daynight

by Megan Thomason

  “What were those pills? I’m not feeling so hot,” I say, putting my head down on the nearest surface, which happens to be Blake’s lap. I’m sure to keep the ruse going, he runs his fingers through my hair and away from my face. The garden images on the walls relax me and before long I close my eyes, comforted by his touch and the silky feel of the couch.

  “Yeah, what’d you give her?” Blake says.

  “I believe it’s just something to relax her and help her sleep. After the stress of the night it’s important she be well rested for her procedure,” Spud says. I’m too tired to speak, but those pills did not resemble those they gave us to sleep when we first arrived.

  “I’d like to understand her surgery better,” Blake says.

  “She asleep?” Spud asks.

  “I think so,” he responds.

  “As the doctors explained to her there are some side effects Recruits face by going through Thera’s portals. Often small lesions form on the female’s reproductive organs that if left unchecked can cause long-term infertility.”

  “And so that’s what the doctor is fixing tomorrow?” Blake asks.

  “Yes, of course,” Spud replies.

  “So then why are they messing with me?” Blake asks.

  “Oh, well for males there can be issues will sperm motility, which can make it difficult to fertilize a female’s egg.”

  “Seriously, stop right there. Don’t ever talk to me about sperm again, okay? Besides, I’m not sure children will be in my future,” Blake says. Why would he say such a thing? And why’d he stop stroking my hair? He’s obviously upset by the exchange.

  “Of course they will be,” Spud says. “Which is why these tests and procedures are so important.”

  “What exact tests are they running on me?” he asks.

  “I’m sure they’re just going to take some samples and make sure all is well,” he says. I can feel Blake shaking beneath me. Perhaps he hates needles as much as I do.

  “Is that so?” Blake says.

  “Yes,” Spud says in such a tone I know that conversation is over. “So, tell me how the night went. Was it hard to see your sister? Or harder to see your girlfriend meet up with her old boyfriend?”

  “Well, it’s not like I got to chat with Leila since she’s a freshman. And the whole Tristan thing sucked. What did you expect? That Kira would thank you? That I’d thank you?” Blake says.

  “No, I imagined it would go as it did,” Spud replies. “She needs to get past it.”

  “I don’t know,” Blake says. “Can she?” He’s back to playing with my hair which feels amazingly soothing.

  “I thought you’d like her,” Spud says. “You’ve got a thing for her, haven’t you?” He pauses, which makes me think Blake gave a non-verbal answer to his question. “She’d make an excellent Cleave for you, you know. Just remember that you came here to do a job, not just find the love of your life.”

  “I know. I got it. I won’t let you down,” Blake says. And then almost as an afterthought he adds, “As creepy as it is working with the Second Chancers, we’ll do as instructed.”

  “Excellent. Well, I’ll be going. I’ll let myself out. I assume you’ll see to it that Kira gets to bed?” Spud asks.

  “I’ve got it covered, Ted,” Blake says. Ted? Since when are they on a first name basis? I hear footsteps and then the door shut. Blake silently sits there for several minutes before sliding out from under my head so that he can scoop me off the couch and carry me to my room. He pulls the covers up over me and kisses me on the forehead before I drift off to sleep.

  I’m barely showered and dressed before the doorbell rings and an all-too chipper Spud Rosenberg is at the door and ready to usher me to the clinic. Blake insists on accompanying me, but Spud says no, ‘his appointment isn’t for a half hour.’ There’s no chance to interrogate Blake about his debriefing with Spud. That will have to wait for later, when we can take a walk in the canyon, assuming I’ll even be up to it. Actually, I don’t care how I feel. My need for information will have to trump any pain or discomfort.

  We traverse the path to the clinic through the glowing lights in the canyon, and I congratulate myself for my improved skills at avoiding the spiky brush lining the path. I try to start up a conversation with Spud, but he’s clearly not an early evening person. He happily hands me off to the doctor who informs me that due to my ‘fear of needles’ they’ve decided to put me under for the procedure, although it will be a ‘twilight’ anesthetic so I’ll wake up immediately following, just like when I got my wisdom teeth out a year ago. I remember Blake’s clear instructions to not let them do this so I know exactly what’s being done to me, but the doctor refuses to relent and I’m out like a light within moments.

  My watch reads 20:10 when I come around, so I was under less than forty minutes. My abdomen feels sore and bloated, and there’s a little bleeding, but other than that I appear to be functional. The doctor confirms that I’ll likely have some discomfort and pain for a couple nights, but should be back to a hundred percent thereafter. He gives me a bottle of pain medication to help me deal before forcing me into a wheelchair and handing me to a nurse.

  As we’re wheeling out to the clinic lobby I hear a heated exchange coming from an examination room. One of the voices is my doctor and the other rings so familiar it hits me like a wrecking ball to the gut as he says, “What did you do to her? If you hurt her, I’ll make sure you suffer.” Ethan. But that’s impossible right? Or not. I saw him at the scale model at Headquarters. At the time I was certain. But Brad Darcton scared me off. Why wouldn’t Ethan come see me if he was here? Unless he’s a Second Chancer and doesn’t remember me. Which would suck. Although, wouldn’t that mean he couldn’t remember his girlfriend, either? What is wrong with me? I’m horrible and need to get a grip. Ethan’s not mine to pursue, even if he is on Thera. Regardless, I want to know his fate.

  “Who’s in there?” I ask the nurse as I get out of the chair and attempt to open the door, which is locked. Thankfully she catches me when I collapse from standing up too fast. “I know that voice. I need to talk to him. I really, really need to. I’ve been looking for him. Please open up,” I say through the door. “If it’s you, please stop avoiding me.” The voices in the room go silent.

  “I’m afraid that information is privileged, Ms. Donovan,” she says. “We take patient confidentiality seriously here. Should I get a member of the Ten or Council to address your concerns?” That’s all the reminder I need to stand down. In my loopy state I’d ignored Brad Darcton’s admonition to not go looking for people I’d previously known.

  “No, no, never mind. I’m sorry. I think I’m just hallucinating or something,” I say. She shakes her head and delivers me to Blake, who is apparently supposed to push me all the way home. I’m surprised he’s waiting, but don’t address him as I’m still muttering about the voice I heard. I want to stay and see the mystery patient come out of the room, but Blake’s eager to get me out of there. The anesthetic they used has me in a bit of a fog, which I blame for my delusions. Finally, Blake breaks the silence once we’re in the open canyon.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah, I think so. Doesn’t look like they removed anything life sustaining,” I respond with a weak smile.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he mumbles.

  “Huh?” I say.

  “What did they do? What did you see? Tell me exactly?” he asks, his tone fearful.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see anything. They decided to put me out because of my needle issues. Why, what do you think you know? I heard you and ‘Ted’ last night, Blake. You seemed to be on quite the paranoia trip. You going to share?”

  “Oh. I thought you were asleep,” is all he says.

  “Come on, isn’t it time you tell me what your story is?” I say, turning in my chair to look at him, which wrenches my abdomen enough to cause extreme agony. “Ugh. My stomach hurts.”

  “I’ve got to get back to start my classes on tim
e and you have to get some rest. Later, during free time I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he says. “I promise.”

  As much as it pains me I stop our forward progress with my legs and stand up out of the wheelchair to face him. Since he’s still pushing, he whacks me in the knees with the chair and I almost fall over.

  “You’ll tell me now or I’m not going anywhere,” I say, although if my shakiness doesn’t make me tank the heat may. It feels unusually hot and I can barely breathe. The relative darkness of the spot we stopped unnerves me, but I press on with my interrogation. “I have to know what happened to you that was so crappy that you think I’m going to hate you for it. I just can’t hang out all night imagining up crazy scenarios while I watch you do a bunch of boring online classes. I won’t do it. So, please tell me. Now.” The discomfort I’m causing Blake is apparent in his eyes and body language, but I refuse to back down. Although, I may not be able to stay upright for long. The combination of anesthesia and pain medications has me swaying.

  “Fine, but please sit so you don’t keel over,” he says, gently helping me back into the chair. He kneels in front of me, trembling, putting his hands on top of mine.

  “I’m sitting. Go ahead,” I say.

  His eyes don’t leave mine as he speaks. “I’m just going to spew it out. Kira, the deal is that I was born here on Thera. My parents were Exiled for stealing government secrets. My dad was a Daynighter—just like that guy from Foreign Affairs we met—so he traveled back and forth between Earth and Thera doing business between the governments. He discovered some things he shouldn’t have—and shared them with my mom—not realizing everything they discussed was monitored. So they were both Exiled, despite the fact my mom was pregnant with me. My parents hooked up with a colony of Exilers in some caves outside the city. That’s where I was born. I lived there until I was eight and it was no picnic—the kind of stuff that still gives me nightmares—like watching my Mom slowly die after giving birth to Leila. But, eventually the Exilers took control of an entry portal and found a new exit portal, and so my dad made good on a promise he’d made to my mom to get us out of here, and placed me with ‘Jennifer,’ his trophy wife on Earth.”

  My eyes grow wide and I’m shaking a little myself at the implications. He was born here? In Exile? I don’t know him at all, I realize. “Keep going,” I say. One swirling canyon light keeps illuminating and then darkening Blake’s face—a creepy effect to accompany his equally disturbing tale.

  “The thing is that I’ve been trained since I was eight to do what we’re doing right now—to come back here as a Recruit and get information my dad and the other Exilers need to take control from the dictators who run this place. They’re not good guys, Kira. They’re seriously evil and the cities here are really just some large-scale experiments. Worse, the Second Chancers are just a bunch of pawns. They’d kill me in a second if they knew who I was or what I was doing.” He stops, letting me absorb the information, though he can no longer look me in the eye. His whole life has been one big training exercise.

  “Ted Rosenberg hatched the plan with my dad and helped me prepare for the Test, even though I was pretty much a shoo-in with my DNA. He’s my dad’s mole within the SCI organization, but until now he was stationed on Earth, not Thera. Ted knew that I couldn’t get in and pull off the scam alone. Since Recruits are always partnered so that the SCI can try to Cleave them off and keep them on Thera, he had to find me a suitable match that we could trust not to blow my cover,” he says, pausing. The pained look on his face tells me I’m not going to like what I hear next.

  “So that’s where I come into play? This has all been about getting me on board?” I ask, seething as the pieces start falling into place: the ‘pact’ we made, the trust building, and the fake relationship. Blake pretending the fake could become real. He’s the plant and I’m the pawn.

  “I swear I didn’t know about the partner thing until the day of the Test and I wasn’t happy. I mean, they’d trained me to trust no one and then tell me that I can’t do it alone, and that I’m going to be responsible for another life. A girl’s life. Your life. Ted told me it was going to be you that afternoon after you insulted him in the interview. But he was worried you weren’t going to be cooperative. So after the whole disaster unfolded at the Goodington’s I knew they were behind it.”

  “What do you mean ‘they’ were behind it? So who are the ‘they’? What the heck are you saying?” I ask, though deep down I already know the answer and can feel my bones frost over before he even responds.

  “The SCI killed your friends and my sister to make sure we’d commit—you’d commit. They caused the blast that night and engineered every single thing that followed,” he says. He pauses to allow me to process and respond. It takes me a full minute to do so. I saw him at school every day for two months following the accident and he never said a word. He knew we’d end up here together and my life would be in danger.

  “And you knew and you let me come,” I say as the last puzzle piece ratchets into place and I understand why he thinks I’m going to hate him.

  “I didn’t know if I could trust you, didn’t think you’d believe me, and was selfish because I needed you. Without you reacting to Thera the way you did it would’ve been obvious I knew too much. So yeah, I knew and I let you come, to preserve both our lives,” he says.

  There’s nothing more he can say, or at least that I want to hear until I can process what he’s already told me. He removes his hands from mine and proceeds to roll me up the path towards our home in dreary silence.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Blake

  Kudos to Ted Rosenberg for scoring the job as our Handler and shedding new light on my deal here. I learned as much in our fifteen-minute debrief last night as I did the entire week of training, with exception of the visit to mini-Garden City which was the equivalent of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for me.

  First, our house is bugged, but there are no cameras—at least not in the living area, because Ted’s words didn’t match his non-verbal signals. For one, after he described the so-called surgery for reproductive lesions I asked if that’s what they were doing to Kira. His words said ‘yes’ but he was shaking his head ‘no.’ When I said children weren’t in my future—because I’m not sure I have a long life expectancy ahead of me—he says they will be, his body language screaming ‘count on it, whether you want it or not.’ And he made sure I knew that my tests have squat to do with making sure my sperm’ll make the swim team cut.

  Second, he was all in my face about my deal with Kira—even if it’s good cover I’ve got to keep trained on my real mission. Like I don’t know that. Though I have to admit, holding her in my arms to comfort her last night had my body going haywire. Nothing a cold shower couldn’t remedy.

  Third, the powers that be are totally buying the whole relationship thing.

  Four, there are moments where I forget the relationship isn’t real. And that means I’m screwed. The moment I tell her the truth she’s going to turn on me and that’s going to open her up to Tristan’s full court press for a quickie Cleave. I doubt she’d turn me in at this point, but the living situation could get unmanageable fast. And I need her to stay on my side so she can cover for me when I’m off doing daddy’s bidding.

  Five, Bailey’s going to be a real obstacle for my fake relationship, no question. Almost makes me wish she had her memory back. She spent our entire workout educating me on ways to have ‘fun’ without crossing the Cleaving line. If I’d thought she was pretty creative during our short relationship before… the stuff she whispered to me had me blushing (and otherwise reacting) and I don’t embarrass easily. That conversation required an extra long cold shower post-workout.

  Six, I’m pretty sure that my fake relationship with Kira and potential Cleaving has everything to do with Kira and me being the ‘future of Thera.’ I’ve got whacked thoughts like they want us to breed a bunch of super DNT babies, which would explain why they
’re all about our reproductive systems functioning. I just can’t tell how far they’re taking it.

  All I know is the clinic just made me give them a sperm sample. And they’re in there doing who knows what to Kira. With any luck she’ll be able to detail it out for me, but I’m betting they’ll make sure she can’t. Ted told me the pregnancies were all done in-vitro, which screams ‘lab creations’ to me. For all I know they’re manufacturing a bunch of mini-me’s right now and there’s nothing I can do about it. Or maybe they’re shoving my goods up her to try to get her pregnant, but that doesn’t really jive either since we’re not Cleaved, so that means any pregnancy, ‘assisted’ or not and we’d be Exiled. However, it’s equally likely my upbringing has made my overly paranoid and they’re just trying to grow some DNT in a lab and the repro deal is a huge red herring.

  My dad trained me for just about every scenario, but we never covered reproduction in a whole lot of detail. In fact, I don’t think he ever factored female influence into the equation, which was a major oversight on his part. He shut down my relationship with Bailey the moment he found out. Beat the crap out of me for getting involved with her, so between his reaction and Bailey’s reaction I equate girls with pain. Sure, I have a teenage sister. But it’s a heck of a lot different having a girlfriend, fake or not. I could foist my sister on my step-mom when she got touchy and emotional, but I’m expected to shoulder that responsibility with Kira and I am way out of my element. I’d give anything for a laptop and an hour of Internet access because a little research is in order. Google’d be my best friend about now. I wonder if somewhere deep within the SCI administration buildings if they don’t have some internet cable that runs through a portal.

  I realize Kira hasn’t been in for long, but I want to see her and find myself pacing the small lobby of the clinic. The receptionist keeps glancing up like I’m an annoying distraction, but I don’t give a crap because I need to know what they’re doing to her and whether they’re hurting her. My sleep suffered as I spent the hours reliving how my body felt holding her. Though, if I’m being honest, I might have been thinking about some of Bailey’s suggestions, too. Bad-news Bailey’s the kind of distraction that could blow the mission completely.