Stray (26 page)

Startled, I squeeze in reflex.

The cool fingers squeeze back.

I open my eyes and stumble – concrete beneath my feet. Before me in the middle of the ReProg room, Jamie slumps in the straps of the suspended chair, white medical scrubs from the waist down, bare chest glistening with sweat, his breathing ragged. His head hangs forwards, blood on his chin, dripping down his front, his hair short and bristling. His wrists are raw beneath the restraints and there’s a wet patch over his crotch and thigh. A trail of urine beneath the chair stains the slope to the drain and I want to look away. I want to cover him.

“Everybody pees.” The girl with silver eyes, chalky skin and white hair. The one who lay in the bed next to mine when I first woke on the ward, frightening me when she turned her head.

I try to pull away, rustling in my paper gown.

Her fingers tighten around mine. “Don’t do that. They’ll know and they’ll increase the Symbiosis. You don’t want to be a vegetable, do you?”

“Jamie.” But I don’t know what to say and he doesn’t look up. I’m probably the last person he wants to see but I’m so confused. He was still in Tesla’s lab when they took me to ReProg and I’m pretty sure his pants were blue.

“He can’t hear you. This is a memory.”

Breathing shakily, I stare at her, at Jamie, the black glass walls, darting a sharp glance over my shoulder, expecting to see Knox, Tesla and the Executive glaring down at me from the metal walkway. The glass reveals nothing, nothing but Jamie nodding and alone in the chair.

“We’re vampires.” She chuckles and waves at where her reflection should be in the glass, where my reflection should be. “Spinny, huh?”

My head
is
spinning. I stagger but don’t pull away, unable to comprehend. This isn’t real. It can’t be real. I’m dreaming. This is a dream.

“Sort of,” the Proxy says … and I know without needing an explanation that that is who she is, though I was expecting the blue-eyed child from Felicity’s memory, the blonde hair and peachy skin.

“I grew up,” she says. “That was an old memory. The
goo-tank
bleaches everything – you’ve seen Felicity’s hand.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“I thought it would be easier to talk to you like this,” she says, rustling in
her
paper gown. “You’re very strong and I don’t want to hurt you. Jamie makes you feel safe so I thought here would be a good place.”

Safe? I couldn’t think of a less appropriate word for how I feel about Jamie or where I am right now. “What did they do to him?”

“Don’t worry - they kept to the limits of the reform but, you know, it’s still pretty awful. I suppose it has to be or we’d all just do what we liked.”

I go to reach for Jamie’s hand, stop myself and pull back.

“Everybody pees,” she says again. “Some vomit or bleed, hence the drain, but everybody pees. You think they’d use a catheter but they’d rather you wet yourself. Shame can be motivating too. That’s why Robert had your hair butchered. He’s big into the old ways.”

A sticky sob catches in my throat. “They hurt Jamie because of me.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And your mom.”

My heart squeezes to a stop.

“You have a fascinating family.”

I’m unable, at first, to find my voice. “Then they know everything?”

“I haven’t told them.” She smiles softly. “Not yet.”

Not yet? I search her face but she watches me with her bland smile, not giving anything away. She’s playing with me. She wants something.

She looks away. “Jamie was to deactivate, you know.”

The bruised feeling in my chest throbs. “Maybe he still can.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“We haven’t …”

“I didn’t mean sex. I meant how you got the program shut down.”

Heat flashes up my neck.

“It’s a pity,” she says and there’s a smile in her voice. “The sex, not the program. He’s very beautiful, like Ethan at this age, sort of raw and refined at the same time.”

The potent memory of Tesla strapped to the chair returns to me, and the weird stirring of desire. Was it her in my head, before the Symbiosis started?

“Can you blame me?” she says. “Ethan was gorgeous. Still is, if you ask me.”

I shiver at the thought of how far her powers might reach.

“You’d be surprised,” she says.

“Were you really there when I woke up on the ward?”

“In a way.” She shrugs and cocks her head at Jamie. “He feels wonderful in your mind.”

The shiver becomes a crawling feeling.

“All that electricity.” She sighs. “All that wholeness. I haven’t felt many Synergists. It’s almost intoxicating. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them about that either.”

The sheer creepiness of it stalls me.

She draws closer to Jamie, bringing me with her. “He’s very angry with you, for valuing a stranger’s life more than his sister’s – your best friend’s. You put her at risk, betrayed his trust, his parents’ trust. You’re a liar and a sneak, Evangeline. You only think about yourself.”

It hurts, a winding pain, like being punched in the gut, but it also feels familiar – that cruel voice. Was it her in my head when Knox was questioning me, telling me how selfish and ruthless and cruel–

“Yes,” she says. “But they weren’t my words. I was simply reflecting your feelings back to you.”

I try to stay calm. “So you know everything I’m thinking?”

“Here, in the Symbiosis.” She bites her lips. “Do you know why he’s so angry?”

“
Of course I do
.”

“He’s afraid.” She touches her forefinger to Jamie’s chest then the flat of her hand and closes her eyes. “An unbearable fear of his own powerlessness to protect the people he loves.”

It seeps into me and expands, fear like tidal waves, earthquakes, forest fires, flash floods, lightning strikes, acts of God. I’m swallowed, shaken, burned, drowned, struck down and devastated by my own uselessness. “Stop it,” I choke, tears on my face.

She slips her hand from Jamie’s chest like a parting caress and instantly the horror lifts. “It’s not rational,” she says. “He has control issues.”

But Jamie’s terror is just like mine and that’s what leaves me trembling.

She nods her head, a slow up and down swing. “If I had a brother, I think I would help him too. Even if he was a killer.”

“Aiden is not a killer,” I say, my teeth clamped together. “You saw the KMT, you felt the change.”

She smiles her small wrong smile. “Jamie doesn’t believe you. Nobody does, except your mother.”

“What about Tesla?”

“Ethan believes in measurable evidence.”

I suppose it’s better than an outright no. I hesitate then ask, “Can I trust him?”

“You’re asking
me
who to trust?” The Proxy’s smile widens, her eyes ranging over my face. “You have a very pretty mouth. Jamie loves your mouth.”

I snap my lips closed.

She dabs at her lower lip, lifting her shoulders to sigh. “He’s a good kisser, isn’t he?”

I screw my face up. “What?”

“She thinks so too. Deactivation is painful, you know, but even when it hurt she didn’t mind kissing him.”

A coiling feeling tightens my stomach, my joints, and heat grows in my chest. A burst of colour in my periphery and I turn my head, a blooming vision in the black glass. A memory opens up that my brain has no framework for. Jamie’s hands fumble loose the buttons on a woman’s blue blouse, his hands slip the shirt off. A cream lace bra. A tumble of sandy hair over narrow shoulders. His hands slide up behind a slender neck and her face comes into focus. Helena. I remember her from the photo Jamie’s mother showed me. She’s older than me, early twenties, rosebud mouth, blue eyes. Her lips move but I can’t hear her speak.

“I see you,” the Proxy murmurs, her words syncing with Helena’s. “I know you, I choose you, As you choose me and know me and see me as I am–”

“No.” I try to tug away. Inside, it’s like slipping off a ledge, that sudden loss of foundation and the plummet into space. I can’t look away.

“I bind myself to you in trust,” the Proxy continues, tightening her grasp. “This is what I believe, It is the truth that I choose as you choose me.” Helena’s eyes flutter closed. Her lips part and her chin tilts up.

“No!” I tear my hand free.

A lash of pain lights up the back of my skull and everything is black. A squall of static. Pressure swells inside my chest. Fire in my spine. I thrash against my restraints, agony in my wrists and a terrible roar in my ears before my eyes spring open. Back in my body. Back in the chair. Blood in my mouth. Blood on the armrests, smeared and glowing ruby red. The noise in the room hurts my ears. Knox commanding something, Tesla swearing, the sound of my own screaming reverberating off the walls. My tears come. The hot slip of them over cheek and jaw to pool in the creases of my neck. I gasp for insufficient pockets of air, my nose closing from the pressure, my chest buckling with shallow sobs as I try not to stretch my back.

Grief like a geyser, for the memory of Jamie’s hands on a blue blouse, for a lacy cream bra and a slender neck, for the words of the sanction on her lips, for everything I didn’t see. I force myself to picture what would have followed, brutalising my imagination with her hands on his chest, at his waist, on his belt. Him laying her down, his mouth on her neck, his weight on her hips. Her hands on his back, tracing his scars and
her
– her not fainting.

My jealousy is a monstrous, roaring, fevered thing and I’m blind and insensible until I’m sore all over from clenching my muscles, hoarse and half-suffocated from tears and sheer exhaustion in a pain-weakened body.

He said – he told me it wasn’t like that between them. Not “together” together. Not touching or kissing or taking clothes off “together”.

Is that what he said?

And I don’t know if that doubt is the Proxy or me.
Is
that what he said? Had I just wanted to believe it wasn’t like that to justify giving in to my own pathetic and insistent want of him? And what use is jealousy over someone I’ve lost all rights to? Aren’t I the betrayer of trust? The Proxy’s words stab at me.
You’re a liar and a sneak, Evangeline. You only think about yourself
. Then I’m falling again into darkness, the bandwidth like a chasm as I plunge.

“Do you know why it’s a secret?” The Proxy. Her cool slim hand holds mine. She tugs my arm.

When I open my eyes, I am standing again in ReProg, this time it’s my own body strapped in the chair. Tesla and Knox’s voices echo faintly in the background. I look terrible, like I’m having a massive seizure, my face contorting, my body straining beneath the restraints. I watch repulsed as wetness spreads on the front of my gown and trickles from the edge of the seat, a translucent yellow spatter on the concrete floor. Somehow I’m dry where I stand.

“Sorry about that,” she says. “It was bound to happen.”

I try to yank free from her grasp but I’m too weak.

“Don’t do that.” She squeezes my hand, grinding my finger bones. “Don’t fight me. I told you before, what use is it if you become a vegetable?”

“What do you want?” I lean away from her.

“I asked you a question. Do you know why it’s a secret?”

“What?”

“Your parents, your birth, your brother – God, what else?” She squints at me like I’m simple. “Did Miriam explain it to you, or not?”

“She – she said it would be dangerous if anyone knew.”

She nods at my body in the chair. I’ve stopped seizing. My eyes are closed and I seem to be asleep. The Proxy turns to me and searches my face. “I’m sorry.” She nods at the screen. “It was cruel of me to show you that. Childish. But, wow, the whole Synergist jealousy thing is something else.”

I don’t reply, partly because I’m exhausted and confused by the sudden turns and mostly because I don’t want to talk about Jamie and Helena. I don’t trust myself not to lose it. I want to crawl into my bed and sleep and never wake.

“Brünnhilde,” she says with a smirk.

Wrong-footed, I look at her blankly. “What?”

“She was a warrior queen from Norse mythology. Isn’t that what Ethan calls you?”

I scowl at the teasing in her voice, embarrassed to know Tesla has been making fun of me.

“No, it suits you,” she says. Then changing tack, “You shouldn’t be angry with Jamie. You can’t blame him for having a past relationship. It wasn’t like he cheated on you. Besides, it might not even mean what you think it means. It can be hard to know what to believe.”

“It’s none of your business.”

She gives a brittle laugh. “Everything is my business, otherwise they wouldn’t float me in the tank.”

She looks back over her shoulder at the black glass. There in cinematic display is my memory of the night after Barb shot me. Jamie sits in Kitty’s reading chair, pulling his shirt up over his head, balling the fabric in his hands, his expression uncertain. My hand reaches out and strokes his cheek. The moment of relief. Seeing it feels like a knuckle pressing a bruise in my chest. My voice hitches. “You’re sick …”

Impossibly, the scene changes point of view. There I am, half naked and cradling my bandaged arm.

How is the Proxy doing it?

“Practice.”

It’s like an external camera moving slowly around Jamie and me. Pitifully, it’s the sight of my hair spilling down my back and Jamie’s hands tangling in it that makes me want to cry, but then it’s the whole scene, the slow unspoken exchange of reconciliation, shadows slipping over our skin as we find our way back to each other.

But overriding it all, there’s violation, humiliation, shame. My private memories exposed. I hate knowing Tesla can see it. Knox. All of them like a pack of voyeurs. I want to shout and swear and beat the screen with my fists. Helpless tears blur my vision, wet my cheeks.

The Proxy sniffs next to me, her silver eyes huge and swimming. “This is my favourite. Even more than the willow, and seriously, I love the willow, but this is … raw. You should
feel
it in Jamie’s memory.” She rolls her eyes up, fills a sigh with yearning.

My skin crawls.

“It’s a crime you haven’t slept with him.” She wipes her cheeks with her free hand and chuckles at my scowl. “It is. The whole Synergist buzz. It’s like a drug. Better than drugs
and
he’s divine
and
you’d be good at it. I can tell.”