Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

by Charlotte McConaghy

  I offer her my hand but she hugs me instead. I return the hug easily and hold her as tightly as she holds me. When she lets go I let go. She looks at me without blinking so I look at her without blinking.

  Here is the secret to human behavior: not emotion, but mimicry.

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” she says softly. Her voice sounds scratchier than it might once have been. Maybe whatever cut her throat damaged her vocal chords. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Luke is crying again, I see. He wasn’t a crier as a child. I can’t remember him ever shedding a tear beyond the age of about three but he has wept almost consistently since we met. It stirs something, but only very vaguely, like an awareness of pity, perhaps. I know I don’t wish for his pain – in fact I would go to great lengths to prevent it, I think – but I can’t detect anything that goes beyond that.

  This has become a daily exercise for me. The cataloguing of emotions, motivations and thoughts. An intellectual process of understanding what I am capable of now, and perhaps what kind of thing I am in general.

  “You’re his wife,” I say belatedly.

  “Josephine Luquet.”

  I must be exuding some kind of confusing blankness because Luke takes the opportunity to explain about my three cures.

  She doesn’t react at first. It doesn’t seem to sink in. Then she says very softly, “Love?”

  Luke nods. I watch the look that passes between them.

  “Impossible,” Josephine says. “No injection can cure love.” There is a short silence and then she adds, “Only life can do that.”

  *

  Some time later her eerie-colored eyes fall on me. This time there is none of the genuine joy with which she learned my identity. This time she is like the wolf with whom she shares her heterochromia.

  “Why were you put in the cell with Luke?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She doesn’t believe me. “We need to search you for trackers.”

  Luke doesn’t protest. He lifts my shirt over my head and tosses it in the corner, then runs his fingers over every inch of my chest and arms, looking in my armpits and through my hair, inside my mouth and nostrils and even my eyes. Next he tells Josi to turn around so he can search my legs and groin. I don’t feel any embarrassment but I can tell that he does. He hands me a clean set of clothes to change into and then Josi runs a hand-held piece of tech around my body to look for anything inserted under the skin. It comes up clean.

  We sleep, or at least pretend to. I lie awake and listen to them whispering to each other in the dark.

  “It’s too risky to take him below. There’s no way it isn’t some kind of trap.”

  “I’m not leaving him up here.”

  She doesn’t reply at first, then says, “I’m happy for you. I am. But he’s dangerous.”

  “He’d tell me if there was a plan.”

  “He might not know about it.”

  “Come closer. Why am I not touching you?”

  I hear something moving.

  “Josi. What’s going on? Where did you get these wounds?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I can feel the tension in the air. It makes me uncomfortable and I find myself slipping into a memory of Livvy. I think of her often, my ex-girlfriend, the one who was scoured clean of her heart and soul by the very same cure that makes me calm. I think of her now just to see if my heart will stutter back into beat but it never does.

  Only life can do that.

  Pity swells in my teeth. Poor Luke. It may not be obvious to him yet but it is to me: while he wasn’t looking his wife fell out of love with him.

  *

  December 17th, 2067

  Luke

  It’s a slow process getting back to our tunnels. One of the first things we did was set up protocol to ensure no one follows us or happens to witness us vanishing below ground, which means going in the opposite direction to where we live. We head to an aqueduct in the heart of the drug-fucked suburb, the Crimes-Are-Us suburb, a place so rife with basic human crumminess that it’s perfect for hiding our comings and goings. Only problem is that this is the kind of place where if you blink too slowly you get stabbed for no conceivable reason. Once we’re below ground it’s a matter of following the tunnels home. We’ve set up cage doors and alarm systems at intervals to notify us if one section has been breached by Furies, and there are fail-safes to ensure that no more than one section could go at a time. The rest of the group Josi brought to rescue me is made up of six resistance members, and they’ve divided into two groups that will stagger their journey. Basically it’s a big pain in the butt to get home, but I couldn’t be happier to be free.

  Once we’re below, Josi opens each gate by scanning her prints and retinas. We make our way slowly beneath the expanse of city, avoiding the rats and listening for any sign of Furies. There shouldn’t be any in the tunnels we’ve cleared for travel but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Moving in the dark is second nature to Josi and me after a year underground, but I can hear Dave stumbling and tripping like he secretly got wasted before the journey.

  At about halfway it’s safe to use the motorbikes chained at one of the gates. The noise won’t be heard above but if there are Furies nearby it’ll definitely alert them to where we are. Every time I silently pray to the universe for the gates to hold firm, I feel my heart rate rise. One of these days, surely, one of the gates will give, and after the nightmare of the Inferno, when Furies stormed our compound and killed hundreds, I am filled with dread at the thought. All we can do is keep checking and fortifying our defenses.

  Josi and I take a bike each and Dave hops on behind me. He feels too light as we whizz through the tunnel. My mind races ahead to imagine how Mom and Dad will react to this. I need to give them some kind of warning. I can’t predict how their cures will allow them to feel.

  I don’t think about how Josi’s behaving toward me. I don’t.

  It happens with about three miles left to go. I’m glancing down at the stretch of ground illuminated by my bike’s headlight when I hear an engine rev. My eyes shoot up to witness Josi skidding her bike wildly around a turn. The wheels fly out from under her and she hits the ground sideways. I lose sight of her around the bend and hammer my brakes on without losing my own grip on the wet ground. Water flies up from beneath me in a great arc. Then I’m around the bend in time to see Josi disappear between the wall and her bike.

  My heart lurches but I’m moving without thought. I angle my headlight at her before I stop the bike and jump off. Dave is slower to dismount and I have to make sure I don’t drop the heavy thing on him before I dash over to Josi.

  She’s already crawling her way out of the wreckage. “Furies,” she pants.

  I immediately spin to check our surrounds but I can’t see or hear any. I frown and jog back the way we came, to the bend where Josi wiped out. If she says she saw something then she saw something. Only I can’t work out what as I listen. There are no footsteps approaching nor are there the growls they emit when attacking. There’s just that cold, eerie stillness of the tunnels.

  I jog back to see Dave helping Josi out from under the bike. She looks beat up and bruised but on high alert, her gun already aimed into the dark.

  “What—” Dave starts but Josi hisses at him to be quiet. She has her eyes closed.

  Without opening them she swings her gun directly overhead and fires twice. Sparks rain from the metal but it works – we hear the distinct scuffle of many sets of feet in the tunnel above.

  “Yep, there’s a crapload of them,” she comments. “How the hell did they get in there?”

  “I dunno but we gotta warn the others,” I say. In the group behind us is Will, Blue and Henrietta, and if those Furies find the opening farther along then this tunnel will be swarming in no time.

  “You take Dave ahead and I’ll scout back to reroute them,” she says.

  “We don’t split up.” That’s the rule. We have teams for a reason and she
knows it.

  Her eyes dart to Dave pointedly. I know what she’s saying – in terms of safety he’s pretty much a burden rather than an asset. But what my eyes say is even simpler: you go, I go. Dave’ll be alright. He’s a Townsend and we don’t go down easy.

  Before either one of us can cave the sound of the second group of motorbikes roars down the tunnel.

  Fuck. Our bikes are directly around the curve. There’s zero visibility and this corner’s already a death trap. Josi and I sprint to haul our motorbikes out of the way but hers is mangled so badly it’s difficult to maneuver. Before I can shout at her to leave it Will’s bike zooms around the curve, clipping its back wheel on Josi’s. The boy goes flying over his handlebars like he’s been shot out of a cannon. Meanwhile his bike flattens Josi’s and scrapes it along the wall of the tunnel at high speed. For the second time in minutes she is dragged along somewhere between them, showered in red sparks and billowing smoke.

  And that’s when the ceiling caves in, raining Furies upon us.

  In the chaos I see that Henrietta and Blue have managed to stop their bikes in time to avoid yet another collision. I grab Dave and shove him behind me, trying to peer through to where Will hit the ground. Thankfully he’s struggling woozily to his feet, badly banged up but not dead, not dead.

  Josi isn’t moving.

  “Don’t let go of the back of my shirt,” I bark at Dave and then start fighting my way through to her. My fist smashes skulls and jaws and shoulders and ribs. I hit anything moving – Jesus, there must be at least fifty of them and I’ve never felt so bone-weary. Whatever shit they pumped me with yesterday has decided to take this moment to make my limbs weigh an extra thousand pounds.

  Bullets explode from barrels. We don’t fire guns in the tunnels unless as a last resort. Too much risk of them either ricocheting, accidentally hitting one of us or drawing more Furies to the fun. But they’re sure as hell being fired right now, which means someone is panicking.

  I reach Josi and haul a Fury off the bike pinning her. She’s awake and looking up at me calmly. “Deal with them.”

  I want to get her out but I don’t have time so I do as she says. Thrusting Dave out of the way I use the long hunting knife Josi passes me to slash through the carotids of every Fury I face. The bullets are still hailing chaotically and there’s a very real possibility that one of them is about to pop through my head.

  Behind us the third group of resisters arrives and their weapons finish off the remaining Furies.

  But someone’s still firing.

  I look over to see Henrietta sending bullet after bullet into the already dead bodies piled before her. I skirt around behind her and say her name loudly. She doesn’t answer so I reach swiftly for the gun, forcing it down and twisting her wrist so she’s forced to drop it.

  “Hey,” I say, taking her face and forcing her dazed eyes to me. “It’s over. You’re okay.”

  She nods shakily and I let her go. Blue and Eric are hauling Josi out from beneath the bikes. Her feet give out beneath her and she nearly hits the ground before they catch her by the arms. Dave watches them calmly, apparently unbothered by the fight. Will is leaning against the wall with his eyes closed – he’s in pain but I have to check on my wife first.

  “Jose, you okay?”

  She nods but her teeth are gritted tight and there’s sweat beading her forehead.

  “What’s the damage?”

  “Left leg.”

  I look and see a gruesome gash along her thigh. Blood has already pooled around her foot.

  “Seen worse,” Blue comments, because he’s a dickhead and all he ever says are very dickheadish things.

  “I’m good,” she says briskly. “Let’s move out. Will, you good?”

  He nods. Henrietta has managed to gather herself and is now supporting him. I don’t know what his injuries are but I hope he can make it home. “Blue, get Will home on a bike,” I order.

  Blue settles the smaller boy on behind him and revs off into the dark. It’s a measure of how out of it he must be that Will doesn’t argue.

  “Josi, you ride too.”

  She shakes her head. “Can’t bend it enough to ride.”

  “I don’t want you walking on it. Eric and Alo, can you carry her?”

  Josi ignores that and sets off, brushing past Eric and Alo as they offer to lift her. I can see how badly it costs her to walk but she does so without a sound.

  “There’s nothing to prove!” I protest. She knows that – we don’t do more than we can because it’s a quick way to endanger yourself and others. We ask for help. We rely on each other. But Josi just walks off alone into the dark, leaving the rest of us to hurry after. She leaves a trail of blood that seems to get thicker and darker as we walk.

  Something really messed up has happened to her. What scares me is that I can’t remember if I should know what it is. In my head there’s a whole chunk of time missing from when I got captured. From around the blood moon.

  *

  Dave

  One of the things that remains is intellect. Another is instinct. Logic, reason, problem-solving. And survival. The survival instinct is the most intact, oddly. I feel it all the time in a way I never used to. Perhaps love made me complacent. Perhaps sadness made me immobile, anger made me blind.

  Now I see so clearly all the endings and they are all here, under the ground. This is where creatures come to die, I am sure of it.

  And fear… That never goes away. No matter how much else gets stolen.

  Chapter 4

  March 5th, 2067

  Josi

  I dream there are wolves at the door, tap tap tapping to be let in. But when I open it there is only a mirror. My reflection has blue and brown eyes and long, sharp teeth. The real wolf gazes back at me.

  *

  The preparations for the mission to rescue Shadow are underway. Luke is focused on about a million different tasks and it’s impossible to get two words from him. I’m waiting on Teddy to present me with an idea he had about the tech, but that won’t be for another hour or two. I check my watch and realize it’s time for my history class with the dreaded teens. Truth is, I mostly feel like one of them. I certainly don’t feel like an adult.

  All thirty-four of them are sprawled on the mats in the arena, looking up at the spots of sunlight in the distant roof. The silo isn’t particularly class-like, but it’s comfortable on the mats and big enough for everyone to spread out. I join them and hesitate, thinking about how Teddy ‘gently’ broke the news to me that my class is boring and useless. Thanks, Teddy.

  “You okay?” Will asks me. He doesn’t have to attend the classes but he always does. I think his brain is as bored as mine sometimes gets. The poor guy is in that awkward place between adolescence and adulthood. He’s eighteen, which makes him older than any of the other teenagers, and he’s certainly a lot more experienced, but I don’t think he feels like he fits in with the resistance fighters from the Inferno either. Ever since he lost Hal, and Pace had a baby to contend with, he’s been at a bit of a loss. I wish I had more free time to spend with him. He’s grown close with Eric, at least, Hal’s ex-boyfriend, but Eric tends to get swallowed up by relationship drama.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” I answer. “I’m just … Is my class boring?”

  Nobody says anything.

  “I’m going to infer from that awkward silence that the answer is yes.”

  “It’s just hard to remember for normal people,” Georgie assures me kindly. She’s thirteen, precociously smart, and the sheer volume of the questions she asks could fill the sea. “Not that you’re not normal!”

  “Okay, so what can we do about it? Do you want to make it more of a conversation? Got any questions you want to ask?”

  “About what?”

  “Anything, really.”

  “Can we have more free time?” Lawrence asks, flashing a disarming smile.

  “You get plenty.”

  “What about a holo projector? We coul
d set it up to play movies. Make a film club.”

  “When I said ‘anything, really’ I meant ‘anything, really, within the bracket of history’.”

  He sighs, scratching that beard of his.

  “But that’s a good idea,” I add. “I’ll look into it.”

  “Are we criminals?” Georgie asks abruptly.

  I blink. “Well, I’d say that since every single one of our possessions is stolen – yes.”

  “Aside from that. Can it really be criminal to remove yourself from the politics of society? Or from society full stop?”

  “Law says we have to be cured,” Alo puts in morosely. “Avoiding that’s the biggest felony there is.” He’s a very beautiful boy, a Greek renaissance painting of a young Narcissus. With golden skin and hair and pale blue eyes he’s the crush of every adolescent girl in the tunnels, as well as some of the boys. Only problem is he’s the most mournfully earnest creature anyone’s ever met.

  “Bigger than murder? Rape?” Georgie asks as though the words don’t fit in her mouth.

  “Apparently.” He shrugs and sighs.

  They look at me. This isn’t really what I had in mind, but I sigh and figure that it must be what they need: someone to give them the answers straight up, without holding any punches. Or at least to challenge them to find their own answers, as Teddy put it.

  I consider my response. “Once we let the rule of law reign. It was what governed each of us, even those in power. It kept us culpable, and equal – in theory. It gave us the right to elect and remove our leaders. But when those at the top no longer abided by those laws, and our power to denounce them was lost, the rule of law no longer governed us. That’s what’s called a totalitarian regime. It renders its citizens powerless. Which is why we had to remove ourselves from it, or our denial of their rules would have seen us killed without consequence.”