Freefly

by Michele Tallarita

  We lurch downwards, and I scream. Sammie clutches at her temples. I put my hand on her shoulder, as if this can steady her.

  “You alright?”

  “Double-fly.”

  I breathe heavily, remembering the night on the beach, when Sammie spent hours unconscious and in pain. Even worse than having to relive that experience, what if we plummet? We’ll drop a hundred feet into a vat of molten metal.

  “You really need to hold it together,” I say.

  “Trying.”

  I fly up to the grating again and clutch the bars, pressing against them with all my might. The grating arches outward ever so slightly, but remains in place. I look down at the dark tunnel. It stretches straight and empty for as far as I can see.

  “Wait up here,” I say. “Please don’t let us fall.”

  I flip around and fly back down the vent, the smell of metal growing stronger with each foot I descend. When I’ve covered a good distance, I stop and hang suspended, upside-down. Then I shoot back up the vent with all the speed I can muster, drawing on the cool breeze at the back of my neck for power. I whip past Sammie and smash into the grating with my feet. It pops free and flops out of the way.

  “Yes!” I cry.

  The cool breeze completely evaporates.

  In a miracle moment half fueled by adrenaline and half by terror, I manage to grab Sammie’s hand and the edge of the vent at the same time. We hang there, holding on by the flimsy grasp of my fingers.

  “Sammie!” I cry. Her eyes are half-open, her breathing labored, and her free hand paws at her forehead. Realizing I’m going to have to do this myself, I squeeze my eyes shut and pull upwards with everything I have. We rise slowly, inch by inch, but then drop again, my fingers nearly slipping from the ledge.

  “Sammie!”

  The muscles in my arms feel strung out and molten, as if they themselves are turning to liquid metal. Why did I never lift weights? Why did I have to devote my entire life to the singular task of studying? The myopic facts of my life are going to get us killed.

  Sammie’s eyes shoot open, then bulge.

  “Double-fly, now!” I scream.

  The cool breeze floods back in. I groan as all of the weight is lifted from my arm. Sammie rises to my side, and we float in place, our breathing thunderous.

  “Sorry,” she says, the mask of ferocity breaking to reveal...something else. Fear? Something darker than that, something sad and final.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nods, and the ferocity returns. The cool breeze balloons at the back of my neck and we shoot out of the vent at hyperspeed, rising hundreds of feet into the air so quickly that the men flooding onto the roof don’t even have time to lift their stun-guns.

  CHAPTER 11

  Damien

  I can’t help but feel immense joy as Sammie and I whip across the sky, a sea of dense trees rolling beneath us. We did it: we escaped the white place. This means...well, I’m not really sure what it means. The scientists will continue to hunt us, so we will still have to hide—but this is better. Much better.

  Sammie looks less relieved. Her face still contains the same ferocity as in the white place, but is breaking more often to reveal that strange expression I noted in the vent: the look of sad finality, her lips pressing together while her eyes stare off into the distance. Is she thinking about Jiminy? I glide closer to her and touch her wrist.

  “He was a good guy,” I say. “I could tell, just from talking to him.”

  Sammie says nothing, only lifting the corners of her mouth ever so slightly, like the ghost of a smile. After several seconds pass, she says, with a hint of anger, “He shouldn’t have died.”

  I nod.

  “You’re not getting it. Too many people have given up their lives for me.”

  I process this new information: Jiminy gave up his life for Sammie. What happened? Was he defending her? Though I have never met him, I am grateful to him. “It was his decision to make, not yours—”

  “Well, I’m sick of people deciding that. He should be alive right now. You should be...getting into GLOBE and going on to be a famous scientist.”

  I exhale in frustration. Sammie will still not accept that I have chosen her over that path, even if this new path has been forced upon me. My only regret is that I never had the chance to become someone great, someone worthy, though even that was worth giving up. “I love you more than becoming someone great.”

  Sammie stops short, and I whoosh past her. When I turn back around, she is glaring at me, her hands on her hips. “Get over here.”

  I float toward her, glancing around, uncertain of what is going on. She grasps my shoulders and stares into my eyes. Her own are fiery and blue.

  “You’re...already...great,” she says, pronouncing the words so slowly and deliberately it’s like she is carving them from stone.

  My gaze breaks from hers.

  “Look at me!” she says.

  I snap my eyes up.

  “It was your idea to try and use the bus station to escape from Thorne. It was your idea to fly out of the skylight. You thought up holding yourself ransom so Thorne would let me go back to the Tower. You thought up that whole thing with the bobby pin. And you’re the one who got us out of the vent and kept us from dropping into boiling metal when my double-fly conked out. So quit saying you’re not great. Look at me, Damien! Quit thinking you’re anything less than brilliant and worth it. I love you exactly the way you are.”

  She says all of this in a hurry, the words quick and sharp, leaving me blinking and stunned. Before I know it I’m kissing her, twining my fingers in her hair, feeling a rush of energy in my stomach as we whoosh up several feet. Then it dawns on me that her words contained the same essence as her strange expression: finality. I pull away.

  “You’re still in trouble,” I say, breathing heavily.

  She says nothing.

  “What happened at the Tower?” I say again.

  She gazes at the trees blurring beneath us, then pulls her eyes up. “I told them I wasn’t coming back.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning...” She draws her hand to the back of her neck. “I don’t have much time left.”

  “What?”

  She stares at me, looking both scared and resolved.

  “Sammie, no. You’ve got to go back to the Tower!”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? You’re going to die!”

  “That’s kind of the whole idea.”

  This time, it’s me who grasps her shoulders. “Are you telling me you did this on purpose?”

  She shrugs slightly, the movement so casual it infuriates me. “It seemed like the only way,” she says.

  “The only way to what? Ruin my life?”

  “Get you your life back. Without me, no one chases you. No one holds you hostage and uses you as bait.”

  “I don’t want a life without you.”

  “I’m a killer.”

  I fling my hands off of her shoulders and turn away. When I speak again, I cannot keep the anger from my voice. “So that’s what this is about.”

  “I kill. I get people killed. I ruin people’s lives. I’m no better than the people back at the Tower, or the people at the white place.”

  “Do you think any of them would even consider your current plan?” I say. “The very fact that you want to get yourself blown up for me proves you’re not like that. Jiminy wouldn’t have died for someone like that. I wouldn’t have abandoned my microbiology textbook for someone like that.”

  She laughs, though her eyes fill with tears. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right. Didn’t you just call me brilliant?”

  She laughs again. Then her expression grows fearful. “It’s too late. I only have a half an hour left—”

  She clutches at her temples. We plummet.

  Sammie

  I know I shouldn’t be unconscious even as I am. Damien and I were high up, a good hundred feet of
f the ground. Falling would mean death for the both of us. Am I already dead? No. Pain spreads between my shoulder blades and pulses in one of my arms. Death would be painless. Wouldn’t it?

  I think of Damien: the hard line of his cheek, the way his black hair flops in front of his eyes, the studious furrow of his brow. He’s right: I’m not like Thorne, or the boss. For some reason, I can see this clearly now. Maybe it’s because I’m willing to sacrifice myself, like Damien said. Maybe it’s because I can feel my love for him tangibly, the way you can feel someone drape a blanket over you, and don’t think that that sort of love can coexist with the need to succeed at all costs.

  I want to see Damien again. One last time. I need to know he’s okay.

  I force my eyelids open. Sunlight shines through the tiny gaps in the ceiling of trees above us, striking my eyes and making me blink. The pain in my head is thunderous. I glance to my right. Damien is there, sprawled on his back. A long cut slashes across the side of his face, probably from our fall through the trees. The trees that likely saved our lives.

  My life, anyway. Is he alive? The idea that he might not be makes me panic.

  “Damien.” My voice is scratchy and low. “Damien.”

  He inhales sharply, lifting one hand to the cut on his face. I exhale. The device at the back of my neck begins to vibrate, like a cell phone receiving a call. Knowing that Damien is alive, knowing, once I’m gone, that the scientists will no longer chase him, I shut my eyes.

  Damien

  I wake up gasping, certain that I’ve died, summoned out of slumber by Sammie’s voice calling my name. A sharp pain sears my forehead. I reach up and touch it with my fingers, only to feel moisture. Have I actually survived the fall? I jerk upright, causing pain to cascade down my neck. Sammie is near me, but I must have been imagining her voice: her eyes are closed. Is she alive? I flip onto my hands and knees and crawl to her side, my entire body aching. She breathes shallowly, with many small cuts on her face, and one large one running down the length of her right arm. A strange noise, like a purr, vibrates in the air over and over. I listen carefully. Is it coming from Sammie? Confused, I lay one hand on her forearm. A vibration thrums beneath my fingers. I slide my fingers up her arm, and the vibration grows stronger. When I reach beneath her head and touch the back of her neck, it is positively a rumble.

  The device is going to go off.

  I leap to my feet. Instantly, a wave of nausea washes over me. I vomit metallic liquid onto the leaf-covered ground. Wiping my mouth, I look at my surroundings. Trees crowd around us, their branches thick with leaves. Somewhere nearby, a stream flows, quietly gurgling. We are alone.

  I stumble toward Sammie. In the slanting sunlight, her hair looks almost white, fanned out behind her head. Her skin is so pale and fragile-looking that it’s a wonder she did not emerge from the fall with more gashes. I crouch beside her and pick her up, slinging one hand beneath her knees and the other behind her shoulder blades. Breathing hard, I stand up straight and look around again, as if in the intervening seconds something helpful might have appeared. Nothing has.

  I take off at a jog. Sammie is limp in my arms, her body slumping against my chest. The vibrations of the device shiver through me. How long do I have? How will I stop the explosion? I take comfort in the fact that, if the device goes off right at this moment, it will probably take me with it.

  Up ahead, the trees seem to thin. Light pours into the woods, like a shrine. I launch forward with renewed energy. Maybe it’s a house, or a building.

  I emerge into the clearing to find a house under construction. It’s nearly complete, with one story and a porch, but white plastic covers the walls instead of siding, and the doors and windows yawn open, without glass. The area surrounding the house has a floor of tightly packed orange dirt. A red pickup truck sits outside, as well as a long blue trailer. As carefully as I can, I set Sammie down in the dirt and rush toward the trailer. My heart scampers within me. Any second, Sammie could die.

  I bash into the trailer’s door, finding it locked. I take a few steps back and bash into it again, and this time burst inside. A desk sits in the center of the room, surrounded by filing cabinets and a few exhausted-looking armchairs. For a moment, despair sings through me: there is nothing in here that can help me. Then I see it, latched onto a wall: a bright red AED—automatic external defibrillator—which is used to administer electric shocks to a person having a heart attack. My mind races with possibilities. I snatch the AED off the wall and rush back outside.

  Sammie lies where I left her. I collapse onto my knees and place the AED on the ground. Trying hard to be gentle in spite of my panic, I grasp her shoulder and flip her onto her stomach, causing her to groan. I push her hair off of the back of her neck. The device is barely noticeable, a small gray rectangle beneath her skin. I will need something to conduct electricity between it and the AED. Perhaps, if I do this right, the shock will kill the device.

  I clamber to my feet and sprint toward the nearly finished house. Sure enough, many nails and screws litter the dirt that surrounds it. I snatch a nail and rush back to Sammie. My stomach is already lurching as I drop to my knees: I am about to stick a nail into the neck of the person I love. The idea makes me cringe, but how else will I conduct electricity directly from the AED to the explosive? I polish the nail with the hem of my T-shirt, then hold it between my thumb and forefinger to examine it. It is roughly three inches long, with a sharp tip and a flat head. I am certain I read somewhere that nails are made of steel, and steel is made of mostly iron, which is a highly conductive metal. Silver would be better, but I have to make do with what I have.

  Clenching my jaw, I align the tip of the nail with the device in Sammie’s neck. The device is slightly off center, to the left of her spine, in the bit of fleshy tissue above her shoulder blade. I plunge the nail into her neck until the tip strikes the device. My hand is shaking as I let go of the nail, which sticks out of her skin, embedded. The edges of my vision darken. I bite on my lower lip, using the pain to draw myself back into focus.

  I reach for the AED and rip open its red exterior. Inside, two round, white pads sit atop a device that looks a little like an answering machine, with a small screen and two buttons. One of them displays a power sign. I punch it.

  “PLACE ONE PAD ONTO PATIENT’S CHEST,” reads the screen.

  I grab one of the pads and pull it away from the machine, to which it is connected by a spiraling black wire. A sheet of wax paper sticks to the pad, and I rip it off, revealing a layer of glue underneath it. Instead of placing the pad on Sammie’s chest, I set it on top of the nail head.

  “PLACE THE SECOND PAD ONTO THE PATIENT’S SIDE,” reads the screen.

  I remove the second pad and toss it to the ground. Finally, the AED reads, “PRESS SHOCK BUTTON.” I reach for the button, which contains a small lightning bolt that unnerves me. What if this goes wrong? What if the shock simply causes the device to detonate? I put my fingers on the button, feeling the cool plastic. If I do not try this, Sammie will die anyway.

  “Please stay alive.”

  I push. The AED lurches, and Sammie jolts. Then she is perfectly still, her hair covering part of her face. It is too quiet. Then I realize: the vibrations have stopped. I rip the nail from Sammie’s neck and place the tips of my fingers onto her skin. The device does not rumble. I’ve done it.

  “Sammie!” I say, my heart jumping. “I deactivated it!”

  There is no response from her. I place my hand under her shoulder and flip her onto her back, her hair falling away from her face. She is impossibly pale. The cuts on her face seem a blazing shade of red. Her eyelids don’t flutter, and her chest doesn’t move.

  “Sammie.”

  I place my hand over her chest. No heartbeat thumps beneath it. My breath whooshes from my lungs, as if I have been punched in the gut. There is no heartbeat.

  In the distance, there is a rumbling, like the crush of tires over a gravel road. A blue pickup drifts into the clearing
and stops. Four men in construction uniforms tumble out, first slowly, with the lethargy of late afternoon, then quickly, as they spot Sammie and me. They run toward us, their boots thudding against the dirt. The first of them to reach us, a man with a brown beard, hurls himself onto his knees beside me.

  “What happened?” he says, clutching at Sammie’s wrist.

  I explode to life and grab at the AED. “She doesn’t have a heartbeat!”

  The other three men skid to a stop around us. I clamber toward Sammie. The bearded man pushes me away, and I fall backwards into the dirt.

  “What are you doing?” I say.

  The bearded man takes the AED from me. “Damien, you need to step away and let me work.”

  My breath catches as he uses my name. How does he know me? Then I remember the newspaper with my face spanned across the front page. Sammie and I are famous. Infamous. “She needs help!”

  “I’m going to help her,” he says, holding my gaze. “But I need space.”

  Two of the workers grasp me by my arms and lift me to my feet, holding me still between them. The bearded man begins performing chest compressions on Sammie, counting every time he punches down. Her body quivers dreadfully. I strain against the men, but they tighten their grip on my arms. It’s like high school, with the Leslies holding me back. But this is good. They’re trying to help her.

  The man stops the chest compressions and grasps Sammie wrist. Sweat beads on his forehead. He shakes his head ever so slightly, and I am certain I see a hint of resignation in his eyes.

  “Sammie!” I shout.

  The man dips his head and breathes into Sammie’s lips, then continues to do chest compressions. But I am certain it is over. I deactivated the explosive, but the electric shock somehow killed her. I should have thought up a better plan. I should have...I don’t know, done something differently. But almost as if Sammie herself is whispering to me, I feel a wave of reassurance. I did everything I could. I tried the best option available to me, because if I didn’t, she would have died anyway.