“It’s weird,” he mumbles. “We’re just walking, and there’s no monsters, no Army, not even that many bodies. Maybe we’re outside the main area where they’re swarming.”
I give him a little smile and hope it will relax him. “Veronica is just around the next bend.”
“What’s going through your head right now?” I hear worry in his voice, and instantly understand that he’s trying to spare me some of the suffering he endured.
I think on the question for a moment, then feel an earnest smile spread over my face. “My thoughts are very efficient right now. If I applied my mind to a problem, I could solve it almost instantly.”
Without missing a beat, “What’s 407 times 17?”
I loop numbers through my head in beautiful spirals and reply, “About 7000.”
“That’s not solving it.”
I shrug. “I don’t want to waste energy on specifics.”
A rueful smile twists his lips. “Hopefully, a ‘real’ problem won’t pop up.” He squints at me. “What about your memories? Is anything coming back?”
I apply my new-found mental powers to my miscategorized data system . . . Nothing. Again, no bloom of recollection, only silence. I shake my head, and my good mood is very slightly tainted.
“Do you have any idea where we were when I last used Mjolnir?” I wonder out loud.
“I didn’t know this part of the city very well before . . . you know.”
“Before you had your brains rearranged twice?”
He squints into space and mumbles, “That sounds like too few . . .”
A bitter smell washes over us, and he covers his mouth with his free hand. “Ugh. Smells like burning plastic. Any idea where that’s coming from?”
I listen, and in the eerie silence, there’s a distant roar. “It’s a fire. South, maybe a block over.”
He opens his mouth, then pauses, then looks at me. “If Veronica is hurt and wandering around, she’d head for a landmark, something unique. A burning building might work. And monsters would stay away from it.”
I’m open to any idea at this point, and it seems like a fine one. We start jogging toward the smell and sounds. “Maybe we’ll get our bearings and figure out where Mjolnir is,” I add hopefully.
When we emerge from the alley, heat blasts us from across the empty street. There before us, the top of a seven-story hotel is in flames, a pyre licking up into the afternoon sky. The flames are gradually traveling down into the sixth floor; soon the whole building will be alight. Of course there are no fire trucks or cops, but there are also no Humvees, no tanks.
We make our way around scattered bodies — I stare, fascinated, while Kazuma averts his eyes — to the front entrance and peer inside. The doors are propped open, and the lobby is deserted. There’s no flame in sight, but tendrils of smoke are forming under the elevator doors.
Just as I’m about to suggest there’s no one to save, we hear a weak scream from further inside, out of sight. Kazuma rushes forward, shouting Veronica’s name, head whipping around as he checks warily for fire and smoke. I follow, staring at the gun on his back, wondering if he can fight off a monster in these close quarters.
My stomach is suddenly queasy, and I pause at the end of the lobby, at the entrance to a convention hall. He shoots me an odd look and heads inside, expecting me to follow. But my head is spinning, and I taste stomach acid. There’s no fire in sight, no monsters prowling, and yet panic is blooming inside me, licking up the inner sides of my torso, burning and melting and destroying.
I sit down on the carpeted floor and press my back to the wall, staring down the lobby toward the doors. It’s warm, though not uncomfortably so. I press a hand to my heart and find it pounding.
My inner searchlight is still intensely bright, and I swing it around in every direction, hunting down the source of this anxiety. So many worthy candidates — the war raging around us, the military presence that might capture us, is Kazuma safe (and is he safe to be around?), Veronica and her insistence and her hand tugging and her holding me by the shoulders and shaking me violently and screaming in my face and blood on her forehead—
I close myself off, and the memory fades instantly.
I stare at the smoke slinking out from under the elevator doors.
Slowly, carefully, I coax the memory back out into the open.
I can’t remember the words, but Veronica was screaming at me, shaking me, tears in her eyes, confessing deep need and rage and despair. And I wouldn’t— no, I couldn’t listen, but she thought I wouldn’t listen, and that only infuriated her more—
This memory doesn’t fit into my personal timeline. That’s a rare thing. It’s like re-watching a movie from childhood and having no memory of when or where or how I saw it the first time. I know the movie, but I don’t know the person who watched it.
I’ve been assuming Mjolnir’s pulse rearranged parts of my brain, or induced a stroke. But this doesn’t fit into that theory.
The spotlight swings . . .
. . . and lands on the gun strapped across Kazuma’s back.
His hand clamps around my upper arm. “Someone’s buried in rubble!” He yanks me to my feet. “Come on! Before the fire spreads or the goddamn building collapses!”
On shaking knees I follow him into the convention hall. He pulls the shotgun off his back — “Heavy fucking thing,” he mutters — and slaps it down on a table. It looms before my eyes. My head spins again; I lean heavily against a chair, vaguely aware that we’re in a room of round, half-set dining tables. The only light streams dimly through curtained windows on the far side of the room.
“Come on!” Kazuma roars, already on the other side of the room, where a wall has collapsed on top of several tables. He’s furiously moving boulder-sized chunks of plaster and stone.
I can’t move, terrified that I’ll vomit. I stare down at the gun lying on the table, breathing heavily, mouth full of saliva, and it tastes wrong. My skull feels wrong.
“Please, God, no,” I whisper robotically. “Please, God, no.”
“Eden!” Ron shrieks. “We’re all dying! Why do you want to? Why do you always do this?”
“Please, God, no—”
Ron is pulling the gun from her back, checking the safety with shaking hands. “I’ll fix you,” she mumbles through numbed lips. “I’ll fix you.”
I press my hands to my ears, hips against the edge of the table, and slam my jaw shut. No more, please, no more, please, God, no, please, God, no, pl—
“Every time I need you, you abandon me!” Ron is screaming. “If you want to die so badly, I’ll help you!”
“Please, God, no,” I beg, and I start to stand up, but the gun, the gun, THE GUN—
Flames have begun to travel down the wallpaper around us. Kazuma grunts as he shoves his way through rubble. I stare at his back as he pushes and pulls and kicks and growls.
“What did she do?” I whisper. My tongue feels thick in my mouth.
He can’t hear over the increasing roar of the fire.
I clear my throat and ask as loudly as I can, “What did she do to me?”
He freezes, then looks over his shoulder at me. He flinches bodily and bares his teeth. “The eyes! It’s not just me!”
Then his stare slides down to the shotgun I’m holding, pointed at his hips. Slowly, his hands rise, and he turns toward me. “Put down the gun.”
“What did she do?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I stare at him. I wonder if I look enraged. I don’t feel enraged. All inside me is ice.
“She did something to me.” I heft the gun a little. “With this.”
His face is set in stone. “Leave it alone, Eden.”
“I have to know.”
There’s a crack of thunder twenty feet above our heads that makes him jump. “We need to dig out this woman and get out of here!”
“Ron did something to me. I want to know what it was.”
He stares into my soul, and I can see the argument going on behind his eyes, the internal debate of a liar. Come clean now and beg forgiveness, or stick to the story and pray I start to doubt?
But there is no doubt.
Kazuma lowers his arms. “Can we rescue this woman first?”
I heft the gun a little, trying to ignore the ice water cascading down over my shoulders.
He sighs. “A worm swallowed you, and it took us a while to get it out of the ground and split it open. By the time we pulled you out, you were . . .” He stares at the patterned carpet as if trying to ignore a mental image.
I expect a flood of memories, but none comes. He might as well be relaying a story he saw on the news.
“We went back and forth for an hour, trying to comfort you, talk to you. But—” He chokes for a moment. “You weren’t you anymore. We couldn’t find you.”
I’m salivating as if I’m about to vomit. “And that meant I deserved to die?”
He’s shaking his head. “What more do you want? We reset you. We gave you back eternal life, after you’ve done nothing but bitch and moan about it.”
A hand settles heavily on my shoulder, and, impossibly, Kazuma whispers in my ear, “It’ll all be over soon.”
I stare at him, gun still pointed at his waist. My thumb checks the safety. It’s off.
“You had a plan,” he says, struggling, maybe fighting his own animal rage with rationale, “some crazy scheme to destroy everything made of needles, at least within the city. Veronica was so busy weeping over you, she didn’t even realize you were prepared to kill all three of us.”
“All these innocent people are dying!” Ron screams in my face as she shakes me violently. “Why do you want to? Why do you always do this?”
“It was her idea to reset you, yes. That’s true. We thought it was what you would want, and that you were too far-gone to do it yourself. So I did the right thing. I— I didn’t want your blood on Veronica’s hands.”
“Every time I need you, you abandon me! If you want to die so badly, I’ll help you!”
Kazuma gently pulls her away from me. “I’ll take care of it.” He takes the shotgun from her and hefts it.
Please, God, no.
“I did what I had to do for our survival.”
“It’ll all be over soon,” he whispers, gripping the shotgun. “I’ll take care of it.” He stares into my eyes. My mouth burns and my legs are cold. Kazuma’s eyes loom in my vision, two black wells of despair, of apology, of my father looking at the cat duct-taped to the chair and thinking, ‘This is for the best’.
I was begging them not to. I wanted death, oblivion, escape. Not reset—
He raises his voice. “We— I did it f-for your own good! And it worked, didn’t it? You can’t even remember! Once you adjust like I did, you can still have a normal life!”
—clawing up through my chest, shoving itself into my jaw, wrapping itself around my arms and hands—
“We fixed you!” he roars. “We gave you a second chance!”
Finger tightens on trigger and shoulders begin to tense, to raise the gun—
Please, God, n—
“What do you want from me?”
I stare down the barrel at his face.
Well, hell. It’s a good question. There are several answers, but— “I can’t trust you to fulfill any promises you make while I’m pointing a gun—”
“Is it because I infected you?” He stares into my eyes. “You would have done the same. Or rather, your needles would have. Your Tedrin.” I start to argue but he cuts me off, “It’s a survivor, by any means necessary. Maybe it thought you would be an ally, or maybe it wanted a mate, or maybe it just wanted to spread to the nearest warm body.” He points at his own chest. “I was a passenger.”
“It is fucked up, the things people tell themselves so they can sleep at night.”
“You’ve felt it already, that rush of distance, like you’re deep inside your own head and your body is acting on its own, protecting you, hurting people for you—” He sucks in a deep, shuddering breath, and for a moment I can see the person he was before staring out at me through eyes made of needles. “Do you finally understand?”
It frightens me, how perfectly I understand. “And when the time comes, and I’m alone with someone, the needles may decide they want me to infect them, and there’ll be nothing I can do about it.”
“Do you see?”
“I see the really good argument you’ve made for destroying ourselves as soon as p—”
“We can control it!” he shouts. “We’ll help each other, the three of us. When one is tempted, the other two will stop them.”
“And what if all three of us decide to kill and infect the same person?”
“We’ll have rules! We can’t spread it to anyone, even if they’re dying, even if we love them — unless they choose!”
Pisses me off. “Anyone would choose to have their lives saved if they’re dying.”
“You didn’t!”
“I’m weird!”
He presses his hands to the sides of his head for a moment. “No one, then! We’ll infect no one!”
Kazuma moves like a blur, and suddenly he’s gripping my upper arms. The air closes in around us, furnace-like. The gun is sideways between us, and he’s deliberately ignoring it, trusting me not to hit him with it or blow his feet off.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he whispers desperately. “I was wrong. Maybe you wouldn’t have done the same in my place. Of the three of us, you have the willpower. So here’s the deal: As long as you never infect anyone, I won’t, either. Ever again.”
My head jerks in surprise. “That is the shittiest thing anyone has ever put on my shoulders, bar none.”
“Every time we’re tempted, we’ll ask you. And you, being you, will tell us not to. And we’ll know, deep down, that if we go against your advice, we’ll finally be all the shitty things you think about us.”
I want to argue with him, but he’s seen so far down into me that I’m sure he already hears the words in my head.
“But until then, until that day that may never come, everything will be alright. Everything can go back to normal.”
I swallow slowly, still staring into his eyes. “We’d have to . . . go somewhere. We couldn’t stay in Gothic.”
Standing in a burning hotel with his hands clamped around my upper arms, I allow myself to fantasize. The three of us could go on such unimaginable adventures, exploring vistas no mortal human would ever see. And Ron as good as said she wouldn’t mind if Kazuma and I got involved, as long as he still loved her. He and I could spend our first few decades working out our revenge on each other’s bodies — and who knows what after that . . .
I wobble on my feet, steady myself, and shudder. There’s a weird little feeling in my belly, spreading through my torso like a shot of rum. Happy hormones, I think distantly. The needles are trying to make me fall in love with the idea of survival.
When I look up at Kazuma, he’s smiling, pleased at my change in mood. His hands on my upper arms are soft, holding me upright.
I’m still gripping the shotgun between us, but my knuckles brush his waist. Where his shirt is ripped open, I touch hot, still-healing flesh. His entire body pauses, ceasing even breath, as he commits that moment to memory and wonders if there might be more. His two instincts, toward alternately power and tenderness, slam together and become one. He touches my elbow and gently draws me closer—
—a deer stand rebuilt with parts of every horrifying, sickly, deformed, stitched, salvaged garbage and burned to destroy and never-aging never-dying never-ending-NEVER-STOPPING—
—my hideous prison-body purrs about how he’s pulled me against his chest, cupping the back of my head with one hand, pressing the other flat against the small of my back, bringing my mouth toward his, bending closer—
—PLEASE, GOD, NO, DON’T TAKE AWAY THE DEER ST—
—I’m finally fixed, my body works now, and it tel
ls me to drop the gun and pull him closer, to grab and claw, to bite and then suck, because I want, I hunger, I burn—
—THIS IS TAKING AWAY MY HEAD! I NEED MY H—
—slams me down across a table and presses me against it, hands everywhere, frenzied, like an animal—
—I NEED TO THINK! THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANT—
Slowly, his lips pull away, and I can still taste him. “We can’t escape destruction,” he whispers against my cheek. “It’s all around us. But we can make ourselves a little haven in the midst of it. We couldn’t save this woman; she would have died of her injuries, and I wouldn’t have infected her. Better to get used to the idea now, that people around us will fade away no matter what we do. Our lot in life is now to minimize the pain we cause.”
I press my cheek to his. He burns, and maybe I do, too. For a moment, I allow myself to love whatever collection of traits can be called ‘Kazuma’. My heart breaks for the poor guy I wish I’d known before this nightmare began.
I’ve forgiven him. Tears sting in my eyes at the realization.
“I’ll take your deal,” I whisper. “We’ll never infect anyone.”
“Let’s go, then.” He reluctantly pulls away from me, stands, and starts toward the exit. His hand lingers on my elbow, then draws away, assuming I’ll follow him.
I sit up. I’m still holding the gun, and he’s turned his back to me.
One last time, he’s trusted me.
I grip the gun, and I suck in a deep breath.
Our lot in life is now to minimize the pain we cause.
The gun is pointing at the floor. The barrel is hot in my hands.
Kazuma lies at my feet, arm awkwardly crooked over a chunk of plaster.
The rubble beyond him is splattered with
Tables are burning.
Eden Green Page 22