by Logan Keys
“Gone,” she whimpers, and we hold on to one another.
-93-
I woke wishing I was dead. Before my eyes opened, my body became aware of his absence.
Not long after leading Tommy away, Cory had returned, and I’d whispered to him, “It’s done?” His guilty look is the last thing I remember.
Every piece of me denies this possibility.
An already too big and empty world now feels that much emptier.
I hadn’t known just how much a girl could love a boy, without device, without design, without sexual feelings. Just love him for every hair on his head, for every good thought he brought to heal this place. The brown-eyed gaze full of the assurance that we’d live to fight another day has gone.
I dreamt of him dead, crumpled on the field, framed by the old blue sky — a day so beautiful, where I’d watched Thomas Ripley Hatter meet his maker.
My heart’s been replaced by a sad, limping thing of stone.
What a stupid, fickle muscle that beats on, when it should give up.
Had they struck his heart right away? Or in the head that willed relief for mankind, almost naively? Or had he suffered?
This last thing, I wanted to know the most.
Thoughts of Tommy trying to die, yet trying to live, could almost end me where I stand.
And I was prepared to be ended.
Now I understand why Baby had entered the machine. One more word from Tommy is all I want — just one.
Cory comes into my cell now, slowly approaching me like the wild animal I’ve become.
With each glance, my eyes flash “murderer” at him, and I will him to see what I think of him. Then I turn my back, to fold up like a thin piece of paper.
“Liza.”
He says a bunch of words after this, but they all muddy one another with their intrusive scheming. The Underground needs something from me; it’s been their only goal from the first — to use people, and then spit them out. Chop them up in their meat grinder of an ideal.
All of these things, Cory says. They lilt of a question, and end with a plea.
Like he cares.
His pretend concern crashes like waves upon my rocky heart.
Just because I’m alive, doesn’t mean I’m ready to start living.
But he keeps on, until the vitriol boils up inside of me, enough to pour out.
“Your time will come, Cory,” I say, laughing an old lady’s croak of disgust, hiding my face in my knees. “You won’t be untouched by this place. I see it all now, clearly, how Tommy was right. You’re a liar, and you’ll only be remembered because you were so worthless you killed an innocent man for nothing other than your jealousy.”
I turn to face him deliberately, for the first time feeling something other than a numbing pain. “You can blame Simon all you want, but you were able to save him, and you chose not to.”
Cory tries to hide the way my words take root, and with a fake smile, he says, “I’m happy to see you’re up, after weeks of incoherency.”
“Weeks?” I feel suddenly woozy. “It’s been a day.”
Cory brushes a hand through his hair. “You slept for a week, woke, ate, and slept again for another.”
“I … it can’t have been…”
“Liza, you have to know — ”
“I know you did it — ” A sob breaks up my words. “I know you shot him.” When Cory doesn’t flinch, I scream at him, throwing myself across the cell. “You evil pathetic liar — ”
He catches me, holding my wrists. After my weeks of sleeping, I’m too out of touch with my strength. I’m pummeling him limp-wristed.
Cory shakes me until I look up. I hope my eyes show my rage. I know he’s reading my mind.
He doesn’t even look sorry. “I had to. We all did.”
“You can’t hold a candle to him, you know that?” I smile when I see this hits the spot.
His lip curls, and Cory places something onto my bed. “I brought you clothes. Get dressed.”
After dressing, I let Cory take me out of my cell, and beyond the here and now. Where we’re going, and what we’ll do, I have no concerns. Placing one foot in front of the other is a distraction against the loneliness fighting its way to the top tier.
Along the way, we’re stopped by the Medusa. Adrian’s waiting in the labs, as if she’d been expecting us.
“Chalberg’s been murdered,” she says, motioning to the empty cells. “They cleared this out. He’s not happy.”
She means Simon.
Cory seems irritated by the sight of the Medusa, but nods his head.
“And so, here she is,” Adrian says.
The strange woman comes closer, now only a breath away. She smells like cinnamon, and inside her luminescent eyes lies all the world. Not a happy place.
Covering one of these jewels, she scrapes at my very soul with the other, and I’m unable to move as she pokes and prods, not unlike Cory does inside my mind, only she does it differently.
“Well, hello there,” Adrian says to whatever she finds. “So many choices. To be or not to be a monster, that is the question. Sadly, a man cannot change his fate. A woman, on the other hand …”
She pulls away, glancing over at Cory. “How could I have been so blind? We’ve been betting on the wrong horse, chose the wrong type of darkness. There’s anger in this one, the kind we need. Give her the tools. She’ll change the stars.”
“The stars?” I ask, confused, and exhausted by even standing here.
“The stars, my love.” She lifts her hands up high. “They map out our destiny. But some of us, a few, create the map.”
Again she looks at Cory, and I notice his fear. “I love it when the mind reader has gotten it wrong.” Adrian approaches him, holding out a hand.
He glances away, then back again.
I stiffen. On her arm sits a giant spider that’s appeared out of her coat, and it crawls toward Cory, in an aggressive way.
“My spiders are hungry, Prince. All over the world they starve, needing their rewards. They’ve worked so hard. Don’t fail this time. Take her to him. You’ll see that I’m right.”
Adrian pulls back her pet and leaves.
On the bed she’d stood by, I see a familiar shine poking out of a box.
“These,” I whisper as if even ghosts could hear. “They’re his things.”
I go to the box that holds Tommy’s small number of items. Joelle’s diary. I lift this out, hiding it against my chest. My hand finds Spirits’ handle.
I look at Cory in accusation.
“What will be done with it?”
“Keep them,” he says. “They’ve no value for the Underground.”
I toss the diary back inside and lift the box, hugging it to me, feeling that much closer to Tommy since he left.
We keep on walking toward the blue room, light flickering inside.
Simon’s already waiting for us alongside his precious machine.
I frown at Cory, and Simon attempts to elucidate. “I figured it’d crossed your mind.”
His words make me freeze. The thought had, yet hadn’t. Nothing like this, like anything that’s too good to be true, will work. I can’t bring Tommy back. He must know that. This is all a ploy to get me to try out his machine as the perfect Special, to give him more power somehow.
But it might kill me, too.
Simon looks to Cory.
Cory motions toward me. “She thinks you mean to kill her.”
Simon smiles. “That would do me no good, Liza. You’re strong enough. I’ll go with you, to ensure that you’ll return in the amount of time needed. Just think of what or who you might find in there.”
Horror mixed with hope makes me tremble. Is it my imagination, or do dark shapes loom just inside the sphere?
I set the box down, and let myself be conned just a bit closer.
Simon, seeing this as a positive thing, nods at Cory, who flips the switch behind us, and the machine begins its whir of noise. Simon w
aits for me to join him, to spin my side’s metal sphere.
“You haven’t brought anyone back,” I say, knowing it’s true when he doesn’t argue.
“That boy isn’t just anyone.”
“No,” I say softly, “and he wasn’t a boy.”
I feel my anger build. At this point, the only thing keeping me alive is my fury, but the orb and its blue brilliance is mesmerizing, and I stare into it, wondering if Tommy can really see me.
It makes sense Tommy would be inside. “He was a bright light,” I say, “a beacon of peace.”
But … my gaze falls on Spirit. Gritting my teeth, I whisper, “Darkness cannot comprehend the light.”
Simon spins both sides of the machine, not waiting for me any longer.
I watch the sphere brighten until I can no longer look at it straight on and I have to shade my eyes.
Out of the corner of my eye, Simon’s form enters the insanity of his machine, and I see him there, waiting.
Cory watches the display with a strange expression. Is he afraid, for me?
When I get close enough to feel like my particles are coming loose, I look back at Tommy’s things again.
And that’s when I notice … Spirit … her handle’s glowing the same blue as the machine.
They’re made out of the same material.
Curious, I pry myself away from Chronos and walk over to withdraw the sword from her sheath.
Bright along her blade in the same blue glow, the inscription shimmers. In my hand, the sword gives me the same sensation as before, only a thousand times stronger.
My arm heats, and then my body, and my hair is pulled straight to stand crazily around me. What a sight I must look — glowing, and blue, and holding this sword. Cory confirms this thought as his jaw opens as wide as it’ll go.
Spirit’s hot in my hands to the point of burning, and she wills me to do something, anything, branding my palms with her intensity.
When I draw nearer to Chronos, the sword blazes.
Cory backs off, his face cast in white from her more pure glow overpowering Chronos’ blue.
Without thought, I run at the machine and thrust the blade into Chronos’ side as if it were a foe.
What happens next is chaos.
It felt as if I were dying, and I was certain that the entire planet was perishing, as well, and my particles were being pushed out of joint and realigned.
Chronos still glowed blue, but I was jamming her signals, and instead of taking me apart, and the world with me, it froze like glass — a thick, blue iceberg that stood dry in the middle of the room. Inside of the beyond, shapes and shadows danced just out of reach.
With Spirit stuck in its side, Chronos’ lifeblood oozed onto the blade, tattooing strange shapes onto the metal. The liquid leaked into a world it didn’t belong to mark the blade and then finally me, as it also ran up my arm.
My trance breaks.
“What have you done?” Cory screams above the din, sounding as if he’s been repeating himself.
I try to pull Spirit back, but she won’t budge.
Shadows creep toward me from the other place.
I almost crush the bones in my hands trying to free the sword from the iced-over Chronos. I know it’ll hurt, scar even, to continue; somehow the stuff that’s escaped its wound has bonded to the sword, and to me.
A sense of death hovers in the air, and life, warring with one another, taking its effect on my body, like my own soul’s aware that it, too, can flee its encasing when another’s does, herd-like in nature. People who loved each other dearly would grow old and pass close together in time, as if the souls had joined and the one that’s left is forever tugging at the other.
Maybe, just maybe, from wherever he is, Tommy tugs at mine.
Cory lunges forward to help me. “You’ll start the apocalypse!”
I can barely hear him over the strange squeal of metal against metal as Chronos fights to move. Then we both yell and jerk backwards, releasing the blade from its entanglement.
Simon’s there, stuck in the beyond, his face a mask of fury and hatred when he realizes he’s unable to return. The sound of metal has been him trying to force one of the circles from his side, of him trying to get through, but unable to.
Black smoke billows out of Chronos’ gut where she’s been wounded, like a living thing. Before, I’d have scoffed at such an idea. But Spirit pulsates in my hand, falling dimmer and dimmer.
Slowly, Chronos knits the hole. Or rather, with Spirit free, the rest of the flow shores up once again. At its center, it’s pure glass now, and Simon flattens against it, banging, saying something, but we can’t hear him, even though the noise has died down to almost nothing.
My arm itches, and when I look at where the goo had latched on to me, I gasp.
This had been the spot where the word “Eve” had been, but more letters appear now, in the same blue as the machine’s glow.
Cory traces them.
“Revenge” it reads, all in the same writing with the “eve” set in the center of the new wording to create another altogether.
I begin to laugh hysterically. Cory stares at me like I’ve lost my mind.
I walk up to the glass to show Simon, who reads the word with a dawning in his eyes. He understands the cosmic joke.
Rubber Man, the Island Doctor, has played his hand. Two giants, both scientists, one competitive game, and the one who made me has won this round.
“What does it mean?” Cory asks.
“I’m a decoy. I’m not Eve. I’m a repayment to Simon. Somehow, he must have known we’d come here and Simon would embrace me as Eve. And he knew Simon would try to get me into the machine, and once I was near, the truth would appear.”
“And now he’s stuck,” Cory says.
“Old debts,” I mouth to Simon, who closes his eyes in acceptance.
-94-
“Liza?” Cory nears, and I drop the sword while the world spins.
My head’s about to explode.
“You don’t look so good,” he says as I bend in half.
Then I do something I haven’t done since waking: I remember. Not just parts, or jagged bits, but all of it. Touching Chronos has done something to me, and my brain’s on fire with my entire life story rushing back — my parents; the Authority taking me away; the cancer; dying on the island; pretend man, or rather the doctor from the island; going to Anthem; staying in section; living but not living … so many rules.
An uprising.
Me, facing the leader of the regime, Reginald Cromwell.
And lastly … Jeremy.
Purple eyes that smile at me across the green lawn, where he quotes poetry in our last days together.
Our love shared, my music, him kissing me.
And when I feel the bullets go in all over again, I clutch at my stomach and wail. He shot me!
And I’d shot Reginald. I’d killed the evil man who’d fathered the one I loved.
And still love.
Cory’s there at my elbow, trying to console me as I choke on the pain of old and new emotions that collide.
I shake Cory from my arm and glare at him. “You,” I say. “You used him to make me feel sorry for you!”
He’d used the piano, the poetry, the purple eyes I love so dearly. He’d plucked memories from my brain to trick me.
I reach for Spirit, feebly lifting her in my hands that shake from the fast beating of my shattered heart, and I turn toward the liar, pointing her sharp edge at him.
Cory eyes Spirit like he isn’t sure whether he should take me seriously.
“You knew someday I’d remember.”
When I step closer, he backs away, hands up. “I’m a mind reader without even trying. I didn’t mean to abuse it; it was the only way to get you to trust me.”
“You control people, manipulate them. I actually cared for you, but you’re no different than they are.”
“I am.”
“Then tell me you didn’t kill Tom
my.”
He can’t.
We stand frozen.
Cory tries to placate me, walking forward with an arrogant tilt of his head. I raise Spirit and, thinking of Tommy in his final moments, slash her down, her edge catching him in the face.
Cory shouts and falls back, tripping over his feet.
I’ve cut him from forehead to chin. Blood flows freely, and it’s a satisfying sight.
What is Spirit for, if not for righting the wrong?
Cory touches his face, and horror dawns at the flap of skin he feels flayed on his perfect visage. “You witch!”
I push the sword’s edge up to his heart, easy to do with him flat on the ground. Cory’s eyes flash with fear when he realizes I’ll do it. “Wait! Come with me to Anthem. Don’t you see? We’re free now, Liza.”
“Free? I’ll never be free. I’ve lost everyone now. If Simon doesn’t use me, someone else will. This whole time I’ve been payback for old vendettas — one between the scientists, and another between you and Tommy.”
“That’s not true. I can help you, Liza. Just let me — ” But he loses the false hope. “You know he never really cared about you, right? I can read minds, Liza. He just didn’t want to be alone. He couldn’t stand the thought of it — it terrified him! But when he got here, in a snap, Tommy was inches into that Asian girl. He wasn’t worried about you, not when he had her. Every. Single. Night. Why would he choose someone like you, Liza, when he could have a full woman? One whose body hadn’t been hacked away at by the Authority’s butchers.”
Hands shaking, I press Spirit harder into his chest, and he shuts up.
“You can’t make me hate him, you worm. No matter what you say.”
With a sneer, Cory spits out the blood that’s gotten into his mouth. “How does it feel to be one of the only girls left in the world, and still be second choice?”
The marks on my arm glow again, and my eyes grow blurry, a faintness makes me sway.
Even my voice has changed; I sound as if I’m channeling something greater than myself. “Time will not be kind to you, Cory Prince. It’ll wear you down, make you old, long before you should be. Simon’s right about you.” I sense Cory’s fear, something Simon had said to him … what was it? The words paint themselves across the wall of my mind. “You’re a reject.” That’s it. Cory’s eyes widen with wonder. “The headaches will go on longer, worsen until you lose control of yourself, and someday, you’ll be unable to bear it.”