Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

  “I gotta see this.”

  We share a grin and then I put my game face on. With my pot in hand, I march through first the boys’ sleeping barracks and then the girls’, whacking away and shouting at the top of my lungs. “Up! Up! Up!”

  There is a chorus of horrified groans. I don’t let up until every one of the brats is out of bed and following me into the arena.

  “Line up!”

  They all line up sleepily. I catch a few what the hell looks.

  “A tap is a very simple concept,” I say. “Because evolution has kindly given you opposable thumbs, you are able to twist one until the liquid stops running. Indeed, you can even twist it far enough to ensure it doesn’t drip. Are we agreed that this is a task even the most pathologically distracted of you are able to complete?”

  They mutter an unenthusiastic yes.

  “So then who is the Neanderthal incapable of turning the goddamn toilet flusher off?”

  No one says a word. A few of them snicker.

  “Do we all remember what happened last time it didn’t get turned off? The toilet overflowed and the sleeping areas got flooded with feces!”

  More laughter and a few groans of memory.

  “Me being the optimistic kinda girl I am assumed that this would have taught the toilet bandit a lesson, but I guess that was giving you too much credit. You’ve got one last chance to own up or every single one of you gets punished.”

  “How are we meant to know who did it?” Lawrence asks. He is always the first to speak, the last to shut the hell up. On his chin sits the day’s five o’clock shadow, which I know drives him crazy – at sixteen he’s the first of his friends to deal with the endless hair growth, and goes through more razors than the girls combined. “If we knew we were doing it, we wouldn’t do it,” he points out smugly.

  “The clues point to a conscious decision to leave the flusher running,” I reply. “Whoever the culprit is, they’re premeditated and pathological.” Out of the corner of my eye I can see that some of the adults have risen from bed to watch in amusement. Luke is leaning against the opening of the silo with folded arms and a smile. I feel momentarily guilty for having woken them with my pot bashing but return to the problem at hand.

  “Come on. Step forward and be cleansed by the truth. We’re not leaving until someone does.”

  A few murmurs and rustles go through the group and then finally Coin steps forward. We call him Coin because he’s the best pickpocket around – he can pinch you anything you want without a soul being the wiser.

  “It was me,” he sighs, brushing his long blond hair behind his ear as his neuroses demands he must every time he speaks.

  “Hallelujah! Why?”

  “Because it grosses me out. Those toilets are never clean enough.”

  “He’s got OCD,” Malia giggles. “Ligit.” She is tiny, a human in miniature, and she’s also Coin’s girlfriend. The two of them spend all of two seconds a day not glued to each other’s mouths.

  I raise my hands to the sky. “Yessssss!” The month-long mystery is solved and now I can return to being a normal human being. I sink to my knees and hug Coin around the waist fervently. He rolls his eyes and starts laughing and then so is everyone else as I lay the garlic wreath around his neck.

  “I dub you King of the Crapper. You get toilet duty for a week. Everyone give it up for the King!”

  A mighty cheer goes up and two of the other boys lift Coin onto their shoulders. I jog over and switch on the ancient iPod and speakers.

  “Can we go back to bed now?” Henrietta asks.

  “Screw bed. Let’s dance!”

  Suddenly the silo is filled with the thumping base of a dance track. The kids give another cheer and immediately everyone is dancing, including the adults. I am immersed in a sea of moving limbs. We love to dance here in the tunnels. We take every opportunity we can get, even if it’s the middle of the night, even if it’s first thing in the morning, or right in the middle of building something or cooking something or punching something.

  In this sea I am reminded of my dream. And though compared to some of the nightmares I’ve had it ranks pretty low on the creepy scale, I feel inexplicably disturbed by it. If I half close my eyes I can almost see the flap of a set of wings or the flick of a furry whisker or the dart of a long reptilian tongue.

  Hands take my waist and Luke is behind me and we dance close. He holds his watch up to show me the time. 12:32. Into my ear he says, “Happy birthday, kid.”

  Today I turn twenty-two, and for once I just want to act my age. So we dance all night because why not?

  *

  September 22nd, 2067

  Josephine

  My veins are empty. The percentage of fluid that is meant to make up a human body is on average sixty. I think I have dropped well below that. I think I might be steadily drying out and very soon I will be at zero percent. I will be a shriveled husk of a creature preparing to become dust, the very same as what she is lying upon. I will dissolve into the ground and the sky. Into a world of endless, endless dust.

  When my eyes worked better I saw dust in every direction. When I could taste I tasted it in my mouth and nose. When I could hear more than the sluggish thump of my slow heart I heard it swirling on currents of wind. My skin, now too raw to distinguish sensations, felt the dust flick and press and coat it. There’s no water left in this world. There is certainly none left in me. My mindless mind takes up residence in the ocean but I don’t have the imagination to keep even it filled. Instead it turns swiftly to a dry bed of salt.

  I am done. Turned inside out and wrung dry. I’m at my end and I have no power to forestall it any longer.

  The hands that appear above me are unfathomable miracles. They trickle fresh cool water into my parched mouth and somehow I am returning to the edge of life once more. I can’t make sense of it until I see the eyes above and recognize that every blood vessel in them has burst. The red of them is the brightest thing in this yellow gray world.

  The red is how I remember where I am.

  And I wish simply that I’d been left to die after all.

  *

  March 3rd, 2067

  Josephine

  I groan aloud and lick my cracked lips. My mouth feels like it hasn’t tasted water in weeks but has instead devoured something foul and furry.

  “Water,” I croak.

  I hear the jarring sound of Luke’s laughter as he holds a cup to my lips. I drink greedily and slump back on my pillow.

  “Whyyyyyyyy.”

  “Not feeling too hot today, are we?”

  “If you even so much as think smug thoughts I will kill you.”

  He laughs again and passes me some painkillers for my pounding head. I manage to sit up slightly.

  “Think you’ll puke?”

  “Don’t say puke.”

  “Knock knock!” someone says loudly from the entrance to our little bedroom. Pace is the culprit.

  “Shhhhhh.”

  “Happy birthday, you look like rubbish,” she says cheerfully. Glimpsing the amount of metal piercings in her face makes my eyes sore. “I’m here to make a deposit.”

  Luke jumps up to receive the small child. Pace spends a moment kissing her son’s cheeks then waves to us. “See ya, losers.”

  “You’re welcome,” I mutter. “She better not be off on another date.”

  “With who? She’s already slept with every unattached human of the male variety in the tunnels.”

  “And one or two of the non-male variety.”

  Luke carries Hal to the bed and lays him between us. I kiss his chubby fingers happily, instantly feeling a million times better.

  “I’m sure he’s part Viking,” Luke says. Hal is enormous for his age and has a mane of thick blond hair. Just like his father. Luke’s large hand rests on the boy’s chest, feeling the heartbeat.

  “Can we steal him? Pace wouldn’t mind too much, right?”

  “Nah. I don’t think she’s very attached.??
?

  The birthday celebrations got particularly rowdy last night. I got carried away because I’ve been pretending not to mind that a certain person isn’t here. Not that I could care less about birthdays. But down here it’s impossible to ignore when someone’s missing.

  I clear my throat. “I think it’s time to get Shadow.”

  Luke shakes his head. “We don’t have the intel. Surveillance needs another month at least. Nor do we have any of the equipment.”

  “So we’ll get the equipment and make do with the intelligence we have.”

  “We gotta wait, Josi. It’s not like other missions. It’s a death trap.”

  I meet Luke’s green eyes. “We’ve waited six months already. We can keep waiting and waiting forever and it might never make a difference. We have actionable information now.”

  He watches me intently in that assessing way of his. I’m not sure what he sees. Besides a revoltingly hung-over newly twenty-two-year-old.

  After a while he just says, “Trust me, not yet.”

  So I nod and I trust him.

  *

  Will has a gift for me, despite clear rules to the contrary. He’s picked it up on one of his missions above, and when I see it I gasp aloud. It’s an ancient looking book on birds called Migrations.

  Once upon a time there were birds in the world. It was they who delivered a plague that wiped out most of the world’s population. It was birds who then died of the same thing, one after the other, and if any survived they were shot down in fear, every single one, every single species.

  All but the chickens, because our appetite for them outweighed even our fear of plague.

  Once upon a time there were birds in the world but now the only ones that remain are locked in cages and then eaten.

  Will opens this precious book and eagerly shows me a section on the migration paths of wild geese, reading aloud about how geese fly in a V formation. Because their leader must cut the path for the others through the air currents, they work harder than the rest and allow the others to fly in the slipstreams they create. After a long shift at the front, the leader falls back and the freeloaders migrate to the front of the V to take over the more difficult work. They can travel huge distances like this, working together in a cycle. Or, they could, when they were still alive.

  “There’s heaps of cool stuff in here like that,” Will says, closing the book and handing it to me.

  “I love it.” And I do. Even if it makes me sad.

  There’s a feast to celebrate. I had no idea but it was obvious everyone was acting shiftily. The eating tunnel is long and narrow and slightly curved. We don’t usually eat together because there isn’t enough room, but tonight everyone crams in to present me with a massive flan-type thing that looks like a cake but isn’t, of course, because we can’t cook a cake. Luke’s done an awfully good job with whatever this creation is. They sing me happy birthday and cheer when I blow out the candles and it’s very sweet but I can’t shake this awful nagging feeling in my chest that I’d hoped this year would finally be the year I got to spend with family, at least one member of it. It’s ungenerous and ungrateful but I really, really want my dad.

  “You okay?” Luke murmurs in my ear as Claire starts dividing the long flan into enough portions to give everyone a taste. Actually, it may be more of a smell than a taste, but still.

  I nod and smile.

  Lawrence, Alo, and Coin have made up a song to sing me while Malia accompanies them (quite poorly) on the guitar. It contains lots of jokes about my so-called obsession with toilets.

  Afterwards I play my cello. I pluck the strings and fill the tunnels with bluegrass. Sara plays her fiddle and Henrietta her recorder and despite wanting newer electronic music the kids all seem to forget how old these songs are and instead just enjoy them.

  Twang, go my strings, deep and vibrating. The music is lively but my bass notes feel heavy. As I play I watch Luke and his parents. He sits between them and all three are tapping their feet. He says something that makes them both smile. Tobias’ hands shake and his son reaches over to take them in his own, to squeeze them tight as though he can gentle them still. The sight makes me ache. Just as the sight of Hal in Pace’s arms does. She is dancing with him, spinning him around and bouncing him to the beat. There’s this thing in her now that seems to cry out in sweet freedom. He has unburdened her somehow from whatever difficulties her life held.

  I watch them all and I play and I feel lonely. I shouldn’t. I have so much. So much life and love and friendship. A few short years ago I was truly alone but now I’m surrounded by people and I’ve never felt so lonely and it’s such a sick thing, a hateful thing. I don’t understand it.

  I don’t think I was built to be happy and the thought makes me ashamed.

  When we finish I duck out to go to the bathroom and instead make my way blindly back to my room. I sit on the edge of my lumpy mattress in the dark and relive those last moments.

  I’ve done this a thousand times. Remembered the exact look in my father’s eyes as he held Falon Shay to the ground and shouted at me to go, go! And Luke pulling me out of that building and into the chaos of the night in time to escape the explosion that should have killed him. Might have killed him. But if the minister got free then maybe Shadow did too. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  I asked him once if he had family and he said he had, a lifetime ago. A wife and a daughter, both dead. I wonder now as I do every damn day why he thought me dead. How did the events that brought me alone to a rough dirt road near the wall when I was two unfold? How could it be that my mother was the wife of the Prime Minister, and why does that minister think Shadow murdered her? How did she die, and why didn’t Shadow take me with him when he left for the west? There are way too many questions and they’re making me crazy. I’m lost in them, when I shouldn’t be lost at all, I should be found.

  I rest my head in my hands. That’s how I am when I hear Luke lighting a match. He climbs onto the bed and sits behind me, threading his arms around my shoulders and waist. His lips find my hairline, my jaw, my ear.

  “I can’t watch you like this any longer. Let’s get Shadow back.”

  I swallow. “We don’t have the intel, or the equipment. I can’t ask you to do it.”

  “But you’re going, aren’t you?”

  I nod slowly. His question makes clear something I hadn’t quite realized myself. I am going, of course I am. “It’s smarter for you to stay here. You’re too needed to risk.”

  Luke tilts my face so we’re looking at each other in the candlelight. He smiles a little. How silly you are, this smile says. You go, I go, it murmurs.

  It feels as it did the first time I loved him. How does this happen? This endless maddening ardent love? How could it still feel like those first frenzied days or weeks or months? After all these years and all these lies I still adore him to distraction. When I was a child I was experimented on and made a slave to the violence of the blood moon. Once a year adrenalin flooded me and ravaged my body and nearly killed it. This feels the same. This feels like too much intensity to handle, like it must surely eat away at me and leave me destroyed.

  My mouth finds his and I taste him. His hands pull at me, at my soul, removing me from my clothes and my sadness.

  “This is going to kill us both one day.” I’m not sure if I’ve said it or thought it or wished it or dreaded it.

  Luke pulls away to look at my face. His hand takes my chin, then gently encircles my throat. His eyes hold the same thing that’s in my chest and he understands, he feels it too and he’s a creature from my dream, one of the wildest ones.

  Chapter 3

  December 16th, 2067

  Dave

  I’m a piece of wood that was once twisted and gnarled through with knots and dips and grooves and edges. I had sharpness and smoothness and roughness. A living breathing throbbing thing. I was ugly but I was beautiful in my ugliness. Gloriously, beautifully ugly.

  Now I have been sanded down until t
here is only smooth. I am evenly surfaced and weighted and round. I am perfect. A sphere of wood dropped into a tiny tank of water and left to peer out through the slow blur and wonder what’s on the other side of the glass.

  *

  The girl is wild. I know it instinctively because I know she’s all the things I’m not. Her calm is as far from mine as fire is to smoke. Seemingly so close, so similar, and yet formed of a completely different elemental makeup.

  My brother sits somewhere in between, or perhaps he’s not even on the same spectrum: he has no calm whatsoever. He is a beating heart without ribs for protection. Without muscle or even skin.

  We follow and do as the girl says. As Luke’s wife says. She gets us free and through the city to a safe house I have no idea how they managed to obtain. Her capabilities are immense and she is seemingly without compassion for human life. Or at least for Blood life, these soldiers of the Ministers, men and women made more deadly than any on the planet. There’s no difference between them and us, in truth – they are just people, after all – but maybe she doesn’t know that yet.

  I’m weak and Luke is flagging after having been so consistently drugged for three months. There are others in her group – resisters, presumably – but they flit in and out of our vision and then disappear entirely. All of a sudden Luke and the girl and I are alone in a small living room. I peer around at the dark, windowless space. Outside her people will be sweeping and watching for any danger, keeping the safe house safe. I know this instinctively, not because I know anything about rebel groups or sweeping and watching or keeping safe houses safe.

  I see Luke try to hold the woman but she removes herself from his touch and turns to me.

  “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Dave,” I say, when Luke doesn’t.

  She looks at her husband. He doesn’t even have to nod for her to understand that yes, it’s the Dave he’s mentioned, the brother Dave.

  Her face shifts. It was lovely in its ferocity but now as she smiles a true smile it becomes beautiful. I feel no stirrings of desire, not even the base, primitive ones most people left in the world would feel when faced with beauty of this nature. Warm, tugging beauty.