Maybe that's why Drake didn't need the gun with Keller in the end. Maybe the real Keller couldn't really do any of these things after all, and she knew then why it felt so wrong when Ams kicked him after knowing that Drake didn't need the gun, and that Ams knew it too, and felt the wrongness in it. That's why Riley's face was all splotchy with her hand prints on it when he came out with her, why he wasn't talking to Ams or even looking at her for a long time. She held on to her small hand harder now, letting her know that she understood why she tried to make the boy not like her anymore and that she still had her to talk to about any of it when the time was right. That she wasn't the only one afraid of whatever it was they made them and hoping it could somehow be unmade.
They finally made it to the tall building. She knew Ella and Drake would be waiting for them with their questions, but she couldn't tell them any of this. Riley would have to do it, and she didn't want to hear him tell it, and see his face go broken again like that.
She let Ams go when they got to the top floor and walked away from the big room, down to the other side, found a tiny closet of a room, and curled up in a chair that seemed more like the ones they had at the compound, hard and small, and waited. Waited until everyone else knew, and waited for them to cry over it. Waited until it would be the right time to ask any of them what she needed to ask them.
She felt her eyes close after a while, and she was drifting, up and down in a swing, Ams smiling at her, screaming words at her against the wind they were making, short ones now, because of how high up they were going, Ams smiling bigger and bigger, and as she came down to where Ams was just taking off from, she heard it, Ams screaming "Bones" at her.
Tagged
Riley, April 26, 2236, Reston Office Tower
He didn't need to tell her, looking at him like that, with the knowing already in her eyes, so he just nodded to her and to Drake, who seemed to know everything Ella knew without needing to talk to her, and walked over to the chair by the window, the farthest from the wall with the pictures on it, pictures he couldn't get out of his head now. Drake had his shirt off and the strange man was touching him, like he was looking for something. Of course he is, stupid, the tag. Ella was holding Drake's hand, as if this looking could hurt him, and then he knew she wasn't holding it for that, but for the chance that they couldn't find it, and that she was doing it for her, not Drake.
Ams was curled up on the couch, her back to everybody. He knew he had to let her be after what she saw. There is no talking that out of somebody. So he watched the man move from Drake's back to his chest, poking at him with his fingers, probing, and then he stopped and looked at Ella. He was pointing at a spot right over Drake's heart, "It's in here. I knew they'd do something like that sooner or later, so you couldn't disable it with an electric current without killing the person. Any current to where the tag is would stop his heart is what I'm saying." He looked sad saying it. He also no longer seemed mad in the way he talked now, as if drawing that picture on the wall, letting them know what happened, made him okay again. He didn't even seem to notice when Ams walked in, didn't seem to mind her now. Maybe Ella and Drake told him about the girls, and he knew they wouldn't hurt him. He was just glad the man wasn't ranting anymore.
"Can you cut it out?" Drake asked him, flatly. The man shook his head, "We don't have anything to do that with. You'd need meds, to put you under. They put it really deep in there. I'd have to cut your chest open, and it's too risky to do something like that. I could kill you. I'm a scientist, not a doctor. I wouldn't know how to do that, get it out of you without killing you, I'm sorry." Drake nodded to him then and walked away, not looking at Ella.
Her pad was out and she was writing frantically on it, and showing it to Drake, and he was shaking his head at her. They kept at it for a while, and finally he couldn't take it anymore, so he walked over to her and took her pad, quickly flipping through the last few pages. She wanted to do it. She thought she could, working in clinics as long as she had. She'd dealt with all kinds of wounds. She could make it work. But Drake wasn't letting her for some reason. He couldn't figure out why he wouldn't let her do this thing she at least had some training for but would have no problem letting this stranger try to cut him open. It didn't make sense. Only it did. Of course it did. He thought of Ams stitching him up and how badly it hurt her to hurt him then, and she didn't even really know him yet. Drake didn't want Ella to hurt for him. But he had to let her do this. There was no other way.
"You have to let her, Drake. I'll help. Ams will help, but you have to let her try. It's her burden to carry if it goes wrong, not yours. You can't take that away from her, I won't let you." He meant that last part. He couldn't let Ella be destroyed by losing Drake, not if there was anything at all she could do to change it. Drake was staring at him, as if he didn't know who he was, as if he had forgotten that Ella was his much longer than she was Drake's. After a beat he nodded at him, and left the room.
Riley walked out after him, knowing he needed to talk to this man in a way that would make him okay with all of this, not the way he just did. He saw him standing at the end of the hallway, leaning on the wall, eyes closed. He was still shirtless, and Riley stared at his large chest, thinking how little sense it made that this big man seemed to feel so little to everyone, to himself. Little enough to get picked on at school, and then at the compound. He walked up to him, thinking of just the right way to say it, looking at his face, eyes still closed.
"If you could have done something to stop Hassinger that night," and he saw Drake flinch at that, but knew he had to keep going, "if you could have stopped it but I didn't let you, and you had to live with that, would you ever forgive me, Drake?" He opened his eyes now, staring at him and then shook his head. "That's what it would be like for her if you don't let her try to save you. I am not an idiot, Drake. I know you don't plan on going back if we can't get the tag out of you. So you have to let her save you or you will leave her with watching you die, not knowing if she could have helped, and that will destroy her. I can't let you do this to her or to you. I see the guilt you feel when you see my scars, but you couldn't have done anything then, Drake. I always knew you couldn't have. But maybe she can," he said softly, as softly as he could, and watched Drake nod at him again, his face tense. He knew he hurt him, could see it in his eyes, but he knew it was the only way to get him to see it the way Ella would if he didn't let her do this.
Ella was writing things in her pad when he got back to the room, with the strange man hovering over her. It occurred to him just now that nobody knew his name, or maybe it was just him who still didn't. "Stan," he told him flatly when he asked, and went back to whatever he and Ella were working on. He sat down next to Ams on the couch, watching her. Without thinking he reached out and patted her hair, the little bit of it that was sticking out from under the blanket, until she stirred and she looked up at him, eyes red-rimmed, tired. He hugged her silently, breathing in her Ams smell, holding her close enough to feel her heart beating into his own chest.
"We are ready, if the big man is, and anyone else you think you need who could help you. You'll need all the help you can get. I'm not so good with blood. There is a hospital about 200 meters down the road. It'll have all the surgical tools we'll need, but they wouldn't have left any of the stuff to knock him out with. We'll have to pick up some liquor on the way to help him some, we just can't give him too much, or he won't stop bleeding, but it should be enough to take the edge off."
When they finally made it to the hospital, it was starting to get dark outside. They had to turn the lights on to just read the signs for the different floors. Surgery was on the 7th. He had never been to a real hospital before. In Waller, they went to this one doctor who would still barter for something his parents could give him the few times that he got sick enough to need medicine. They went to his house, a shack only slighter bigger than theirs, that smelled like chemicals. He didn't remember much of it except for the smell. It smelled like that here too.
The surgery floor was flooded with light now. They followed the strange man, Stan, through sliding glass doors into a large open room with a flat bed in the middle under even more lights. Those lights came on now. Stan must have found the switch. Ella walked over to the metal shelves against the wall, and started pulling out various shiny objects and putting them on top of a rag on the tray she was holding.
He flinched involuntarily when he saw a tiny-handled knife with a short sharp blade on it. He looked at Drake, hoping he could take this. His face looked serious, and a little sad, but he didn't seem afraid. Ella stuck all the metal things she collected into what looked like an oven, and pressed a button. The thing beeped after a little while, and she took the metal things out and put them back on a tray next to the bed. She seemed done with preparing whatever she needed to.
Stan handed Drake a bottle of something that he swiped from a tiny dark-looking place on the way here. He went in there by himself and they let him, somehow knowing he wouldn't run, that he had nowhere to run to. Drake was shaking his head at it, "I don't drink."
Stan unscrewed the cap, took a long sip, and handed it back to Drake, "Today, you drink, big man. Or you die from shock," and he did then, drank in long gulps, making a face as if what he was drinking was hurting him. It probably was, by the looks of it. And when he had as much of it in him as he could take, he gave it back to Stan, pulled his shirt off and walked over to where the bed was, nodding to Ella that he was ready, and then whispering something to her that wasn't meant for the rest of them.
She strapped his arms to the bed, put a wide belt around his waist and tightened it. He and Ams would have to hold him down by the shoulders, so he didn't accidentally hurt himself. He hoped they could do this thing, and a small part of him wanted to say goodbye in case something went wrong, but even the thought of doing it scared him, as if he were inviting the wrongness, so he shook his head hard, and put both his hands on Drake's shoulder, pressing it into the bed with all his weight.
He didn't scream when she cut into him, eyes shut so tightly he saw the creases all around them. His jaw was clenched, hard. He could feel the tension in him, but he didn't make a sound, and he didn't move, and after too long of cutting into him, Ella pulled a tiny metal round thing out of him, smaller than one of the eyes on Brody's dragonfly. She was stitching him up now, and her hands moved in a way he knew she's done this many times before, not the way Ams' hands did it. He was still pressing on Drake with everything he had, and Ams was doing it on her side, only her face was wet, and she looked like she'd want to take a swig out of that bottle when this was all over.
And when it was, and they let Drake just lay there and breathe afterwards, they all did, Ella too, sharing it, drinking the strange liquid that burned all the way down. He knew what it was for then, this liquid Brody handed him all these years ago to take away his pain at having lost everybody.
He drank to make everything blurry in his mind, the door of their little house with the words on it, Samson's collar, Ams kicking at a dead body, Drake who wouldn't scream, and that awful charred field on the edge of the city.
He drank until all he could see was Ella leaning over Drake and kissing him softly on the lips, not caring that everyone was watching her do it, not caring about anything other than this man who was still breathing, and who wouldn't have to die now.
The Promise
Amelia, April 27, 2236, Reston Office Tower
What the hell would possess her to hide in this nothing of a room? She and Riley spent half the night looking for her after getting back from the hospital, leaving Ella to watch over Drake. Half the night of frantically checking every room on the floor, hoping she didn't run off while they were gone.
She felt guilty for not knowing until they were done with Drake that Laurel wasn't with them. None of them noticed. She was mad at herself then, and scared when she couldn't find her in any of the places she expected to. Finally they did find her, curled up like a little kid in this tiny chair, head in her knees.
And she wouldn't talk to them, when they got her out of there, not even about how Drake's tag was out of him now, and that he could come with them wherever they were going and they'd be safe because of his not having the tag anymore. She just nodded at them and didn't say anything. They put her to sleep on a couch in the east room, and she stayed with her the rest of the night, arm over her, waiting for her to talk, but she didn't talk, and then the stuff she drank finally took her to a dreamless sleep, and she was glad for not having any dreams in her.
A voice of a stranger woke her up before she felt ready to be up, so she lay there listening for a while. Not a stranger, Stan, she heard it now. Stan and Laurel. Something about the implant. She made herself wake up more, enough to where these snippets made sense. Laurel wanted to know if the implant could make them do things they didn't want to do, bad things. She thought that's how all the people here went to the fire, but he was telling her that Zoriners didn't have implants. Of course not. Everyone knew that. Laurel knew that. She wanted him to tell her how it worked and if there was a way to get it out of her. It seemed to be scaring her, to have it in her.
Ams couldn't figure out why it would suddenly be scaring her after so many years of it being there. And then she knew what it was that Laurel was so afraid of.That whoever put those implants in them could maybe do something to them through these things, change them somehow. But Stan didn't know much about how they worked. Just that they were these tiny neuro blocks of data that were now a part of them, not really implants so much as microscopic computers, and they couldn't take them out like they did Drake's tag. He seemed genuinely sorry telling her this.
She was up now, all the sleep gone from her, looking at Laurel and reading so much fear in her face, fear and sadness. Stan was drawing pictures for her on one of Ella's pads, and chewing on the pencil when he was thinking of how to draw something. These weren't like his other drawing, like the stick figures and boxes earlier.
He drew the little circle metal thing they took out of Drake, and then a drop of blood, and a tiny speck inside the blood bubble, and then added a few other specks like that and drew tiny lines between them. That was the implant, these tiny specks that would all fit inside a drop of blood and still have plenty of room left to move around.
Then he drew a small thing that looked like a bug, like something Riley called a spider, only he made it look shiny with the pencil, as if it were made out of metal. "This thing - this I can fix. It's why Ella can't talk. They didn't take her voice, they just put this bug in there and it's clamped on her vocal chords so nothing comes out when she speaks. I can fix this, brake it with an electro-magnetic current. It's the only thing I can fix, I'm sorry," and he really did seem sorry that he couldn't fix anything else.
She ran out looking for Riley. They had to tell Ella that this strange man could fix her voice. She didn't want to tell him about the other thing yet. She didn't think anybody could make their implants do something strange, but a part of her wondered the same thing Laurel did. A part of her was afraid of it too. Riley was already at the hospital with Ella and Drake, the note he left for her told her, so she ran the few hundred meters, fast, impatient to see him and to see Drake, hoping he was awake now, and well enough for her to hug him. She desperately wanted to hug Drake.
When she got there, he was awake, and she hugged him lightly, afraid of the thing on his chest, just enough to let him know how worried she was for him last night. And then she told all of them about the bug, the metal spider, that St
an said he could make not work anymore, and Ella would get her voice back, and that they wouldn't have to cut into her or anything, just zap at it with something the name of which she couldn't remember now.
It made her happy to tell them, and see Drake and Riley smiling now, only Ella didn't seem happy about any of it. She was shaking her head at them, and it didn't make any sense that she wouldn't want this man to help her. It didn't make sense that she wouldn't want to have her voice back.
She grabbed Riley's hand and took him with her out of the room, thinking that Drake could make Ella happy about the voice thing, because she knew she loved Drake, and he just let her cut him open like that to take his bug out, knowing that he could have died then, and he let her do it anyway, so she would have to let them help her get her voice back, because she owed it to Drake.
"There is something else, Ams. I can feel it. Something you are not telling me. No more secrets, remember?" He was leaning against the wall in the hallway outside the surgery room, looking at her. She told him then, about the other things Stan drew on Ella's pad, and how he explained it to Laurel, who was scared of having it in her, and seemed really sad when he told her he couldn't fix it. She told him, too, that she worried about the thing Laurel worried about, that she thought maybe the implant could get to the places that make her her after all, because it didn't make any sense that anybody could do some of the things they did, her people, to his people, without something making them do it. And that maybe Drake didn't need the gun on Keller because it was the only way to fix the implant, that Keller didn't want to be Keller anymore.
Escape (Alliance Book 1) Page 16