Unbreakable (Unraveling)

by Elizabeth Norris

  And Ben.

  Ben is across from me, on his side, his lips slightly parted, his eyes wide, struggling against his restraints. He looks too pale, but I can’t see how much blood he’s losing. I try to tell him with my eyes that this isn’t his fault, that it’s okay.

  If I move the wrong way, I’ll cut open my own throat, and my ankle is still sore from Barclay pushing me into the subway. There’s no need to try to calculate my odds of escape, so I force myself to stop.

  I meet Meridian’s eyes with my own. This close, I can see they’re a muted green with flecks of gold—not the color I would have imagined for someone so cruel.

  “Are you going to try to bargain for your life?” he asks. “Offer to switch sides?”

  I don’t answer. I hold myself straight and set my jaw.

  This is it.

  00:08:36:17

  I’ve heard that some people accept their death when it comes—that it’s their time. I never understood that until just now. It’s not that I’m giving up or lying down. It’s that I’m going to make the choice to go proud.

  This time when my life flashes before my eyes, it’s not my optic nerves firing, it’s not death, and it’s not Ben Michaels.

  It’s me.

  I remember my mother on the beach, pregnant with Jared, our discarded sand castle next to her.

  I remember the summer I turned thirteen, when the local video store had a special on old movies: four movies, four days, four dollars. Kate and I let Alex pick four action movies with no plot, and we laid out our sleeping bags in my living room and watched all of them in a row. We let Jared watch with us until he fell asleep and then we drew aliens on his forehead in permanent marker, ate popcorn and pizza, and drank Sprite until Alex puked from eating too much. Then we rode our bikes to Black Mountain Park and watched the sun rise.

  I remember coming back to life on Torrey Pines Road, with Ben’s silhouette leaning over me, his hands warm on my skin. His first memory of me flooding my mind—when I was ten, in my pink flowered bathing suit, pulling him from the water, like I was some kind of angel.

  I remember Jared’s birthday this year. It was just me, Struz, and two of Jared’s friends, a cake from a box with soymilk and egg substitute and frosting from a jar. We sat outside and passed around a flashlight telling the creepiest horror stories we could think of until the batteries died, and then Struz surprised Jared by getting one of the helicopter pilots to take him up for a quick midnight spin.

  I remember my first date with Ben. When he took me to Sunset Cliffs and we ate takeout from Roberto’s and watched the sun set over the water. The warmth of the sun, the smell of the ocean, and the sound of the waves—the taste of Ben’s lips against mine for the first time.

  I remember my dad. The way he used to come in and read to me as soon as he got home from work, the way he managed to make it to all of my swim meets despite his job, the way he looked at me every day—like he was radiating pride.

  And I remember that day at Disneyland. The smell of popcorn and funnel cake, the bright colors, the balloons, and little kids on vacation laughing and screaming, Jared and I gorging ourselves on chili bread bowls and Mickey Mouse ice cream, waiting in line for Space Mountain and the Tower of Terror twice, then watching the Jedi training show and the fireworks at Cinderella’s castle.

  I don’t even blink as I tilt my chin up and think of everything I’m about to leave behind—in my own world and here in Prima. Something warm trickles down my neck. I’ve left my mark on the lives of all the people I saved—the ones Ben and Barclay and I set free, the ones IA will be able to free once they take Meridian down.

  I was here.

  I lived.

  I mattered.

  This is a good way to go.

  “It’s a shame I have to kill you,” Meridian says.

  He readjusts his grip on the knife, and right before he drags it across my throat, I pretend I can see Ben in front of me, smell soap, mint, and gasoline—

  00:08:36:16

  Everything seems to happen at once.

  I don’t actually register it at first. It’s just a series of noises.

  A grunt and a sort of gurgling noise.

  Then a gunshot, and something warm sprays my face.

  Shouts, a struggle, the pressure against my throat gone, and another gunshot.

  And another.

  I touch my face, and my hand comes away covered in blood. I lean forward and put my face in my hands, feeling around, but I can’t tell if I’ve been shot. Someone grabs me by the shoulders and turns me to face them, shouting something at me, but I can’t concentrate on their words.

  Fighting to get my bearings, I focus on the room.

  It doesn’t make sense at first. There’s a body on the ground next to Ben, lying in a pool of blood, something sticking out of his throat. The governor is lying facedown in a crumpled heap on the floor. So is Meridian, in front of me, and his face is gone. A bullet is lodged in the wall a few inches above my head. The man who is not Struz stands in front of me, a gun in his hand. For a second it looks like it’s pointed at me, but then I realize he’s just holding it, holding it like someone who’s just used a weapon and done something he didn’t think he was capable of, and now he’s at a loss for what to do next.

  When I see Barclay on the floor, a gun in his hand, blood pouring out of the hollow of his throat, Elijah crawling toward him, I know what happened.

  00:08:36:09

  Barclay rescued me.

  He must have been in the process of trying to escape when I made my run for it too early. That’s what he was trying to tell me—what he wanted me to know.

  I was just too focused, and too arrogant to pay attention.

  When I was reliving the moments of my life, with Meridian holding the blade to my throat, Barclay finished breaking out of his restraints. He grabbed the ballpoint pen from the dead bodyguard’s eye and drove it straight into the jugular of the live one, while in the same movement reaching for the guy’s gun.

  And before anyone could react, he shot Meridian in the back of the head.

  But that’s as far as the element of surprise could get him. The governor had a gun too, and as he turned on her next, she shot him.

  Barclay killed the governor’s bodyguard and then Meridian. The governor shot Barclay—

  And someone shot her in the back.

  00:08:36:08

  As I look at him, Deputy Director Ryan Struzinski lifts his gun.

  I make a dive for Barclay, grabbing the gun from his hand, and point it at the last threat in the room.

  He might be in shock, but he’s not stupid. His gun is on me a split second before mine is on him, and my body tenses involuntarily, like that could somehow stop the bullet.

  But he doesn’t shoot.

  At least, not yet.

  We’re frozen, both of us pointing guns at each other. At this range, neither one of us would miss a shot to the head, and the effect would be fatal, no question. Even with delayed reaction time, either of us firing would likely end up with both of us dead.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I say, though I’m not sure why. I have nothing to bargain with. Sure, his two main conspirators are dead, but with us out of the way, he could still patch this up. And I’m not going to bother even trying to lie to him about keeping his involvement quiet. He would never believe me.

  Struzinski’s eyes meet mine. He looks a little sad, like he doesn’t want to do what comes next, and I can feel the muscles in my right arm starting to spasm under the tension.

  “It’s over,” he says.

  Then he turns the gun on himself and fires.

  00:08:35:01

  For a split second, I’m paralyzed with shock.

  Then my own gun drops from my shaking hands, and I reach for Barclay. I’m not about to just let him die on me.

  The blood is everywhere.

  I try to stop it, to put pressure on the wound, to somehow keep that blood in his body, but it puls
es against my hands, warm and thick.

  I want to tell him he’s an idiot or slap him across the face. That has to have been the dumbest thing he’s ever done—jump up like that and take on four people with weapons. And Barclay of all people should have known his odds. He should have known he didn’t stand a chance.

  But as his eyes flick toward me, I know he did. He knew all that, and he made his move anyway. He sacrificed himself.

  To save me.

  It’s almost too much to handle in a long line of things that should have been too much. My throat constricts, my eyes sting, and I shake my head. All the times that I’ve been hard on him and called him an arrogant asshole, there’s never been any question that Barclay has been a good guy. Without him, Cecily and the other Unwilling would be slaves for the rest of their lives. Without him, I’d be in the Piston, waiting to be executed.

  But it’s more than that. He believed in me. He did things to protect me to make sure I’d be okay. And now I may never be able to pay him back.

  I try to will my hands to stop shaking so that I can actually be of some use, and I look over at Ben, who’s crawling toward us, his blood leaving a trail on the carpet.

  Elijah has his hands over Barclay’s abdomen. Halfway up his forearm he’s covered in blood. “I can’t fucking heal him!”

  Then Ben is beside me, thrusting his hands into the fray.

  I lean over Barclay, my free hand reaching for his face. The blood on my hands smears across the cool clammy skin of his cheek, and the faint beat of his heart thrums against my skin. I suck in my breath. His eyes are unfocused, his skin pale, and his lips are starting to turn blue. He’s got seconds before he bleeds out, and if Elijah can’t heal him—

  “Tenner,” Barclay grunts. “The gun . . . the door.”

  “Nothing is fucking working,” Elijah says.

  “The door,” Barclay repeats, his voice strained.

  I do what he says, ignoring the protest in my muscles. The last thing we need is to be caught unaware. I remember what Renee said about the guys Meridian sent on an errand.

  “Is it working?” I look at Ben.

  He shakes his head.

  We’ve been here before, and I refuse to have the same outcome. I don’t care how tired and beat up they are, we just need to give Ben enough time to heal Barclay so we can all get out of here.

  Then it hits me. They won’t be able to heal him. Not in this building.

  “The hydrochloradneum shields,” I say. “You can’t open portals or heal him while we’re inside.”

  “We have to get him out of here,” Ben says.

  I jump to my feet. “We just have to get far enough outside the house—”

  “Tenner!” Barclay coughs. “I’m fucking dying.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ve—”

  “I said I’m dying, Tenner. You can’t.”

  “You’re being stupid,” I say, dropping to his side so he can see me.

  “The window,” Ben says, reaching under Barclay’s shoulders. “We just have to get outside. We’ll do it anyway.”

  But Barclay reaches up and grabs my arm. “Don’t play God, Tenner,” he says.

  “Don’t be a dick,” I say back. Because I’ve just started to like him and now he’s determined to die on me.

  “We can still do it,” Ben says.

  Barclay coughs in response and blood coats his lower lip. It seems too dark to be real.

  I open my mouth to say something else—to try to convince him somehow—but my throat is closing up. The only thing that comes out is “please.”

  But I know I’ve already lost.

  I look at Ben, and he takes the gun out of my hand.

  Barclay smiles. “The bullets,” he says.

  I glance around. I have no idea what he means.

  “Hydrochloradneum . . .” His voice trails off.

  I’d forgotten. Even if we got him outside the shields, IA standard-issue ammunition is hydrochloradneum-plated bullets, which create wounds that can’t be healed by their powers. Elijah found that out the hard way when Eric shot him last fall.

  “We made a good team, Tenner.”

  I want to say, One of the best. I open my mouth, but I can’t get the words out.

  Barclay reaches out and I clasp his hand. “I couldn’t have done it without you.” Tears spill out of my eyes, and they burn as they roll down my face.

  He coughs again, his time more blood coming up. He’s pale, ghostly, even, and I squeeze his hand as if contact with the living will keep him with us just a little longer. His fingers move slightly, and then his hand is dead weight in mine.

  “Janelle . . .” he says, his eyes having a hard time staying focused.

  “I’m here,” I say, adjusting his head so he’s looking at me. “Right here.”

  “Make sure.” His eyes close.

  “What?” I say, shaking him a little.

  “My monument.”

  And then I’m laughing and crying at the same time. “I’ll oversee it myself if I have to.”

  And then I know. He’s gone. Whatever made Taylor Barclay the conceited asshole, determined and driven to the point of obsession—whatever it was that made him my friend—that person is gone. He’s just a body now.

  00:08:28:57

  Ben pulls me to him, and the warmth of his body around mine is just too much to handle. We’ve both been shot, and we’re both bleeding, but we’re still here.

  We’re alive.

  “I thought you were dead,” I say, and I taste the salt from my tears.

  “Yeah, so did he,” Elijah says.

  “I would never leave you,” Ben says, his voice whispering into my hair.

  “Cecily?” I ask.

  “As chipper as always,” Elijah says. “And back with the Unwilling.”

  “What happened?”

  “I took a risk,” Ben says. “I ducked when I saw the gun, and the first shot missed me; the second grazed my arm. Two more ended up lodged in the vest. I grabbed Cecily and ran us through the closest exit: the window.”

  “But the drop . . .”

  “He thought it would be a good time to test these portal-opening powers,” Elijah says. “As they were falling, he thought of the hospital, opened a portal, and they fucking fell right through. You believe that shit?”

  “You went back to the hospital?” I say. We should have gone back there—we should have regrouped, but I just didn’t have faith. “I thought you were dead.”

  “The landing was brutal, and we were both knocked out cold on the hospital floor.”

  I squeeze Ben tighter. I’m still expecting him to disappear, to wake up and realize I’d only imagined that he’s still alive. “How did you find us?”

  “The guy was desperate to find you,” Elijah says. “It was pathetic.”

  “I didn’t know where I wanted the portal to go, but I knew I had to find you. Instead of thinking of the location I needed to go, I opened a portal, thinking of just you. I wasn’t sure where it would take me, but we ended up in the backyard of an estate. It brought me as close to you as we could get. We tried to sneak inside but got caught by the guards downstairs. You know the rest.”

  I can’t believe it. Against all odds, we might get out of this room. We’ve managed to save each other—again.

  “I hate to break this up, but we have to get the fuck out of here,” Elijah says.

  I nod against Ben’s chest. Who knows if or when Meridian’s guys are going to come back here?

  Remembering Renee, I push back and turn in her direction. She’s crouched under the desk with her eyes closed, and I think she’s praying.

  “Renee,” I say, approaching her. “Come with us, we’ll get you out of here.” I want to ask her what she’s been doing for the governor, but now’s not the time, and the governor is dead anyway. We have plenty of time to discuss that later.

  Her watery brown eyes look up at me, and she looks younger than early twenties and older at the same time. I suppo
se being abducted can do that to a person.

  “We’ll get you home.”

  She stands up. “Home,” she says, and something about the way that she says it, I know she’s not talking to me. I know she didn’t think that word would have meaning for her.

  I grab the gun Barclay used to kill Meridian, and check it—four bullets left. “Grab a gun. We might need it.”

  “Whatever, J,” Elijah says. “This is the second fucking time I’ve gotten shot when I was with you. I don’t think we can be friends anymore.”

  For some reason, the fact that we are friends makes me want to smile.

  Ben pulls the quantum charger from Barclay’s pocket.

  I almost tell him that we don’t need that. For some reason, I don’t want to rob Barclay of something that is so intrinsically his. Ben doesn’t need it to open portals, and I don’t know how to use it.

  But then I remember that both Ben and Elijah have been shot, and are likely pretty exhausted, and I certainly know how to learn. Having a charger is the smart thing to do. Besides, Barclay would want me to take it.

  Elijah carries Ben, piggyback style, and we move through the house, quickly and quietly, in a single-file line. I go first, ignoring the throbbing pain in my arm and the exhaustion moving through my whole body. I hold the gun in front of me, and I’m ready to fire if I need to. I don’t know where the governor’s husband is, but I keep reminding myself that we just need to get outside. Then we can portal to safety.

  Renee is behind me, and Elijah and Ben are behind her. The details are a blur.

  All I know is that when we get downstairs, I see headlights—headlights that belong to too many cars for me to count—but instead of panic setting in, all I’ve got is anger.

  It rolls through me like fire—anger that I’ve been shot, that I almost died twice tonight, that I’m beat up, exhausted, and in more pain than I thought possible. This needs to end, here and now. I’m not running anymore.