Luke gets up and walks into an adjoining room. I can still see him, sitting behind a glass wall. Moments later the wall turns to reflective mirror, and I can only see myself. It makes me crazy imagining him sitting there—I want him out of my head, out of my body, I want him gone. He is a jagged knife, hacking its way through my body, my organs, destroying the rest of me like my brain was destroyed many years ago.
“Would you like to talk?” Anthony asks me. I blink, looking at him. It’s so silly that I smile. I reach out and take his hand. Drones don’t lie. I’ll give them that much. He and I haven’t really touched before. It is strange, but also important. All of these touches—I think drones forget about how important they are.
“What do we have to talk about now?” I ask softly. “You’re a party to my wacky story.”
He smiles awkwardly. His blue eyes are open and honest as always, but he seems troubled by something.
“Would you like to talk, Anthony?” I ask. He doesn’t answer, so I press, “What’s wrong?” Focusing on him helps me to ignore the pain I’m in.
“I shot a man. Outside. I didn’t really mean to. I was just aiming … and it hit him in the head. By mistake.”
I stare at him. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t realize it got that bad outside …” I squeeze his hand because there are no words. I know very well that there are no words to fix this kind of mess.
“You’re so strong,” he says suddenly. “So resilient. I feel fragile all the time. Even before the cure.”
“You’re not fragile,” I tell him. “You’re here, and that’s brave.”
“All those drugs I made you take,” he whispers, voice breaking. “And the electro-shock therapy … Jesus, I feel sick.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him quickly. “I’m resilient, remember?”
“But everyone in your life has hurt you so badly …”
I look away, over at the mirror of glass. I wonder if Luke can hear us. I want him not to hear us. I want him to go away and never come back. I want him to come back into the room and climb into bed with me and tell me that none of it matters because he loves me and that not everything was a lie. How could he tell me the truth but not tell me how he feels about it? How could he say: I lied, but not also say: I regret it? How could he still be here, in this room with me, if he did not feel … something?
Lying here in this bed, I am faced with a simple, awful reality. I am about to die, one way or another, and I want the man I love to hold my hand and kiss me. That’s all. Even if I could have anything in the entire world, all I want is Luke Townsend, even after his betrayal.
The only problem is that I’m not sure Luke Townsend—the Luke Townsend I know—exists. The Blood agent exists. The liar exists. I’m not sure what else is behind that glass because he doesn’t seem to want to tell me.
Or perhaps he has told me and I was just too foolish to listen.
“You have a daughter, don’t you?” I ask Anthony, pulling myself away from the glass. I heard a nurse ask him how she was, and the idea of him having a child stunned me at the time. Now, knowing him better, it makes more sense.
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Marley.”
“How old is she?”
A very strange look passes Anthony’s face, but he swallows and says, “She’s two.”
“I bet she’s beautiful,” I murmur, closing my eyes. I feel so tired. Everything hurts, every tiny movement, every breath, every heartbeat. My body is failing.
“She is,” Anthony says. “I wish I knew her better.”
“Does she laugh?”
“Yes, I imagine so.”
I smile, sharing his imagining of it. “So beautiful. Don’t let her get cured. Luke and I will never let our children get cured.” I can see a little girl, laughing and crying, playing and kissing me as I brush my lips across her forehead. Her hair is dark and thick and smells sweetly of lavender, soft against my cheek, and her chubby little hands clutch around my fingers stronger than anything I’ve experienced.
I am stretched with longing for her, our her. She’ll have his eyes, too green to believe, and she’ll have grandparents, his parents whom he loves, people who will cuddle her and give her presents and no one will ever hurt her because I’d die before I let that happen.
“I’m here, baby,” he says against my ear and I realize I have been saying his name, and he has come in from behind the glass, and he is lying in bed beside me, holding me, and his touch doesn’t hurt anymore—the spots where his fingers rest are the only parts on my body free of pain.
“I hate you,” I whisper.
“I know,” he says, and I can taste his tears on my lips.
“You keep making me fall in love with you, over and over and over. Even when you do nothing but sit behind a mirror I still fall in love with you.”
Maybe it’s because he gave me the impossible possibility of this child while we were in the supermarket. He brought her into my heart, along with another two, and these children are something we will share now until we die.
Maybe it’s because he remembers things in color, or cooks like it’s brain surgery. Maybe it’s because he loves old music and deep bathtubs and solving problems and brushing my hair.
Maybe it’s just because he’s lovely.
“Sweetheart,” Luke utters, and then his lips are on mine, and if only I had more energy I might be able to care that it is a betrayal, that he is a betrayal, but instead I have only the energy to adore him and pretend we are back in the beginning. Then things were complicated in a simple way, but now they are complicated in a complicated way.
“You need to figure out how to get out of here,” I tell him, looking into his eyes and trying to escape this dreadful pit of quicksand. I need to get back to reality, to this room, to the painful fact that I’m about to die and there are things to be done. One of Luke’s hands is on my cheek, the other rests along the length of my spine, burning like a column of red-hot iron. “You and Ben and Anthony. Do it now, while you still have a chance.”
“Ben hasn’t finished what he’s doing.”
“He won’t finish it—not before I change.” I lick my dry, cracked lips. “There’s no point. I’m dying, Luke. Save yourself.”
His hand moves into my hair and, even though it hurts against my sore scalp, I love having it there, having part of him entwined with part of me.
“Josephine Luquet,” Luke says in his deep, rough voice. “You are the love of my life. There is nothing else that matters. If you die, I die.”
And so he’s done it after all. He’s come here into the abyss with me, and he’s given me the one thing he could never give when under the cover of all the lies. Here is his ‘I love you’. Here at the end when it means something.
My hands shake and I can barely get my words out. “Then why did you do this to me? Why did you lie?” I start to cry, hating myself for it.
Luke’s lips are against my skin, moving over my tears, and he’s holding me so tightly that it’s an agony of impossibilities. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “I saw you and I loved you. That’s it—that’s the only thing that makes any sense. From there it was this stupid string of wrong decisions. I thought it would be safer for you if I stayed your agent and reported you as non-threatening. I knew that if I reported my feelings for you they would send another Blood who wouldn’t care about what happened to you. I needed to keep you safe. I knew it was a mistake to talk to you in that nightclub, but I had to, Josi. I wasn’t supposed to but I fucking had to. You and I together … It was like a tidal wave I never even had a chance of denying. I had to keep it from everyone I worked with. I was lying to them just as much as I was to you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I hiss. “I would have understood, Luke! I would have forgiven you! We could have worked it out together!”
“You would have hated me!” he exclaims. “This thing between us was so fragile for so long—you were suspicious and untr
usting. We both worked so hard to create the love between us—it felt like such a triumph, such a beautiful triumph. I was the first person you’d ever trusted, and I couldn’t let that fact be the very thing that hurt you. I was desperate to preserve what we had.”
“You were a coward.”
“Yes,” he agrees fervently. “I was. That whole year I was a coward until the moment my mother told me something.”
I swallow, a lump in my throat. “What did she tell you?”
“It was something Dave used to say. ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’”
There are more tears coming, more than I can manage. This seems perfect in too many ways. “Where is your fury?” I sob. “All this time, where has it been?”
“Rotting my insides,” he says flatly, and even now he can’t let go, can’t raise his voice, can’t scream or shout or smash things. I realize that he has such an interminable control over what he feels that it has become the very definition of how he sees himself.
“Where is it now?” I press.
“Don’t ask for it,” he utters. “Don’t ask me to let it out. I’ll lose myself completely.”
“Or maybe you’ll find yourself.”
“Through rage?” he demands. “You think all that matters is anger? That’s not who we are. It can’t be.”
“Not anger,” I murmur. “Choice.” I move my hands to his face, running my fingers over the hard edges of him, the softness of his lips, the strong line of his jaw. “No one can tell you what you’re allowed to feel, Luke Townsend. Not ever.”
“I’d burn the whole world down if I could,” he whispers, his eyes flashing with a bright, exhilarating fever. “I’d make it so that there was no cure, no censorship, no propaganda, nothing but you and I.”
And this is when I understand the truth, the one truth that means anything.
They cannot take my fury from me, but I can let it go, because there are more important things in life.
Luke
When she says it, I have to go to her. It’s like I am being pulled out from behind the glass.
Luke and I will never let our children get cured.
It’s the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard in my life. I don’t even think she knows she’s saying it—she’s delirious and fevered and mumbling through the agony, but it seems to me like the deepest truth she has, and it means only one thing for me: I still have a chance, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life fighting for it.
“Luke,” she cries, closing her eyes. “Luke!”
I reach the bed but Anthony tries to stop me. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s hallucinating.”
“I don’t give a shit,” I snap. “She’s asking for me, so I’m here. Get out of the way.”
Anthony looks like he might protest further, but he doesn’t have much fight in him, so he vacates the bed and I slide in with her.
*
An hour and fourteen minutes have passed when Josi goes very still in my arms.
“You okay?” I ask quickly.
“I’m numb. I can’t feel the pain anymore.”
I sit up, inwardly freaking, outwardly calm. “How’s it coming, Ben?”
“Don’t rush me,” the scientist snaps.
“It means I’m getting close to the change,” Josi warns.
“But just the first one, right? Not the proper change.”
“What difference does it make?” she snaps. “I murdered nine people the last time I went through the first change.”
I walk over to Ben and look at what he’s doing. He shoots me an irritated glance and then harrumphs. “If you’re so tense, you can help me. You too, Doctor.”
Anthony has been sitting in the corner looking haunted, but now he gets up and joins me at the workbench.
“Heat half of that up,” Ben orders, pointing to a small vial of yellow liquid.
“It’s not piss, is it?” I ask and receive a cold glare.
“It’s Zemetaphine.”
“The stuff that started all of this?”
“The last bottle I know of that exists. I’m using it to create an antidote.”
I sit down and pour half the liquid into a beaker, swirling it around against the light. “I feel like smashing it on the floor.”
“Do that and we all die. Stop gawking at it and heat the damn stuff up.”
I look around for a microwave or stove.
“See this metal thing here?” Ben says, tapping a steel faucet. “This is called a Bunsen burner. Did you pass high school science?”
I can’t help but laugh at his deadpan manner. “Give me a break. I’m on edge.”
While I’m waiting for the liquid to boil, thoughts start colliding in my mind. I look over my shoulder at Josephine, who is staring at the roof. She looks so frail and weak on that hospital bed that it’s almost impossible to imagine the way her muscles are knitting together to make themselves stronger. If I hadn’t seen the proof of it, there’s no way I could believe it.
“Ben,” I say slowly. He doesn’t look up at me. “What would this drug do to an adult?”
He pauses, milky eyes moving to my face. “Why?”
“Curiosity.”
“There’s no way to know. It could heighten physical attributes. It could induce rage. It could be instantly fatal.” Ben frowns, meeting my eyes. “Or it could cure someone of their fury, like we first hoped it would. In an adult brain, it would be utterly unpredictable. There’s only one certainty—it would be extremely dangerous, and would end up killing you, no doubt about it.”
Everyone in the room is staring at me now, so I shrug blithely. “Just curious.”
*
At one o’clock in the afternoon, Josephine starts pacing the room. I watch her, unable to help Ben any further. Anthony is staring at the wall, oblivious. Outside they’re not bothering to try and get in—Jean has no doubt informed them that the safest course of action is to wait for Josi to kill us all and then arrest her in the morning when she’s safe again. She doesn’t realize that Josi will be dead by then, but it would probably suit her just fine.
I don’t ask Josi how she’s feeling because we all know.
Anthony starts crying. I close my eyes, willing him to stop. He gets louder and louder until Josi puts her arms around him and holds him tightly. “It’s okay,” she tells him gently. “It’s going to be fine, I promise.”
“I killed a man,” he weeps.
“I know,” she murmurs. “I know.”
“Tell us about your daughter,” I suggest. Josi releases him and starts pacing again. She’s got too much adrenalin in her system to stop. Anthony wipes his eyes and looks at me. He seems hollow and vacant, like a switch has flipped in his head, turning off the wave of sudden emotion he was flooded with only moments ago.
“Marley,” he says her name on a breath. “I write her letters. I draw birds on the paper. Hundreds and hundreds of birds. We went to the zoo once and she wouldn’t stop watching the birds. They were her favorite.”
Something about the way he’s speaking makes me go cold. I sit still on my stool, watching him, a part of me shifting to dread.
Josephine has stopped pacing—she can feel the change in the air just as I can.
“I write her a letter every night.”
“You don’t …” I clear my throat. “You don’t see her, Anthony?”
“Brie and I met six months before we were cured. We scheduled our procedures on the same day so we could be reborn together. But after … everything was different. We had Marley and I thought it would change things. Make us closer. A family. But Brie was severely depressed. She got hooked on all kinds of prescription medication that I brought her from work. I couldn’t see what she needed—I thought she just needed more pills. I thought they’d remind her how to love. I thought they would make her more lovable.”
He is speaking in a dead monotone, his eyes locked onto mine but also miles and miles away. The sens
ation of seeing him but also not seeing him is chilling.
“It didn’t work, nothing worked. I moved out. I knew Marley wasn’t safe with Brie, not in the state she was in, but I was selfish and obsessed with work. I didn’t want to look after a child. I couldn’t care about either of them. Brie begged me not to leave. I didn’t listen. I went back two weeks later. They were both dead. No one had gone to check on them. Brie had overdosed and left Marley to starve to death.”
I feel so cold I’m sure my bones will shatter at any moment. The horror in the room is palpable. Josephine is frozen, her eyes wide. Anthony is still staring straight at me as he says, so softly it’s barely more than a whisper, “I stood there and looked at them both for so long. I didn’t know what to do. I was just … blank. I still am. Except that I can’t stop drawing birds.”
Josi sits down on the end of the bed, her head in her hands.
This is what they take from us when they give us the cure: our humanity.
Chapter Twenty
September 16th, 2065
Josephine
At three o’clock I’ve had enough. I feel powerful. I feel enraged. I can’t stop thinking about Marley, and I know what I have to do.
Before it’s too late, I walk over to where Luke is sitting, snatch his gun from the holster at his ribs and lift it to my temple.
“No!” All three of them shout at once.
“I have to.”
“I’m nearly there!” Ben cries, holding up a slide. “I swear, Josephine—I’m nearly there. Just wait, please.”
I look at them, the three of them, and I lower the gun.
It’s a mistake, as it turns out.
Anthony
Josephine lowers the gun, but as she does so she closes her eyes. I feel a moment of relief until she opens them again. They are red.
I gasp. She looks like a creature out of a nightmare.
“Get behind the glass now!” Luke yells at Ben and me. I grab the things off the bench and run for the door. Josephine lunges at me but Luke pummels into her from the side, knocking her into the bed. It buckles under their weight, and I am momentarily stalled by the sight of Luke being launched into the air and sailing back down on top of the workbench. It reminds me of a bird in flight and my fingers itch for a pen so I can draw it.