E (29 page)

We're at the edge of the market when Jonas says, very softly,
"There's something I have to tell you."

There's a weightiness in his voice that makes me look at him,
half-startled.  He glances at Oscar, then pulls me to a stop.  We're
at the corner of an intersection, not far from a Sentry's post, but it doesn't
seem to bother Jonas, and I'm too curious to worry about it.  We stand
against the side wall of a building, facing each other, our opposite shoulders
leaning into the wall.  My eyes move over his face, but I find no answers
there.  Only a look that I've never seen on him before, at once serious
and vulnerable and hesitant.

I can't quite bring myself to ask the question, but I see he's
working up to the answer, anyway.  My heart races, afraid of what he'll
say.  My mind, trying to keep up with my heart, runs through all sorts of
scenarios of things gone wrong.  Things that could send this moment
crashing down on me like a collapsing building.

He smiles, just a little.  Enough to soothe me.  I take
a deep breath, and wait for him to speak.

"She doesn't have it in for us," he says, quietly, like
he's telling me a secret.

My eyes dart back and forth across his face.

"Fate," he whispers.  His smile is soft, tentative,
and warm as can be.  While I'm still puzzling over his words, he draws his
hood up over his face.  I shiver.  He moves closer, both of us turning
so that I'm more against the wall than he is.  He places his palms against
the brick on either side of me, leaning close.  "Lily," he says
softly.  "It's your name.  Lily."

My whole body reacts to the sound of it-- electric shivers through
my spine, the tightening of my stomach and ribcage, the sense that my brain and
heart have had the ground yanked from under them and they're falling.  The
flower peddlers are long gone, but I'm hearing their song, feeling that mix of
too-intense emotions, and knowing, now, that it has nothing to do with death,
or flowers, or anything but me.  I remember Jonas humming that tune, and
everything intensifies to the point of dizziness.  Trembling, wide-eyed, I
stare up at him, wanting to ask him a million questions.  But he already
knows I want to ask them. In that secret world we have created between us, he
does his best to answer them.  He raises his hands to his mouth, pulls
down his lower lip, and waits.

The 'L's are inked backward, but the other letters are
symmetrical, and require no reversing.  "YLIL".  Lily.

My world changes faster than my brain can keep up with. 
There are so many things to make sense of, and they all come at me randomly, in
glimpses.  It may take me years to truly process it all.  Jonas has
this name printed on his lip, and it seems to belong to me.  I have one on
mine.  Jason.  Jason, Jonas.  Jonas, Jason.  I stare and
stare at him.  He's looking at me with barely restrained hope, and
suddenly I remember the feeling of losing him.  How real it was.  Because
it was real.  Tears start to well up in my eyes, but then, he leans in,
and our noses touch, and we're breathing each other's breath.  I am in the
eye of the storm.  Everything has gone calm, and haunting, and quiet.

"Aw, seriously?"  It's Oscar's voice, suitably
scandalized. 

We pull away from each other quickly, though not entirely.

"Can't you do that later?" Oscar says, and takes another
shot at a pile of snow, and runs away.

Jonas and I, watching him go, giggle like children.  His
face, close to me, is pink from the cold and laughter, his eyes slits, his
cheeks smooth mounds at the end of a broad smile.  I've never seen
anything so beautiful.  I glance at the intersection, at Oscar, who is
digging in the snow.  A young boy rushes by and bumps into a woman who is
carrying recyclables in a basket.  They spill and scatter in the
street.  Oscar abandons his rock and rushes to help pick her items up.

"He's doing OK," Jonas says, echoing my thoughts. 
Joy is beaming inside me.  For as bad as the world has gotten, Jonas is
right.  Maybe Fate doesn't have it in for us after all.

He turns his green eyes back to me, and the smile, like the world,
falls away.  He leans closer to me, and our noses touch again.  The
air from his mouth is like pure oxygen.  I want to breathe more of
it.  I want to breathe him in.  His smooth, warm lips ease over mine,
and I'm reeling, lost in every sensation.  The pressure.  The slow
slipping of our mouths together.  His palms sliding over my waist to the
small of my back.  Shrieking.  "Thief!  Thief! 
Thief!"  We pull away from each other, eyes widening.

Oscar, with a piece of cardboard in his hand, looks up at the
woman with dawning horror.  The Sentry's mirrored black visage glints in
the sun as it pivots toward him.  I scream his name, lunging from too far
away.

Jonas catches me in his arms.  I twist and claw my way
free.  I have to get to Oscar.  Every movement feels like pushing
through water.  Reaching for him.  I’m so slow, and the Sentry is so
fast.  It will take him from me.  Take everything.  I move
forward.  Jonas’ arms around my waist hold me back. 

“Oscar!” I shriek, but it comes out a sob.  Tears gush from
my eyes.   My fingernails tear into Jonas’ arms, but he won’t release
me. 

Oscar's eyes dart toward me.  He doesn't try to run.  He
knows.  His face is grey with terror, but he finds my gaze.  His
little mouth forms the words silently. 
I love you
.

I sob the words back.  My heart screams them.  A
thousand times.  As if expressing the truth and depth of the emotion could
somehow make this stop.  As if the Sentry would see that it simply cannot
take him.  It cannot leave us, who have so little, with nothing.

My soul is tearing to shreds trying to go with him
.
 
But I can’t go with him.  I can’t protect him.  He will be lost, and
alone, and he will not remember how I loved him so much. 

The Sentry looms over him, the bringer of suffering.  Defiler
of the innocent.  Thief of joy.  There is no malice in its blank
face.  Only apathy.  Below it, Oscar’s brown eyes are still locked
with mine.

"Let go!”  My voice is hoarse, shredded.  My feet
slide on fragments of concrete.  “Please.  Please. 
Please!”  Jonas does not let go.

It strikes.  It’s metal claw closes over Oscar’s face and
jerks him upward.  His body goes limp, hanging.  It turns, and moves
away.  Oscar’s little legs and feet dangle limply from under the monster's
arm.  Every step carries him further out of my life.  Every step is a
divide that can never be crossed.

I’m hanging over Jonas’ arms, reaching for the little boy who has
slipped beyond my grasp.  I can’t see the world through my tears. 
Instead, I see Oscar’s face.  The first time he smiled at me-- how it
melted me.  How it made me want to be part of this family.  All the
silly, toothy grins.  His face scrunched up, concentrating on his
slingshot.  The whispered secrets. 
Buckets
.   Our
hands, clasped together. 
I love you.

Jonas’ reigns me in, pulling me close to him.  “No, Eden,” he
whispers, holding on to me fiercely.  “He’s gone.”  

I blink the tears away to find him.  My Oscar.  But
Jonas is right.  He’s gone.

“Oscar!”  His name pours out of my heart, my lungs.  I
can’t see him.  “Bring him back, you soulless piece of crap!” I
shriek.  People in the street move away from us.  “Bring him back or
I’ll--“

Jonas’ hand muffles the rest of my words.  “Shhh,” he
insists, squeezing me to him.  “You can’t.  They’ll take you, too.”

I don’t care.  I shake my head to free my mouth of his hand.

“It’s too late,” he says.  “I’m sorry.  He’s gone.”

No.

No
, I want to say, but the words are gone, too.  There is only
a noise building inside me.  A noise unlike any noise I have ever made
before.  It comes up my throat, growing, feeding itself.  Every cry
or scream or shriek I have ever made before pales in comparison.  This
noise is its own thing.  Raw grief unleashed.

I fall backward into Jonas’ arms.  He half catches me,
lowering us to the ground.  He holds onto me desperately, whispering my
name, rocking me, trying, somehow, to comfort me.  But there is no
comfort.  Oscar is gone.

There will never be comfort. 

I sit in the dirt, my head thrown back to the sky.  My wail
runs down the streets of the Outpost, searching for a boy who has already been
erased.

I spend three days in bed.  For three days, I recall every
detail of what happened.  I think of all the things I could have done to
stop it.  All the things I might have done differently.  All the
choices I made that led to Oscar's being taken away from me forever.  I
berate myself for every wrong choice.  I hate myself.  I hate
Jonas.  When that pain is not enough, I imagine Oscar, alone and
frightened, in a box.  Thinking he's dying.  Not knowing who he
is.  I imagine him waking up in a world that hates him.  I imagine
all the horrifying, unthinkable things that could happen to him.  They're
all my fault.  I didn't love him enough to keep him safe.  I failed
him in the most terrible of ways.  All this thinking and imagining eats away
at me, and finally, near the end of the three days, I slip  from
consciousness with only the image of Oscar in my mind.

When I wake, only Neveah is with me.  I could have been
asleep for a few hours, or a few days.  Whatever has hold of my head is
squeezing with exactly enough pressure to cause immense pain without actually
crushing my skull.  Neveah, having sensed me stirring, is already taking
warm water from the top of the stove and sprinkling a packet of herbs into
it.  She swishes it around with her finger, then brings it to me, presses
it into my hands.  I gulp the whole thing without asking, hand the pan
back to her, grab my jacket, and head out the door.

The streets are filled with slush.  Clearly, there's been
more snow, but it's purity cannot stand up to the grey footprints of our
souls.  I slip through the muck and mud, not knowing where I'm
going.  Not caring.  Everything has changed.  There is no beauty
in this world.  No point to it.  So I wander, and wander, and my own
grey footprints only add to the mess.  Everything I see reminds me of
Oscar.  So I stop seeing.  I just stop.  And I walk without
seeing anything at all.

Sometimes, I'm back at our house, and people are trying to get me
to eat things, or drink things, or change out of my wet socks.  Sometimes,
I'm sitting in near-darkness in alleyways or on street corners.  Sometimes
I'm walking those winding paths, in daylight or moonlight.  Here. 
There.  My awareness skips from one place to another with no logical
progression between them.  I'm a mangled book, pages torn out and stuck
back in the wrong order.  Sometimes backward.  Upside down.  It
doesn't matter.  It doesn't even matter that sometimes the
sometimes
is me staring up at a Sentry.  I feel no fear, standing there under its
looming iron presence.  Only deep, deep hatred.  But Sentries do not
feel emotions.  My hating them cannot hurt them at all.

The days, like autumn leaves, fall away, and around me I see
everything slowly dying.  I shun the comfort my friends try to give
me.  I shun Jonas, and his apologies, and his empty words about how strong
Oscar is; how capable of survival.  He asks if I'm angry with him, and I
say no.  I don't want to argue.  It's just easier to stay away. 
He's so busy with his little army that he doesn't have time to figure out I'm
lying.  It works for both of us this way.  Simpler.  Less
heart-breaking.  But being
away
is heart-breaking.  I am
angry, but I'm angrier that he doesn't try harder.  I want to be alone,
but I'm lonely.  So I walk, and fight off the recurring nightmares on my
own, and then walk some more.  Everything is building inside me,
seething.  I feel abandoned.  Forgotten.  Erased.

One day, I'm walking down the main street near the Rustler, and
ahead, by the door, I see Matt slip inside.  It makes me laugh.  Even
Matt.  But as I draw nearer, he comes back out.  His steps are slow,
hesitant, as he walks to the edge of the sidewalk, meeting my gaze.  He
says nothing-- just glances briefly down at the object in his hands. 

My eyes fall on it and linger.  I swallow against the swell
of emotion inside me.  I want to run away.  He holds it out. 
Before I know it, I'm reaching for it.  My fingers graze the band and
close around the cold metal where it forks.  I turn it over in my
hands.  Oscar's slingshot.  Matt says nothing.  I'm so grateful
that he says nothing.  Suddenly, I'm clinging to him, and tears are
spilling onto his shirt, and his arms are tight around me, squeezing out the
grief.

He takes me inside, out of the cold, and sits me on a stool next
to Miranda, who has ingratiated herself to him in a very short time. 
Arthur Adner sets a glass of whiskey in front of me.  It takes no
coaxing.  Unlike food, this goes down quickly and smoothly. I have several
before Miranda tries to slow me down.  I don't really care.  I just
sit there and clutch Oscar's slingshot-- the tiny piece of him the Sentries did
not take away.

This becomes my place, my perch, my habitat, as more days slip
by.  I'm here often, but I'm separate from it.  My world has been
severed from everyone else's and there's no reattaching it.  I'm entirely
peripheral.  Things happen around me.  The story of our lives is a
river that parts around a rock.  I am the rock.  They still try to
comfort me, to coax me to eat, but I am more stubborn than they are patient. 
And just like Jonas, Matt is busy with war preparations.

I ignore the long discussions about strategy-- aware that once I
would have listened eagerly.  The names that are mentioned, the details of
weaponry, none of it matters now.  I have nothing to protect.  Even,
sometimes, when people are dragged in, threatened, beaten, I only feel like I
should
feel sad.  But I don't.  I feel nothing at all. 

This nothing stretches on.  The span is too long.  My
mind comes to know this, but I can't seem to fix it.  Even trying to think
about Oscar just makes me tired, like I can't quite get the energy to
remember.  It's like being dead, but still moving.  Surely someone
has made a mistake and they just haven't noticed yet that I'm dead.  After
a while, I really start to wonder.  I haven't eaten in days.  I haunt
the Rustler, lingering in the background, speaking to no one.  It's too
crazy to be true, so it must not be.  But then, why am I like this?

I walk barefoot in the snow because I want to feel
something.  Cold.  Pain.  Numb.  I'm experiencing frostbite
of the soul.  Pieces of my being are shriveling and falling off.  Of
course, walking inevitably leads to the Sentries.  I face off against one
of the monsters again.  Its black face turns to me, anticipating. 
The aether-fumed air around us is charged with what will happen next.  But
is it real?  I wake in the middle of the night, and it was a dream. 
But it wasn't, before.  And it isn't the next day.  Or is it? 
How are we really supposed to tell the difference?

When I finally do feel the return of emotion, it is sheer
hatred.  Not the internalized, seething kind, but hatred that is focused
and motivated.  I'm sitting outside the Rustler, looking down the street
at the Sentry that guards the intersection.  My fingers curl, nails
slicing the soft flesh of my palms.  The rage moves, electric, surging
through my body, demanding to be conducted through brute force into the metal
construction that is supposed to protect us.  Miranda's hand on my
shoulder stops me from acting.  "Come inside," she says,
wrapping her arms about herself as she looks down on me.  "It's too
cold out here."  She shivers, for effect.

I quell my rage, but take it with me, glancing back toward the
Sentry as we move inside.

As I sit, evening moves into darkness.  Pieces start to come
together in my mind for the first time.  My dreams.  The
Sentries.  Oscar.  And Jonas.  The little bits of my brain that
were intact when I woke up from erasure.  The white tower.  Needing
to run.  As my mind touches the idea, I feel the need again, like thinking
about it has given it control over me.  I'm pummeled by a wave of
desperation.  I
need
to act.  Yet I'm still trapped in this
little world where I cannot.  There's no way out of the Outpost without
being caught.  Winter is closing in on us.  Outside, Grey's men are
probably looming.  If only I knew
why
all these things are in my
head.  If only I could somehow reach in and take them out.  I'm
sitting here thinking this over and over, when it hits me.  I turn and
glance around the Rustler, looking for Miranda.  She's standing by one of
the tables, talking to a group of Matt's men.  I strain my ears and catch
a few technical words.  The men are nodding, deferring to her
expertise.  One of them is jotting down some notes on a scrap of yellow
paper.  Another one leans closer to Miranda, laughing, saying something in
a low voice.  She smiles slowly back at him, meeting his gaze. 

I sigh, and lean back against the bar.  While I wait, I
formulate plans in my mind.

***

Holding my breath, I walk the length of tunnel behind Miranda's
bobbing lantern.  Fractured shards of flame and shadow play on the
wall.  I try to focus on the movement instead of on where I am.

"Are you
sure
you want to do this?" Miranda
whispers.  "I mean, aside from the fact that if Matt finds
out...."  She trails off, turning to peer at me over her
shoulder.  "Are you OK?"

I take a deep gulp of air.  It tastes like cold earth. 
Like a grave.  I swallow and nod, though inside I'm already
screaming.  "Just go," I growl.  Miranda scowls as she
turns back to where she's going.

We arrive at a metal doorway set into the end of the
corridor.  Miranda fiddles with the key in the first lock, but the second
turns smoothly.  She pushes the door open, sets her lantern down as we
come inside, and closes the door quietly behind us.

The room we've come into is not large, but it's enough to
alleviate my claustrophobia.  A simple square hollowed out of the
earth.  There's a second door on the opposite wall, but I really don't
care what's behind it.  We're here for the VR machine that sits in the
middle. 

A web of electrodes is worked inside a clear helmet on a swiveling
machine arm.  Beneath it is a half-reclined chair with heavy nylon straps
at the neck, shoulders, lap, ankles, and wrists.  The upholstery on the
arms, at the very ends, is torn.  Clawed.  The seat is dressed with
concentric stains-- whatever body fluids its many victims have ejected in the
throes of their distress.

I sit down, trying not to think about the other people who've sat
in this chair before me.  My eyes scan along the machine arm, following
its multiple twist of umbilical cords across to the console where Miranda is
standing.  She's frowning, but working away, her face lit with the
haunting cobalt glow of the aether tank beside her.  I can only hope she
knows what she's doing.  Her hands move across buttons, and keys, and
dials.  I watch her face.  Her intense eyes.  The focused turn
of her mouth.  The uncertain little twitch of her lower eyelid.

At last, she looks at me.  She frowns.  "You're
sure?"

I reach for the helmet, swinging it down over my head. 
"Let's go."

Miranda's frown deepens.  She walks across the room and
fusses about me, adjusting the way the helmet sits, working a strap across the
chin.  When she's satisfied that the electrodes are in place, she tightens
a hand-bolt on the swivel.  "I wonder if I should strap you in,"
she ponders, hand on chin.

I shrug.

"Don't move," she snaps.  She turns and walks away
without strapping me in.

I take a deep breath and try to prepare myself.

"The first part will just feel a little weird," Miranda
says.  "The machine synching with your brain or something."

"Or something?" I mumble.

"Shh."

I shut up, close my eyes, and consider the fact that if this goes
wrong, I might forget my troubles all together.

***

Darkness and light flutter before me, a great black-winged raven
flapping wildly in my face.  I blink against the vertigo, clamping my eyes
shut, then prying them open.  There's a screech in my ears-- a high
pitched hum that sinks its bit straight into one ear canal, through my brain,
and to the other.  Louder.  Higher.  The pressure in my head
builds.  Blinding light.  Whiteness that bleaches my mind free of the
stain of reality.  Then sudden quiet.  The whiteness softens. 
Blurs.  The fuzzy edges bleed with tendrils of color.  Floating like
seaweed, they reach upward, tangle, weave together. 

Oscar is in the grips of the Sentry and I'm trying to beat Jonas
off of me.  I'm screaming Oscar's name, twisting away.  I catch a
flash of his brown eyes, begging for help, but I'm unable to help him. 
Blocks of myself collapse inward to form a pile of rubble, but still I
scream.  If I can't break loose, I will lose everything.  I am beyond
panic, beyond despair.  This is the ultimate crisis.  This is the
death of the sun.  My mouth hangs open as I gape at the Sentry, turning,
turning away from me with Oscar in its arms.

Streaks swipe across the image, like someone has clawed it out. 
It crumbles into a thousand glimmering fragments that fall, then disappear into
nothingness.  The empty space where they were is a black hole.  It
widens, growing like it will suck the entire universe in.  Soon, it's so
wide that there is nothing else.  I look wildly around, realizing I'm
alone.  Realizing that the blackness of space is six metal walls that are
close enough to touch.  They move inward, shrinking around me.  I
flail at them, pressing my hands against the warm metal, but they continue to
close in.  I'm still screaming.  I've never stopped screaming.