The luminosity pulses and vanishes with a crackle, leaving a sulphurous, hot scent on the air. The smell of a spent firework.
“Can you control it?”
I shake my head, then draw my knees to my chest and bury my head there with a resigned sigh.
“Eleni. This is it. This is how you escape. If Prothero knew about this, they wouldn’t send you off to fight.”
“Prothero knows. They know exactly where I am and what’s happening to me. They’re not going to save me. Not again.”
He's silent for a moment, absorbing my words. His eyes dart back and forth and he shakes his head against the truth. His bushy eyebrows raise in supplication. “The Fullers owe me.”
“No way. I wrecked their son. You said it yourself—their help comes with a price.”
“I already paid it.”
“You can’t—”
He shakes his head. His gaze flickers down to the rotting floorboards between our hands. Our fingers brush close together and blue licks between them. We watch it with distracted fascination, heads dipping close.
“I want to fly with you, Eleni,” he says, his fingers curling into mine. The blue ignites and sparks around our wrists, tangling up our arms. “I want you.”
My heart shudders and I bury my head against his chest, the wet shirt giving off a strong scent of bleach. His cinnamon breath drifts into my nostrils. Rabbit smell.
He folds his long limbs over me, the places where we touch buzz, cerulean cascading around and cocooning us. The loud, nervous pounding of his heart rumbles against my bad ear. It’s comforting. Human. I drift off but I don’t dream of the metal orb. I dream about floating weightless in a spacecraft. I dream about the taste of Rabbit’s lips and the sight of an infinite number of stars burning into our vision as we rush through the galaxy—together.
It’s later. The sky is burnished, the sun tucked off somewhere below the horizon. I’m laying on Rabbit’s warm chest. His arms are still around me. His nose is buried in my wavy hair. I rise and shake him gently. His head lolls, eyes snapping open.
“What time is it?” He asks, voice warm and wrinkled like a used bed sheet.
The interface on our bands reads 4 a.m.
“Damn. We should get to the base. The sooner the better.” He pushes up off the floor and scrambles around the dusty house, gathering his pack and the telescope.
The rain stopped, so we trudge back to the camp. It’s empty. The others left already, seeking shelter or walking back to Fort Columbia. My purpose out here—sneaking away to harass Carmen for a letter—was largely forgotten until this moment. We’ll walk right past the church housing complex. There’s time. There’s still a chance. I turn to Rabbit.
“Will you walk ahead of me?” I ask, grabbing onto the sleeve of his jacket, tugging him to a stop. “I’ll meet you at the bottom of the hill in fifteen minutes.”
“Why? What’s going on?” he asks, rubbing at the bags under his eyes, his mind operating on military auto-pilot. “We shouldn’t split up.”
“This isn’t a combat SIM. We’ll be fine. Go to the bottom of the hill. I’ll meet you there. Wave me when you’re ready.”
He looks around, scanning the squat, ugly winter cherry trees. He spies the looming cross and Prothero flag waving above the church building in the distance. His mouth sets in a thin line but he moves forward anyway. I stay rooted to my spot, pretending to be absorbed in a dormant ant-hill along the side of the road. He rounds the corner and disappears from view. I wait another five minutes or so and walk languidly towards the building. Rabbit’s band glows off in the distance. I mute mine. The new tech eye comes equipped with enhanced night vision anyway.
I search the sidewalk for the needed item, a rock large enough to attract attention but to not look entirely out of place. An object designed to elicit notice from those who’ve spent a lifetime looking for minute details. I grab a sharper rock and trace an X on the bottom of the round stone to indicate a meeting tomorrow morning at 10am. Our usual spot is behind a tool shed in the orchards. In the parking lot I keep to the shadows and slink up against the wall at the front doors, placing the round rock on the steps.
My metal heart seizes when a brush rattles ominously across the road. A deer leaps out onto the sunken pavement and flicks its ears towards me. I make a shooing motion and it hops back off into the wilderness, into the orchard.
Rabbit’s wave pops up on my display and I tiptoe down the main walkway, onto the sidewalk and out into the street. I brighten the light on the band, stepping carefully through the naked, forlorn trees to the shed. I trace another white, chalky X on the rusted tin metal. Just in case Carmen doesn’t notice the first clue. Rabbit, growing impatient and concerned, sends another wave. I jog back out onto Cherry Heights.
When I reach the bottom of the hill, I’m breathless and panting. Rabbit holds out an arm to halt me and I pause, gulping oxygen into my lungs.
“What are you running from?” He squints up the road.
“Nothing.” He is not assured. He looks suspicious of the shadows and possibly of me. Too much military training. Or maybe prison or drug dealing. That prison tattoo on his chest.
He gives me a quick visual scan and we move out. I catch him giving backward glances to the Prothero flag waving above our heads until we turn off the road. I thought Rabbit’s tension and vigilance was him taking the Academy too seriously, but I’m wondering if looking over his shoulder and cowering away from dark corners isn’t just a way of life for him.
We’re silent on the long walk back to the base. Rabbit is distant, contemplative. We’ve both been given a lot of new information to analyze. I’m absorbed in my own thoughts and don’t notice he’s stopped walking until he clears his throat behind me.
“Garza,” he calls out, in the tone I’ve grown familiar with on the virtual battlefield. When he’s shaking me from a stupor I’ve slipped into, when he’s calling me back from my silent musing.
“What’s going on?” I jog over to where he’s stopped, his pack and the telescope piled at his feet.
He pushes the sleeve of his jacket up and unclips the rosary bracelet with the red cross and white beads. I extend my arm to him and he wraps the rosary around my wrist, hooking the clasp together. His fingertips linger for a moment and then he spins the bracelet, testing the tightness against my skin. Satisfied, he looks down at me with a smile.
“My mom always said this meant hope. If you believe in hope.” His hand rests around my wrist, encircling it and the rosary beads.
“Do you believe in hope?” I ask him.
“I do.”
“Good enough for me.”
His brows knit, and he leans down towards me. We kiss. I like the gentle weight of his fingertips resting tentatively on my neck. I like the cinnamon taste of his tongue searching for mine. The blue vapor returns, tingling across our skin, but not quite as powerful in the light of day. A contented groan purrs from his throat, and a pleasant warmth blooms in my belly.
“I could get used to this,” he murmurs. His hand squeezes around my wrist, pressing the rosary beads firmly against my skin. Again, I feel that dull recognition of the object but that mental push away from it. As if for some reason my brain doesn’t want to linger too long on its implications. It’s a nagging, distressing feeling I can’t easily shake. I want to forget the ever-present tangle of nerves and confusion. I just want to focus on the good things in front of me.
For the moment, I have hope.
Hope is a dangerous thing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Revelations
I’m on my way to meet a terrorist. The letters from Mateo are letters from a Contra. My tin—the one nestled underneath my bed in the barracks—is full of four years of communications detailing every bit of information I’ve stolen from Prothero and transferred to the Contras.
I didn’t know Mateo was a Contra. Not at first. At first it was just us sitting under a lime tree in a courtyard outside the gates of a military bas
e, peeling the rinds off citrus fruit and tossing them to crows. We’d watch one of the local boys—Javier Hernandez—gathering limes to sell on the street-corner to the soldiers and tourists.
Javier had been tagged in crossfire between two factions of Contras—revolutionaries with different types of revolution in mind. The irradiated bullet tore through his calf, breaking his bones apart. He replaced it with a plastic leg, the kind of hollow, creaking item that could easily be printed up at a corner replicator store. Not sturdy enough to last for long. His parents probably purchased one every six months, like a new pair of shoes. I liked Javier. He always waved and smiled at me with a palpable cheerfulness, limping between the trees, limes bulging from the hemp bag slung over his shoulder.
Matty and I listened to the chatter of nationals, watching as they lined up in the hot sun to receive inoculations. We talked about how I was leaving in two days and how we imagined Paris—my new destination—would look, feel, and smell.
We communicated in Mateo’s broken English and my limited Spanish. We bit sour fruit and held hands in the shade of the tree, hiding away from the suspicious gazes of the military personnel around us.
Mexico City was falling apart. In a few places, literally, where the bombs exploded. Where civilians rioted for inoculations, burning cars and shattering glass. Boards went up over windows and were never removed. Shop doors were shoved ajar and left open to the public, all the contents inside looted. The city was littered with damaged buildings and parks where average citizens waged battles against police and soldiers, suffering the fate of unarmed people when they go up against authority clad in riot gear and wielding weapons.
A Prothero lab exploded in the city seven years ago and released an experimental nano weapon that spread across the population like wildfire in a summer field. The nano virus started in Mexico City. Ground zero. Not many other people know—that’s secret information obtained only by those working in the Prothero government with access to high level security clearance. People like my parents. My parents knew and yet they never seemed too terribly concerned with why Prothero had developed a bioweapon for which there was no cure.
As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the terrorists loosed NV, so the world supports never-ending conflict as retribution. Any solution to get rid of the virus and the terrorists. The only “cure” is an expensive inoculation produced by Prothero which has a short-span shelf life and has to be readministered every few weeks. They hold the sole government patent for the next twenty years.
The inoculation was created by my parents. They spent their last days traveling the globe dispersing it with Prothero’s consent—tugging me in their wake as they delivered salvation to the populace.
I had the cure—the genetic lottery that allowed me ready and frequent access to inoculations. Mateo did not. We held hands anyway. He was dying under the lime tree. I was leaving for Paris so my parents could establish an emergency base to deal with an outbreak there. The whole world was sick and dying but Mateo’s palms were warmer than the Mexican sun and our fledgling love smelled like limes.
You couldn’t skip a bi-weekly inoculation if you were a government employee or dependent. I tried to let Matty go in my place instead since enough of the drug accumulated in my body to last for weeks. He was turned away at the door. It was impossible to cheat this system, they scanned your retina to ensure the medicine was going to the right person. Over the course of four months I watched him grow sicker.
Mexican citizens who couldn’t afford to purchase the inoculation only received the drug if they were selected by weekly lottery. Mateo’s number was sixteen and it hadn’t come up in six months. Inky veins snaked like deadly, poisonous rivers under his skin. It should have worried me more, I suppose. But life outside of Prothero contained a dreamy sense of unreality. I’d always watched the world crumble from a safe distance, wrapped in a comfortable blanket of ignorance. It should have worried both of us but I could only concentrate on how devastating it was that our flight was leaving in forty-eight hours and I’d never see him again.
Nestled under the lime tree, Matty asked me to steal an inoculation from the hospital cart. And I agreed. He said if I delivered the medicine to him that evening, he would not be sick anymore. I didn’t have a good reason to say no.
Stealing from Prothero felt like a game, like pretend. I wasn’t scared of them. I’d grown up with some measure of their involvement my entire life, like a benevolent overseer. A third, kindly parent figure, gifting me good health, abundant food, and shelter. Disobeying Prothero possessed all the weight of defying my parents. And those consequences were never more severe than standing in the corner with my nose against the wall.
I was fourteen. I was an idiot.
Love for my friend made me brave and Prothero’s indiscretions colored my perception of what was right and wrong in the world. Maybe that’s not entirely true. Seeing the sickest, deadliest parts of the world tainted my perception of what was right and wrong. I knew stealing was wrong, but letting people suffer when you had enough medicine to heal everyone was also wrong. The alternative was watching Matty die.
We planned it out that morning. I would be seated at the small battered desk in the former kindergarten room of an elementary school they'd repurposed for a public health facility. Right before they gave me the inoculation I would moan and fake stomach cramps, doubling over. It worked. The nurse looked away, calling one of the assistants over to us. While her attention was diverted, I grabbed a handful of injections and stuffed them into the outer thigh pocket of my cargo pants. I was certain no one noticed, despite the pocket bulging with medicine. I never witnessed authorities scanning Prothero staff and family after inoculations. We had no need to take what was offered for free.
Prothero wasn’t immediately aware I’d stolen the medicine. So I enjoyed this one, glorious evening where I thought everything was going right. I was a hero and I’d saved another person’s life. There were the final, brief, fleeting moments where I delivered the inoculations to Matty in a tin box my father purchased from Afghanistan, another of my parents war ravaged travel destinations. The tin was special. It still is. I didn’t possess many items, we traveled often and learned to pack only the objects of true importance. I kept them all locked away in the tin. I’d scooped all the “important” trinkets out of it already, like the mood ring from my Grandparents. The miniature china tea set from my Aunt. Stickers. Toys. A whistle. Chapstick. These were all dumped in a plastic bag and shoved into my luggage.
I presented the box to Mateo. The tin constructed with graceful, swirling decorative symbols in Arabic I could not decipher. Neither could my father. The key to unlock it is genius in its simplicity. A silver coin slips into a slot on the left side, the gap in the metal expertly hidden under all the decoration. Most people’s fingers would normally glide right past it, but for a small indent where two objects meet, a moon and star. In between them is the slot. The coin rolls into it and an internal mechanism clicks. The key rolls out the right side. The coin is emblazoned with the same image, the moon and stars melting into one another. My father punched a hole in it and I wore the coin on a chain around my neck for safekeeping.
I offered these items to Mateo and explained how the lock and key work. There were six vials inside. One a week for the next six weeks. I wasn’t sure if it would save him. But I was sure it would stall the progression of the darkened veins moving up his neck and spreading like a fungus across his jaw and cheeks. I stood a moment, admiring his tawny skin and wide nose, sharp cheekbones, long hair that framed his large brown eyes. He offered me a generous smile as he took the box and we hugged. My nose and heart filled with limes. The bitter scent stung my nostrils, searing into my brain, permanently rooting in my memories.
He stooped his neck down towards me and I placed the chain over his head. He gave me a slip of paper, written in the Spanish I learned from our stilted conversations.
We could not communicate over waves—they were not se
cure. Prothero scanned for exchanges between nationals and servicemen, especially on military bases, so electronic communication was not an option if we wanted privacy. Privacy is what every romantic wants. The sense of a forbidden, marginally dangerous love. The first slip of paper he gave me contained the hastily scribbled name and address of a connection in Paris to whom I could deliver letters. I didn’t question why or how he would be acquainted with a person half way across the world. I was too enamored of the idea of our secret tryst.
He departed with the box and I took the slip of paper. The Spanish words didn’t take long to memorize, as he’d instructed. I repeated them all the way back to base where I ripped the paper into shreds and flushed it down the toilet with the gray water.
More secrets to hide.
Prothero soldiers came for me the next morning. They'd noticed the inoculation discrepancy and reviewed the security devices to determine how the injectors had gone missing. When the officer first knocked on the door my parents were polite. Polite and upset. Then they were frightened. I was led away in unfamiliar tech handcuffs. They took me to a sparse, cold white room, sat me on a chair in front of a table and left me there for two hours. I chewed the inside of my cheeks raw, hoping my parents would arrive at any moment. Instead a scary General with pepper gray hair and icy green eyes entered the room. One look at the grave set of his jaw and I couldn't stop my frightened tears.
He questioned me about the inoculations. Why I’d taken them, where I’d taken them, what I’d done with them. I lied consistently, keeping my story straight every time. I told the Prothero general I’d tossed them down one of the open sewage drains near the base because I thought they would go into the water system, and assumed more people could get the inoculations.
Then my parents were led in. We viewed the tape of my indiscretion together. I couldn’t force myself to witness the crime, so I watched my parents horrified faces instead. It was worse than I imagined to see their countenances morph in shame and fear. Their looks of confusion as they watched me steal the drugs they helped create from their employer. Their pained expressions told me all I needed to know about what the future held in store for us. Prothero wasn’t going to forgive and let this go easily. The corporation no longer acted as a benevolent care-aker. There would be serious consequences for violating their protocols.
Metal Heart: Book 1: The Metal Heart Trilogy Page 14