by Natalie Reid
“Should I go get Melissa for you?” he asked weakly.
She shook her head. “She doesn’t understand! She was always so lucky. No matter how many guys she was with, she never got pregnant. She never had to make the decision I did. She didn’t stay awake nights, going over the facts in her head. Twelve years and no job. Twelve years of being stuck to a child, not going out to see your friends.” She lifted her head to stare at him. “Do you know how hard it is to get dressed when you’ve got your arm hooked up to a kid twenty four hours a day? You have to rip a line down all your clothes and sew buttons into them! And using the bathroom, going to sleep, even walking around the apartment. All that and no job. We just weren’t meant to do that!”
Griffin gulped and stared at her in pained silence. He realized that this was what would have happened to his parents had they decided not to have him. This was the road not taken. His father would be alive to read and to work and then to come home and cry on a couch. For the life of him, he couldn’t tell which one was the better choice.
Suddenly Saturn got up and rushed to the kitchen to run her hands under the facet. Pooling the water in her palms, she dunked her face inside and then let out a long breath.
“You should go,” she said in a dead voice. “I have to get ready for work.” When she turned around, she looked like a brand new woman, no tears, no sadness, and no regret over her lost daughter. “Eight to four in the morning at the Bank of Social Numbers. There’s living the dream, right?”
He offered her a sad smile, but then rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. “Uh, so would you know where Melissa is, then?”
She chuckled and shook her head. “It’s not your night with her, bird man. She’s over at Mercury’s with another one of her boyfriends.”
She had said the words so casually, as if she had to speak them every day. She had no idea what she had just done to Griffin. The sound of breaking glass and pumping blood thundered in his ears, and his mouth tasted bitter like an acidic cup of artificial coffee.
“Hey,” she said, breaking him out of his silent spiral into depression. “Would you like to have me instead? I’m already late for work; what’s a few more minutes?”
“I’m sorry?” he asked shaking his head like a scared animal. “I-I don’t even know you.”
Saturn snorted. “Like that stops anyone these days.”
“No, I…” He broke away for the door. “I have to go.”
The shock of Saturn’s request shook him awake from his despair and dejection enough for his brain to concoct a half-baked idea that there had been some mistake—that he should break his vow of never entering into Mercury’s and go and see for himself that Saturn was wrong. He even told himself that Saturn had lied. She was a sad, jealous girl that wanted to make her friend suffer as she was suffering. That’s why she said those things. She would only feel better if she brought sweet, innocent Melissa down to her own level.
Even though Griffin had never been to the Pleasure Bar, Mercury’s, he drove through the streets as if he had the route engrained into his head. When he parked his bike and swung off of it, looking like something fired up and not to be messed with, several people standing outside grinned and started barking at him in encouragement. Griffin tried to ignore them, but felt oddly compelled by their drunken barking. Speeding up, he burst through the front doors of the bar.
Inside, the music was deafening. Silver and blue lights spun on the ceiling, and some strange song was being played so loud that he couldn’t even hear the words. The people slouched over at the bar, downing the silver, metallic liquid, did not seem to notice the music, and the more lively people in the center were enjoying it too enthusiastically.
From above him, raining down from the ceiling was a strange glittering particle that dissipated whenever it touched his skin, reminding him of how fireworks always disappeared before they got too close to the ground. The first time he had seen a firework, he had been scared that the embers were going to fall right on him. They grew closer and closer to the ground, and he was sure that everyone should be running, but they all looked up in happy amazement.
And now the embers from the fireworks were touching his skin. They did not burn him, but Griffin still felt as if he was on fire. He wanted to shout out to the people in the bar that they should run; they were in danger. No one had listened to the scared Potentian shouting at the fireworks, and no one would listen to him here, above the rocking of the music and the haze of alcohol. No one, except maybe his Melissa.
And then he saw her. The flash of her auburn hair in the silver light was as recognizable to him as a fingerprint to a computer. The only thing was, the girl he found dancing there amongst the swaying bodies and silver embers wasn’t his Melissa. There was a man dancing next to her, if the term ‘next’ could even be applied. They were so close it was hard to tell them apart. The dress she was wearing was nowhere near as modest as the one she had worn on their date, and that one had still proven to be a shock to Griffin’s system.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, staring at her, but when he forced himself to turn away, he knew everything about his life was different now. Melissa wasn’t the sweet girl he had imagined her to be. She wasn’t from the world of the past that he had read about and had dreamed her inside of. She, like every other girl in Aero City, was from this world. There was no escaping it. They were all the same.
He repeated this over and over in his head as he drove back home. They were all the same, and he did not love Melissa. They were all the same, and his dad was dead. They were all the same, and it was all his fault.
Chapter 10
Indescribable
Nights inside Bunker City were the worst. The closed in space and ever-present lights could get to the best of people. To a pilot that lived much of her life eighteen thousand feet up in the air, they could cause insanity, infuriation, claustrophobia, and an imminent sense of suffocation and restlessness.
The first night, Jessie had been too tired to notice it. The second, she had spent mostly above ground because of her race to Ritter’s apartment. But by the third night, the feeling became too much for her that she had to abandon her bed and make for someplace wider, someplace where the ceiling looked a little more like the night sky.
Sneaking through the streets, she made it to the piano stadium cave. There she stretched out on the rock and tried to breathe normally, but the solitude of the darker cave did not help matters. She grabbed a bottle of water she had stuffed in her jacket pocket and gulped it down as if it were air. When she had consumed every last drop and still didn’t feel right, she cast it on the rocks in anger.
Sitting on the hard ground, she drew her legs up to her chest, rested her elbow on her knees, and pressed her palms to her forehead. Suffocation reigned in around her, yet Jessie couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. She felt she was forgetting something, something integral. It was the Aero Complex, she told herself. It was just the left-over feeling from when she evolved and had the Potentian Band taken from around her neck. For days and weeks afterwards, she would go around thinking she was forgetting something, something more than just a synthetic band around her neck. Once, she had stopped right in the middle of a military training exercise to go looking for it, but the name and the ‘what’ she was searching for wasn’t there. Maybe there wasn’t even a name for what she felt was gone, or maybe nothing was really gone in the first place.
“Which night?” she breathed out, gripping her head tighter and closing her eyes. “What night, mom? What were you trying to tell me?”
She still had her head in her hands when a voice called out close by, “I know how you feel.”
She jerked her head up to see Jack standing a few feet away, leaning on the side of the cave wall.
“What do you mean?” she asked, running her hands through her hair and letting her fingers meet up at the top of her head.
Jack gave her a sad look of understanding.
�
��I know that feeling,” he said. “That feeling that there’s something missing, right? And you don’t quite know what it is. They call it the Aero Complex; mistakenly label it as some side-effect from before we were human. They lie and call it a disorder that goes away in a few years. But that’s not true. We all still feel it… in the quiet, in times like this.”
He pointed to the ceiling, saying, “The people up there will tell you to fill the emptiness with drinks at Mercury’s, new science teck, age deprivation pills. They’ll tell you to go out and sleep with anyone and everyone you can.” He shook his head. “The truth is, none of that stuff works. That feeling still comes back. It’s as inevitable as death itself.”
“Actually,” she said, giving him a sideways smile. “I think I just don’t like being underground.”
Jack chuckled and stuck his hands in his pockets. “No. I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”
He took a few steps backwards and bent down to retrieve the discarded bottle she had thrown down in anger. Holding it up, he asked, “You ever think it’s not water you’re thirsty for?”
She blinked her tired eyes and shrugged.
“Tell me Jessie, what is it that you want?”
She stared at her hands on the top of her knees and watched how the purple light made her pale knuckles appear almost translucent. She thought she knew what she wanted. Most of it she couldn’t have. She wanted Ben back, she wanted for her mother never to have been taken away. And she wanted…
“I need to go somewhere,” she announced, getting up to her feet. “I can’t take sleeping underground, and…” Her eyes wandered off to look blankly out at the expanse of cave. Turning back to Jack, she said, “There’s someone I need to see.”
She began walking briskly past him and out towards the tunnel that led into the city. “If someone goes to look for me,” she called out, “Tell them I’ll be back by morning.”
Jack waved her off. “Don’t worry. I’ll cover for you.”
He watched as the young woman hurried out towards freedom, out towards the open air and dirty snow, and the smell of warm bodies defrosting in artificial heat, and purpose. Especially purpose. That thing that fueled her steps and quickened her breath and made her feel like there was something out there worth working and sweating and searching for.
* * *
The brick of the northern apartment walls hadn’t rotted anymore since the last time she had seen them. The moon hung in a different spot in the sky, but like before, it was the room’s only light source. Outside the window, she could hear a Task Force helicopter in the distance. It was heading away and wasn’t searching for her. At least that had changed since the last time she was here. But Jessie didn’t care about the condition of the brick in the once promising apartment, the phase of the moon, or even the heading of the government helicopter. What she did care about was the slim shadow in the corner, and the low sound of life streaming in and out in shallow sleep.
“This is a dangerous spot to spend the night, you know,” she commented, filling the room suddenly with unexpected conversation.
The shadow in the corner shifted, and a moment later she could see the man to whom it belonged, coming out of the dark and rushing over to her. A sharp pain tugged at her chest upon seeing him, like the pain of pulling thread out of skin that’s been stitched up.
“Tom,” she whispered.
She took a step towards him and stopped. She wanted to tell him how much she missed him, how relieved she felt at seeing him alive and safe, but she couldn’t say any of that. The way she thought things were between them was really nothing more than an illusion created by Ritter’s twisted games.
“Jessie,” Tom breathed out. He kept a safe distance from her. His face was wincing in pain, guilty for the secret that he had kept. “I didn’t think you were coming back,” he confessed.
“I didn’t actually think I would find you here.” She glanced around the place. “Didn’t Ritter tell you it was dangerous?”
A wave of regret washed over his face as he closed his eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. He made me swear not to. He said he’d kill us both if I didn’t.” He tried to take a step closer to her, but she shot him a look that told him to stay back.
“You knew what was going to happen to me?” she asked, trying to sound strong and mask the swell of tears hiding just behind her throat. “How long?”
“Just the night before it happened,” he explained. “After you left BLES the day of the attack on Division Bank, Ritter found me in my lab. He said that tomorrow morning you were going to come storming into the Desolar Complex, and that his men would arrest you for giving into the Bandit. Then he said it was my job to save you. He gave me the plan, everything I would need; he even drove the car that brought us all the way here.”
She avoided looking him in the eye as he said this. She had already told herself that Tom didn’t have a choice in all of this, that he had lied when he said he did it because he couldn’t bear to see her killed. But hearing him actually admit it made it hurt even more.
“But that wasn’t all, was it,” she added, almost defensively.
“I had to keep Ritter informed of our location for our own safety. He kept Task Force away from us! We might not have escaped the junkyard if he hadn’t blocked the alarm that went out.”
“That wasn’t all he was doing. He wanted to know where we were so he could lead me right to the Resistance. So you could!”
“Better that than die!” he insisted.
She bit down on her lip and realized that she had no idea what Tom really thought of her. He could still be afraid of her for all she knew. Every time he looked at her, he might still see that bloody, pale Bandit that had been brought to his operating table. There were a few times that she thought she saw something else in the way he looked at her. After they had danced across his lab the night before she left BLES, or at the pool, when he had stood close to her and given her the cylinder key…
Suddenly she gulped down hard and asked, “Why did you give me that unrestricted pass?”
“I’m sorry?”
She cocked her head and winced in pain, just as she had seen him do countless times. “The unrestricted pass,” she repeated, slower this time. “The one that allowed me to see Ben; the one thing that led to all of this. Did Ritter tell you to give it to me?”
“What? No!” he exclaimed, shaking his head in anger. “I gave you that pass on my own. I risked my neck to do it.”
“Why?”
He charged forward until he was just a foot away. “I did it for you! Because you were my friend. Because I wanted you to be happy!”
Her breath caught in her throat, and she looked down to the floor. She couldn’t believe she had thrown into question their entire friendship. He didn’t deserve that after everything he had risked for her. And with that thought came the realization that it wasn’t Tom she was angry at. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He had still given up everything to save her, regardless of the way he had to do it. She felt sick at having been so mean with him, at having believed the worst of him.
“That picture back in your lab,” she said quickly, trying to draw attention away from herself. “It was taken inside of BLES, wasn’t it?”
He was quiet for a moment before asking, “How did you know that?”
“The shadows,” she admitted, letting her head droop a little to her shoulders. “They didn’t come from the outdoors.”
His hand reached out and held the side of her arm. He angled his head so he could better see her face. “You said you befriended me because of what you saw in that picture,” he reminded her.
“I also said I wanted to be your friend just because I did.”
She forced herself to look at him; see the messy brown hair, the blue green eyes and the unassuming face of the brilliant young man, a young man that seemed to have grown so much older since the last time she had seen him. Guilt weighed down on her for having snapped at him before.
&n
bsp; “Why bring that up now?” he asked, the hope rising in his voice.
He searched her face and made her feel warm under his gaze. She turned and walked towards the window, seeking the coolness that slipped through the glass. “To make myself feel guilty, I guess. If that picture was taken inside of BLES, that meant it had to be your home for a long time.”
He looked down to where her hands were gripped at the edges of the window seal. Slowly he slid his palm over the back of her left hand. His fingers curled around it so that she had to loosen her grip on the ledge. Her heart pounded in her chest as he did this. She wondered what he was doing, and if he could sense how nervous it made her. She wanted to tell him that she forgave him, that he really had nothing to apologize for, yet the only encouragement she could give him was in not drawing away.
“Growing up in BLES,” he said, speaking the words softly, “…was not what you would call having a happy childhood. My mom was in bed most of the time, which meant that I was sitting by her side all day. I read and studied and tried to learn everything that the scientists coming in to check up on her knew. Then when I evolved, I stayed because it was the only life I knew. I had been around scientists nearly my whole life, so a scientist was all I knew how to be.”
“What happened to your mom?” she asked. Her eyes stung. She tried to blink away the moisture that built up inside them.
“She died,” he admitted in a strained whisper. “Shortly after I evolved. They called it Potentian Separation Disorder. Apparently being separated from me cost her more energy than when we were connected. Physically, it didn’t make any sense. Everyone said she should have gotten stronger after I evolved and she no longer had to support me. But…”
He trailed off. His thumb rubbed the back of her hand in absent strokes. She gripped the tips of his fingers to give him comfort.
“The, uh, the picture,” he said, sniffing, “was taken the day I was going to evolve. My mom wanted to capture what we looked like while we were still connected, but I had been so excited. When they took it, I had been pointing to a man that was supposed to drive us into the city to the Bank of Social Numbers. That picture meant so much to my mom, but I hadn’t even stopped for one second to pose for it.” He sniffed in sharply again and blew out a hot breath.