The Always War

  “So it’s true, what people say?” she asked. “That everything can be traced?”

  “Not everything,” Gideon said. “Not if you know what you’re doing.”

  He began putting some of the wires back in, twisting them in different ways. He pulled out a set of tweezers from beneath the mattress and did surgery on some of the circuit cards.

  Tessa let her hand slip off his and just watched. After a few minutes he put the bottom of the computer back together and flipped it over and turned it on. He began typing in commands Tessa had never seen before, bringing up strings of mysterious code. They scrolled across the screen too fast for Tessa to read any of it. But Gideon kept typing, almost endlessly, his coding appearing just as rapidly and indecipherably as the computer’s. Did he keep all those incomprehensible strings of letters and numbers in his head? Why? What was he looking for?

  Tessa thought maybe he’d forgotten she was there. Then suddenly he stopped. He stared at the screen.

  “You won’t want to see this,” he said. His voice had gone flat again.

  “It’s my computer,” Tessa said stubbornly.

  Gideon looked at her. His eyes were so, so sad. Tessa had been around unhappy people all her life, but she’d never seen anything like this. You could drown in that kind of sorrow. You could fall into that grief and never be seen again.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Gideon said.

  He hit a single key, and the long strings of coding vanished. A few numbers still flashed across the bottom of the screen, but Tessa ignored them. Instead, suddenly, she was watching video.

  People dressed in odd, colorful clothes were crowded into some sort of marketplace. They swirled randomly from one stall to another, examining piles of melons, heaps of strawberries, oranges that seemed to glow in the sunlight. Children laughed and licked ice cream cones. Mothers snuggled babies tight against their chests and kissed their foreheads and tickled their tummies.

  Tessa leaned closer, drawn in. Enchanted.

  And then suddenly everyone in the video was looking up and screaming and running. The pillars of the fruit stands fell over, watermelons splattering to the ground, oranges rolling underfoot, people tripping and falling and screaming and screaming and screaming.

  Tessa felt the explosion that followed, rather than hearing it. She realized that Gideon must have turned the sound off. But she still felt shaken to her bones. She cringed, as if she expected the ceiling to fall on her own head, the world to come crumbling down around her own body.

  On the screen, dust rose up to meet everything that was falling down, falling apart, dying. The dust covered dead babies, dead children, dead mothers. Mercifully, the dust hid everything.

  The screen went black.

  Tessa couldn’t move.

  “That’s what I did,” Gideon said, and his voice was every bit as dead as the babies, the children, the mothers. “That’s what everyone’s worshiping me for.”

  He looked toward Tessa, and his eyes were dead now too.

  “I killed one thousand six hundred and thirty-two people,” he said. “Do you still think I’m a hero?”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Tessa backed away from him, pinning herself against the wall.

  “Didn’t you have to?” she asked in a small voice. “Wasn’t it … necessary?”

  “Was it?” Gideon asked, and in those two words she saw how completely lost he was. He was trying to find something to stand on, something to hold himself up.

  But there was nothing.

  “The enemy,” Tessa said numbly. “They want to kill us. Starve us. Choke us. To death.” She was only mouthing words she’d heard all her life. They didn’t seem to have any meaning anymore. Not with all that death seared onto her eyes. “You were killing to protect the rest of us.”

  “Those babies were going to kill us?” Gideon asked. “Babies?”

  “When … they grew up …,” Tessa whispered.

  “They’re not going to grow up!” Gideon screamed at her. “I killed them!” He snapped the computer shut and thrust it into her hands. “Go on! Get out of here! Before you’re contaminated too…. What I did—it was wrong! Evil! Evil! Evil!”

  Tessa yanked the door open and ran from him.

  In the outer room Mrs. Thrall was sobbing, her face twisted and anguished and destroyed, like Gideon’s had been twisted and anguished and destroyed. And now Tessa’s was twisted and anguished and destroyed too.

  At least Tessa could run away.

  Mrs. Thrall wasn’t looking at Tessa, but Tessa still paused at the door out into the hallway. Something made her stop and cram the computer back under her shirt, some fear that Gideon was right and somebody could be watching and just the sight of Tessa carrying a computer out of the Thralls’ apartment could be dangerous.

  How could she care about something like that when all those people were dead?

  Tessa ran into her own apartment and into her own room and threw herself across her bed. The edges of her computer, tucked under her shirt, poked into her skin. She shoved it down to the end of the bed. Somehow that wasn’t enough. She lifted the edges of the computer—retching just because she was touching it—and all but threw it under her bed. After a moment she dropped her pillow down after it, and then a blanket, too, stuffing both of them on top of the computer as if she could suffocate it.

  She still felt as though the images could float up from the computer into her head, like poison.

  Or ghosts.

  What if the images of all those dying people were still on her computer the next time she turned it on? What if they were always there? What if they were always in Tessa’s head?

  Those people are always going to be dead. Whether I remember them or not.

  “Gideon, you were supposed to be better than the rest of us,” Tessa whimpered. “Someone worth admiring.”

  Tessa heard a door open and a door close. She listened hard, something like hope springing back to life in her heart.

  Then she heard a toilet flushing, a door opening, and a door closing again. It had only been one of her parents, stumbling out of bed to use the toilet and then stumbling back to their grimy mattress.

  She remembered what she’d thought only a little while ago: Not me. I’m not going to be like them.

  And yet here she was, wallowing in her despair the same way they always wallowed in theirs.

  “No!” she wailed.

  She stood up, woozily. She yanked the mattress down from the frame and wedged it against the side of the bed, providing another layer between herself and the computer that had held those awful images. Then she whirled around and ran out of the room, out of the apartment, out of the building.

  If she ran fast enough, maybe she could trick herself into believing she had somewhere to go.

  After a while her legs cramped, and her lungs rebelled against drawing in another gulp of air when every breath felt like a blade against her ribs. She slowed to a walk.

  She’d been running blindly, darting around corners without any mind to direction, and now she was in a completely unfamiliar part of the city. She wended her way through the blank-faced crowds, people grimly standing in lines, people walking with their heads down, their eyes averted.

  She was in a marketplace. But in contrast to the cheerful, sun-dappled place in Gideon’s video before the bombs began to fall, this marketplace was full of filth and rot and misery. Toothless old men tried to sell shriveled-up apples rattling around in nearly empty boxes. Glassy-eyed children coughed up phlegm and spat it on the ground. And if some of the phlegm sprayed up onto the apples, nobody bothered wiping it away.

  No! Tessa wanted to scream. Somewhere there’s beauty, there’s hope, there’s love; somewhere it doesn’t get destroyed….

  She remembered the delicate, dew-covered spiderweb she’d seen that morning. She knew the dew would be long gone by now, but the spiderweb itself had been like a work of art.

  Suddenly she felt like she
would die if she didn’t look at that spiderweb again.

  She began running once more, navigating her way through the crowds, squinting at street signs and turning and asking for directions and asking again when people didn’t know. First she got more lost, and then she figured out where she was, and then she got lost again. This happened over and over. The images in her head kept slipping down over her vision—the dying children, the dead babies—and awful thoughts kept pushing their way into her mind. I thought that he would like me. I wanted him to like me. I still want him to like me. Does that make me evil too? But she could push back the images, the thoughts. She had a goal now.

  Just think about the spiderweb. Remember? And then after you see it, you’ll be able to think of other beautiful things, other hopeful things, other things to love….

  She hadn’t realized how far she’d traveled. It was almost dark when she got back to her own street, approached her own apartment building. She hadn’t eaten all day. But she brushed past the front door and hurried around back to the dirt pile where she’d found the weeds and the spiderweb.

  Children were playing on the dirt pile now—not toddlers making mud pies, but older boys, fighting.

  “This is our hill, and you can’t have it!” one yelled as he stood at the top. He was maybe seven or eight, a miniature brute.

  “Oh, yeah?” another yelled back. “Who’s going to stop me?”

  He charged up the hill, his fists out.

  Tessa squinted into the twilight, gazing at a spot between the two boys. There, amazingly, the spiderweb still hung between two stalks of foxtail grass, its delicate architecture testifying that everything Tessa wanted to believe in was possible.

  And then the two boys crashed into it, flattening it as they rolled down the hill fighting.

  “No!” Tessa wailed. She raced up the hill after them. She grabbed them by their shirts and pulled them apart. She was so much bigger and stronger than them that this was easy to do.

  “No!” she screamed at them. “Don’t you see what you did?” She dropped the two boys and began feeling around on the ground. She wanted evidence. She wanted them to see the ruin they’d made. She wanted them to hurt like she did.

  But of course there wasn’t even a wisp of the spiderweb left. And of course it had never been anything but another illusion. It had been so beautiful—and yet the spider had built it solely to trap and kill.

  Like Gideon looks so handsome, so perfect, so heroic, but all he did was kill….

  The two boys looked up at Tessa. They were little, only five or six or seven or eight. But their eyes held no innocence. They were already filled with hate and anger, greed and fear.

  Tessa began hitting them.

  “Stop it!” she screamed at them, pounding her fists against their backs, their shoulders, their arms. “You’re already ruined! You already ruin things!”

  The boys fought back, their fists small but well aimed.

  “Help us!” they called to the other boys standing around. “Attack!”

  And then there was a whole pack beating up Tessa. She scrambled away, leaving behind a hank of her hair in somebody’s hand. She could escape from children. But she couldn’t escape the new images crowding her mind: the beautiful spider-web falling, beauty itself revealed as a fake, Tessa’s own fists beating up little children….

  She ran until she found herself back in her own room, on the bare bed frame, sobbing into the wall. She started to move away, then changed her mind. She wanted Gideon to hear her crying. She wanted him to know the pain he’d caused, the misery.

  But he’d killed one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two people.

  Why would he care about one meaningless girl’s broken heart?

  CHAPTER

  7

  Sunday was dark, rainy, and hopeless. Tessa did her best to sleep through as much of it as she could.

  Oh, Mom, Dad, is this how you’ve always felt? Ever since you gave up? She wondered if she’d been too hard on them all along. What made you give up in the first place? Did you ever see what I saw, people dying in the war? Did you ever know anyone like Gideon?

  She didn’t bother standing up, walking into her parents’ room, asking the questions out loud.

  Even if her parents answered her, how would that make any difference?

  Monday morning Tessa had to go off to school. She banged around in her room getting ready, slamming drawers and doors and making as much noise as she could.

  Why should Gideon get to sleep late and relax all day? she thought bitterly. He’s not a hero. He’s a killer. He said so himself. I saw what he did. He should be in prison.

  There was an uncomfortable echo to that thought: And what about me? What do I deserve for beating up children? What if I’m every bit as evil as he is, and always have been—I just never got a chance to drop any bombs?

  At school, kids stabbed pencils in other kids’ backs and tripped people and started fights in the school cafeteria. It was a school day like any other, but somehow even the pettiest cruelty felt unbearable to Tessa. Cordina Kurdle snapped a rubber band at Tessa’s arm, and it was all Tessa could do to keep from bursting into tears. Cordina’s henchmen, seeing this weakness, went for an all-out assault of pinches and shoves and jabs every time the teacher looked away.

  Tessa finally let the tears out after school, as she hunched over, scrubbing floors at the hospital. Sometimes in the past she’d found ways to make her job almost enjoyable—competing to scrub an entire room as fast as she could, or creating designs on the floor in water and suds. But today it was all she could do just to slide her cleaning rag back and forth across the dingy concrete. Tear-blinded, she reached for her bucket. Her hand struck too low and knocked the whole thing over. The gray, slimy water spilled across the floor she’d just cleaned.

  “Clean it up!” the supervisor commanded. “Scrub everything all over again! And I’m docking your pay!”

  Either the supervisor didn’t notice that Tessa was crying, or—more likely—he didn’t care.

  Not fair, Tessa thought, after everyone else was gone and it was just her and her bucket and rag in the huge, empty room, all that filthy concrete left to be scrubbed. This is Gideon’s fault. He killed all those people and he’s the reason I’m crying and he still gets to have some hope….

  Tessa almost dropped her rag. She froze. Was that right? Could she fling the accusation “still has hope” at someone who’d looked as anguished as Gideon had, just about every single moment she’d spent in his presence?

  If he didn’t have any hope, what did he want my computer for on Saturday? she asked herself. Why did he want to look at that video? Was he just hoping to destroy me, too? Or …

  She remembered that he’d told her she wouldn’t want to see the video. He’d warned her not to look.

  So why …?

  She remembered how final everything had looked on the computer screen, all those dead bodies, all those lives ended. But evidently it wasn’t finished. There was still something Gideon had wanted to see, some reason he had needed to scan those horrific images again.

  Was there still something he thought he could change?

  Tessa threw down her rag. She left her bucket of water in the middle of the floor and took off running. On alternating steps she thought, I can stop him, and I can help him, and she didn’t know which one she believed.

  But what if there really was something she could do?

  Then I could be a hero, she thought, running harder. A real one. Whether anybody else ever knows it or not.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Tessa crashed into her room without a fully formed plan in her head. She couldn’t decide if it would be best to crank up her computer and scour every archive she could find—study it all intensely—or if it would make more sense to grab the computer and stalk over to the Thralls and confront Gideon, first thing. She was leaning toward the confrontation, just because it would be faster.

  But what if he lies? What
if he just makes up some story, and I don’t know enough to be able to tell if it’s true or false?

  In the midst of scooping up her computer, Tessa paused just long enough to take a deep breath.

  And then she stopped completely.

  Her room smelled like paint.

  Fresh paint.

  Her room hadn’t been painted in years.

  Tessa whirled around, gazing open-jawed at walls she normally didn’t notice.

  There. Just above the bed, in the middle of the wall she now knew lay between her bedroom and Gideon’s, the paint caught the light and glistened, as if some of it wasn’t quite dry.

  And—Tessa studied it more closely—in one wide circle that contained the glistening spots, even the dry paint was a slightly different shade of industrial gray than the rest of the walls.

  Why—? Tessa wondered. How—?

  She remembered that a storeroom lay directly below her room. The janitor who occasionally bothered to clean the hallways kept brooms and trash cans in there. It was possible that he had cans of paint there as well.

  Instinctively, Tessa looked down. The battered rag rug that she kept across the floorboards was bunched up, slightly out of place.

  Tessa kicked it aside.

  There, in a spot that had been hidden by the rug before, someone had taken out the nails from a roughly circular area of the floorboards.

  Someone? Tessa thought. Oh, no. I know who did this.

  She looked from the circle of fresh paint on the wall to the circle of unattached boards on the floor. She was working on a theory.

  So Gideon wanted to get out of his room without being seen. He cut a hole in my wall, and then pried open a hole in my floor. He crawled through and then tried to erase all signs that he’d been here. But he couldn’t put the nails back in the floorboards to completely cover his tracks because … Tessa looked down again. She knew why. Because he still hasn’t come back.

  Was he going to? Or was he gone for good?

  Tessa hugged her arms against her chest, as if she were capable of comforting herself. She’d forgotten she was still holding the computer, and the cold metal sent a jolt through her system. She jerked her arms back, tilting the computer crazily.