by Tyler Vance
He grabbed at pieces of the stuff drowning Emili, but they passed right through his hands. Like they weren’t real.
Sheikoh noticed without interest that the synthskin of his right hand had somehow been repaired. His struggling had accomplished nothing, other than halting his wild spin. Sheikoh watched the island-sized glob with despair. He stretched out a trembling hand, desperately willing himself forward. And a tendril of the stuff streaked out of the mass. It wrapped itself firmly around Sheikoh’s waist.
Had it responded to his thoughts?
His chest surged with hope.
“Bring me to Emili!”
At his words, it jerked him forward, moving blindingly fast. The otherworldly otherworld was blurred into speed streaks around him. Like he was riding the fastest Swifthooves in the world, times ten. As the blob grew nearer and nearer, he closed his eyes, steeling himself for impact.
But there wasn’t an impact. Not even a watery splash.
After a moment, Sheikoh opened his eyes. Currents of strange, psychedelic colors swirled around him. He didn’t feel anything as he slid through the liquid time, besides the tentacle, around his waist.
As he was pulled forward, the currents rearranged themselves into a scene. When it became clear, it elicited a gasp. Sheikoh’s feet found solid ground. He stared around in numb wonderment, barely noticing as the coil around him melted down his legs and dissolved into the floor.
Sheikoh had somehow been transported back to Interium.
He was in Alimiat’s abandoned house, or rather, Dorothi’s.
Sheikoh walked through, glancing at the mess of gears and wires strewn across the kitchen table. That had been where Emili worked on her projects. He suddenly noticed her screwdriver, pitted and rust-sheened. The way that it had been before Dorothi had begun polishing it. He took a quick double take. Had he somehow gone back in time?
After everything that’d happened already, Sheikoh didn’t discount the possibility.
He walked through the rooms in a state of wonderment, taking in everything that he’d forgotten. He saw the battered chest that held their winter clothes, stained from the time that he Emili had knocked a cup of coffee onto it. In the living room, he half smiled at the hole in the wall he’d kicked back when he was still learning to rein in his cyborg limbs. He let his body fall into the blue armchair in front of the TV. Alimiat’s chair for when he had been wigged out on Four.
As soon as Sheikoh thought the word ‘Four’ the living room rippled with blinding shockwaves. Sheikoh shook and spun, gripping the arms of the blue armchair with white knuckles and screaming like a little girl. The room howled, spinning like a top. The edges of the weathered furniture blurred, and pictures danced around on the cabinets like groundhogs, popping into and out of the ground.
Sheikoh felt like he was riding a roller coaster without a seatbelt. While an earthquake exploded beneath. Cups and CDs and gears flew through the air, but instead of crashing into the walls or each other they landed different cabinets or shot through the open doors like cannon balls. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
Sheikoh looked around warily. The furniture had moved a little and everything looked a little more battered, but other than that, everything looked okay. Then he noticed the computer screen in the corner, or rather the date on the screen’s corner. He felt a lurch of shock, as though he’d walked ten steps up nine stairs. The screen said that it was July 29th.
The day he lost Emili to Four.
Sheikoh knew it was that day, knew what was coming. Certainty and dread filled his in equal measures. He tried to fight it. He pictured Dorothi, then Indigo beating the crap out of him, and even the Centaurai holding that silver scythe to his throat. But the room remained. He was going to have to face everything that he’d been hiding from. The ever-present pain in his chest had crystallized into the scene around him.
Sheikoh had never been more terrified in his life. He’d spent so long running from the pain that never that lived in his hollow chest. The pain that numbed every injury he’d ever taken to a light tingle. It crept at the edges of his vision, but until now he’d always been able to look away. This day had stabbed him in the heart more painfully than Chain’s sadism ever could have. Alimiat’s final retribution from his chance child Four was going to take Emili from Sheikoh all over again.
The chair beneath him floated into the corner of the room.
Sheikoh was barely surprised.
From the air, he watched their morning rituals. Dorothi was up first, as always. She woke up the younger Sheikoh, who poured them each a bowl of cereal. ‘We still do that,’ Sheikoh realized with the tiniest flicker of a smile over the anxiety that wrote his expression. After they’d finished eating and talking, Sheikoh walked the younger girl to school. Then Silence did his thing on the streets.
Sheikoh watched his younger self from open air. Even from far away, he could vividly make out individual features. He could tell when the different colors of dyed hair didn’t match the edges of the women’s roots, or spot the fat man scratching his butt with unnatural sharpness. Sheikoh saw the purmynx slinking at the edge of an alley, scrounging for scraps, the blue-silver bandana of a Legacy gangster shouldering his way through the crowd, all along with the red-eared man wearing the brown overcoat that he was about to pickpocket. Sheikoh saw the younger him blur a tiny bit, and memory told him he’d easily managed the lift.
That a boy…
The thought was tempered with the despair of foresight. He already knew he’d taken the man’s wallet, he’d already done it. Sheikoh remembered he’d felt proud for the lift. It was surprising to know that he had felt anything happy at all that day that had sliced his life in two.
Sheikoh floated after himself like a ghost. At one point, the blue armchair drifted through a building’s brick wall like a ghost. He was surrounded once more by the currents of bright colors and darkness he’d seen when pulled through into here in the first place.
He came out on the other side and watched little him dart through the crowd like a lizard. The kid melted into one of the dark alleyways and disappeared for a few moments.
Sheikoh smiled sadly. The alleys had always been his winding sanctuaries. Interium was Sheikoh’s mother and her alleyways were the arms that cradled him in warm blankets of shadows and safety.
Sheikoh spent the morning following his younger self feeling odd jolts and stabs in his chest, as well as bittersweet nostalgia for the simpler time. He watched himself steal and con his way through the streets. Back then, the Legacy thugs hadn’t known that Sheikoh was a figure to be wary of. Sheikoh watched as the younger version of him took care of a gangster that had decided to question why a little boy like Sheikoh was alone in a dark alley.
His eyes followed himself curiously. Dorothi always said he’d looked different than he did in the pictures Emili’d taken of the three of them. He’d always glance back at her and make some joke about getting older or whatever. But she was right. Even though his features were all pretty much the same, if younger, and his outfits always lasted him a couple of years, something was just a bit less… him… He hadn’t understood why he looked so different until now.
It was his eyes.
The Sheikoh beneath him hadn’t understood the weight of real responsibility, until Emili had-
Until they’d lost Emili.
Back then, she’d been the one taking care of him and Dorothi. His life had been hard back then, but he’d had a safety net. And he hadn’t realized how much he’d needed it until it was gone. Emili was the one who took the pictures. With her gone, neither Sheikoh nor Dorothi had any inclination to continue the tradition. In all of the pictures, he’d still had Emili.
Sheikoh watched his younger self with pity for what he was going to have to endure. He grinned humorlessly.
Did that count as self-pity?
The younger him Sheikoh went into a store called StartMart. Sheikoh watched himself pick up his and Emili’s lunch and then head
back to his secret, roomed garden. Sheikoh’d only ever shown to Emili and Dorothi. Dread’s iron fist clenched around Sheikoh’s heart. He knew what happened next.
Emili slept while Sheikoh brought Dorothi to school, so the two always met here for lunch. Emili was often with a customer, or getting paid to repair something at someone’s house. He had usually been there waiting by about 12:30. Emili however, rarely made it until 1:00. An outlaw had a lot more freedom than an engineer.
A tense Sheikoh hugged his knees to his chest and watched himself eat. Unbearable fiery desperation raced through his body as he watched the younger version of him fingering vines and flowers, bored.
Sheikoh couldn’t stand this. His muscles were clenching and his left eye wouldn’t stop twitching. Tears began crowding his eyes, but he hugged his chest and blinked them away. It tortured him that he couldn’t change what happened.
From the depths of agony, Sheikoh gritted his teeth.
Why did he have to endure this all over again? What was the point? He knew he wasn’t a good guy by any means, but the people he’d killed had deserved to die. He knew they did. He couldn’t deserve to suffer like this.
This was worse than dying ever could be.
Two unbearable hours. Sheikoh waited there for two unbearable hours before he watched himself get up.
Sometimes Emili hadn’t been able to make time for lunch of course, but when she couldn’t, she always made sure to send him a text. He’d texted her, but she didn’t reply. The kid’s expression grew anxious as he watched his cellpad for any new messages.
Finally he stood up and pushed through the door.
Above, Sheikoh thought he’d be relieved when the waiting was over with, but he felt even worse. Memories pressed themselves over his eyes, and dread curled in his gut like a snake.
When he closed his eyes, he was inside his younger head. He opened them with a weak cry and a shudder. Reliving this day was the only eventuality that was worse than watching from the sky. Sheikoh let his hair fall over his face.
The chair began lumbering off behind the kid, and he broke like a twig.
“Please no, don’t make me see this again, please make it stop,” he begged the chair in a whisper. He tried to force himself off the blue armchair, but it was attached to his spine. He willed the armchair’s flight to stop without success. It was somehow anchored to Sheikoh below. The teenager was forced to watch himself dodging briskly through crowded walkways. Sheikoh came home and found the door locked. He opened it with his spare key.
“Emili? Anyone here?” Sheikoh shouted. There was no answer.
The blue chair floated through a wall, and Sheikoh saw the sharp worry in his own face. It echoed deep in him even though he had nothing to worry about; anxiety is for the future. And he already knew the end to this story.
Younger Sheikoh drifted through a notebook on the kitchen table, the one Emili used to keep track of business transaction. His younger self read the last entry aloud.
“$99… #122… The Trickway…”
Sheikoh turned and headed out of the door. Behind him, Sheikoh followed.
He remembered feeling faintly hopeful, now that he had a plan of action. But it hadn’t dispelled all of his worry; it’d been out of character for Emili to forget to send him a message. She texted more than anyone he knew.
The real Sheikoh suddenly remembered thinking that Emili had been kidnapped. He wished that was the case. It would’ve been better that way. Easier, for sure.
An invisible tether locked him to the child beneath. He watched himself dart through Interium, lost in his pain. Before Four had become popular, gangsters used to break into people’s homes to ‘charge’. They would go through a family’s fridge and sprinkle a pinch of the bone-white dust into a few drinks, then write a tiny, little phone number on the bottom of it; something you’d find only if you were desperate for every last drop of the liquid.
The addict ended up calling the number. Four was the most addicting substance on the planet. Charging was a short-lived fad, though; once Four had become well-known, the demand had far exceeding the supply for whatever reason. Even after the original charging victims overdosed and died off, there were always people after the life-ruining substance.
Sheikoh floated above Interium, forced to relive his worst nightmare. Every heartbeat tore his chest with blades of loss. His hand twisted into a taunt claw over his ribs, trying to hold the agonizing pain at bay. Cold dribbled from his chest like blood and fear.
Love was shit. Love wasn’t worth the pain it brought. Sheikoh just wanted to die, but he’d already done that. He wanted oblivion. He wanted to disappear, to leave and never come back. But he couldn’t. Life had finally done broken him. Sheikoh was utterly, heartrendingly, shattered. For painless black nonbeing, Sheikoh would even shoot some Four.
Below him, the kid froze in horror.
There was no way he was looking. No way in hell. Not again.
Sheikoh turned his head. He couldn’t add another image of Emili, lying in the dirt and rags, to himself. He couldn’t take it. But the chair was merciless. It twisted through the air, forcing Sheikoh’s eyes on Emili’s prone body. Either that, or it was the whole world twisting around him and the hateful, horrible chair he was trapped in. Its base thudded against dirty concrete walkway.
Sheikoh’s neck began bending of its own accord, and he was forced to watch himself shake Emili’s shoulder and try to pull her out of unconsciousness. For the second time, he saw the syringe lodged into Emili’s lolling arm. He wanted to vomit or cry or gouge out his own eyes as he watched himself, sobbing silently, pull the needle out of Emili’s arm. A trickle of blood wound down the teenage girl’s arm, so Sheikoh ripped off a piece of his shirt and bound the hole.
The two Sheikohs waited there for a long hour, and then another one. Finally, Emili’s eyes flickered open. Her crystal blue pupils were tinged through with yellow lines. The teenager’s hand clawed at his ragged heart and silently he watched the memory unfold.
“What the hell happened, Emi?” Sheikoh interrogated the girl desperately. She half-smiled up at him, her usually lucid eyes curiously blank.
“Their microwave broke down. While I was working, they gave me a cup of coffee and put me in the best mood. Like the most amazing mood ever. You’ve got to try this,” Emili urged him in a clumsy mockery of her beautiful voice.
Hearing those words again pierced Sheikoh like an arrow. His breath whooshed out. He suddenly realized that this was the first time that he’d heard Emili’s voice since she’d died. If Indigo told Sheikoh that it would help the pain if he broke his ribs one by one, Sheikoh’d acquiesce with a nod and a thank you.
“The man realized that it was Four when he found a phone number. Remember battery caging? We called it and a Legacy man sold us some more. He taught us how to mainline the stuff and… Oh. Em Gee. It was heavenly,” Emili confided emphatically.
Then she yawned and stretched and Sheikoh noticed writing on her arm. He assumed that some kid had written on her while she’d been unconscious. Emili curled up like a cat and fell back asleep; Sheikoh pulled off one of her socks and spit on it, preparing to wipe the writing off. At the last second something caught his eye. Sheikoh read the note that Emili had written him.
The watching teenager didn’t need to read it with him; his nightmares had repeated the message over and over. He memorized it a long time ago. Sheikoh recited the words out loud.
“Dear Sheikoh,
“I know that I’m stupid I know that this is irresponsible, but sometimes you just have to go out and live, right?. I know that I said that when dad did this that it was wrong on every level, but I don’t feel it anymore, I guess? All I feel is happiness and love for you and Dorothi. And If I’m doing anything to hurt you guys then I’m sorry. Maybe I’m exactly the same as dad, but I don’t think so. I’ve spent my whole life hating him for what he put me and Dorothi through, but now I see that he just wasn’t strong enough. I’m strong enough though. I
won’t lose myself.
“Just in case, you’re the man now, Sheek. I know that you can handle anything. Make sure that you take care of Dorothi if I can’t, and if you tell me to go away then I will. I know it’s irresponsible for me to keep drugs in the same house that you two live in, but maybe Four isn’t as bad as everyone says it is. We’ve always said that drugs are bad, but it’s not as simple as that. They are just a thing that bad people blame their mistakes on. Drugs aren’t the cause of crime, they’re the effect.
“Don’t worry about me. I can control myself. I’m not as weak as the other addicts. I love you more than any sister has ever loved her brother,” Sheikoh murmured in a dull voice.
He watched from Alimiat’s armchair as Sheikoh lifted up the unconscious girl and carried her back to her bed, but his arms were empty. The prone form of Emili lay unconscious in what Sheikoh suddenly realized was his walled garden. This time, the chair didn’t follow the memory of a younger Sheikoh. Tears dripped down his cheeks as Sheikoh looked at Emili. It felt like a funeral.
The flowers’ and vines’ bright greens begun to wither. Their greens stalks twisted into crinkled, brown corpses. Grass receded before an onslaught of coarse dirt. Overhead, the sun slowly faded until it had blackened under eclipse, and the garden was plunged into brooding darkness.
The walls lit up with the aftermath of that day.
Emili hadn’t been strong enough of course. Mainlining Four was the most addictive process in the world. After Emili had taken two more doses of the drug, Sheikoh looked up some stuff online and discovered that Four’s chemical make-up was different now than it used to be. The new version was even more concentrated. So much so, after a few doses withdrawal was usually fatal.
Still, she had tried to stay herself. Emili woke up earlier, took care of the shop, tinkered with peoples’ broken gametoys and cellpads like she always had, but occasionally she would slip a couple glow out of the register and score some Four. At first Sheikoh had pretended not to notice. But ‘occasionally’ had quickly turned into daily.
