by Karen Healey
After eating, most of us got some sleep on the memory-fabric bedrolls that smoothed out the rough cavern floor. They weren’t entirely comfortable, but I was exhausted. It was with real reluctance that I swam to the surface of a dream to find Tegan shaking my shoulder, her hand warm on my shoulder, her eyes bright.
“Come with me?” she said quietly. “I want to explore one of the smaller tunnels. There should be another room in there—not this big, but enough space for a second hideaway.”
Anyone capable of finding us here would definitely not be put off by having to go a little deeper into the ground, but Tegan’s arched eyebrows said she knew that, too.
“Sure,” I whispered back, and followed her to the foot of one of the ladders, carefully picking my way around the occupied bedrolls. Zaneisha was sitting by the entrance to the cave, her bolt-gun ready in her lap, but everyone else was asleep—or seemed to be.
Hanad opened one eye from where he was sitting propped up against the wall, then closed it again. He didn’t have to say anything. If I’d somehow taken this opportunity to have Tegan guide me out through a secret exit, the others would suffer for it. As it was, when I clambered up the sturdy ladder I wasn’t thinking of escape. Only of Tegan, and privacy, and how much of it we might claim for ourselves.
“Is there really another room in here?” I whispered. I was bent over worse than before. I didn’t mind this time, not with my eyes fixed on the view. There was being polite and not staring, and there was being invited to follow a girl I was on kissing terms with while she bent down and groped her way through ancient drains.
There was laughter in her voice. “I think so. Alex and I only tried the small tunnels once. I know it’s in one of them.” She made a satisfied noise. “Here we are. Room for two.”
There was, just. I sat beside her, moved a rock from an uncomfortable place, and relaxed. It felt like it had been a very long time since I’d let my shoulders stop hoisting themselves toward my ears.
“Does this remind you of old times?” I said.
“Definitely. Tunnels weren’t really my thing, but Alex loved them.”
Alex, a woman long dead. Tegan’s best friend, long ago.
I thought again of the weight above me and made myself concentrate on Tegan’s warmth, the firm muscle of her thigh pressed against mine. “Why tunnels?”
“She liked exploring secrets and hidden things. She had a set of abusive foster parents, and it took a while before anyone realized. She kept running away, and there’d be an investigation, and they’d lie like champions and be so concerned about their poor, disturbed girl who they loved like a daughter…. And when their secrets were finally all out in the open, and everyone could see what disgusting people they were, her life got better. She didn’t trust secrets, or governments, or, I don’t know, politeness. She’d have liked you.”
“Really? But my mother is—was—in government. And I lie all the time. I’ve kept a lot of secrets.”
“No, you care about people. You keep secrets for them, not from them.”
It seemed a fine distinction to me, but if Tegan was happy with it, I wasn’t going to argue. “Speaking of secrets,” I began.
“Marie and the two new revivals. Yes.”
“Do you think we can trust Zaneisha?” I asked
“I want to,” Tegan said. “We don’t have any proof either way.”
“No. But we should be careful.” I considered her. “How do you feel about it?”
“About there being two more people like me? I was never really the only one, you know. I saw one guy, right after I woke up. He seemed maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, super healthy body, no obvious injuries or anything. He looked alive. I mean, he was. He was breathing on his own, and his eyes were open. But he didn’t see me. He wasn’t taking anything in.” Tegan shook her head. “It felt like he wasn’t there.”
“Marie said you weren’t the only successful revival anymore,” I remembered.
“Yeah. I guess they counted him as unsuccessful. So these two new people must be conscious.” She sighed. “I’m not sure how I feel. Strange, I guess. Sort of relieved that I’m not such a freak, and sorry that they’ll have to adjust like I did, and worried about what this means for the Ark Project. That was the final missing piece. Now Cox can definitely carry off what he’s been planning. More and more people are going to rush to be frozen, so they can buy a place on the Resolution.”
“I’m surprised he hasn’t announced it yet,” I said. “He must be waiting for the right moment. We’ve got to talk to Marie.”
“Yeah. When we can.” She showed no signs of moving, though, and I was happy to sit there with her and rest.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
“Of course.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about the lady in the pink dress? The one who recognized you at the rugby grounds?”
I hadn’t offered an explanation, because there really hadn’t been any excuse for endangering everyone. I’d just apologized and shut up. But Tegan was asking in the spirit of inquiry, I decided, not to needle me. “Because of Lat,” I said honestly. “He told me not to go, and he would have been so happy to hear that I might have made a mistake.”
Tegan shuffled round to look at me straight on. “How come you hate him so much?”
I gaped at her. “Because he tortured you.”
“He had to,” Tegan said. “He didn’t do it for fun.”
“Not like Diane,” I said. “She loved it.”
Tegan shuddered. “How could anyone be like that?”
“I don’t know. But does it matter that she liked it, and he didn’t? The results were the same—pain, for both of us.”
“It matters to me. Before he came and told me there was hope… Abdi, I think I was going to lose myself. I was so close to giving in for real. I almost became what they wanted me to be.” Her face scrunched up. “I hated you a little bit, every time you resisted, even though I should have been pleased, because—”
“I understand,” I said. I might have been the only one who could. I’d hated her, too, and hated being made to hate her and… it was awful, what they’d done to us. I could only think around the edges of it, and I was beginning to see that it would take a long, long time to heal.
And she was right. We needed to talk about it. I needed to talk about it with her. I couldn’t do it all at once, but I could make a start.
“At the very beginning,” I said, “when they made us stay awake, and you didn’t give in until the fifth day—I hated you so much, then.”
She blinked at me. “You mean the third day.”
“What?”
“I gave in on the third day. I went to my knees and begged. I swore I was sorry, so, so sorry, that I would never ever be bad again, and they finally decided I was sincere. I was, at the time. I would have promised anything if they’d just let me sleep. And then they told me you hadn’t apologized yet, and I’d have to wait until you did. And you didn’t until the fifth day—”
“I broke on the third day, too,” I said. “They told me you held out.”
We looked at each other, and then Tegan began to laugh. It wasn’t funny in the least, but I couldn’t help joining in, letting the sound leach some of the poison out. With every second, I felt a little lighter, a little less rotten on the insides.
“You know,” I said, after we’d subsided. “Our first mistake might have been believing people who were trying to hurt us.”
“Including Lat, you mean,” Tegan said, her voice regaining some edge.
We always had to come back to Lat. “Yes. You ask why I hate him. Well, I can’t understand why you don’t.”
“I can’t describe it to you, how I felt when he said he’d help us.” Tegan’s voice cracked. “I didn’t believe him. I was afraid to hope. But he showed me I could trust him.” She summoned a smile, a small, trembling thing. “And we could. He got us out. I’ll always be grateful.”
“He threatened to rape yo
u,” I said, more bluntly than I should have. But I couldn’t bear that Tegan be deceived by someone she thought was a knight in shining armor. And maybe I couldn’t bear that she keep talking about him like that. “When I wouldn’t go out on stage that last time”—had it really been only three nights ago?—“he told me that he’d do it. That he’d make me watch that, too. He said you might like it.”
Tegan exhaled slowly. “I’m sorry he said that to you,” she said quietly. “I was never threatened with sexual violence. Not once, not by Lat, or by my first handler, or anyone. No one—they did other things, you saw them, but never…”
“Good,” I said, and meant it.
“Can I hold your hand?” she asked.
“Always,” I said, and went further by putting my arm around her shoulders. “Sorry about the smell.”
“We all reek of smoke,” Tegan said, and kissed my cheek. I wanted more than that. I turned to catch her mouth with mine, but she pulled back. “Wait. I just want to… did Diane…”
Be a good boy, Abdi. Don’t make me punish you.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I said, suddenly in a fever of longing. I slid my hands up her sides, feeling heated flesh against my own.
She was breathing faster now, her pupils dilating in the dim light. “You don’t have to,” she whispered. “But are you sure…”
I wasn’t sure about anything. But my body was very sure about what it wanted, with whom, and when.
We did smell, of burning things and the acrid sweat of panic. Tegan’s hair, when I brushed it aside to kiss her collarbones, smelled strongly of smoke. I didn’t care; I buried my face in the soft, dark cloud of it and breathed in deep. I could lose myself this way, give in to the rush of desire and pour fear and confusion into heat and joy. Tegan wriggled in my arms, and I leaned back, pulling her on top, where I could stroke down her thighs as she straddled me.
“Hey,” Tegan murmured, braced above me on her elbows, her lips tantalizingly out of reach, her eyes gleaming in the dim light. “We should think about…”
For once, I didn’t want to think; I wanted relief from thoughts. I reached up to bring her mouth down to mine, my hands skating up her arms, around the back of her neck—
“Ow!” she cried, and scrambled off and back.
I’d stroked right over the implant removal wound.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sitting up fast. “Tegan, I’m sorry; are you all right?”
“It hurts,” she said, gasping. “Ugh, I feel sick; it really hurts.”
“Let me see?”
There were tears standing in her eyes, but she turned, and I tugged down the high cowl-neck of her tunic. The skin around the dressing looked tight and red, and when I lightly brushed my fingers on the edges, I felt the heat of her skin.
Not the warmth of a hot day. This was a sick heat. I felt the back of my own neck. There was pain when I pressed on it, but not when I only brushed over the injury, and there was no heat radiating from the site.
“I think you have an infection,” I said. “But you took the immunoboosters, right?”
“Of course. The last ones right before we got to that swap station.”
“You might need a top-up. And we should change the dressing. Maybe I should take a look?” I tugged at the edge of the false skin, but she jerked away.
“Don’t!”
“That hurts?”
She laughed breathlessly. “Uh, yeah.”
I laid the back of my hand against her forehead. “Do you feel feverish? Your skin is really warm.”
“I’m thirsty. And hot, but I’m always hot now. And I have a headache.”
“Anything else?”
“Actually,” she said slowly. “I was hoping it would go away, but I have been feeling a bit dizzy. On and off. For a couple of hours.”
I scrambled to my feet, no longer in the mood for kissing. “We’re going straight back to the others,” I said. “Marie needs to do something about this right away.”
“Okay,” she said docilely, which alarmed me most of all. Tegan was a lot of things but not docile.
I watched her as we walked back, and not in the same way I had on our trip to the small room. Her breathing was audible, little huffing pants, and twice she stumbled and braced herself with a hand against the tunnel wall. Had she been hiding how unwell she felt before, or had I just not noticed? I itched to help her, but there was nothing I could do until we had space. When the light from the big cave appeared ahead, I breathed a little easier.
And too soon.
Tegan turned around and groped for the ladder rungs with her feet. I saw her face clearly as she descended—one rung, then two, then a small, chilling pause. She looked puzzled, as if she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do next. Her eyes drifted closed.
I lunged forward, heedless of the scrape of my back against the tunnel roof, but I was too late.
Dreamily, Tegan fell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sotto
Tegan had jumped off buildings and landed safely. She’d crawled through roofs and launched herself over rails onto narrow steps, balanced sure-footed on pipes an inch thick, and flung herself over wire fences three times her height.
She must have had bad falls and injuries as she learned and stretched her limits. She must have damaged her small, strong body many times before. But I’d never seen her do it. To me, she’d always been startlingly physically competent—aware of her body and what it could accomplish in the same practiced way that I knew how to use my voice.
As she lay on the dirty cave floor, crumpled at the foot of the ladder, I felt as if the world had shaken around me.
And I was breathtakingly, uselessly, shamefully furious with her.
Marie was sitting by Tegan with Eduardo, doing things with Joph’s medical bag and a kit Eduardo had unearthed. The rest of us had been firmly told to move back, but Joph and Bethari and I were clustered close by, with Zaneisha hovering behind us. Only Joph’s hand on my arm had made me go that far, as stiff and slow as if I were made of stone.
“Abdi?” Tegan was calling, her voice plaintive. “Abdi?”
Marie looked up and nodded, and I came forward. Tegan was flushed red, her skin drenched in sweat as she lay flat on her back. Her pupils were blown wide, so that her already dark eyes seemed almost black.
“Abdi,” she said, as I knelt by her head. “I fell.”
“Yes,” I said, glancing helplessly at Marie.
“Just be here,” she advised. “There’s no spinal injury, so we can turn her over and take a look at that wound. We gave her something for the pain, but it’s not going to block everything.”
“But it’s okay,” Tegan said. “Because you’re going home, yay! Yay for you, I mean. Sad for me.” She coughed, then winced. “Ow.”
“You have a cracked rib,” Marie told her. “Try not to agitate it.”
“Did you tell me that before? My head really hurts.” Tegan squinted at me. “You’re so pretty.”
Marie gave me a tight look.
“Joph, isn’t he pretty? Don’t you just want to lick him?”
Joph managed a smile that came nowhere near the calm beauty of her usual expression. “I don’t want to lick men, remember?”
“Oh, yeah! Zaneisha! Do you want to lick him?”
“I don’t want to lick anyone, Tegan.”
“Bethari? You like boys, too!”
“Uh, no. No offense,” she added to me.
“None taken,” I replied.
“Well, I want to lick him,” Tegan declared, and beamed at me.
Eduardo didn’t look up from where he was laying out a stretcher, but I saw his shoulders shake silently. Laughter, at a time like this? I could have murdered him.
Except he was a ruthless and experienced killer. I was a soft, pampered boy, and he’d put me flat on my face in a second.
“It’s going to be fine,” I said.
She waved one arm, and I caught her hand to keep it still
. “I don’t know. I feel pretty bad.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice rough. Joph’s eyes were tight with anxiety as she looked at me, Tegan’s other hand grasped in hers.
Marie took Tegan by the hips and nodded at Eduardo, who braced himself by her shoulders. “We’re turning you on your side now, Tegan. You might want to scream, but that’ll hurt your ribs, so don’t. Abdi, move back.” I let go of Tegan’s hand and retreated to crouch by Joph.
“Should I bite on something?” she asked brightly. “In past-timer movies—I mean, past-timer movies about the past—they used to—” She broke off as, acting on some hidden signal, they turned her onto one side. I couldn’t see her face. She made a funny, choked sound, almost a whine. But she didn’t scream.
“All right,” Marie muttered, and carefully plucked away the dressing over Tegan’s wound.
Tegan screamed then. Her body jerked, hard, before it went terrifyingly limp.
“Oh no,” Joph breathed, and grabbed my arm as if she thought I would rush forward. But I couldn’t move, frozen by the sight of Tegan’s neck.
Whitish-yellow pus was oozing out of the wound in thick curds, and the air was heavy with a sickly smell of rotting meat. Livid red marks radiated from the cut site. And worst of all, as Marie quickly mopped away the pus, I could see movement in the depths of the injury.
The implant wires were alive within her, jerking to some hellish beat as they danced in Tegan’s body.
“But she’s on immunoboosters!” Joph said.
“They both are,” Marie said. “How are you feeling, Abdi?”
“I’m fine.”
“No fever, no aches and pains?”
“No, nothing.”
“Tell me what they are saying,” Eduardo said in Somali as he handed Marie a diagnostic tool. I didn’t know what it was. My brother would have, and I wanted him here, to take care of Tegan. All I could do was translate, so I squared my shoulders and did that, my tongue awkward in my mouth.
Eduardo looked at Marie, then carefully pushed the edge of the wound and watched the pus swell, his eyes thoughtful. “And she was on immunoboosters. Has she ever had the measles?” he asked.
