Intrepid

by J. D. Brewer

  My breath was shaky as it found its way in and out. This was how my life in Geronimo began. With everything else, this was not a story I thought to ask about.

  Ringo pulled the rest of it off like a bandaid. “When I escaped, I was nearly irreparable. Never Jump when your wounds go that deep, because there’s a solid chance you won’t survive it in one piece. Had it not been for Papa and Sheriff Garza, I would have died. My body wasn’t healing fast enough to stop all the bleeding…”

  I closed my eyes and thought of Iago and Liam. They’d Jumped with open wounds, but Liam healed quickly while Iago hadn’t. There was still a chance that Iago wouldn’t heal right, even though Ringo’d promised he was safe.

  “I intended to leave you with Papa to raise you on Geronimo. I was going to go back and take the consequences for my actions. I was going to say that I realized my mistake, but when I got back to where I thought I left you, you were already gone. I was gonna work my way back into the Shadow Boxers—regain their trust—so I could protect you from the inside. But then I realized that wouldn’t work. There were spies everywhere, and to leave you would put you into more danger than to stay with you. Papa and I decided that the only way to protect you was to keep access to you and knowledge of you limited. So we enlisted Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz, commandeered Santiago, and created a little world on Geronimo for you. It was the best decision I’ve ever made—to stay with you.”

  I felt the eye-roll begin, but I was able to catch it before it moved full circle. “But you didn’t stay with me. You left some cryptic letter and sent me off with two teenage boys. Boys, you hear me? They don’t know what they’re doing any more than I do, and you left them to explain everything. You should have been the one to tell me.”

  Ringo got up from the bench and shook his head. “We all have our parts to play, and that was not my role. There are things I had to do on Gaia, things that are just as important as you are. Your entire life, I’ve been moving pieces around the political chess board for you, and now that the Change has happened there are still equal amounts of people who support you as those who don’t.”

  I groaned. Again with the secrets. I realized I didn’t understand all the politics of things yet, but I didn’t accept the explanation he gave. It felt like a cop-out.

  “But perhaps you’re right,” he said. “It was a mistake to leave the most important part up to the boys, and I promise things are about to change. I never make the same mistake twice.” He leaned down to kiss my forehead before walking towards the door. “We’ll talk more tomorrow, okay? It’s been a long day, and it might do you good to get some rest. You look like crap.”

  “Don’t sugarcoat it or anything.” I felt the smile form on my lips. It was such a Ringo thing to say, but I knew now not to mistake brutal honesty for true honesty. He was still keeping things from me. “Love you more than crawfish heads,” I added.

  He laughed the laugh I’d been craving—the one that was gargoyle infested in that guttural, rain-gutter sort of way. “Love you more than toe fungus.”

  There was comfort in the fact that love never changed, but even though I loved my faux-father, it didn’t mean I could trust him—nor did it mean I could stay with him.

  Ringo paused at the door and the smile fell off his face. “The tracker is non-negotiable. You’ll have a new one by morning.”

  I watched him disappear through the door and stood up to head to my own room. He was right… the tracker was non-negotiable because I wouldn’t be there in the morning to negotiate the terms surrounding it.

  Liam

  ‘On Finding Answers’—The Manifesto

  Answers are an elusive lot. They are but fireflies off in the distance, flickering to remind you they exist, but disappearing before you get a proper look. You will not catch them by sitting still.

  No.

  You must find a jar with a proper lid, chase down each fidgeting bulb, and clamp the lid down tight once you catch one. Only then can you examine it, study it, and pick it apart for meaning.

  But beware… a closed lid robs the jar of oxygen and extinguishes the light you’ve caught. In the darkness you hold in your hands, your once-bright victory is stolen, and your eyes will be directed back out into the horizon where it will witness the millions of answers still yet to catch.

  —S1,V1

  Chapter Forty

  I propped my head up with laced palms under my skull, and I watched the stars shoot along the sky. Here and there clouds made dark holes as they moved along with the wind, but not even counting the stars cleared my head like it usually did. I couldn’t stop thinking about Texi.

  Who did she meet in the 620s, and what did she know about me that I didn’t? My entire life, I thought I knew things about her that she was still in the dark about. Now, the tables were turned, and I didn’t know how to feel about it. Then there was the fact that Ringo was here. Something big must be going on for him to break protocol.

  There were entire constellations of confusions drawing haphazard pictures across my thoughts. The dots kept connecting so that I understood absolutely nothing. What was it she wanted to talk about when she got back? I should have let her say it, but after trying to kiss her, I was too terrified to stay in the galley with her. I couldn’t figure out what had come over me. Her eyes were swirling in blue-hued purples when my fingers tangled in her hair. I wanted to pull her into a kiss, and I almost did. My face was centimeters from hers, drinking in all the Energy that was raging in her eyes, but her voice came between us like a cement blockade.

  Kissing her could be dangerous.

  Dangerous.

  What a stupid word. Wasn’t danger relative? Wasn’t everything?

  When she knelt down to examine my gashes, and I recognized every curl that fell out of her ponytail and every wrinkle that grazed the skin around her eyes. I knew everything about her, except for where she’d gone. Her return should have been infuriating, and the fact that she left should have sent me into a rage. But she was back and safe, and that fact did things to my lungs that it shouldn’t have. The way they constricted forced a sob from my throat, and when I reached out to touch her, I was more confused than ever.

  I didn’t tell Ringo everything. For the first time, I kept intel to myself, and I didn’t know why. I should have told him that she wasn’t the dangerous one… I was. I didn’t tell him about the otter-shark or the mammoth-bears, and I didn’t tell him that I suspected I wasn’t a normal, average Saltador. Did he even know there was something different about me? He had to know!

  I asked Texi what I was, but I had a feeling she didn’t completely know herself. I couldn’t Splice. I knew that within my gut. But I could do something bigger and more chaotic.

  I stared at the dark spots of clouds in the sky, unable to see the bigger pictures within the stars. The horizon was as cloudy as my objectivity. I knew what objectivity should look like in this situation, but I couldn’t bring myself to see things as they should be seen. All my life, I’d catalogued hers under the heading “Subject.” I wrote down every detail I noticed as scientific data points, and I analyzed evidence that made me believe her mutation would catch.

  With distance, I was able to take everything into consideration. With her here, she was all I could see. She was on the other side of this universal mirror that made me question everything I used to think was true. How was I supposed to know that in examining her life, I was examining mine, and how could I have understood that in anticipating her survival, I was anticipating my own?

  When Nobu helped me through the Change on the beach, his face held so many shades of pity, determination, hope and sadness when he let slip he didn’t think I’d survive it. It all made sense now, because Texi’s chances of survival were my own. Growing up, Nobu was never optimistic about Texi’s chances. He always landed on the she’s-gonna-die end of the spectrum. I guess that meant he always believed, deep down, I’d be dead too.

  Acknowledging this rewrote my history for me, and all the secrets Nobu an
d Corbin hid walked into the spotlight. I kept returning to the past because these memories were all I’d always known for sure, but even they were proof that I didn’t understand my own history at all. My memories were the only thing I valued, and I couldn’t even trust them. Despite this, I wanted to retrace my steps and figure out where I lost my understanding. Maybe looking through these new lenses would give me a better answer. Maybe there was a moment, somewhere, that would explain it all if I could just find it.

  But I kept thinking about Texi in new ways. I wondered where she was on the ship and what she was thinking about. I wanted to know what made her and what she was capable of. To know every embarrassing and mundane detail of her existence was infuriating because these details didn’t make the person. For everything I knew about her, I was beginning to realize there were a million things I didn’t.

  What would happen if we gave in and followed our instincts and set out on our own? I had the feeling we could do amazing things out there, and there was possibility in that. The night we learned to take a Culture Pulse, she’d wanted to save the Vein as much as I did. What could have been so wrong about something that felt so right to do?

  I closed my eyes to the stars and could still see their remnants against my lids. I could still feel her hair pressed into my fingertips. I could still hear every torturous movement of breath as I gripped her curls in my hands. I counted the stars that stained the back of my eyelids, and this counting slowed my breathing. Sleep finally came in a dreamless abyss, but when I woke, it was because a soft hand landed on my mouth.

  I tried to push myself up, but the hand held me down. “Shhhh,” Texi whispered.

  My eyes adjusted so I could make out the shape of her face shrouded by her unruly hair. She wasn’t dressed for bed. In fact, she had on a leather jacket over her white tee-shirt, and I immediately realized she wasn’t planning on staying on the boat.

  “Texi?”

  “We don’t have much time.” She placed her hand on my arm and we entered the Nothing only to return to my room—or I guess it was her room now. Reentering the Nothing with her was still shocking. I could see her and feel her in every incendiary way possible, and when we returned to reality, I fell a small distance and landed on the floor since there wasn’t a lounge chair to catch my prostrate body. She got up from where she knelt and sat on the bed, and I noticed that it was made. Every corner of sheet was tucked in and the comforter only had wrinkles where she sat. She never made the bed as if she was going out of her way to annoy me by destroying my room. I propped myself up on my elbows, and I felt the familiar furrow of worry as she pointed to a pile of clothing sitting on one of the chairs.

  “I’m leaving in two minutes. You’ll either come or you won’t,” she said.

  “What?” I jumped up and stood over her. Her face took on a new brightness, like a clarity that went beyond clear. The Knowing radiated off of her, and her eyes were almost as translucent as cucumber guts. I felt my eyes begin to tingle, like raindrops were being poured directly on the irises. I’d been examining my own eyes in the mirror as much as I’d been examining hers this past week, and the cracks in the marbled hues always seemed to be shifting. It was getting to the point that I could actually feel mini earthquakes within the colors. These same cracks were shifting in her eyes, and the cucumber guts were filling with lavender so I could see entire universes forming within them.

  “Liam, we could do so much more if we weren’t tied down to all this fear. These fears are not ours to feel. They are theirs… You know it.”

  “What am I?” I asked again, because I just couldn’t figure it out.

  She laughed. “You really haven’t known this entire time, have you?”

  I shook my head no, and leaned into the sound of her voice. There was something right about the way her words laid the foundations for a different possibility. There was truth within her hope, and I wanted the same clarity she was feeling, but I was still too confused.

  “Let go of those doubts I see forming in your head. Feel the shifting in your eyes and search into the Knowing. You Know exactly what you are and exactly what you can do, just as much as you Know we were meant to do more than this. You Know that we are in danger if we stay. You Know these things just like I Know what’s in Iago’s syringe. Just like I Know that it’ll only take one big mistake before he has to kill you or me. I cannot stick around for someone else to have that type of control over me.”

  The swirling in my eyes grew into a torrent of movement, and I closed them so I could rub my lids.

  “Come with me. Please?” she asked.

  “I can’t.” I opened my eyes to the answer. Could we really consider leaving? It’d been a little less than a week since she’d found out what she was, and there was still so much she needed to learn about the Multiverse and Gaian protocols. To leave now could have irreparable consequences.

  “You can. You’re just scared, and it’s clouding your judgment.”

  “What do you know about judgment?” I asked, because clearly hers wasn’t clear at the moment.

  She stood up and held my face so I could look at her and only her. The eyes that bled with purples pulled me into them, and I could see what she saw. I reached up and tangled my fingers in her hair again, holding tightly to the curls as if they could anchor me to where she was and where she wasn’t. Creation was so terribly different from the Nothing. Both held equal parts chaos and equal parts peace, but one held possibility while the other held destiny. We were destined to return to the Nothing when it was our time, but with Creation, that day did not have to be soon.

  “I can Move,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” Texi said. “And we need to go. If we leave, we can make things happen. If we stay, we are bound to do something they dislike. They could kill us over one, tiny mistake.”

  I hated how right she made her logic sound. If I believed as she did, the word “subject” had to be thrown out of my vocabulary. If I clung to it, it meant that I fell under the same nomenclature as Texi. We didn’t deserve to be lab rats. We were human, and more than that, we were humanity’s last hope.

  The answer fell into place and adjusted so it became my new truth. I looked at the crackled-bleeding colors pulling out of her eyes so lavenders and violets were the only colors left. I felt the surge and shift of the world around us, and dug into the Energy swishing about in the ocean. I felt my consciousness land on every animal and plant and tide, and I pulled from it gently. I didn’t yank, like I had with the mammoth-bears. I didn’t consume like I did with the otter-shark. I just borrowed it and channeled it, so that when Texi activated the Splice, I felt the surge of Creation.

  We exploded out on the other side of it and collapsed on the floor in a fit of laughter. I grasped my wrist between my fingers and felt the tha-tha-thump of a new universe crawling with potential. The Primitive Energy was blooming into something new, and who knew where it’d end up?

  Chapter Forty-One

  I looked out to the horizon where the sun was due to appear at any moment. There was no time to waste, and I got up to pull on the clothes Texi’d laid out for me. She sat on the bed with her eyes closed, trying to give me some privacy so I could change. I noticed that she was biting her lip as the miles of zipper crept up threaded metal and the button of my jeans treaded through the fabric. Something about her reaction made me blush, but it also made me want her to open her eyes. It was strange, the way the word “bold” began to hold new meanings for me. It was like I had been scared my entire life without realizing it, and now that I recognized how timidly I’d been living, I wanted to do everything with an edge of brilliance. I wanted to drink in every adventure and live out every possibility.

  Texi and I were going to do great things out there. I just Knew it.

  Just as my lips stretched out into a broad smile, I heard another body on the quiet, replicated Geeta. Ringo must have felt that we Spliced the universe and followed us here.

  “We have to go,” Texi whispered as
she opened her eyes. She reached over to my journal, and I smiled. It, too, had been replicated. There were now double accounts of Texi’s life, documented and secure on a universe no one would ever think to visit. They’d drift off into nothing, and no one would ever miss them.

  Texi grabbed a pen and wrote: Subject(s) have discovered a way to search for the Path. Subject(s) herby promise to do no intentional harm and only seek to help humanity. One subject loves you more than moldy bread. She let the book lay open like a splayed carcass and set the pen on top of it to hold the correct page down.

  Her lips quivered, and I let pity in this time. Screw objectivity. “You okay?” I asked, and she nodded.

  She placed her hands on my forearm, and the shocking trickle melded our skins together. “You ready?” Texi asked.

  “Our bracelets aren’t activated?”

  “We don’t need them to be,” she replied. When she said it, I knew it to be true. Our eyes held matching swirls that were similar in shape but different in color. “Similar, but not the same,” she whispered as she noticed the same thing in my eyes, but I didn’t understand what that phrase meant to her.