Silence (26 page)

Sheikoh had somehow been transported
back to Interium.

He was in Alimiat’s abandoned house,
or rather, Dorothi’s.

Sheikoh walked through, glancing at
the mess of gears and wires strewn across the kitchen table. That
had been where Emili worked on her projects. He suddenly noticed
her screwdriver, pitted and rust-sheened. The way that it had been
before Dorothi had begun polishing it. He took a quick double take.
Had he somehow gone back in time?

After everything that’d happened
already, Sheikoh didn’t discount the possibility.

He walked through the rooms in a state
of wonderment, taking in everything that he’d forgotten. He saw the
battered chest that held their winter clothes, stained from the
time that he Emili had knocked a cup of coffee onto it. In the
living room, he half smiled at the hole in the wall he’d kicked
back when he was still learning to rein in his cyborg limbs. He let
his body fall into the blue armchair in front of the TV. Alimiat’s
chair for when he had been wigged out on Four.

As soon as Sheikoh thought the word
‘Four’ the living room rippled with blinding shockwaves. Sheikoh
shook and spun, gripping the arms of the blue armchair with white
knuckles and screaming like a little girl. The room howled,
spinning like a top. The edges of the weathered furniture blurred,
and pictures danced around on the cabinets like groundhogs, popping
into and out of the ground.

Sheikoh felt like he was riding a
roller coaster without a seatbelt. While an earthquake exploded
beneath. Cups and CDs and gears flew through the air, but instead
of crashing into the walls or each other they landed different
cabinets or shot through the open doors like cannon balls. Then, as
suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

Sheikoh looked around
warily. The furniture had moved a little and everything looked a
little more battered, but other than that, everything looked okay.
Then he noticed the computer screen in the corner, or rather the
date on the screen’s corner. He felt a lurch of shock, as though
he’d walked ten steps up nine stairs. The screen said that it was
July 29
^th
.

The day he lost Emili to
Four.

Sheikoh knew it was that day, knew
what was coming. Certainty and dread filled his in equal measures.
He tried to fight it. He pictured Dorothi, then Indigo beating the
crap out of him, and even the Centaurai holding that silver scythe
to his throat. But the room remained. He was going to have to face
everything that he’d been hiding from. The ever-present pain in his
chest had crystallized into the scene around him.

Sheikoh had never been more terrified
in his life. He’d spent so long running from the pain that never
that lived in his hollow chest. The pain that numbed every injury
he’d ever taken to a light tingle. It crept at the edges of his
vision, but until now he’d always been able to look away. This day
had stabbed him in the heart more painfully than Chain’s sadism
ever could have. Alimiat’s final retribution from his chance child
Four was going to take Emili from Sheikoh all over
again.

The chair beneath him floated into the
corner of the room.

Sheikoh was barely
surprised.

From the air, he watched their morning
rituals. Dorothi was up first, as always. She woke up the younger
Sheikoh, who poured them each a bowl of cereal. ‘We still do that,’
Sheikoh realized with the tiniest flicker of a smile over the
anxiety that wrote his expression. After they’d finished eating and
talking, Sheikoh walked the younger girl to school. Then Silence
did his thing on the streets.

Sheikoh watched his younger self from
open air. Even from far away, he could vividly make out individual
features. He could tell when the different colors of dyed hair
didn’t match the edges of the women’s roots, or spot the fat man
scratching his butt with unnatural sharpness. Sheikoh saw the
purmynx slinking at the edge of an alley, scrounging for scraps,
the blue-silver bandana of a Legacy gangster shouldering his way
through the crowd, all along with the red-eared man wearing the
brown overcoat that he was about to pickpocket. Sheikoh saw the
younger him blur a tiny bit, and memory told him he’d easily
managed the lift.

That a boy…

The thought was tempered
with the despair of foresight. He already knew he’d taken the man’s
wallet, he’d already
done
it. Sheikoh remembered he’d felt proud for the
lift. It was surprising to know that he had felt anything happy at
all that day that had sliced his life in two.

Sheikoh floated after himself like a
ghost. At one point, the blue armchair drifted through a building’s
brick wall like a ghost. He was surrounded once more by the
currents of bright colors and darkness he’d seen when pulled
through into here in the first place.

He came out on the other side and
watched little him dart through the crowd like a lizard. The kid
melted into one of the dark alleyways and disappeared for a few
moments.

Sheikoh smiled sadly. The alleys had
always been his winding sanctuaries. Interium was Sheikoh’s mother
and her alleyways were the arms that cradled him in warm blankets
of shadows and safety.

Sheikoh spent the morning following
his younger self feeling odd jolts and stabs in his chest, as well
as bittersweet nostalgia for the simpler time. He watched himself
steal and con his way through the streets. Back then, the Legacy
thugs hadn’t known that Sheikoh was a figure to be wary of. Sheikoh
watched as the younger version of him took care of a gangster that
had decided to question why a little boy like Sheikoh was alone in
a dark alley.

His eyes followed himself curiously.
Dorothi always said he’d looked different than he did in the
pictures Emili’d taken of the three of them. He’d always glance
back at her and make some joke about getting older or whatever. But
she was right. Even though his features were all pretty much the
same, if younger, and his outfits always lasted him a couple of
years, something was just a bit less… him… He hadn’t understood why
he looked so different until now.

It was his eyes.

The Sheikoh beneath him hadn’t
understood the weight of real responsibility, until Emili had-
 

Until they’d lost Emili.

Back then, she’d been the one taking
care of him and Dorothi. His life had been hard back then, but he’d
had a safety net. And he hadn’t realized how much he’d needed it
until it was gone. Emili was the one who took the pictures. With
her gone, neither Sheikoh nor Dorothi had any inclination to
continue the tradition. In all of the pictures, he’d still had
Emili.

Sheikoh watched his younger self with
pity for what he was going to have to endure. He grinned
humorlessly.

Did that count as
self-pity?

The younger him Sheikoh went into a
store called StartMart. Sheikoh watched himself pick up his and
Emili’s lunch and then head back to his secret, roomed garden.
Sheikoh’d only ever shown to Emili and Dorothi. Dread’s iron fist
clenched around Sheikoh’s heart. He knew what happened
next.

Emili slept while Sheikoh brought
Dorothi to school, so the two always met here for lunch. Emili was
often with a customer, or getting paid to repair something at
someone’s house. He had usually been there waiting by about 12:30.
Emili however, rarely made it until 1:00. An outlaw had a lot more
freedom than an engineer.

A tense Sheikoh hugged his knees to
his chest and watched himself eat. Unbearable fiery desperation
raced through his body as he watched the younger version of him
fingering vines and flowers, bored.

Sheikoh couldn’t stand this. His
muscles were clenching and his left eye wouldn’t stop twitching.
Tears began crowding his eyes, but he hugged his chest and blinked
them away. It tortured him that he couldn’t change what
happened.

From the depths of agony, Sheikoh
gritted his teeth.

Why did he have to endure
this all over again? What was the
point
? He knew he wasn’t a good guy
by any means, but the people he’d killed had
deserved
to die. He
knew
they did. He
couldn’t
deserve to
suffer like this.

This was worse than dying ever could
be.

Two unbearable hours. Sheikoh waited
there for two unbearable hours before he watched himself get up.
 

Sometimes Emili hadn’t been able to
make time for lunch of course, but when she couldn’t, she always
made sure to send him a text. He’d texted her, but she didn’t
reply. The kid’s expression grew anxious as he watched his cellpad
for any new messages.

Finally he stood up and pushed through
the door.

Above, Sheikoh thought he’d be
relieved when the waiting was over with, but he felt even worse.
Memories pressed themselves over his eyes, and dread curled in his
gut like a snake.  

When he closed his eyes, he was inside
his younger head. He opened them with a weak cry and a shudder.
Reliving this day was the only eventuality that was worse than
watching from the sky. Sheikoh let his hair fall over his
face.

The chair began lumbering off behind
the kid, and he broke like a twig.

“
Please no, don’t make me
see this again, please make it stop,” he begged the chair in a
whisper. He tried to force himself off the blue armchair, but it
was attached to his spine. He willed the armchair’s flight to stop
without success. It was somehow anchored to Sheikoh below. The
teenager was forced to watch himself dodging briskly through
crowded walkways. Sheikoh came home and found the door locked. He
opened it with his spare key.

“
Emili? Anyone here?”
Sheikoh shouted. There was no answer.

The blue chair floated through a wall,
and Sheikoh saw the sharp worry in his own face. It echoed deep in
him even though he had nothing to worry about; anxiety is for the
future. And he already knew the end to this story.

Younger Sheikoh drifted through a
notebook on the kitchen table, the one Emili used to keep track of
business transaction. His younger self read the last entry
aloud.

“
$99… #122… The
Trickway…”

Sheikoh turned and headed out of the
door. Behind him, Sheikoh followed.

He remembered feeling faintly hopeful,
now that he had a plan of action. But it hadn’t dispelled all of
his worry; it’d been out of character for Emili to forget to send
him a message. She texted more than anyone he knew.

The real Sheikoh suddenly remembered
thinking that Emili had been kidnapped. He wished that was the
case. It would’ve been better that way. Easier, for
sure.

An invisible tether locked him to the
child beneath. He watched himself dart through Interium, lost in
his pain. Before Four had become popular, gangsters used to break
into people’s homes to ‘charge’. They would go through a family’s
fridge and sprinkle a pinch of the bone-white dust into a few
drinks, then write a tiny, little phone number on the bottom of it;
something you’d find only if you were desperate for every last drop
of the liquid.

The addict ended up calling the
number. Four was the most addicting substance on the planet.
Charging was a short-lived fad, though; once Four had become
well-known, the demand had far exceeding the supply for whatever
reason. Even after the original charging victims overdosed and died
off, there were always people after the life-ruining
substance.

Sheikoh floated above Interium, forced
to relive his worst nightmare. Every heartbeat tore his chest with
blades of loss. His hand twisted into a taunt claw over his ribs,
trying to hold the agonizing pain at bay. Cold dribbled from his
chest like blood and fear.

Love was
shit
. Love wasn’t worth
the pain it brought. Sheikoh just wanted to die, but he’d already
done that. He wanted oblivion. He wanted to disappear, to leave and
never come back. But he couldn’t. Life had finally done broken him.
Sheikoh was utterly, heartrendingly, shattered. For painless black
nonbeing, Sheikoh would even shoot some Four.

 
Below him, the kid
froze in horror.

There was no way he was looking. No
way in hell. Not again.

Sheikoh turned his head.
He couldn’t add another image of Emili, lying in the dirt and rags,
to himself. He couldn’t take it. But the chair was merciless. It
twisted through the air, forcing Sheikoh’s eyes on Emili’s prone
body. Either that, or it was the whole world twisting around him
and the hateful, horrible chair he was trapped in. Its base thudded
against dirty concrete walkway.

Sheikoh’s neck began bending of its
own accord, and he was forced to watch himself shake Emili’s
shoulder and try to pull her out of unconsciousness. For the second
time, he saw the syringe lodged into Emili’s lolling arm. He wanted
to vomit or cry or gouge out his own eyes as he watched himself,
sobbing silently, pull the needle out of Emili’s arm. A trickle of
blood wound down the teenage girl’s arm, so Sheikoh ripped off a
piece of his shirt and bound the hole.