Suck It Up and Die (27 page)

“What?” Rachel blurted.

“I’ll post something on the website to make it official. It’ll stay in effect till you can hold a proper election for the next president.” Rachel was too stunned to speak, so
Birnam went on. “I’ve loved my time as captain of the Leaguer ship. But Fate, the mutinous sailor aboard every ship that sets sail from the Port of Human Hope, has put me in a lifeboat and set me adrift.”

Rachel’s shock gave way to confusion. “
What
are you saying?”

“Nothing,” he said with a chortle. “I was giving you a lesson in steering a straight metaphor. Goodbye, Ms. President. The wheel of hope is in your hands.”

Morning stared at his computer. He had scoured the Internet, and so far, “the tempest in the Tasting Room” still revolved around Cody’s bloodlust footage and the uproar over it. None of the other participants had been identified, and the bouncer, who had recognized Morning, had not come forward, probably because guarding the door of a bloodlust club was not something he wanted on his résumé.

Morning knew he could only pretend to sleep late on a Saturday for so long. He got up and looked in the mirror over his dresser. He stared at the pimple still growing on his forehead. Whether it had gotten bigger and redder from stress or from
pneumabrotus
and his hormones kicking in, he didn’t know. Whatever, it had to be hidden. He covered it with a new smear of makeup.

His computer bleeped with a Skype alert, summoning him back to his desk. He took the call. Birnam’s ancient face appeared onscreen. Middle Eastern music played
in the background; it looked like he was in a cybercafe. Birnam smiled as his window on Morning opened. “Hello, Morning.”

“Hey,” Morning said grimly. “Do you get the news in Tripoli?”

“Yes. I’ve turned the IVL over to Rachel.” Morning blinked, aghast. “You’re just giving up?”

“On some things, yes.”

“But the IVL, the VRA,” Morning protested, “it’s all you ever cared about!”

Birnam nodded. “Until now.”

“What changed?” Morning demanded, trying not to shout.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try me!”

Birnam answered Morning’s frustration with a Buddha-like smile. “It’s got to do with what I discovered in Tripoli. Not only is the food utterly magnificent, I also found the secret of life.”

“Oh, really.” Morning frowned. “What is it?”

Birnam leaned forward to impart his discovery. “Stories. But then, after that, I found the
secret
of the secret of life. I discovered the secret of stories.”

“Which is?”

Birnam leaned back with a beaming smile. “The end.”

Morning stared blankly. “The end?”

“Yes!” Birnam exclaimed like a scientist discovering the happy gene. “If you don’t get to the end of a story, it’s not a story; it’s an endless parade of events. If you don’t get to the end of a life, it’s not a life; it’s an endless parade of sensations. I don’t think of myself as dying, I think of myself as having rediscovered life just before death. Not a bad
way to go. Which reminds me, I have a lunch reservation, and I plan to relish each bite like it’s my last. It might be.” Birnam added a hearty laugh.

Morning shook his head in disbelief. “If you ask me, it sounds like you’ve still got a few more years left.”

“Or not,” Birnam retorted. “When you see Death coming around the corner, you get a little adrenaline spike. This is mine.”

“But what if it’s not an adrenaline spike?” Morning argued. “Maybe your last gasp of health is something else.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe because a big chunk of your Lifer dream, passage of the VRA, is about to crash; maybe the fountain of
pneumabrotas
that rebooted your aging has dried up. Maybe you’re returning to immortality. And maybe tomorrow, after your Lifer dream is snuffed out, you’ll wake up a vampire again.”

Birnam contemplated this, then gave Morning a sympathetic smile. “I know why you’re saying this. You’re scared that’s what might happen to you if you get kicked out of the fire academy and your Lifer dream ends. You’ll go from re-mort to re-vamp.”

“Yeah, it scares me,” Morning admitted.

“It’s not going to happen,” Birnam declared.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I’ve turned so mortal I’ve acquired a thing called faith. I have faith in you and Rachel. And I can feel in these dying bones that somehow Leaguers, and Lifers, are going to rise above the Becky-Dells and DeThanatoses of the world.” He raised a bar of something and began to unwrap it. “Whatever happens, Morning, my last wish is that you get to revel in a long, sweet stumble to an end.
I believe you will because you’ve always known a simple truth I only learned in the past few months.”

Morning didn’t have a clue. “What’s that?”

Birnam pushed forward the unwrapped bar of candy.

“Turkish taffy.”

“Not
that
,” Morning protested. “What’s the simple truth?”

Birnam answered with a beguiling smile. “Life is a gift that requires assemblage. Death provides the instructions.” He leaned back; his voice grew distant. “Goodbye, Morning.”

Morning refused the finality of his words. “See you later, Mr. Birnam.”

The old man’s smile widened. “Or not.”

As Birnam bit into his taffy, the Skype connection went dead. Whether he had hung up or not, Morning wasn’t sure. Whichever, his gut told him it was the last time he would ever see Luther Birnam.

Morning stared at the blank screen as moisture pooled in his eyes. He heard a tentative knock on the door. It wasn’t Sister Flora’s. He rose and opened the door.

Portia stood in the hall with a beleaguered look. “I bet you hate me.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.” He stepped back, waving her in. “I just talked to Birnam. He made Rachel head of the IVL.”

Portia entered. “I don’t care about that anymore.”

“You’re making a documentary about Leaguers and you don’t care about having access to the IVL’s new president?”

She faced him. “I just want access to you.”

He let out a nervous chuff. “Portia, I don’t wanna be in any more movies.”

“I don’t wanna
make
any more movies,” she replied.

Morning stared for a moment. “Say what?”

“I’m done screwing people’s lives up by sticking cameras in their faces,” she declared.

He eyed her cautiously. “This isn’t like last night, is it? You’re not DeThanatos CDed into Portia, are you?”

She smiled for the first time, appreciating his attempt at levity. “No, I’m the new me.”

“What’s the new you?”

She let down her guard and spewed. “Last night, you were right, okay? We never should’ve gone in there. We got totally set up. The invites to the Tasting Room came from DeThanatos. We blew it. For Leaguers, the VRA—” She cut herself off and took a breath. “Okay, I came to say I’m very sorry about what’s happened—and I am—but there’s another reason I’m here. There’s something else that banged my eyes wide open last night. The new you.”

Morning’s insides gripped tight.
If Zoë told Portia about my re-aging
, he thought,
I’m not gonna turn her, I’m gonna kill her
. “Oh, yeah?” he said coolly. “What’s the new me?”

She stepped forward and hit him with a full-mouth, curl-your-toes lip-lock. His shock was annihilated by the mouth-probing, heart-ballooning delirium of a kiss he thought he had lost forever.

When he pulled away from their tongue-twisting tumble into the river of desire, the river glistened on in her eyes. He heaved a breath. “Where did
that
come from?”

“The new me,” she said. “And something I saw last night.”

He was still fuzzy about what exactly had happened during the blurry moments after he had cracked his head on the paving stones, or how his Epidex had gotten ripped. “What did you see last night?”

She touched the makeup-covered bump on his forehead. “Looks like that stress pimple is getting bigger?”

“Yeah, after what we’ve been through—”

“Sure.” She tapped him on his shoulder, making him wince. “And the Band-Aid on your arm is covering …?” She spread her hands giving him the chance to fill in the blank. “And the hair on your chest is from …? And the”—she air-quoted—“ ‘big news’ that you never told me was …?”

Morning hesitated.

She stepped back. “After last night, I can understand why you might not want to tell me. But as much as I screwed up, I still think I deserve to know what’s going on.”

Morning sat Portia on the bed and filled her in on all he had learned about reconnecting with Lifer dreams, re-triggering
pneumabrotus
, and how aging could be rebooted. As he told her, Birnam’s last words echoed in his head. He repeated them. “ ‘Life is a gift that requires assemblage; Death provides the instructions.’ ” Then he said, “If things keep going right, we can reassemble what we had before. With one difference.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“You’ll always be two years older than me.”

She found his eyes. “I can handle that.”

What he didn’t tell her, because he was scared to, was that he was one demerit away from being booted from the academy, losing his Lifer dream, and maybe reverting to immortality. But he wouldn’t let that happen. He was so sure of it, he popped the question he’d been wanting to for days. “Has anyone asked you to the End Is Upon Us Ball?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Do you wanna go?”

“You know I’m not a dance kinda girl, but since it has such a cool theme, and you’re the one asking, yes.”

Morning beamed. “Cool. But there’s one condition.”

“Oh, man,” she groaned, “are you gonna make me wear a dress?”

“No, I want you to keep making movies.”

Her face quirked with curiosity. “Why?”

“ ’Cause I don’t want some fake you, I want the real you. And it’s what you’ve done ever since I met you.”

She nodded slowly, remembering her flippant conversation with her mother. “Okay, but my senior project isn’t a doc about the Leaguer movement anymore.”

“What’s it about?”

“Competitive knitting.”

Morning chuckled in disbelief. “There’s such a thing?”

“Not sure,” she replied, “but if there’s no ‘competitive’ in knitting it’s gonna be one boring-ass doc.”

Morning laughed from relief. He still had the caustic, funny Portia. He took her hand and felt like he was holding happiness itself. Then his mind tweaked with a guilty thought. “Is it fair to be so happy on such a miserable day for Leaguers?”

“Probably not,” she said, before raising a scheming eyebrow, “but the day’s not over.”

Morning sacrificed his urge to know what she meant for the only thing he wanted to assemble: another tongue-twisting tumble into passion’s torrent.

As members of Congress flip-flopped and withdrew their support of the VRA, Rachel and Penny swung into damage control. They called a press conference in the lobby of Diamond Sky; the media showed up in full force.