Chapter Twenty-four: The Past of Oliver Dark
“You don’t have a right to question me!” I shouted at her defensively. “You don’t get to see what I am or who I am or what I do! That isn’t for you to see!”
“I think I’ve earned that right!” she shouted back.
“Really?” I asked her, taking a step forward. “You think you’ve earned it, huh? By doing what? Committing a murder? Being a bitch?”
If I hadn’t learned to read the placid eyes that I loved so much, this would have seemed like she was unfazed.
But I saw.
I wanted to stop now. I suddenly realized I wouldn’t be able to stop.
“Now, you’re going to stop asking about me right now or something very bad is going to happen!”
She sneered.
“Like what? What else could you possibly take from me?”
This was a slap to the face, and she and I both knew it.
“What have I taken from you that you haven’t taken from yourself?” I said loudly. “Was it me that killed your entire family? This colony? Everybody? No, that was you! And all of them?” I motioned uselessly outside. “They had a right to know their murderer was a Deviant, but you didn’t tell them that, did you?”
It was cruel. Her face didn’t move, but her eyes did. I was drawing satisfaction from it.
“You know what? I helped you get through those deaths – I did. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead right now!”
“I made through just fine without you with Fade, Ollie,” she snapped meanly.
“Yeah…well I – I still helped you. Maybe you should just shut up and take what you get!”
“And maybe you should shove that logic up your ass!”
I lost it.
“You know what?” I shouted. “I haven’t once asked you how you’ve been, where you’re from, who you’re with! I haven’t asked you ONCE!”
She was steady in her glare at me. It was a contest to see who could hate each other more.
“I hear things about you, Ellie! I hear how you’ve always been destructive! You’ve always brought some sort of trouble to this place. You Deviants are all the same. Sometimes I wonder how –”
“Yeah?” she shouted. “If you have questions, then ask! Ask away! I’ve never pretended to hide anything from you!”
“How can you even live with yourself every day after murdering and blundering and killing?”
“Me?” she shrieked. “You think I am at fault for all this death?”
“You don’t?” I snapped.
“No! They died, and I did everything I could to stop it! How dare you!”
Then, finally, she lost her temper and swung back at me with an open palm, but I grabbed it and we struggled.
“HOW DARE YOU! DON’T TOUCH ME! LET GO!”
“You think you’re so smart?” I mocked. “So clever. So strong. So brave. Little Deviant, going out of her way to protect the tiny little humans!”
“SHUT UP! IT ISN’T LIKE THAT! IT ISN’T – LET GO!”
“Oh, but they don’t like you, do they, Aio? You’re wrong, and they know it! They’ve always known it! From the very beginning!”
Finally, she tore away, whispering,
“It isn't like that.”
“Isn’t it? You seem like an outsider to me! Pathetic and sniveling, desperate for attention, and when they don’t give it to you, what do you do? Kill them?”
“No!” she said, sobbing. “I didn’t kill them! I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean to!”
“IT DOESN’T MATTER!” I shouted. “YOU ARE A MURDERER! THAT’S WHO YOU ARE! THAT’S WHAT DEVIANTS DO!”
“Why do you hate me?” she asked desperately. “What is happening? Why are you talking like this? I don’t understand!”
I could hear the tears in her voice. I didn’t care. She was the one thing on that earth that I had ever been trained to hate, and the motions of it came back in a rush, like a muscle I had not needed in some time.
“HOW DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?” I roared. “THEY ARE KILLING EVERYBODY! EVERYBODY IN MY LAND WHO HAS EVER DIED BECAUSE OF PEOPLE LIKE YOU IS ON YOU! YOU ARE THE REASON DWINDLE IS IN ASHES! YOU ARE THE REASON THAT WE ARE AT WAR! DON’T YOU GET IT?”
“No!” she shouted weakly, caving now.
“They – they manipulate! And they lie! And they pretend! And they eradicate! They exist now to make sure humanity does not survive!”
“That’s not why I exist!”
She took a step forward, palms out, reaching for me, but I turned away with a noise of disgust.
“Yes, it is!” I shouted. “Dammit! Don’t you see it? I’ve been telling myself that you were different, you weren’t trained like them. But just because you’re an Aio doesn’t make you different – it makes you worse!”
“Why?”
“You know, at least humans – we know we’re cruel. You sit above that – hiding behind that noble innocence, that insane notion that you can somehow protect anything! You think you know…But I know. I know your methods better than you do. There are more of you – more Deviants, more Highers. Only you’re the only Great Deviant I’ve ever heard of. They’ve been waiting for you, these things. They’ve been waiting so long for you to lead their extermination.”
I couldn’t breathe with the hating.
“Except you know what they do? Of course you don’t know, why am I asking? They kill us. They kill humans. More brutally and more effectively than we’ve ever been able to fight them. They tell everyone that they are these – these guardians of peace, designed to know what’s best for us!”
“They kill you?” she asked quietly now.
“No, they don’t kill us! They butcher us! They’ve butchered us! By the millions, Ellie!”
“It sounds like they did it because the computers wanted us dead!” she shouted.
And the fact that she had the gall to defend something she knew nothing about goaded me into a rage.
“They did it because they are broken! And we have to stop them!”
I couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even cry.
“Who does?”
“People like me!”
“I don’t understand!”
“Exteriors! We have to kill you!”
“Why?” she asked, sobbing. “Why do you have to?”
“Because you’ll kill us if we don’t!”
“But I don’t want to kill humans!” she cried, tears in her eyes.
“I KNOW AND I DON’T KNOW WHY!”
I hit the wall. Flecks from the ceiling crumbled, and I felt a painful unraveling in me begin to come undone. I had no reservations anymore. I couldn’t hold back. She would know everything. And she would see me for the little worm that I was.
“So you want to hate me for something I didn’t do but that I should do?”
“YES! NO! I DON’T KNOW!”
I made a weak noise from somewhere deep inside of me.
“I AM AN EXTERIOR!” I shouted at her. “That should matter to you! You have to – we have to hate each other!”
“Why do you want to hate me?”
I was breathing so, so heavily. There was a slight pinch in my chest where my lungs were supposed to be, and with every sentence was it growing. I was remembering. I hadn’t remembered in a long, long time…
“Because you are better than me!” I said loudly, unable to breathe. “Everything you do happens that way – everything. You’re perfect.”
I spat out the word.
“You’re just – just gods with too much power, squabbling over something we humans call justice.”
I finally turned back to her and saw her again. She didn’t move now, didn’t even make a sound. I began to shake. There was a silence and the two of us just breathed. I had to continue. I had to commit. I had to show her why she should be afraid.
“And you know what? I am a soldier! I did kill people! I have fought in wars and strangled necks! I am a murderer!”
>
“Even though I look like you?” she asked, so small.
“I…I hated them since I can remember. I hated them, even after I saw that they were so close to us in all the ways that hurt. But I live in a cage, and that was all that mattered! When My Master told us to turn around to hunt them…kill them, I did it.”
There were no tears in her beautiful face where I had wanted there to be. All I heard was the heaviness of my own breath.
“But why?” she whispered.
I blinked hard.
“Because…because…”
Why?
“Because I did what I was told.”
She didn’t speak.
“But it’s…easy to say that, and it’s…a lie. I did it because I hate them. Deviants. I’ve been brought up to hate them. Trained to hate them. Bred to hate them. And I – sometimes, I don’t even know why.”
I couldn’t breathe or see, I just had to unload.
“You know what it’s like – you know how easy it is to despise those things that betray you, that try you, again and again, push you to your limits, force you to see them, force you to break yourself to make yourself stronger. To save something that hates you. To hate something that saves you when you don’t want to be saved.”
“You mean you…” she whispered softly.
“You should have let me die!” I said between gritted teeth. I felt a burning sensation in my throat that I thought might have stemmed from shame. “The big corporation I told you about – Probe. They own me. I am theirs. And the High Council, they direct me. And the Masters, they tell me what that direction is. And they told me to come to Dwindle…and die. And that was what I was supposed to do. And then you ruined everything!”
When she saved me, I didn’t hate her. I hated what she hadn’t allowed me to have. My voice shook a little as I realized that I had been weak enough to want to die. And she had stripped that from me. I felt strong with her, invigorated with new life.
My voice trembled as I confessed to her what I had never confessed to anyone.
“They wanted me dead because I left the High Council and my Masters and Probe all behind me.”
Fisher whispered,
“If…if you hate Deviants…why?”
“Because I couldn’t do what they wanted me to do anymore.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Who are you?”
“I am something that belongs to Probe. A tool, not a brain. That’s what they say. You don’t know who they are, not really.” I felt as if I were genuinely talking to her for the first time, like I wasn’t trying to hide or be noticed. I was just trying to explain. “But every other person in the real world does. They control everything. They are responsible for the Dark War.”
“War?” she asked fearfully.
“Yeah,” I said, knowing she’d only heard terrible stories. “War. With blood, killing, bombing. We attack Deviants. Entire populations. I attacked them. I started killing them – a lot of them. That’s what being an Exterior means.”
“Being a killer?”
I nodded, eyes still closed. I couldn’t look at her.
“We were trained so that we could kill them. I knew all about it. You can’t get too close. No attacking them when they were armed, no fist fights, no guns…”
I saw that my words were strange to her. Strangeness felt so odd to me. I had never had time for strangeness. It had happened, but to tell her was strange. I had never admitted what I had done. And I realized for the first time that what I had done was strange. I was so good at the strangeness, but I realized I shouldn’t have been. I shouldn’t be. Looking at her right then, in agony at how bad it was, I didn’t want to be strange. Not for her.
“You could use grenades though,” I explained strangely. “Flash worked sometimes. Drugs, gasses, provocation. My Master usually wanted them alive. I didn’t know why until…”
I couldn’t speak.
“But that didn’t stop us from torturing them every chance we got. They trained us hard, forced us to break and remold. Some of us died.”
“But not you,” she said.
“Not me,” I said bitterly. “No, I was good at it.”
I laughed. It was that sick laugh that I had heard out of Myth’s mouth just yesterday. It was only yesterday.
“What made the whole thing worse? Their deaths weren’t the best part…the best part was making them suffer. They seemed so human in their last moments – when you saw which ones were cowards and which ones weren’t. It was hard to watch. But I taught myself not to care. I was good with a shield. I was good at protecting myself. I was really good at it.
“And everyone I ever spoke to noticed, after I started. I didn’t have anyone anymore. I couldn’t. I had only my work and my purpose, and that was all I needed. The wall only works when nothing gets through, and if that meant keeping myself from dull pleasures to save lives, that was what I was going to do. If I could kill as many Deviants as I could before I died to make sure that future generations would have a world to live in, would have a chance to kill the virus, I was going to do it.
“The governments of Probe noticed too. They sent me to kill more and more. They wanted me to do their bidding more and more and more…and more…Sometimes…sometimes the Deviants wouldn’t even know I was there…”
I felt silence within me. There was usually a storm of self-torment but now there was peace. I’d never said any of this out loud.
“Is that why you act…the way you do?”
She could tell I wasn’t really angry. Not anymore. Just bitter and cold. Her voice sounded cold when she spoke herself, but it wasn’t angry either. It was dark. The light had gone out. The only light we had was the moon outside of her place, and it shone in on both of us to let us know the other was there, listening, speaking. It startled me, her constant presence. She was letting me have my say. She was letting me speak. I decided for that that I would answer her question, if only for that.
“I don’t know. Probably. Some. It’s impossible to tell…” My mouth wanted to say something so it said it. “I don’t really know how to act the way normal people do.”
“What did you do with them when you hunted them down?” Fisher asked.
“He had us torture them for him.”
“Who?”
“My Master.”
“Why torture them?”
“Get information. War intel.”
She said nothing, and I hurt inside with wanting a reaction.
“But I…I didn’t want to do it anymore, like I said. Not after…after…” I couldn’t say it. “So I stopped. And I waited. And I ran when I could. I just…I didn’t want to do it anymore. I couldn’t.”
There was a long, long silence. I knew that she couldn’t breathe to absorb this information. I almost didn’t want her to.
“But…I’m sorry, I still don’t understand…”
I waited with cold sweat on my brow. I felt sick. It wasn’t just physically; my hands were shaking and my stomach felt weaker than it ever had. I had never said any of these words out loud to anyone before. Her voice sounded so innocent. I wanted her to hate me for this. I wanted her to. When she didn’t, I almost cried aloud with wanting her to. I had counted on it.
“Why are you here now then? They can’t have ordered you all to just die. They could have killed you for that. Is there…some purpose to all this?”
She knew our mission. She knew already that I was sent there to kill them. She knew everything already. It was like I was telling someone who knew calculus that two and two made four. She didn’t need to be told. Fisher had always been clever.
“They sent us here to survey the land and to make sure there were no survivors,” I said dully. “My Masters – and the High Council – thought that if humanity was to retake this location the war on the outside could turn in our favor. The Deviants have held this territory outside Dwindle for a very long time.”
“Is that why you’re here?” she whispered,
finally staring up at me. “To kill me – us?”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m here,” I whispered bitterly.
Her words were unreadable to me as she asked,
“Why did you leave in the first place? What did you see?”
“There was a girl…a woman, I guess.”
She waited for me. I had never told anyone. But I felt that she needed to know.
“She was in one of those rooms. A torture room.”
“How was she different?” Fisher asked after a moment.
I could tell that she wanted to help me. After everything that I had said, her voice, whether her mind wanted it to or not, was willing to help me. I didn’t know how to say it. I had thought all of what I had already said in my head, so I knew how to say those harsh words. These thoughts were newer, untouched. They were buried deep in my subconscious, and I struggled to unearth them, even for Fisher.
“She just went on and on, speaking mindlessly. I listened too, which was…” I laughed at myself. “Stupid…”
I felt a choking begin in my throat. It made my voice sound strained, almost higher than it usually did.
“I heard every word she spoke to me, almost desperately…I was the interrogator, but I knew I had nothing over her. She knew she was going to die. That was the worst part.”
I took a deep breath. It didn’t do anything to help.
“She already knew what was going to happen to her and she had addressed it.”
I couldn’t breathe but I continued on without breath, feeling as if it were my punishment anyway. I saw her face in front of me, as clear as I saw Fisher, and, the way the two pictures mixed, that woman’s face was Fisher’s face. I was squished by the agony I felt inside of me.
“She talked away. She was so alive, and she wanted me to know her story.”
Like you, I thought sadly.
“She knew she was going to die, but when she looked at me, she cried. She pitied me.”
I realized that there were tears in my eyes.
“She apologized, tried to make it quick. Helped me into it. She…”
Something painful rose out of my chest, something I’d never felt before.
“I killed her for that,” I whispered. “I stabbed her again and again, trying to get just…I don’t know. One scream out of her to soothe me. She was so – she was so nice to me…”
I felt strange again. I felt so exposed, as if I were without clothes in front of her, as if she was forcing me to stay just to look at that part of me, the most intimate parts of me that I’d never allowed anyone to know even existed.
“And…and I knew I couldn’t do it anymore after her. It…hurt…way too much.”
She said nothing. I looked away, humiliated, but it was only momentary.
“Why?” she asked after I said this.
Her hands were clamped tightly in her lap, white. So she was frightened. I hadn’t expected fear. Hate. Anger. But not fear. I began to lose my breath. I hadn’t wanted that at all. I felt deep self-hatred, pain only she could take away. But why would she? What had I done to deserve it?
“I don’t…” she began, but she stopped.
She seemed lost, but she held on, if barely. My brave girl.
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this. If I’m this big thing – this…”
There was so much for her to realize and analyze in her way. So much for her to think about. I was overwhelming her.
Why did I always do that to her?
“If I’m this…this guardian thing why would you tell me that you kill my own people?”
“Because…because you’ve got a life ahead of you. You have a willingness to stay alive that I haven’t seen in…any Deviant. In anything…In anyone. And anyone who is even around you hasn’t got long to live.” She didn’t even cringe as I said it, and I was sad. I had done that to her. “I need you to know my story…before I go…because you deserve it.”
“How do you know I’m not using you without meaning to?” she asked quietly.
“Because you’re not just any Deviant, you’re special.”
I said it softly now, almost lovingly.
“So special…so great…”
Her eyes snapped shut.
“Don’t say this to me.”
There was another long pause. It made in me emerge a pain that I had never experienced or one that I had not felt in a long, long time. It was sorrow. It was remorse. It was trepidation. I didn’t feel anger. I couldn’t feel hate. Not for her. Not anymore. It was different with her. It would be different after that, I knew.
She wasn’t looking at me. She couldn’t really. I knew she hated what I did. Hell, she hated killing things. She hated the virus. She hated herself. She hated monsters. I was a monster to her. Fisher couldn’t even look at me. It made my self-loathing reach a new level. She couldn’t even look at me. I was sorry. I wanted her to look at me. I needed her to just glance at me like she used to. I caught my breath with missing it and needing it with constantly increasing intensity. It made me sore.
I couldn’t help brooding for that. I was fool to think that she could accept what my past was, and I was a fool for wanting her to. I was a fool for letting her even get to me that much, and I was a fool for letting my wall down at all. I was a fool for being cruel to her and thinking that I could dispose of her like Deviant trash. I was a fool for saying she was the same when she was different. I was a fool for so many things.
I couldn’t help imagining her stabbing me, like she had stabbed Fade the few times. I couldn’t help but imagining her own face twist with hate as it had been towards Fade, but in my imagination, she was looking at me. I could imagine that she was just like them – the other Deviants – down to the very uniform. I could see her with them. I could see her on their side. I could see what it was that she would be doing to me. It wasn’t just our side that checked in hits. They could deal it out too. I could imagine that she could hurt me better than I could kill her, because in that moment I realized something. Fisher, whether she knew it or not, had gotten around my wall. She had penetrated it, crumbled it, barreled right on through it. I hadn’t noticed right until then as I stared at her, waiting for her to say something. Anything.
I hated myself with the waiting, and I was positive that she would hate me for my past. I was sure she wouldn’t be able to look at me the same. Those silver eyes that danced, sparkled, glowed – they would never again dance for me.
Then, suddenly, like she was waking up, her eyes fell into mine with a disarming beauty that was so even and unnerving. She’d learned all that I was and brushed it aside to see the man beyond, wilted and wasted in his terrible and rotten domain.
“Okay,” she whispered quietly.
Her eyes were guarded. They usually had something in them. There was nothing in them now. Not for me. Eventually, I couldn’t see them.
Because my eyes were welling with tears.
“I’m so sorry, Ollie…” she whispered sorrowfully.
“Don’t…” I just barely managed. “Don’t say that to me. Don’t – I’m the one who –”
“Whatever I did – whatever – whatever I am…”
“That isn’t what I –
“I’m sorry.”
Fisher stood up and walked out then, leaving me there to lie on the ground, trying to cry, unable to. On the way out, I could have sworn I saw a single tear fall. Only this time…the tears were from me. I curled up like she had, invisible to all in the terrible darkness of night, and I tried unsuccessfully to breathe where there was no breath for me.