They stare. I keep my eyes on Luke because he’s the one who will make these decisions, as much as our “democracy” would like to believe otherwise.
“We have an antidote for the cure,” Pace argues.
“That was an antidote to the symptoms a Fury experiences, and it was made by a dead scientist and destroyed in Dodge’s lab. If we ever want to come up with a way to reverse the effects of the cure it will take many years, a team of scientists and a huge funding budget. So that stays out of the current discussion.” I don’t say that I think it’s hopeless anyway – scans of a cured brain look fundamentally different in a way I can’t imagine will ever be reversible.
Pace shakes her head angrily. She’s not looking at me anymore. I’ve pissed her off but I can’t find the energy to care – it’s going instead into ignoring the walls of this tiny space and reminding myself to breathe.
“What are you doing?” Luke asks me softly. I realize belatedly that what I’ve said has let the air out of the room, like a pin to a balloon full of hope.
“Managing expectations.” I look around at each of them. “If you think we’re taking over a government without massive casualties then your heads are in the sand. Are you prepared to commit these kinds of crimes? Which one of you can murder? Who is prepared for slaughter?”
None of them answer because none of them are.
Except Dave. He says, “You are, Josephine.”
“No she isn’t,” Luke snaps.
But Dave holds my eyes and we both know I am.
“What, then?” Blue demands of me, jumping at any chance to argue. “You want us to rot down here? Give up and carry on the way we are forever?”
I shake my head and take a moment to think about my next words. “Aside from Luke, there are no soldiers in these tunnels. Not real ones. We survive down here, we endure. Most of us have never taken a life. If we’ve fought, it’s a fist fight with each other or a skirmish with unarmed Furies. We haven’t faced an army of Blood soldiers. But that’s what will need to happen. They have to be neutralized before we even get close to the ministers, and let me tell you right now – killing anyone at all, friend or enemy, is a different beast to surviving. Killing a Blood asks for a piece of your soul.”
The silence deepens.
“It’s gonna feel impossible, and it almost will be,” I say softly. “So you must know how much you have to give. I can’t be the only one who knows.”
“You’re not,” Pace says, offended at the very idea.
“What makes you the expert on killing all of a sudden?” Blue snaps.
I don’t answer. They think I don’t know what I’m talking about. I can’t bring myself to enlighten them.
“We know,” Shadow assures me. They all say the same but I realize as they voice their certainties how childish it feels. Sitting around a table pontificating about how tough we are, how far we’re willing to go. None of it means anything; it’s air and words into silent, deaf earth. My fault for bringing it up.
I stand and my chair scrapes on the concrete. My hands are shaking slightly so I crack my knuckles to make them stop. “I’ve thought a lot over the last few months about the best way to do this, and I have plans, but they don’t include getting rid of the Furies. Anyone tries to kill them, they go through me.”
There it is.
I let them chew over their shock and stride from the dining room.
*
I’m heading for the northern tunnel when someone grabs my arm and wrenches me around. I react badly, shoving the person up against the wall and pinning my arm over her throat. It’s Pace.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks, purplish eyes wide.
I release her. “Sorry.”
“You’re not acting like you. You’ve never been cold but you’re really goddamn cold, Dual.”
“My name’s Josephine.”
She frowns as though I’ve spoken another language. “Okay, Josephine. What happened to you out there?”
“Nothing.”
“Why do you have a burned-off face and a missing finger and a cut throat?”
I brush past her because all she’s doing is tempting us both with a thing we once had but is now gone. All she’s doing is pointing out physicalities when nothing that happened to me was done to my body. Nothing real.
I make my way quickly down the tunnel. I have to get out of here right now – I need the sky.
But there’s someone waiting for me at the base of the ladder.
*
Dave
Josephine Luquet. What an anomaly. I stop her at the ladder. She doesn’t display any anger though I know she’s desperate to get out of here.
“A piece of advice?” I offer.
She smiles crookedly and motions for me to go ahead.
“The best way to fit in when you don’t fit in is to mimic.”
She tilts her beautiful head to the side and the look in her eyes is enough to make me feel as though she can see right through to my bones. “I’ve got no interest in mimicry. But thanks, Dave.”
“Josephine.”
She stops and I can see her impatience now.
“I agree with you, for what it’s worth.”
“About what?”
“About not killing the Furies.”
This sparks her attention. “Why?”
“It’s the kind of thing that destroys the people who carry out the action just as brutally as it destroys the targets. Mutually assured destruction.”
“So it’s a self-preservation thing for you?”
“It’s a humanity-preservation thing for me.”
She turns for the ladder. I watch her disappear lithely up into the darkness.
My brother finds me soon after. “Have you seen Josi?”
Something makes me hesitate. “No,” I answer. Because I may not feel a whole lot but I know how to recognize emotion, and that girl was full to the brim with it. All she wanted was quiet, and alone, and above. And as part of the humanity-preservation thing, Josephine Luquet needs to be allowed at least part of what she wants. Otherwise I have the peculiar feeling she’ll disappear once more, and this time she won’t come back.
*
Luke
I can’t find Josi – she’s been disappearing every night since she got back and I have no idea to where. Instead I find her father. Phillipe Luquet is in the training room lifting weights despite the fact that it’s the middle of the night and he broke his wrist last week. He’s one tough bloke. The first time he and I met was as he tortured me for my identity, but I never found the desire to hold it against him.
I go to a punching bag and start belting the crap out of it, but I give up after a few minutes. “What’s wrong with her? This is bad, man.”
Phillipe puts his weights down and glances at me reluctantly. “What she’s saying makes sense.”
“She hates the Furies more than anyone. They destroyed the Inferno and killed hundreds – including Hal. Now she wants to give them all a big cuddle?”
He doesn’t say anything, just lifts a weight into a curl. His long, lean limbs are more wiry and muscular than any I’ve seen.
“And with me? Apparently she wants nothing more to do with me. And you can say whatever you want about that, man, but the last thing I remember between us was love. Whatever happened to her made it go away.”
Horrifyingly, there are tears in my eyes. I dash them away impatiently.
“Whatever happened to her,” Shadow says softly, “is her own experience, and traumatic or not, you can’t erase it, boy. We are fluid – always changing, always learning. You can’t make someone un-know something, or forget what they’ve been through. You can’t control who she becomes.”
“So what? I just give up? Put up with her not loving me? Fuck you.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Fuck you,” I repeat.
And then Shadow says, “Be brave.”
I turn and get the hell out of there. He’s as
king me to be braver than I could ever be; getting over Josi would take more courage than I’m capable of.
I barrel into someone in the dark. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s Dave.
“You okay?”
I swallow, wipe my eyes again and ask, “Want to come somewhere with me?”
*
We go to the beach where I proposed to Josi nine months ago. It’s not like it was that night – there is something very unquiet about the sea under this particular moon. Dave and I walk onto the sand and watch the rough waves. I have no idea why I brought him here. I haven’t got any security measures in place. If the Furies come, they come.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“Me? I should be asking you.”
“Why? I wasn’t tortured in a lab for three months.”
I blink. I guess that’s true. Except … “You’ve been tortured in your body for eleven years.”
He shakes his head. “Nah. It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
Dave folds his arms. Crash goes a particularly large wave. Crash, crash, crash go three smaller ones. “It was just … quiet.”
“Was it lonely?”
“For the first couple of years. Then I got used to it and loneliness seemed arbitrary.”
I shake my head. “I wish I could have kept you from that.”
“Lukey, it wasn’t your job. It’s not your burden to bear, as much as you might wish it were. I was your older brother. I should have protected you. And I didn’t. But that’s the way of it, right? There’s a whole lot of ‘shoulds’ and if you waste time thinking about them they make a trap of you.”
I swallow. “Not ‘was’. You’re still my big brother.”
He nods slowly. “Of course, Lukey.”
I think of his shoulds and my shoulds and then abruptly I think of Anthony Harwood’s shoulds. He’d certainly been trapped in the heart of them: they’d hollowed him out and chained him to his empty body. For a second I’m back in that asylum lab on that horrible night he died, listening to him tell us of his wife and daughter, the daughter he’d left to perish alone in their home.
“Do you have any of the side effects?” I ask Dave, suddenly afraid that this kind of soullessness will come over my brother. Anthony used to space out, like a robot whose hardwiring held a glitch. He used to draw birds all over everything, his memory rooted in that happiest of days so it wouldn’t have to face the horror of what came after. I wonder if Dave has gone through anything like this, any glitches or lost time or dementia.
“Nope. I’m the successful case study they pin all their data on.”
“So you’re clearheaded?”
“Very.”
“What about stress? Does that have an effect on you?”
“I don’t feel stress. I problem-solve.”
He glances at me and smiles crookedly – I realize my nose has crinkled with something similar to distaste. “Do you remember feeling things?” I press.
He shrugs. “Not really. I mean, do you? Or do you just tie the theory of emotion to particular memories?”
I try to think back to big moments and I suppose he’s right – I know how I felt during them, I know the words, but I can’t just turn a switch and feel the same things again. I wonder if Josi’s eidetic memory allows her to. “I guess … Do you still feel fear?”
Dave nods.
“When?”
“I don’t know, Luke.”
“Tell me.”
“I felt pretty scared when you first brought me down here.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to die.”
“I’m not gonna let you die, bro.”
There’s a silence. I keep imagining him as a ghost already, I can’t help it. Or perhaps he’s not the ghost. Perhaps Dave’s ghost – my old Dave – stands between us, reminding me of all that he was and all that this version isn’t. He used to make me laugh so much. There was such animation in his face, such feeling in his voice. I would look at him and feel a closeness between us that couldn’t be expressed or even identified – it just was. Intrinsic and infinite.
Now he’s gone the way my wife has. Away.
“How would you feel if I died?” I ask. Why do I ask him this? Sick self-punishment, I guess. Vain hope. I’m trying to push and prod him, like Josi used to do to me when she thought I was cured.
“I don’t know. How am I meant to know that?”
“Imagine. You can still imagine. That’s still a capability of yours, right?”
“Don’t get upset, we’re just talking,” he counsels, and the calm condescension of this pisses me off further.
“Then answer.”
He breathes out, almost like a sigh but not quite. “I’d feel regret.”
“And that’s it?”
He shrugs helplessly. “Do you want me to lie?”
I believe I said exactly this when once upon a time Josi screamed at me to get angry. The air deflates from my chest.
“Just like I regret that they hurt you.”
“I’m not hurt,” I promise, like a vow. “They tried. Those fuckers tried. But they don’t have the power to hurt me.”
That power belongs to you, big brother. How could he not know that? He would have – he was kinder and more sensitive than any soul I’ve ever met. Which means that this isn’t the same man. This isn’t my brother standing next to me with a million miles of distance in his empty gaze, this is not Dave Townsend. It’s someone else, some pale imitation.
I miss him now with such potency that for a second I can’t breathe. I let out a groan, sink onto the sand and rest my head in my hands. Dave doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t touch me. We just stay this way while the sea’s hungry teeth creep toward our waiting feet.
I think of the other versions of us somewhere out there. I think of all the infinite universes and imagine that something has gone desperately wrong, lines have been crossed, a glitch in the hardwiring of existence has occurred. Somehow versions of Dave and Josi meant for other loveless worlds have crossed over and arrived in this one.
You can’t control who she becomes. Shadow was right about that. And it must also be true of my brother.
But I was never as good at love as Dave and Josi were.
I loved them both as well as I could, as vast as the breadth of my soul, as unfathomable as the depth of this sea, and it still wasn’t enough to keep them here. There are much bigger, stronger forces in the world than my will.
So what if this version of me isn’t capable of loving these versions of them?
Chapter 12
April 1st, 2067
Josephine
After everyone fled the stormy wedding and arrived back in our dining tunnel drenched to the bone we realized there was only one way to warm up: don’t stop moving. To that effect we’ve been dancing for five hours straight. And I mean everyone. Will’s breakdancing as usual, which is endlessly impressive, and he’s finally managed to get the incredibly sexy Henrietta to look at him with a certain light in her eyes. Blue is violently jumping around like he’s in a mosh pit, heedless of whoever he might land on and royally pissing everyone off. Pace is killing it with some crump, Claire is swaying and waving her fists out of time to the music and Tobias is shuffling in an excellent albeit awkward Charleston. Even Shadow is dancing, although his interpretation of that is to stand to the side and nod his head minutely to the beat.
It’s neither the time nor the place for me to play Elgar to Luke. At least that’s what I tell myself. I’m so nervous at the thought that I could throw up. What a nutcase.
When we’re all finally dry and warm we start feasting on the delicious wedding food Luke’s spent the last three days overseeing. The ingenious morsels are laid out on the long table, which we’ve shoved to the side so everyone can wander over and grab handfuls while chatting. I’m grateful it didn’t turn into a sit-down formal dinner, or whatever appropriation of that we could muster. Instead
it feels completely relaxed. Fairy-lights have been strung up along the walls (I’m not worrying about where the power is being rerouted from – I’m not) and Will stayed up all of last night to paint a new mural. It’s the most beautiful piece of art I’ve ever seen: I cried when we arrived panting and soaked through to see it.
I have no idea what time it is when Eric clinks his glass for a speech. No one hears him, of course, so he ends up jumping onto the table and hollering at the top of his lungs for everyone to shut up. “It’s time for the speeches, heathens!”
“No,” I groan. I’m perched behind Luke on an overturned milk crate, my arms draped around his shoulders and clasped over his chest.
“Our fearless leaders have made it official!” Eric announces. A cheer goes up and I can’t help laughing. “And it’s just as well because everyone knows the best societies are run by monarchs. Just don’t go all Lord and Lady Macbeth on us, please.” Now everyone is laughing.
“You’d be the first to go,” Luke warns him.
“Yeah, yeah. But seriously. To see you both happy makes life sweeter for the rest of us, and that’s an honest fact. To the bride and groom!”
“To the bride and groom!”
We all raise our cups and drink. It’s not champagne, but we managed to pinch some wine for the occasion, which is a nice treat.
“I also just want to add to the end of that, that the whole reason Josi and I met was because she was hitting on me to make Luke jealous.”
“I told you that in confidence, you jerk!” I snap.
Luke is laughing so much he bends over and I’m lifted off my feet.
Next to give a speech is Pace, and I brace myself. “Yo,” she greets us, taking her place on the tabletop.
“Can we not stomp on the Madeleines, please?” Luke asks her, pained.
“We can shut up,” she replies pointedly. “So Dual and I were forced to be friends. By which I mean that I was forced to be her friend. And let’s be honest – those of us who knew her then know how much of a depressing cow she was.”