by Natalie Reid
He took a step closer towards the ledge and waved his tablet up and down as if it was the answer he was looking for. However, with only one hand gripped around the sleek edges, the tablet quickly slipped out of his clammy hand and fell straight into the water.
Without wasting any time, Jessie dove back into the pool and caught the tablet while it was descending down to the bottom. Resurfacing, she went over to the ladder at the edge and climbed out.
“I hope it’s water proof,” she commented with a smile.
She extended it out to Tom, who was hurrying over to grab it from her. She glimpsed at the letters GAPQ, before he hurriedly grabbed it.
He had moved so fast over the slick floor, however, that when he took his tablet away from her and backed up several paces, he began to lose his balance. Jessie, who had been momentarily hurt by his apparent aversion to her, quickly put that aside and reached out to grab him.
Her arm wrapped around his middle, and she drew him towards her as if she was giving him a hug. Tom immediately regained his balance and then stiffened in her grip. For a moment she froze as well. She had not thought that catching him would require coming this close to him. His hair brushed past her ear, and the moisture from her own hair dripped down onto his shoulders. It was then that she realized what she had done. She was soaking wet, and had just drenched Tom in water.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, stepping back. She could see lines and splotches of water littering his clothing.
Tom stood there in silence, as if getting over a shock. She wondered if she had scared him, or if he was gaging on how to walk out of there without being seen. Then his head turned to the side, and he looked up at the corner of the wall. Jessie followed his gaze and saw that he was staring at the small blue dot that indicated the camera watching them.
“I can run and get you a new set of clothes if you like,” she offered, biting down on her lip in apprehension.
She was about to step around him, when he suddenly stepped in her way, whispering, “No, wait.”
Jessie froze, realizing that he was now standing just a few inches from her.
“Just stay right there,” he said softly.
She lifted her eyes to his face, not far from her own, and she found him looking down to his pocket. His hand reached in, and when he pulled it out, it was clasped around something that she could not see.
“I have something for you.”
He slid his hand inside of hers and pressed the object into her palm. His hand stayed there for a moment more before returning back to his side.
Though he didn’t say as much, she got the feeling like he didn’t want the camera to see what he had given her. So instead of lifting the object to her face, she tilted her head and carefully unfurled her hand to see a small blue cylinder key inside.
“I thought you could use a non-visitor’s pass,” he explained, practically speaking the words right in her ear. “I figured it was probably a pain having to ask someone to escort you somewhere every time your pass decided not to work. Plus, now you won’t have to do any late night climbing.”
She carefully flipped the key in her hands and looked down at the words printed at the top. “This says unrestricted on it.”
“Yeah, must have been a mistake,” he said, tweaking his mouth in embarrassment. “Just don’t get into too much trouble.”
Jessie looked from the pass to study his face. She wasn’t sure if he knew about her late-night visit to Ben. But why else would he give her a pass that would allow her to do it again? The whole thing surprised her. She didn’t think he was capable of something so sly.
“Surprising,” she said, giving him a small smile.
“What is?”
She took a step back and cuffed him lightly on the arm. “You.” Then, becoming more serious, she looked him in the eye, saying, “Thank you,” before quickly walking out of the pool room and trying to calm down the pounding in her chest.
Later on that night, Jessie stared at the clock on her wall, waiting for it to get late enough to sneak out. She figured by ten-thirty most of the hallways would be empty enough for her to sneak around without being noticed. As she waited, she turned the cylinder key over in her hands, watching as tiny bubbles formed in the blue liquid. Her fingers absently went to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and she found her thoughts unwillingly drifting to Tom.
She knew that it hadn’t been a mistake that her pass was unrestricted. He had done it just for her, and yet he was trying to play it off as nothing. She wanted to call him her friend, for then his behavior wouldn’t seem abnormal. But the truth of the matter was, it hadn’t been that long since he thought she could still be a Bandit.
During the few minutes of waiting she had left, she mulled over her relationship with her young doctor that seemed to grow more complicated each day. Yet, even allowing herself time to think about Tom seemed a luxury. Her conversation with Ual a couple weeks ago was always lurching at the back of her mind, reminding her that the world was changing quickly, and that she was going to be affected by this change whether she wanted to be or not.
She was still thinking about Ual’s words, when she softly knocked on Ben’s door a few minutes later. He had been awake and apparently waiting for her. When she opened the door and looked down at his happy expression, she felt horrible for making him wait several days before coming to see him again. She had tried, of course, but no one had come around to her hallway so she could make it out into the main corridor.
She visualized the monotony that must have ruled each of Ben’s days as he waited for her to come back. But the worst part, she realized, was probably not the boredom, but the underlying tragedy of it all. He was an abandoned Potentian. He couldn’t evolve without his Protector; he couldn’t do anything but wait each day to see when BLES would finally finish experimenting on him and pull the plug that inevitably needed to come out.
When Ben led her further back in his room, and they both took seats on the floor, he reached for his bed and pulled out something under the mattress. In his hands were scores and scores of paper fish, some large and some so tiny she didn’t even know it was possible to fold something so small.
“Tom gave me some paper,” he explained, dropping the school of fish onto his lap.
Jessie leaned forward, rested her elbows on her legs, and griped at the bridge of her nose to keep herself from crying. She even dug her fingers into her skin and drew a pinch of pain to keep her emotions in check.
“Ben, that’s amazing.” She picked up the smallest fish he had folded, smaller than the fingerprint on her thumb, and gently cradled it in her palm. “I’ve never seen one so small. It must have taken ages to fold.”
Ben shrugged and looked up at her with a smile. “What’s it like up in the sky?” he asked.
Jessie studied his expectant face. It seemed as if he had been going over in his head for the past few days the exact question he should ask her when she came, as if their time together was so short that only the best, most important questions should be asked.
She thought about his question carefully, trying to put as much effort into her answer as he seemed to have put into his question. Then, something long forgotten snuck its way back into her memory. It was a conversation that had happened so long ago it had almost slipped through the cracks in her mind like a stay coin falling between the grates of a street gutter. But now, after all these years, in the dirty light of the Desolar Complex, she was remembering the smell of steamed vegetables and boiling Ramen noodles, and the comforting weight of a stranger’s jacket as it sent away the cold.
“Being up in the air,” she started. “Is like…like being a whole new creature. Humans don’t have wings, see,” she said, reaching over for Ben’s arm and extending it to prove her point. He laughed softly as she did this, but waited for her to continue.
“Being up in the air, up with the clouds…” She closed her eyes. “It’s like seeing something we weren’t supposed to see.” She met his gaze an
d whispered out her next words as if they were a secret. “It’s like, when you wake up really early in the morning when everyone is supposed to be asleep, and you peer out your window and see the first rays of the sun poking out over the top of the tiny trees in the horizon. Flying is like sharing a secret with nature. Just you and the sky, and the silent wind.”
After she said this, Ben curled his legs to his chest, rested his head against the mattress of his bed, and looked over at her with eyes that pleaded with her to continue. And so she did. She told him of every good thing she could think of. She told him of Sarah, her mother, and of the little things she would say to her throughout the day when Jessie would feel lonely or frustrated that she couldn’t play or talk with anyone else. She spoke for hours, until her voice grew hoarse and tired, telling him about her life and the world. She tried to steer clear of the subject of the war, but so much of her human life had been immersed in combat and battle strategy that she found this difficult.
So, the next night, when she came to visit him again, she finally asked the question that had been on her mind for quite some time now.
“Ben?” she spoke softly, sitting next to him by the wall and letting him rest his head on her shoulder like she’d imagine a big sister would. “What was your life like before you came here?”
He suddenly felt very stiff at her side, but after a moment he answered her in a painfully quiet voice. “It was busy. I worked most of the day alongside my Protector, trying to make money.”
A pain crept up in Jessie’s chest, and she was suddenly reminded of all the parts inside her that were not her own. It was strange, but she felt like she wanted to rip them out so that it was only her in there. She almost felt guilty that so much was done to keep her alive, when Ben did so much and yet was left here to die.
Slowly, piece by piece, Ben started to tell her the story of his life outside these walls, speaking carefully like someone walking on sore legs. Jessie was tempted to tell him to stop, for both of their sakes, but she also felt that it was a weight that he needed to get off. So she listened as he recounted the small, everyday struggles of his life, and the few constants that made him happy.
He didn’t talk much about his Protector, a woman named Katherine. He didn’t even say why, after ten years of taking care of him, she had to give him up to the Desolar Complex to be terminated. He just said that she couldn’t look out for him anymore. When she took him in to BLES, they offered her a choice. They could either terminate him right away, or pay her a small sum of money to allow the scientists to run tests on him. Of course, it wouldn’t mean that he would survive.
Ben had been there for over a month now, and that fact scared Jessie. She knew that he wouldn’t be able to live much longer on artificial support. She had once heard a scientist say that those machines were really only built so that the parents wouldn’t have to see their Potentians dying the second they took off their Protector’s Bands. They were meant to keep them alive for a few days, but Ben was defying so much by staying alive for this long.
Ben had admitted these facts about his life in small chokes of breath, but what he really wanted to talk about were the things back at home that made him happy. He told her about a squeaky step in the stairwell of his apartment building that he could stand on and make sing. He spoke about the snow and how it would brush against their window in the spring in soft whispers and send him to sleep better than any lullaby. Most of all, he spoke about a little bird with a red chest that would fly around the rafters of his building’s attic.
When Ben and his Protector needed to go up there to clean, he would make sure to save the crust of his bread from breakfast and lay it out on a corner of the room so the bird could eat it without fear of getting too close to them. The bird never sang more than a few simple chirps, but Ben loved how the small creature would turn its head in every direction, trying to see the world from all angles to determine which one looked best.
As he recounted these things, Jessie looked down at him and studied him closely. Though his eyes were strong, she could see signs that he was growing weaker. His skin was pale, there were dark circles under his eyes, and every time he took a breath, she could hear a rasping noise emitting from the back of his throat.
Each night she came to visit him, she thought that the noise was growing worse. But she didn’t know if it was her fears making it louder, or if he really was withering away before her.
During the day, she would see Tom, and a whole host of questions would bubble up in the back of her throat, waiting to be spoken, but she just couldn’t bring herself to ask them. She knew that if she asked him questions about Ben, she wouldn’t like the answers. So she kept her mouth shut until one day, she couldn’t take it.
It was the day before Carver was due to give her another physical. She was tremendously nervous, and even considered faking a cold so that she could stay here a little while longer to be with Ben. But she had a duty as a soldier and a pilot. There were so few of them that she knew she was direly needed back up in the skies. Still, she couldn’t just leave Ben with a final farewell and go off to war knowing that he would soon die.
That evening, before dinner, she sought Tom out in his lab. She tried to act casual as she took a seat in the chair he offered her, but her mind was weighed down with so much worry that Tom could see she was not happy.
“Are you feeling alright?” he asked.
She placed her arms on her lap and let her shoulders sag. “There’s something I want to ask you. Since this might be my last day here…” She let her words trail off as she stared down harshly at her hands.
“Ask me anything,” he said softly.
She lifted her head and looked over at the photo on Tom’s shelf. “If a Protector gives up her Potentian…can she take him back?”
He followed her gaze to his picture, and then glanced despondently down at his shoes. He looked almost as if he had been expecting her question, yet he also seemed sadly disappointed.
“I’ve never seen it happen,” he admitted. Then, seeing the expression on her face, he added, “But that doesn’t mean that, theoretically, it can’t be done. A Potentian needs to be connected with its Protector for twelve years in order to evolve into a human, but who’s to say that it can’t be briefly interrupted and then started again later?”
Jessie felt her heart skip a beat. She tried to control the light-headed feeling that this hope brought her by reminding herself she might be losing a friend tomorrow. Looking over to Tom, she saw that he was fiddling with his glasses.
“You know, I always wondered what you were looking at inside those things,” she said, gesturing to the glasses.
He smiled and twirled them between his fingers. He looked like he wasn’t about to answer, when his face lit up and he asked, “Would you like to see?”
“Really?” Her hands hovered over the arms of her chair, unsure if she should get up or not.
He tapped his fingers on the inside of the lenses, as if he was pulling up a specific file. “Come on,” he said, standing up. “I promise, it won’t be boring and sciencey.”
She got to her feet as well, feeling suddenly anxious and excited to wear his glasses. It somehow seemed so intimate, like he was sharing with her a deep secret. When he extended the glasses out to her, she was almost afraid to take them. The handle was still warm from where his fingers had held it. She could smell his scent as she pushed them up the bridge of her nose, chemical sanitizer and that warm cotton scent of a freshly laundered shirt.
Placing the glasses to her eyes, she felt her body still at what she found. There were clouds around her. White, billowy clouds all around like she was somehow up in the air, thousands of feet from the ground. They moved softly around her, drifting in a slight breeze. It seemed so real, she felt as if her hand would be met with their cold moisture should she extend it out.
“Is this really what you were looking at all this time?” she asked in astonishment.
“No, not all the time.”
He paused for a moment before admitting, “Actually I just put this program on there. Needed a co-worker to help me work out the glitches. He assured me that it would be just like—”
“Flying,” she finished for him. She wanted to take off the glasses to look at him, to thank him properly for the thoughtful gift he had given her, but she found she couldn’t leave the clouds just yet. “Tom, this is…” She shook her head, at a loss for words.
“Would you like to take it for a spin?”
“A spin?”
“Step forward,” he encouraged her. “See what happens.”
She took a careful step forward, and as she did so, it was like the clouds moved with her. This wasn’t just a moving picture she was looking at; it was somehow interactive, like the clouds could feel her presence. She slowly spun in a circle, taking in the whole scene around her. The more she saw, the more she began to feel weightless. The floor dropped away beneath her, and nothing but a miracle was holding her up. She took a few more steps forward, when she thudded into the hard surface of a table.
“Are you alright?” Tom asked, rushing over to steady her.
“Maybe you should guide me,” she suggested, blindly extending her arm out.
“W-what?” he stammered. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel him close by. His voice was like a strong entity speaking through the clouds.
“Please?” she asked, turning her face to where she judged he stood.
A moment later, she felt his fingers gently slip around her wrist, and his other hand held her arm at the bend of her elbow. Her back was warm with his presence as he guided her forward. The clouds moved around her. She felt less like a pilot and more like a bird, with nothing to separate her from the splendors of the world above.
At first Tom moved slowly as he guided her across the room, yet he gradually picked up the pace so that the clouds moving in front of her eyes were a constant veil of swift mist. As he moved faster, one of his arms slid around her waist to keep her more secure, and he even spun her around several times, causing her to laugh and feel alive with dizzying energy. Soon flying felt like dancing, and she thought it strange that Tom could not see everything she was seeing, for he felt like he was right up there with her in the clouds.