“I’m sorry,” I murmur, to no one in particular.
Scar tells me to be quiet.
“No. I’m not a monster. I’m not a monster, Rabbit. I’m not.”
His lips touch my temple and he whispers against my fake ear, “You’re not. I never thought you were. Just hold on for a little longer. You'll be fine Eleni. You’re fine. You’ll be OK. It’s OK.”
His tears land on me, rolling into my mouth and overriding the taste of copper and metal.
“Rabbit,” I say with a heavy sigh.
More shadows fold in.
My eyes open once more and Mateo swims into view above me. I reach out to him. He shifts towards me, presses against me and warmth spreads over us like a blanket. My body burns with cleansing blue fire. My hand, still clinging to one of his letters, closes around the back of his neck. My fingers trace up past the curls and into the short hairs on the nape of his neck. Part of Prothero lives there. Everywhere. It's evil signature lurking in all the technology I touch. I will burn it out. I will destroy Prothero if it’s the last thing I do.
Mateo’s mouth meets mine and the world recedes, all thoughts of Prothero vanish in our kiss. The wristbands fry the already damaged skin of my wrists. I don’t open my lids but light brightens around me. Mateo’s lips are scorching. His lips and arms and hands are hotter than the sun.
My implant skips every other beat. A heavy weight builds in my chest. The pain in my wounded stomach disappears. I don’t let go of Mateo. I don’t let him go this time. I’m not going to leave him. Scarlett cries and pleads in the background. Copper and wires and limes and chocolate assault my taste buds. Sweat fills my nostrils.
The fire in my veins is unbearable. It’s all I have left. If I stop kissing Mateo—when I stop kissing him, I’ll be dead. The panic and weight of this knowledge drives me upwards. The electric pulses explode out of my veins like millions of microscopic rockets. My body explodes and Mateo goes flying away from me and disappears into the night.
I let him go. I'm sorry, Mateo.
Scarlett rises above me in the night sky, pale and luminous, like a faraway moon orbiting the earth. Her voice ebbs and flows around me, singing in all the beautiful timbres I remember. Singing like the sweetest machines and happiest memories. My lids close and I don’t open them again. Colors and shapes drift before me as random scenes crash into view.
My parents explode. Scarlett laughs, her skin dappled with sunlight. A meteor shower kicks off in the night sky. The Eiffel tower at sunset. Mateo under the lime tree. Rabbit Santiago framed in the blaze of a firefight. The Rosas twin ponytails swaying out from under their hats as they walk down the hall. Nurse Esperanza sets the medical kit on the counter. Dr. Dawson steeples his fingers and leans towards me. The biting plunge of a needle into my right bicep. The tin box yawns open, the letters spilling out. The vial of blood rests in my open palm.
I’m collapsing inside myself. My limbs are too heavy to lift. Every second stretches out into minutes and hours and days and years.
I don’t want this. I don’t want to die. I didn’t cure the virus. I didn’t save Mateo. I didn’t save anybody.
This is wrong. I’m a dying star, burning a hole through the galaxy, sucking everything up in my gravity. My eyes close for an eternity. I’ll never open them again.
A heavy, familiar hand covers my heart. It pushes down with all its strength, crashing into my chest, down past my ribs until my internal organs are exposed. The hand pushes me down further into the inky blackness, where the moon and stars can’t reach anymore.
My metal heart stops beating. I don’t want this. This isn’t how it’s supposed to end.
I’m dying.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Runaways
I’m sitting in the middle of dead bodies. My best friend, Eleni Garza is dead. The boy who killed her, Clinton Fuller, is also dead. I killed him. Rabbit Santiago, the kid who started this whole mess, he’s administering CPR to Len’s lifeless body. It was the first thing he did after she went all blue and glowy and propelled him into the air like a rocket. He scrambled back to her on his hands and knees, pushing down on her chest, cracking her ribs, gasping his hot air into her lungs.
I’ve been useless since shooting Clinton’s brains out. I could have called for medical help over the waves. I could have grabbed the med kit and—did what exactly? I’m not a medical resident. Not smart enough for that. I can’t remember most of the basic triage we all learned in basic. First Aid certified and what good are those skills now when I’m reduced to sobbing and rocking and hugging my knees like a five year old. The med kit from Len’s backpack is tossed to the ground three feet from the tree Santiago landed against and I only stare at it like an idiot child. I’m so close to fetal I should suck my damn thumb.
Santiago stays busy, buzzing around the scene with nervous, frenetic energy. If he stops moving he will collapse and pass out. He keeps going back to Eleni, touching a new spot on her. Cursing. Speaking out loud moving between his two languages in a flurry nearly impossible for me to decipher. I’m multilingual, but not at that rate. It’s exhausting to watch, so I tune him out and concentrate on breathing through the wash of snot and tears.
It’s Rabbit who snaps me out of it. He calls my name. The urgency and authority in his voice cracks like a whip against the slower, sludgier parts of my brain. I draw a bloody arm over my forehead. I don’t stop to consider what bloody crusty parts of Clinton cling to me. We’re all a gross mess. We’re all bloody and broken. But only two of us are alive.
Eleni. I can’t look at her empty shell anymore. I rise up from the ground. There’s a tarp in the back of the tent. I retrieve it and fold it over Len. This is right. This is the right thing to do. Rabbit disappears from view, but I hear him near me, vibrating on some awful key, raising goosebumps across my body. Touching and moving objects around. Muttering to himself? I dunno. I almost wish he would disappear entirely. It’s easier to focus once the cerulean blue tarp is laid over Len. I’m sitting on the ground with my legs folded and touching the top of the tarp. Smoothing it down. Holding it down. We need rocks. We need to secure this tarp.
Rabbit emerges from the tent behind me, I turn as the rustling of the material distracts me. How did he get in there without my noticing? He’s wearing Len’s bag. He’s carrying a plasma rifle. He drops a soft, bulky object in my lap. My pack. I lean my head back and look up at him. His stupid floppy hair drapes over his features like curtains drawn in a darkened room. He looks funereal and positively ghoulish from this angle. I shudder and hug myself. I’ve been praying down here next to the tarp and I don’t even know how long.
“Scarlett,” Rabbit says. I’m surprised at his calm. It’s eerie. “You need to get up.”
He extends a hand to me and I nod vacantly, accepting his help onto my feet. I wobble and he steadies me with a strong, steel grip. His long, alien fingers dwarf my shoulder and he looms over me like a scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield. If I only had a brain. I blink at his empty face. We couldn’t rub two brain cells together.
Len is dead. A wave of panic and emotion threatens to level me, but Rabbit’s grip intensifies and holds me in place.
“Scarlett,” Rabbit says my name again.
He holds up a piece of cloth and I accept it blindly, scrubbing it across my hot cheeks. My vision clears. He nods. He’s good. He’s good with trauma.
“What are we going to do?” I croak around the frog sized lump in my throat. Speaking out loud here, amongst the dead, has a sacrilegious undertone. I’m not sure how I’m going to make it another five minutes in the silence. Poor Len. It’s dark forever under the tarp. I want to lift the material and look at her one final time.
“We should move her,” I whisper. “We should put rocks on the tarp to hold it down. We should send a wave to Nurse Esperanza.”
Easy as that, all the plans of action slip into my brain, one after another. Diving in on top of each other in an avalanche of reason. Rabbit shakes his hea
d slowly, absorbing each of my statements and refuting them with a flop of his hair.
“Scarlett. There’s no time. We’re going to run,” Rabbit says. I nod. This makes sense. This is the perfect plan of action. No. No it’s wrong. The idea of leaving Len here, abandoning her to the cold for wild animals to—
“We can’t leave her,” I insist, sinking like a stone to the tarp. Didn’t it look like she was sleeping? Maybe we should check again.
“You can’t stay here.” Yes, that’s true. “You killed Clinton.” Yes, that’s also true.
“We have to leave now?” I ask around watery hiccups.
“It’s our only chance,” he says. “Let’s go.”
He pulls my arm up and I drift with it, clutching the handle of my pack. He drags me away from the Salt patch. Away from Eleni. He’s stomping and dragging and I’m flopping along in his wake, watching her body recede to a distant point on the horizon.
“Someone will find her,” Rabbit assures me. He rustles his hair and it sticks out at odd angles from his head, the follicles coated with sweat and blood. I stifle a nervous laugh burbling up from my belly. Who laughs at a time like this?
“Where are we going?” He frets, stumbling over clumps of grass and stones as we move north through the dark. I’m waking up. Absorbing his statements, turning them over like flapjacks on the hot griddle of my brain.
“Len wanted to board a train to Mexico City. The bullet train goes south,” I whisper.
Rabbit stops in his tracks. I stop too, because he was providing all the forward momentum. It’s all I can do not to collide and become entangled in his thin, wiry frame.
“Mateo,” he spits the word out like it tastes nasty. The name pushes a button in my mind. “The Matador. Mexico City.”
I shake my head sluggishly. We can’t go there. I don’t wanna go there. Eleni wanted to go there. She made me promise her. I dig around in the pocket of my uniform pants, bringing back the vial of blood. Rabbit makes beady eyes in its direction.
“What is that?” he asks.
“It’s from Len. We need to take it to Mexico City to help the Contras. And my brother,” I say. “It’s a cure for the new strain of the nano virus. She thought she was gonna save the world. Heh. Save the fucking world, right?”
Rabbit reaches for the vial and I give it over. He cradles it in his palm, taking a long glance back at the blue tarp. Tears spark in his eyes.
“Holy shit. She was going to save the world.” His voice cracks.
“What the fuck did you think she was going to do?”
“I didn’t know,” he says. “I wanted to help her. She wouldn’t let me help her. And now she’s gone.”
His lip trembles.
“So, help her.” I gesture towards his hands. “We can still help her.”
He nods and pockets the vial. “We’re going to Mexico City. We’re going to cure the virus.”
We could be safe there, if we could find The Matador.
Rabbit and I exchange a heavy gaze. We are the pallbearers of a double funeral, moving away from the grave site, catching a midnight train to a warzone. It seems inevitable we should end up there. Cosmic. The planets of fate aligning in two deaths and us here tumbling across the open field, radiating a signal to Prothero authorities we survived and Len didn’t.
We can’t stay here. We can’t stay anywhere now.
We need to escape.
We’re going to Mexico City.
EPILOGUE
Resurrection
Wake up.
A voice like a bolt of lightning crackles through my brain. Sings up my veins.
Wake up.
Another jolt like a rough, tearing gasp of air into my lungs. The unpleasant burn of oxygen. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe under here. Under here? Under where?
You cannot sleep, Eleni Garza.
Sleep? Was I asleep?
WAKE UP.
My eye pops open. Just the one, the robot eye.
Everything is blue. The stars have gone out. I can’t breathe. My left arm lifts and pushes against something cold and it crinkles. It’s plastic. I push and lift. The stars swing into view.
I want to get up. I need to get up.
Not yet.
The voice drives my arm down, back to the ground. My eye snaps shut. The tarp falls over my face. I can still breathe. It hurts but I can still breathe. I can feel my metal heart beating. Slow and sluggish and painful. But it’s still beating.
Soon. I will see you soon.
The voice whispers, tickling my ears and sending shivers rolling like live wires over my skin.
I’m alive. Help. I’m alive.
And something powerful wants me.
A Sneak Peak at Tin Road, the Sequel to Metal Heart
Rabbit Santiago wants me to shoot him. It's only with a hand-held EMP, and only to obscure the signal transmitting from the band around his wrist. But considering tonight I already shot and killed his best friend, it’s a tall and brutal order. I’m rooted to the spot—finger poised on the trigger—when the sound of sirens stirs us. A hovercar is on its way.
We hear the wails before we see it mount the horizon, floating above the ground like a flashing gray ghost. My finger twitches against the metal and the EMP gun kicks. Rabbit grits his teeth as a pulse sucks all the juice from his tech.
“That hurts,” he grunts, rubbing at the glowing band.
“It shouldn't.” Aside from an unpleasant static cling, the EMP guns are harmless.
“Well it does. Now get down.” He grabs my arm and pulls us both to the earth. My knees hit the dusty grass first, and then my chin grinds into the rough soil. I curse under my breath, but Santiago doesn’t seem to hear it. I wipe at my throbbing chin, smearing a crusted patch of blood I didn’t even realize was there.
His instincts aren't bad. The hovercar rolls about a thousand yards past our position, towards the signal emitting from Clinton Fuller's band. The RFID called them here. Two flood lights attached to either side of the vehicle's windshield kick on and the body of our deceased friends are now bathed in eerie blue light. Beside me, still gripping my wrist with his fierce bony fingers, Rabbit sucks in a breath and blows it out. I catch a whiff of cinnamon, overridden immediately by the tang of sweat and metallic odor of blood.
Eleni and Fuller's blood. We’re covered in it.
“We need to get out of here,” I say, my vision locked on the scene. Neither of us moves. We’re transfixed by the steady motion of the machine and the fact that two people died tonight because of what we did.
The metal ramp rolls out of the bowels of the hovercar with a clinical thud and medical officers emerge, carrying a single stretcher and medical equipment. Half of them run to Fuller's inert body and the others cautiously approach the tarp we laid on top of Len. I don't know if I can watch this. I don't want to see them lift her shroud. I can't see her body again.
“Let’s go.” I climb to my feet, dislodging the steel vice grip Santiago has on me.
“Scarlett, wait.”
“We can't. We need to get to the water. Wash the blood off our hands. We're covered in blood.”
“I know.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Maybe they're still alive. Maybe—maybe we can fix this.”
“I shot Fuller in the head. Nothing can fix that.”
The medical officers far across the field have radioed for backup. More vehicles approach, wailing off in the distance.
“Shit,” Rabbit says.
“Let’s move.” I grab his arm this time.
I don’t see or hear or feel anything for the next fifteen minutes except the reverberating thump of my heart, the pound of our legs over the dry grass, and the labored breath ringing in my ears. We hit gravel then train tracks, dashing over them and skidding down an embankment to the lip of the river. Rabbit sheds his pack—no, not his pack, Len’s pack—in one swift, almost graceful movement and plunges head first into the water. I stand on the shore wat
ching him, my boots crunching in the silt. He’s gone for awhile. He’s gone for too long.
“Rabbit?” I send the question out over the undulating water. The current is fast and strong. He could’ve been carried far from shore by now.
There’s only silence.
Finally, after almost a full minute he explodes up from the water, gasping loudly. OK, he’s breathing. It’s my turn. I crouch near the edge of the water as he comes slogging out, his body dripping wet—heat and moisture steaming from his head. He unintentionally splashes me but I hardly notice. He looks like someone took a bucket of water to a scarecrow.
“You were under for a while,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He walks a few feet from where the water touches the edge of Oregon and he falls into a heap. I turn my attention to the bitter cold river lapping softly against the shore. Everything is moving. Nothing stops just because we fucked up. We can’t stop here either. Not for long.
Once my fingers are submerged in the Columbia and I’m wiping the red from under my fingernails—I realize the cold is not that bad. Warmer than I thought it would be. The bare skin of my clean hands eases the tension in my neck and shoulders. I wipe my hands on the outside of the pack. There’s blood caked everywhere else on my body, but at least my hands are dry.
“We gotta keep moving.” My eyes flicker over to Rabbit washed up on shore, nothing but a skinny pile of laundry.
He makes an indecipherable grunting noise and drags himself up from the sand. He walks over to the embankment, crawls to the top, and peers over. I join him, elbowing up next to him and grinding my shoulder against his. His gaze doesn’t flicker away from the chaotic scene across the field.
The hovercars still perch near the Salt patch. My Salt patch. I’ve spent an entire year cultivating that crop. My stash of Ecto and the remaining vials of Flash are hidden there. The sounds of the officers rummaging through the shed and their headset chatter drift across to where we sit. Rabbit’s breathing is labored. I shake his shoulder roughly.
Metal Heart: Book 1: The Metal Heart Trilogy Page 29
