The Other Side (16 page)

A
line of azure fire streaks through purple puffs of sunset clouds. A drone plummets, explodes. Soldier Boy orders us to a black barn two fields over. He looks at me as if he expects an argument. I give him a worthwhile scowl but a grudging nod.

Black Hair interprets the situation with more clarity. “Run, Colin. As fast and far as you can. Praxus will kill you.”

“Praxus.” Soldier Boy recites the name as if it's an epithet. He steps up to Black Hair, eyes ablaze. “I should put you down for this.”

“Maybe later. Right now, you're the one who has to worry.”

Soldier Boy shakes his head. “Drone goes down, dragon
jets scramble. In a few minutes, your friend will be dead and Melissa will be free.”

“Will there be enough?” Black Hair says. “Given everything that's happened, how can you be sure the dragon jets will even show?”

They continue to argue. They make the mistake of forgetting about me.

I sift through dead weeds and find a suitable rock. I'm tiptoeing into position behind Soldier Boy when a raspy voice startles me.

You condemn cowardice, yet only cowards sneak up on their enemies.

True, but I don't care. I cock my improvised cudgel, focus on his brain stem. Kill shot. Always go for the kill shot, somebody once told me.

I swing. Somehow Soldier Boy ducks away, as if he has eyes in the back of his head. Or a raspy voice in it, I realize as he spins toward me. Before I can strike again, he grabs hold of me, whirls me around, and twists my arm behind me until I cry out and release the rock.

Two Reds emerge from the clouds overhead. The dim one with the mangled tail descends toward us as the other bellows and launches itself at Praxus. Brightening, Praxus tightens his wings to his body and accelerates with his own roar.

RPGs shriek back and forth; invisible bullets purr across the sky. The dragons evade and resume their collision course. The Red's quicker, darting around Praxus's bursts of fire, but it can never get close enough to do any real damage to the larger dragon. It's nothing more than a pesky gnat.

Soldier Boy's grip on me loosens a notch. I glance at him. He's fixated on the battle. I groan. “Colin, you're hurting me.”

“Melissa?”

“Yes,” I whisper. “What's happening to me, Colin? I'm scared.”

He leans in. “It's going to be okay, Mel—”

I whip my head into his jaw. He staggers. I thrust my elbow into his gut, donkey kick a kneecap. He doubles over, letting go of me altogether.

I throw another elbow at his Adam's apple but am jerked away by Black Hair. He flings me to the ground, straddles me, pins my shoulders. I knee him in the groin, slip an arm free, and straight punch him in the nose, followed by a jab to the solar plexus.

Blood pouring from his nostrils onto my neck, he grabs my wrist, smashes it to the ground. He clamps his legs around mine, flips me over, puts me in a chokehold. I thrash, but he is stronger than he acts.

“I'm sorry,” Black Hair says, and presses hard against my
throat. My breath weakens. The distant music of roars and gunfire fades, my resistance wanes, my vision tunnels on that dim dragon hovering above us.

A rider dismounts via the rope ladder hanging from its shoulder. He hurries over, grapples with Black Hair.

“Get off her, James.” His voice, muffled by an oxygen mask, sounds a mile away.

Soldier Boy yanks the rider away. “She's not right, Preston. Dragon exposure.”

“That's not real,” the rider says.

“It's very real,” Black Hair says. “She'll be fine. Go. Now, before it's too late.”

“It already is,” I want to tell them, but I can't speak.

They argue, but I can no longer make sense of their words. A dragon scream pierces the night. The rider blanches, and in the moment before everything goes dark, I think I hear him say, “Keith.”

I
wake with a headache. Not a normal one. CENSIRed.

A heaviness weighs on my wrists. Shackles.

I force my eyes open.

The edges of a steel ceiling come into view.

I struggle into a sitting position, clanking the entire way. I'm in the corner of a room of indeterminate size. The fading light from a pair of hand-crank lamps illuminates my cot, a nearby toilet, a shelving unit laden with water bottles and canned food. The steel walls around me disappear into shadow after a few feet.

Chains thicker than my thumb connect my shackles to bolts in the concrete floor. I give them a yank. The metal bites into my wrist. The limits of my leash allow me to reach the toilet and shelving unit. After relieving my bladder, I
forage through the pop-top cans of ravioli.

“Sorry, Melissa, not the greatest selection.” Black Hair steps from the shadows, a tablet clutched in his left hand, his right arm bound in a sling. He cranks the nearest lamp to full brightness to reveal a dozen more cots and shelving units scattered throughout a large room, though my sleeping cubicle is the only one outfitted with a toilet, provisions, and manacles.

“What happened? Where are we?” I ask as he sits in a chair beyond my reach.

“Somewhere safe, Melissa,” he says. “Detox usually takes several days.” He indicates my manacles. “Until then, we need to protect you from yourself.”

I offer up an agreeable smile. “I am harmless.”

“There's no point in lying, Melissa.” He taps his own CENSIR, shows me his tablet.
CENSIR for Melissa Callahan
is written above a 3-D image of a brain. Flashing red text on the right side of the screen indicates my
Current synaptic state
as
Violent, dangerous to others
.

I lose the smile. “What do you want?”

He loads a picture on his tablet of a stern-faced man in army dress blues. The name tag on his uniform says
CALLAHAN
. “Do you recognize this person, Melissa?”

“The cripple.” Before he was crippled. “And stop saying that name.”

“Melissa, he is your father. Peter,” Black Hair says.

“I don't see the relevance of who he was.”

Black Hair pulls up another picture. A ginger in dragon camos. He sits atop a pile of rubble beside a dead Green. “Melissa, this is your brother, Sam.”

“If you want me to play this game, stop calling me that.”

He nods, loads another picture. The woman from the yellow Beetle, in dragon-riding attire.

I roll my eyes. “Has to be my mother. I suppose she's alive.”

“No.”

“Too bad. Means I can't kill her for real.”

I grin at Black Hair. He moves on to the next image in his slideshow.

At first I don't recognize her. Not with the makeup, long hair, and full cheeks. She shares an obvious resemblance to her mother, though, which helps me remember. Cut away the brown locks and twenty pounds, and she's that girl in the black car in the black city.

I hone in on the wrinkle of expectation that creases Black Hair's forehead. “My sister?”

His tablet indicates my lie, but he doesn't call me on it. Instead he tosses me a compact. “You don't have a sister.”

I check my reflection, gasp with feigned drama. Yes, we look alike, but that girl is not me. That girl was a fool. I
toss the compact back. “You tried to save her, didn't you? But you couldn't. You couldn't save her, could you? Could you?”

He rises.

“Couldn't even save yourself,” I call after him.

“Tomorrow will be better, Melissa,” he says calmly, though he makes his escape from the room a hair too quickly.

Using my manacles as an improvised whetstone, I sharpen a half-dozen ravioli lids into jagged shivs. I slice up a bedsheet for handles. Then I practice, accustoming myself to the weight of the chains and the feel of my makeshift talons. They will no doubt fold against bone, but should make it through skin and sinew well enough.

I wake with tears on my cheeks. Black Hair sits nearby.

“A memory?” he asks.

“A nightmare.” One of many. The girl was in all of them. Sometimes she was younger, and her mother was around and her father was healthy. Most were more recent: climbing a hill with her friends to take a picture around a dormant Blue; stargazing with Black Hair atop a stone tower; sitting in a room surrounded by people who stare at her with loathing, except for her father, who can express no emotion because of his crippled nature, but somehow the emotion—something far kinder than loathing; something I can't quite wrap my
mind around—leaked out anyway.

All the emotions did, hers in particular. Too often it was a mixture of fear, anguish, or, worst of all, that one the cripple had, which popped up in all the scenes with her family, that Silver, or that annoying little talker girl.

Black Hair looks at me with clear expectation. He wants to talk about these nightmares of mine.

I head for the toilet. “Can you give me a sec?”

He spins around, retreats to the door. I recover my sharpened ravioli lids from beneath the mattress, wedging them between my fingers. I keep my hands relaxed so they remain concealed.

I flush. “Who is the black man with the scar on his face?”

Black Hair returns. “Oren. What did you think of him, Melissa?”

“He takes what he wants at any cost. He is not afraid.”

“In a world of cowards, that must be nice.”

“Yes.”

“How do you feel?”

I chew at a blister on my lip. It's all I can do not to look at his throat. I must focus elsewhere. I settle on his shoes. “These nightmares, they are the girl's memories?”

“They are your memories, Melissa. They will grow stronger. The ones Praxus fed you will dissipate. You will return to normal.”

“Whose normal? Yours? That's what you want, isn't it? Somebody you can protect, somebody who needs you. Somebody to make you feel important. Because you don't feel important, do you?”

He chuckles. “That Melissa never needed me.” He loads a family portrait. “Tell me about your dreams.”

I slump onto the bed. “There's no point fighting it, is there?”

“The faster you cooperate, the faster you'll be free.”

I sigh. “The first one was a long time ago. Melissa was eight or nine. The principal stood in the door of her classroom. A visit from him only ever meant one of two things. Fortunately, somebody hadn't died. Melissa's mom was going to war.”

“Olivia,” Black Hair says.

“Yes, Olivia. Mom. Melissa stood on the curb and watched her go.”

“How did she feel?”

An image pops into my head. The girl and her family in a field of black crosses, everybody dressed in bright colors. A knot forms in her throat. I cannot breathe. Her tears swell in my eyes. I force them back.

“Are you okay, Melissa?”

“Terrified,” I say through gritted teeth. “She felt terrified.”

“And you? How do you feel?”

“Strange, uncomfortable.” Good, ambiguous terms.

He checks his tablet. “What happened next?”

I tell him everything. Black Hair interrupts to supply names of people and locations, which I subsequently use to show my progress toward reformation. New memories blindside me along the way. I cry her tears at the more painful recollections, laugh when appropriate. By the end, my eyes sting from her weakness.

Black Hair has edged closer to hear, the tablet set aside long ago.

I finish with the dream of him. “Melissa and you were on that stone tower—”

“Shadow Mountain Lookout,” he says.

For a second I'm in a bivouac, and he's cuffed to a chair. A beautiful woman lies on a gurney nearby, pale and lifeless. Tears streak his face, and he is brittle with pain. A blink, and I'm back in chains and he's staring at me.

“Your mother had just died,” I say, as if trying to get the facts straight.

He swallows. “Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Doesn't matter. What were Melissa and I doing there?”

“You were showing her the stars. . . .”

“But she already knew them, didn't she?”

“She did. She liked the feel of your arms around her. She felt safe in your arms.” I let her sorrow creep over me. “That's all we ever wanted. We just wanted to be safe, James. I just wanted to be safe, James. But there was nowhere safe.”

He gets up. I clench my hands into fists, exposing the sharp edges of my talons. He crosses that invisible line that I marked in my head yesterday. “You will be safe, Melissa.”

I spring from the bed, slash at his throat. Come up a foot short. He doesn't so much as flinch. He indicates my chains. “Adjusted them before you woke. It's okay. This is not unexpected. But I think we made good progress today, Melissa.”

I glare at him. “You set me up.”

“If you hadn't been so determined to conceal your intentions, you'd have been less cooperative. Tomorrow will be better.”

I won round one, but round two I must grudgingly concede. Round three, however . . . “Yes, tomorrow will be.”

But first I must get through today. We are at war, she and I. Her memories continue to attack in sharp bursts. I exercise at max intensity to combat the onslaught. Push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks with my shackles. When I'm desperate, I hit my healing rib, screaming at the fire that spiderwebs through my chest. Pain helps fight thought better than anything.

But I grow tired.

She does not.

I wake with the name Baby on my lips, the smell of mountain air in my nostrils, and a lightness in my heart. The crank lamp is at full brightness. Morning, I suppose. Black Hair is nowhere in sight.

Between exercises, I look for him. The light dwindles, but he does not show. Perhaps he is out of tricks, perhaps he is afraid of me or, as I realize mid push-up, he knows his presence is no longer needed. . . .

The Silver appears in front of me, her glow dim.
He said you won't have to worry about things like Georgetown, stupid TV shows, or insurgents. He doesn't mean it, Melissa.

My arms give out. I collapse to my stomach and cry. I'm not sure whether they are the girl's tears or mine.

“James!”

He does not answer.

I am repulsed by the desperation that infects me, but I cannot keep from calling again. “James!”

He does not answer.

The third time I break off before his name can escape my throat. I smash my fist into my rib. No! I will not let them defeat me. I roll onto my back and crunch the girl's frailty into oblivion, envisioning ways in which I will kill him, should he make the mistake of ever freeing me. Then the next memory hits, and I am empty again.

He lied to me.

Today is not better.

Nor tomorrow.

Days pass. Black Hair remains a ghost, though the lamp continues to taunt me brightly each morning. I tried to stay awake last night, but he must have waited till my body surrendered before entering the room. He must be monitoring my CENSIR on a regular basis, but if anything, this realization only makes me feel lonely, abandoned.

Makes me feel weak and insignificant.

Like the girl.

“No!”

I hurl ravioli cans, smearing walls with sauce that reminds me of blood. But blood no longer excites me. It only orders up memories of Georgetown and the slaughter slab and more tears. But I hurl them anyway.

Maybe my tantrums will force them to restock.

I perk to every creak, every groan that echoes from beyond the walls. I coil with anticipation, but the sounds fade into imagination too fast.

Sometimes between futile outbursts and futile exercises, I call for Black Hair. “James!” Other times I curse his existence. Sometimes I want him to sweep into the room and hold me to him and lie to me that everything will be all right. Other times I want him to hold me to him and lie with me
so that I can catch him unaware and claim one final victory.

I imagine him there on my mattress and slice him apart with my talons, but I am interrupted by a vision of him with a sword jammed into his stomach. Me holding the hilt. Then I'm crying again. Slicing and crying, slicing and crying.

When Black Hair's not tormenting me, it's the girl's dysfunctional family or that needy silver dragon or that annoying little bitch with her yes, yesses and no, nos. Their names dance on my lips, but I'll be damned if I'll slip and give them sound, too. More push-ups, more sit-ups. More pain. Always more.

“I'll be damned.” I laugh and cry and this time I'm sure they are my tears.

I am damned.

That night, I hear explosions. As I lurch up, that stupid yellow car flashes through my mind's eye. The car horn blares. Closer, in the infinite blackness around me, the red-haired boy whimpers and the cripple offers bullshit words of comfort. The girl stifles sobs.

“Go away!” I yell. “Go away!”

For once, the hallucinations listen. For the most part. The car horn dies. The boy and the father go silent.

The explosions, however, louden.

The earth trembles.

Shelves rattle, cans tumble to the floor.

A flashlight beam sweeps my way, and I flinch, expecting a gunshot and Major Alderson behind it. Except this time, I make no move to avoid it.

But there is no gunshot. The flashlight comes closer.

“Melissa, are you okay?”

I don't recognize this memory.

The crank lamp flares on. A boy around my age smiles at me. He wears a Confederate-flag bandanna. A rectangular piece of paper protrudes from it, taking up the space between his left eye and ear. Something's written on it, but he's too far away for me to read the words.

“I'm Darryl, though everybody calls me Double T. Talker Talker,” the boy says, his words made of rapid-fire twangs. “James asked me to check on you, and I figured things got a little strange and you might be having some questions. If I do say so myself, given the circumstances, you are doin' mighty fine.”