Intrepid (24 page)

My voice shook when I answered. “Eight generations.”
 

“How will it happen?”
 

“Let’s drop it,” I said when I noticed Texi’s face had grown several shades of pale. But that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t want to continue the conversation. I couldn’t relive the experience in words. It was as if I’d been placed on a zip-line of time to see the origin of destruction. I saw the man who started it all with one decision, and the chain-reaction decisions his Splice prompted.
 

“It always starts with one,” Santiago said. “Remember that. One person can destroy everything, just as easily as one person can save everything. Energy is contagious, and ultimately you choose how you want to participate in it. These people will choose to participate in it negatively, whether the choice is passively or knowingly made.”
 

“How can our brain take all that in?” Texi asked. “How was I able to see so much so quickly?” Again, she asked the good questions.
 

I hated how the uptake of the question marks in Texi’s voice sent tingles through me. I was just so curious about her. Now that she was right in front of me, I couldn’t explain the nervousness I felt around her. In so many ways, it was like I’ve always been with her. She was like a long lost friend who’d returned to me from some imaginary reality. But I knew it was wrong to see her that way. In fact it was downright stupid.
 

I focused on her question and answered, “You let the Collective Energy connect you to the Big Whisper.” At least I knew the mechanics of a Culture Pulse, but now I finally knew what it was like to actually experience it. I wished I could go back to what I didn’t know.
 

“Will it Splice anymore?” she asked.
 

“A few more times,” Santiago answered.
 

“So that’s it?” There was an expression on her face I recognized. It held no acceptance of the situation and she closed her eyes. When she opened them, purples collided into her greens. I felt the tug of it as well, like I had an unreasonable faith that she’d know just the right pressure to put on the universe before it’d crack apart into oblivion, and I felt the irreparable rip in my soul. Knowledge can be a thief like that, and to know that I could be a part of a possible solution was tempting. All I had to do was let Texi trust herself and follow her lead, but there was still too much we didn’t know. “Don’t do it,” I said. “Even if you give it that little extra push, we cannot stay here to see it through. This is not the Optimal Path.”
 

“Give the pain time.” Santiago backed me up. “It’ll get bearable. It always does.”
 

Texi shook her head and pulled up the screen from her Planck Activation Bracelet. She was getting good at managing the screen size in crowds so the bracelet looked like a glowing watch. “I want to go home.”
 

Santiago nodded, and then they were gone.
 

 
I stayed in the crowd a moment longer. I wasn’t ready to leave the fading chaos just yet. I watched the dancing mass of Energy and said the Gaian Prayer to the Dying. “Be Intrepid until the end, but when that end comes, Know that it is time to submit to Peace.” Then I pulled up my own screen and disappeared into the Nothing.
   

When I finally got to the boat, Santiago and Texi were not on the deck, and I plopped myself onto a chair, thankful for some time alone. I both hated and enjoyed that Texi was here. She kept clouding into my thoughts, like a deep, dark smog, but there was still something about her I was missing. There were still things I didn’t understand.
 

I stared up at the stars and felt the peace of calmed Energy. For the first time, I was sad for my home. I finally understood how sick it was, despite the beauty I witnessed on a daily basis here. I used to think Stagnate planets were lucky with no humans to muck them up or ruin them, but now I knew there had to be a balance. The alternatives only brought us one step closer to the end.
 

Since Texi and Iago got to
Geeta
, I’d found myself sleeping in the strangest of places. The couch in the den or the benches in the garden. It hadn’t rained in a while, so everywhere I slept was temperate and comfortable. If she knew the room she’d taken was mine, she wasn’t letting on about it. She’d taken to leaving her mark on it, and I let her.
   

And so it happened that I fell asleep on the deck, under the infinite weight of stars, with the inevitable taste of Destruction in my heart.
 

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It was her laughter that woke me up. I stood up and glanced around for her, but didn’t see her on the deck. The sound was coming from close by, and I followed it with my ears until I realized it wasn’t coming from the boat. I poked my head over the railing and sighed.
 

Of course she’d gone swimming.
 

Time is funny when schedules don’t exist. I’d never had to live by one before, because living a solitary life on a solitary boat on a solitary planet didn’t really tie me to that type of responsibility. I worked and rested when either was necessary. Santiago and Texi had lived a life paying attention to time and its expectations, so, over this week, they had trouble adjusting to making their own schedule. Santiago had taken to the habit of sleeping until almost noon, while Texi woke up every morning around six to go for a swim. How a teenage girl had that type of internal alarm clock was beyond me, but then again, she had more to think about and digest than before.
 

When I asked her about the swimming the day before, her face grew sad, and I remembered that she used to go swimming with Sully all the time at that spot on the river. Instead of bringing that up, she said she wanted to swim in the sunrise. “The way the colors bounce off the water makes me feel like I’m swimming in orange juice.”

She was right. The reflection on the water overtook everything for a good ten minutes every morning and every evening. I wondered what it meant for her to look out at the horizon and realize that there was so much more out there than what she’d always known. Did she have a new reverence for the sunrise? Did she seek it out just so she could swim away her frustrations?
 

There was a school of neon-bright fish swimming circles about her body, and with every stroke she made, they adjusted around her. Bright blues and purples and oranges darted this way and that, and their movement harnessed to her laughter. I felt a tingling in my gut, the remnants of fear. It was as if she was controlling the paths of the fish with every movement she made with her own body. How did she manage to manipulate movement like that?

She looked up and saw me watching her. “Come in! This is awesome!”
 

I shook my head no. It was getting harder and harder to be around her. It felt like any wrong move would crack the shell of something bigger, and I hated to admit how much this confused me. “Naw,” I lied. “Those fish always creep me out.”
 

“Liam Martinez! You mean to tell me Mr. Universe is afraid of little school of fish?”
 

For a moment, I wondered how she learned my matriarchal name. Then I realized she must have been combing through journals in my room. I shook off the feeling of invasion. It was fair for her to disregard my privacy. It evened the playing field a little.
 

Before I could reply, she was gone. I rubbed the sleep sand from my eyes and almost wondered if I’d imagined her, but within the second it took to think the thought, there was a push from behind. I felt a brief tingle from where her fingertips had applied pressure, and it jolted through every inch of me before I landed face first into the water. I thrashed to reorient myself and find the surface, and I sputtered up a breath just as another splash fell in next to me. She surfaced and started laughing.
 

In just a couple days she as getting good at the Bucket Hop. Rather than walk the halls of
Geeta
, she kept appearing out of thin air. Santiago joked at lunch yesterday that she was going to eventually get fat if she refused to walk, to which she replied by shoving mashed potatoes into her mouth. The way the two of them acted around each other made me miss Nobu because I saw so much of us in them.
 

I moved my hands through the water and wondered if her Planck Activation Bracelet was even turned on or if she was doing Hopping on her own. I was about to ask her, but she cut the question off before it came out. “You should have seen your face! I didn’t know boys could squeal like stuck-pigs!”
 

“I didn’t squeal.”
 

“Dude. You. Squealed.” She propelled her hands in the water so she put more distance between us, and I caught the light in her eyes. They kept terrifying me because they were a cucumber green—not the peel of a cucumber, but the guts of it. Since the Change, the color kept shrinking in on itself, shifting between cucumber guts and celery like inefficient mood rings.
 

Because of it, I found myself examining my own eyes in the mirror. They’d become strange shades of blue, especially next to the almond color dark on my cheeks, but this past week, it looked like turquoise was battling with the color grey. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with her presence.

Her laughter shifted like it was constantly discovering new notes. It reminded me of soft bells learning how to dance in a rain storm, and for each breath she needed to push the sound out, a raspy gasp was barely audible. The laughter crunched up her eyes and pulled her lips into a smile over a mountain range of bright teeth. It made her face change in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. Light entered dark and shadows ran away, and her hair was everywhere: drifting in the water, sprouting into the air, curling around her ears, and trapping in the sunrise.
 

I hadn’t heard her laugh like that in person, because it was a laugh she reserved for her friends.
 

Feelings moved from one realm into another, and my breath caught in my throat. I surprised myself with my own laughter, which laced into the strings of hers before she dove underneath to play with the fish.
 

I closed my eyes to the sun as it rose in my face. It was the soft warm of morning, and I plopped over onto my back and floated.

Texi’d touched me. Briefly. But the world didn’t implode. She made me laugh, and the Vein didn’t collapse. Was I being too cautious? Was I reading too much into what I thought was my role in all of this?
 

The water flooded my ear canals, and I focused on the sounds. I could hear every little fin movement as the fish created a giant, swishing, underwater symphony. Tiny little flutters like butterfly wings swirled around Texi’s feet as they moved back and forth in mini, kick-drum tidal-waves underneath the surface. It was her feet that struck me, over and over again with a tsunami of ripples.
 

I hated whatever was happening inside of my chest. I kicked my feet, too. I wanted the kicking to pound whatever was going on out of me, but it only pounded it into me.
 

Then there was something bigger. A tail going from side to side in large fluid movements. I righted myself and looked in its direction. I gasped, angry at what it meant. How could I have been so stupid? The schools of neon-fish always attracted otter-sharks.
 

“Texi!” I yelled. Her head bobbed about thirty feet from me, and she faced the sun as it made its last push into the sky. It was a perfect orb, bright beyond bright, and it made her head a dark speck just above the surface. “Texi!” I yelled again, but she didn’t hear.
 

I wondered if she’d turned down her hearing completely to swim in silence. That’d be the only reason she couldn’t hear me.
   

By the sound of the swishing, the otter-shark had picked up speed and was headed right towards her. If I swam to her, I wouldn’t make it in time.
 

“Think, Liam. Think.” But I didn’t need to think. I needed to act. I closed my eyes, Bucket Hopped, and exploded out of the Nothing so that I was face to face with her in the water.
 

She gave me a startled gasp that I ignored, and I wrapped her in my arms to Hop back to the boat. But before we entered the Nothing, I felt the fire in her skin—the explosive nature of Creation making every hair on my body stand on end. And when we went into the Nothing, I wasn’t alone. I felt her in my arms, bare skinned and slippery. Every atom that existed within us was aflame—like ice being dragged across every inch of flesh, and I shuddered at the painful pleasure of it all.
 

Existence should not reside within the Nothing, but there we were. I buried my face into her neck, afraid that letting go of her would mean letting go of so much more, and when I tightened my arms around her, I felt her heart beating within her chest. There was a feeling of infinity within the Nothing, as well as the feeling of possibility.
 

When we reappeared on the bow of the boat, I still couldn’t let her go. I pulled my face back and noticed that when she opened her eyes, they had shifted into the color of celery with cracked lines of lavender. I touched my forehead to hers and our breathing ran in rapid parallels, pulling out a simultaneous feeling of desire and repulsion. I wasn’t sure which feeling I felt towards her and which I felt towards me. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to rip her apart. And none of it made sense.
   

There was a shiver of fresh air that hit us and chilled the water dripping from our bodies, and it jolted me back into reason.
 

I had to let her go…

“Um. Guys?” Santiago asked from the balcony of the second deck. “What was that?”
 

Texi

‘On Her Innocence’ from
The Eightieth Generation