by S E Anderson
“Foollegg,” I hissed, my tears falling freely now. “Was this the Agency? What did they do to you?”
I pressed down on his stomach, hard, but the sheet must have had some kind of hospital starch on it because there wasn’t a trace of blood on it. I pushed down harder, trying to stop him from bleeding out. How he could actually be bleeding out, of all things, was completely beside me.
His hand squeezed around the sheet, pulling it further down in his stomach. I put my hand on his, shocked to see it free of blood. Even I hadn’t managed to do anything. He nodded, his breaths coming out in short, hard rasps.
My impossible man was impossibly dying.
“They said they only wanted me.” His lips curled into a smile, warm and bright like a spring morning, before he coughed and send it all to hell. “But they lied, Sally. They are coming for you. They want you and Blayde to burn.”
“Who? The Agency?” His words barely registered. His light was dimming, taking my heart with it. “Zander, are you—?”
“Dying?” he interrupted, coughing lightly, the red liquid seeping through his lips. “I think so. This wouldn’t be the first time.”
“You can’t die,” I said, incapable of holding tears back any longer. “You can’t, Zander. You can do anything, but you can’t do this.”
“My time is up. I can’t protect you anymore, Sally. You have to fight. They’re coming.”
“You can’t die,” I repeated, still disbelieving. This could not be happening. It defied the laws of the universe. “We have to fight them together. I can’t do this without you; I can’t do this alone.”
“You have to,” he said, or more accurately, exhaled. His voice was so faint now I wasn’t sure I was even hearing him speak or was just putting words in his mouth. “You have to fight them. You have to.”
“Stay with me, Zander,” I pleaded, reaching for his hand. “I’m right here. You don’t need to go anywhere. Just wait. Your cells will regenerate. It’s just taking some more time, that’s all.”
His breathing got more strained with every word he attempted to utter. “I’m going.”
“Zander, the light in the tunnel is a trap. It’s a train. Don’t walk into the train.”
“I love you.”
His eyes fluttered shut, and his breathing stopped. I stifled yet another scream. This was just temporary. Just five minutes of death.
I forced myself to remove my hand from his belly. The sheet hadn’t done anything. The blood had only spread out and around the wound but avoided my fingers like it was contaminated.
I watched. I waited.
Heal.
Come on, heal.
But the cells were frozen. Dead.
Seconds passed. Each tick of the clock on my bedside longer than the last. Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes that felt like an eternity.
Three hundred seconds.
Five minutes had passed.
And Zander was still unconscious.
No.
Zander was dead.
I screamed into the night, my entire being ripping to pieces as I shrieked into the night. Zander could not be dead. He couldn’t be. He just couldn’t be.
Yet he was.
And the Alliance was coming. The Agency was here, and they knew how to kill us. Blayde could already be dead if they’d gone for her next, which they probably had seeing as how Zander had time to speak with me. Which meant I was next.
Zander was dead, and there was nothing between me and the Agency.
Well, maybe Zander’s hissing, terrifying corpse as it sprung up, clapping his hands against my ears, sharp stabbing driving deep into my skull. That was enough to make me scream all over again. But I couldn’t even hear it. The drilling of metal against bone was filling my ears, ringing through my skull, my head a gong.
I reached up instinctively to cover my ears and found other hands there, not the strong, square hands that Zander had so tenderly wrapped around mine, but long, talon-like fingers that wrapped around the back of my head and forced the drill further inside. The cruel hands held on tighter, and Zander’s face distorted in concentration. Only it couldn’t have been Zander, not with teeth like that.
Snap. A new ringing filled my head, mixing with my anger and fear. Zander’s face, already white, drained of all remaining color in an instant.
Now was my chance. I grabbed the hands firmly and threw my head forward, slamming into Zander’s nose.
This time, the scream wasn’t mine. I pulled back, the hands falling from my skull, two large, red spikes extending from the palms. The drilling stopped instantly, and all the pressure inside my head was gone.
The ringing only got louder.
“What are you?” spike-handed Zander hissed before melting into a puddle on the floor. A puddle that slid and moved, rushing along and up the wall, escaping through the ventilation grate.
I collapsed, exhausted, pushing myself away from the light with my feet. My hands still gripped my head. The ringing was still there, intensifying, a feedback loop inside my very thoughts. I couldn’t make sense of my brain words. I couldn’t sense make my brain words. Couldn’t words from brain made I.
I clenched my teeth, breathing deep and reaching my fingers behind my ears. I cringed, more out of shock than pain, at the depths of the holes. They were already beginning to close, close around the source of the sound, and I dug in deep, scratching until I pulled out the quarter-sized metal plate behind my ear. It was split in two. Crushed.
My translator sputtered and sparked to death in my hands.
Well, at least the ringing had stopped. But there went the most awesome piece of tech I had ever owned.
I stuffed it under my pillow when my door flew open, letting in two nurses, the same two women we had seen at Peter’s side the night before. The taller of the two did a quick double take, her eyes darting from the empty floor to my bed, as if she knew what had been there mere moments before.
“Bad dream, sweetie?” she asked, almost tenderly, reaching for me as her colleague extracted pills from a bottle in her pocket.
“No. No,” I said. Since when had I started trembling? “There was a thing here. It looked like Zander. Made me think he was dead. Then it attacked me.”
My hand wasn’t as steady as I liked when I lifted it to point at the floor. You can’t blame me, not after all that. But there was no evidence there. Even my hands were clean, as if I had never held him. As if he hadn’t just died in my arms.
“You’ve had a bad dream, that’s all. Don’t worry. It’s all gone now.” Her colleague took my outstretched arm, pressing a needle into the skin. I hardly felt it. I didn’t even have the energy to ask her what she was doing to me.
The other nurse handed me a cup and some pills. “Take this.”
“But … it wasn’t a dream,” I said, or at least I think I said. Words were a little slurry at this point. “I wasn’t sleeping.”
“These will help,” she said, pushing them toward me.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Medicine.”
“What kind?”
“It helps you sleep.”
“Like Nyquil?”
“It’s not something off the shelf,” she said. “Go ahead, take it. By tomorrow, the dream won’t even be a memory.” She sat in front of me, staring. I shivered.
“No, thanks. I’ll be fine.”
“Take it.”
“No.”
“Doctor’s orders.”
I shrugged. No harm done. I wasn’t even sure if medicine worked the same on me as it once had.
She handed me the pills, and I swallowed them, taking the water next to wash them down. She helped me back into bed, tucking in the sheet around me with motherly kindness.
“Sleep well.” She switched off my light as she walked out of the room.
I stared at the ceiling and quickly knew the answer with a small wave of relief: the pills had no effect on me. Which was for the better because now was most definitely not a time for slee
p.
What had just happened? Zander had died. Then he wasn’t dead. Then he attacked me. Then he was gone.
My brain pinched.
Wait, what? Pinched?
It suddenly felt too hot in the room. But it was February, wasn’t it? Still didn’t change the fact that it was too hot to sleep.
I jumped up to my feet. No, it wasn’t just the heat. My hands were shaking. Trembling. And my head—the ringing had gone when I had pulled out the broken translator, but now it felt too full, swollen.
My head was spinning. It wasn’t supposed to spin.
I tried to stand but slumped to the floor. I couldn’t stand anymore. My skin was burning, hot like coals, the linoleum floor freezing cold to my touch. I was on fire. Water dripped off my head—no, rushed like a torrent. Never before had I sweated this much in my life, not even when I had run through a jungle to get away from an alien troll.
Instinct took over. The pressure had to go. The fear too big, the brain bursting. I feebly pushed myself up, dropping my head against the floor. Again. Again. My head banged over and over, repeatedly bashing against the hard floor.
I wasn’t in control anymore. My mind was working violently to protect itself and only itself as my brain expanded inside my skull. I reached up to my head, my arm shaking. What was I doing? Why?
My head was about to burst.
Maybe I should just let it burst? It’ll just grow back.
But it had to go.
I slammed my head on the floor and broke it like a nut.
Some unknown time later, I woke up with blood pooling around my head, but at least my head wasn’t exploding anymore.
Anymore? When had it hurt in the first place?
What had I done? Had I done anything?
I must have fallen asleep waiting for the Agency to get me, fallen off the bed and somehow cracked my head open like an egg. Which made no sense. This was a mental institution, a hospital. These places were supposed to be impossible to injure yourself on a normal day, let alone to do it by accident.
There was a dream—a dream of what? It bothered me that I couldn’t remember, couldn’t quite put my finger on what had bothered me so much.
Zander.
Must check on Zander.
Why?
Because it’s important, stupid.
But why is it important?
Because.
Because I was afraid. I knew it. Why? I didn’t know. Maybe I just couldn’t remember.
I grabbed my balled-up bed sheet, wiping the bloody mess on the floor. My blood, right? I felt my heart in my throat as I realized the blood must have been mine, but what exactly had happened, my mind would not share with me. Panic rose within.
I ran my hand through my hair, feeling the sticky substance there, and it left a red mark on my fingers as I pulled them away. More blood.
Shit.
Evidence for all to see.
The evidence of what, exactly?
I needed to go see Zander.
I felt oddly nauseous, dizzy on my feet. I didn’t think this was supposed to happen to me, not anymore. Not after I’d changed.
I found my eyes staring at the center of the room, dead center of the pool of moonlight. Nothing. Yet I couldn’t help but look. I shivered as the ghost of a memory flashed before my eyes, a fleeting instant carrying the sheer terror I had felt before. The instant was so horrifying, so realistic, that I found myself gripping the wall behind me for support. But there was nothing there. The floor was empty, just as it was supposed to be.
A shiver traveled from my ears to my toes. Was this what being roofied felt like?
Instinct pulled me through the void between places, and instinct led me back to him.
“Sally?” Zander asked, as I collapsed on his floor, exhausted and terrified after jumping clear across the institute by feel alone. “What happened?”
My own questions, my own words. I knew I had said the same to him. Only I hadn’t. I had said it to the wrong Zander.
“I’m not sure,” I stammered before collapsing on his floor, my legs giving out beneath me. Oops. “Can you help me up?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Serious déjà vu. I think.”
He picked me up carefully, placing me on his bed and wrapping his comforter around me. I was shaking now, my teeth chattering. Hell, I was going into shock.
“I heard screaming,” he said. “Did you see who it was?”
“I think it was me,” I said, through still chattering teeth. “I can’t remember. I was sitting on my bed, then I was on the floor. And I think you were there.”
He shook his head, sitting on his bed and wrapping a warm arm around me, pulling me close. That seemed to be the cure I needed because my shaking stopped at once.
“Oh, don’t cry. It’s okay,” he said. “You’re safe now.”
“I don’t—I don’t know why I’m crying.” I wiped the tears away with a finger. “It’s like—hold on, Zander, I think you died.”
“A nightmare? I guess this place really does induce them.”
“But … look.”
I pulled away from him only slightly, showing him the side of my head. The wound might have been gone, but the blood that it had left behind was still caught in my hair. He went rigid against me.
“What happened to you?”
“I can’t remember, Zan,” I replied, shaking my head. “But something tells me it’s the same thing that happened to Peter. And maybe to everyone in this damned place.”
And as much as I wanted that to be my dramatic ending, as much as I wanted to have that stiff-upper-lip and confidence that all this would get better, I broke down crying in his arms and couldn’t be coaxed back to my cold, dark room where I would be alone again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Blayde gets freaky with presentation tools
“You’re going to have to start over. You’re not making any sense.”
Oatmeal tasted even better than yesterday. I scarfed it down as Blayde watched me from across the table, her eyes peeled. Zander’s hand would not let go of mine, probably making it hard for him to eat, but he managed all the same.
“A part of my memory is missing,” I said. “Something happened to me last night, and it couldn’t have been pretty.”
“Okay.” She nodded as if this wasn’t news to her.
“And my translator was destroyed.” I showed her the small metal pieces before shoving them back into my pocket. “Which means I couldn’t have imagined it.” She nodded again, still saying nothing. “What do I do?”
“The same thing anyone does when they lose something: retrace your steps. Tell me what you do remember. We’ll work to recreate the missing images from there.”
A shiver I could not control spread through my body. “I’m not sure I want to recreate the images.”
“Look, do you want to know why you have a hole in your mind or what?”
“Yup. Yes, I do.”
“Fine. So, tell me what you do remember.”
“Um …” Easier said than done. Thinking back when you’re missing time doesn’t exactly have a roadmap. I probed the edges of the memory hole. “I remember—oh, a dream.”
“Wow, useful. Dreaming. Don’t worry, we’ll figure out what happened. And punish those accountable for giving you shit nightmares. Is it the Sandman or the crabapple blanket on Earth? I know it’s one or the other. “
“Come on, I’m being serious.”
“So am I. Bad dreams seem to be rampant in this place. Ask my brother if he’s had any.”
“Oh, come on, you two are still giving each other the cold shoulder?”
“I’m shunning him. That’s different.”
“It’s still childish.” I reached for my toast, disappointed the oatmeal was already gone. “Are you trying to punish him for something?”
She shrugged. “Possibly.”
“For what?”
“He’s becoming soft.” She raised her eyebrows. “And, u
nfortunately, this isn’t the kind of place that looks kindly upon siblings sparring out their differences. Not that we have any swords lying around anyway. Zander needs a bucket of cold water in the face, so to speak. Or a few stabs through the heart.”
The memory—vague and misty as it was—came rushing back. Zander: his nose broken and bleeding. His hands: long spikes from his palms. I stared, eyes going dry. Blinked.
All a dream, right?
“Oh, come off it.” I rolled my eyes. I guess I inherited the ability from her. “We’ve got too much on our plate to be petty about anything. What is this even about, really? Actually, we might be in an ideal place to get you both some couples counseling.”
“We are not a couple,” she snapped, “and I don’t quite appreciate your tone.”
“Family therapy, then. I don’t know. I don’t care. I’ve got my own family to look out for, a beast preying on bad dreams and stealing memories, and all this while trying to keep the two of you out of the clutches of your worst enemy. So, excuse me for being snippy.”
“They’re not our worst enemy,” she muttered, looking down into her plate. “Just the nearest.”
“Attention, can I have all eyes here, please?”
I turned my head for my eyes to rest on the face of Dr. Smith, her eyes bright with excitement. She held in her hand a drinking glass, tapping it ever so slightly with the side of a knife.
“Since the storm two nights ago, a few branches and tree limbs on the grounds are in dire need of clearing up. Anyone who wants to help with the clean-up crew can volunteer for the day, as long as your doctor gives you proper authorization. Just find a nurse and tell them you’re interested. It’ll probably last most of the day. Did I mention you get an extra helping of jello if you volunteer?”
“Yay, jello,” I muttered.
“Yay, jello!” Zander grinned, his enthusiasm shining through. “Anyone fancy some fresh air?”
“What is this jello?” asked Blayde. “Is that the species of meat we’ve been eating? Anyway, this sounds good. An opportunity for fresh air. And free speech.”
“What if it’s a trap?” asked Zander. “This is all too convenient. This could be how the Agency gets us—sends us on a clean-up crew, whisks us away, claims we made a run for it to cover it up.”