“Walk with me, Brody,” Riley whispered, finally, voice strained.
He nodded and Riley took him away from the camp, not to any of the clearings they normally used, but towards the little cemetery where Trina was.
He stopped when they were about halfway there, making Riley turn around and look at him. “I can’t go there now. I am sorry, but I can’t.”
Riley just nodded and leaned against a tree, not looking at him. “I need to say something to you, and I don’t exactly know how to.” His head was down, as if he were ashamed or embarrassed.
He took a step toward him, but Riley put his hands up, stopping him. “Please, don’t, Brody. Please, just stay where you are.”
He did, feeling worried for his friend, not knowing what to say to make it easier for him to just spill it. He could see his hands bleeding through the bandages, but didn’t want to ask about that. It looked like he pounded on trees or did something equally stupid.
“I tried to break up with Ams last night. I almost did, too, only she wouldn’t let me.” He was looking at him now, eyes tired, and sad.
“I’m sorry, Riley… I’m sure you two will work it out.” He knew it was a stupid thing to say as soon as he said it, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Please, Brody… Don’t talk.”
He nodded, waiting.
“I almost broke up with her because of what I did to you, only I didn’t know that’s why I was doing it. I don’t know how to say this right, so I am just going to say it. I didn’t realize until after talking to Drake when I was screaming at him for letting Ella come to Crylo with us, what I did to you… That it was the worst kind of wrong to do that to anybody, and why it hurt you as badly as it did… I am not going to ask you to forgive me for it, because I know you well enough to know that you would, and I can’t do that to you. And I know I can’t ask you to ever really trust me again. I don’t even expect you to ever want to talk to me again—”
Brody could see tears pooling in his eyes, Riley clenching his jaw to keep them in. He took a step towards him, couldn’t help it, but Riley stopped him again, shaking his head at him. “I’m almost done, Brody. Please, just let me get through this.” He looked like it was taking everything he had for him to just be standing, and he ached to run over to him and hug him, to make him not hurt like this, but he couldn’t do that, not when he was looking at him that way, so he stopped where he was.
“What you said before, that you and I are done, I know why you said that now. I am okay with it, Brody, I’ll have to be. If you ask me to walk away, I won’t fight you on it… But it has to be after Crylo. I will let you be after that, I swear, and I’ll never ask anything of you again, but you still have to let me come with you. I couldn’t live with myself—”
He ran over to him, Riley shaking his head, whispering that he wasn’t done, but it didn’t matter anymore, he needed to make him stop. Riley stood still, looking helpless and ashamed, his head down.
Brody grabbed him by the face, trying to make him look at him, but he wouldn’t look at him, eyes down. “Riley, what you’re doing, you need to stop, you need to stop doing this. You’re killing yourself for no reason, and by the looks of it, you’ve punished yourself about as much as you could take… I’m not angry at you, I’m really not. Would you please just look at me?”
Riley didn’t move, his face hard under his hands, still refusing to look at him, as if he were afraid of him.
He let go of him, not wanting to embarrass him, and as soon as he did, Riley slid down the tree and put his head into his broken hands. He crouched in front of him, afraid to touch him, not wanting to hurt him any more than he was hurting already. “I am not going to lie to you and say you didn’t hurt me. You putting the band on me like that after everything… It hurt, worse than anything, but I didn’t really leave you any choice. You didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done, if I thought it was the only way to keep you safe. I’m not angry at you, I swear to you I am not, so there is nothing to forgive… Please, trust me on that. There is nothing to forgive,” he said softly.
Riley still didn’t move. He could see him breathing like he was trying to hold his insides in. He looked as fragile as he did that night outside his house, when he knew for sure that his parents were gone, sitting in front of that swinging door with the stupid words on it, not letting anyone comfort him, as if he thought it was somehow his fault. He had to get him back to the flier and put him to bed, if he could do nothing else for him.
“Riley, please don’t fight me on what I am about to do. I’m going to get you up, and I’m going to hug you, for as long as I can… For as long as you let me, and I really need you to let me. And then, we’re going back to the flier. I’ll carry you if I have to. And you’re going to get some sleep, because I don’t think you’ve done that in a while. And you can think straight again, we’re going to make a bloody plan that’s going to get all of us back safely, because there isn’t a person here I can stand to lose.”
And he let him. Let him pull him up, and let him hug him for a long time, and he could tell he was still hiding his face from him, so he let him hide, squeezing his hands into the back of his head, until he wasn’t breathing like that anymore. And when it was over, he told him what he told Laurel earlier, that he didn’t want to die anymore, so at least Riley didn’t have to worry about that. He told him, too, that Laurel was a great shot, a natural, they just had to help Ams get good enough. And that if the girls could shoot at actual people, they might all make it out of there alive.
And he hoped he believed him, hoped he believed himself. He owed it to Riley to keep everyone safe. Owed it to all of them.
1
Recruit
Laurel, May 24, 2236, Woods Outside Waller
She couldn’t do this, what Brody was asking her to do. There was no way she could do this. He was standing in front of her, not three meters away, and telling her to shoot him with the stun gun. He had taken his shirt off and he had Loren draw a target on his chest for where she was supposed to aim. He was looking directly into her eyes telling her to just walk up to him and pull the trigger but she couldn’t do it. Trelix and Loren watched them at this for a while now, and she felt bad; felt like she was failing some kind of test. She tried telling him that it would be different for her if she were shooting at people she didn’t know, people she hated. That he shouldn’t expect her to be able to shoot him, of all people, but, for some stupid reason, he did.
She saw Riley come into the clearing, looking at her, a smirk on his face. He pulled his shirt off and walked over to her reaching for her gun with his bandaged hand.
“You don’t need me to draw you a target, Brody, do you?”
Brody shook his head, took the gun from him, aimed it at his chest, and pulled the trigger as if it was no big deal.
Riley was on the ground, not moving, and she ran over to him, shaking him but he wouldn’t get up, wouldn’t move at all.
Brody finally pulled her away. “You have to give him a few minutes, Laurel. It knocked him out cold. He’ll be up and whole in five, I promise. Now, please, just point the damn thing at me and shoot so I know you can. So I know you won’t freeze if you have to.”
And she did then, only she kept doing it, kept squeezing the trigger, without meaning to, and Trelix and Loren ran to her taking the gun away, and then ran to Brody, looking frantic, shaking him and then whispering into their comms.
She didn’t know why she didn’t let go but she could tell she really hurt him. He was barely breathing… Somebody must have gone to get Ella because she saw her running to Brody with the medkit after a short while, Drake following behind her. She was crying hysterically, trying to get to Brody only there were hands on her and they wouldn’t let her move.
She heard Riley saying something to her but she couldn’t make sense of it. She was watching Ella doing something to Brody but he still wouldn’t move, wouldn’t wake up. She felt Riley’s arm around her, and she could tell h
e was still talking to her because his lips kept moving and finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and she broke away from him and ran to where Brody, her Brody, was lying like a corpse in the grass. She screamed at him to bloody wake up over and over, to please just wake up, telling him that she would never use any of these damn things again, would never touch them but to please, just wake up. Her voice was hoarse from all the screaming but she couldn’t make herself stop, not until he moved, not until he woke up…
His eyes finally opened and he looked at her, surprise and concern written all over his face. Ella told him then that his heart stopped, and they weren’t sure they could get it going again. That what he got was as close to lethal as it gets with him still being alive, and that she would be eternally grateful if they didn’t practice on live subjects again. And she and Drake left after that.
Brody got up and hugged her, wiped the tears off her face, and then handed her the gun again. He took a few steps back from her and told her to pull the trigger but there was no way in hell she was ever doing that again.
“Laurel, forget what just happened. Point and shoot. One pull on the trigger. All you have to do is let go. Now, shoot.”
She shook her head at him. “No. I’m not doing this to you again. I’ll shoot anybody else, but I am not shooting you.”
He walked back toward her, looking uncomfortable. “I can’t ask anyone else. It, being shot with these things, it kind of hurts. So it’ll have to be me. I am sorry. You have to get comfortable with shooting at people.”
Riley walked up to Brody and handed him his shirt and a marking pen, looking at him without any smiles now, eyes serious. “I got this, Brody. You can’t take anymore. Your heart might just stop. It’s not safe for you and you know that. Draw the target. I got this.”
Brody nodded and drew a target around Riley’s heart—the dot she had to point at in the middle—and then Riley was standing just a few steps away from her, telling her to do it, that it was okay, telling her that she wasn’t going to kill him, to just pull the damn trigger but she couldn’t do it, and then he was screaming at her to just bloody shoot, over and over again, and finally, she did because she couldn’t take him screaming at her like that anymore, and he was on the ground, a burn mark on his chest. She knelt next to him, checking his pulse, making sure he was breathing. He was. She reached over and hugged him, and let herself cry on his chest, rising evenly under her.
She heard Brody and his boys laughing behind her but she didn’t care that they found any of this funny, not when she almost accidentally stunned Brody to death. Trelix and Loren volunteered to let her shoot them after that and she let go both times just as soon as she pulled the trigger and they didn’t even fall down, just stood there smiling at her, and Brody made her do it again, until she got it right, until they were on the ground, not moving.
She walked away from them after that, needed to be alone for a while, to process all of it. She needed to talk to Ams, tell her about what these things could do, and that she had to let go or she’d hurt somebody. She didn’t think Ams would have to do this part for a few days yet as she just started with the targets on the trees but she wanted her to know anyway, so she could prepare herself.
Ams was in the flier with Drake. He was making her load and reload the old school weapon, and she seemed good at it, her small hands moving quickly, clicking things into place. She watched her for a long time and then caught Drake looking at her and shaking his head. He didn’t want Laurel to tell her about Brody, she got that, only she couldn’t figure out why. She had to know she could kill Riley or somebody, whoever they’d make her shoot at. She didn’t want her to go through what she just went through out there; nobody should ever go through that.
Drake put his arm around her and walked her down to the clearing leaving Ams with the old guns and a timer.
“Do you love him—Brody—do you love him?”
She did, even if she hasn’t said as much to anybody yet, not even him. She nodded.
“Then you will let him do this his way. He is good at it, really good. And he is trying to teach you in a week what should take years. You have to let him. And it will hurt, and you will feel like you are screwing up all the time but you have to trust him and you have to let him. What you saw, him lying there like that, not moving, you needed to see that. You needed to know that’s what happens when you shoot somebody. It’s the hardest thing to do, Laurel. But no matter how many holes you can put into those targets on the trees, if you can’t do that to a person, it won’t matter. So let him do his job, and you can’t tell Ams. She needs to learn this the way you did. I’m sorry.” He walked away from her back into the flier.
She went to her little target range and stayed there until it was too dark to shoot; until she couldn’t see the targets clearly anymore. Everybody was at the fire when she got back, chatting comfortably, laughing as if what happened today was entirely normal. She took a bowl from Ella and sat by herself, not talking to anybody, just watching the flames move.
“Mind if I sit?” Brody asked, leaning over her with a cup of that stuff nobody liked in his hands.
She could smell the bitterness in it. She nodded. She was still mad at him for making her shoot at him today and for making her shoot at Riley like that. She knew she could kill anybody else, anybody she actually had to, felt it somehow, and they didn’t need to risk her hurting them to make her know that for sure. They could have just asked.
He watched her, not saying anything, and as soon as she was done with her food, he got up and pulled her up with him. “We are going for a walk,” he said, and that was that.
He took her to the stream, the moon making light tracks on it, enough to see each other by, and they hiked for a while alongside it, climbing the bank, not talking. She raced ahead of him for a bit and then couldn’t hear him behind her, and when she turned around, he was sitting against a rock down below holding his chest in his hands. She ran to him but he just looked at her stopping her with that look. She could see the sweat on his face, his jaw clenched. He was in pain, no matter what she knew he’d say when it was all over if it was ever going to be over.
And then it was, and he seemed like himself again, only embarrassed now when he looked at her.
“I am sorry, I didn’t think that would happen. I’m okay, Laurel. I promise I’m okay.”
She put her arms around him and held him, playing with his hair, running her fingers down his back, feeling his breathing return to normal and then suddenly not normal again, and she stopped, afraid.
He smiled at her. “Good idea. I don’t think my heart can take anything more today. Sit. We need to talk. Instructor, not boyfriend talk.”
She didn’t want to have one of those. Didn’t like it, the whole instructor thing from him. It made her feel like a little girl who kept doing things wrong. Not that he was ever mean to her, or anybody, he wasn’t. It’s just that he was so disgustingly good at all of the stuff he wanted them to learn now, there was no way he was still human. She watched him shoot and throw knives and go hand to hand with Riley and Loren, and she hated him for how easy it was for him. She remembered that morning at the cave, when she came out and he had all those bruises on him, and it didn’t make any sense to her now. There is no way Riley could have landed a single punch on him. Unless Brody wanted him to, and that didn’t make any kind of sense.
“Can I ask you something before you go into full-on instructor mode?”
He nodded, looking at her.
“I’ve seen you fight, seen you and Riley fight, and it doesn’t add up for me. I get why you wouldn’t hit him back but I’ve watched you, the way you move, and you wouldn’t have needed to. It’s like you wanted every punch to land on you.”
He shook his head, looking embarrassed for some reason. Like this was some big secret between Riley and him. She kept staring at him. She wasn’t going to let him dodge everything that made him uncomfortable.
“I owed him, Laurel. The way Anders pummeled
him, I let it happen. I couldn’t do it myself, not to him. I would have never hurt him like Anders did, and I knew it. So I owed him. I’ve been asking him to beat me up ever since. He needed to do it, whatever the reason in his head for when he finally did. I just knew he needed to,” he said in a quiet voice and put his head down again for a little while, and she let him be.
“Instructor mode, Laurel. I am sorry, but we have to. What happened when you shot me? I need to know if the gun locked up or you froze, stopped thinking. Need to know what it was, so I can help you.”
She thought back on it for a long time and knew that it was her, not the gun. “I think I was angry at you for shooting Riley like that, for scaring me. It wasn’t the gun. I didn’t know what would happen, or that I would hurt you but I know I was angry at you when I shot you. I am sorry, Brody.”
“Just the facts, Laurel. Not boyfriend,” he snapped at her.
She nodded, hating how cold his voice was.
“We are going to need to work on that. You can’t be shooting at anyone out of anger, not even at people who are trying to kill you. You need to learn to shoot to kill but only if you absolutely have to, and you only have to if they can kill you or one of us first, not if they make you angry. Do you understand?”
She did, but she felt awful enough for what she did to him today already that he didn’t need to lecture her. She nodded and stood up, turning to the trail to the flier. She was done with this conversation for the night. She felt his hands grab her shoulders roughly and turn her around. He looked angry now, angry like she’d never seen him before, and she didn’t know what she did other than shoot him like that to make him look at her that way.
“You insisted on coming with us. Nobody asked you to do that. I sure as hell didn’t ask you to do that but I am not going to throw you into a situation I can’t control, or one where you can’t control yourself because that would put everybody else in danger. I have to know I can trust you to do what I tell you to do and how I tell you to do it at all times if I have any hope of keeping you and the rest of us alive. We are not done here until I say we are done, and that means you don’t get to walk away when you think you’ve had enough. Not boyfriend, Laurel,” he said in his clipped soldier voice as if she were one of his boys.
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 33
