“I’m scared to take that leap, though.” I gulp. This is the deepest conversation I have had in a while, and it feels like I am having something as invasive as a prostate exam done. “I’m scared of being vulnerable, of feeling all the pain. I’m afraid to confront my dark side.”
“We all have a dark side.” She smiles. “There is nothing to be afraid of. The journey will be worth it in the end.”
“But what if I fail?”
“What do you mean, what if you fail?”
“I mean, what if by some chance I try my hardest. I open myself up to my emotions, I try and find the good in me, I practice good mental self-care, and even begin to be nicer to myself.” I take a deep breath. “What if I do all of that and it doesn’t work?”
“You can’t use failure as an excuse not to try.” Her tone shifts to be sterner. “You won’t know until you do it, and if it doesn’t work out, it will be like you didn’t do it anyway.”
“Failure is my greatest fear.” I pause. Chills trickle down my spine until they reach my entire body. “And I don’t know how to overcome it.”
“What are you afraid of failing at?”
“For starters, Deadwave. This is my last year on the Deadwave Tour.” An eerie silence follows my words as I glance around, still hyper alert for anything that seems out of place. I made a point of letting Jake be the only one who knew where we are, and of checking every few seconds on the way here to ensure we weren’t being followed. But still, the fear is there. “I’m moving on after this year. I’m so afraid of losing and that this will be my only chance.”
“What do you mean, you’re moving on?” Her eyes look upset. Meanwhile, she tilts her head, looking at me confused.
“My dad is stepping down as CEO of Chimera, and although I’ll need a few years of training before I can fully take on that title, I’ll be working with him to lead the company.”
“Oh, wow.” She sounds surprised. I can tell she resents that about me, that I can have my life handed to me without any work. She doesn’t understand what I have had to go through to get this—my dad didn’t make me sweat for it, he made me bleed. “Well, that’s awesome, it sounds like a great opportunity.”
“Thanks. Thank you. But yeah, I don’t know.” I say that in the way every stereotypical rich kid would. In a way that seems as if I am unappreciative of the life I am being handed, unthankful for an opportunity most could only dream of. But that couldn’t be more untrue. “I’m just scared. Scared that I might fail at that too.”
“No matter what happens, it will be a great experience.” She puts a hand on my back, trying to comfort me. “You get to lead one of the biggest virtual reality companies in the world. That is so exciting.”
“It’s scary. Scary as fuck.” I sigh, letting the stress ebb out of my nostrils and dissipate into the night sky. “The company isn’t what it seems it is. It hasn’t ever made a profit. Now, the executives do get paid well, but besides that, all the money has been poured into research, and recently investors have been growing impatient. They want to see money, and lots of it from the tens of billions they have poured into research over the last decade. And finally, they have the plan. The plan to make Chimera the world’s most valuable company, but in the process I’m afraid they might end it. And I’ll be the one that has to deal with it all. I’ll have to deal with the fact that I didn’t just fail myself, I failed everyone.”
I look into her eyes, hoping to find some comfort in the warmth of her body that is pressed up against mine, but I can’t find any. I want to tell her the truth. That I’m afraid I’m going to fail her too. That I’m afraid the global brand ambassador deal my dad is offering her to be the face of the Chimera Brand will be the worst of her life. I’m afraid that my dad is going to use her and that this secretive group will end up wanting to kill her too. I’m afraid that her own father will be used as a pawn, his life sacrificed to a virtual world to showcase why everyone else should escape into one forever too. Just an excuse for the rich to suck even more wealth from the poor, and for the government to give back just enough money to everyone to be able to afford the monthly payment to live in a Life Pod. It’s not a real solution. It doesn’t fix the problem, it tries to make it irrelevant, by making this world itself irrelevant.
It makes my father and I able to wipe our asses with Franklins, but I’m not like my dad. I can’t ignore that in the process we will be shitting on the world and shitting on Riva too.
“You’re not going to fail everyone,” she says. “I promise.”
“You don’t know that.” I shake my head. “You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“I know you well enough to say that you are a better man than you think you are.”
“It means a lot that you are saying that. I’m gonna start working on trying to believe that.”
“I really hope you do. You’re doing great things, and you’re going to keep doing great things. You’re the first guy I’ve met who I can definitely say that about. I just hope you feel great about it all.”
“Me too.” The moment takes over me. The next movement of my body is entirely out of my control. I lean my head forward so that my lips are inches away from hers, the energy of the night seeming to bring our bodies closer together. “Me too.”
The next moment, our lips connect. At first, the movement of our lips is slow and concentrated. It feels amazing to kiss her, like there is a chorus of light and happiness erupting inside me. I can feel her breath surging through me and feel the electricity of her hands moving down my chest. In time, our movements become more intense. Our tongues become intertwined, as well as our bodies. As the moment overcomes me, every feeling of doubt, of guilt, and of fear inside me melts away into a fiery passion.
Then, a few minutes into our fireworks show, a loud shuffling breaks through the silence of the night.
“What was that?” I grab Riva’s shoulders, clearly more frightened than she is.
“They are cleaning the Bean.” She grins at the crew of workers who appeared out of nowhere. The whistle of water splashing up against the metal echoes through the night as the figures power-wash the base of the sculpture. There are at least ten of them, all of whom are dressed in plaid overalls and wearing blue baseball caps. “I guess they don’t care about us.”
“Of course not.” I smile, looking right into her eyes. “This world is ours. At least, it feels that way.”
Our lips connect again, and despite my eyes being closed, I feel like I can see all the colors in the world flashing before me. It’s moments like these that make me question if maybe I have things all wrong. That maybe this feeling can overpower the numbers. That maybe it’s moments like these that matter most.
That though doesn’t last long. A sharp needle pierces my skin. I open my eyes and grab Riva, trying to protect her from whatever stabbed me.
But all the strength in my muscles has fled. She screams as two masked figures come up from behind her and pick her up. I feel myself get dragged backward, my body scraping against the cement beneath the bench.
I want to scream, but I don’t have it in me.
My eyes close, and the night sky above disappears into nothingness.
Chapter 23
My entire body is covered in water.
Cold water.
I flail my legs, my movements halted by the Velcro straps that surround my ankles and arms. My feet feel heavy; in fact, there seems to be a covering around them that weighs dozens of pounds, enough to drag me down to the bottom of the dark waters below. I am drowning. Water covers every square inch of my body, cresting in surges over my mouth, causing a rush of vile-tasting freshwater to travel down my throat only for me to cough it out the second the trough of the wave reaches me.
They are gonna kill me. They are gonna win.
I have had enough nightmares by now to know that this is real. There is a certain richness that the senses have in real life that fails to accompany dreams, and by the distinct tinge that t
he night sky has from the dozens of stars above, I know that this is really happening. This time they have me again, and they aren’t playing around.
“Help! Make this stop!” Riva screams, her voice beginning to crack as the waves continue to surge over our necks.
Not her too. Anger explodes inside me, but it is not enough to outweigh the confusion and terror that cause my heart rate to skyrocket, and my mind to spin with thoughts. Riva is a few feet to my left, and behind us, we are both chained to the back of a boat, the sharp blades on its motor inches away from slicing apart my head.
It is impossible to tell how big the boat is, or who’s on it. My entire vision is confined to the vast expanse of water in front of us. For miles and miles the cold waters gently cycle in smooth waves with the wind. There is no shore visible on the horizon, no people in sight, and no light to combat the darkness.
We are in the middle of hell with nothing but the stars to call to for help.
They won’t answer.
“We tell you to listen to us, and this is what you do.” The chilling voice echoes in my ear, and I jerk my body around to try and see who it is. Except the back of the boat, which is hard metal coated in white paint, prevents me from turning around, and effectively chains my head forward to the lake.
My teeth chatter, any audible words refusing to come out of me. The temperature of the water is already starting to take hold of my body, causing my core to shiver as an uneasy silence permeates the air.
The metal of the boat jams into the back of my head. By the rocking of the boat, I can tell people are moving around on it, and my muscles tense as I imagine what they could be preparing to do.
“First you reject our commands.” The same voice booms through the night, which only causes me to shiver with more hysteria. “Then you enlist the help of this girl to try and help you destroy the world as we know it.”
A chorus of laughter erupts, not from the presumably male voice that rings in my ears, but from a legion of people who are on the boat, all stationed to watch us be tortured.
“We can’t let you recruit more people to destroy the natural order, when you haven’t even done your duty.” There is another silence, and I close my eyes, the anticipation inside me threatening to explode as I fear they are about to start the engine and tear me apart.
This is all about the sponsorship. They know that my dad is thinking about making Riva the face of Chimera. They know she is going to be helping us, and now they want to hurt her.
“We are killing her,” he says.
Riva opens her mouth, an audible squeak coming out of it before her head is submerged in water. The latch around her neck that holds her chained to the boat detaches from her body, and she instantly sinks to the bottom of the lake.
“No!” I lunge forward. “Please stop! She doesn’t deserve it. She didn’t even know what she was getting into! Please stop!”
I watch in horror as her face disappears from the surface of the water and goes out of sight into the darkness. She must have weights on the bottom of her feet too. Her body is going to sink to the bottom in minutes. She’s going to drown. She’s going to die.
“Kill me!” A hysteric scream makes its way out of me as I completely lose it. My covenant of no crying breaks as a round of tears pours down my face. My entire body spasms in an attempt to do something—do everything—to try and save her. “Please, end this! Turn that engine on and tear my head apart. Take me! Kill me, not her. She doesn’t deserve it.”
“Oh, please,” the voice whispers, its hot breath caressing my ears. “Stop whining. You knew you had this coming. You knew what we would do. Now it’s happening.”
“Make this end.” I cough, all my muscles straining from trying to break free. “Make this end! I’ll do anything! Anything! I don’t want to feel this again. I need you to leave me alone. I need you to save her.”
“Until you give us what we want, we will never leave you alone.” He speaks slowly and coldly, as if he is whispering a dark secret in a loud coffee shop. “You can’t escape us. We are the most powerful people on Earth, and if anyone messes with us, they learn to never do it again. We kill people. But we can’t do that to you yet. We have business to do. We have to take the power from your father.”
“Why don’t you kill us all and get it over with?” My voice cracks, and an odd sound full of desperation and paranoia leaps from my chest out of my throat. “Why don’t you end this now if you’re going to anyway?”
The air seems to freeze around us as I ask the question. It feels like I have broken some untold code, and now no one knows how to react.
“It would destroy the order of things.” A new voice emerges. It is deep, scratchy, and foreboding. “It would destroy everything we have built over the last hundred years.”
I know well enough not to probe any more than that into the issue. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the energy to take the pain they will cause me after. I need to try and save Riva. She doesn’t deserve this—I do.
“Well, if you’re not going to end our lives, don’t end hers. Don’t do it!” I scream at the top of my lungs, hoping that my hysteria will help to pull some strings of emotion in their hearts. Riva has already been down there for over a minute; they need to get her out now. She needs to live.
“We will pull her back up under one condition.” An evil cackle echoes in my ears. “You have to promise us to never talk to her again. To never even talk about her, even think about her existence. If she must live, then she must never get in our way again. She must never try and stop us. She must never be with you.”
“Okay,” I respond, even though every word that comes out of the man makes my insides ache. “I’ll do it. I’ll do anything. She doesn’t deserve this.” Tears flow from my eyes, falling down into the dark waters below. “Pull her up! Now!”
I hear a low rumbling as some gears shift beneath the boat. I take a deep breath, the distinctive musty smell of the lake making its way through my nostrils. There is utter silence from the boat behind me as my heart practically pounds out of my chest. With each passing second, Riva comes closer to the surface, and I don’t know if she will be dead or alive.
I don’t know if I killed her or not.
And if I did, if my existence results in even more pain upon a human being I care about, I will never be able to live with myself. I will never allow myself to care about anyone or anything again.
The top of Riva’s head pierces through the surface of the water. I can now see that we are both strapped to the boat from our lower backs by a rope, which they used to drag her back from the depths of the lake up to our little floating vessel of torture.
The second her face emerges, all energy leaves my body.
She looks dead. Her eyes are shut, her skin looks heavy and lifeless, and her stomach is bloated from the amount of water she swallowed. Her body vibrates as the rope continues to pull her up, her muscles providing no resistance against the tension in the rope and force of the wind. The tears, which already pour down my face, quickly turn into a full-fledged mental breakdown.
No. A scream erupts from my throat as I witness her lifeless body get dragged up onto the boat. Her beautiful black hair is the only part of her that seems to have any life left, the rest of her body having all the color sucked out of it. They don’t deserve to have her body. They don’t deserve to be on this Earth.
I sit in silence, my body giving up on trying to resist them, trying to make my voice heard, after I see firsthand what their power can do. The tears stop coming out of me as my muscles tense, my mind turning my body to stone.
There is an odd feeling in my stomach, a sharp pain that makes me feel like I want to vomit and continue vomiting until there is nothing left of me.
Riva drowned.
The thought sends chills through my spine, but that isn’t even what feels the most chilling about it all. Somehow, everything about my past, everything about my mom’s death, makes sense. These people, they have the sa
me dark energy that absorbed the cliff that night. They are capable of faking anything.
They faked my mom’s suicide.
They killed her.
She was never depressed like I blamed myself for not realizing for years. She was murdered. She was murdered by the same people who are trying to kill me, the same people who have destroyed my entire life.
I look out at the lake and can’t help but grin.
A surge of adrenaline, one accompanied by a feeling of sheer power, overcomes me. I have a new purpose now. A new goal to drive me—one that will keep me going every day despite all the pain threatening to drag me down.
I feel a needle stab through my neck, my muscles instantly tightening as a syringe appears in my peripheral vision. I already know what is happening: they are going to knock me out and I’ll wake up in my hotel room bed as if nothing happened.
As if they didn’t just end Riva’s life. As if they aren’t going to end mine.
But I don’t care.
I don’t care about any of that. I can’t focus on the past, I can’t even think about it for a second. I have to let it fuel me.
I need it to remind me of my sole purpose in life: to kill them.
To kill every last one of them. To become more powerful than they will ever be.
Chapter 24
“Sam. Sam. Sam.” An anxiety-ridden voice shakes the blackness from my mind. “Wake the fuck up, man, please. Please wake up.”
I can see the relief flood over Jake’s face as I open my eyes. I want to jump, startled by his face hovering a foot away from mine, but my body is too sore to immediately begin to move.
“Dude, what did they do to you?” He hugs me, sighing as he lifts my back off the floor. “Why did they do this again?”
“I don’t know.” The words struggle to come out of me, my brain still trying to process everything around me. I am seated on the rough carpet of the hotel room me and Jake are supposed to be staying in for the night (those plans got derailed a little bit). The room smells of Jake’s timber-scented cologne, and the lights are turned down low so that I can barely see the color of the bed sheets of the two queen beds in the room. “I can barely feel my body. Everything is still coming back to me. It all feels like a dream, one fucked-up nightmare.”
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