by AJ Steiger
“Go on,” I say. “You looked at my eyes and you saw?”
“I saw—I dunno. A surprising lack of bullshit, I guess.”
“So romantic.”
He lets out another short laugh. “I mean, you had that wide-open face and those big eyes, and you were just so… nice. But not weak. You called me on my crap, and you were so sharp, and you had this crazy power over me. Not just because you were a Mindwalker. Because you were you. And it scares the hell out of me, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
“I wish you had told me all this before.”
His smile fades, his eyes moving in small flickers as they search my face. “I never have the right words when I need them. I don’t know how to make things sound… true. Even when they are. I tried to tell you that I wasn’t in love with Rhee, but I don’t think you believed me.”
Yes—I remember that now. He spent so much time talking with her, sitting with her. It hurt me. “Then why…”
“Because she and I were alike. She was the way I used to be, I mean, before I met you. She shut herself off from everyone. I wanted to help her. I thought—I thought that I could be like you. That I could save someone.”
“But you seemed…” My voice wavers a little, despite my efforts. “When you were fighting side by side, you seemed to click. And not just her. You seemed to fit in with the Blackcoats. It was like you didn’t need me anymore. And I should have been happy about that, maybe. But I wasn’t.”
He shrugs. “Sure, I agree with the Blackcoats about a lot of stuff. Maybe too much. At first, it was great to be around people who were just as pissed off about everything as I was, but after a while, it got old. If you let that kind of anger consume you, it burns you out fast.” He stares at the ceiling. “Rhee and I, we both need—needed—something to fight for. We both had these empty spaces inside. We couldn’t fill each other. I wanted to explain that to you, but I didn’t know how. And when I finally did, you were gone.”
My pulse drums in my throat. “What am I to you?” I whisper.
“After all this, do you really not know?”
“Tell me.”
For a long moment, he’s silent. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. “When you got your memories taken away, I knew it would’ve been better for you to leave you in IFEN headquarters, because as long as you didn’t know anything, you were safe. But I couldn’t. I’m that selfish. You’re the only reason I even bother to keep breathing, and if they take you away, none of it means anything. Without you, the whole world is bullshit.” He meets my gaze. “You’re everything.”
For a moment, I can’t breathe.
He brushes a few strands of hair from my face. “It’s not fair to you. I know that. You never asked to be the glue holding me together.” He lets out a small, choked laugh. “Who the hell would want that?”
“I do,” I whisper.
His breath catches. He rests his forehead against my shoulder. “Maybe that’s just because I infected you. I knew the first time we met that I was going to get you dirty. Make you sick, like me.”
“You aren’t sick.”
He smiles, eyes filled with pain. “You really believe that?”
I give a small shrug. “Maybe we’re all sick.”
“Not you.”
Abruptly, mind flashes back to the initiation, to Zebra’s hand moving under my skin, touching my heart. My secret. A knot fills my throat.
Zebra’s dead now, so I’ll never get the chance to ask what he saw, but maybe deep down, I’ve known all along and just didn’t want to deal with it. After everything that’s happened—after I essentially blew up the URA’s government—it doesn’t seem like quite as big a deal. But it still takes an effort to speak the words. “I always told myself that I wanted to become a Mindwalker so I could help people. So I could make the world a better place. But it’s not like that.” I can’t look him in the eye. Heat swarms my chest; there’s a squeezing pressure around my lungs.
“What do you mean?” A hint of unease creeps into his tone.
“You asked me once what my drug was, and I told you that it was this. Saving people.”
“Well, yeah, you do have kind of a Messiah complex going on. So?”
“It’s not that noble.” My voice is tiny, barely audible. “It’s not that I need to feel like a hero. It’s not even self-destructiveness. I’m an emotional vampire. I feed on trauma. I don’t help people. I use them. I eat their pain and darkness, because it’s what I need.”
There’s a long pause. I count my heartbeats in the silence.
“Damn,” he mutters. “And here I thought I was the regional champion of self-hatred.” In the dimness, I can’t make out his expression. “Who made you believe this about yourself?”
I turn my face away. “I’m not looking for reassurance. I’m telling you the truth. I’m not what you think, I’m not good—”
“If you’re not a good person, then I don’t know what the hell a good person is,” he says firmly. “You don’t have to be perfect. God knows I’m not.”
My heartbeat quickens. I close my eyes, feeling the warmth of his breath against my skin.
“If this is something that really bothers you, we can talk about it more, but I want you to know now—whatever secrets you’ve got, whatever you have inside you that you think is ugly or weird or whatever, I can handle it. Hell, it can’t possibly be worse than what you’ve already seen inside me.”
“Are you sure about that?” I whisper.
“Yeah. I’m sure. I want all of you, not just the parts that are easy to deal with. I mean, have you not noticed the fact that I’m completely, pathetically, head-over-heels in love with you?”
I try to swallow the tightness in my throat. Maybe he’s right. We have something good together. Perhaps this guilt is just the stubborn voice of my Mindwalker training trying to ruin it for me, to pick it apart and frame it as an unhealthy codependence. The way I feel about him does seem too intense to be normal, at times. But who decides where that line is drawn? Can’t we just let feelings be feelings, without analyzing where they come from or what they mean? Isn’t it enough, sometimes, just to love someone? Or am I still rationalizing?
Even if I am, I don’t care.
“I’ve missed you so much.” I gently, carefully touch his face, like he’s made of glass or crystal, something precious and delicate. “I hated feeling like we were always apart.”
Pain flickers through his eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” I touch his lips, silencing him.
And then his lips are pressed against mine.
The kiss is cautious at first, experimental; I move my lips against his, seeing what feels right. He tastes clean and warm, and slowly, I start to lose myself in kissing him, and a pleasant vertigo creeps over me. It’s like immersion—that warm tingle, starting in my scalp, then slowly spreading through my body. Every nerve is awake. When he pulls back for air, I’m flushed and straining to catch my breath, and my lips are swollen and pleasantly raw.
He looks into my eyes. His calloused thumb touches the corner of my mouth, then feathers across my lower lip. The touch sends an electric current through me. “I still don’t know how I got so lucky,” he whispers.
His thumb glides across my lower lip again. Does he have any idea how distracting that is? I lick my lower lip, tasting the faint hint of salt left behind by his skin. My eyes have adjusted to the dim light, and I can see one side of his face—the curve of his cheek, the short, pale fringe of his lashes, the shine of his eye. “You’re beautiful, you know.”
“That’s my line.”
I rest a hand against the side of his face. His palm slides over my shoulder, down my side, to my hip, as if he’s memorizing the shape of me. My hands slips into his hair. “Steven?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared.”
“Me too,” he whispers. “It’s okay, though. That’s how you know you’re alive.”
Then his lips meet mine, and for a while, we
lose ourselves in each other, exploring each other’s bodies in small, careful touches. I can feel the connection between us, like a cord running from his chest into mine, snugly encircling my heart. My fingers wander through the cornsilk forest of his hair, feeling the tiny, rippled, familiar scar on his scalp. His lips touch my neck. “I love you so much. You know that?”
After what I did—we did—I have no right to be happy. I know that, and I can feel the weight of the dead like cement in my bones. I’ll carry it for the rest of my life. But for now, there’s no IFEN, no URA, no Blackcoats. There’s only Steven, me, us. “I know,” I whisper.
39
We leave the Citadel at dawn and head south.
Stealing the trucks wasn’t difficult; with the city still reeling from the aftermath of Mindstormer and the police trying desperately to control a terrified populace, no one tried to stop us. We just hopped the fence around a factory and hotwired a half-dozen vehicles.
I sit in the cargo bed, squeezed in between Steven and Ian, our breaths echoing through the silence. We drive through the night. Once we reach the fence, Steven locates a tunnel, and we file through, emerging into the woods on the other side of the border. Dawn frosts the horizon with pale light, and a crow caws, three harsh, rusty notes. We stumble through the woods, lugging overstuffed supply packs.
Apparently, we’re in Upstate New York, just a day’s walk from Oceana. By late afternoon, we can see it in the distance—a collection of sharp-edged black skyscrapers, cutting clean silhouettes against the pink blaze of clouds. The city is surrounded by a towering cement wall. As we draw nearer, a gate swings open and a platoon of dusty trucks glides toward us. They’re filled with men and women in camouflage vests and pants, all carrying huge rifles.
I clutch Steven’s hand, my heartbeat drumming in my fingertips as the trucks rumble to a stop about thirty feet ahead. The Blackcoats—our Blackcoats—huddle together in a tight knot. A tall, bronze-skinned woman hops out of the truck in front and strides toward us. Her hair is short and bushy, her eyes a pale violet-gray. “Who is the leader?” she calls out in a clear voice.
To my surprise, Ian steps forward. “Sorry, our leaders are all dead. You’ll have to talk to me.”
She looks him up and down and smiles, showing a row of very white teeth and an unexpected dimple. Then she sticks out a hand. “I’m General Guthry of the North American Alliance. That’s what we’re calling ourselves now. Pleased to meet you.”
Ian hesitates briefly, then shakes her hand.
“You’ll be safe here,” she says. “Come on. You look like you could use some rest.”
We all pile into the trucks. Guthry barks an order, and we head back toward the city. I suppose I should feel something—relief? Nervousness? But I’m just too tired. I sit next to Steven, my head on his shoulder. He slips an arm around me, and I stare at the skyscrapers in the distance, watching them grow larger and closer. It’s hard to focus; my vision has gone fuzzy with fatigue. Faintly, I can hear Ian talking to Guthry in the front of the truck, filling her in on our situation.
“What do you think we’ll do once we get there?” I murmur.
“I don’t know. Just stay here until the war is over, maybe.” He looks around at the huddled, hollow-eyed Blackcoats. “I don’t think they’ll want to keep fighting.”
What will happen, I wonder, if their offer to let us stay is conditional upon our willingness to fight? We’ll deal with that problem when we get there, I suppose. “What about you?” I ask. “Do you want to keep fighting?”
For a minute, he doesn’t respond. He strokes my hair, his fingers warm and gentle. “I never want to touch a gun again,” he replies.
Maybe the words should surprise me, but they don’t, all things considered.
My eyelids drift shut. I doze, lulled by the rumble of the truck and by Steven’s heartbeat. I don’t know what will happen to us now, but then, no one ever knows what the future will bring.
We’re alive. We’re together. And there’s one thing I’m certain of—no matter what happens, I’m never going to leave his side again.
Epilogue
I open my eyes and stare at my bedroom. Sunlight filters in through the pink curtains, illuminating the familiar walls, the desk, the row of stuffed animals on the shelf.
It’s still strange, sometimes, to wake up in my old room in the house I once shared with Father. As if none of it ever happened. I’m fortunate that this place even survived the war; many parts of Aura had to be rebuilt. When I first returned, most of the appliances had been looted and the food in the pantry was gone, but aside from some gouges in the wall and a few scrawls of graffiti, the house itself was untouched. There are mornings when the war feels like a dream. But if I want proof that it was real, all I have to do is glance at my right hand.
Slowly, I clench and flex the artificial fingers. It responds exactly like the old one. The doctors told me that they could make it look like a real one, too—the most advanced prosthetics are indistinguishable from real limbs—but I chose a jet-black model with red stripes running along the fingers. I didn’t want to pretend.
For a few minutes, I watch the dust motes spiral in the sunlight. “Chloe,” I say.
She appears at the foot of my bed in a flurry of sparkles. “Good morning, Lain! What can I do for you?”
She’s not exactly the way she was before—occasionally, I’ll notice small differences in her responses and personality—but she’s pretty close. Since Dr. Swan destroyed the original, I had her programming reconstructed. “What time is it?”
“One thirty in the afternoon.”
I wince. I really should start setting an alarm. “Could you send a message to Steven’s phone? Tell him that I’ll meet him in the Underwater Café after his training.”
“Certainly.”
Slowly, I slide out of bed and get dressed.
It’s been three years since Steven and I fled to Oceana with the other Blackcoats, two years since the war ended. The tide turned quickly once Canada lent its support to the rebels. The Canadian government offered a fast track to citizenship for any refugee who joined the military, and their ranks swelled. IFEN—weakened and fragmented—was quickly overwhelmed, and a provisional government was formed by the North American Alliance. All that feels like such a long time ago, now. Another life, almost.
“Don’t forget your medication,” Chloe chirps.
I roll my eyes. “I never forget them.” I head into the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. The amber bottles stand in a row—the one on the left is for anxiety, the next one over is an antidepressant, the third is a mood stabilizer, and the fourth… honestly, I’ve forgotten what that one does. The fifth is vitamin D, because I don’t get enough sunlight these days. I open the bottles one by one and shake the appropriate dosages into my palm.
The nightmares and panic attacks began shortly after we returned to the URA. That dead spot deep inside my chest—the one that settled in after I pulled the lever and blew up IFEN—slowly grew into a vast void. A voice in my head kept whispering, What right do you have to be happy, after what you did? I knew that such thinking didn’t do any good, and I tried to fight it, to cling to the knowledge of everything we accomplished. But still, the darkness crept through me, poisoning my thoughts. I spent so many nights crying or lost in a numb haze of depression, until finally, Steven convinced me to seek treatment.
Psychopharmaceuticals aren’t as effective as Conditioning, but I’ve decided I’m never going back into a Conditioning unit as long as I live. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably be taking this cocktail of drugs for the rest of my life. Oh, well. There are worse things than swallowing a few pills every day.
“You should go outside today!” Chloe calls cheerfully from the bedroom. “You’ll be glad you did!”
I sigh. Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t programmed so many reminders and pep talks into her. “I’ll take a walk after breakfast.”
There’s a place I want to visit, anyway.
I eat a slice of cold leftover pizza, then shrug into my black leather coat—it’s the one Rhee gave me back in the Citadel, the one with the bullet hole—and leave the house. The day is bright and breezy, the sky a warm, innocent blue dotted with clouds. Birds sing in the trees. Sunny days annoy me; they feel sardonic, somehow, like the weather is mocking me. I want rain. Or at least some dark clouds.
I walk with my hands shoved into my pockets and my gaze downcast. My hair has grown out, and it hangs around my face in a loose, unkempt curtain, shielding me from the view of passers-by. My feet carry me to the mono station, and I take the train downtown.
The city of Aura is the same as ever, at least superficially. Oh, there’s some damage from the war, a few crumbled buildings, but the worst of it has been repaired, the glass and ashes swept up, the bloodstains scrubbed away. Video advertisements still dance across the sides of skyscrapers. No more Somnazol ads, though. Here and there, screens display propaganda for the North American Alliance, and it’s not uncommon to see Alliance militias patrolling the streets. But by and large, life goes on.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpse a familiar face, and I halt. Aaron Freed—Dr. Swan’s former protégé, the boy I interrogated in the Citadel—smiles from a video poster, dressed up in an expensive suit and tie. He’s put on a little weight since I last saw him. Need help? You’re not alone! PhrenTech is a privately owned mental health service. We offer free, anonymous counseling sessions and a legal guarantee that your medical data will be deleted after treatment. Learn more online. A Net address scrolls across the bottom.
Funny, I never pegged Aaron as an entrepreneur, but he’s done pretty well for himself. The void left by IFEN is now filled by dozens of small clinics offering pills, cognitive therapy, Conditioning, and even Mindwalking. The downside is that they’re not very well regulated. They run the gamut from highly professional and impeccably ethical (always more expensive) to shady fly-by-night operations offering cheap, shoddy services to desperate people. There was a case last year of someone getting brain damage from a sloppy neural modification. That company went out of business pretty quickly, but the hapless patient still can’t control the left side of his body.