He hooks my chin with one finger so that I can’t reasonably look away from him. And then he kisses me and the shame recedes. It doesn’t vanish. I will always carry regret with me. Regret that the last time my parents saw me, I fought with them. Regret that I let my anger over my father’s broken promise fuel my decision to go this party to spite him and to spite my mother for siding with him.
Strega has seen it all now, has felt it alongside me. He fits me against himself and strokes my hair instead of walking away from the selfish, pouting girl I was.
Relief lulls me to sleep.
21
I CAN HEAR them yelling from outside the meld. It’s early, and neither would have thought to expect me back from Assimilation for another half hour but a system upgrade at the reaction center led the facilitators to dismiss us early with an early start time tomorrow.
“You promised!” Strega bellows.
“And I’m keeping it, Strega! It’s what I was assigned to do. Do you think refusing to perform the duties of my function will help me keep my level up?”
Ritter catches sight of me and immediately tries to pull me in. “You should be helping me,” he says. “Concordia wants to obliterate Attero! Their answer to Supernova is to introduce a wave of mass suicide! Strega, they have enough evidence from their test run on the low functioners to confirm that they can manipulate the suicide genes. All they need to do is find a surefire method for the widespread release of whatever it is that they’re using to activate those genes, and then they’ll dump it on Attero! Once they do, any person with the mutations will end.”
Not having heard the entire argument, I can only look from one of them to the other.
“He’s spying on the guardians,” Strega informs me, “hanging around their unwinds, their parks, their neighborhoods! He came in wearing a guardian uniform.” Turning back to Ritter he snaps, “They’re going to learn who you are, and you’ll both be disposed!”
“Can you be disposed of just for performing your function?” I ask Ritter, despite his prior assurances that heralds have some leeway when it comes to violations of the theft standard as it applies to the theft of truth.
“No,” he answers, shooting Strega a triumphant look that brings back a flash of memory about their childhood game with the interrupters. He might as well be hopping gleefully up and down in Strega’s back yard.
“Were you specifically told to go undercover, to pretend you’re one of them? Is that where you got the guardian uniform?” I ask.
“I was told to get the story on the raids,” Ritter says. “That’s what I’m doing.”
“Getting disposed of won’t do anything to help Attero,” I reply.
“And have you forgotten about Davinney?” Strega asks. “If you’re disposed before she assimilates, she’s disposed of, too!”
“If someone doesn’t piece this together soon, either Attero destroys us, or we destroy them. And then each side’s allies will retaliate. The entire multiverse could be at stake!” Ritter cries.
They’re increasingly agitated, the distance between them closing a little more with each word spoken. I step between them and place a hand on each of their chests.
“Stop!” I yell, staring out toward the canals. If I look at one or the other of them, the one I’m looking at will assume I’m siding with them. It doesn’t matter who’s right. “We shouldn’t be talking about this here.” My pointed look along the walls and at the light fixtures clues them in.
Strega backs away from my hand to signal he’s done. Ritter steps back, too, but his look is accusing. He storms out of the keeping. When Strega moves to follow, I put my hand on his chest again.
“Let him go. He needs to blow off some steam.”
I manage to convince Strega to go to his keeping and let me talk to Ritter. At the meldway he turns to me and says,
“This is out of control.”
Above all, Strega hates being out of control. For all his intelligence, he still hasn’t learned that control is an illusion. He is not in control of anything. Neither is Ritter.
Neither am I.
Even so, someone has to get Ritter to lay low. Who better than me?
After about an hour, I find Ritter at an unwind three blocks from the keeping. With that sort of lead time, he’s well on his way to a hangover. He looks up at me with bloodshot eyes.
“Go away,” he says and downs the rest of the amber liquid in his glass.
“Ritter,” I begin, but he actually claps a hand over my mouth to shut me up.
“No,” he shakes his head. “You need to have a little faith in me,” he slurs.
Wondering how he’s gotten this way on what the unwind’s ScanX will allow, I pull his hand off my mouth, but I let him go on.
“I would never do anything to get you disposed of. Never,” he shakes his head. His hair is sticking up in all directions because he rakes his hands through it when he’s upset.
“Ritter,” I say and lean back to avoid the hand that tries to silence me again. “You’ve got to function tomorrow. We need to go now. Pay your tab, and let’s go.”
He clumsily signals the barkeep, who shoves the Idix reader across the bar so quickly I have to wonder if Ritter’s been bothering him. On the way to the meld, Ritter picks up some long gone patron’s half full glass from a table and gulps it down. I make a face and tug on his elbow. That explains how he got past the ScanX.
He can walk surprisingly well. I’d been worried that he wouldn’t even make it to the slide, and I’d have to log Strega for help. He’s only a little unsteady, and he chooses to follow me rather than resist.
By the time we’re actually on the slide, he’s grown quiet but more alert. His eyes, when he glances my way, are less hazy and his pupils no longer dilated. The only thing that tells me he’s still a little drunk is that he weaves just a little as he’s exiting the slide.
I give up on talking to him tonight, content to walk beside him, letting the crisp air sober him up even more. It’s amazing to me that I need long sleeves in early August. But then, we’re not in Surprise, Arizona. The coordinates research we did in onboarding confirmed my suspicions. We are in what Attero calls the Pacific Northwest. Washington, to be precise.
Ritter’s still just a little clumsy, and he stumbles into me as he reaches past me for the sensor. We’ve continued to set the meld to unwilling, even though we know it won’t keep the guardians out. The hassle it will cause them if they raid the keeping is satisfying in a petty sort of way.
As he leans for the sensor, Ritter’s face is close to mine. Just before he kisses me, I realize that he’s going to and I duck away, thrusting my hands against his chest.
“I’m not Linney,” I blurt.
He frowns. “I know that!”
I search his face. “Do you?”
Maybe he does. Maybe I don’t.
The next morning, Ritter creeps into the dining room as I’m eating breakfast. Very deliberately, he eases into a dining room chair. I wonder if it is a hangover or if he’s walking on eggshells because of what happened at the meld last night.
He nearly whispers, though, so I suspect it’s the latter. “I just wanted to say, again, that I would never do anything to get you disposed.”
I can’t say, “I know.” I can’t say it because his actions are saying the opposite.
“Are you factored if you’re function free?” I ask, staring down at my plate. The ScanX has me eating heartily these days because Assimilation is so intense. I’m always rebuilding, as Strega would say.
“No,” Ritter answers softly. He doesn’t have to ask what I’m getting at. “I’ll ask my superior about leave today. Enough to last until you assimilate.”
I look up at him, but now he won’t look at me. I nod. “Thanks.”
He starts to reach for me, but he stops, his arm falling back to his side. “I know you’re not Linney,” he says softly. And then he pushes away from the table before I can say anything else.
I close
my eyes. I’ve hurt him. I don’t know what to do about that, how to fix it. My hearty meal holds no further appeal, but I finish it, anyway. I’ll need the energy for combat.
When we break for lunch, I check my logger. There’s a single line of text from Ritter.
I’m function free until August 25th.
I can’t help the rush of relief that courses through me at the sight of those words. He can’t lose another function level if he’s not factored during leave. I don’t have time to answer back. We’re due in the reaction center, and I still have to return my empty box to the onboarding facility’s ScanX.
The trouble with everything that’s going on is that I’m distracted in the reaction center. I make a couple of mistakes that could have been very bad for me, but Stacy manages to fix both. As my partner in this exercise, she has a vested interest in my actions.
“Get it together,” she hisses, thumping my back hard with her palm, disguising it as protection as we run for the concrete pad.
To my credit, I’m the first to notice the arrows, and I yank hard on her collar. She gets the message and we Army-crawl the last few feet to the pad. Her eyes flick to mine as we rest on all fours, catching our breath.
“That’s better,” she says, one corner of her mouth quirking upward. I know better than to not smile back. If you don’t give her the reaction she expects, she’ll force it out of you. She scares the hell out of me.
Yaryk scares me, too. We used to be friends, or something close to it. But ever since I outranked him he’s been frosty. He no longer strategizes with me. Krill is becoming more distant, as well. It just drives home that in the end, it is every person for themselves.
The gap between Yaryk and I grows since Stacy and I just beat him and Krill. Krill’s eyes rest coolly on mine as I imagine he mentally calculates the point difference between us. Then he drags a towel over his face and shoulders his way past me through the meld.
As we scatter to different slides, I feel a pang of longing for Kate. I miss her, miss having a true friend in Assimilation. Knowing I have Strega and Ritter helps, of course, but the days are long and hostile.
It is August 9th, two weeks until Belgrade shares our factors with the Tribunal. If I factor well, I become a full-fledged citizen of Concordia. If I don’t, I become one of the disposed.
Ritter is reasonably safe now, so long as he keeps his word and stops snooping around in the guardians’ affairs and does no further research on erasure. It is on me now, a thought that brings a lump to my throat.
It’s been almost three months, but I feel like I’ve been here a year. That last day on Attero feels so distant. Slamming out of the house when Dad told me we were moving again, when he reneged on his vow to put me up in my own apartment…I wish I could take it back. So what? So what if we moved to Georgia for his promotion to Lieutenant General at Moody AFB?
I never even congratulated him.
I can see clearly now how moving across the United States again, starting over…all of it would be a welcome change now, in hindsight. Family is everything.
Ritter, part of my Concordia family, is not at the keeping when I arrive. Given that he’s function free, the fact that he’s not there ratchets up my concern. I’m just about to log Strega when he enters the living room.
“Why is the meld set to willing?” he asks crossly.
I slip my arms around him and kiss him just below his ear before whispering, “It doesn’t matter, Strega. The guardians can enter no matter how the meld is set.”
He sighs deeply, and his muscles relax just a little. “Anything new today?” he whispers back.
“No.”
I am relatively unharmed, so instead of pulling me into the cleanse, he locks his arms around me and kisses me deeply.
“Of course.”
I freeze at the dull sound of Ritter’s voice. The anguish in his voice stabs at my heart, but then Strega and I turn to him and I see that same weary resignation in his face that I saw when he zapped Strega with the toy interrupter and Strega didn’t fall. The betrayal is too much for Ritter. He storms out of the keeping for the second time in two days.
I let my forehead fall to Strega’s chest. “He’s still so tied up in Linney,” I groan. “He says he knows I’m not her, but then he goes and tries to kiss me, and I—”
Strega looks like I’ve just smacked him. “What? He tried to kiss you?” Now Strega is angry. “Why would you push him away?”
I back out of his embrace. “What do you mean, why would I push him away?” I ask incredulously.
Strega pales, reaching for my hands, but I hold them out of range. “That’s not what I meant,” he says, shaking his head. “I just meant that maybe until you’ve assimilated, it would be better if...couldn’t you just—”
“Couldn’t I what? Loan myself out to your brother because I look like someone he loved and lost? Are you seriously suggesting that I should let Ritter kiss me just to keep him calm and out of trouble until Assimilation is over?” My voice rises until I’m surprised the glass isn’t rattling.
Strega looks sheepish now.
“You don’t know what it did to him,” Strega tries again to take my hands. “When Linney ended, he was…he was…”
I nod numbly. “Yeah, Strega, I’m sure I have no idea what it’s like to have someone I love torn away from me.”
“Don’t do that with me,” Strega frowns.
“What? Don’t do what?”
“Be sarcastic like that. You don’t have to do that.”
“Why not? Because it might make it even more obvious that you just hurt my feelings? Because it might prove that there are some things that your stupid alpha inducers can’t fix?”
Strega looks like he wants to say something else. In the end, he just takes a step back. And then he leaves. He turns and he leaves, and I am alone in the keeping.
I think of Kate again. Maybe I’m channeling my anger at Strega into grief for her, or maybe I’m making the memory of her out to be more of a friend than she was, but I cry for her for the first time since Lyder told me she’d vanished. Melayne and Mina are just a log away, but I’m afraid to reach out to either one. It kills me that I don’t know if they can be trusted.
Though I know it’s the easy way out, it’s perfectly legal to breathe into the MedQuick, to bring it my turmoil, and to accept the moodleveler and sleepbringer it offers. The sun is still shining as I sink onto my rift, steadfastly ignoring the voice in my head, shouting that I’m a hypocrite.
In the days that follow, Strega and Ritter are polite but cool toward each other and toward me. Strega doesn’t apologize to me, and I do not apologize to him. I don’t feel I owe him an apology. He was the one to imply that I should lead Ritter on, after all.
Attero Davinney might have used that painful blow to stop trying again, to ignore the ScanX and the MedQuick and wind up half-starved and zombie-like. Attero Davinney even whispers to me that doing so might get Strega to have more than just a caretaker’s concern for me again. But I am not that Davinney. I am warrior Davinney, blank faced and unaffected. Or at least outwardly so. And just a small part of warrior Davinney is afraid that Strega won’t, in fact, ever care about her like that again.
I go along with Strega’s apparent decision to revert our relationship to that of caretaker and ward. Though my heart makes no progress toward rebuilding as the days pass and the end of Assimilation creeps closer, I soldier on as if that decision were my own.
Ritter busies himself during his long, function free days by taking up various body mastery classes. He hikes and learns to shoot. Less than a week after he sees me kissing Strega, he takes off with a group on a short trip into the Outer Territory, out beyond the reach of the slides, away from the ease of the ScanX and the MedQuick, and camps for several days.
Strega no longer stops by the keeping unless he can see visible damage when he logs me. The MedQuick will suffice for anything less. Only three days after Ritter takes off on the trip to the Outer Terr
itory, I’m going crazy. After just three days of having the keeping all to myself and talking to no one, I pull out my logger.
“Strega, would you please come over?”
“Are you hurt?” The genuine concern in his voice stings so bad I have to clench my jaw. Because I’m doing that, I can’t answer right away, and he grows more concerned. My Strega, I think, dropping the logger the moment he says, “I’m on my way.”
There’s no hiding the fact that I’ve been crying. Nothing the MedQuick can dispense will hide the evidence quickly enough that Strega won’t see. Instead, when he arrives at the keeping, he realizes at once that it is nothing medical. The fact that he remains motionless in the short hallway rather than approach me brings on a fresh wave of tears that no amount of blankness on my part can stop.
Finally, finally, he’s Strega again, crossing the room in two quick strides, enveloping me in his arms, making no move to grab those little disks that could calm me in an instant. He says nothing, just holds me and lets me talk.
“Strega,” my voice muffles out from his shoulder, “please don’t shut me out. I can’t do this. Ritter’s gone, and you’re gone, and I’m afraid to talk to Mina or Melayne because they’re both involved with guardians. I don’t know whose side they’re on, and there’s no one else…” That sounds horrible, like I only want him because there’s no one else. But that’s not what I mean and that’s not how he takes it.
Finally, finally, he kisses me. Slowly at first. Timidly, even. But soon everything is poured into that kiss. Desperation. Longing. Loneliness. Fear. Regret. Desire.
When I am left breathless, my forehead on his chest, he speaks.
“I don’t know how to love you without hurting Ritter,” he admits.
“I know,” I say, idly running my fingers over his solid shoulders.
“And I don’t know how not to love you,” he adds huskily.
More tears sting my eyes, but these are happy tears. Relieved tears. “I don’t want to hurt him, either,” I say. “But I’m not Linney. I just look a little bit like her.”
Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) Page 25