Unnatural

  * * * *

  “This is from my dreams,” said Sabrina.

  They sat on a branch of a green-tinged, massive tree. Everything had a tint of some emerald shade: the clouds that crawled across the sky dome as if time were dozens of orders faster, the mountainous expanse in the distance, the aurora hovering over their heads, the other trees that formed a perimeter around a chasm with no bottom in sight. Their branch extended almost to the hole’s center, impossibly supporting their weight.

  “It’s beautiful,” Uriah admitted. “But it’s a distraction. What do you think Marshall meant by ‘decide who lives’?”

  “Somehow I doubt that means we’re supposed to kill each other. It wouldn’t fit with how he’s gone about things so far.” She didn’t look at him directly as they conversed, rather at the pit. “You know, in real life I’d be terrified of falling in there. I’m not afraid in here, even though for all I know there could be anything in that. Probably hell.”

  “Ya think he would do that? Marshall’s a scumbag, but could anyone be willing to subject another human to that kind of torture?”

  Sabrina snapped a twig off the branch, stretched out her hand, and dropped the twig. She cupped a hand around her ear and leaned toward the pit. “It could just be bottomless. Falling forever – maybe that’s hell.”

  Uriah said nothing in the time he was mesmerized by the disappearance of the twig. Then Sabrina jumped at the snap of his fingers near her ear.

  “Forget it,” said Uriah. “This is what he wants. He tried putting us in confinement to make us crazy, and that didn’t work, so now this is the ploy to make us put our guards down. This is probably just the start of what he could give us. Dig deep enough in someone’s memories and you could find something so … euphoric that they couldn’t say no to whatever twisted demands are made of them.”

  He stopped, his mouth open. He seemed to be seized up in an ecstatic moment, unaware that he was falling backward.

  “Dennis!” Sabrina took his hands and looked into his eyes, which were focused somewhere between the aurora and the trees. They were really his eyes, not those of the Libertas, perhaps because she still remembered him as he’d been before the transplant. Uriah didn’t respond, but he was breathing heavily. She analyzed the rest of the tree. It was a complicated mess of wood and leaves, but in this world she felt no apprehension about navigating it. Marshall truly had given up on terror.

  Uriah sobered up by the time they landed on the forest floor. “This isn’t good, Sabrina,” he gasped. “I mean, it was incredible, what I just went through, but it’s gonna end up killing me.”

  His voice as he said “incredible” said enough about the experience, but she could only barely suppress a hint of curiosity. Envy, even. “Or worse,” she said, standing and trying in vain to discern what lay beyond the woods.

  There was still the ghost of a wide smile on his face. “What could be worse than death? That could result from this kind of pleasure, I mean.”

  “Betraying your identity. You don’t exactly give into bribery, after all.” Sabrina led the way into the crowd of trees. Something in the gentle sway of these plants, which soon gave way to the travelers and left open a path easy to the feet, softened her to the core, reluctant as she was to believe it. “We just might get out of this nightmare alive, but we sure won’t be ourselves anymore.”

  “Maybe it’s just the dopamine talking, but I could live with this. If I weren’t at the mercy of a man who’d sell me down the river easily for his ‘vision,’ that is.”

  She stopped and faced him. “Are you serious?”

  “Look, Sabrina, I may be the only man whose first thought after almost every human dies is, ‘Dandylicious, this is the perfect chance for me to extend my lifespan!’ But it was, until Marshall decided to become too powerful for his or anyone else’s good. A happy life is all I ever wanted, identity be damned.”

  “I can’t believe you! Hasn’t anyone told you, ‘Those willing to give up liberty for security deserve neither’?”

  Uriah scoffed. “Benjamin Franklin was a hack. The problem here isn’t Marshall taking our freedom. It’s that this isn’t real security, which needs the freedom to defend yourself. That’s the one thing we can’t do until we stop wasting time and just decide who lives.”

  She stayed in place, hands on hips, even as he gestured for her to keep going. “So that’s it, then. After all this, you’d stay here if Marshall somehow convinced you that he wouldn’t screw you over. Maybe he won’t. He gave you that gun, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but you know as well as I do that the more powerful someone is, the more you should stay wary of them.” He turned his head to the side, but his body still faced forward. “Or do you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sabrina took great strides to keep up, losing the peace the trees had once given her.

  He crossed his arms when she met him. “Marshall called you ‘God girl.’”

  “So?”

  “All I’m saying is I’m surprised you aren’t the one acquiescing to a godlike power who could damn you as easily as save you.”

  “That’s different. I don’t know much about God, but he’s God. He knows how everything will end up, and I have reasons to think it’ll all be for the greater good.”

  He gave her a look that conveyed as much skepticism of what she believed as of whether she actually believed it. “Why’d you hide it from me, Sabrina?”

  She supposed he’d earned some honesty. “I thought you’d lose your respect for me.”

  “I never said I respected you. The better question is, why were you afraid of that?”

  She tried to be nonchalant. “We were in a life-or-death situation. You could’ve decided your life was more important than mine.”

  “What do you take me for? Come on. You don’t have to be ashamed for wanting summa this.”

  She laughed nervously. “Don’t flatter yourself. Just another trick of Marshall’s on my mind, nothing more.”

  He scrutinized her as they continued walking. “Maybe you’re telling the truth. That would make sense, and good for you if you value respect more than looks.”

  “‘That would make sense’?” She smiled and looked down. It wasn’t as if she wore her lesbianism on her sleeve. “Well, you just see through everything, don’tcha?”

  “And you sure don’t. Look up and ahead.”

  What she saw repulsed her. It was now dark and red rather than a soothing verdant hue. Vines dominated the site beyond the forest they had exited, and the aurora and swirling clouds were gone.

  “How did you –?”

  “As we were walking, I just focused on the memory. That’s how I got out of here before you got to Livingston’s, but this is the best I could do to fight Marshall’s influence. It’s from my own dreams, which I guess says something Freudian about what my subconscious thinks of the world.”

  For that moment more than any other before, Sabrina felt shame – like a traitor to the Organics, to America. This wasn’t just a sacrifice of the comfort of a Libertas for him. He was a victim, and he hated himself for not being able to change that.

  “So now we have no excuse to sit on our asses. Tell me, what did Zolnerowich talk with you about?”