Over the Edge: The Edge - Book Four

by Reiss, CD

  He cupped my jaw in his hands and held my eyes in place with his. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “How?”

  “I swear it, Greyson, I swear on my life I’m going to fix this. Can you believe me?”

  Could I?

  I believed he believed it, but the feeling of being on defense was so awkward that relief seemed impossible. The need to move-move-move to get away-away-away before I was overtaken was as mentally uncomfortable as I’d ever been.

  “I feel it. It’s another me. It’s a me who knows things that she wants to show me. My God, Caden, she has a name. I split, and she has a fucking name. How did you cope with this?”

  “I had months. This came on you quicker.”

  “Why?” I was suddenly desperate for some kind of answer.

  “The dose maybe? Maybe years of repression made the doors open slower? I don’t know.” He moved his hands to my shoulders, squeezing where they met my arms. “All I know is we’re going to fix it.”

  “When?”

  “What’s her name? The one you’ve locked away?”

  “I don’t want to say it.”

  “Say it so I know what to call her.”

  “Respite.” I said it as if I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t a name, but it was the word that came to me over and over. Respite. A reprieve. A suspended sentence. And the name of mental discomfort. The name of its opposite.

  The convoy creaked by, and the soldier blocking us moved to the left to block two women wearing abayas that blew in the wind.

  I ran across the street—toward-toward-toward.

  Chapter Seven

  caden

  There were so many things I’d wanted to do. Bring her to the hospital. To Blackthorne. Home. I wanted to try circular breathing. Anything and everything…but one thing at a time.

  Then she was off like a shot, across the street through a break in the line of military vehicles. She was hard to catch under the best of circumstances. When she ran, she took off as if she was taunting me to catch up.

  I was in heavy boots and a uniform built for protection against harsh elements. Not speed. Not comfort. My feet were heavier than hers, and her timing had been as catlike as her risk-taking.

  Guns swung toward her. Clicks echoed off the sky.

  I had a choice.

  Use the air in my lungs to run after her and catch her bullet-ridden body before it hit the ground. Or use that air to stop the shots.

  “Hold fire!” I shouted from the deepest, widest part of my lungs.

  I had no authority over these men, but I was a major and I was in uniform. I held my hands out to both hold them and show I wasn’t a threat.

  The convoy shut down, and men piled off the Humvees.

  The guy who’d stopped us from crossing the street jogged to me. “What the fuck—?”

  “She’s with me!”

  “Who was that?” A dusty sergeant came to the sidewalk. I looked small and sad in the mirrors of his goggles. That was intentional. Self-reflection was intimidation.

  “My wife,” I said, straightening so I looked a little more authoritative in the mirrors. “She’s with a contracting operation.”

  “Is she trying to get shot?”

  In his mirrored glasses, I looked at myself expectantly. Small or not, I had leaves on my collar.

  “Sir,” the sergeant added. “Is she trying to get shot, sir?”

  “Just in a hurry, Sergeant. If you give me room, I’ll be following her.”

  He stepped aside and kept his opinions to himself. “Let’s move out!”

  They hustled back to the line of trucks, and in the moments before they moved again, I dashed across.

  * * *

  The Green Zone was both militarized and demilitarized, with one making the other possible. The pop-pop of live rounds went off sixteen hours a day at the Blackthorne training compounds, where the sight of a person rappeling or jumping off the roof of a building onto a yellow-and-blue stunt bag coexisted with a Subway franchise and a makeshift Burger King.

  The American place Greyson had mentioned existed in the nether region between the white-tablecloth restaurants the diplomats and businesspeople frequented and the fast-food joints the low-rent contractors went to.

  I jogged after her, avoiding the piles of rubble that dotted the streets as a reminder of how we’d gotten here. When I turned the last corner, she was half a block ahead and walking into the diner. I slowed down, relieved she hadn’t changed course on a whim.

  “I ordered you an egg sandwich with cheese,” she said when I walked in. “They only have cheddar.”

  Too early for lunch and too late for breakfast, the place was nearly empty. She was standing by the front counter as if she was ready to make a getaway.

  I leaned over to the woman at the register. “We’re having it to stay.”

  “Caden,” Greyson said behind me, annoyed.

  “Sit anywhere,” the hostess said.

  I took my wife gently by the elbow and guided her to the back.

  “I don’t want to stay,” she hissed.

  “Neither do I, but the convoy could be another ten minutes at the rate they were going.”

  She slid into the back booth facing the rest of the room and folded her hands together on the table. I got in across from her. The window to my left was coated with a fine layer of dust.

  I clasped her hands in the center of the table, squeezing briefly as if that could transmit my level of empathy. “I know what you’re going through.”

  “Is it wrong that makes me feel less alone?”

  “That’s a question for a priest.” I pulled our fists to my mouth, kissed her hand, and put them back on the table.

  “I feel like my mind is a record that’s skipping. I have this nagging pressure from ‘her,’ and the only thing that shuts her up is moving forward, and the space between them is just on and on.”

  “Where does it tell you to move forward to?”

  “Just anywhere.” The space between her brows knotted, and her hands tightened around mine. “And Jake. I’m so worried about him. It just says, ‘Do something,’ but there’s nothing I can do.”

  “They’ll find him.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  A waiter in a stained white polo shirt brought our breakfast on paper plates and left a fistful of metal silverware in the center of the table.

  “Please eat.”

  “I’m not hungry. I mean, I’m starving actually. But this anxiety.” She pressed her thumb to her sternum.

  Being married to a psychiatrist had its downsides. She thought everything could be solved with talking. She had clinical terms for everyday discomforts. The upside was the fact that she could identify what she was feeling and verbalize it without a song and dance. Right to the point without a hedge or word of denial.

  I picked up a fork and reached across the table to cut a section of her omelet before spearing the piece so I could hold it up to her mouth. She glanced at it, then at me with big, brown eyes that considered my offer to do half the work for her. With parted lips, she accepted, chewing slowly.

  “What do you think her name means?” I cut another piece.

  “It doesn’t mean respite, that’s for sure.” She took the food.

  “The core of my problem was in Damon’s name.”

  “What about the other thing?” she asked. “You split again. That didn’t even have a name.”

  “It might have come out if a bomb hadn’t hit the building.”

  “Do you realize this means it can go on forever? You think you solve one split, and another pops up?”

  “We didn’t solve Damon with the deployment. Come on.” I waved another forkful at her. “Eat. Don’t make me do the plane and the hangar.”

  Ruefully, she opened her mouth and ate. After she swallowed, she said, “I’m glad I took it. Instead of you.”

  “I’m not.” I pushed the half-eaten omelet around to get a better angle. “I didn’t want this
for you. And we could have handled it if it was me.”

  “I can handle it.”

  As I fed her the last of her breakfast, I had no doubt she could manage at least as well as I had. I was worried about my ability to handle being the sane one.

  “I’m going to kill Ronin,” she said.

  “He thinks he’s doing the world a favor.” I put the fork down and put my plate in front of me. Dark spots had formed under the egg sandwich. “Fucking dangerous, that attitude.”

  I took a bite. It was salty and tasteless at the same time. I was starving. This thing was going down in two bites.

  “I don’t care if it works half the time,” she said. “I want to destroy every one of those syringes.”

  “They’ll just send more.” I finished the sandwich with one last bite.

  “I’m bringing it down.” Her voice was determined, and a new fire lit up her face. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m ignoring the NDA and bringing it down.”

  The wind was picking up. Sand ticked against the windows like sleet. They could prosecute her for destroying property or revealing trade secrets. This Greyson was impulsive and action-oriented. This wasn’t a side of her that thought through consequences. I had to do that for her.

  “If you do,” I said, “if you do anything to lose your access to Blackthorne’s data, you won’t have a case. They’ll just hide.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And if they have a fix, you’ll never get it.”

  “There’s no fix. Nothing short of a completely accurate recreation of past trauma.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.”

  “Damn it, Greyson.” The force of my voice was raised, but the volume was as low as I could make it. “You need to bend a little.”

  “I’m bent near breaking.” She took her napkin off her lap and tossed it on the table. “I’m going to work.”

  I stood with her, blocking her way. “Don’t do anything reckless. Please.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I won’t do anything reckless.” She had mischief on her mind. Worse, it was mischief with a purpose. “Not today.”

  Chapter Eight

  GREYSON

  The wind whipped. The sand pelted my skin. I covered my mouth with a scarf to get into the building. I wanted Caden. I wanted to stay with him. He soothed my need to be in motion. Without him, I was bigger than my skin. A balloon filled and filling faster, stretching thin as I tried to focus on getting into my office. I passed the storage room. Behind the coded door was a refrigerator stocked with prefilled syringes that, depending on the patient or the dose, delivered either madness or relief. All I had to do was go in there and smash them to pieces.

  “Greyson!” Dana called.

  Shocked out of my reverie, I waved and rushed to my office before closing the door behind me. Back to the window, I put the heels of my hands on the ledge and breathed as if it was my only job.

  Wow. Okay. I could handle this. I was totally okay. A part of me could see how my desires and behaviors weren’t consistent with rationality. I could see myself crumbling under them as if I was watching a movie.

  Ronin opened the door.

  “Get out.”

  He closed it. “You and Caden disappeared on me.”

  “Sorry.” I shoved away from the ledge and pushed paper across my desk. “I have work to do. So, if that was all?”

  He bent to see my downturned face. “I want to help you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Prove it.”

  * * *

  Proving it turned out to be harder than it seemed. My blood pressure and pulse gave me away.

  “You really did a number on yourself,” Ronin said as the Blackthorne nurse took the cuff off my arm.

  “It’s just stress.”

  The nurse showed herself out, and I put my jacket back on.

  “I can’t tell if you’re consistent with other unprepped subjects taking a high dose unless you’re honest with me.”

  “And how are those subjects doing now?”

  He tightened his jaw for a moment. “Fine. We had some early testing in 2004, and they’re fine.”

  He was minimizing or lying outright.

  “So, there’s no problem,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that. We’re working to develop a counter-treatment to undo the effects. Some of the subjects are at our complex in Texas.”

  “Some? Where are the rest?”

  “We have a facility in Saudi.”

  I crossed my arms. “Long way from Abu Ghraib. That’s where they’re from, isn’t it?”

  “We’re taking very good care of them.”

  “I’m sure that outside the destruction of their psyches, they’re having a great time.”

  “You said you were fine.”

  He’d caught me in a fat lie.

  “Touché.”

  He didn’t rub it in. Had to give him that.

  “I can’t offer you a cure. But I can offer a little respite.”

  The name of my alternate rang like a bell. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. It must have been the random use of the word that bent me enough to agree to a little of what he was offering.

  * * *

  Soo-hoo-soo-hoo-soo-hoo.

  Sitting still in that little room was hard at first, but the breathing did calm me. I had to hand it to him.

  Makeup in your eye.

  Respite pushed against the barrier with a whisper. She showed me things I didn’t want to see, and I had nothing to fight her with.

  He said you looked like a raccoon.

  She was showing me Jake in the front seat of his Chevy, smoking a clove cigarette. A sight and taste I hadn’t remembered in years and didn’t want to ever, ever think about again. He said something I couldn’t hear over the wind. The picture flashed and disappeared, but Respite spoke clearly when she made me recall the scene.

  Calm down, calm down. Jake told you to calm down.

  A flicker of a Coke can. The hole at the top flashed with a flame inside it. Smoke.

  Jake: It’s done.

  Jake’s statement had cut through the fog. He was like Caden, deeply flawed and powerful beyond measure, as the flash from inside the Coke can lit his face.

  Jake: He’s got the cleanest fingers in the county.

  This was before Scott had pushed me off the diving platform.

  Respite whispered a correction. You jumped.

  I’d jumped off that platform even though I was scared of heights. Why had I insisted he’d pushed me? Because it was easy to believe I’d had to save myself from his probing hands?

  You jumped.

  That was impossible, yet I knew it was true. He’d had his hands on me even when I’d said stop. They went between my legs, and I knew bad things were going to happen. I would resist it and like it and hate it, and bad things would happen.

  You jumped to save him.

  Respite was talking too damn much, and she could go fuck herself.

  Chapter Nine

  CADEN

  Casualties of the sandstorm, civilian and military, started coming in as soon as I reported for duty. They’d been hit by flying garbage, gotten knocked off their feet, been found wandering and disoriented. People came in coughing up orange grit.

  I shouldn’t have left her. She wasn’t herself. If something happened to her, I’d be responsible. If she went off half-cocked and broke every syringe they had, the consequences were on me. I’d let her go. Worse, she was splitting in two, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Couldn’t even stay with her when she needed me. I’d abandoned my duty to her. All the times I’d walked out the door of our house in New York while carrying the weight of Damon on my shoulders, had she felt like this? When I’d deployed, had she been crushed by this level of failure?

  I called her office repeatedly, like a desperate guy she’d met at a party the night before. What a sad excuse for a man I
was.

  “Shamal can go on for days,” Stoneface said as he plucked debris from an open wound in the shoulder of a little boy hit by a flying palm frond. “We’re going to see a bunch of aspirated sand today.” The boy cried out, and his mother soothed him. “Almost done, kid.”

  I bent over the freezer and retrieved an ice pop. Rosewater vanilla. I thought it tasted like a cold bottle of Chanel No. 5, but it kept the kids quiet. “If my wife comes in, I want to know about it, no matter where I am.”

  “For the hundredth time, yes, okay.”

  He spoke to the mother in choppy Arabic, telling her the disinfectant would sting. I unwrapped the popsicle. The boy’s eyes lit up like Christmas trees, then filled with tears as the spray dehydrated cells and killed them off with a sting.

  Nice bait and switch. Doctors are assholes.

  I handed him the popsicle, and Stoneface got to stitching him up.

  “Incoming!” Heartland shouted, bursting into the neighboring exam room with a gurney full of bleeding soldier.

  We descended as another guy came through with his leg open at the thigh, screaming. These weren’t sandstorm injuries.

  “Get Boner!” I shouted when I saw the gray femoral fragments in the muscle.

  “They booby-trapped it,” the corporal said. “Fuckers. They put the bait and booby-trapped it.”

  I wasn’t in the business of unraveling wartime who-did-what-to-whom. I had vitals to get and a trauma to treat.

  With my powerlessness over Greyson tucked behind my carefully-built detachment, I got to work.

  * * *

  Fresh out of the changing room, I started for the office. Surgery was done, and the wall between my personal life and the job on the table disintegrated. I was going to call Greyson repeatedly until she answered. From behind, I felt a vise grip on my arm pulling me in the opposite direction.

  “I need you to stay calm.” DeLeon said as she guided me down a hall with a sun-soaked window at the end.