“I thought you were dead! Things changed when you came back! And then, when he came back–”
“You forgot about me all over again.”
Gabe’s words hit me like a punch to the gut. The air grows sharper. I’d go to him, but I’m afraid of being pushed away. “I never forgot about you.” My words are quiet. “Not for a day.”
“You did when you were with him.”
“How… how could you know that?”
“I can read you.”
“But that… that’s…” That’s something else. That’s more than just feelings. “This… this connection between us…” I start. “You’ve… you’ve always felt it more keenly than I have, haven’t you?”
Gabe nods slowly.
“And… and you’ve always been good at reading other people, too.”
“What are you getting at?”
How many times had Gabe seemed to know how everyone was feeling, without anyone telling him? He knew Julia was keeping something from us. He could tell when Mi was disappointed, even when he wasn’t showing it. Even back at the Institute… the way he manipulated the guard into letting him share my punishment, and when we were younger...
Oh, Eve! You don’t know what they’re really like!
But Gabe knew. He knew because he could feel them.
“You’re empathic, aren’t you?” The words hardly feel like my own. What this means… “Like Moona. Only you learnt to control it. You learnt really young.”
Gabe cannot look at me. “I… I always wondered if you’d figure it out. I thought maybe you had, when you asked me about our connection. I won’t… I won’t say I’ve mastered it. There’s still plenty of times I feel what I don’t try to.”
“Why… why would you hide that? From me? From Mi?”
“Because I wanted you. To myself. I didn’t want to be like Mi to you. I wanted you in a different way. A special way–”
“If you think that’s romantic–”
“I won’t pretend–”
My breathing increases to the point I feel I might choke on it. “Oh, Gabe, what have you done? What did you do? How much of what I’ve felt for you is–”
“I can’t change how people feel! Everything you’ve felt for me was your own, I swear it!”
“But it was built on a lie!”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if we–”
“Of course it matters!”
I think of all the times feeling his thoughts hurt me, particularly when I was reeling from the loss of Nick. He let me feel that. He made me feel that. It was cruel and manipulative. Not to mention… had he made me feel his desire? Had his own thoughts meddled with my own? How could it not matter?
“You made me feel what you felt,” I swallow. “That… that wasn’t fair.”
“I wanted to share. I wanted to share everything with you, like we had before.”
“You wanted me to know how much you were hurting. You wanted to punish me.”
“I didn’t. It wasn’t like that–”
“But how can I know that?”
“Feel me. You know it–”
I cut across him. “Did you kill Abe?”
Gabe’s face tightens. “Would it matter if I did? He was a danger, Ashe. You’re too trusting.”
“But–” How could you not tell me? How could you do all this by yourself?
“Don’t go pretending he wasn’t a complete waste of space,” Gabe snaps. “Don’t go pretending you’re not glad he’s gone.”
“I am, but…”
“I’d do anything to protect you. Anything.”
I said the same thing, only a few hours ago, about Nick. But I was wrong. There are some things I wouldn’t do. Kill Abe, sure. Hurt innocents, no. Lie to him, no. And there’s a fiery honesty to Gabe’s words. He really would do anything.
“I can’t… I can’t trust you any more.” The words escape out of me almost like a wail. “I don’t… I don’t even know you.”
“You don’t mean that. You can’t mean that.”
“You know I do.”
“No. No!” The fire inside Gabe darkens. He turns away from me, pacing about the roof, his fingers coiled in his hair as if he’s trying to rip his thoughts away. “You can’t leave me. You can’t do this. Not after everything I’ve done for you!”
“What… what do you mean?”
“I got you out of the Institute. I saved you. All of you.”
“I know, but–”
“No, you don’t know. You don’t have any idea what I did for you all!”
After his confession about Abe, I’m not sure I want to ask. But I have to know. Of course I do.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“The day… the day after we heard what they were going to do to Mi, I went to them. Begged them not to kill him. To at least set him free, give him a chance. They said they’d do one better: they’d let all of you escape. I just had to make it seem like you’d done it yourselves.”
“That’s… that’s not… what?”
It doesn’t make any sense. Why would the Institute not only let us escape, but engineer it? What possible motives could they have?
But then… The Director let me go again, today.
A horrible, dark, shrinking feeling coils inside me. We never escaped from the Institute. We are still puppets in whatever twisted game they’re playing.
“I don’t know why they did it,” Gabe continues. “I asked. They just called it an experiment. I told you I would have done anything to save him. It seemed like a sacrifice worth paying, at the time. But then I was trapped there, for five years, without you. Without anyone. With nothing but my thoughts and the thoughts of everyone else…”
How did that not destroy him? How could anyone go through that and not be… altered? But then I look at Gabe’s dark expression, and realise something in him is not quite as it should be. There’s something in him that’s different from the darkness inside the rest of us.
My throat is painful. All of me is painful. I feel warped, raw, exposed. “Why… why didn’t you tell them?” I ask. “About your powers? Maybe... maybe they could have helped.”
Gabe laughs. “What? Like they helped Moona? No thank you.”
I don’t believe this. I can’t believe it. All those years I spent bemoaning the connection we had, knowing how special we were… and it was a lie? It was all something he fabricated as a child? How can this be?
“I knew you’d be upset,” he continues. “But you need to know: I only did it because I wanted you so badly. We belong together.”
“No, Gabe. You took away my choices.”
“Because you didn’t know–”
“You never gave me a chance! You never, you never…” Words fail me. I cannot summon them, cannot imagine them into being. They do not exist. I cannot explain to someone who can feel all of my emotions precisely what I am feeling.
“I see,” says Gabe. “Like I said, I knew you’d be upset." He hovers over the ledge, looking out over the slums. "I think... I think I should go now.”
“Go where?” I ask numbly.
“Anywhere. I’m not sure. But I can’t stay here and watch you look at me like that.”
I swallow. In the very, very back of my heart, this still feels wrong. This is Gabe. Gabe should not be leaving. Gabe is family.
But the Gabe I knew would not do this.
Who was the Gabe you knew?
He leaps off the roof before I can find the strength to call out, and is swallowed by the shadows.
My heart should not be broken, because the person I loved didn’t exist. Somehow, though, the minute he’s out of sight, it goes cascading to the floor, my body along with it. I grip the railing and try not to scream.
Oh, Gabe, what have you done?
* * *
End of Book 2
The story will conclude in:
The Phoenix Project Book III: Rebirth
Please read on for a short story featuring
Mi and Scarlet, set in-between books 1 and 2.
A Spark from the Ashes
Mi was trying very hard not to think about Scarlet right now. He was doctoring someone’s wound. Really, that should be taking up all of his focus, but it wasn’t a hard task, and all the rest of him that wasn’t occupied with cleaning the cut was completely occupied in the knowledge that she was standing a few feet way, talking to Julia.
Scarlet’s body seemed to burn. It gave off a strange, intense kind of heat. It wasn’t like firelight. It was something smooth and thicker, almost like oil. The air between the two of them seemed to part whenever she came close.
It was distracting, to say the least.
They had been close before –very close– and Mi thought he really ought to have kissed her the night before everyone set off for the Institute. Only he’d freaked out at the last moment and worried about missing her lips and hitting her nose or something and so he’d backed down, and the moment had slithered away.
She’d been a rock in the days after Ashe’s death, coming by with food, making them all eat something and doing the tasks that couldn’t wait but no one felt like doing. Then came the night when it truly hit him, that Ashe was gone, that he was the oldest now, that he had to protect them now and he wasn’t sure if he could. He’d gone up to the roof, kicked something, and let rip the scream that had been simmering underneath the surface for days.
That was where she found him. She pulled him into her arms, and all his strength just dribbled away.
“I was wondering when you’d break,” she told him. “Nick did days ago. It’s all right to feel this way. I’m here. Whatever it is you need, I’m here.”
She was gone the next day, of course. Back to her family, to Nick. He was her Ashe, after all. He could not begrudge her that. She gave him space, space to get up and carry on, to learn to be human without his sister, like he’d learnt to live without his brother, without his sight.
How much could one lose, before they were completely broken?
He heard Abi and Ben playing inside, and realised that there was still more. There would always be more.
He finished with his patient and dismissed him. The conversation with Julia was over too; she had moved back into her study and was tapping away at something on her keyboard. Scarlet materialised at his shoulder.
So close, so incredibly close.
“Are you tired?” she asked.
He smiled. “Not remotely.”
“Good. I was wondering how you felt about dancing.”
“Dancing?”
“Yes. It’s when you move to music.”
He half-laughed, half-sighed. “I know what dancing is!”
“Good. Ever done it before?”
“In the kitchen, maybe.”
“Care to do it in public? There’s a bar I know–”
“Is this for a mission?”
She paused, and it was not an easy one to read. Disappointment?
“No,” she said eventually. “It’s just you and me, hanging out, in a bar, like two crazy kids in a time long ago.”
It was impossible to say no, even as his heart seemed to thump against his throat. “Sure,” he managed. “Just give me a little while to freshen up.”
He could feel her grin radiating in the air between them. “I’ll meet you by the top entrance in ten.”
He ran into Julia’s office the minute Scarlet shut the door behind her, mumbling something so fast he was surprised anything comprehensible came out at all. He managed to relay the gist of what had just transpired.
“Do I look OK?” he babbled. “What does OK look like and do I look it?”
Julia just laughed. “Handsome as you are, Michael, I don’t think Scarlet likes you for your looks… but I’ll get you a fresh shirt. Wait here.”
Ten minutes later, he was waiting for her by the door, wearing a fresh new shirt, devoid of any grim that Julia could discern, his hair neatly brushed. It fell across his eyes within seconds of Julia parting it.
Scarlet laughed when she saw him.
“What? What is it?”
“You look… stiff…” She leant up and unbuttoned his shirt collar, and he caught a whiff of some kind of fragrance, like orange and honey. Summer. It suited her.
“You smell lovely,” he said.
“Ugh,” she said, giving the distinct impression of rolling her eyes. “It’s to fight off the stench of beer. You’re going to love it.”
“You’re really selling this experience for me.”
She linked her arm in his. “Come on. Wouldn’t want to miss the party.”
◆◆◆
It was a warm evening, for April. He could still feel the sun on his skin as they walked through the town, Scaret’s arm not moving from his, even when he started to sweat. That was embarrassing. It took a lot for chimeras to work up a sweat, generally speaking, but apparently all it took for him was a prolonged contact with Scarlet’s skin.
Ashe would have had a field day, teasing him for this.
He could hear the bar a while before they reached it, feel the music thrumming through the ground. It was located in a basement. It was noisy, positively reeked of alcohol, and the floor was sticky.
It was still the best night he’d had in a long, long while.
Scarlet ordered them some food, some sort of potato dish loaded with spicy sauce, and they downed a few drinks, chatting about the music, the good things that had happened recently, and which of the guys at the bar would be the first to start a fight. They drank a bit more. Mi, as far as he few, couldn’t get drunk… or would at least have to inbide a lot for it to truly take effect. But after his fourth, he felt a bit… lighter. Looser. Like he’d finally been given permission to relax. How long it had been since he’d last felt that way...
The feeling vanished the second Scarlet seized his hand and pulled him onto the dance floor, replaced by a new feeling of blank terror.
“If you make one comment about being afraid to step on my feet, I will deck you,” she said fiercely, placing his hands on her waist. She was wearing a dress. He’d suspected as much from the way she was walking earlier, and the feel of the fabric against his elbow. It was light and soft, in complete contrast to the rest of her. It was lovely to touch. Had she… had she chosen it for him? And… and the scent, too? He once told her he loved the smell of oranges…
She pressed herself against him. “You… you’re supposed to move to the music.”
“Sorry!” he said. “Lost in thought.”
“Happy one?”
“My hands are around your waist. What do you think?”
Scarlet’s smile warmed the air, and she reached up to kiss his cheek. “I’ve missed that,” she said.
“The smiling… or the humour?”
“Both,” she said, sliding her arms to his neck. “This. You. All of it.”
He didn’t smile much anymore, he realised.
◆◆◆
He smiled that night. He smiled so much his cheeks ached, danced so much his feet ached, spent so much time swinging Scarlet around that his arms ached, too. He wouldn’t have changed a moment of it. He forgot time, forgot most things. He didn’t spare a thought for Abi or Ben, didn’t worry about getting home to them, didn’t worry about anything outside of the four walls. For a few, blissful, heady hours, nothing outside seemed to matter.
They were among the last to leave, crawling up the steps into the cool, inviting night air. It was raining hard. Spasms of sound reverberated off every surface. He’d been having so much fun, he hadn’t even noticed until they were almost out in it.
“Ah,” he said, a little nervously, “rain.”
“What’s the matter, Michael? Afraid it’ll mess up your hair?” She raised a hand to his tufts, her fingers brushing his scalp. “Pretty messed up already, actually…”
She was close, now, so close. He could almost taste the wine on her breath...
“It’s not that that…” he said, twisting his thumbs.
“The rain, er… it interferes with my otherwise finally-toned senses. It can make things a bit more… disorientating.”
“Oh,” said Scarlet. “I didn’t think of that.”
“It’s fine. I’m not completely er…”
“Blind?”
“For want of a better term, yes.”
“Would… would it be completely patronising if I wanted to walk you home?”
He smiled, holding out his arm. He was never, ever going to turn down the offer of her company. “No.”
Scarlet seized his hand instead, and jerked him outside into the rain, laughing.
“You are going to get soaked!” he said.
“Yes, but we’re building a memory, and we’re going to look so romantic doing so!”
“Romantic?” he repeated, but she only giggled, and dragged him onto the concrete. They were soaked in seconds, but her laugh was what he heard over the thunderous rain.
They didn’t stop running until they were in the hall of his apartment.
Scarlet still hadn’t let go of his hand, even when they both went completely still and she squared up to him. “Mi,” she said. There was no trace of laughter, not now. Her heart hammered against her ribcage. She was nervous; not something he often felt from her. “I… I don’t want to be impatient, but… I also don’t want to be wrong. Am I… completely misreading the signals here? Or is there some other reason you haven’t kissed me yet?”
Mi swallowed rapidly, pulling his hand away. “There’s… I… um…”
“If you want me to back off, just say so. I can be your friend. I have no problem with that. I mean, I’d prefer to me more, but I’d… I’d like you in my life regardless.”
He knew she didn’t have superpowers, but how was it possible that she hadn’t heard his heartbeat? That some essence of it hadn’t crawled out of his chest and flung itself at her feet by now? Were regular people really that unobservant? Did she honestly not know how he felt about her?
“Say something!” she demanded.
“I really, really like you, Scarlet,” he managed. “Only I’ve never kissed anyone before… and... I’m afraid I’ll mess it up.”
Resurrection Page 29