by David Estes
“Sit with me, Son,” she says, patting the windowsill she’s been curled up on, gazing out a dirt-smeared window.
Harrison gladly lowers himself beside her, his muscles aching. After Destiny’s attempted suicide forced them to move, they walked for hours. Harrison never left Destiny’s side during the march, despite the fact that she didn’t speak a single word, wrapped up in her own head. Eventually they reached an abandoned town miles away from Saint Louis. The group is now spread throughout the six floors of an old building that once housed a large Midwest bank that is now as bankrupt as the rest of the banks, with the exception of U-Bank, of course.
Destiny is in one of the corners of the room, waiting for him. She seems to be as anxious to get moving as he is.
They’re safe, for now.
But Benson will never be safe, not unless Harrison changes the situation.
“Every day that passes is like November rain,” his mother says, patting his knee.
Harrison’s not sure what she means, or even whether it’s a good or a bad thing, so he just nods thoughtfully. “Are you okay, Mom?” he asks.
“Do lions play with the mice?” she says.
Again, Harrison is clueless as to the meaning, but he hopes it’s a yes.
“Luce was a good girl,” his mother says.
“She was something special,” Harrison agrees.
“I’m scared for Benson,” she says, the conversation sounding more and more normal.
“He’ll get through it,” Harrison says. “We have to help him.”
“He needs his big brother,” she says, as if the two minutes older that he is counts for years and years of experience.
“He needs his mother more,” Harrison says. “Can you be there for him if I’m gone?” He knows he’s approaching the dangerous portion of the conversation, and his mother’s loose tongue could ruin everything, but he has to try to get a message to Benson. She’s his best bet.
“You’ll never be gone,” she says. “You’re a real person. You won trophies. You have an identity.”
“And Benson? He’s not real?” Harrison asks, genuinely curious as to how his mother’s mind works.
Her eyes seem to try to look at him, but settle somewhere just off center. “To me he always was. Your father, too, I think. But to the world, he’s a fake. He’s like Zoran. He exists, but not really.”
“Like a three-dimensional cartoon?”
She laughs. “You’re the only one that ever understands me.”
That small statement means everything to Harrison. If he was a different person in a different time he might be fighting off tears now. Instead his eyes are bone dry and burning.
“I need you to tell Benson something for me,” he says.
Her eyes finally meet his, and he’s surprised to find them crystal clear and lucid. The redness and puffiness is gone. If he took a picture of her with his eyes, she could be the same mother that used to embarrass him when she dropped him off at school. Her response surprises him, too.
“I’ll do anything for my boys,” she says.
“I know you will. But all I need for you to do is to stay safe, watch over Benson, and to tell him that I’m sorry. Can you do that?”
“Do ghosts challenge politicians to duels?”
Somehow, some way, he knows exactly what she means. “Yes,” he says. “Thank you.” He wants to hug her, to say goodbye, but he doesn’t want to arouse the suspicion of anyone who might be watching.
He walks away, turning the crosshairs in his eyes on his brother, who speaks quietly to Check in a corner of the room. He hasn’t destroyed anything in a while, so he figures now is as good a time as any. And for once, destruction is so very necessary. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” Benson says.
“Can I talk to you?” Harrison says.
“I guess,” Benson says. Check doesn’t move.
“Alone?”
Check looks at Benson, who nods. Check scoots away, casting them a sidelong glance before melting into the shadows.
Harrison knows what he has to do, for his brother’s sake, but the words still stick in his throat. When he pauses, Benson asks, “Is Mom okay?”
“She’s fine,” Harrison says. The truth slides out so much easier than the lies sticking to his tongue. “Better than fine. She seems happier than she ever did when we were kids. Having us together…it’s made a big difference for her. Having you alive again.”
“I was never dead,” Benson says.
“But to her you were. To me you never existed.”
“Sorry to interrupt your life,” Benson says bitterly. Harrison knows he doesn’t mean it; he’s grieving for Luce, as he should. As it turns out, he’s played right into Harrison’s hands.
“You’ve got to get over it, bro. Just watching you is depressing.”
Benson’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Harrison has shocked him, which is exactly what he wanted to do. “Get over it?” Benson says incredulously. “She’s dead,” he growls, his teeth clenched.
“She was just some chick,” Harrison says. “There are many more where she came from.”
Benson’s on his feet in an instant, his chest pressing into Harrison’s, his eyes on fire. He’s breathing heavily, his fists clenched, and for a moment Harrison thinks his brother might actually hit him. He almost wants him to. It would make this all so much easier. So much more real.
But Benson doesn’t, because he’s not Harrison. He might look like him, wearing the same expressions in a slightly softer way, but he’ll never be the same. He’s far too good to be Harrison. Far too good to be from the same womb. Benson’s chest continues to heave, but he doesn’t take a swing. Instead he says, “You don’t know a damn thing about my life. You don’t know a damn thing about what matters in life. Winning some stupid hoverball game is nothing. Having a bunch of fake friends is nothing. Loving yourself more than anyone else around you is nothing. Luce. Was. Everything. You’ll never see that, and THAT’S what makes us different. You might be my brother by blood, but you’ll never be my family. Now leave me the hell alone.”
Harrison can feel the heat in his cheeks, the blood rushing to his head. It’s not anger. It’s shame. Although he knows Benson’s words are built on extreme sadness and Harrison’s own spiteful lies, they cut him deeper than a butcher’s carving knife could.
Because, in a way, they’re true. Benson has lived a real life, with real friends, while he’s lived on a cloud with a false bottom. A cloud that disappeared the moment Harrison decided to rescue his mother, leaving him in an eternal freefall, one which will likely dash him to pieces if it ever comes to an end.
He turns and walks away from his brother, feeling hate-filled eye-lasers slicing across his back.
Although Harrison has achieved the outcome he wanted—his brother’s hatred—it doesn’t feel good. Nothing about it feels good.
At least he knows Benson won’t follow him where he knows he has to go.
~~~
Despite the sliver of hope Destiny managed to grab onto during their long march, she’s still ashamed of herself. Harrison had been so good to her, had saved her twice, and yet she was willing to throw all his sacrifices away because she couldn’t handle living in her own skin. And then he saved her again.
She’s pathetic. Hopeless. Damned. Those words, particularly the last one, send her mind falling into a familiar death spiral, one that will only lead her to do something foolish.
Where is the strength she found not that long ago? Her strength used to come so easily, and now it feels like a math problem with numbers that keep changing every time she figures out the solution.
So she blocks out those terrible words one by one—
Pathetic
Hopeless
Damned
—by humming a lullaby her mother used to sing to her. Her mother who sacrificed everything so she could live. She still can’t believe she was going to toss it all aside like a dusty old toy.
Right? She was going to do it, wasn’t she? Even now, she can’t be sure. Just because you’ve got a gun pointed at your head doesn’t mean you have to pull the trigger. Maybe pointing the gun at your head in the first place is enough to show you’re serious about admitting your mistakes.
But it went off, she reminds herself. I pulled the trigger. But even that might’ve only been because Harrison collided with her, she realizes, feeling a blossom of hope in her chest. Maybe she wasn’t going to do it.
Either way, she screwed up. Big time. But so did a lot of people. It wasn’t all her fault. And Pop Con is really the one to blame. She keeps telling herself these things, regardless of whether she believes them or not. Maybe one day in the future she will.
Maybe one day she can find redemption, just like Harrison said.
The Lifers won’t let her volunteer for perimeter patrol again, and they definitely won’t give her a gun, but Harrison convinces them to let them patrol together. Like a buddy system. He’s good with people, flashing his pearly whites and making small talk until they agree to his wishes.
He requests that they guard the topmost floor.
She wears her hoverskates and he carries a hoverboard under his arm.
When it’s pitch black and everyone’s sleeping, they ease silently into the night sky and away from the abandoned building. She knows the smart thing to do would be to run, to get as far away from the big cities and the Pop Con Hunters and anyone else she might hurt.
Instead, they head directly toward Saint Louis and redemption.
~~~
When night falls, it's like a club beating Benson to a violent, unwanted sleep.
He awakes from time to time, in fits and starts, trying to remember his dreams. Was Luce in them? he wonders. But he can’t remember, and, to his utter dismay, he can’t remember her face either. Is this what it’s like to lose someone? he wonders. Forgetting everything about them you never thought you’d forget in a million years?
If so, he never wants to lose someone again.
Finally, he gives up on sleep, moving away from Check and Rod and Gonzo, who are breathing heavily nearby. He checks that Geoffrey’s still there, too, and he is, looking even younger in sleep than he does when awake. Janice—his mother—is curled up like a backwards S. There’s something in her hands, clutched tightly. His old Zoran watch, he realizes. She really loves that thing.
The entire building is asleep, except for the guards perched on the windowsills. He wonders where Harrison and Destiny are. He assumes they’re together as they’ve been inseparable since the gunshot incident back at the camp. As they fled the woods, his brother and Destiny stayed together, whispering to each other the whole way. They seemed close in a way he’s only ever been with Luce.
Which means Harrison should understand why…what happened…left him so broken. He should understand that he can’t just “get over” Luce and that she’s not just “some chick.” A renewed burst of hot anger seeps through his veins. He takes a deep breath, trying not to think about Harrison or their argument. Trying to move on.
His mind restless, his feet seem to have a mind of their own. To his surprise, he finds himself in the temporary medical corner. There are a handful of beds, which are really desks with blankets on them. All the patients are sleeping. Except, wait…
Not all of them.
One is sitting up, staring at the wall, back to him. A woman, he guesses, judging by the long dark hair. Minda, the guardswoman who saved Harrison and Destiny—later saved by the same pair during Pop Con’s raid. Last he’d heard, she hadn’t woken up and her status was precarious.
Clearly, she’s awake now.
“Are you okay?” Benson asks.
He sees her body tense, but she doesn’t flinch, or even turn around. “My head feels like it’s swimming through quicksand,” she says. “Oh, and I can’t see out of one of my eyes. Other than that, I’m perfectly fine.”
“You almost died. Do you want me to get the doctor?”
“Where’s my pack?” she asks, ignoring the question.
Benson grabs a bag off the floor at the foot of the table. Hands it to her.
She grabs it roughly, rummaging through it. Pulls out a portable holo-screen. “No,” she says, staring at its shattered face. And again, “No.”
“You’re alive,” Benson says, “and you’re worried about your stupid holo?”
“It’s not just a stupid holo,” Minda says, “I need it to—” She stops and shakes her head, placing the broken holo back in the bag. “Never mind. You’re right, it doesn’t matter. Now tell me what happened.”
“How much do you remember?”
“I remember the alarms and getting trapped in the bunker and an explosion. Then there was smoke, so much smoke. I tried to tuck my mouth into my shirt but I’d already taken a deep breath of the stuff.”
“Gas,” Benson says. “Lethal.”
“Then how?”
How am I here? How am I alive? How did I get out of the gas-filled room? Benson hears all three questions in her ambiguous inquiry.
“Destiny and Harrison saved you,” Benson says.
Finally, she turns, one eye open, one closed. She nods, as if it’s the exact answer she expected. “Those two are good ones.”
“They are,” Benson says, silently wishing he knew either of them well enough to really make that judgment. For all he knows, Minda might have had more conversations with them than he has. And his last one with Harrison makes him wish he’d never met his brother in the first place.
“But Harrison hates your father,” Minda says. “I worry he always will.”
Strangely, Benson feels simultaneously defensive of both his brother and father. “Harrison didn’t get to see our father the way I did. And my father saved my life more times than I can count.” In that moment, Benson realizes that blood is like a thick rope, tying him to his family. As much as he wants to hate Harrison for what he said before, he can’t. Just like he couldn’t hate his father, even if he should’ve.
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” Minda says. “I was just wondering whether you think Harrison will ever forgive him.”
“Oh,” Benson says, surprised by the turn in the conversation. “I—I don’t know.” I don’t know anything about my brother. “I hope so. One day.”
“I hope so, too,” Minda says. “One day he’s going to find out about my past, and I’m going to need his forgiveness, too.”
“What do you mean?” She’s a Lifer. A strong, independent woman. She seems exactly like the type of person Harrison would gravitate toward.
“I used to work for Pop Con,” she says.
Benson sucks in a breath, picturing her wearing a gasmask and shooting lasers at his head. He shivers at the frightening thought.
“I know,” she says. “I feel the same way when I think about the old me.”
“What were you?”
“A Hunter,” she says.
“How did you…” Benson lets the question trail away, not wanting to offend her.
“Gain the trust of the Lifers?” she says, reading his mind. “It wasn’t easy, not that I can blame them.”
Benson digests it all. “What changed for you?” Benson asks. After he asks it, he realizes how important the question is to him. How vitally important. Because he needs to know what makes people change their thinking.
She shakes her head. “I was always so confident in my beliefs. Everything was black and white. There are laws and you follow them. The laws are for the good of everyone. Anyone not obeying the laws threatens our society. I studied population control. As soon as I graduated, I applied for a job at the Department of Population Control. I was ecstatic when I got it. I was doing something good. I was help—”
“You were killing innocent babies,” Benson says coldly.
Her face goes stone cold. She nods. “I did horrible things. Not just a few times. Many times. I didn’t go through with it the first few missions. I stayed back, let the other
s do the dirty work. I was reprimanded, suspended, almost lost my job. But then I forced myself to disconnect my emotions from the job. They weren’t babies anymore, they were UnBees. They had no souls. They were abominations that never should’ve been brought into the world. I imagined them with claws and beady eyes and blood-dripping fangs. And I was the ONLY one who could stop them.” Her lip is trembling and her face screwed up and her eyes burning with intensity.
Benson sees the Hunter she once was.
The expression fades and the Minda he met a week ago returns. “Then I got pregnant, accidentally,” she says.
Benson’s stomach turns. “You were married?”
“Boyfriend,” she says. “We took precautions, but nothing is foolproof.”
“What happened?”
“Although we didn’t realize it before, we wanted a baby together. So we applied for a Death Match. We didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant, not even my parents or his. And we waited. As the months went by, it got harder and harder to hide the bump. We hadn’t committed a crime yet, but my boyfriend was already talking about finding a doctor who would deliver the baby illegally if the birth authorization didn’t come through in time.”
“Where’s your child?” Benson asks, a bolt of fear striking his heart.
She continues on, as if she didn’t hear the question. “We argued. I said we couldn’t do it—we couldn’t have an unauthorized baby. He said the laws were wrong, unfair, that we had every right to have and raise a child as everyone else. Every day at work, I felt like the other Hunters were constantly staring at my stomach. I waited another few weeks and then turned myself in.”
“But you hadn’t committed a crime,” Benson argues. “There was nothing to turn yourself in for.”
She shifts in her seat. “We hadn’t announced the pregnancy, hadn’t made plans to terminate it if the birth authorization didn’t make it in time. We were contemplating an illegal birth.”
“They kicked you out of Pop Con?” he asks. And killed the baby? he doesn’t ask.