Check punches Benson in the arm. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Benson says, watching Harrison put an arm around Janice and begin speaking to her in hushed tones. He seems so…good with her. Benson feels a pang of envy—he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to approach a conversation with his own mother.
“It’s been a crazy ride, huh?” Check says.
“Yep.” Despite everything that’s happened, the only thing Benson can seem to think about when talking to Check is Lucy. Benson and Lucy. Lucy and Benson. How is he going to tell his best friend that the girl Check’s been obsessing over for years has been kissing and holding hands with him?
But does that really matter? They’re all alive. That’s what counts.
Except for…
His father. He bites back a swell of emotion, blinking furiously. He’s only beginning to understand his father’s role in keeping him safe over the years—what he must have sacrificed. But does that excuse all the terrible things he allowed to happen? Could he have stopped them if he’d wanted to, or would he only have gotten himself killed sooner?
Is his father a hero or a villain?
Something in between, he decides.
“Thanks for saving our butts,” Benson says when he realizes Check has fallen silent.
“I did it for Luce, not you,” Check jokes.
“I’ll bet you did,” Benson says. Tell him. Just tell him.
“She has better legs than you. A better smile, too.”
“Thanks a lot.” Freaking tell him. You owe him that. Benson’s teeth grit together.
“I’ve got to keep it real, my friend. So, what was it like spending every second with her?”
Talk about a lead in. “Interesting,” Benson says.
“Interesting? That’s all you got for me?”
Benson is suddenly angry. “Yeah, interesting. We were running for our lives, dodging bullets, getting chased by psychotic cyborgs. I’d call it pretty interesting.” He’s breathing heavily, and he can tell by the look on Check’s face that he’s probably looking pretty crazy right now.
“Hey, it’s okay, man. Calm down. You’ve been through one helluva an ordeal. But you’re safe now. We’re all safe.” Check rests his elbow on Benson’s shoulder, exactly the way he has since the day they met, and Benson feels the anger and the frustration evaporate. Who was he even angry at? Not Check, he realizes. Himself. Himself for not being strong enough to be honest with his best friend. Himself for not being strong enough to save his—he blinks rapidly, fighting off a well of emotion—his father.
His father. His father who he never really knew. His father who used to tuck him in at night. His father who was responsible for killing innocent children. His father who taught him to swim.
“It’s okay,” Check says. “It’s okay.”
As it all becomes too much, Benson falls into his friend’s arms and sobs into his shoulder.
Millions of tears for the millions of lost childhood memories.
~~~
This room could be her room if the walls weren’t so hard. Janice taps the wall again, half-expecting it to push back at her finger.
Harrison flops down beside her and says, “Are you okay, Mom?”
Janice frowns, and her eyebrows feel weird like that, almost like they’re touching her eyes. Frowny frowny frown frown. Should she say that out loud? No. Doesn’t make sense. What did her son ask her?
“Mom?”
Was that a question? Doesn’t matter. Questions don’t matter now. Answers either. Because she has her two boys again. Harrison and Benson. When Michael arrives they can be a family again. He can quit that nasty old job of his and they can run away and bake devil’s food cakes and have birthdays and never have to touch a padded wall ever again. Right? Right?
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she says, the words escaping her lips before she even has a chance to consider them. Who’s dead? Why would she say such a horrid thing?
“Yes,” Harrison says. “Dad’s dead. He saved us all.”
For a moment, she feels something in her eye—an eyelash?—and when she reaches up to try to get it out, her finger comes away wet. She licks it. Salty! Salty salty salt salt. She’s a salt maker—no, a salt factory! She’ll make millions.
What were they talking about?
“I love you, Son,” she says.
His smile isn’t quite right as he hugs her, but she lets it go because he says, “I love you, too, Mom.”
~~~
When he gets up from hugging his mother, Harrison wipes at his cheeks with the back of his hand. He’s surprised when they come away dry.
His father is dead. Not just absent from one of his hoverball games, working late, too busy to spend time with his son. Dead. As in never coming back. And he should be sad about that, right? What kind of cold person wouldn’t feel something at the death of a parent?
Ahh, there it is. He does feel something. But it’s not sadness or grief or even bitterness.
What he feels is relief.
Does that make him a bad person? he wonders. He’s certainly not a polished gemstone, like his brother seems to be, but can he help it that he feels relief that he’ll never again have to see his father on advertisements or on holo-screens or anywhere? Or that he’ll never have to feel disappointment at another of his father’s broken promises?
Benson is crying on his friend’s shoulder, like a good son. Harrison touches his cheek once more, just to be sure. His skin is as dry as sandpaper.
He approaches Benson and his friend, hovering nearby, waiting for an opportunity. After what feels like an eternity, Benson pulls back, dries his tears with his shirt, and notices his brother.
Harrison clears his throat. “Uh, can I talk to you?”
Benson nods and Check pats his shoulder. Check gets up, glancing between Benson and Harrison two or three times—“Freaky,” he says—before moving to the opposite end of the room to join their other friends.
Harrison sits beside his brother. “Long day,” he says, the best opener he can come up with.
“The longest,” Benson says. “And I think it’s only the afternoon, although it’s hard to tell down here.”
Harrison chuckles.
“Is Janice—I mean, Mom—okay?” Benson asks.
“She’ll be okay,” Harrison says.
“You’re good with her.”
“Ha!” Harrison says with a laugh. “I can barely communicate with her. If I’m good, then I’d hate to see bad.”
“But you’ve had time to get used to her…eccentricities.”
Of course. Benson doesn’t know. How could he? “Bro, I haven’t visited her in eight years. I only really met the new Mom yesterday.”
Benson’s eyebrows lift, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t seem to pass judgment. Instead he asks, “What’s, uh, wrong with her?”
“I think she even managed to confuse the doctors,” Harrison says. “They mixed and matched all kinds of terms for her ‘condition.’ Acute bi-polar disorder. Shades of schizophrenia. Inability to discern reality from fantasy. Hallucinations. In short, she’s certifiably nuts.” He offers a wry smile.
Benson shakes his head. “I caused it,” he says.
“No, Benson, you didn’t,” Harrison says. “Do you know what Dad told her?”
“I’m not sure I want to,” Benson says.
“Yes you do.” So he tells his brother everything their father told him before he was killed. When he finishes, Benson stares off into space, lost in his own thoughts.
No, he’s staring at Janice—at their mother. “This life is too hard,” he says.
Harrison would normally laugh at a comment like that, but he can’t manage it because of everything they’ve been through in the last day and a half. “And made harder because of all the damn idiots running around with guns,” he says.
Benson’s eyes flick to his, and for a moment he thinks he said the wrong thing, but then his brother laughs loudly. “You know, that pretty
much sums it up,” Benson says. “Idiots with guns.”
Harrison laughs, too. Perhaps he and his brother will get along just fine. Maybe even become friends.
And for the first time in longer than he can remember, he feels happy. Real happy. Not the fake happy from winning hoverball games and being the most popular kid in school and making out with Nadine—although the latter felt real enough—but sincere, in-the-core-of-your-heart-and-soul happy.
Weird that everything could be so screwed up and yet he could feel this way.
And he smiles.
~~~
Janice is talking to herself when Benson slides beside her.
“Hi,” he says.
If she sees him, she doesn’t give any indication, just keeps on talking to herself.
Not herself, he realizes. Her watch. “Do you miss the asylum, Zoran?” she says. “No, neither do I. But I miss Alice. No one else. Just Alice.”
And it’s not her watch. It’s his. His old Zoran watch, a gift from Janice for his third birthday. She kept it all these years, he marvels.
“I used to love Zoran,” he says softly.
Janice’s eyes flick sharply to his, causing his breath to catch in his throat. He doesn’t know how to talk to this woman—not the way Harrison seems to. He can’t even think of her as his mother, much less call her that. He’ll always remember the eccentric, kind, intelligent woman who raised him. “Zoran was my son’s favorite,” she says. Then her eyes widen and she says, “Harrison is gone.”
Benson tries to hide the horror he feels at the screwed up expression on her face. A look of madness so foreign to his memories of her that it feels like he’s talking to a different person. “No, he’s right over there.” He motions across the room where Harrison’s sitting, knees bent, with his back to the wall. His brother waves at them. Smiles.
“Yes, he’s gone. Over there,” Janice says, as if that’s exactly what she meant. And it probably is. Words seem to carry slightly different meanings for her. “But you’re my other son,” she says. “And you loved Zoran.”
Benson starts to speak, to agree, but she’s not done. “You once were dead,” she says.
“It felt that way sometimes,” Benson says, feeling his heart skip a beat. “But I’m not anymore.”
“No. You’re not,” she says.
“Janice, I’m sorry. About everything. You deserved better.”
She giggles. Taps the watch. “Shut up,” she says, he thinks—he hopes—to the watch. Looks back at him. “Now you sound like Harrison. You two are so alike. And not just in looks.” Three normal sentences.
Is it possible the woman he once knew is still in there? Is it possible his return to her life and the realization that he never died could cure her?
“Shut the hell up!” she roars, ripping the watch from her wrist and chucking Zoran across the room.
Everyone’s watching them. Everyone except Luce, who moves to recover the watch.
“It’s okay, Janice,” he says, putting a tentative, awkward arm around her.
“My lost son,” she says.
And then she hugs him so tightly he can barely breathe.
Chapter Forty
The Lifer leader wants to meet with him alone, which seems weird to Benson. After all, his friends are as much a part of this as anyone else. They’re all wanted criminals now, responsible for aiding a Slip, which is an offense punishable by death. Which is all on him, the Slip.
But he can hardly refuse the request, considering it was the Lifers that saved him.
The man appears to be about his father’s age, with dark brown eyes that are creased around the edges, thin white lips that seem to sit in a perennial frown, and silvery hair combed across a balding scalp. A gun sits in a shoulder holster, and, based on the dark look in his eyes, Benson suspects he’s used it many times before.
“Why’d you bomb U-Bank?” Benson asks before the man has a chance to open his mouth. It’s something he’s been wondering for a long time.
“They’re government-owned,” the man says calmly, as if he expected the question.
“Innocent people were killed.”
“U-Bank funds Pop Con,” the man says. “Pop Con controls the screwed up birth authorization system, as well as metes out punishment for violators. Anyone who works for U-Bank might as well work for Pop Con. In other words, they’re not innocent.”
“You don’t even know them,” Benson says.
“I know their type,” the man says.
“You sure you didn’t do it to create more Death Matches for people who want kids?” Benson asks.
“We don’t believe in the system,” the man says. “We don’t support it in any way. We want to destroy it, not keep it moving forward. What you don’t seem to understand, young man, is that the system relies heavily on death to remain viable. If people stop dying as much, there will be fewer birth authorizations granted, and the citizens of the fine RUSA will rebel. Based on history, inequity has a way of working itself out.”
Benson soaks in the man’s words, wondering how much truth is behind them. Given his situation, he’s obviously not a supporter of the system…but is it really in serious jeopardy of failing? Of rebellion?
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” the man says. “I’m Jarrod.”
He wonders whether it’s his real name. “I’m Ben—”
“I know who you are.” Of course he does.
“Sit,” he says, adding “please” to make it appear to be a request rather than an order. But the command in his voice tells Benson this is a man who’s used to being obeyed.
He sits in a chair across from him, nothing but a meter of empty air between them. This room, like all the others, has metal walls and dim yellow lights overhead. It’s cold, but not unbearably so, which, from years of experience hiding, Benson knows is to avoid detection by Hawk heat-sensors. He waits for him to speak first.
Jarrod looks at the ceiling, stretches, cracks his knuckles, and then settles his arms across his chest. Stares at him.
Benson’s tired and hungry and ready to go back to his friends. Ready to go back to Luce, who he hasn’t really talked to since their escape. In short: He’s not in the mood for a staring contest. “Where’d you get the Hawk?” he asks.
He cocks his head. He’s surprised him. Good. “A simple thank you might have been a better place to start.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Where’d you get the Hawk?”
Benson thinks Jarrod smiles, although it’s hard to tell because he doesn’t show his teeth and his lips only move from a downward curved frown to a straight line. “We have our ways,” he says. “And you’re welcome. You are, after all, a symbol of what we’re trying to achieve.”
“I’m just a kid who was dealt a bad hand,” he says, feeling bold. Exhaustion seems to cast inhibitions and fear aside.
“Yes,” he says. “You were. But like it or not, you’re also a symbol. Now more than ever. A sign that the system is crumbling. That the Department of Population Control isn’t as powerful as everyone thinks. And more than that, a symbol that stifling life doesn’t achieve anything good.”
Benson wishes Jarrod wasn’t right, but he knows he is. He might not have chosen any of this, but he knows how all of this will be viewed by the public. A traitor in the midst of Pop Con. And not just any traitor, the most powerful man in the city standing against his own kind, against the ideals he supposedly believed in? It’ll be a public opinion disaster for the government. And, finally, him…a Slip, defeating them. Still alive.
He takes a deep breath.
“What do you want from me?”
Jarrod uncrosses his arms and rests them on his legs, which are crossed. “You cut right to the chase, don’t you?”
“I never understood that expression,” he says.
“It means—”
“I know what it means; I said I never understood it.”
“Look, Benson, we’re on the same side here.”
 
; He closes his eyes, gains his composure, reopens them. He can feel the heat of the blood pumping through his veins, the pounding of his heart in his chest, the rush of adrenaline sending electricity into his muscles. He feels like he’s cut from stone, like the last few days have hardened him into a statue. “I’m just trying to survive,” he says. “Trying to protect my friends, who are worse off because they know me. Trying to get to know my family, one of whom I haven’t seen in years, and one of whom I’ve only just met. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not in the mood for this particular conversation.”
If the Lifer leader is angry at his response, he doesn’t show it on his face, his expression vacant. He nods. “Fair enough. But this is a conversation we’ll need to have soon. That is, if you want you, your friends and your family to continue to be protected by the Lifers.”
He doesn’t know what this guy’s agenda is, but he knows his friends and family will be safer here than out in the city somewhere. At least for now. “You’re right,” he says, softening his tone. “We’ll speak soon, I promise. And thank you. For everything. This wouldn’t be over if it wasn’t for your help.”
“Over?” he says. “This fight has only just begun, kid.” With that, he stands and walks by him, pausing only to put a hand on his shoulder briefly, before exiting the room and leaving him alone with his thoughts.
~~~
Check and the others are off giving Harrison and Janice a tour of the Lifer facilities, but Benson asked to be shown another time. To his delight, Luce did, too, and now she sits next to him on one of the ten metal cots in the quarters they’ve been assigned.
“You okay?” she asks, kicking his shoe.
The simple act instantly breaks down the beginnings of a wall he’d felt going up between them. “I’m…hanging in there,” Benson says. “You?”