by Gates, J.
We might be running through clouds. There are no landmarks to measure our progress, only the thick, vile curtains of smoke and the never-ending, teeth-grating buzz of the Ravers. Their dark forms fade in and out of the oblivion surrounding us, forcing us to dodge and weave, duck and sprint. Tears run down my face from the particles in my eyes. My lungs ache.
Then I suddenly realize: Clair’s still holding my hand! It’s a dream come true nestled inside a nightmare.
Raver darts whistle past us, terrifyingly close, but I feel invincible. Then without warning, a gust of wind comes by, sweeping away the smoke for a moment, and the sight that it reveals stops my breath: hundreds of Ravers swarm around us. The density of their numbers obscures the sky. The murmuring buzz of their propulsion drowns out even the crackle of gunfire.
Now, ahead and to my right, I see my death coming. A dozen or so Ravers veer toward us and fire a volley of darts all at once. With preternatural clarity, I can see each stinging point as it approaches me, sharp, deadly, inexorable. Clair, on my left, sees them too, and suddenly I am pulled off my feet. My left shoulder shoots with pain, as if jerked out of its socket, as I’m swung to the ground. I hit hard, feeling each piece of broken asphalt cutting into my back, tasting the dirt in my mouth, wincing at the sting as the skin is shredded off my right arm where I tried to catch myself.
Clair threw me down and now she’s on top of me, her face an inch from my own.
Then comes a sound, like a brief drumroll on a muted drum, and I feel her body tense up against mine. Her hair flutters as the Ravers pass over.
She stares down at me, her hazel eyes moist and red-rimmed from the smoke.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no . . . ”
I reach around her, tracing one hand up to her back. My fingers pass from dart to dart. There are probably hundreds of them. In that instant, the world seems to cease its turning. I stop breathing. The gunfire that had rattled in my ears only a moment before fades into nonexistence. The flames, the smoke, the pavement, the bullets, the explosions, the Company, the Protectorate, all of it disappears from my mind, and there is only me and Clair, and the incomprehensible horror of what has just happened, the overwhelming desire to undo it, and the terrible knowledge that it can never be undone.
“Clair, why? Why did you do that?” I can’t hold the anger out of my voice.
She blinks slowly, and her eyelids flutter open again. I hear the buzzing swarm above her. Her body is hot, pressed against mine.
She shakes her head slowly. Her words are barely audible. “Not Clair,” she says.
I open my mouth and search for the breath, for the courage to say what I have to say next. “Kali?”
Her features soften into a smile. I want to memorize every feature of her face, so beautiful but so unlike the face I remember from the love of my youth, but my tears blur her beauty.
“Kali,” I whisper, “why didn’t you tell me earlier that it was you? Where have you been? Why do you look so different? Why did you throw me down, goddammit? I was supposed to die for you.”
She doesn’t answer, but she brings her face close to mine. Her smooth, perfect cheek is cold.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m so sorry about your dad. I should have helped you. We should have run away together. I’m so sorry.”
I put my arms around her, careful to avoid the bristling darts in her back.
“I love you,” I croak through tears.
Shaking, I hold her to me. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Through the silken strands of her hair, I watch the smoke above billow and shift, capricious and black, but the Ravers are mostly gone, moved on.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In my arms, Clair twitches once then goes perfectly still.
A sound comes from my throat, something between a moan and a growl. It resonates up from my chest, my crotch, my gut, low and horrible. I grope the ground and find Clair’s—no, Kali’s—gun, and slip out from beneath her. I brush the hair from her brow and kiss it. As I stand, the sound in my gut erupts into a scream so primal and horrible that it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I sprint, sightless, fearless and screaming, through the nothing-scape. I fire the gun indiscriminately, just to hear the deadly report. I am utterly hollow, as if an atom bomb had exploded in my heart. All I want is to die, and I run toward my death desperately, hungrily.
In the shifting smoke, I can almost see my Kali again: her face, her body, her hair—and the parts of her precious life that I missed.
~~~
I don’t know any of this, of course—not for sure. But I can see it. I can feel its truth in the marrow of my bones. And I know this is how it was. . . .
I see my Kali leave her home and wander the streets. Forgetting her father, herself, her life. Forgetting me. I see her hungry, weak, unable to face the reality of her life, her utter incompatibility with the world. I see her taking pills she wishes will kill her, but will not. I see the pills stealing the light from her eyes and the flesh from her bones. I see her lost.
To survive, she must steal, fight, hurt others, and allow herself to be hurt. She becomes a killer, a cold, wandering wraith, stalking the night in search of sustenance. For her crimes, she is placed on the squad’s “wanted” list.
Now she cannot enter a Company building, because the cameras of the e-security system are programmed to scan something called the Face Database for any criminal matches. If her face is seen on a Company camera, it will instantly be connected with her identity in the computer system, then an alarm will sound at squad headquarters and within minutes she’ll be arrested. She is an unprofitable, reviled and exiled.
She cannot venture indoors where the cameras are, so instead she lives on the streets—and on the streets, she is prey. Huge, black squad trucks stalk her through alleyways. Black-suited squadmen find her huddled beneath overpasses and kick her awake. When these predators catch her, she must give them what they want, whatever they want. When she’s lucky, it’s just affection. The unlucky times, she wills herself to forget.
Within a few years, something terrible happens: squad cameras are put not only inside Company facilities, but on the streets, too. Now there is no hiding from the Face Database anywhere. Before, if a squad member had caught her on the street, he would just mess with her, maybe hit her, maybe make her perform some humiliating act. Now, if she were to be spotted by a camera and identified in the Face Database, it would become official Company business. The squadmen wouldn’t have the option of simply having their fun with her and letting her go; they would have to bring her in. And the Company is not as lenient as its sadistic employees.
The only way to escape the cameras and the database is to alter herself. This is performed at great expense, and the only currency she possesses is her body. The procedures are done by a series of unsavory, sometimes amateur surgeons, often in strange locations, with disturbing instruments and in disgusting conditions. Afterward, she will awaken on the street again, her face wrapped in blood-soaked gauze, a new bottle of pills rattling in her pocket. In a week or so, when she gets up the nerve, she’ll stop at a storefront window to look at her reflection. The feeling that washes over her is one of mingled revulsion and relief. She is herself, but she is not herself.
And that’s good. Perfect. That’s just how she wants it.
The pill “trips” that make her vision spin out of control, the mutilation, humiliation, and beatings, the endless fleeing, fighting, fearing that she endures—these are not the worst parts of her life. The worst comes after. When the squadmen or surgeons are done with her, when the pills wear off—then, she is horribly, inexorably herself again. No matter where she runs, what she does, she cannot escape herself: Kali, the little girl who broke her father’s heart. Kali, the sinner. She steals things, hurts people. She changes her name, changes how she speaks, walks, tal
ks, and thinks, but no matter what, she is the same: a selfish little girl, a lesbian, an addict, a whore.
But there is a solution, she knows, an absolution, a comfort, yes. Sooner or later, she will end herself. This thought alone sustains her. At least she will accomplish this. But before she dies on the streets; perhaps only months, weeks, or days before she is able to bring herself to die, a man finds her. A man named Ethan Greene.
He finds her in the men’s bathroom at a plastics factory, sleeping in a pool of her own urine—how she got through the door without a cross is anyone’s guess—and he carries her home.
All she knows is that he’s a mid-level tie-man in the psychology division of the Company’s HR department. He will tell her no more. She likes that about him. He asks her no questions. He has a lot of illegal guns. She likes those things, too. Never does he ask to kiss her or touch her—although later she’ll insist on it. He is handsome, and often reads, and sometimes stays out all night with no explanation of where he was. She likes all those things. Slowly, painfully, she begins to trust him.
As years pass, Ethan takes the pieces of her, the scattered fragments, and puts them back together. The surgeries she’s had on her face, designed to make her someone else, someone anonymous and lethal and irresistible and immune to suffering—he sees through them. He takes her to a real doctor, who fixes the sloppy work those back-alley surgeons have done on her. With his help, she is remade.
Finally one day, Ethan tells her of his secret—and of the special role she might play in it. Because she has lived for so long outside the Company, she is in a unique position to help his cause. She can be an agent of something called the Protectorate. Her life and death, finally, can stand for something besides shame.
Eagerly, she begins her new incarnation, the last in a seemingly unending series of rebirths. Kali is dead. Now, she is Clair—strong, healthy, and clear-minded (no pills now, no; Ethan would never have it). She is Clair, strong, ruthless, and beautiful.
But even now, having run so far from her old life, from the awful summer when her sinful love drove her father to madness, she cannot quite forget that she was once just Kali, a quiet girl who loved butterflies and lying in the hammock, eating grilled-cheese sandwiches and kissing a pretty girl named May. May, who eventually betrayed her. She has not forgotten, no. Memory is an incurable and painful disease.
A few years later, when May finally reappears, a woman now—dark, powerful, mysterious, and strong—Clair cannot help but love her again. Nor can she help loving Ethan. There is no escape, she decides: no escape from her feelings, no escape from herself. The years of running were all in vain. There is no shame anymore. No right, no wrong, no heaven or hell. No change, no beginnings or endings.
There is only Kali, right or wrong.
There is only this one, fleeting life.
There is only her love.
She embraces it, lives, fights.
And finally, she dies as she lived—beautiful and wreathed in smoke.
—Chapter Ø22—
Still screaming, still shooting, I run blindly through the vacant parking lot.
Then, as if the smoke solidified before my eyes, a wall appears. The shopping center rises before me, a bleak beige mass of crumbling stucco. I look left, and against the wall I see a dark shape moving. I train my gun at it, starving, lusting to kill something, but for some reason I stay my trigger finger. Instead of firing, I rush the thing. I’ll beat it to death with my own hands! Crush it! Rip it apart.
Drawing close, though, I can tell even through my tears that the figure isn’t a squad member or a Raver. Still I run, eager to see its blood fanned out across the wall, eager to be the bearer of death.
As I approach, words gradually seep into my mind. “May! May, it’s me. May! Me, McCann!”
He stands against the wall his hands up, his gun pointed heavenward. “You okay?” he says.
I realize I’m still screaming. My teeth are bared like a rabid dog’s. When I close my mouth, all is horribly silent. I’m shaking. My gun is aimed at McCann’s head, and I lower it, suddenly embarrassed.
“Where’s Clair?” McCann asks, but I can see by his face that he’s already guessed the answer.
“Kali,” I correct. I don’t say anything else, but somehow McCann understands. He motions for me to follow him, and together we creep along the wall, through the smoke.
Shots still ring out, but they’re more distant now and we know enough not to shoot back and give away our position. After following the wall for a few hundred feet, we find a set of glass doors—shattered, presumably, by Ethan’s entry—and McCann leads me inside.
Here, what dim light there is comes from skylights, which are periodically obscured by the shifting, drifting smoke. It is a world of half-light and shadow. The sounds of destruction outside are stifled. We traverse cracked tile floors covered in a half inch of dust. Every shop window is broken, the glass scattered across the floor. Everywhere, strange paintings and curse words adorn the walls and ceiling, looking as if they were painted by cave people. If I could see anything but Kali’s face before me, I might be amazed; never in a Company area have I seen so much as a single white wall defaced. If I were capable of thought, I might delight in the bravery, the will it must’ve taken for somebody to create these sloppy murals. But as things stand, the sight awakens a strange fear in me. This looks like a world of Chaos, and Chaos, like the deadly order of the Company, is the enemy. We are not anarchists, Ethan’s words from one of our training sessions come back to me. Anarchy means letting animal greed go unchecked—that’s what the Company does. We stand on the side of order.
McCann puts two fingers in his mouth and makes a strange, high-pitched whistle. A moment later, another whistle answers. We follow the sound down the long, dark hallway, passing desolate shops, broken skylights, and twisted, abandoned clothing racks. Ahead, the hallway ends and a great, black opening, like the mouth of a whale, gapes at us. Above, a dingy-looking sign can still be read: Macy’s. I’ve never seen a store by that name, but I imagine it must’ve been one of the many independent retail stores swallowed up years ago and rebranded by the N-Style division.
From the shadow of the store’s arching entrance, eyes peer out. Perhaps a hundred people wait here. Some crouch, resting, others pace restlessly, with eyes scanning the darkness around them and fingers on the triggers of their guns. Still others sit on the floor, their eyes closed in either despair or prayer. Out of the shadows, Michel appears, running like a terrified cat and finishing in his father’s arms.
“I’m safe,” McCann says. “It’s okay. Daddy is still working. Sit back down there by the others and everything will be fine.” He kisses his son on the head, and the boy runs back into the shadows.
From among the figures, Ethan emerges.
First, he sees McCann and me—then, as his eyes search the shadows behind us and find them empty, his expression of relief dissolves.
“Clair?” he asks.
“She saved my life,” I say. The words seem miserably inadequate, but I can’t find any others.
Ethan nods stiffly and glances at the survivors huddled in the shadows. “I figure twenty minutes, tops, and they’ll realize they’ve cleaned out the convention center and start on the other buildings,” he says, his words fast and low. “They probably already have the perimeter surrounded. So how do we get out? Any ideas?”
“It’s a tough one,” says McCann, thinking.
I try to think, too, but I am incapable of it.
Even now, with almost certain doom waiting around every corner and through every door, even with the agony of Kali’s loss, none of this seems real. Though I still see Randal’s hair burning when I close my eyes, though Grace’s blood is still smeared all over me like war paint, even their losses seem like something out of a fast-fading dream. And my own predicament, even
in this moment, is beyond my power to comprehend. Maybe it’s my N-Corp schooling, an education so rooted in fiscal practicality and disconnected from visceral reality that even now I’m unable to see myself as a mortal, precious life. Maybe I’m just afraid to think too hard about the situation we’re all in—surrounded, hunted, haunted. I just want to be alone, to be in silence, to lie down and waste away and meet Kali again in a brighter world beyond all this strife and misery. I wander a few steps away from the others.
“May,” says a little voice.
In the shadows I see Michel, sitting cross-legged against the wall. His face is smudged with soot. He picks at a scab on his knee.
“Hey,” I say.
He looks up at me expectantly. As much as I want to turn away, to be alone with my wounds, I am unable to ignore the pain I see on his face.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“Well . . . ” he says. “Ada was taking care of me. You know Ada?”
I nod.
“She always watches me when Father is fighting.”
“Where is Ada?” I ask, though I’m almost afraid to hear the answer.
He nods his head toward the convention center. “One of the little black planes was coming, so she threw me into a closet. I skinned my knee, see? I stayed in there a minute, hiding, then when I came out Ada was lying down. She didn’t move. She had some, like, darts in her, but I took them out. I couldn’t wake her up, so I just left her there. Do you think she was dead?”
“Do you?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “For sure.”
He doesn’t cry. He just looks gloomy and picks at his knee.
“I wish the fighting would stop,” he says. “I want to play football again.”
I nod. What else can I do?
“May,” Ethan calls.
I lean over Michel and rub his little head. “Hang in there.” I tell him. “We’ll play football again soon,” and I turn away from him.