Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) (24 page)

Strega is the only thing that feels like home. It makes no sense. There’s no reason that he, with his Concordian customs and knowledge and history, should feel like Attero to me. He’d be baffled by Attero, by the lack of sophisticated diagnostic and preventative medical technology. We’re in the dark ages compared to this place. And still he feels like home. Like everything is okay. All of the danger recedes to far corners while he’s near.

This time, when we trace, Strega’s memory is a pleasant one. It’s of him and Ritter, young enough that Ritter’s parents are still alive somewhere, but old enough that the boys are almost too old for the sort of game they’re playing. The two of them are out behind the Bocek keeping in the rugged, high-desert back yard, chasing each other around with toy interrupters, which are like Atteroan stun guns but with longer lasting paralysis.

For some reason, I don’t fuse completely with Strega the way I did with the horrible memory of his parents on the slide. This one is more like watching a home movie of the two of them.

“I got you!” Ritter whines when Strega doesn’t pretend to fall, paralyzed, to the ground.  “Strega, I got you. You’re paralyzed!”

Ritter is small compared to Strega, even with the two year difference in their ages. The frustration on Ritter’s face is obvious. By the looks of him, he’s used to Strega winning out at most games. And now, when he clearly feels he’s achieved something, Strega’s failure to acknowledge the victory hits him hard.

In that moment, finally, I fully meld with Strega. His experience becomes mine even while I still know who I am.  Our chest hurts at the look on Ritter’s face. It’s just a game, but it is clear that’s not how it feels to Ritter. We think of onboarding, how no one wants him on their teams during body mastery because he’s always a little slower, a little clumsier than everyone else.

We can give him this. We want to. And it’s okay, it’s not a lie, we tell ourselves, because it won’t hurt him. It will make him happy.

We drop to the ground, unmoving. Unblinking. It’s cold in the shade of the large pepper tree, and we’d just been about to suggest a break for the cleanse and a snack. The cold only increases our need to pee.

Ritter jumps up and down nearby, celebrating his delayed victory. We hope it is genuine, that he doesn’t suspect we just gave in.  We blink while he’s not looking because the staring makes our eyes water after too long.

We wonder how long we should wait before pretending to regain use of our muscles. Surely he doesn’t expect the full span of actual interrupters.  That would be unbearable!

Ritter’s celebration wanes as he realizes that by interrupting us, he’s lost us. We can’t play if we’re paralyzed, after all. And so he crouches next to us and plucks a fallen twig from the ground and says,

“Look! I’ve discovered this wand that can make the interrupter wear off instantly! Let me just charge it. Once I touch it to you, you’ll be fine.”

We have to bite the inside of our cheek to keep from smiling. He might not be cut out for sports, but he’s got us all beat when it comes to imagination.

“What happened?” we ask the moment the twig touches us. Ritter smiles and says,

“I saved you.”

“Thanks,” we grin, popping to our feet.

It seems Strega and I are doomed to opposite traces. When mine was pleasant, his was horrible. And now his is pleasant and mine is not.

I take Strega through the night of May sixteenth, the night Ritter saved me from the path of an oncoming car and sentenced me to Assimilation with the threat of Disposal.

The memory is fresh. Surreal. Time hasn’t dulled the fear or the sensation of bile rising at the back of my throat as Jake Armadice gropes me against the tool shed. When Concordia returns and we find ourselves with our fingers resting lightly on each other’s left arm, Strega and I are both trembling.

I can’t look at him. The things he’s seen. The wild party I didn’t even want to go to. Rae with the random guy. Seeing it through his eyes, I feel ashamed. Ashamed of myself for being there, ashamed of what he’s seen Rae doing, what he must think of my best friend. Of me, by association.

He hooks my chin with one finger so that I can’t reasonably look away from him. And then he kisses me and the shame recedes. It doesn’t vanish. I will always carry regret with me. Regret that the last time my parents saw me, I fought with them. Regret that I let my anger over my father’s broken promise fuel my decision to go this party to spite him and to spite my mother for siding with him.

Strega has seen it all now, has felt it alongside me.  He fits me against himself and strokes my hair instead of walking away from the selfish, pouting girl I was.

Relief lulls me to sleep.

21

I CAN HEAR them yelling from outside the meld. It’s early, and neither would have thought to expect me back from Assimilation for another half hour but a system upgrade at the reaction center led the facilitators to dismiss us early with an early start time tomorrow.

“You promised!” Strega bellows.

“And I’m keeping it, Strega!  It’s what I was assigned to do. Do you think refusing to perform the duties of my function will help me keep my level up?”

Ritter catches sight of me and immediately tries to pull me in.  “You should be helping me,” he says. “Concordia wants to obliterate Attero! Their answer to Supernova is to introduce a wave of mass suicide! Strega, they have enough evidence from their test run on the low functioners to confirm that they can manipulate the suicide genes. All they need to do is find a surefire method for the widespread release of whatever it is that they’re using to activate those genes, and then they’ll dump it on Attero! Once they do, any person with the mutations will end.”

Not having heard the entire argument, I can only look from one of them to the other.

“He’s spying on the guardians,” Strega informs me, “hanging around their unwinds, their parks, their neighborhoods! He came in wearing a guardian uniform.” Turning back to Ritter he snaps, “They’re going to learn who you are, and you’ll
both
be disposed!”

“Can you be disposed of just for performing your function?” I ask Ritter, despite his prior assurances that heralds have some leeway when it comes to violations of the theft standard as it applies to the theft of truth.

“No,” he answers, shooting Strega a triumphant look that brings back a flash of memory about their childhood game with the interrupters. He might as well be hopping gleefully up and down in Strega’s back yard.

“Were you specifically told to go undercover, to pretend you’re one of them? Is that where you got the guardian uniform?” I ask.

“I was told to get the story on the raids,” Ritter says. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“Getting disposed of won’t do anything to help Attero,” I reply.

“And have you forgotten about Davinney?” Strega asks. “If you’re disposed before she assimilates, she’s disposed of, too!”

“If someone doesn’t piece this together soon, either Attero destroys us, or we destroy them. And then each side’s allies will retaliate. The entire multiverse could be at stake!” Ritter cries.

They’re increasingly agitated, the distance between them closing a little more with each word spoken. I step between them and place a hand on each of their chests.

“Stop!” I yell, staring out toward the canals. If I look at one or the other of them, the one I’m looking at will assume I’m siding with them. It doesn’t matter who’s right. “We shouldn’t be talking about this here.” My pointed look along the walls and at the light fixtures clues them in.

Strega backs away from my hand to signal he’s done. Ritter steps back, too, but his look is accusing. He storms out of the keeping. When Strega moves to follow, I put my hand on his chest again.

“Let him go. He needs to blow off some steam.”

I manage to convince Strega to go to his keeping and let me talk to Ritter. At the meldway he turns to me and says,

“This is out of control.”

Above all, Strega hates being out of control. For all his intelligence, he still hasn’t learned that control is an illusion. He is not in control of anything. Neither is Ritter.

Neither am I.

Even so, someone has to get Ritter to lay low. Who better than me?

After about an hour, I find Ritter at an unwind three blocks from the keeping. With that sort of lead time, he’s well on his way to a hangover.  He looks up at me with bloodshot eyes.

“Go away,” he says and downs the rest of the amber liquid in his glass.

“Ritter,” I begin, but he actually claps a hand over my mouth to shut me up.

“No,” he shakes his head. “You need to have a little faith in me,” he slurs.

Wondering how he’s gotten this way on what the unwind’s ScanX will allow, I pull his hand off my mouth, but I let him go on.

“I would
never
do anything to get you disposed of. Never,” he shakes his head. His hair is sticking up in all directions because he rakes his hands through it when he’s upset.

“Ritter,” I say and lean back to avoid the hand that tries to silence me again. “You’ve got to function tomorrow. We need to go now. Pay your tab, and let’s go.”

He clumsily signals the barkeep, who shoves the Idix reader across the bar so quickly I have to wonder if Ritter’s been bothering him. On the way to the meld, Ritter picks up some long gone patron’s half full glass from a table and gulps it down. I make a face and tug on his elbow. That explains how he got past the ScanX.

He can walk surprisingly well. I’d been worried that he wouldn’t even make it to the slide, and I’d have to log Strega for help. He’s only a little unsteady, and he chooses to follow me rather than resist.

By the time we’re actually on the slide, he’s grown quiet but more alert. His eyes, when he glances my way, are less hazy and his pupils no longer dilated. The only thing that tells me he’s still a little drunk is that he weaves just a little as he’s exiting the slide.

I give up on talking to him tonight, content to walk beside him, letting the crisp air sober him up even more. It’s amazing to me that I need long sleeves in early August. But then, we’re not in Surprise, Arizona. The coordinates research we did in onboarding confirmed my suspicions. We are in what Attero calls the Pacific Northwest. Washington, to be precise.  

Ritter’s still just a little clumsy, and he stumbles into me as he reaches past me for the sensor. We’ve continued to set the meld to unwilling, even though we know it won’t keep the guardians out. The hassle it will cause them if they raid the keeping is satisfying in a petty sort of way.

As he leans for the sensor, Ritter’s face is close to mine. Just before he kisses me, I realize that he’s going to and I duck away, thrusting my hands against his chest.

“I’m not Linney,” I blurt.

He frowns. “I know that!”

I search his face. “Do you?”

Maybe he does. Maybe I don’t.

The next morning, Ritter creeps into the dining room as I’m eating breakfast. Very deliberately, he eases into a dining room chair. I wonder if it is a hangover or if he’s walking on eggshells because of what happened at the meld last night.

He nearly whispers, though, so I suspect it’s the latter. “I just wanted to say, again, that I would never do anything to get you disposed.”

I can’t say, “I know.”  I can’t say it because his actions are saying the opposite.

“Are you factored if you’re function free?” I ask, staring down at my plate. The ScanX has me eating heartily these days because Assimilation is so intense. I’m always rebuilding, as Strega would say.

“No,” Ritter answers softly. He doesn’t have to ask what I’m getting at. “I’ll ask my superior about leave today. Enough to last until you assimilate.”

I look up at him, but now he won’t look at me. I nod. “Thanks.”

He starts to reach for me, but he stops, his arm falling back to his side.  “I know you’re not Linney,” he says softly. And then he pushes away from the table before I can say anything else.

I close my eyes. I’ve hurt him. I don’t know what to do about that, how to fix it. My hearty meal holds no further appeal, but I finish it, anyway. I’ll need the energy for combat.

When we break for lunch, I check my logger. There’s a single line of text from Ritter.

I’m function free until August 25th.

I can’t help the rush of relief that courses through me at the sight of those words. He can’t lose another function level if he’s not factored during leave. I don’t have time to answer back. We’re due in the reaction center, and I still have to return my empty box to the onboarding facility’s ScanX.

The trouble with everything that’s going on is that I’m distracted in the reaction center. I make a couple of mistakes that could have been very bad for me, but Stacy manages to fix both. As my partner in this exercise, she has a vested interest in my actions.

“Get it together,” she hisses, thumping my back hard with her palm, disguising it as protection as we run for the concrete pad.

To my credit, I’m the first to notice the arrows, and I yank hard on her collar. She gets the message and we Army-crawl the last few feet to the pad. Her eyes flick to mine as we rest on all fours, catching our breath.

“That’s better,” she says, one corner of her mouth quirking upward. I know better than to not smile back. If you don’t give her the reaction she expects, she’ll force it out of you. She scares the hell out of me.

Yaryk scares me, too. We used to be friends, or something close to it. But ever since I outranked him he’s been frosty. He no longer strategizes with me. Krill is becoming more distant, as well. It just drives home that in the end, it is every person for themselves.

The gap between Yaryk and I grows since Stacy and I just beat him and Krill. Krill’s eyes rest coolly on mine as I imagine he mentally calculates the point difference between us. Then he drags a towel over his face and shoulders his way past me through the meld.

As we scatter to different slides, I feel a pang of longing for Kate. I miss her, miss having a true friend in Assimilation. Knowing I have Strega and Ritter helps, of course, but the days are long and hostile.

It is August 9
th
, two weeks until Belgrade shares our factors with the Tribunal. If I factor well, I become a full-fledged citizen of Concordia. If I don’t, I become one of the disposed.

Ritter is reasonably safe now, so long as he keeps his word and stops snooping around in the guardians’ affairs and does no further research on erasure. It is on me now, a thought that brings a lump to my throat.

It’s been almost three months, but I feel like I’ve been here a year. That last day on Attero feels so distant. Slamming out of the house when Dad told me we were moving again, when he reneged on his vow to put me up in my own apartment…I wish I could take it back. So what?  So what if we moved to Georgia for his promotion to Lieutenant General at Moody AFB? 

I never even congratulated him.

I can see clearly now how moving across the United States again, starting over…all of it would be a welcome change now, in hindsight. Family is everything.

Ritter, part of my Concordia family, is not at the keeping when I arrive. Given that he’s function free, the fact that he’s not there ratchets up my concern. I’m just about to log Strega when he enters the living room.

“Why is the meld set to willing?” he asks crossly.

I slip my arms around him and kiss him just below his ear before whispering, “It doesn’t matter, Strega. The guardians can enter no matter how the meld is set.”

He sighs deeply, and his muscles relax just a little. “Anything new today?” he whispers back.

“No.”

I am relatively unharmed, so instead of pulling me into the cleanse, he locks his arms around me and kisses me deeply.

“Of course.”

I freeze at the dull sound of Ritter’s voice. The anguish in his voice stabs at my heart, but then Strega and I turn to him and I see that same weary resignation in his face that I saw when he zapped Strega with the toy interrupter and Strega didn’t fall.  The betrayal is too much for Ritter. He storms out of the keeping for the second time in two days.

I let my forehead fall to Strega’s chest. “He’s still so tied up in Linney,” I groan.  “He says he knows I’m not her, but then he goes and tries to kiss me, and I—”

Strega looks like I’ve just smacked him. “What? He tried to kiss you?” Now Strega is angry. “Why would you push him away?”

I back out of his embrace. “What do you mean, why would I push him away?” I ask incredulously.

Strega pales, reaching for my hands, but I hold them out of range. “That’s not what I meant,” he says, shaking his head. “I just meant that maybe until you’ve assimilated, it would be better if...couldn’t you just—”

“Couldn’t I what? Loan myself out to your brother because I look like someone he loved and lost? Are you seriously suggesting that I should let Ritter kiss me just to keep him calm and out of trouble until Assimilation is over?” My voice rises until I’m surprised the glass isn’t rattling.

Strega looks sheepish now.

“You don’t know what it did to him,” Strega tries again to take my hands. “When Linney ended, he was…he was…”

I nod numbly. “Yeah, Strega, I’m sure I have no idea what it’s like to have someone I love torn away from me.”

“Don’t do that with me,” Strega frowns.

“What? Don’t do what?”

“Be sarcastic like that. You don’t have to do that.”

“Why not? Because it might make it even more obvious that you just hurt my feelings? Because it might prove that there are some things that your stupid alpha inducers can’t fix?”

Strega looks like he wants to say something else.  In the end, he just takes a step back. And then he leaves. He turns and he leaves, and I am alone in the keeping.