Slowly, he transfers the backpack to me by the straps. I accept it, relieved to feel the nylon against my skin once more.
“If you’re human,” he murmurs, “then this plan means killing civilians.”
“Don’t worry, we aren’t.”
“Civilians?”
I swallow. “Let’s save the world.” I turn away and jog toward Ron.
She’s looking a little worn. Her clothes are ripped in brand-new ways, and there’s a line of blood running down her chin. “Not feeling so good,” she mumbles as I reach her, and she holds a hand to her bleeding belly.
“Let’s hide down here and rest.” I lead her down an alley, searching desperately for a fire escape. Some of the worst mental effects have worn off, but I still feel my brain running obsessively through calculations. “If the monsters might have spread twenty miles, and the mass increases . . . Well, I dunno, how fast was I moving it when it felt like it weighed thirty pounds . . .”
“What are you babbling about?” she demands tiredly behind me.
“Just doing some math. For fun.” Twelve feet per second? How many feet are in a mile, again? What I wouldn’t give for a computer right now—
She grabs me by the shoulder and spins me around angrily, though careful to stay away from the backpack. “Where is Kazuma?” She’s still in pain from her stomach wound, but her eyes are sharp with suspicion.
“Around here somewhere. He was searching for Mjolnir, same as me.” About five thousand feet in a mile, right? Okay, twelve feet per second made it feel like it weighed thirty pounds, whereas when it’s just sitting in my hand, it weighs maybe . . . two pounds? . . . Holy shit, this thing’s weight increases exponentially. The soldier was right, we need to be careful, lest we collapse the solar system into a supermassive black hole—
Ron’s bloodied hand clamps around my upper arm and squeezes hard enough to bruise. “You remembered.”
Ice slides down my spine. I jerk my arm out of her grip. “Yeah, bet you were hoping I wouldn’t,” I snap shakily, and continue walking, still toting the backpack. “I was nice and docile. I should have blown my brains out years ago.”
She presses a hand to her mouth and looks green around the edges. Then she shakes herself. “We can’t focus on that right now. This is a crisis situation. That means letting me in on what you’re planning. We’re friends, remember?”
“Oh, that’s fine. It’s not like you let your boyfriend snap my neck. It’s not like you didn’t mind when he infected me with an alien symbiote. It’s not like it was your goddamn idea for him to kill me and turn me into some kind of docile sidekick. We’re still best friends.”
Her expression goes blank when I mention Kazuma destroying my brain. “You think . . .” Her hand goes back to her mouth.
We’re walking down the middle of a long, narrow, dirty, garbage-strewn alley. Behind Ron is a rusty but serviceable fire escape leading up to the roof of a . . . count the windows . . . ten-story building.
Eh, it’ll do.
What were we talking about? Right, telling Ron what’s going on. I get caught in her sad eyes for a moment and contemplate telling her what I did to Kazuma, just to hurt her, just to get some measure of revenge. Then I glance back up at the fire escape and reason returns.
“Tell you what,” I decide. “This seems to be a pretty safe spot, so I’m going to sit right here with Mjolnir and rest. You go find Kazuma and bring him back here.” I gesture south, away from the soldier. “Once we’re reunited, we can figure out what comes next.”
She presses her lips together and hugs herself. “Did he tell you why you needed to be reset?”
I resent the implication that I ‘needed’ to be murdered. “He thought I was going to kill the three of us, using Mjolnir.”
She rolls her eyes. “He would focus on that. Then again, he feels responsible for us. His focus is on keeping the three of us alive.”
It physically bothers me that she’s using present-tense, but I have to be careful not to change that. “Why? Why do you think I deserved to die?”
Her mouth twists sourly. “It’s not that you deserved to. But you needed it.” She swallows, and she’s blinking a lot. “You weren’t you. I mean, I know we fight sometimes, but . . . I love you, Eden. You really are my best friend, and you’re the only one who was always there for me. And then you were just . . . gone.”
I’ve heard this before, and I want to ask her to hurry it up, but she’s driving at something, maybe new information.
She presses her lips together for a moment, not looking at me. “You . . . Kazuma ran off and left me the gun, and I turned my back for a minute and . . .” She squeezes her eyes shut.
Acid boils in my gut, and I suddenly feel cold all over.
“You tried to use Mjolnir. On y-yourself.” Her shoulders shake up and down. “B-but, you were still too human!” A sob tears out of her mouth. “Or, you w-were!”
Please, God, no.
Kazuma wasn’t even there.
She calms down a bit, wiping at her face with her hands. “And I was so s-scared. I didn’t want to be alone. I’ve always been alone. And you were the only one I could ever count on.” She sniffles. “I couldn’t stand to see you in pain.”
Please, God, no.
“And I had this . . . idea.”
She unslings the gun, checks the safety, stares down at it, thinks about what she’s about to do.
Please, God, no.
“I wanted to wait for Kazuma, but you were screaming, and I couldn’t stand to see you in pain. I’m telling you, you weren’t you anymore! You were a thing! Hell, you’d have wanted me to . . . !”
The gun barrel looms in my vision, a black well of oblivion. My back presses against brick wall, presses against the rest of the world as it all bends in around me, cupping me toward this moment, and I’m about to die, these are my last thoughts, my body is going to go limp and be dead, and I’m going to not exist anymore, and my body that I’ve spent my entire life in will rot away and become nothing and no one will see it or remember it—
—except I have needles, I’ll grow back, and I’ll remember this moment, I’ll remember dying— no, please, NO, PLEASE, GOD, N—
I turn and vomit so hard, I drop to my knees. Shudders wrack my body, from toes to spine to throbbing head. I sob, then retch, suck in a deep breath, and moan. My hands scrabble in garbage on the alley floor; I clutch at it, squeezing, trying to focus on it.
I can feel her staring down at me. Slowly, I manage to sit up a little, wobble into a more dignified position. I distantly wonder if she takes any pleasure in my weakness and horror, in her power over me.
“I’m not your enemy,” she whispers, and her calm voice terrifies me.
I sit up and wipe my lips with the back of my hand. My mouth tastes like shit, and the back of my throat burns unpleasantly.
When I look up at Ron, she’s human, sad. “I fucked up, didn’t I?” she admits quietly. “I should never have taken that choice away from you.”
“That makes me feel so much better,” I spit, glowering.
“I made you . . . You said it best, I made you docile. I took something away from you.” She hesitates, then adds, “I know it was important to you to stay in control, to not become . . .” She trails off uncomfortably.
. . . you. I wanted to avoid becoming you.
“And I took that away.” She sucks in a deep breath. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life atoning for that.”
“And that’s supposed to convince me not to kill us?” I shriek, squeezing my eyes shut and burying my face in my hands. “You’re fucked! I’m fucked! Kazuma is fucked! It’s better if we all die!” I rise clumsily to my feet, shuddering.
Her calm, apologetic veneer cracks. “I’m not going to let you kill us!” There are tears in her eyes. “Just stop for a second and think! You don’t want to die any more than I do!”
But I do. Rage boils between my ribs, and I want to end my long, shuddering stumbling d
own the hideous path she’s put me on. I clutch at the backpack’s straps, trying not to look at her.
She grabs at my arm. “Put it down!”
I don’t want to fight her. I try to pull away, but she keeps coming after me, grabbing and shoving and yanking. I don’t want to fight her. She’s trying to get the bag away from me without actually getting near it.
I relax my entire body and shut down my mind.
The bag hits the floor of the alley, and I turn toward her. She sees my slack face, my pinprick eyes, the fingers of my left hand flattening into fine blades—
I push my hand into her chest, cracking her ribs, and cup her heart. The inside of her chest is boiling hot, and it’s all I can do not to yank my arm out.
She grips my arms even as she sags. “Nngh!” she grunts, and then she’s falling to her knees, and she’s too heavy for me to hold up, so I follow her down.
Humanity floods back in, and I’m frozen to the bone. “Oh my God.”
She’s on her back, and there’s blood on her teeth and dripping down her chin. She stares up at me with wide, shocked eyes.
“Oh my God.” I’m sobbing. I’m casting about mentally for some way to undo this. I want to take it back. I can’t go through with this. I don’t want to die. I don’t want Ron to die.
She’s trying to form her hands into blades, but they flicker oddly, unable to take shape. I keep waiting for her eyes to become pinpricks, but all I see is a girl, alone and scared.
“But,” she mumbles, and makes a liquid, choking sound.
I can’t do this.
I relax.
“You and I would infect,” my mouth whispers. “We would destroy.” I lean down closer to her ear and add, “This is how I save the world.”
I slice through one of the walls of her heart.
Her shoulders relax, and her gaze slowly drifts away from me. After a moment, the air eases from her chest. As her head tilts, pooled blood begins to pour from the corner of her mouth.
I pull my arm out of her, thick-coated with blood. The slimy, slippery, needle-filled hideousness pulls me back into reality against my will. I wipe it down my pant leg, then across her shirt, then in the garbage in the alley, and my mouth is screaming, wailing, over and over, “No! No, I didn’t want to! Stop!”
On shaking legs, I stand up, and I face the brick wall of the alley, and I hurl myself head-first against it—
SMACK
The world slams down into dizzy blurriness, and my hands are picking up the backpack. My body is following the plan.
Ron’s heart is already healing. I’ve bought myself only a few minutes. She’s going to wake up very fast, and she’s going to be very angry. No time to waste.
My throat burns with stomach acid and thirst.
I contemplate drinking her blood.
Shudders run up and down me, churning my stomach.
I head for the fire escape. The ladder is down. I start climbing, left hand sliding around on the rungs. Luckily, once I’m up over the top of the ladder, the rest of the way is a zig zag of rusty stairs.
On the third landing, when I’m high enough to start feeling a little vertigo, I come upon a padlocked hatch. I wiggle a bloody, slippery finger into it, then turn it into a blade and slice. The broken padlock falls away.
From the fourth story upward, there’s a cage all around the fire escape. If I had the desire to drop the backpack from here, I wouldn’t be able to, at least not without hacking and slicing the rust-red bars. My hand has so far proven effective at parting flesh and thin metal, but I’m not sure how—
Partway up the seventh-story steps, I pause, staring at the building wall outside the cage.
It’s moving.
As I stare, black tendrils crawl up, up, headed for the roof. They start far below and are spreading out over the entire wall.
The fire escape shudders violently under my feet.
I climb as fast as I can, dashing across landings, taking the steps three at a time. The backpack clangs and bangs behind me.
Ninth landing, and the fire escape is wrenching back and forth. Something below is determined to rip it right off the wall. I’m grabbing at handholds as I run, feet sliding over metal, shoulders bouncing off the inside of the cage. My chest burns and my breaths come ragged.
There’s a final hatch, also locked. I slam my shoulder against it uselessly, then fight down panic and access just enough of my human intelligence. I work a finger into the padlock. It takes three tries.
The fire escape tears out of its lower braces and lifts away from the wall, pivoting on the metal holding it to the edge of the roof. My world tips at an angle.
I break the padlock and shove my way up through the hatch, dive for the roof.
The fire escape falls away. I cling to the edge of the roof for dear life, hanging on by my armpits, hands scrambling for purchase. Below me, the fire escape drops a story, hits the alley floor with a teeth-rattling BANG, and begins to tip lazily over. Vertigo spins my head; I focus on the rooftop.
Black tendrils have sprouted into a thorn barrier all over this side of the roof, and are spreading toward me. I heave up over the edge and land heavily on my back on concrete. No time to spare; I stumble to my feet, heft the backpack, and keep moving, headed for the center of the roof, away from the thorns. Somewhere below, the fire escape collapses into the alley, thundering on and on and echoing long after.
The roof is scattered with knee-high, boxy devices. I dodge between them at a jog, craning my neck, careful not to bang my shins.
Ron’s thorn barriers spread like black fire, blocking the western edge of the roof up to ten feet high, closing the hole through which I came. I make for the southern edge, only to find them sprouting there, too. As I approach, a tendril lashes out, whip-like, nearly slicing my throat. I back away, still looking around desperately, chest heaving for breath, and turn to the northeast corner.
A figure is sliding up the wall and into view, silhouetted by the late-afternoon sun. She’s shuddering violently, her body a Swiss cheese nightmare, arms gone, torso full of holes. A thick bundle of thorns extends from her back and spreads out like an absurd, mile-wide cape behind her, circling the roof, trapping me.
Ron steps down from the edge of the roof, onto the concrete ten yards away. Half her face is gone, down to the skull, sacrificed to her thicket. With her remaining eye, she stares at me, prepared to rend me.
I stand there trying to suppress panic. She uses those precious few seconds to solidify her wall of thorns, ten feet high on all sides, built of sentient razor wire. It blocks all breeze, all sound, most light. She stands in its shadow, her back to the sun.
Vertigo twists my stomach as I realize that I can’t talk my way out of this.
I look down at the backpack, and in the corner of my eye, razor wire is encroaching behind me, too nervous to approach as long as I hold this bag. And a different person — name started with an ‘F’, I think? like my tattoo? — would cling to that bag, to the safety it represents, just as she clung to the gun that eventually killed her.
Even if it held any power, it would be useless to me, just as dangerous to my body as it is to Ron’s. Like the gun, it has now served its purpose. I let its straps slip from my hands; it hits the concrete roof with a faint thunk.
Then I’m running, eyes on Ron but mostly on the A/C ducts laid out in a grid all over the roof, dodging and ducking between them, and then fuck it, running up over them, stepping from edge to edge, hurtling— When did I get this fast—
She’s ready for me, razor wire gathering at her sides. Her arms have re-formed, skeleton-thin, and her hands extend down to her knees, fingers glinting sharply. I’m no match for her in combat, but my true strength is in my instincts.
One last time, I give up control.
Before she can bring up her swords, I body-slam her, hands transformed into thick, hooked daggers with cell-thin edges. With a cry, I bury them in her chest.
She staggers for half a secon
d, then rebounds, turning and using my momentum to ram me down on my back on top of an A/C unit. Distantly I feel something hot and sharp stab into my side, between ribs, but the pain is abstract, unconcerning.
I shove her away with my feet, pulling my hands out of her chest, and then I’m up again. I stagger a little as my weight comes down on my injured side, then I’m at her, aiming for her throat.
Just as I’m within range, she grabs my waist with one of her skeleton-hands, fingers like straight-edge razors, and she spins me, using my momentum against me. As I turn, her fingers slice into my stomach and out again, ripping through intestines. I jerk, lose a step, and go down on my side at her feet, clutching at the wound. Here is pain I can’t ignore. I taste blood.
She stands over me for a moment as her arms continue to bulk up, a few cells returning to her from her thicket. Her shirt is a torn, bloodied mess; through it, she’s more scar than flesh.
Her hand clamps around my neck, and with unnatural strength, she lifts me. When I bare my teeth at her, she slaps me hard across the face with her other hand.
“Stop,” she whispers, voice shaking. “Just . . . s-stop.”
I grab at her wrist with my left hand, clutch the breast of her shirt with my right, clawing at her, struggling to regain my footing.
“You’re s-supposed to be the sane one!” She’s crying, grief tearing itself out through her throat.
I grab her jaw.
Her free hand moves, and my right shoulder— my arm— MY ARM—
I sag in her grip, and she lets go, and I fall to my side, screaming, clutching at the stump, wailing, and I don’t want to die like this, I don’t want my last minutes to be like this, but what can I do, I have to stop her, I have to give the soldier enough time to drop the stone—
Through a haze of agony, I see Ron sit down heavily on an A/C unit. Her eyes are lost and scared. She doesn’t want to look at me.
Slowly, the thicket collapses around us. Needles return to her wasted body.
She sighs. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
Eden Green Page 24