After (69 page)

So he took you.”

“From this place?” Gareth asked, his gravel voice just audible.

“Not right here, no. But a place more like this than the other side of the line.”

“And these other men. They...what? They both consider themselves my fathers?

“Gareth, they love you. It broke their hearts, your kidnapping.” Gareth flinched. “It was a bad time. They both loved our mother so much. She'd just died; I'd just been born. But Dad—John—he went out looking for you. The first time, he was gone for weeks, but there was no trace of you. He had no way of knowing which direction Riggs had taken you. There were no leads. Just nothing. He came back home, but he went back out, over and over, for weeks, sometimes longer, trying to find you.” She took a breath, sighed. “You look so much like him.”

“So my dad, the man who raised me, he wasn't really my father?”

“Yes, he was really your father. But you're Dad's. I knew the moment I saw you.”

Gareth looked like he might crack in two.

“I'm sorry, Gareth. I'm not doing this right.” Nadia laughed, but she looked hurt. “I had this idea I'd tell you, and you'd be so happy. As happy as I am to have found you.

As happy as Dad and Papa will be, knowing you're alive and well and here, over the line. They'll be so, so glad. But it's different for you. You didn't even know we existed.

And I'm telling you all wrong. I should have waited.”

“No. Nadia. It's alright. I'm glad you told me.” Nix watched Gareth produce a smiled and touch her arm. “But I need a little time. Please. Leave me alone for a while.”

He looked at Nix. “Both of you.”

* * * *

Soft but rapid, the rap of knuckles on her door pulled Nix from her dark thoughts.

Nadia, her eyes red. Nadia, all startled and brittle. She slipped into Nix's room through the crack of open door and closed it softly behind her, then, almost whispering, said,

“Gareth. He's...something's wrong with him.”

Stupid girl. She'd gone back. Why couldn't she have left him alone like he'd asked? Nix reached for the door, but Nadia swept her hand away from the knob.

Nothing Nadia said made sense. Gareth wouldn't do that. Nix went, shrugging Nadia off when she tried to stop her.

The door wasn't locked and Nix opened it when Gareth didn't answer her knock or her voice. Naked. Like Nadia had said. Naked, and leaning onto the long mirror on the wall, facing himself like an enemy. No sign he knew she was there.

“Gareth.”

He turned and lunged. Stopped short. Staring, his eyes cold and hard, like concrete again, how they'd been that day they'd given her to him. He backed away.

“Nix.” His voice scraped. “I though you were her.”

Gareth went back to the mirror, back to the enemy there, naked and scarred, tall and wide and lean and hard.

“That girl, that soft, lit-up girl thinks I'm one of them.”

His laugh was a terrible contrast to his hard, red eyes.

“And I almost believed her. That it could be true. That I could go with her to that place, have a family. The sister and the two fathers I lost twenty years ago.”

“Why can't you?”

“They're so soft, here. Like wet paper. If I touch her, I think she'll tear. And she kept touching me. Kept trying to put her arms around me.”

“So you scared her off?”

“I had to remind myself,” he said. “What I am.”

“What are you?”

“I'm this.”

The mirror shattered where his knuckle hit the reflection of his stony eye.

“She doesn't understand. I'm not like her. I thought I could go by Gareth, be a person. But I don't think so. I'm Artel. I'm like him. My father. The monster.”

“You believe that?”

Gareth stared at his shattered self, his stoic face twisting, his stony cold eyes flooding. “It was them. They made this place. My mother. Those men Nadia says are my fathers. And all I've ever done, all my life, is hurt people.”

“Who?”

“Everyone I've ever touched.” His hard, naked body shook. “That girl in the sex hotel. The women at the brandings. All the men I've punished.” The tears spilled. “You.”

“No, Gareth. That's a lie.”

“No. It isn't.”

“It's my lie. You've never hurt me. I've been scared. Not of you. Of me. Things inside me.”

“That's not true, Nix. I feel it. I feel you cringe away from me, now. I could feel it yesterday, through that whole ceremony; it made you sick, feeling my hand in yours.

And I know, this morning when you came to my room. You came to say good-bye..”

“No. Gareth. I want to stay. I want to go to the base. That's what I came to tell you. I came to tell you...” Her throat closed around her words, but she forced them out.

“I want to stay with you.”

“I can't be like that. How they want us to be. Like that man in the ceremony yesterday. Smooth and soft and full of light.”

“Do you think I can? I look at these people, Gareth; they're all aliens. I can't even believe we're the same species. I don't want you to be like them. I need you to be what you are.”

“This.” He turned away from his shattered face, his cracked, fissured body. All hard, that dark, angled jaw, those sharp-looking eyes, his muscled breadth. His cock, though, hung heavy. “The sadist. Remember?”

“You're not bad, Gareth. You're a fighter. Like me.”

“No. Not like you. Nothing like you. You defended yourself. Killed your enemies. I hunted men and tortured them. I got off on it. Remember Dorset?”

“Gareth. You're not a monster.”

“Yes. I am.”

“Prove it.”

She pulled off her sweater and tank and shucked off her pants and stood there, mirroring his nakedness. Tears spilled from those stony eyes, slid down that hard face.

“Show me what a monster you are.”

This would be it, finally. Once and for all. Proof of darkness. Or its lack. God, she could be wrong. But she believed. Believed with her whole self.

“You think I won't?” his voice scraped. “I will.”

He knocked her to the floor. She didn't fight. He pinned her, face down. Under his weight it was hard to breathe.

“And when I'm tearing you apart, remember, even though I know you need this so you can walk away, even though I know it's easier for you, for a fucked up bitch like you, being used than being loved, this isn't mercy. It's hate. It's hate,” he growled in her ear,

“and I'm not going to let you float away. Not for one second of this. You're going to stay here, with me. And when I'm done, you'll tell me the truth. You'll tell me what kind of monster I am.”

The last of his softness was hard, now, and her faith slipped. She waited for the push of his knees to drive her legs open, for that hardness to tear into her.

His weight came off her. All her skin was untouched, bared to the air and cold after the heat of his body. Like a child he was curled up, a tight, shuddering ball tucked against the side of the bed. She wrapped him up in her naked heat and held him while he wept. When his fear and rage drained and left him limp, she got him into bed. His lips tasted like tears. His lips, his eyes, his neck, his chest, all wet salt.

* * * *

Now that Gareth had promised her he'd go to the base, Nadia was the lightest and brightest of all the aliens. Her smile never faded, her hazel eyes were always lit up.

Every now and then, she threw her arms around Gareth and held him like she was afraid if she opened her arms he'd disappear again, the way that baby had disappeared twenty years before on the night of her birth. He was getting used to it. Now he didn't startle each time Nadia touched and kissed and embraced him. Hour by hour, he was getting lighter and brighter, too.

They stuffed their few belongings into their packs and in the early morning, fifty-three of them set out on horseback. It was strange, traveling free. Nix couldn't stop feeling that they needed to get off the road and into the trees, couldn't stop searching the horizon for packs of guards and bounty hunters.

But they ambled on at an easy canter, out in the open among the falling leaves and the soft-sifting snow, and never saw a soul. The settlements—college campuses and small, picturesque towns—had been chosen for their seclusion from the main roads in the years before the line dividing slavery and freedom had been secured.

Night had fallen when they arrived at an iron gate set into a stone wall twenty feet tall. Nadia called out a signal and two armed soldiers appeared. A man and a woman.

They greeted Nadia with a warmth that seemed incongruous with everything Nix associated with uniforms, and unlocked the gate to admit them all.

“I so want to take you to the house right away,” Nadia said to Gareth, “but it's been a long day. I'll let you get settled and have a shower and a rest. I'll come around to get you in a few hours, and take you to meet everyone then. Alright?”

Gareth said, “Alright,” his voice flat. Almost cold.

Gareth had gotten more and more silent, more and more grave as they'd ridden, and hadn't eaten anything that day, Nix had noticed. Nadia beamed and squeezed his arm in lieu of a hug; she was keeping Gareth a secret. Leaving them all in the care of her counterpart, Nadia galloped off.

“If it's alright with you, I'll see if we can share a room,” Nix said.

Gareth seemed to startled out of some deep dark thought. He looked at her and smiled.

They left their horses at the stables near the gate, and followed their guide across the campus, a maze of paved roads and low concrete buildings, teaming with uniforms, mostly men. That familiar heavy cold coiled in Nix's gut. It reminded her of the Guard facility out west. Where she'd met Gareth.

The group was given an entire floor of a barracks. Apart from Gareth, there was only one resistance man. The rest were all women, and most elected to sleep in pairs or fours. The Sewanee woman who'd been their escort took a single room at the end of the hall nearest the stairs, a strategy of reassurance, Nix guessed.

“You doing alright?” Gareth asked her when they'd locked themselves into their room.

“Yeah.”

“It's not like Sewanee,” he said.

“No.”

They took turns in the shower. When Nix came out, she found Gareth lying on one of the narrow beds, arms folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling. She lay down next to him.

She thought she probably knew what he was thinking. If they knew what he'd done, what his life had been, they'd reject him. Fear him. Hate him. He'd have to tell them, the way he'd told her. Shown her. What he'd done to Dorset. What he'd done in that sex hotel, his father goading him. All the times between.

“Gareth.” She touched his face. So familiar, now. Familiar and a comfort. “You're the only man I've ever trusted.”

The magnet inside her was pulling her to him, tugging at her. Under the thin cotton t-shirt she could see the slopes and swells of his torso. She rested her palm on his firm belly. “In all my life, you're the only man I've wanted.” She brought her mouth to his ear and whispered past the rock in her throat.

“I love you.”

It had been so hard, saying that, but the breath that she pushed from her lungs, up her throat, over her tongue, past her lips left a euphoric warmth in its wake. They clung to each other for a long time. Then they got up and dressed, and when Nadia came, they went with her.

Excepting those few minutes of terror, Nadia, who'd come to them so serious that first night, with her official mandate, recruiting rebels to her army, had seemed such a child since she'd figured Gareth out. Now it was as if Gareth had never scared her. Nix watched her try to quell some of her ebullient enthusiasm, to soften her irrepressible smile, to quiet her excited chatter because Gareth was so cool, so quiet, even though he hugged Nadia back every time she put her arms around him, even though he smiled each time she pressed a kiss to his cheek or his forehead. When Nix gave Gareth her hand to hold, his fingers were as cold as the snow that was sifting down, melting as it touched the ground.

Nadia led them past a screen of tall, narrow, denuded trees and along a stone path that bisected a broad lawn, toward a structure unlike all the other buildings Nix had seen since entering the base. A real house. Inside, it was the homiest place Nix had set foot in since fleeing her childhood home during the dying. Nadia ushered them to a sofa in a dimly lit sitting room, beside a blazing fire, and then flew off to fetch the others.

Above the mantel was a quartet of photographs, black and white pictures. Some included an infant, some one or two men, but Eva, Gareth's mother was the central subject of all of them.

A moment later Nadia returned, pulling two men along with her. Nix's belly knotted. Nadia, impulsive child, had kept it all a secret. Gareth's hand was limp, cold and damp in hers.

“Here. I've brought someone you'll want to meet,” Nadia said, excitement pulling her voice up, high and tight.

The two men with her stepped into the room, into the light of a lantern hanging opposite the hearth. Left of her, a wiry man with eyes the same shade as Nadia's, but which cast a sharp, even a fierce gaze where hers was soft, seemed to be waiting with stoic patience for the revelation. On her right, the other man was mirthful, infected by Nadia's excitement, eager to learn what had her so ebullient.

Nix's belly fluttered. She saw what Nadia had seen, looking at Gareth. Except for the gray peppering his hair, and the lines aging his face, the man was nearly Gareth's twin. The same gray eyes. That same angled jaw. The same mouth.

Gareth rose from the couch and gravitated toward his sire. When he moved into the lantern's light, both men's faces altered, the wiry, hazel-eyed man's slightly, still constrained by habitual stoicism, the darker man's suddenly, totally, the whites of his gray eyes turning red behind rising tears.

Nadia whispered, “It's really him. It's Gareth.”

“Gareth?” the darker one whispered, then wrapped his arms around him, tight, gripping, like he was afraid his long-lost child was about to disappear again. Holding on, crying, he whispered his son's name over and over, “Gareth. Gareth. Gareth.”

“John.” The wiry man touched the other's shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” John said, letting Gareth go and giving an apologetic smile.