“Yvonne,” I said quietly.
“I’m sorry, Drew,” I heard Michael’s voice in my ear. “I’m sorry.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me along, and we ran in the direction of the hallway, nearly tripping over the fallen ceiling. This corridor was just as hot as the previous one, and even though we had all been perfected and our android bodies were stronger in so many ways, we were all beginning to cough on the smoke. I saw Cassandra up ahead waving us over, and I noticed a window large enough for someone to fit through. She climbed through just as we reached her, and we began to file out after her. Michael insisted on waiting for both of us to get out first, so I climbed through the tiny window, clinging to the side of the building before jumping the long gap to the ground. My ankles screamed on contact with the cement, but I gritted my teeth and hurried toward the road, looking back to make sure Jessica and Michael had come out safely. They hurried over to me and we staggered, coughing, out to the road to join the large group of androids huddled there. I scanned the crowd for the flawed that had come with us. Everyone but Yvonne. My heart stung at the realization. She was gone. Really gone. I looked back at the burning building – my enemy, the heart of so many of my fears, and yet, not too long ago, my home. I had spent my life there. Memories sprang through my mind—Yvonne and I as children running through the halls, playing hide and seek. Then later, wanting to do everything I could for the creators. And later still, realizing they were wrong, that everything in my life I had worked for, was so dangerously wrong. And here was the building I had spent my life in, burning to the ground in front of me.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and I turned, expecting it to be Michael, Jessica, or even one of the flawed, but was surprised to find that it wasn’t. I stepped away, the blonde woman’s hand falling from my arm. “Drew,” she said quietly as if she didn’t know what else to say.
“You’re a creator,” I stated coldly. At this point, it was an accusation that completely explained itself.
She winced slightly, but continued to meet my gaze. “Was a creator,” she insisted.
I shook my head. “I saw you. In the hallways. And why else would you be here if you weren’t still a creator?”
She paused momentarily, her mouth open as if to speak. “For you, Drew,” she said finally, her bright blue eyes staring straight into mine.
I stared at her for a long moment, trying to understand. “For me?” I echoed, about to go on and accuse her of all the things the creators had done. But just then I stopped, still watching her. She began to smile. A hesitant smile that took it’s time forming on her face. And suddenly everything seemed to fall into place in a matter of seconds. Images of the blonde-haired woman ripped through my mind; the day she found me at the hotel, when she dropped the key in my cell, when she darted away in the hallway only minutes earlier, the photo on Glen’s desk – only now did I realize how close they were standing, how Glen had his arm thrown casually over her shoulder. Now I knew why the woman’s eyes had always haunted me. Bright blue flecked with lighter shades of turquoise and emerald. My eyes. My mother’s eyes.
“You’re...” I began and she nodded. I stopped my mouth still open. For some reason, I couldn’t say the words. They seemed too strange, too foreign. Too good?
“I did stop being a creator,” the woman said. “For awhile. Glen,” she shook her head, “your father, forced me to stay away. He was so angry after I left. He said he’d hurt you if I ever came back,” she explained, answering the questions I hadn’t even asked yet. “But when I heard about androids rebelling from the Institution, I came looking for you, hoping you were one of them. And then, after I saw you that day at the hotel, I knew Glen would stop at nothing to get you back. You, above all the others, were his proudest accomplishment. I wanted to protect you in any way I could, so I convinced him I had been wrong and that I wanted to come back and help like I did before.” She shrugged. “And he believed me.”
I stared at her, lost for words. I couldn’t even register all the feelings coursing through me. It seemed so strange that only hours earlier I had been devastated that the family I had longed for my whole life had been Glen, a lying murderous creator. And now, my mother stood in front of me, showing me that my dreams weren’t completely gone.
I stood there, motionless, aware of Michael, Jessica, and the other flawed all watching us, but for some reason, no words left my lips.
“Drew,” my mother said slowly, a hesitant smile tugging at her lips. “Say something.”
I paused, before opening my mouth. “Thank you,” I said quietly. “For coming back.”
She smiled, relief evident on her features, stepping forward, and before I knew it, her arms were around me, pulling me into a hug. I stiffened at first, unable to help myself; after all, she had been a creator. But slowly, I let myself be pulled into her embrace, hugging her back, because for the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I stared down at the gravestone and the pile of red roses that adorned it. Seeing Yvonne’s name engraved upon the cold, gray stone seemed to make everything more real; permanent. She was really gone.
The Institution had burned to the ground, leaving no trace of anything that had been left inside – Yvonne included. But this headstone sat here, reminding us of who she had been.
I kept expecting to turn around and see her smiling at me, laughing at something I had done, or rolling her eyes in the way she always had. But this gravestone shoved reality into my face like a blinding light; I wouldn’t see Yvonne again for a long, long time.
A breeze blew by, rustling the roses and their leaves and carrying their sweet scent across the cemetery. I stared down at the flowers, so like Yvonne and her personality. Their dark and dangerous beauty accompanied by the brave and surviving thorns. I saw Yvonne in those dark, red roses, and that’s why they lay piled upon her grave site, representing the girl she had always been to me.
I stood there in the cold, completely alone in the cemetery as I stared at the frozen ground. I had already gone over every memory of Yvonne. I had thought about all the times we had betrayed one another and then I went back to when we had been so innocent, so small; loving each other because that’s what friends do. I wondered how our friendship could have morphed into something so twisted, and I hoped that those last few seconds of her life had brought us back to our childhood, to the days when we really would have sacrificed our lives for each other. I knelt next to the stone and rubbed one of the petals between my fingertips. “Goodbye, Yvonne,” I whispered. There were no tears in my eyes. Maybe I was all cried out. Maybe I was tired of being sad. Or maybe I had accepted this and was ready to move on. Maybe I was brave enough to let Yvonne go.
I stood up and slowly walked away from the grave, leaving Yvonne’s memory buried under the sunny, winter sky in the hopes that someday God would remember her.
Epilogue
It was as if the world had stopped spinning. Or resumed. Either analogy worked because everything had changed dramatically. All the Institutions had been destroyed in a matter of weeks, and people seemed to go on living in a daze. Day after day passed as we tried desperately to retrieve our lives and bring them back to a normal pace. Michael and Jessica reunited with their parents sometime during the chaos, finding them perfected, but now of sound minds. All of my other flawed friends tried to do the same and after a few weeks of scurrying and mayhem, most everyone had been reunited with the people they had loved.
I thought about my mother, how our lives had intertwined, and how I couldn’t imagine living without her. It had been so strange at first, figuring out how to act around my mother – someone you should be so comfortable with, and I was just slowly learning who she was. I thought about Glen, everything we had gone through, and my heart ached. I knew Glen was locked up in jail somewhere, but I didn’t want to go to him. At the moment, I never wanted to go to him. But I knew that someday I would. Someday I would ask him about my life; at the Institution, with Yvon
ne, becoming an android. I would talk to him about what he had done to me. I would ask him why he did it, and I would try to find a trace of something human, something lovable under his cold and controlling exterior. I would try to find the father I had longed for all my life.
* * * *
I stared out across the field of snow about a mile away from the flawed camp. In the fall it had been a barren wasteland of shrubs and tree trunks but now, with a blanket of snow covering every ugly flaw, the field was beautiful; perfect. I looked up at the sun, peeking out behind a heavy gray cloud, sending a ray of sunlight down to the frozen snow, and I wondered how God could create something so beautiful, so perfect, and how no one seemed to see it. I looked out across the sparkling snow, a forgotten smile on my lips. God had already created something perfect. Why had the creators striven to make it better?
I heard footsteps in the snow behind me, and I turned to see Michael heading my way. “There you are,” he said with a smile, coming to stand beside me.
I grinned back. “I just took a walk.” Michael watched me for a moment, and I couldn’t help but smile as he leaned down to kiss me.
A realization dawned on me. A realization that seemed to lift a huge weight off of my shoulders and make my smile widen. As Michael wrapped his arms around me I realized that I never needed to be what Glen had set me up to become. I never needed to be more than Drew because I knew that God would make up the difference. Michael loved me. My friends loved me. My mother loved me. And God loved me. The way that I was; no different, no better. I smiled as I wondered how I could have never grasped such a small and important concept. That I was okay. That just being Drew was good enough.
That I didn’t need to be perfect.
About the Author
Pauline C. Harris is now seventeen years old and has been writing since the age of eight. After self-publishing her first book at the age of fourteen, she moved on to write the Mechanical Trilogy. She loves reading science fiction and fantasy, and her main hobby, other than writing, is playing violin in various orchestras and quartets. Mechanical, Perfect, and Flawed are her first professionally published novels.
Twitter:
@PaulineCHarris
Website:
paulinecharris.wix.com/author
Blog:
paulinecharris.wordpress.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pauline-C-Harris/404821976275743?ref=hl
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