Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

  Eventually, as the sun begins to rise faintly over the horizon and turns everything an inky gray blue, he speaks. “When you were little and I thought I’d lost you I was shocked into numbness. Every word I could think of speaking or being spoken was an offense to your memory. There was no me without you. I was lost. It was a profundity of grief that was never again rivaled, even when Shay took me and did his worst.”

  I know what he’s trying to say, and I agree. No matter what’s done to your body, it doesn’t rival losing the ones you love.

  I clasp my hands and try to work out how best to convey that this is the last conversation we’ll be having on the subject.

  “You were my father a very long time ago,” I say, “but that ended when I was left to people who hated me and decided to experiment on me. Whatever you think happened to me over the last few months is not what you imagine or went through, and it’s not your responsibility. I’m not saying this to hurt you, I’m just trying to be clear about my expectations.” I stand and brush myself off. “Goodnight.”

  There is a pause and then he murmurs, “Goodnight.”

  *

  When I get back to the tunnels for my breakfast shift in the kitchen it’s to find that I’m the first person here. And sitting on the bench is a wrapped present. I pause to look at it. It’s flat and rectangular, like an A4 sheet of brown paper with a red ribbon tied around it. I’m disappointed to see it – I’ve been praying that no one would do this. I dread the attention this birthday will bring, and the thanks I’ll have to give for whatever gestures they think will draw me back to the woman I once was. I don’t deserve presents and I wish I could find a way to make them see that.

  I consider not unwrapping it, but leaving it there. But that’s cruel, and I can’t stand the thought of being cruel. Uncomfortably I untie the ribbon and look at the card.

  Josi. From all of us. We love you however you are.

  My pulse picks up inexplicably. Why do I feel nervous? My fingers pull back the brown paper to reveal scores of music.

  A sound leaves me. The Bach suites are all here. There is Benjamin Britton, who I once loved because he wrote all his music beside and about the sea. There is Beethoven and Debussy, and last there is the Elgar cello concerto I once tuned my heart to.

  I can’t fathom where they got any of them. So much physical music was lost when the world ended and paper became so much harder to come by. Instruments are rare enough, music even more so. These scores look very old, some of them worn at the edges, some smudged or faded. They must have been stored somewhere or perhaps maintained in the old library. I am overcome with their beauty and the sweetness of the gesture, and I am overcome with a sad sort of guilt that I will never be able to use them.

  *

  March 24th, 2068

  Josephine

  “Tell me again?”

  “Sally Higgs, 23 Swan Avenue, Mica Powell, 2/12 Port Lane, Eli Fjordsson, 44 Markham Street and Ray Burns at 1 Brockwell Street.”

  Luke nods. “Let’s start with Ray and work our way east.”

  We set off, keeping out of the glow of the streetlights and following the quietest route. We’re dressed in normal clothes and any weapons we carry are concealed so that if we’re spotted we look like a couple of drones out for a stroll, and not resistance fighters on a mission to steal the medicine of the recently deceased.

  Tonight it’s just Luke and me. I’ve made a point of not being alone with him too much over the last couple of months, but this had to happen tonight and we were the only two not already occupied with other tasks. So up we’ve come, to the suburb in which he and I used to live together.

  In fact, there it is. Our very own apartment block.

  We walk past in silence, neither of us saying a word about the things that lived and died in that penthouse. It’s sort of insane to me in this moment that we could walk past it without a word, but we do and that’s that.

  A woman pulls her garbage bins onto the gutter in front of us and we immediately take hands as we pass her. She glances at us, smiles and heads back in. Our hands drop.

  We cross the bridge of a canal and I see all the houseboats moored, the ones I used to peer into and wish I owned. Some are offensively fancy – floating piles of money – while others pretend to be less crass with their wealth by hiding it inside. I unwittingly search out my favorite and spot it moored a few meters up the river. It has a garden of flowers on its roof, a burst of color within the surrounding grays and timbers of the more expensive boats. It’s smaller too, and through the windows you can see that one of its walls is completely lined with books. I always wondered who owned that one, and why they never spent any time in it.

  Then we’re across the river and the boats are gone. We cut through a small park with, not grass, but wood chips for children to play on. Past the primary school and our local shopping center. All these places we used to walk by together. Up ahead is a metal sculpture of none other than Minister Falon Shay’s first beloved wife. I’ve been dreading it, but didn’t say a word to change our course, and neither did Luke. I saw it a million times when I lived here but I had no idea then that this woman was my mother.

  As we draw near I can’t help but stop.

  She’s been vandalized, and now no longer has a head or arms. She’s a torso resembling the Venus de Milo, and I find myself smiling.

  “Love the new look,” Luke says. “Must drive the locals nuts.”

  He’s got a point. Everyone walks around here with giant sticks shoved up their asses and if you don’t scrub your windows daily or trim the hedge to regulation height you get passive-aggressive notes dropped in your mailbox.

  “Maybe we have a Renaissance vigilante,” I suggest.

  “And he calls himself Pythokritos.”

  I blink. “Huh?”

  Luke smiles and shrugs. “It looks like the Winged Victory, don’t you reckon?”

  I tilt my head and study it. “I was just thinking the Venus de Milo.”

  “But she has a head. The Winged Victory has no arms and no head.”

  “But it also has wings.”

  We peer at it and despite that, I think he’s right – it does look like a wingless Winged Victory.

  “I can’t believe you know who made that statue.”

  “There you go, after all these years, still thinking me just a pretty face.”

  Our footsteps sound softly as we turn the corner onto Brockwell Street and head toward Ray Burns’ house at the very end. We case the place but Ray only died two days ago so there shouldn’t be anyone occupying it yet. Security is hackable so once the alarm is down we break in a back window and creep through the dark floors of the large townhouse, searching for bathrooms. I find a guest toilet with a marble toilet brush, then a shared bathroom with nothing but strange paintings of pugs and little hotel toiletries. I leave the former and grab the latter, despite a fleeting amusement at the idea of giving Pace a picture of her least favorite type of dog. In the upstairs bathroom is where we hit the jackpot: medication. Ray Burns died of Parkinson’s in St Mary’s Memorial, and just as we hoped, his bathroom is chockfull of the pills Tobias desperately needs. We haul it all into a backpack and head for the kitchen.

  It doesn’t feel good ransacking the houses of the newly departed. It’s a bit like robbing graves, I imagine. But I’ve never had too much of a problem with it because I figure if I died, I’d want people to take all the stuff I couldn’t use anymore. And it’s better than robbing them before they die, when they actually need their medicine.

  Ray has a few tins of tomatoes, some flour, sugar, oats, pasta, honey, just the usual crap you have in your pantry. We take it all and get out of there, headed for the next house on the list.

  We burgle all night, not talking much. If we do say anything it’s light – a joke or two, a few comments about how the other half live. Luke whistles softly and the sound of it calms me without me realizing it. Once our hands accidentally touch and I pull away so quickly he asks
if he hurt me. There’s an awkward moment when I say no and he realizes how badly his touch affects me, and then we go to opposite ends of the house. The next time we pass I can feel the tension in the air between us. The hairs on my arms stand on end, for Christ’s sake.

  We’re in the last house on our list when the cops show up. Of course we haven’t turned on any lights – we can work in any depth of darkness – so I have no idea how we’ve been spotted by a neighbor, but there you go. The second you start thinking you’re on an easy op is the second it goes wrong. The car pulls up out the front, its red and blue lights shutting off with the engine. The cops don’t say anything, they just peer in the front windows, shine their torches and then press the doorbell.

  Luke and I are watching from the upstairs bedroom. We look at each other for ideas. There are only two of them so it’s hardly a big deal, we just need to make sure they don’t find a reason to call for backup.

  A man comes out of the house next door. He talks to one of the officers and points to the side gate, where we entered. The cop approaches it, meaning he’ll spot the broken window out the back soon enough.

  Luke points to the manhole in the roof.

  Despite not wanting to be confined in a small space with him, I shrug and nod. We climb up onto the dressing table and into the dusty roof. I cough and then swallow the discomfort in the back of my throat. For a while we just lie in the dark and listen for what’s going on in the rest of the house.

  “You ever wonder why so many of these massive houses only have one person living in them?” Luke whispers so quietly I barely hear him.

  I don’t reply, because I haven’t ever wondered.

  “It’s like the richer you get, the lonelier you get.”

  “Their spouses have all died, it’s why we pick them.”

  “But no kids or relatives?”

  “You don’t live with your kids or relatives,” I point out. “Not once they’ve grown up.”

  “I guess. But still. One person tinkering around in this huge place … it’s depressing.”

  It sounds pretty sweet to me. Better than being crammed into a too-small, windowless tunnel with a hundred other people. I wouldn’t take this suburb, though. I wouldn’t even take this city anymore.

  This thought reminds me of the ceiling and the walls. It makes me very aware of them. I try to imagine floating up through the ceiling and into the sky, but more and more these days this imagining is difficult to hold onto. It slips through the fingers of my mind and I can’t ignore the shrinking walls or the approaching roof or the steadily dissipating oxygen. It’s too small in here, way too small.

  Without warning I’m panicking.

  “Josi?”

  I hate this. I hate it. I have to get out. I need the sky. I need earth under my feet. I need to breathe, I can’t breathe. There’s blood in my mouth I can taste it, it’s choking me, I’m drowning in the heavy rank iron of it—

  Hands take my face and then Luke’s mouth is on mine. He’s done this before – in an air-conditioning vent while I freaked out about wanting to kill Falon Shay. That time it calmed me, distracted me. This time it doesn’t. Instead of getting lost in the kiss I’m nauseated with alarm and shove his face roughly away. I’m so angry with him for touching me without my permission. My skin is flushed and raw with it; it’s repulsed. I’m so angry, in fact, that for a second I hate him.

  My fist snakes into the first part of him I find, which happens to be his bad shoulder, the one that dislocates under a gust of wind. He grunts in pain and rolls onto his back. “Fuuuuuuck,” he hisses, clutching it.

  Something in my guts is churning, clenching, tightening. Something because of the smell of him or his pain or the rupturing claustrophobia inside my skull. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing as I slide on top of him in the small dusty space and I don’t actually care. I’m throbbing. Vibrating. I hate him and I hate myself but some nasty compulsion makes it impossible for me to stop. Someone walks through the room directly below us as I hold Luke’s jaw with one hand and undo his jeans with the other. His eyes widen and he groans but I can feel his erection getting harder as I press myself against it. He tries to kiss me; I push his face away and he moves his hand instead to grab my hip and all of a sudden he’s deep inside me and I can’t breathe but I can and the hungry thing in me is clawing at him, needing him. We fuck fast and hard, in silence except for our breathing and our raging heartbeats, listening to the sounds of the police in the room beneath us. “They musta gone already,” one of the cops says right as Luke thrusts so hard that I come. He shoves his hand over my mouth but I hardly notice because the roof explodes off the house and I’m in the sky after all, in the stars, rushing steadily away from the vile black shame that has become the ruler of my soul.

  *

  When we’re alone we climb out of the roof and I carefully rotate Luke’s dislocated shoulder back into its socket. I give him two aspirin but he’s pale with pain as we leave the house. I carry both the backpacks filled with medicine and food and he doesn’t argue – as well as dealing with his shoulder I can see he’s also lost in melancholy. He doesn’t mention what happened in the roof or my temporary madness. I feel a moment of gratitude that he doesn’t use it to demand more of me.

  Back at the safe house, we sit at the kitchen table so I can place his arm in a sling. He winces as I maneuver his wrist through the bandage. “Okay?”

  Luke nods.

  I notice his other hand clenched on his thigh, his bad hand. He must have used it too much tonight because it’s swollen and inflamed. I hesitate, then remind myself that in no part of my self-reevaluation did I decide to become ungenerous. So I take the hand and gently massage the joints like I used to. He makes a sound, one of both pain and relief as I work the tight knots from the muscles.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  Broken bones heal by calcifying and becoming stronger. All the bones in the human body do this except for those in the hand, which heal a little weaker, a little more painful. And when you break every single bone in a hand, it might heal but it will never be the same. It will always remind you of that pain, each time you move it, each time it makes a fist, each time the temperature drops. It will tell you in a million tiny ways how much less it is than it once was. You’ll be reminded, Luke once told me, of your fragility, day after day after day.

  “I never believed you when you said it,” I murmur.

  “What?”

  “How fragile we are. I get it now. Did the Bloods teach you that?”

  “They tried to teach me the opposite. It was Dad who taught me about fragility because I kept forgetting mine.”

  There is a long silence as I finish massaging his poor hand.

  Then he says, “I know what happened to you.”

  My hand drops his. I frown.

  “I think I do.” Luke leans forward and looks into my eyes. “You remembered.”

  I stand abruptly and take several clumsy steps back.

  He raises that hand in a gesture of peace, promising silence with it. He won’t ask me anymore.

  My shock trickles away, my heart slows. It’s not so surprising that he figured it out. He doesn’t know the reality though, or any of the dizzying details. He thinks he knows the girl with a moon for a heart but he doesn’t.

  I turn and walk to my bedroom, muttering, “Night.”

  It isn’t until I’m closing the door behind me that I hear him murmur, “Goodnight, darling.”

  Chapter 18

  Inside a stone prison lived a little girl with a moon for a heart. Most days the moon made her lonely, but once a year it hollowed out the inside of her so severely that it left a great gaping hole the likes of which nothing could fill. No matter how she tried, no matter how ravenously she consumed, no food or drink could sate the wild emptiness. One day she couldn’t stand it any longer and, with everything she could lay her hands on too cold or dead to be of any sustenance, she caught the scent, instead, of a small rodent. This she
captured and devoured, tearing into its warm flesh with sharp teeth and a hungry soul. Upon waking the next morning she remembered nothing of what she’d done, but saw her reflection covered in sticky, steely blood.

  *

  A year later the hunger was worse. A rat wouldn’t do. She needed something larger, warmer, wilder. She needed something she could hunt and kill, something whose life force would fill the hole within. She bit into the furry body of a hissing cat but this wasn’t enough. She was so hungry. Desperately, maddeningly hungry. Her wandering feet took her far from her home until she found a girl her own age playing in her backyard. The girl didn’t run, but offered to play with her. She died with the moon girl’s teeth in her neck and an unnatural strength squeezing the air from her windpipe.

  *

  The year after that there were two victims. Both of them adult, neither suspecting until too late that the gangly teenage girl could be capable of ending their lives. She ate all the pieces of them, starting with the fatty flesh and finishing with the organs. The heart tasted best: it held the most blood, and if she could be quick enough to bite into it while it still beat, the more the better.

  *

  Much to the moon girl’s agony, the hunting and the feeding did nothing to ease her starvation. She was wasting away from the inside and the more she ate the hungrier she grew. Each time the moon overcame her she wandered farther, alone beneath the red hewn sky. Her frenzied feet searched and searched for a nameless, impossible thing. An end to the creature she’d become. Her senses heightened along with her strength. She smelled more than she ever had; could catch the scent of life from a long way away. Even the clothes on her back became too much sensation to bear and so she took to wandering naked and primitive as the first humans once did, though their hunger was natural and hers was something entirely other. It fell to a pattern. Her monstrosities grew as she learned tricks for survival. She ate and ate and ate and ate.