And ironically, the fact that I don’t fear anything is what scares me most. I fear myself more than anything. I fear what I am capable of, and the price that I will have to pay to ensure my survival.
“No, I mean like we are going to die now.” Although I can’t see his expression, I know he is likely throwing his arms in the air with annoyance. “This freaking hole can cave in at any moment, and even if the soldiers up there don’t find us, I don’t think people who buried us in a hole will be too nice to us if they ever decide to bring us out.”
“There is a ladder right here.” I put my hand around the rusted metal first rung, feeling stupid for not climbing down that and instead letting my body be chucked twenty feet to the ground. “I don’t think these people are monsters. That girl Ai hugged me, after all. I just think we all have no clue what any of us are saying.”
“Hold up, you are telling me there is a ladder somewhere in here.”
“Dead ass, bro.” I hit my fist against it, a dull ping echoing through our sad pit.
“Damn, our lives are wild.” He leans on me, then shifts away as he recognizes my soft body is not the rigid rock wall. There is no light down here for our eyes to take in. No matter how dilated our pupils are, it’s impossible to adjust to this ebony.
A loud bark echoes down the hole, cutting Jake off before he can continue.
“Dude, there are dogs here.” Jake stands up, his first instinct to try and find a place to run to. They know we are here. And there’s no way we can run away this time. We are trapped in a hole twenty feet under the ground. Not even the Chimera Cube can burrow us out of here without us confronting them.
I open the backpack and make one last-ditch command at trying to save us.
“Scent-eliminating spray,” I whisper and double-tap the cube, and a weird, chemical flavor sprinkles my tongue. I pictured the spray coming in a nice plastic bottle like most household cleaning appliances, but the Chimera Cube has a mind of its own, and its spray swathes the entire hole and burns my eyes.
“What the fuck is that?” Jake snaps at me, the same horrible pain shooting through both our eyes.
“Scent-eliminating spray. It’s the only way to make sure those dogs don’t get us killed.”
“Oh, yeah, cause everyone weirdly whispers into their backpack and out comes spray that can mask our scent from Chinese military dogs.” Jake coughs. The first time, the impulse is genuine, but after that he coughs several more times for dramatic effect. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
“You know how I am. I’m always prepared,” I say, and my ego inflates as silence follows my words. The dogs have stopped barking upstairs. They can’t smell us anymore, but they definitely still know that we were here. And that could be enough to get us killed.
“That’s the problem. No one can prepare for the moment their lives collapse. Yet you are, and it’s about time you tell me why you’re not worried. Why do you seem calm about all of this?”
“I’m not calm.” I chuckle, inhaling the musty, dry air. “I’m good at hiding it. I’m good at numbing myself out. I do my best to forget about a lot of the past. Forget about my dad, about Riva, about all the people I have killed, and focus on the future.”
“What future do you envision for us now?” He’s almost yelling. His voice shakes a bit with the passion in his voice. “Because I don’t see a future at all. I’m trying to live moment by moment. Absorbing one tragedy after another, trying to figure out how me and my best friend can live in a world that is out to kill us.”
“I see an amazing future for us.” I pause, a rush of electricity shooting through my veins as I say the words. Within a second the blackness in my mind fills with the colorful visions of my imagination of a world with endless riches, endless life, and endless love.
A utopia that we create.
“I see a truly awesome one.” My words are airy.
The silence that follows sends chills down my spine. I grip the straps of my backpack, the smooth fabric becoming something like a big-boy security blanket for me.
“Are you mental?” he asks me straight up in the same tone that someone would ask someone about the weather.
“No.”
“Then how the hell can you have so much hope when the world is falling apart? How can you feel that our future is going to be amazing if every second is a struggle to survive for us?”
“There are gonna be some rough times, and things might be shit for a real long time, but in the end, everything will be great.” I try and tell him how I feel without mentioning why. It’s a shitty thing to do in any relationship, especially when how I feel makes no sense given the context.
I have to tell him the truth.
But I’m scared.
I’m scared to confront the monster in the closet of our relationship that caused Jake and I to distance from each other in the first place. I’m scared to tell him the secret that I vowed to never share with anyone.
But I can’t hide this anymore. He deserves to know the truth like Riva did, even if this truth is the reason his dad died.
“That’s such bullshit.” Jake’s voice is an octave higher than normal, which always precedes an outburst from him. “We said we would be open with each other. We said we would be in this together. Blood brothers, remember?” He is speaking so fast that he is putting every hysterical drunk person to shame. “But I don’t know what you’re doing, because all I know is that Li Wang wanted to figure out what was in your bag and that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. And now that we are here you have been creating objects, weapons, futuristic shit at the drop of a dime and somehow using it to get us to survive in a high-speed pursuit with one of the most powerful military forces on Earth.
“Do you know how insane that sounds? The words don’t even make sense as they come out of my mouth! They make no freaking sense, and I need you to help me. I need you to tell me everything you know, everything that is in that bag, because I am not a brick. You can’t hide that from me. And with the way things are right now, I’m not sure if it’s possible for you to hide that from anyone.”
I am unable to speak right after he takes a deep breath and finally finishes talking. The exhaustion and overflowing melting pot of everything else I am feeling brings my mind to a weird state. A state where I am in Jake’s body saying the same exact lines to my dad.
I know exactly how he feels.
My dad did things that I questioned and hid stuff from me for years and for weeks even when my life was on the line because of it.
He did everything to protect his secret because he couldn’t trust anyone with it. He lived in fear over someone trying to take advantage of him and attempting to abuse the Chimera Cube and tarnish Isaac Savery’s legacy.
I can’t be the same way.
I have to be a better man than my father.
It will be hard, it might even be impossible, but I have to try. I can’t live with the fear he had. I can’t always isolate. I can’t always hide from my emotions.
I have to trust him with the truth.
And if it comes back to haunt me later… well, I won’t let myself go down that rabbit hole.
“I don’t know how to say this.”
“I don’t know either.” Jake puts a hand on my forearm. “But you have to try.”
“Okay.” I nod and prepare to tell him, but the second my mouth opens, a sharp cry comes out. Tears pour down my face, the walls of defense inside my body tearing down. Even with the adrenaline still energizing me, it is not enough to hold back the shock and sadness that overwhelms me.
“Dude.” Jake grabs me. “Dude, what’s wrong?”
“Fuck,” I say, the pain audible in my strained voice. It hurts to think, even hurts to exist. I can feel everything breaking down inside me, and the one thing that I detest more than everything else is wreaking havoc on all the orbs of hope I hold inside me—guilt.
“Ae you having a heart attack?”
“No.” I can’t help but cr
ack a smile even in the middle of crying. “No, I’m not.”
“Then what the hell is wrong with you?”
“A lot is coming to me right now, man.” Snot drips down my face. Yes, I don’t cry often, but when I do, I ugly cry. I would tell you not to judge me, but I am already hard core judging myself. “So much shit that I wish I never had to think about.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that I’ve never really trusted anyone, just like my dad.” The tears slow down and my breaths steady, but my mind is still on a wild roller coaster ride that may never end. “And yeah, I’ve opened up to some people in moments, but most of those people are now dead. And you are the only person I love still living, and I can still barely tell you what’s going on, never mind how I feel about it.”
“Why?”
“Because.” I pause, at first sounding like any little kid pouting about time out. “Because I’m not afraid of this world. I’m not afraid of what it can do to me. I’m not afraid of one hundred people chasing us. I’m not afraid of killing people or manipulating world leaders or putting my life in danger each day. But I am afraid of how all that will make me feel. I am afraid of my pain, my sorrow, and everything I have been through that I refuse to feel. I’m afraid to deal with the truth myself. And the second I tell someone else it, I know that I will have to confront all the emotions that I don’t want to. I will need to confront the monsters in my past, the demons in my own mind. And most of all, I’m afraid that someone will use all of that to hurt me and give me yet again another reason to be afraid of feeling and accepting my own truth.”
“That is deep.” Jake sighs. Being this far underground, the only sounds are from our heartbeats and words, which is an ominously beautiful thing. “That’s not why you broke down, though. I know you like the back of my hand. You have struggled with that your entire life. This is something new. This is something else.”
I gulp. Sometimes when your mind decides it has had enough for the moment, it’s hard to know exactly what factor in life pushed you over the edge.
I know exactly what pushed mine to let the floodgates down, and just saying the words out loud will make me feel like an even more horrible person.
“You’re right. You’re right.” I gulp, preparing to share with him the deadliest secret in the world. “The truth is that in my bag is the Chimera Cube. In short, it can produce unlimited materials at zero cost as a result of its hi-tech nanofabrication system. I don’t know all of its abilities, but it’s capable of almost anything you can imagine. In this bag is the cube and the patents to the technology filed after a secret military experiment called Protocol 00. Both our dads were mentored by Isaac Savery, the head of the experiment, and when he died, he passed on the technology to them. Isaac’s goal was for it to be released into the world when it is ready for it, so that the destruction of all human society is prevented, and positive effects of the technology are maximized. But the Chinese government knows we have the technology invented in Protocol 00 and the U.S. government does too. Even the Syndicate knows—after all, the only reason we got caught up in this mess with the Syndicate trying to kill me and tear us apart is because James funneled all the money the Syndicate gave them to fund the research for building this prototype of the device. Then he built an entire mini-civilization called Zion where real people lived in harmony with this technology. They lived in a utopia, and the day the FBI came after us, my dad killed himself and every single person in Zion.
“He destroyed that place forever and gave me the only thing left on Earth from the Protocol 00 experiment. These patents,” I say, patting my hand on the thick stack of papers in the backpack, “allowed my dad to make this cube. And this cube is the holy grail of everything. It’s the only way our civilization can remember one of the greatest geniuses to ever inhabit this Earth. And his one dying wish was that no one ever find out about his work—he wanted to keep it buried because he was afraid to be remembered as the man responsible for creating the beginning of the end.
“I’ve only known about this for less than seventy-two hours, the craziest seventy-two hours of my life, and my dad told me to tell no one. But he was wrong. Because I had to tell you. Even if you didn’t see everything you already saw. Even if I actually managed to keep this thing hidden, I had to tell you because he was wrong about keeping this thing buried until the world is ready for it. The world won’t ever be ready for this. The world won’t ever be perfect. But that’s not an excuse to not try. But trying is hard when you know you have to hurt so many people in the process.”
“How is that even possible?” Jake says. He doesn’t need any demonstration to know what this thing is capable of. He has seen it all already.
“That’s a great question.” I keep the backpack guarded close to me. I may have told him what this thing is capable of, but that doesn’t mean I will let him use it. If something goes wrong with this cube, I want to be the one responsible. And if something goes right, well, I want to be the one responsible too. “I bet I’d learn a lot if I read the several hundred pages of papers, but I haven’t exactly had time to yet. I’ve just been focused on making sure we survive.”
“I don’t expect you to be a quantum physics whiz,” Jake says sarcastically, his tone a bit cold. “Everything is starting to connect in my mind, though. I should finally tell you something too.”
“What is that?”
“There’s a reason why I worked with Drew.” He gulps, a nervous energy emanating off him that signals to me that he knows he shouldn’t be telling me this. There is a slight ringing in my ears as he talks. “There’s a reason why I agreed to throw a party at your house knowing that the Syndicate rigged some of the supports in your porch to fall that night. He told me the truth about James. He said that James killed my dad. And now I know why. He wanted that technology all to himself. He couldn’t trust anyone with it.”
Jake pauses. I hear the grinding of the boxes against the wooden planks up above. I grab the backpack and put my finger on the scanner.
They are coming.
Jake doesn’t move. He doesn’t even seem startled that they are here. All I can feel is the heavy stare he is drilling into me that is causing goose bumps to line my skin.
“I’m glad you are different,” he says.
The planks are pushed to the side at the top of the hole. A number of voices yell down the tunnel at us, and rays of light from the surface penetrate into the darkness, leaving my eyes in pain and shell-shocked.
My mind isn’t even worried about whoever is up there to get us. All my brain can do is run in circles ruminating about Jake’s last words.
He doesn’t know how wrong he is.
I’m not different at all.
I have a choice to make. A horrible choice that I am unsure if it has a right answer or not.
I can either kill hundreds, thousands, likely even millions to ensure that I have the power to implement the Chimera Cube correctly and save billions in the future. Or I can bury this technology, let no one touch it, and by saving millions today I could be inadvertently killing billions tomorrow.
The choice I have made so far is clear.
And all I can think about are the mangled bodies of the imperial soldiers after the explosion and the horrible destruction in Beijing after the aircraft crashed.
They are people too. They all matter as much as everyone else.
Sometimes life isn’t as easy numbers make it seem.
Chapter 19
“They are gone,” the familiar voice of Ai calls down, the outline of her head blocking some of the light as she peers down the hole at us.
“Do we trust it?” Jake glances up at her skeptically. “This could be a sick trick from Mr. Wang.”
“If they are letting us out, let’s go,” I mutter to Jake and zip my backpack up. “If they knew we were here, they would have imprisoned them all by now. We are safe—for now.”
He nods in agreement and we both ascend up the ladder. The rust f
rom the ladder rubs onto my hands and my back cracks with each movement, my body still sore from the fall combined with every other physical feat I have endured in the last couple hours.
I stop midway up the ladder.
“And Jake.”
“What?” he responds, his head knocking into my knees as I abruptly stop.
“Don’t ever tell anyone about our secret. This stays between us, and when the time is right, we will let it out into the world. If either one of us breaks that pact—well, let’s just say it will be exactly how the Syndicate treats it.”
“Of course.” His tone is defensive. “I’m not an idiot, I know that. I would never tell anyone.”
“Good.” After saying those words, I feel better and finish climbing up the last few feet of the ladder. I hate the tense energy in those moments between us, but it’s necessary.
Times used to be different.
We used to be able to laugh and joke truly without a care. We used to be able to sweep our tiny issues under the rug knowing that they would never come back up to haunt us.
Now, those days are gone.
Those days are dead.
“Everything okay?” Ai says, forgetting to say the verb in her sentence. Ai and another woman help pull me up out of the hole in the closet without banging my head against the shelf above me.
They help Jake in the same manner. Ai stares at us, her smile beaming from ear to ear with an infectious glimmer in her eyes. I can’t tell if her cheeks are red from the makeup or whether she is blushing, but she looks beautiful.
The other woman looks the exact same as Ai, only with a slightly fuller face and longer hair. And I mean that—if they aren’t twins then I must be blind, because their facial structure and even eyes are the same shape and color.
“They left.” Ai pats me on the back. I turn to face the candles lining the hallway that now feel bright and lively compared to their dim and ominous vibe before. The air feels much lighter up here on the surface, and having more than a few inches around me to breathe is a new luxury that I very much appreciate.
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