Dualed (30 page)

If I can make her believe she simply has to come in and find me …

If I can make her forget about Chord entirely …

Back in the kitchen, I go to the pantry, wolf down granola bars, dried fruit, juice concentrate—anything that can be done standing up. The act is mechanical, all the food tasteless, nothing more than pure sustenance. When I’m done, I grab my bag from the table, zip it up, and sling the straps over my shoulders. One final glance at Glade’s necklace on the counter beneath the bared window and I know I’ve set the stage as well as I can.

I step outside through the back door. The day is brand-new. Everything is tinged with the gray haze that belongs only to early-winter mornings. I’m careful to stay off the thin strips of grass along the sides of the backyard. They’re crusted with frost, and I don’t know how long it would take for my footprints to disappear.

At the back fence I slide the loose slats of wood over again, slip through, and replace them carefully. When I turn my head to see that the old slab of plywood we used as a climbing ramp is still there, leaning against a different section of the fence, it’s almost like I’m going back in time. A little kid again, here to play, not to kill.

I drag it over and lean it against the base of the tree house. It’s rough with splinters and mildewed, but whole. In my head I hear the young voices of my brothers, arguing about who’s going to go first. I see them crawling up, careful to keep each other from spilling over the edges to the soggy ground below even as they yell at each other to hurry the heck up.

Climbing up now only takes me a few strides. I think of that fire escape in the Grid, the way it led me to a clear sight line as well. When I hit the landing, I immediately fall to a sitting position, testing the floorboards.

To call it a tree house is not a lie; it is a house, and it’s in a tree. But it’s absolutely nothing like what they describe in books, and worlds apart from those do-it-yourself kits you can order online. Seven gapped wide cedar planks for the base, more planks nailed lengthwise to form walls about four feet high. Roughly notched-out holes for windows. And that’s it.

But it’s enough. I slide over until I’m next to the window that faces my house and peer out for the clearest line of sight between me and the enemy.

Everything squeezes in and shuts down to a vivid pinpoint. Sound disappears except for the evenness of my own breathing. I try to break down the shadows inside the house. I can see the light fixture that hangs over the dining room table. The round knobs of the cupboards that line the wall.

Nothing moves, all is still. But soon. Anytime now she’ll be back in Jethro, back at my house.

I rest the barrel of my gun along the jagged bottom edge of
the cedar sill. The muscles along my arm bunch, as do those in my gut.

I wait.

Time plays with you, toys with your mind. Sometimes it flows slow and languid, sometimes so quick that if you dare to blink you’ll miss it all.

And it can hurt … if I let it. I can decide to think about the sharp crick in my neck that’s starting to jab, the pounding ache in my skull that threatens to drum out everything else. I can wallow in the spasms in my hand from clenching the gun too hard, the raw, still-healing heat in my shoulder. I can replay the memories of that first stakeout, too, when I crouched beneath the bushes of that house in Jethro, waiting and waiting even as my body wanted to do anything but.

I’ve learned now. I made myself eat so hunger would become meaningless. I tell myself the aches of muscle, bone, and limb are phantom pains of a body not really mine.

Be numb, a striker
.

The sun is making its daily climb in the sky. Without a watch, I can only guess what time it is. It’s been a while since I left Chord, and the inside of my house is lighter yet.

Ten, I guess from the position of the sun in the sky. Rising steadily, it should make me warmer, but instead there is nothing. My skin, impenetrable.

She’s not there. Not yet.

And time passes. It clings and drags, but passes all the same. Ten o’clock becomes eleven. Twelve. Then it’s two o’clock,
maybe three, maybe even four. The sun is falling. Slowly, but definitely, falling. That pale, ashy light of a dying winter’s day is darkening to speckled granite, swirling with cloud now. Thin shadows of the last stubborn leaves still clinging to the maple tree drift overhead and are gone.

And I’m getting tired, no matter how much I fight it. It makes me less sharp, slowing my reflexes. Eventually it will lead to mistakes. At one point, the barrel of the gun slips, the dull clatter of metal against wood very loud in the quiet. It takes me longer than it should to bring it back into place. Panic works its way through my exhaustion, piercing it like an arrow through prey. Thoughts scrabble and wander down prickly paths, drawing blood that is full of pain and uncertainty, and I’m simply unable to stop it. Unable to stay numb.

Two hours until he wakes up from the drugs. Maybe as little as one.

What will I do if I actually complete? Could I go on to be anything but a striker, when it’s all I know now, its shadow blotting everything else out? Turning my back on it would not keep everyone else from turning their backs on
me
. Even Chord, eventually, in the worst of my nightmares. Being with a striker might wear him down. Or what if I screw this up and she runs? Every minute that she’s alive—that
I’m
alive—he’s in danger. He’s complete, but he still has a death sentence hanging over him. Because of me. What if time runs out for both of us? What if—

Chord
.

It hurts how much I want him. How much I want us to be given new lives again, both of us completes.

But the thought dissipates, disintegrates, falling away even as breath deserts my lungs, taking with it any more capacity to think.

Because someone is inside my house.

The shadowed figure is moving along one side of the kitchen, so I see no more than the slight bob of a head along the far edge of the window frame. But it’s her. It must be.

She’s twenty-four feet away.

I automatically tilt the barrel up by a small fraction. A bullet will start to fall as soon as it leaves the muzzle of a gun.

Then a cool wind flutters against my cheek. It’s gentle enough but has the impact of a hard slap.

The sudden image of my strike, that boy in Tweed’s back lot, appears in my mind’s eye. How that first bullet was supposed to be enough. How I underestimated space and wind and let it go astray, adrift.

Not this time. I tilt the barrel up another fraction.

Then my hand is shaking again, the gun making little tapping sounds against the wooden sill. I lift my left hand to steady my grip. Ignore the snap of pain in my shoulder.

I imagine Chord’s voice in my head.
Breathe, West. Just breathe
.

Twenty feet apart now. The space between us. From limbo to life, active to complete.

I know you’re there. Come closer
.

As if she’s heard me, my Alt steps forward. She’s inside the frame of the window now. I get a glimpse of her familiar profile.

The damage to her cheek from that afternoon on the streets of the Quad has become a purple gash. I’m happy to see it—it makes her look less like me.

As I watch her slowly pick up the necklace from the counter, I can almost feel her initial confusion. It’s a stumbling thought process, she’s seeing something so completely out of context.
Isn’t this Glade’s necklace? How did it get here?
Why
is it here?
When realization hits, it’s like a tidal wave. Her devastation grows, compounds, feeds into itself.

I wondered how much he loved her, whether she loved him in return. How maybe it wasn’t as much as she let him believe, if she let him do what he did. Or perhaps it was the opposite, and it was too much to keep him away. Now I know the answer. And knowing I’ve played a part in her grief, Alt or not, is hard to live with.

A cloud breaks. A ray of weak light winks off the smooth metal of my gun. It sparks. Catches. She looks out the window at the flash of silver.

Her eyes go blank with shock as they meet mine.

A muscle in my hand betrays its weakness, twitching once, and the gun jerks just the slightest.

The sun flicks off the metal again, a twin flame to the first one.

She moves like a cat, beginning to dart away.

I squeeze the trigger. The bullet drives through air and glass before it buries itself in the side of her neck.

I don’t even see her fall, because suddenly tears are burning my eyes. My lungs are gasping for breath, my throat scorched as I choke on wild, unchecked sobs.

It’s over.

Like any professional striker, I’m compelled to make sure the assignment really is complete.

On shaking legs I climb down from the tree house, my sneakers landing heavily on the soggy ground. Mud squeaks and squelches as I hurriedly work my way through the fence, across the yard, and back into the kitchen.

Death must be confirmed.

The replay of it is vivid in my head, like a garish oil painting with too many colors. I see the bullet hit her in the neck, an intricate web of vessels and tissues and connections that can so easily be broken. I’ve done that, without a doubt.

And yet—

Yet—

She’s gone. The kitchen is empty except for a pool of blood in the middle of the tiled floor. She’s not here, where she is supposed to be.

I stare down at the blood. I don’t know what to think
—how
to think. My mind is racing for an answer, a galloping horse blind with the need to keep running for the finish line.

How is it possible? There’s no way. No way she could have survived that.

I’m turning in circles, crazed and panicked. What surrounds me is so familiar, but it only makes it worse. That I can know where everything is in this house except the one thing I’m searching for.

West
.

Not Chord’s voice this time, but Luc’s, an oasis in the storm that’s raging in my head. So calm, even while he was dying.
West, slow down. You’re moving too fast. You always have
.

Mistake number one.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

Now look
. Really
look
.

I look. And I see it. It’s so obvious that I can’t believe I didn’t notice it right away. I really
was
blind.

There are tiny droplets of blood next to the pool on the floor. They lead away in a trail, not a neat one but chaotic, jagged, zigzagging. As they leave the kitchen, their shape changes just the slightest, growing thinner, more elongated.

She’s moving. Fast.

It’s easy to picture it. My Alt staggering to her feet, hand pressed against her neck to stanch the bleeding. She’s thinking it’s a miracle she turned her head at the last second. It was just enough for the bullet to miss anything vital. What should have killed her is instead a messy flesh wound. Her face is drawn with pain. She was sure it was the end. Glade’s necklace might still be hanging from her fingers.

But now she needs to get out of the house because I’m on the way. She’s half stumbling, half running to the front door,
and she yanks it open, furious and desperate and wanting to end this just as badly as I do. She runs outside, toward—

It hits me with the force of a giant bunched fist. Hot, acidic bile strains to climb up my throat. The truth of it is undeniable, indisputable.

Because it’s exactly what I would do.

“No,” I breathe into the silence of the room. Incapable of screaming. Only barely hanging on.

Then I’m running as fast as I can, racing through the kitchen, down the short hall, and across the living room. I crash through the front door, leaving it open and swinging behind me. Only one thought fills my head as my feet hit the pavement, the chilled winter air on my face, its thin, factory stink singeing my nose.

Chord
.

Down the street, five houses down. So close. So incredibly far.

Chord!

I’m only halfway there when I hear it. Exploding glass, shards of it crashing onto concrete. She’s breaking the window to get inside.

The sound of it won’t be enough to wake him, though. Even with the drugs starting to cycle out of his system. By trying to keep him safe, I left him more vulnerable than ever.

Mistake number two.

Hurry. You’ve got to hurry
. No one’s voice in my head now except my own. Hard, cold, without feeling. Me as a striker, moving in on a target. The way I was always supposed to be for this.

The front door of Chord’s house gapes and is just beginning
to drift shut when I get there. More blood on the steps, the scattered droplets turning into little puddles and smears. Even more along the splinters of glass that line the smashed-in side window, where she reached in for the knob.

As I’m rushing up the front steps, I hear my voice inside my head again, cool and calm. Telling me to move carefully, to think things through, to—

But I can’t listen, even if I wanted to.

I push the door open with a foot, then throw myself to the side of the entrance, expecting anything and everything to come at me: the whoosh of a bullet, a wild slice of a blade,
her—

And … nothing.

My breath is fire in my throat, my gun slick with sweat in my hand as I lean back over and peer into the front hall.

Absolutely silent and almost wholly dark all the way through. The last light of the day is falling away fast. I see nothing, and for a heartbeat, I’m literally unable to move. Held prisoner by the weight of the moment.

Fight, flight, freeze. A fresh active will almost always freeze. But I’m not new to this, not anymore—and only one choice is left.

I step over the threshold, past the still-open door. Sweep the wall alongside me with my arm for the light switch. When I find it, I press my palm down, desperate for eyes again.

The overhead lamp turns on, and its muted light trails into the front room, peeks into the kitchen, slides up the first few steps of the staircase. It was comforting last night, almost like
being wrapped up and shielded. No more. Now it’s weak, a sham, not nearly enough to ward off the bad.