Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

  I wonder if this has wounded Dave at all, but see no evidence of it. I think that makes it all the harder for Luke to stomach – that there’s no regret, no pain at the making of this betrayal.

  “This is getting harder to hold,” Will warns from where he’s got his back pressed to the locked door. Shadow returns to help him. The Bloods on the other side have something with which to ram and the lock won’t hold against it forever.

  I hear a strange noise then. A sort of tap tap tap; an avian cry.

  My heart constricts with fear and my head whips up to see Intirri at the skylight, trying to get in to me. “Oh god.”

  “Is that a bird?” Will demands.

  “Intirri, go!” I try to call. “Leave!”

  If they see her they’ll try to kill her – she’s a plague threat. I search around for a ladder – they must have a way of reaching that window, but as though my thought has summoned the dark deed, distant shots sound. At first I don’t know where they’re coming from, but Luke has moved to a different angle to peer up at the bird.

  “I think they’re on the next roof along,” he says. “Firing at her.”

  I lunge for the skylight, forgetting about my body, which roars in denial. A scream tears from my mouth and I slam my eyes shut against it.

  When I open them again it’s to see feathers exploding into the air and then her wing falling still against the glass.

  A shocking sound erupts from me; it’s the slicing of my spirit, the tumbling away of it, the desertion of it. The kind of baying a wolf offers to the moon with its most mournful of hearts.

  I thought I knew pain.

  Before my howl has even ended Luke is moving. Up onto the cabinets, monkeying his way up the rows of shelves to their highest, moving fast enough that his weight won’t collapse anything underfoot and then without a second’s hesitation he launches himself off the shelf, through the air toward the roof, his body stretching as far as it can, hands reaching right out to clutch at the sill around the glass. He grunts with sudden pain and his right loses its grip, swinging low. He’s holding that tiny ledge with only his left fingers now, and I can see the pain in his paper-white lips.

  He won’t be able to hold on, not with one hand, and a drop from that height will break his legs.

  Just as I’m preparing myself to watch him fall, I see him reach up with his broken hand and grip the edge of the window. The pain, it must … I’ve seen him sweat and moan with the punishment of that hand after having done nothing more strenuous than simple tasks like gripping something too tightly or unclenching it too quickly, but this …

  With a trembling cry, he lets go with his left hand and takes all of his weight on the mangled right, the only way he can reach up to unlatch the window.

  The glass opens inwards and gives him something to hold onto. I can’t see Intirri anymore, and soon Luke has hauled himself up through the opening of the roof and he too is gone from my sight.

  The guns continue to fire.

  *

  Luke

  Muscle and bone and nerve endings have betrayed me. Something has come utterly undone in my hand; the things that hold it together have fled me.

  But her bird … I must.

  So I force the hand to do what it’s unable to do. I hold its pieces together with nothing but sheer force of will, because yes, I’m fragile but I’m also resilient, I’m also more than flesh and bone. I make it up onto the roof.

  She’s so small, lying there like that. Her blood and feathers have smudged the glass. I sweep her into my chest, holding her with my bad arm and angling my body over hers. She wakes, makes a sound, a soft call not unlike the sound Josi just made, the sound that will follow me to my grave and into my nightmares.

  “Shhh,” I whisper, cradling the beautiful little falcon.

  They’re still firing, the men who’ve been taught to see flight and think death. I draw my weapon and line them up, one at a time. In the silence that comes after the passing of their lives I look up into the cloudless, empty sky. She is a warm miracle in my hands. A good way to ease a wounded heart. A good way to start approaching the far distant concept of forgiveness for a betrayal too deep. A good way to remember what matters. This is how Josi survived – with sky and a bird. Maybe it’s how I’ll survive what my brother has done.

  *

  Once upon a time a sickness was brought to us by the birds, one that wiped out millions, and so we hunted any bird who survived that sickness and shot them from the sky. We obliterated them from the world, sent thousands of species extinct.

  In my arms lies the last of her kind.

  Or maybe, I think, she is the first.

  Chapter 28

  April 8th, 2068

  Josephine

  “She’s alive!” he calls down. “They only got her wing!”

  Tears spill from my eyes as I let them fall shut. I have sunk so deep into my chair that I’ll never climb back out.

  “There’s a way out up here!” he shouts next.

  A smile finds my lips. They’re going to make it.

  “Go,” I tell the others.

  Dave is packed and bandaged to within an inch of his life and is now sitting up. Zach peers up at the skylight. “How are those of us without superpowers meant to get up there?”

  “There has to be a ladder somewhere,” Will points out.

  “Probably not in the operating room,” Zach snaps.

  Shadow starts lifting the operating table up onto the desk.

  “Everything just had to be so damn majestic for you, didn’t it, Dad?” Zach mutters as he helps try to broach the distance to the abnormally high ceiling.

  “Hey, stop!” Luke shouts. “There’s rope in the pack on your back, Shadow!”

  Shadow unzips his regulation combat pack or whatever it is and sure enough, there’s a coil of rope. He throws this up to Luke, who manages to fasten it to something up there, then shouts for us to hurry while the way is still clear.

  Zach starts climbing without a single glance backwards.

  “Come on, you,” Will says, moving to help me.

  “Don’t.”

  Something passes his eyes, understanding and then blunt refusal. “No way.”

  “I’m not getting up there,” I tell him softly. “My chest plate is broken, I think. All my ribs. My lung is punctured. I can’t move. I can hardly breathe.” I think I’m dying. And I think I’m okay with it.

  “We’ll carry you.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Bullshit. No.”

  Shadow arrives then. He doesn’t say anything, he just lifts me from my chair and even though I scream in pain he doesn’t put me back down or stop, he just drapes me like a baby over his body, like we are hugging, but I can’t hold on, I can do nothing but lie here like dead, useless weight. “Just leave me,” I wheeze, or I try to wheeze, but I don’t think much makes it out of my mouth.

  Will scampers up like it’s the easiest thing in the world, then turns and offers encouragement. Which I don’t think Shadow appreciates, because it mostly consists of needling him about how old he is.

  I have my eyes and mouth clenched shut against the feel of sandpaper sawing at the edges of my bones. From this position every breath sends a needle straight through the center of me.

  Shadow climbs hand over hand, which is no easy feat on your own, let alone with an extra lump of human draped over you. I can hear his breathing grow more and more ragged as he inches his way up. Will was joking but he was also more right than he realized. Shadow’s too old for this. He’s had too many debilitating injuries, has been brought back from the brink of death too many times. This is too much to ask of him.

  Dave is still below. There’s no way he can climb up, so we left him for last in order to pull him up from above. But there’s no way Luke, Will and Zach can pull all three of us – Luke’s only got one hand and the other two have rather limited upper body strength.

  This isn’t going to work. Some things just aren’t l
ogistically possible, and getting two severely injured people up a hanging rope is unfortunately one of them.

  I make a swift decision, sending my heart up through the roof to where my husband waits, to where my bird waits. I’ll leave it there with them. They’ll look after it.

  To my father I say, “It’s alright. It’s enough now. I love you.”

  And I let go of him.

  I fall heavily onto the operating gurney and feel the last meager breaths of air flee my broken chest.

  Dave launches himself onto the bottom of the rope and in the chaos of the door being battered in, they drag Shadow and Dave up as quickly as they can and even though they’re shouting my name they know there’s nothing left to do now, nothing but to get that rope up and save the ones they can.

  As the Bloods surround me I tilt my face up to the square of clear blue sky.

  It seems this is how I’ve faced all of my deaths.

  *

  Dave

  I’ve always been very aware of my own cowardice, but even I’m surprised at the new depths of it. She drops to the bed right beside me. I could stay with her, or try to help her, but instead I scurry onto the rope and allow myself to be pulled to safety. I wonder if maybe love and sadness and anger are the things that allow you to be brave. Or if maybe I’m just a coward.

  Luke’s voice as he screams her name is a riot of sound. There’s music in it, music for heartbreak. But I hear music everywhere.

  I reach them and am in the process of being pulled onto the roof when I feel something attach itself to my foot. I give a gasp. Don’t even have time to look down before I’m being wrenched back into the room.

  Luke drops the bird and lunges for my arms – one hand can’t quite keep hold of me, but the other’s grip is made of iron. My shoulder shrieks.

  “Hang on,” he grunts.

  Will and Shadow are trying to haul Luke back and me with him, but it’s not enough, I’m being dragged down by the force of way too many men. I’m about to be split in half. Or else I’ll simply drag Luke with me into the abyss. And I can’t have that.

  I look up and meet my brother’s eyes.

  “Don’t let go,” he tells me. “Don’t you dare.”

  I’m meant to be smooth and perfect and pure. That’s what Shay tried so hard to create when he turned me from a man into a drone. But I’m not. I’m far from pure, no longer smooth but blemished with mistakes, with treachery and lies. Take everything but fear and you create the worst kind of creature that exists. That is a creature incapable of anything true, anything real or selfless or brave. Act always in fear and you tear the world down around you.

  But as I look at my brother I realize something simple.

  It seems that maybe I can be brave after all. For him, for my little brother, I can be anything.

  I say, “Turns out love doesn’t live where they thought it did.”

  Not in the mind or the heart but everywhere, everywhere.

  I pull free of his weak hand and draw the knife he armed me with. Awkwardly I slash it through his hand and as his muscles jerk he has no choice but to let go of me.

  “No, no, no—”

  I crash down in a tangle of Blood bodies and limbs. Elgar plays in my heart as I fall, a last wish, a last regret that I couldn’t give it back to his wife, and then I hear my own skull hittin—

  Chapter 29

  April 8th, 2068

  Luke

  Please, not again.

  Chapter 30

  April 8th, 2068

  Josephine

  It’s an accident. Nothing more than an accident. As he lands his head hits the floor at the wrong angle. And that’s it.

  That’s how he dies, when the rest of them suffer no more than a few bruises and sprains.

  That’s how he dies.

  My eyes are glued to where his body lies, awkwardly strewn in the position it landed. They don’t move him. They don’t straighten his twisted limbs or close his eyes or clean the blood pooling beneath his skull.

  And it is profoundly unbearable to me.

  So I will do it.

  I drag myself off the bed and tumble to the ground, hitting hip and elbow and broken ribs so hard that my vision goes black. When the world blinks back into life I drag myself, hands still cuffed, over the cold tile floor to his side. My breathing is a horrendous rattling wheeze, louder and shorter with each.

  “Stay where you are,” a Blood orders me. He sounds oddly sad. Or maybe it’s my imagination.

  I ignore him and creak myself into a sitting position. It tears something within. Perhaps one of my broken ribs has punctured something else. I don’t know. I don’t know anything except that I have to spare him this indecency.

  With painstakingly slow movements I pull Dave’s leg into place, twisting it around and lying it straight. I do the same with his arms, one after the other, and the Bloods let me. For the first time since I met him he looks peaceful. It’s true peace, not enforced emptiness. It’s fullness. I’m crying and my tears are falling on his face as I reach to close his eyelids.

  It’s all I can do. My body gives up. I slump over him and rest my cheek on his chest, imagining that a heartbeat will stutter back to life.

  It doesn’t.

  I close my eyes.

  And as I drift off I hear the skull shattering sound of an alarm tone. Three bursts. And then a voice being broadcast over every speaker in the Gates.

  Attention. This is acting Prime Minister Jane Folley, speaking on behalf of the Ministers United. All agents are to stand down. We wish to discuss the terms of our surrender to the resistance under the guidelines of the Treaty Act.

  I repeat, we surrender.

  Chapter 31

  April 14th, 2068

  Josephine

  The world returns slowly. Or, more aptly, I return to it slowly. Some dark place filled with beasts has kept me captive but now I rise ephemerally to the white, blinking, beepingness of reality.

  Medical machines hum softly on either side of me and the sheet covering my skin is the softest I’ve ever felt. I don’t recognize where I am and the disorientation makes my heart rush in fright.

  “Easy there, kiddo.”

  The second I hear his voice my pulse calms. I tilt my head and see him sitting at the window, reading a book. My father.

  “Where am I?” My voice comes out sounding very weird. Rough and scrapey, which I assume must be from whatever tubes they shoved down there.

  “In a hospital.”

  “What? How can—”

  “Shhh. You’re safe. City’s ours. You could probably have this hospital named after you if you wanted.”

  “I do not want.” I settle back on the bed, gingerly noticing the tingle of pain in my abdomen. I’ve never been admitted to a hospital before, not once in my life, but as I note the remarkably different state of my body now compared to when I was last awake, I think I’m rather grateful the timing of my first visit worked out so well.

  “You’ve been in an induced coma for the last week,” Shadow informs me. “Doctors wanted you to heal before you started flinging yourself from roofs again.”

  It hits me like a lightning bolt. Dave. Oh, Dave. “Where’s Luke?”

  “Keeping busy. Think he was a bit shocked at the amount of work it takes to overtake a government. Ministers have been cooperative, though. Turns out they were all terrified of Shay.”

  “Is he … okay?”

  “Not really.”

  I want to ask if he’s come to see me but that feels selfish, given the circumstances. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hated me, after that mess.

  Shadow closes his book and peers out the window. I have no idea where we are or what his view holds, but he says, “All looks the same from here.”

  Which I suppose is the depressing fact of the world. You can change it all you want but it never really changes. Though maybe there’s comfort in that, too, and beauty.

  Someone waltzes into the room and I gasp with delight.
It’s Will, carrying Intirri on his arm. “Look who’s been missing you.”

  Intirri’s leg is tied by a thin cord to Will’s gloved wrist, she’s wearing a little leather hood over her eyes and there’s a bandage around her wing. She looks alarmingly un-wild right now, but at least she’s alive.

  “Come here, darling,” I sigh in relief as Will coaxes her onto my arm. Her wings spread a little and then settle back down. I remove her hood and let her peer around as I stroke her.

  “Just needed to make sure she didn’t try to fly before she could,” Will explains the trappings.

  “Thank you.”

  I untie the cord from her leg and then unwrap the bandage.

  “Vet said she needs to keep that on another few days …”

  “What does a vet know about birds?” I ask. I climb out of my bed and hobble for the window, ignoring their protests.

  I push the window open and give a lilting whistle. Then I launch Intirri off my arm and into the air. Her wings spread and flap as she sinks toward the ground – she will either fly or fall.

  She flies.

  I laugh as she catches a pocket of air and bullets up and over the world. Her cry is joyous and free as she circles around, showing off her skills. She’s exactly where she’s meant to be.

  *

  Will stays all afternoon with me, even when I drift back to sleep. When I wake he reads to me from the bird book he gave me all that time ago and somehow managed to salvage from below, though don’t ask me how.

  “Falcons have an astonishing ability to achieve what’s known as ‘wind-hovering’, or ‘standing flight’, meaning they can hover in the air with almost zero wind. Huh, cool.”

  “Are the kids all okay?”

  “They’re having a ball, running rampant,” he replies, closing the book. “Claire and Tobias are in charge of disciplining them and they want it to be known that they should be given medals.” His expression softens. “It’s good for them to have kids to look after. Until they all go back to their families, anyway.”