Dualed (28 page)

Silence. “Maybe
I
wouldn’t be here, then,” Chord finally says. “Would that have been easier?”

“You know it wouldn’t have,” I whisper, my voice splintered.

“And it wouldn’t have changed you getting your assignment, either. West, I blamed myself at first. And you too. But it wasn’t our fault. Luc would have wanted us to know that, don’t you think? Stop blaming yourself and realize it’s your own life at stake now.”

I can feel my eyes get hot, sting and blur with the weight of his words. “I’m just scared I’m going to screw up again, when it matters the most.”

“How can I have so much faith in you, when you have so little?” He swears under his breath and looks at me; the anguish
and anger on his face terrify me in a way his anger alone never could. “West.
Please
.”

My heart beats fast in my throat. “Chord …” But I can’t say anything else, paralyzed by how much he expects of me, what he thinks I’m capable of.

“If not for yourself, then for me,” he says roughly. “Would that be enough for you to try?”

Each word tears at me. It seemed so simple in the beginning—to keep Chord away from whatever crossfire that might erupt. I believed he wanted to be there only because of guilt and a promise. How to accept that he’s already made me vulnerable by making me love him … and that I might be stronger because of it?

I hear him exhale at my silence. Heavy with exhaustion, the endless chore of dealing with me. But it’s only the most intense kind of grief I hear in his voice when he stands up, shoves his hands into his pockets, and says in a low, uneven voice, “I can’t make you fight, West, or feel like you’re the one who deserves to live. But for whatever it’s worth, I do love you.” Then he’s out of reach, pulling away from me and heading up the stairs.

The sound of his bedroom door, slamming shut.

The sound of his words, echoing in my mind.

I do love you
.

My Alt, coming here tomorrow. Four days left.

And things have never, ever been clearer. They align, fall into place, make absolutely and completely perfect sense. Leave me wondering how I could have ever, for one second, with one breath, with any one part of me, thought otherwise.

When my cell buzzes with a fresh striker job, I don’t respond, barely even hear the ring or glance at the screen. Too frantic and fevered as I mentally work things through, lay it all out, plan my steps. It’s the most important contract I’ll ever have in my life, after all. And it’s going to take everything I have to pull it off.

When I sneak out the back door, the cold, white light of the moon is still bright. Far over the horizon I can see the very first pink tint of day. Crowning it is the high, jagged edge of the iron barrier, thin and spidery in the distance. It’s absolutely freezing out. My breaths are thick puffs of steam.

If Chord notices I’m gone, the note I’ve left him on the couch will have to be enough. I just hope he sees it before he freaks out.

I’m giving myself five minutes. Five minutes to get inside, get what I need, and get back here. Five more minutes I need to keep believing that she’s still all the way over in Gaslight, sitting somewhere and patiently waiting to hear from a dead person.

As soon as I hit the front curb, I take off. My gun is in my hand as I run down the street, ready to jump at any movement that might or might not be a threat. No longer simply houses and windows but faces with deceptive eyes. Not just trees and bushes but perfect hiding places for a slim fifteen-year-old girl. A girl with hair dark enough to melt into shadow, nothing like the glowing blond of mine.

From the moment you get your assignment and you make the decision to run, life changes in the most momentous of ways. It’s no longer a question of what you’re going to do that
day, what you’re going to eat, who you’re going to see. It’s how you’re going to survive until the next day comes. That you were stressing out about some exam or essay means nothing. Instead you learn how to be paranoid. You learn to distinguish between the echoes behind you. You learn how to beg and sneak and how to move in the dark.

You learn that you can never go home again. At least, not until you’re complete.

As I near the front of my house, I take a second to make sure there are still no signs of life inside. I can’t go in blind—
because
it’s my own home, not in spite of it. My house has become a trap, a potential converging point where ninety-seven times out of a hundred things are not going to end well. Not leaving home is surrender; returning is suicide.

No lights. I have to go for it.

I dart to the side of the house and keep running until I reach my backyard. Moving to the back door, I punch in the code with hard, practiced jabs of my fingers. When the lock clicks free, I turn the knob and push the door open. And it’s still swinging on its hinges when I realize I shouldn’t have even needed the entry code because the door shouldn’t have been locked.

She got in
somehow
. Wouldn’t it have had to be here, through the back, out of sight? So then how to explain her being able to lock the door behind her when it’s just not possible? Not without the code or the backup manual key that I lost long ago—

Still unsure but already aware of how there is no time to think about it anymore—not right now, at least—I step inside and shut the door behind me. Lock it and release a breath I
didn’t even know I was holding. It stirs the stale air. And beneath the staleness, the smells are the same, in the way that every house has its own unique scent.

I can smell the eucalyptus of my mother’s hand cream, the tang of the metals my father could never seem to wash off his hands, the oil Aave would use on his knives. I can smell the lingering sweat of Luc’s dirty sports equipment, the citrusy shampoo he liked to use. I can smell Ehm’s candy lip balms, the menthol-mint gum she was addicted to. All of it gone, but still here. Leaving this house, I felt nothing. Now I feel too much.

Standing there in the kitchen, I let it wash over me—the shadows and shapes of all that is familiar, of everything that I’ve ever known—and I’m unable to stop tears rushing to my eyes. It’s at times like this, when it’s more pain than good, that I could all too easily slip back into that safe numbness … if it weren’t for having to leave Chord behind again. I can’t go back to not feeling if it means I would have to stop loving him.

I pass the dining table where my father would often clean his gun, taking the time to show us how to do it properly, how it all came apart and then together again like an intricate puzzle. The kitchen island, corners gone round and soft with the years.

Then the front room. And as caught up as I am in the past, my hand is still clasped tightly around my gun. Safety is not an absolute, not here, not yet.

The bookshelves that line the far wall are filled with my parents’ collections of paper books and assorted flexi-readers. The striped couches on which many of my brothers’ friends
crashed, after it was too late for them to catch the last ward train home. The coffee table, forever too short after my father hacked at the legs in his attempts to fix the wobbliness.

There’s something …

I bend down to the coffee table, studying its glossy surface now covered with a layer of dust.

It’s a water ring. From a careless cup or mug. It cuts through the dust right down to the wood, so I know it’s recent.

I straighten, my heart pounding just a little bit louder now, a new thought forming in my mind. In the wake of my discovery of her ability to make herself at home here, I go to the front door.

It’s unlocked.

I open it and examine the lock from the outside. Run my thumb along the faceplate, close to the area around the manual key override, because it’s too dark to see much, especially something as small as scratches from a wayward lock pick or screwdri—

The raised edges and jagged grooves around the slot are my answer, and I think of Chord’s key code disrupter. How it’s only fitting that she’d have her own system of getting in, too. Both of us, slowly canceling each other out—advantage for advantage, strength for strength.

I shut the door and leave it unlocked, just the way I found it. No reason to let her know anything’s changed, if she comes back early. No reason to not take any advantage I can find.

Nearly all the bedrooms are clear. My parents’ bedroom is still the way my father left it. The bed covered with their sheets,
the unfolded laundry a mountain in the basket. On his bedside table is a book, still open to mark his page. He was only three-quarters of the way through.

Aave and Luc’s bedroom, Luc’s half still messy with his stuff. I wasn’t able to make myself go inside afterward, before I had to leave altogether.

It’s my bedroom—the one I shared with Ehm—that shows signs of intrusion.

After Ehm died, I spread out her ruffled yellow quilt over her bed and placed her favorite stuffed animals alongside her pillow. It was the way she liked to keep them—saving good dreams for her when she went to sleep, was what she said. And I never touched her bed again. Or even really looked at it. It was too painful to still see her there, safe and sound, when she was buried beneath six feet of dirt and reduced to no more than dust and hair and bone.

But it’s been touched now. Her animals have been swept to one side, the pillow askew, the blanket tucked in but mussed.

And my bed has been slept in. Not just sat on like Ehm’s, but the covers pushed back, the pillow indented with the shape of her head. There’s even a lone black hair left on the pillowcase, longer than any of mine, even before my hasty chop-and-bleach job.

I take in everything at once, frantic to see what else she’s ruined. The desktop is a different sort of mess than before. Not the controlled chaos I’ve gotten used to, but a scattered kind of carelessness. My pens and brushes and paints shoved in the wrong pails. Art books and sketch pads stacked in the wrong
piles. Drawers left open a crack. I can smell the faint whiff of turpentine seeping out from inside.

Fury is a red film over my eyes. My Alt sleeping here with my things, finding shelter in a place where Ehm’s scent still lingers, is the same as being attacked, a personal violation. A furious sob breaks through my throat, and the sound of it cracks open the quiet.

Breathe. I just have to breathe. Because my five minutes are quickly running out.

I sprint to my parents’ bathroom. The half-used tube of toothpaste on the counter … my father’s shaver … my mother’s favorite beaded necklace in its little tray that my father never put away …

I feel a distant ache at the normalcy of the sight, an ache that’s always eager to grow bigger. But I stifle it and then I’m searching through the medicine cabinet like I’m hunting for a fix.

Bottles clank and fall onto the counter. They roll off to spill open on the floor. Pills scatter like cheap pastel candy. It has to be here. I remember putting it—

Then I see it. My father’s sleeping pills, prescribed to him after my mother’s death. A small bottle, easy to miss, easy to underestimate.

I pry off the lid and peer inside. There’s enough. Not much after what my father used them for.

Suicide.

It’s a dead word in Kersh, foreign and nearly obsolete. Like a sore on my tongue, no matter how many times I try to equate
it with my father’s death. For an idle to fail to understand the fundamentals of combat, for an active to never actually manage to engage, is one thing. For a complete to decide survival is not worth it in the end is another.

It’s what my father decided when he downed his pills. That in the end, life with me and Luc wasn’t enough to make up for a life without my mother, without Ehm, without Aave. And I hated him for it … then. Now, when I think of what I have at stake myself, I still might not understand it—and maybe never will, I don’t know—but I don’t hate him for it anymore.

I pour all the pills into my palm and tilt them into the pocket of my jeans. Chord’s too sharp. If he’s awake when I get back, no way he’d miss the bulk of the bottle, no matter how I try to sneak it in.

Nearly out of time now, and I leave the same way I came: down the stairs, out into the kitchen, and through the back door. Then along the side of the house, through the front yard, and onto the street. Day is slowly filtering through the house, shadows withdrawing by degrees. I need to hurry, before I become a target that’s all too visible.

Back inside Chord’s house, I stand at the door for a minute, positive he knows I slipped out. Half of me is dreading him asking me where I’ve been. And the other half almost wishes he would, if only so I wouldn’t have to do this. So he could convince me of some other way.

But Chord’s still asleep. The door to his bedroom remains shut.

I get to work.

It takes me a long time to make breakfast. Not only has it been forever since I’ve cooked anything, but combine that with my already less than stellar skills in the kitchen and I’m lucky I don’t burn the house down.

I do a quick visual check of the food. It actually appears edible. Eggs, toast, bacon, orange juice. Nothing’s too black or too raw. It’ll pass. I give the orange juice another stir, just to make sure the crushed sleeping pills have all dissolved. I know I’ve already stirred it half to death, but I can’t help it. If Chord even suspects what I’m planning, this won’t go much further.