Intrepid (33 page)

When Nobu helped me through the Change on the beach, his face held so many shades of pity, determination, hope and sadness when he let slip he didn’t think I’d survive it. It all made sense now, because Texi’s chances of survival were my own. Growing up, Nobu was never optimistic about Texi’s chances. He always landed on the she’s-gonna-die end of the spectrum. I guess that meant he always believed, deep down, I’d be dead too.
 

Acknowledging this rewrote my history for me, and all the secrets Nobu and Corbin hid walked into the spotlight. I kept returning to the past because these memories were all I’d always known for sure, but even they were proof that I didn’t understand my own history at all. My memories were the only thing I valued, and I couldn’t even trust them. Despite this, I wanted to retrace my steps and figure out where I lost my understanding. Maybe looking through these new lenses would give me a better answer. Maybe there was a moment, somewhere, that would explain it all if I could just find it.
 

But I kept thinking about Texi in new ways. I wondered where she was on the ship and what she was thinking about. I wanted to know what made her and what she was capable of. To know every embarrassing and mundane detail of her existence was infuriating because these details didn’t make the person. For everything I knew about her, I was beginning to realize there were a million things I didn’t.
 

What would happen if we gave in and followed our instincts and set out on our own? I had the feeling we could do amazing things out there, and there was possibility in that. The night we learned to take a Culture Pulse, she’d wanted to save the Vein as much as I did. What could have been so wrong about something that felt so right to do?
 

I closed my eyes to the stars and could still see their remnants against my lids. I could still feel her hair pressed into my fingertips. I could still hear every torturous movement of breath as I gripped her curls in my hands. I counted the stars that stained the back of my eyelids, and this counting slowed my breathing. Sleep finally came in a dreamless abyss, but when I woke, it was because a soft hand landed on my mouth.
 

I tried to push myself up, but the hand held me down. “Shhhh,” Texi whispered.
 

My eyes adjusted so I could make out the shape of her face shrouded by her unruly hair. She wasn’t dressed for bed. In fact, she had on a leather jacket over her white tee-shirt, and I immediately realized she wasn’t planning on staying on the boat.
 

“Texi?”

“We don’t have much time.” She placed her hand on my arm and we entered the Nothing only to return to my room—or I guess it was her room now. Reentering the Nothing with her was still shocking. I could see her and feel her in every incendiary way possible, and when we returned to reality, I fell a small distance and landed on the floor since there wasn’t a lounge chair to catch my prostrate body. She got up from where she knelt and sat on the bed, and I noticed that it was made. Every corner of sheet was tucked in and the comforter only had wrinkles where she sat. She never made the bed as if she was going out of her way to annoy me by destroying my room. I propped myself up on my elbows, and I felt the familiar furrow of worry as she pointed to a pile of clothing sitting on one of the chairs.
 

“I’m leaving in two minutes. You’ll either come or you won’t,” she said.

“What?” I jumped up and stood over her. Her face took on a new brightness, like a clarity that went beyond clear. The Knowing radiated off of her, and her eyes were almost as translucent as cucumber guts. I felt my eyes begin to tingle, like raindrops were being poured directly on the irises. I’d been examining my own eyes in the mirror as much as I’d been examining hers this past week, and the cracks in the marbled hues always seemed to be shifting. It was getting to the point that I could actually feel mini earthquakes within the colors. These same cracks were shifting in her eyes, and the cucumber guts were filling with lavender so I could see entire universes forming within them.
 

“Liam, we could do so much more if we weren’t tied down to all this fear. These fears are not ours to feel. They are theirs… You know it.”
 

“What am I?” I asked again, because I just couldn’t figure it out.
 

She laughed. “You really haven’t known this entire time, have you?”

I shook my head no, and leaned into the sound of her voice. There was something right about the way her words laid the foundations for a different possibility. There was truth within her hope, and I wanted the same clarity she was feeling, but I was still too confused.
 

“Let go of those doubts I see forming in your head. Feel the shifting in your eyes and search into the Knowing. You
Know
exactly what you are and exactly what you can do, just as much as you
Know
we were meant to do more than this. You
Know
that we are in danger if we stay. You
Know
these things just like I
Know
what’s in Iago’s syringe. Just like I
Know
that it’ll only take one big mistake before he has to kill you or me. I cannot stick around for someone else to have that type of control over me.”

The swirling in my eyes grew into a torrent of movement, and I closed them so I could rub my lids.
 

“Come with me. Please?” she asked.
 

“I can’t.” I opened my eyes to the answer. Could we really consider leaving? It’d been a little less than a week since she’d found out what she was, and there was still so much she needed to learn about the Multiverse and Gaian protocols. To leave now could have irreparable consequences.
 

“You can. You’re just scared, and it’s clouding your judgment.”
 

“What do you know about judgment?” I asked, because clearly hers wasn’t clear at the moment.
 

She stood up and held my face so I could look at her and only her. The eyes that bled with purples pulled me into them, and I could see what she saw. I reached up and tangled my fingers in her hair again, holding tightly to the curls as if they could anchor me to where she was and where she wasn’t. Creation was so terribly different from the Nothing. Both held equal parts chaos and equal parts peace, but one held possibility while the other held destiny. We were destined to return to the Nothing when it was our time, but with Creation, that day did not have to be soon.
 

“I can Move,” I whispered.
 

“Yes,” Texi said. “And we need to go. If we leave, we can make things happen. If we stay, we are bound to do something they dislike. They could kill us over one, tiny mistake.”

I hated how right she made her logic sound. If I believed as she did, the word “subject” had to be thrown out of my vocabulary. If I clung to it, it meant that I fell under the same nomenclature as Texi. We didn’t deserve to be lab rats. We were human, and more than that, we were humanity’s last hope.
 

The answer fell into place and adjusted so it became my new truth. I looked at the crackled-bleeding colors pulling out of her eyes so lavenders and violets were the only colors left. I felt the surge and shift of the world around us, and dug into the Energy swishing about in the ocean. I felt my consciousness land on every animal and plant and tide, and I pulled from it gently. I didn’t yank, like I had with the mammoth-bears. I didn’t consume like I did with the otter-shark. I just borrowed it and channeled it, so that when Texi activated the Splice, I felt the surge of Creation.
 

We exploded out on the other side of it and collapsed on the floor in a fit of laughter. I grasped my wrist between my fingers and felt the tha-tha-thump of a new universe crawling with potential. The Primitive Energy was blooming into something new, and who knew where it’d end up?
 

Chapter Forty-One

I looked out to the horizon where the sun was due to appear at any moment. There was no time to waste, and I got up to pull on the clothes Texi’d laid out for me. She sat on the bed with her eyes closed, trying to give me some privacy so I could change. I noticed that she was biting her lip as the miles of zipper crept up threaded metal and the button of my jeans treaded through the fabric. Something about her reaction made me blush, but it also made me want her to open her eyes. It was strange, the way the word “bold” began to hold new meanings for me. It was like I had been scared my entire life without realizing it, and now that I recognized how timidly I’d been living, I wanted to do everything with an edge of brilliance. I wanted to drink in every adventure and live out every possibility.
   

Texi and I were going to do great things out there. I just
Knew
it.
 

Just as my lips stretched out into a broad smile, I heard another body on the quiet, replicated
Geeta
. Ringo must have felt that we Spliced the universe and followed us here.

“We have to go,” Texi whispered as she opened her eyes. She reached over to my journal, and I smiled. It, too, had been replicated. There were now double accounts of Texi’s life, documented and secure on a universe no one would ever think to visit. They’d drift off into nothing, and no one would ever miss them.
 

Texi grabbed a pen and wrote:
Subject(s) have discovered a way to search for the Path. Subject(s) herby promise to do no intentional harm and only seek to help humanity. One subject loves you more than moldy bread.
She let the book lay open like a splayed carcass and set the pen on top of it to hold the correct page down.
 

Her lips quivered, and I let pity in this time. Screw objectivity. “You okay?” I asked, and she nodded.
 

She placed her hands on my forearm, and the shocking trickle melded our skins together. “You ready?” Texi asked.
 

“Our bracelets aren’t activated?”

“We don’t need them to be,” she replied. When she said it, I knew it to be true. Our eyes held matching swirls that were similar in shape but different in color. “Similar, but not the same,” she whispered as she noticed the same thing in my eyes, but I didn’t understand what that phrase meant to her.
 

We both heard the stutter of running boots. Then there was a gap in the sound where Ringo must have Hopped, because the boots started on the deck below and landed outside the door. The creak of hinge groaned against the door as it opened, and Ringo yelled, “Don’t, Texi!”
 

But it was too late. We entered the Nothing just as the words fell on our ears. I could still see Texi’s face and the colors swarming in her eyes. Inside of them existed things like the transitioning of universe. How was it possible to feel every feeling at once? How was it possible to see every color and hear every noise at the very same time? Universes were water sliding off the skin of our eyes as we pulled ourselves out of the ocean of possibility. They were recurring cycles blending in and out of time. They were blooming artichokes as their leaves were torn limb by limb from the body. They were the shedding skin of a rattle-snake and the expanding ripples of stones skipping on water.
 

When it was time, we just
Knew
. Or better yet, the Nothing
Knew
.
 

Then again, perhaps it was Texi who
Knew
, because we were outside of the nursing home where Corbin had spent the past few years.
 

Texi

‘Across the Universe.’
 

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes

They call me on and on across the universe

Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box

They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe

Jai Guru Deva Om

Nothing’s gonna change my world.
 

—The Beatles

—S-2343, V-3234-JYU, Prod.
 

Chapter Forty-Two

The hallway held that same air to it. The musty, ancient smell of old people, and Rebecca sat behind her desk with her head buried in a chart. There were baby T-Rexes on her blue scrubs, and I smiled. What self-respecting woman wore baby dinosaurs on their uniforms?
 

I cleared my throat, and when she looked up, her eyes widened. “Texi!” She stood, knocking the chair she sat in over so that it clattered to the ground. There was that I’m-seeing-a-ghost, deer-in-the-headlights look smearing across her face while she ran from behind the counter that surrounded her desk and pulled me into a hug. “You’re alive!”
 

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked, but my voice was muffled by her shoulder and the tightness of her arms.
 

Rebecca stepped back and coughed on her sobs. “Who’s this?” she asked as Liam stuck his hands in his pockets. They examined each other with the strong air of distrust, and I groaned.
 

“This is Liam,” I answered.
 

More confusion crossed her face. “That’s where you’ve been? You’ve been off with some boy while everyone else—We thought you were dead!”
 

“What the heck are you talking about?”

“Oh, honey. You don’t know?”

“Know what?” I tried to keep the exasperation out of my voice, but I was starting to lose my patience.
 

 
“The Ortiz house burned down, and Sheriff Garza said you were all in it when it happened. Oh, Texi. Bless your heart! It’s a miracle! Where in God’s good name have you
been
?”

The information slid through my ears. This must have been the protocol Papa was talking about, which meant the Ortizes weren’t here. I rolled my eyes at the originality of their escape plan. Another fire? Seriously? “Where’s Papa?” I asked.
 

This only brought out another sob. “He’s gone. Just. Gone. Last week, he disappeared out of thin air.”