The Untimely Deaths of Alex Wayfare

by M. G. Buehrlen

  It’s a long, windowless room, almost an exact replica of one of the medical labs at AIDA. When I step inside it feels like I’m back there, at Headquarters, a lifetime ago. Stark white walls, tile floor, a bank of computers on one side, three reclinable chairs in the center, like the ones you find at a dentist’s office. Bright lights, harsh and unnatural, overhead. Completely incongruous with the posh scene upstairs. This feels sterile, cold, and smells sharp, like stainless steel and rubbing alcohol.

  I don’t like it. It makes me remember the vile glint in Gesh’s eyes and the wicked grin on his lips as he whispered heinous things in my ear. As he ran his hand up my leg.

  I shiver and push the thought out of my mind. Gesh isn’t here. Only Micki, and Levi, who’s sitting at one of the computers. He swivels around in his chair and lifts an eyebrow at us. Just the sight of him makes me feel a bit calmer. His presence makes the room look less intimidating: this sleek, cool cat, lounging beneath surgical lamps instead of sunlight. His jeans are faded, his boots camel-colored, his button-down shirt perfectly slouched, his dark blond hair swept back. I swear, he could give up all the glamor of Sub hunting and start his own men’s fashion feed on Instagram. Add Micki to the mix and they’d be internet style icons overnight. One smoking hot couple.

  “Saddle up,” Micki tells Levi, clopping in her wedges across the tile floor and grabbing the seat next to him. “We’ve got a mission. Take the middle one, Four.” She nods at the dentist chairs.

  I climb in and anxiety creeps under my skin, like I’m about to get a filling. It’s reclined back almost all the way, and I close my eyes at the harshness of the lights. I hear Levi and Micki whispering as Micki explains the mission, and how we plan to leave in three days. Their voices, low and droning, lull me toward sleep. My mind wanders, trying to picture what China will be like in the 1700s, what I’ll be up against.

  What Gesh might do when I capture his flag.

  “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  My eyes fly open. Levi and his frown are standing over me. “Thanks,” I say.

  “I think what you’re doing is noble, but it’s dangerous.”

  “Thanks,” I say again, dryly this time. I reach around the chair for some kind of lever so I can sit up, but find nothing. So I lie there awkwardly under the lights and Levi’s frown.

  “It’s further back in time than you’ve gone before,” he says. “We wanted to work you up to that sort of distance. Three days isn’t enough to learn the culture or the customs. One wrong word, one wrong move, and you could make an impact.”

  “I got it, Levi.” I finally find the lever and pull it. The chair swings up, smacking against my back. If Levi were anyone else, he would’ve laughed. But laughing isn’t in his DNA. He just stares at me like I’m a curiosity.

  “As far as safety goes,” Micki says, “it’s a relatively harmless mission. You’ll be starting out in Beijing, a homeless orphan living on the street. No one to miss you or report you missing when you go looking for the cure. There are convoys leaving daily filled with poor souls like yourself, heading out to remote villages, seeking healers. Peasants mainly, old and feeble. You shouldn’t have to talk to any of them. The route is through a particularly gentle part of the country. Beautiful, too. The journey takes a few days, the convoys stop along the way, and you’ll have to scrounge up your own shelter and food. Other than that, it’s cake.”

  Levi folds his arms across his chest. “Except that you’ll need money to pay the convoy and the healer. And if you’re a homeless orphan, I’m guessing you won’t have much handy.”

  Micki shrugs. “So she steals something to barter first. Easy enough.” She grins at me, her sly, tiger smile. “And if you happen to steal anything else to bury along with the cure? A vase, perhaps? That would be the icing on the cake.”

  So that’s why she’s so eager to help me. The treasure. More money in the pot for her Sub-Hunting Fund. But I don’t say a word. We’ll need as much money as we can get to create the drug, run the clinical trials, and pass it out to whoever needs it.

  “It’ll be easy,” Micki insists. “I’ll be right there with you, guiding you the whole way.”

  “What do you mean you’ll be with me?”

  Her red lips spread wide. “We’re doing things differently this time. Levi?”

  Levi wheels a monitor over to my chair and unwinds a series of wires. “We’ve been working on a few things, like the ability to accompany you.”

  “Accompany me where? On my mission?” I don’t like the thought. I want—need—time alone, to regroup, to see Blue. With them there with me, I won’t be able to relax. “I thought you guys were Subs. You can’t descend, right?”

  “We won’t be descending,” Micki says, “just ascending to Limbo. We can communicate with you from there, be your eyes and ears while you work, like Porter.”

  Porter’s been a voice in my head since the first time I descended. He was there the first time I met Blue in 1927 Chicago and didn’t want to leave the past behind. Porter shoved his voice into my head—it felt like frozen needles—and pushed my will out, trying to replace it with his own, but I managed to push back. I broke his connection with me. It ended up being such a silly, stupid, selfish thing to do. I altered history and had to go back and reset it, erasing my impact. Erasing my first date with Blue. My first kiss.

  Now I know better. Now I know my connection to Base Life, to Porter, is a lifeline, keeping me from making an impact on history. That connection means the difference between ruining the entire mission and coming home a hero. One wrong move and I could miss my window for a touchdown. I could slip past Limbo and land right back in Base Life; I could age a few seconds and be unable to go back to the same time to do a touchdown, unable to erase the damage I’ve done.

  Lives would be lost. History altered.

  The world as we know it would end.

  And I’ve already messed it up enough for one lifetime, let alone fifty-seven.

  So I give Micki a single nod and say, “What’s the process?”

  “Remember the microchip in the Descender’s brain?”

  Oh god. They’re going to implant something in my head. I press back in my seat, eyes wide, and she laughs.

  “Don’t get any morbid ideas. Remember when I said the chip manipulates the brain’s natural vibrations? Makes it vibrate at a different frequency?”

  I nod, white knuckles gripping the chair’s armrests.

  “All we’re going to do is link your frequency with mine and Levi’s. We’re going to slow our brains down into the theta realm so an OBE can occur.”

  “An OBE?”

  Micki tightens her ponytail. “An out-of-body experience. You have them all the time when you ascend, but Levi and I never do. If we sync our frequencies with yours, altering our state of consciousness, you should be able to pull us with you. This way we’re all in Limbo and we can all be on the mission with you in real time. We used to use this technique back in the day. Gesh called it ‘tethering.’”

  One by one, Levi sticks wires to my temples, my forehead, the back of my neck, brushing my hair away. His fingertips graze my skin, warm and soft. The screen Levi wheeled over beeps and blips, displaying a green jagged line like Audrey’s heart rate monitor at the hospital.

  “We’re doing this right now?”

  “Just doing a little test run.”

  It’s quiet for a while as Levi finishes sticking wires across my chest and down my arms. Micki clicks away at her mouse. The sound echoes across the room.

  “You tried to tell me, didn’t you?” I say to Levi, my voice low.

  He stops messing with the wires and gives me a questioning look.

  “In the kitchen,” I say, “when we talked at the safe house. You told me I could stop traveling, that I could live out my life how I wanted. That you guys would pick up later when I was reborn, and you’d train me in my next life. I didn’t understand why you’d give me that option. Now I do. You knew I’d be reincarnated
by the end of the year. You’d have a new weapon to sharpen and use for this war within a few months.”

  A cloud passes over his face. “It was never my intention to keep this from you. I wanted Porter to tell you. You just learned about your gift, and now you find out it’s going to kill you. It’s not fair to you.”

  I sniff and shake my head. Doesn’t he know? Fair stopped applying to me long ago. The moment Gesh and Porter created me. The moment Audrey got cancer.

  Levi brushes another strand of hair from my forehead and resticks a wire that came loose. “I meant what I said. You’re not alone in this.”

  He’s wrong again. Even with them here, on my team, even with them in Limbo, crowding into my head, I’m still completely alone. Even with my family sitting next to me, their arms around my shoulders. Even tangled up in Blue’s soul in Limbo, even tangled up with him in the past. None of it matters. Nothing is as it seems anymore. I’m alone wherever I go, whichever life I’m walking in.

  The only companion I have now is the certainty of my untimely death.

  That means I can’t be stupid anymore. I can’t walk blindly. I must open my eyes, chin lifted, fists raised, ready to fight for Audrey’s chance. Because it’s the only thing I have left that defines me. It’s the only thing that runs through my veins and sustains my breath for another day.

  The hope of life flowing through this doomed and damned vessel.

  Chapter 14

  The Test Run

  “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Micki trades places with Levi, gliding her computer chair over to the screen monitoring me. The thin green line jumping across it is jagged and uneven, like the results of a lie detector test. Levi sits at the bank of computers, their screens running scrolling lists of data fed by the monitor.

  “See that?” Micki says about the green line. “That means your brain’s working. Congrats.” She flips a few switches on the machine until there are three different-colored lines, one red, one green, one blue. “See this red one here? That’s your excitement level. If you think of something exciting, it’ll rise on the screen. This blue one tells me how bored you are.”

  The blue line is higher than the red. “Does that mean I’m bored?”

  “Yes. And I’m extremely offended.”

  “But I’m not bored. I’m freaked out. Thoroughly.”

  “This is you freaked out?” she says, looking me up and down. “Good grief, Four. What do you look like when you’re relaxed? Like a stroke victim?”

  I give her the same look I’ve been giving her since the day I met her. She meets it with her usual tiger grin.

  “The blue line isn’t very high,” she says. “It’s just higher than the red, which means you’re holding back, restraining yourself. If you think of something exciting, that red line will jump. Close your eyes and show me what ya got.”

  I close my eyes and lean my head back, settling into the chair. My mind drifts back to Blue, back to Chicago and our first date. There are so many things I wish I would’ve done differently that night. When we were at Peg Leg, in the back room alone, sitting at the piano with the hazy orange lights filtering in through the grimy windows. I wish I had climbed into his lap, taken his face in my hands, and kissed him good and decent. I wish it had been passionate, his mouth on my neck, his hands on my back, his fingers unzipping the back of my dress…

  “Damn.” Micki says. “Skyrocket.”

  My eyes open. The red line skims the very top of the screen.

  “Mind telling me what you were thinking about? Must’ve been delicious.”

  I shake my head, feeling my cheeks burn.

  Micki leans forward and whispers, “Ohhhh, was it a memory about Levi?”

  I didn’t think Levi was paying attention to us, but when Micki says that, he glances over his shoulder. One quick glance, almost like sleight of hand, but I noticed. And I wonder if he noticed my red cheeks.

  “What?” I say, feeling my face turn an even brighter shade of red. “Of course not.”

  Why would Micki bring up the past—the fact that Levi and I used to be together—when he’s sitting three feet away? To embarrass me? To hurt him? Even though I’m not Ivy, not anymore, I still look like her, and it feels cruel to remind him.

  Micki shrugs. “Meh. It was probably something nerdy like getting a new motherboard on Christmas morning. Or finding the right size screw in your box of random screws. You know, Things That Get Alex Hot.”

  I’m thankful for the subject change even if she is poking fun at me. “Yeah. Motherboards and boxes of screws. You got me pegged.”

  “Oh, now we’re talking.” Micki leans toward the monitor and taps a long red nail on the screen. “See that blip there?”

  Along the green line, which has been scrolling lazily at the bottom of the screen, there’s suddenly a huge spike that measures off the scale.

  “What is it?”

  “Your trademark. Your tell. That’s how I know you’re a Descender. That you have access to Limbo.”

  “You can tell that from my brainwaves?”

  “Oh, yeah. Gesh discovered it ages ago. That’s how he recruits his new Descenders. He has all his AIDA employees scanned with an EEG. It’s procedure when you start working for the company. He finds those who have a strong connection to Limbo and pulls them into the fold. The stronger your connection to Limbo, the higher the spike in the frequency. Yours is off the chart. Pretty cool, huh?”

  It’s weird seeing this side of Micki again, resembling the feel-good scientist chaperone I thought she was in Chicago. Getting geeked about brainwaves. Especially after the crack about Levi.

  Levi pushes his chair out and heads for the stairs. “Be back in a few.”

  Micki and I watch him go, me wondering if I made him feel uncomfortable, Micki’s narrowed eyes diagnosing his motives, his actions.

  When we hear the series of doors close and lock, she looks at me. “Do you have any memories of being with him? Any at all?”

  An image of playing Polygon with Levi when we were kids flashes before me. Another image—of Levi watching Gesh torture me—flashes too. Those are the recollections linked to my Polygon stone. The memories that trigger my déjà vu. But I don’t want to share those with Micki. They’re private.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “He has tattoos. All over. Each one symbolizing his time with you. Did you know that?”

  I shake my head and look everywhere, anywhere but at Micki. I don’t want to think about Levi’s tattoos, what they represent, or where they might be located. I’d rather think about the wattage of the overhead fluorescent lights or the speed of the processors powering the CPUs.

  “You do know you used to sleep together, though, right? That you lived together at AIDA? That fine specimen of a man was your personal boy toy. You had him wrapped around your finger and dipped in chocolate. He did anything you asked. And I mean anything.”

  “Um,” I say, squirming in my chair. “Too much info.”

  I’m so not in the mood to hear about my past self’s sex life. Plus, it feels disrespectful to Levi. Not to mention that it makes me feel really freaking weird. And really freaking nauseous.

  “Aw, did I burn your New Life virgin ears?” Micki pouts, a sarcastic puppy frown.

  “I don’t think we should talk about him like this.”

  “Suit yourself.” She rolls her chair back over to the computers, typing and clicking. A huge laser printer in the corner whirs to life. “You’ll start remembering things,” she says after a while, her back to me. “The longer you live, the more you’ll start to remember. At least, that’s how it was for Ivy. She could remember all sorts of things about her past lives by the time she was your age. They were fragments, and I had to help her connect which ones matched which lives. I assume it’ll happen to you, too.” She swivels around to face me. “Little things at first. Sunlight. Melodies. Smells. They’ll awaken something inside you. An image will flash. Then you’ll remember deeper things.
Like how you felt when he touched you. Kissed you.”

  I grip the armrests of the chair, trying to stay cool. “Would you stop?”

  “I thought you’d want to be prepared. Those memories, they’re going to feel real. And you may start having urges—”

  “Oh god, please don’t use that word. Why are adults always using that word?”

  “What word? Urges?”

  “Gah.” I plug my ears.

  She shrugs. “I’m just saying.”

  “Stop saying. And stop planting stuff in my head.”

  She raises a sharp eyebrow. “I’m planting stuff in your head now? How very sci-fi of me.”

  “Yes. You all are. Ideas and thoughts I wouldn’t have on my own. Things I don’t want to think about.”

  “Such as?”

  “That Blue’s a traitor, that he’s working for Gesh and trying to find out who I am in Base Life. Now I can’t stop thinking about that. What happens if I run into him in Beijing? I’m going to want to trust him, but now there’s this seed of doubt I can’t shake, and it’s going to affect how I am around him.”

  It already has. But I don’t want any of them to know I met with Blue in Limbo. That might be the only way I can see him from now on. I don’t want to risk losing it.

  “And now this,” I say, “making me think things about Levi I don’t want to think. Making me picture things. Gross things.”

  “I’m just giving you a heads up. If those memories resurface, things could get complicated. You could fall for him all over again, and that kind of age difference is sort of frowned upon these days.”

  “It’s not ‘sort of frowned upon.’ It’s illegal.”

  She raises her hands in surrender. “OK, OK. I’ll drop it. I’m only trying to help. I know you don’t like being kept in the dark.”

  I can’t figure out if she’s telling the truth or trying to trip me up somehow. She’s right, though. I hate when Porter keeps things from me. Isn’t that why I’m here right now? But the way she says it, like she enjoys watching me squirm like a mouse in an experiment, keeps me from trusting her completely. And now I’m going to feel weird around Blue and Levi, which might compromise my mission. Is that what she wants? For me to fail? What happens if I run into Blue in China? I wanted him to help me—be my partner, like he said he would. I wanted him to help save my sister. And I wanted to touch him, flesh on flesh this time, not like in Limbo. What am I going to do now, knowing Levi will be watching my every move?