The Body Electric - Special Edition (29 page)

It feels as if everything in my life is nothing but rotting bones.

Jack takes me a few blocks away from the catacombs, and he accesses a street-level garage with a retina scan. The locks to the metal door slide open, and a few minutes later he emerges with an antique black electric-model all-terrain Vespa with gold trim. It’s beat-up and old, but when he starts the engine, the thing is silent, and the tires look new. It looks inconspicuous, old, and worthless, but the bike is probably powerful enough to scale a mountain on.

Jack swings a leg over the seat and scoots forward, making room for me. “I don’t get my own?” I say.

“There’s only one, love.”

“Then let me drive,” I say. “And don’t call me love.”

Jack moves back in the seat, but just before I clamber on, he adds, “Of course, you
do
know where we’re going, right?”

I growl and climb onto the Vespa behind him. I don’t put my arms around his waist, instead opting to hold onto the fender behind me. Jack glances back at me, shrugs, and the scooter purrs to life, lurching forward and bouncing over the pot-hole-ridden street in front of the garage as the doors close automatically behind me.

I’m so turned around that I’m not sure where we’re going, other than away from civilization. Jack avoids all the bigger towns and cities on the way. Mdina fades into the background, although the bright lights of New Venice—including the sparkling tips of Triumph Towers—are still visible to the northwest.

When Jack veers off the road and into the rocky terrain of a warehouse packing district, I grab his waist to avoid falling off the back, clinging to him as we bounce painfully over the streets that were probably never properly paved. Jack drops one hand on top of mine, holding me against him, and I start to pull away, but decide against it. It’s warm, next to him, and it makes me feel safe.

After a while, I realize where we’re going. The land is more and more deserted, not even factories venturing this far north and east. Hollow remains of buildings stare blankly at us as Jack risks the bumpy streets again. The roads were once well-travelled and popular, but hardly anything of that time remains.

We’re heading into the former war zone.

The Secessionary War was hard on every country involved. There is a mark in every land. In Malta, our biggest scar is the former capital, Valetta.

Jack stops before we reach the ruined remains of the city. He pulls up to a twisted iron gate that blocks a series of broken stone steps. A blue-and-white tiled sign speckled with age announced that we’re at
SENGLEA
. Underneath the city is a phrase written in Latin:
Città Invicta.

Jack sees my gaze. “It means, ‘the unconquerable city.’”

What a joke. Every city falls.

I jump off the Vespa, rubbing my sore butt as Jack uses an old-fashioned key on a metal lock at the top of the stairs, and the gate swings open. The dim night sky is full of more stars than I have ever seen. I push past Jack, my eyes to the heavens, and step forward onto a plaza made of smooth, pale bricks, many of which are cracked or missing. A low wall made of similar bricks lines the side of the plaza, and I rush to it, breathing in the heady scents of saltwater as I gaze up.

Above us, the moon is a sliver, nothing more than a tiny scratch of white in the sky. The constellations stretch out far over the sea, and the waters glitter beneath them.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathe. I never see the stars in New Venice.

I turn to look at Jack. But he’s not looking at the sky. He’s looking at the water. He’s looking at the hole in the world, an entire city leveled and filled in with the sea.

“That’s where Valetta used to be,” I say, even though we both know. The once great city, the former capital of our entire nation. Nothing but a sunken circle of black water. All that remains of the city—all the remains of the hundreds of thousands of people who used to live in the city—is under the sea.

I look around me with fresh eyes, eyes that are aware of where we are. There are bricked-in olive trees arching over us, a sort of memorial made of stone balls in the center—but past the garden I can see the relics of old buildings, the crumbling foundations of a church, a clock tower that was knocked sideways in the force of the blast that destroyed Valetta.

“When the capital was bombed during the Secessionary War,” Jack says somberly, “Everyone there died immediately. It completely wiped out the whole city. But some of the cities nearby, like this one… some of the buildings survived. Most of the people didn’t, not if they didn’t make it to a shelter.”

I feel dangerous just standing here, overlooking the remains of a city long-dead. The bomb was a solar-flare; the radiation poison might make a person sick, but it rarely killed, not like nuclear bombs of the past. Still, I feel as if we shouldn’t be here, a wrongness that reminds me of my reaction to the catacombs.

And then I recall what PA Young told me, about how she was in Valetta just before the bomb, with my parents and Ms. White. I imagine what it must have been like as they huddled in a bomb shelter for protection. The terror, the horror. Ms. White, nearly bleeding to death after her arm was lost in the blast. My parents, not even married yet, unsure of if they would survive. And Hwa Young, the woman who would one day rule the entire UC, crouched in a shelter, listening to the sounds of a hundred thousand people dying.

Maybe if I’d been there, I would understand why she is willing to turn people into soulless shells in order to avoid such violence again.

Jack and I lean over the wall at the top of the garden in Senglea, looking across the Grand Harbour at where Valetta once stood. Jack makes a sort of growling angry noise, and turns his back on the emptiness that was once the capital, staring instead at the scattered remains of the city we’re in, destroyed not by the bomb, but by the blowback and tsunami that followed it. “It’s worse, I think,” he says in a low, almost inaudible voice, “to leave something more than a gaping hole.”

fifty

Jack walks under the wind-swept olive trees toward a tower built into the wall at the very edge of the city. We’re high up overlooking the harbor, and I’m momentarily filled with vertigo as I watch Jack jump over the pavement broken by tree roots and age, nothing more than a twisted, rusted iron railing protecting him from the deadly drop over the side of the walled city.

A small tower is built into the wall, no more than the size of my closet. Neat, rectangular windows are cut directly into the stone bricks that make the hexagonal room, capped with a pointed dome roof that ends on a geometric sort of a design that I can’t quite fully see in the dark. Over top each of the windows of the tower is an additional carving, alternating between a giant ear and an enormous eye. A bird, its long neck craning down, is carved into the stone.

Jack notices me staring. “This used to be a watch tower, like a thousand years ago. The eyes and ears represented how the guards of the city were always watching and listening.”

We were asleep—among the closed-eyes of the dead

in the catacombs—now we’re awake. Jack’s code finally makes sense.

As Jack approaches the tower, the stone bird over the door comes to life. Jack stands still, his eyes wide, as the bird’s head moves up and down. The bird snaps back into place, every appearance of stone. The eyes and ears carved into the tower flash once, bright red, and then they, too, fade back into stone.

“I don’t think that’s from a thousand years ago,” I say, staring at the stone bird, the electronics inside it now invisible.

Jack snorts with unamused laughter. “The Zunzana may have done a few updates. It’s a bug-out tower now, for if one of us has to go on the run.”

I step inside the small room under the stone roof. The windows are open, as is the door. It’s small, but there’s plenty of room for both of us standing.

Jack works quickly, first typing a code into his cuff, then touching a hidden panel under the lip of the stone wall. Silvery material drops like curtains around the building.

“Anti-tech cloth?” I ask, touching the slick material.

“It’s the closest thing we have to an invisibility cloak,” he says. He nods toward the door. “Go look.”

I step outside the tower room and look back at it. The anti-tech cloth lines the inside, keeping any geo-locators or nanobots out. Meanwhile, the outer shell of the curtains is made of a thin, malleable screen that projects the image of an empty tower. When I’m right next to the curtains, I can tell that they’re hiding the tower, but even from a few steps back, it looks as if the tower is empty, all signs of Jack gone.

When I step back inside, there’s barely room for me to stand. Jack has opened a hidden compartment in the floor and withdrawn two instabeds. He pops open the packages, and two foam mattresses spring to life.

I lean so far against the window that I’m practically hanging out it, my shoulders against the anti-tech cloth. The instabeds are narrow and thin, much like this tower room. When Jack lays them down, they’re side-by-side. It’s more like one large bed than two small ones. I can’t take my eyes off the nonexistent space between the mattresses.

Jack looks up and notices my nervous face. “I don’t bite, love.”

I whip around. “I told you to quit calling me that.” Jack opens his mouth to speak, but I don’t let him. “I don’t care what kind of person I am in your memory. Because I’m not that person
now
.”

Jack looks as if I’ve smacked him across the face. He turns silently back to the beds, pushing them as far apart as possible. My heart is racing; I feel like I’ve run a marathon.

I snatch the second thin pillow and metallic blanket from his hands, spreading them out over my foam mattress, and then lay down as far away from Jack as possible, my body scrunched against the angled stone wall.

Part of me feels stupid. But part of me feels scared.

I don’t know who I am anymore, and I don’t like the way Jack seems to know me in a way I don’t know myself. I don’t pretend to understand the situation. Jack has memories of me—
a blue-and-brown damask bed cover, a night together, kisses that stop the whole world.

But…
I
don’t have those memories.

“I’m sorry.”

I peek over my shoulder; Jack has his back to me and spoke the words to the wall.

“I forget,” he says, still without turning. “You—I forget you’re not my Ella anymore.”

“I’m not,” I say softly. I don’t know what I used to be, I only know what I am now.

“I know.”

The night is silent. Although I am not touching Jack at all, I’m deeply aware of his presence, just a few inches from me.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he says finally, his voice so low I can barely hear it. “To have loved you the way I loved you, and for you to not even remember who I am.”

I roll over, facing the center of the tower, and, after a moment, Jack shifts too. He watches me intently, his face cast in darkness, his eyes unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. The words feel feeble and useless, but they’re all either of us has.

We both turn away from each other, and we let the night encase us.

fifty-one

I wake up in his arms.

For one brief moment, I panic. This isn’t my bed, my home. I freeze, and my brain whirls into motion.

It’s barely dawn. I can’t see the sun, just that everything’s a little brighter, a little less midnight blue and more orange-gold. I’m tangled up in two blankets, mine and his, and Jack’s barely covered at all. His arms are around me, one under my head, the other thrown over my body. His face is centimeters from mine.

This is a comfortable position. It is one, I realize, that we must have practiced. My body knows how to meld against his.

I stare at his face as the world grows lighter. His eyelids twitch, clinging to a dream. His mouth murmurs, and even though I cannot hear the sound, the shape his lips form is my name.

How does he know me?
I want to reach into his mind and know not simply what he knows of me, but how. I want to see myself through his eyes; I want to know the Ella he cannot forget.