprehension dethroning concern. “I was thinking about you.”
“Me?”
I close the gap between us again. Nod against his chest.
He says nothing, but I can hear his heart, racing in the quiet, and eventually I hear him exhale. It’s a heavy, uneven sound, like he might’ve been holding his breath for too long. I wish I could see his face. No matter how much time we spend together, I still forget how much he can feel my emotions, especially at times like this, when our bodies are pressed together.
Gently, I run my hand down his back. “I was thinking about how much I love you,” I say.
He goes uncommonly still, but only for a moment. And then he touches my hair, his fingers slowly combing the strands.
“Did you feel it?” I ask.
When he doesn’t answer, I pull back again. I blink against the black until I’m able to make out the glint of his eyes, the shadow of his mouth.
“Aaron?”
“Yes,” he says, but he sounds a little breathless.
“Yes, you felt it?”
“Yes,” he says again.
“What does it feel like?”
He sighs. Rolls onto his back. He’s quiet for so long that, for a while, I’m not sure he’s going to answer. Then, softly, he says:
“It’s hard to describe. It’s a pleasure so close to pain I sometimes can’t tell the two apart.”
“That sounds awful.”
“No,” he says. “It’s exquisite.”
“I love you.”
A sharp intake of breath. Even in this darkness I see the strain in his jaw—the tension there—as he stares at the ceiling.
I sit straight up, surprised.
Aaron’s reaction is so unstudied I don’t know how I never noticed it before. But then, maybe this is new. Maybe something really has changed between us. Maybe I never loved him this much before. That would make sense, I suppose. Because when I think about it, when I really think about how much I love him now, after everything we’ve—
Another sudden, sharp breath. And then he laughs, nervously.
“Wow,” I say.
He claps a hand over his eyes. “This is vaguely mortifying.”
I’m smiling now, very nearly laughing. “Hey. It’s—”
My body seizes.
A violent shudder rushes up my skin and my spine goes rigid, my bones held in place by invisible pins, my mouth frozen open and trying to draw breath.
Heat fills my vision.
I hear nothing but static, grand rapids, white water, ferocious wind. Feel nothing. Think nothing. Am nothing.
I am, for the most infinitesimal moment—
Free.
My eyelids flutter open closed open closed open closed I am a wing, two wings, a swinging door, five birds
Fire climbs inside of me, explodes.
Ella?
The voice appears in my mind with swift strength, sharp, like darts to the brain. Dully, I realize that I’m in pain— my jaw aches, my body still suspended in an unnatural position—but I ignore it. The voice tries again:
Juliette?
Realization strikes, a knife to the knees. Images of my sister fill my mind: bones and melted skin, webbed fingers, sodden mouth, no eyes. Her body suspended underwater, long brown hair like a swarm of eels. Her strange, disembodied voice pierces through me. And so I say, without speaking:
Emmaline?
Emotion drives into me, fingers digging in my flesh, sensation scraping across my skin. Her relief is tangible. I can taste it. She’s relieved, relieved I recognized her, relieved she found me, relieved relieved relieved—
What happened? I ask.
A deluge of images floods my brain until it sinks, I sink. Her memories drown my senses, clog lungs. I choke as the feelings crash into me. I see Max, my father, inconsolable in the wake of his wife’s murder; I see Supreme Commander Ibrahim, frantic and furious, demanding Anderson gather the other children before it’s too late; I see Emmaline, briefly abandoned, seizing an opportunity—
I gasp.
Evie made it so that only she or Max could control Emmaline’s powers, and with Evie dead, the fail-safes implemented were suddenly weakened. Emmaline realized that in the wake of our mother’s death there would be a brief window of opportunity—a brief window during which she might be able to wrest back control of her own mind before Max remade the algorithms.
But Evie’s work was too good, and Max’s reaction too prompt. Emmaline was only partly successful.
Dying, she says to me.
Dying.
Every flash of her emotion is accompanied by torturous assault. My flesh feels bruised. My spine seems liquid, my eyes blind, searing. I feel Emmaline—her voice, her feelings, her visions—more strongly than before, because she’s stronger than before. That she managed to regain enough power to find me is proof alone that she is at least partly untethered, unrestrained. Max and Evie had been experimenting on Emmaline to a reckless degree in the last several months, trying to make her stronger even as her body withered. This, this, is the consequence.
Being this close to her is nothing short of excruciating.
I think I’ve screamed.
Have I screamed?
Everything about Emmaline is heightened to a fever pitch; her presence is wild, breathtaking, and it shudders to life inside my nerves. Sound and sensation streak across my vision, barrel through me violently. I hear a spider scuttle across the wooden floor. Tired moths drag their wings along the wall. A mouse startles, settles, in its sleep. Dust motes fracture against a window, shrapnel skidding across the glass.
My eyes skitter, unhinged in my skull.
I feel the oppressive weight of my hair, my limbs, my flesh wrapped around me like cellophane, a leather casket. My tongue, my tongue is a dead lizard perched in my mouth, rough and heavy. The fine hairs on my arms stand and sway, stand and sway. My fists are so tightl
y clenched my fingernails pierce the soft flesh of my palms.
I feel a hand on me. Where? Am I?
Lonely, she says.
She shows me.
A vision of us, back in the laboratory where I first saw her, where I killed our mother. I see myself from Emmaline’s point of view and it’s startling. She can’t see much more than a blur, but she can feel my presence, can make out the shape of my form, the heat emanating from my body. And then my words, my own words, hurled back into my brain—
there has to be another way
you don’t have to die
we can get through this together
please
i want my sister back
i want you to live
Emmaline
i won’t let you die here
Emmaline Emmaline
we can get through this together
we can get through this together
we can get through this
together
A cold, metallic sensation begins to bloom in my chest. It moves through me, up my arms, down my throat, pushes into my gut. My teeth throb. Emmaline’s pain claws and slithers, clings with a ferocity I can’t bear. Her tenderness, too, is desperate, terrifying in its sincerity. She’s overcome by emotion, hot and cold, fueled by rage and devastation.
She’s been looking for me, all this time.
In these last couple of days Emmaline has been searching the conscious world for my mind, trying to find safe harbor, a place to rest.
A place to die.
Emmaline, I say. Please—
Sister.
Something tightens in my mind, squeezes. Fear propels through me, punctures organs. I’m wheezing. I smell earth and damp, decomposing leaves and I feel the stars staring at my skin, wind pushing through darkness like an anxious parent. My mouth is open, catching moths. I am on the ground.
Where?
No longer in my bed, I realize, no longer in my tent, I realize, no longer protected.
But when did I walk?
Who moved my feet? Who pushed my body?
How far?
I try to look around but I’m blind, my head trapped in a vise, my neck reduced to fraying sinew. My breaths fill my ears, harsh and loud, harsh and loud, rough rough gasping efforts my head
swings
My fists unclench, nails scraping as my fingers uncurl, palms flattening, I smell heat, taste wind, hear dirt.
Dirt under my hands, in my mouth, under my fingernails. I’m screaming, I realize. Someone is touching me and I’m screaming.
Stop, I scream. Please, Emmaline— Please don’t do this—
Lonely, she says.
l o n e l y
And with a sudden, ferocious agony—
I am displaced.
KENJI
It feels weird to call it luck.
It feels weird, but in some perverse, twisted way, this is luck. Luck that I’m standing in the middle of damp, freezing woodlands before the sun’s bothered to lift its head. Luck that my bare upper body is half-numb from cold.
Luck that Nazeera’s with me.
We pulled on our invisibility almost instantly, so she and I are at least temporarily safe here, in the half-mile stretch of untouched wilderness between regulated and unregulated territories. The Sanctuary was built on a couple of acres of unregulated land not far from where I’m standing, and it’s masterfully hidden in plain sight only because of Nouria’s unnatural talent for bending and manipulating light. Within Nouria’s jurisdiction, the climate is somehow more temperate, the weather more predictable. But out here in the wild, the winds are relentless and combative. The temperatures are dangerous.
Still— We’re lucky to be here at all.
Nazeera and I had been out of bed for a while, racing through the dark in an attempt at murdering one another. In the end it all turned out to be a complicated misunderstanding, but it was also a kind of kismet: If Nazeera hadn’t snuck into my room at three o’clock in the morning and nearly killed me, I wouldn’t have chased her through the forest, beyond the sight and soundproof protections of the Sanctuary. If we hadn’t been so far from the Sanctuary, we never would’ve heard the distant, echoing screams of citizens crying out in terror. If we hadn’t heard those cries, we never would’ve rushed toward the source. And if we hadn’t done any of that, I never would’ve seen my best friend screaming her way into dawn.
I would’ve missed this. This:
J on her knees in the cold dirt, Warner crouched down beside her, both of them looking like death while the clouds literally melt out of the sky above them. The two of them are parked right outside the entrance to the Sanctuary, straddling the untouched stretch of forest that serves as a buffer between our camp and the heart of the nearest sector, number 241.
Why?
I froze when I saw them there, two broken figures entwined, limbs planted in the ground. I was paralyzed by confusion, then fear, then disbelief, all while the trees bent sideways and the wind snapped at my body, cruelly reminding me that I’d never had a chance to put on a shirt.
If my night had gone differently, I might’ve had that chance.
If my night had gone differently, I might’ve enjoyed, for the first time in my life, a romantic sunrise and an overdue reconciliation with a beautiful girl. Nazeera and I would’ve laughed about how she’d kicked me in the back and almost killed me, and how afterward I almost shot her for it. After that I would’ve taken a long shower, slept until noon, and eaten my weight in breakfast foods.
I had a plan for today: take it easy.
I wanted a little more time to heal after my most recent near-death experience, and I didn’t think I was asking for much. I thought that, maybe, after everything I’d been through, the world might finally cut me some slack. Let me breathe between tragedies.
Nah.
Instead, I’m here, dying of frostbite and horror, watching the world fall to pieces around me. The sky, swinging wildly between horizontal and vertical horizons. The air, puncturing at random. Trees, sinking into the ground. Leaves, tap-dancing around me. I’m seeing it—I’m actively witnessing it—and still I can’t believe it.
But I’m choosing to call it luck.
Luck that I’m seeing this, luck that I feel like I might throw up, luck that I ran all this way in my still-ill, injured body just in time to score a front-row seat to the end of the world.
Luck, fate, coincidence, serendipity—
I’ll call this sick, sinking feeling in my gut a fucking magic trick if it’ll help me keep my eyes open long enough to bear witness. To figure out how to help.
Because no one else is here.
No one but me and Nazeera, which seems crazy to an improbable degree. The Sanctuary is supposed to have security on patrol at all times, but I see no sentries, and no sign of incoming aid. No soldiers from the nearby sector, either. Not even curious, hysterical civilians. Nothing.
It’s like we’re standing in a vacuum, on an invisible plane of existence. I don’t know how J and Warner made it this far without being spotted. The two of them look like they were literally dragged through the dirt; I have no idea how they escaped notice. And though it’s possible J only just started screaming, I still have a thousand unanswered questions.
They’ll have to wait.
I glance at Nazeera out of habit, forgetting for a moment that she and I are invisible. But then I feel her step closer, and I breathe a sigh of relief as her hand slips into mine. She squeezes my fingers. I return the pressure.
Lucky, I remind myself.
It’s lucky that we’re here right now, because if I’d been in bed where I should’ve been, I wouldn’t have even known J was in trouble. I would’ve missed the tremble in my friend’s voice as she cried out, begging for mercy. I would’ve missed the shattering colors of a twisted sunrise, a peacock in the middle of hell. I would’ve missed the way J clamped her head between her hands and sobbed. I would’ve missed the sharp scents of pine and sulfur in the wind,
would’ve missed the dry ache in my throat, the tremor moving through my body. I would’ve missed the moment J mentioned her sister by name. I wouldn’t have heard J specifically ask her sister not to do something.
Yeah, this is definitely luck.
Because if I hadn’t heard any of that, I wouldn’t have known who to blame.
Emmaline.
ELLA
JULIETTE
I have eyes, two, feel them, rolling back and forth, around and around in my skull I have lips, two, feel them, wet and and heavy, pry them open have teeth, many, tongue, one and fingers, ten, count them
onetwothreefourfive, again on the other side strange, ssstrange to have a tongue, sstrange it’s a sssstrange ssort of thing, a strange ssssssssssortofthing
loneliness
it creeps up on you
quiet
and
still,
sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep wrapssitself around your bones squeezing sotightyoualmostcan’t breathe almost can’t hear the pulse racing in your blood as it rush, rushes up your
skin
touches its lips to the soft hairs at the back of your
neck
loneliness is a strangesortof thinga sstrangesortofthing an old friend standing beside you in the mirror screaming you’re notenoughneverenough never ever enough
sssssometimes it just
won’t
let
go
KENJI
I sidestep an eruption in the ground and duck just in time to avoid a cluster of vines growing in midair. A distant rock balloons to an astronomical size, and the moment it starts barreling in our direction I tighten my hold on Nazeera’s hand and dive for cover.
The sky is ripping apart. The ground is fracturing beneath my feet. The sun flickers, strobing darkness, strobing light, everything stilted. And the clouds— There’s something newly wrong with the clouds.