by Travis Hill
I was stunned. I didn’t want to believe it, even though I knew it was true. Ebbers wouldn’t lie to me, and she had no reason to make up a ridiculous number after five years together.
“You don’t believe me,” she said without emotion and tried to pull away again.
I held her arms while rotating around to face her, our cheeks sharing the same pillow.
“I believe you,” I said softly, caressing her cheek. “Ebbers told me you were old, maybe a thousand years old, but I doubt he’d be surprised to hear he was off by a bit.”
“Ebbers…” she said, trailing off.
“He loved you, you know.”
“I know. I loved him too, but…”
“Dogan,” I finished for her.
“I was with him. I could have been with both of them. But all I cared about was Dogan. After… I couldn’t see Ebs. I avoided Tech City for almost fifty years.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“I don’t know.” I pinched her bicep. “Okay, I sort of know. You heard what happened, I’m sure.” I nodded. “You can understand, then.”
“Yeah, I can understand, but I can’t understand why you couldn’t just say it.”
“I don’t know, Drea. He wasn’t the first love I’ve lost in my time down here. Just the hardest to get over.”
“There were others?”
She laughed. It was a bitter, derisive sound.
“Of course there were others. Two thousand years is a long time to go without companionship, don’t you think?”
I felt my face turn red, ashamed at how stupid my question sounded. She laughed again and kissed me on the mouth, forcing my lips open with her tongue. We were a single entity, a merged dream. Time slipped away like it always did when I was in her arms.
“How many?” I asked after a while. We’d worked ourselves into a frenzy of pawing and kissing but stopped short of anything more, slowly winding down until we were again facing each other as we lay on the bed.
“Is it important?”
“I’m not going to insult you by suggesting you’re a whore, if that’s what you mean.” I felt the flash of anger slice through me. “I mean, two thousand years, right? Even if you had a different lover every year, so what? Right?” I clamped my mouth shut after realizing my voice had risen almost to a shout.
“Drea, why is this important to you?”
“Because I need to know how many times you’ve had your heart ripped out and stomped on when someone you loved, loved like me, like Dogan, even like Ebs, was killed, expired, died during a timer hack, or had to sneak to the surface and get to the portal in time. I don’t want to be another in a string of heartbreaks for you!”
Melly smiled. It infuriated me until I saw a single tear fall from her eye. I watched it roll down the side of her nose and onto the pillow.
“At least sixty,” she said. “I never kept a diary, but I’ve had my share of sex more than enough over the years. I’d say somewhere around sixty that I’ve loved like Dogan. Like you.”
“How can you do it?” I asked, my own heart crushed at the implications of sixty or more times she’d had to watch someone like me die or depart. “How are you not a bubbling, quivering mass of emotional goo?”
“Time heals all,” she said and turned over on to her back.
I scooted closer to her, resting my head on her chest, sighing and tingling at the same time when she began to stroke my hair.
“Does it?” I asked, swirling my fingers around her stomach, tracing the various scars she’d acquired over two millennia in the most dangerous place on Earth. As far as we knew, anyway.
“Sure,” she said, linking her fingers with mine before they could tickle her stomach any more. “It probably isn’t easy to understand to someone as young as you. But trust me, as the years roll on, somehow life gets harder while letting go of lost loves gets easier. It’s the curse of life, I guess.”
“We weren’t meant to live as long as you have, were we?”
“No, I don’t think we were.”
“When you were in school, did they teach you that we’d only started colonizing the galaxy a few hundred years earlier?”
She stopped stroking my hair and pushed me away gently.
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because Ebbers said he was taught the same thing. He says since we only get forty years, and because we are indoctrinated to live the way they do upstairs, no one ever gets together and compares notes. We just accept what we’re taught and we don’t question it because we try to pack ten lifetimes of living into four short decades.”
“Ebbers has a big mouth,” she said, but she smiled and hugged me. “When I was young… It doesn’t really matter what we were taught, nor does it matter what you were taught. They have their rigid, scripted existence up there. The system is so well-oiled that even if you could freely walk around the streets while carrying signs claiming they were being lied to, it wouldn’t change anything. We’re one or two cogs in an infinitely complex machine.”
“Who runs the machine?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at her for a long time. For the first time since I’d met her, I truly felt like she had lied to me. I was already angry, but our talk and our fooling around had cooled my temper off. Even though it still burned in the background, I decided I wanted to get back to life. I was tired of living in my own darkness, dragging Melly down into it for no reason other than because I was selfish. For too long, I’d wanted her to suffer with me instead of making the most of the time we had left together.
I decided to leave it alone. It didn’t really matter. I didn’t want to spend my remaining years with a rift between us because she wouldn’t tell me what she knew about whatever existence humanity had been forced to endure. I wanted to be selfish in a new way. To spend the rest of my time with her, loving her, holding her, listening to her beautiful voice, feeling her body arch when she came.
I loved her. No matter what. I closed my eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Departure: -07h 11m 00s
I peeked around the blocks of concrete that had collapsed on each other during a previous battle. The barrier was just up the street. If there was another way out of The Bower, Melly either didn’t know about it, or didn’t bother to ever tell anyone else.
At least thirty blockers from the Death Lords were bunched up in blobs twenty meters ahead of us. They (and we) were watching a rival gang of scavs that wore no colors or symbols. The scavs sniffed up and down the road near the barrier as if they knew something or someone was coming.
“What the hell are we going to do?” I asked. I checked the chron Ebbers had strapped to my wrist that let me know I had seven hours before my timer expired.
“We’re going to wait,” she whispered without looking at me.
“How long?” I persisted. “Clock is ticking.”
“I know.” I felt her hand clutch my shin, the squeeze conveying her concern as well as an apology for watching the gangers instead of paying attention to me. “Soon.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“I don’t know. The Death Lords have numbers and firepower unless they know something about the scavs we don’t.”
As if on cue, a grinding, whining noise filled the air. I watched as half a dozen Guardians touched down at the barrier’s entrance.
“Shit,” Melly grunted. “What the fuck do they want?”
We watched for another hour, none of the three groups making a move, other than the scavs who crawled all over the area. They must have known about the Death Lords, as they steered clear of our side of the entrance. Five minutes later, Melly lightly whistled at the group of blockers ahead of us. I froze. I wanted to shake her for giving away our position, but she only turned back long enough to smile at me. I relaxed when she gave me a wink. She had a plan.
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” a man’s voice said from a few feet away
, just loud enough for us to hear.
“Howdy, Griff,” Melly said in a cheerful voice.
“What the hell do you want?” He snapped his fingers, bringing at least a dozen Death Lords within a few meters of us, the rest continuing to keep an eye on the scavs and Guardians.
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she said casually.
“I’ve got one for you,” Griff rumbled. “How about you step out and I put a bullet in your fuckin’ head?”
“Now, Griff,” Melly said, chiding the blockers’ leader. “I know we’ve had our differences, but this is important.”
“As important as when you wasted an entire chapter of my people?”
“Okay, hold grudges if you want,” she said. “But then you’ll miss out on some Guardian tech.”
“We don’t have enough firepower up here to take on the six of them,” Griff replied, though his voice couldn’t hide his interest in the chance to acquire Guardian tech.
“We do with this,” Melly said and held up the implosion grenade.
A sudden shuffling of feet and a low squawk made me smile. A second shuffling of feet caused a chuckle to escape my throat when the whine of the charging grenade broke the tense silence.
“Who you got with you?” Griff asked, his voice sounding a few meters farther away.
“Don’t sweat that,” Melly answered. “Come on, gather around. You’re not afraid of a girl, are you?”
I laughed again. Mellisandra had probably killed more than a thousand citizens of The Bower in her years. Maybe five thousand. The Death Lords had tangled with her too many times to be anything but paranoid when she was around.
Griff appeared to my left, three of his crew flanking him. He held out his hand and I shook it. His goons couldn’t take their eyes off me until Melly held out the shiny grenade to capture their attention.
“Eyes over here, boys. She’s spoken for.”
The looks of disappointment on their faces was classic, and I antagonized them with a sultry wink of my own.
“Listen up,” Melly commanded in a voice that somehow forced others to obey. When she commanded me to do anything, whether it was to pick up after myself or take care of her physical needs, I snapped to it like a marionette. It wasn’t a supernatural force compelling me to do her bidding. It was more like I wanted to please her, to gain her favor. She had the same effect on almost everyone I’d ever met.
“Drea here is on a tight schedule.”
The men looked at me.
“Clock still running, eh?” one of them asked.
I nodded.
“Justice portal?” he asked.
I nodded again. I seemed to have gained a few notches of respect in their eyes, though that was probably because they knew I was Melly’s fuck toy.
“I’m going to hand this grenade to Griff and show him how to keep it charged without detonating it,” Melly continued. “We need to draw those Guardians in and get them to rumble with the scavs. Maybe a few of your guys just to confuse them when the shit hits the fan. When you get at least three Guardians in a ten meter area, toss that sucker.”
“That’s three Guardians’ worth of tech that will just pop out of existence!” one of the men hissed.
“Right,” Griff said, tapping on the man’s forehead with his knuckles. “Which means we only have to fight thirty scavs and three Guardians instead of thirty scavs and six Guardians.”
The man looked down at his feet. I grinned and slugged him lightly in the shoulder. Melly smiled at me then put her serious face back on.
“When you get three or four Guardians down, you should be able to finish the rest off, but try to wait until they’ve thinned out the scavs.”
“What about you two?” Griff asked, his eyes locked on the implosion grenade.
“We’ll be busy sneaking through the barrier and running like hell to the portal.”
This was the part of the plan that Melly and I had fought over for the last week or more. If she was caught topside, they’d probably execute her on the spot. Without a working timer, she couldn’t activate a portal. The topside leaders wouldn’t risk anyone finding out they could live for thousands of years by deactivating their own clocks.
*****
Departure: -5d 14h 09m
“I don’t want you to go,” I said, my voice stern, commanding even.
Melly laughed and pushed the cleaning brush across the table toward me.
“So you do have an escape plan?” she asked, turning her head to look me in the eyes. The slight grin she gave me annoyed me to no end. “Does it involve stealing an orbital shuttle or secret underground tunnels out of the city? Am I too old to join you on your adventures?”
“I appreciate the sarcasm,” I said, keeping my voice and lips tight to let her know I most certainly did not appreciate it at all.
Melly sighed. “Your problem is that whatever you want won’t stop me from going with you. So put that nonsense out of your head.”
She reached under the table and rubbed my knee. I wanted to jerk it away, but her touch was electric no matter how angry I was with her.
“Why?” I asked, finally moving my leg to let her know I was serious. “Why can’t you just let me go?” My halfhearted attempts to anger her to the point she’d abandon me had only made her laugh over the last few hours.
“Drea… would you let me go alone?”
“Yes!” I said hotly. “If it was what you wanted! Especially if you told me that I’d be killed without question because I didn’t have a timer.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve survived long enough down here where everyone is looking to score a kill. Topside… it’s just Guardians. Citizens are useless when it comes to fighting.”
“You forgot the part about how Guardians probably number in the thousands and you can’t take even five of them on at once, let alone however many they send after us when the alarm goes out.”
“And you think you’ll just waltz right through the middle of the city, do a little window shopping on the way, then politely step through the portal?” She grunted a sarcastic chuckle. “A murderer who can only enter the Justice portal? I think I might have hit you in the head too many times when you were training.”
She grabbed my wrist but I swept her hand away and stood up. The burning, intense look I shot at her bounced off the playful grin that protected her face.
“Stop that!” I yelled.
She cocked her head slightly which infuriated me even more. I stomped to the tiny bathroom we’d rigged up in the corner of our flat. Her laughter at how forcefully I relieved myself in the makeshift toilet only made me angrier.
“It’s not funny,” I said from behind the fibrene barrier that gave me a small bit of privacy.
I wiped then washed myself in the basin before stepping out from behind the half-wall. Melly continued to stare at me with a goofy grin until I growled and yanked her chair away from the table. I straddled her, locking my feet together behind the chair, but she made no move to escape.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I shouted in her face, my hands locked in her hair so she had to look at me.
“Because I love you and I want to make sure you make it to the portal,” she said in a soft voice.
I melted into her. She clutched me tightly, stroking my hair while kissing my shoulder.
“I love you,” I finally said, raising my head from her neck. “I don’t want you to die while trying to get me to the portal. At least if I don’t make it, you’ll still be alive.”
“I’ll be fine,” she repeated before kissing me on the chin.
I pushed off her and went back to my chair across the table from her. Melly scooted toward the table and began cleaning her ballistic pistol again.
“What do you think is on the other side of the portal?” she asked without looking up from her task.
“No one knows,” I answered, wondering where the question had come from. In nineteen years, we’d speculated about the portals ma
ybe five times. It was a question I avoided thinking about as much as possible, and it had always seemed to be a subject she wasn’t interested in discussing.
“I know that,” she snapped before her tone softened again. “But what do you think happens?”
I thought about it for a while. Was it a portal to hell? Whether an old biblical hell from one of the dead religions, or a modern hell set on a world with boiling methane for oceans and entire continents of flowing lava, I didn’t know. What if it opened into the core of a star?
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s a test.”
“What kind of test?”
“Maybe if we spent our forty years in step with the program, whatever it is that drives topsiders, we get to move on to a different life? Or maybe we’re rewarded?”
She laughed. “That might be the fate of normal citizens. What do you think is beyond the Justice portal?”
“Prison? Some kind of slave mine where we have to extract resources for our masters? Or maybe be a food source to them? What about you? You’ve had a lot more time to ponder the question, old woman.”
She threw a bullet at my chest. “I don’t look any older than you,” she said with disdain.
“Don’t avoid the question,” I said, repaying her with a bullet of my own.
“I don’t think it’s anything,” she said after picking the slug round off the floor. “It’s a gateway to nowhere. Both of them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. You step through the portal and you no longer exist.”
“That’s somehow worse than becoming a slave laborer or a snack for an alien baby.”
“It is, isn’t it?” She looked away.
“What?” I asked, reaching out to clutch her hands in mine.
“I always tell you that I love you,” she said, locking on to my eyes with hers. “I don’t think I’m able to put into words just how much.”
“Don’t make me cry,” I whispered.
I didn’t want to go through this again. I’d done enough of it on my own when I thought she couldn’t see me, couldn’t feel my body trembling as I spent my tears in despair over my departure.
