Crash (18 page)

He shifts an empty milk carton to the right, taps it against the table a couple of times, and shifts it back to the left. “What you're talking about here, Miki . . . I'm not skilled at it. Think of it as someone doing surgery with a machete instead of a scalpel.” He rubs his left arm, the one with the scars he got when he returned from the mission where Lizzie died, somehow bringing a Drau back with
him. “I've only tried it twice. On two of
them
. Never on a person.”

“Guess I'll be the first,” I say. I sink my teeth into my lower lip, wondering what he's going to think when he finds out about the Drau begging for mercy, about how she didn't kill me when she had the chance, about my suspicion that Lizzie has Drau on her team and that those Drau helped save our lives the night of the Halloween dance. “It'll be okay.”

“Will it? I can't go in and delicately pick out the bits you want to share,” he says, his tone harsh. “When I did this before, I was pretty much like a backhoe shoveling out tons of information, then sifting through it to find what I wanted. Strategies. Attack plans. Locations. I'll see things you might not want me to see. Do you understand what you're asking me to do?”

I think of the Committee trying to force their way into my brain and huff an ugly little laugh. “Nothing that hasn't already been done to me.”

“No.” He surges to his feet, staring down at me through his mirrored shades.

“No, you won't do it? Or no, you're pissed that they tried?”

“Both. Miki—” He makes a visible effort to uncurl his fists, lower his shoulders, take a slow breath. He's back in control, but I figure it's by a thread. “Wait . . . you said they
tried
. They didn't succeed?”

I shake my head. “And you need to know why.” I get to
my feet and methodically gather the garbage onto the tray. Then I carry it to the bin, dump it, and set the tray on top. “There's a bench out back. It's in this isolated little courtyard. I found it when Mom was here. I went there when I needed to cry and I didn't want anyone to see. We can do this there.”

For once, Jackson lets me have the last word. He hooks his finger through my belt loop and follows me outside, but I can feel the tension radiating off him in waves.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

IN WARMER WEATHER, THE TREES IN THE COURTYARD ARE green, the flowers pink and yellow and red. But today, the world is a million shades of depressing gray—hospital walls, bare branches, and the patchy, frozen grass of early winter.

The times I've come here before, it was almost always deserted. True to pattern, there's no one but us here today, either.

I lead Jackson to the bench. We sit sideways, so we're facing each other.

“So how does this work? Do you ask me questions and then root around in my head for the answers?” I ask.

“Root around? Like a hog?” he asks dryly.

I smile a little, surprised that I can when I'm so wound
up. But that's the thing about Jackson. He always manages to reach through my mood, even when it's sad or angry or scared.

He takes my hand and slides his fingers through mine. The air's cold; his skin's warm. He lifts my hands to his lips to blow warm breaths against my fingertips, then tucks my hands in his coat pockets.

“Putting my thoughts in your head's pretty much second nature,” he says. “I don't really think about it. I just do it. But the other half of the equation, hearing what you're thinking, that's foreign territory.”

“It hurt them, right?” The Drau. “When you did this to them?” Just like it hurt him when the Committee tried to thrust themselves into his mind.

Jackson clenches his jaw. “Yeah.”

I remember watching on the monitor while he dispatched the Drau with his knife on the last mission, his face expressionless, reflecting neither joy nor remorse. He isn't expressionless now. He's tense, wary.

“It didn't hurt me,” I say. “When they tried to get in. They told me that if you had just let them in when they wanted inside your head, it wouldn't have hurt you, either. I'm guessing the—” I break off, reminding myself not to say the word
Drau
out loud, not to do anything that might flag the Committee's attention. “The
ones
you questioned weren't exactly thrilled to have you stomping around inside their brains. I'm guessing they put up a fight.”

“You could say that.”

“So we're going to work with the idea that if I just let you in, if I don't fight you, it won't hurt.” I swallow and rush on. “But even if it does, even if it's agonizing, you have to keep going. You can't stop. I need you to know what I know. We need to make a plan.”

Jackson shakes his head. “We don't have to do this, Miki. Think about it logically. If they were listening in on us right now, if they could hear us, then they'd know why we're sitting”—he gestures around us—“here. They'd know what we're planning to do and they'd have stopped us by now. Which means they can't hear us. So it's safe for you to just tell me.”

“They can hear us. And they're smart enough to use our laissez-faire attitude to their advantage. You want it to be safe because you don't want to take the risk of doing this.”

His brows rise. “Do you?”

“No, but I think we're out of choices. We can't assume they aren't listening in. They could have a million reasons for not stopping us right now. Maybe they don't listen in all the time, but they could just happen to tune in right when I divulge information we don't want them to know. Maybe they aren't listening at all. Maybe they can't.

“But maybe they
are
listening right now, amusing themselves at our expense, waiting to see if this experiment will work,” I say. “Just waiting for us to slip up and say something by mistake. We don't know, and it isn't just my secrets I'm about to share. There are other people”—I
pause over that word, thinking of Lizzie and her team, thinking that maybe that team isn't completely human—“involved. Other people at risk.”

“When did they become the enemy?” he asks, meaning the Committee.

“I didn't say they are.” Or maybe they always were. I'm just not sure anymore.

Silence hangs between us.

I pull my hands from his pockets and lift his glasses. He holds still and lets me, his eyes locked on mine. I will him to understand my turmoil. There's just a ton of stuff that doesn't add up: Lizzie, the Drau that Kendra killed, Lizzie's team that I never get to see, the Committee's harshness. Maybe if he knows what I know, he'll make different connections than the ones that are starting to haunt me.

Finally, he says, “We do it your way,” his tone even. Sure. Confident. Now that we've made the decision, committed to a path, he'll stay the course, steady, strong. That's who he is.

“So how do we do this?” I ask.

“I bounce questions at you and I try to lock in on answers.”

“But you might not just lock in on the answers. You might find out other things, too.” Other things like my private thoughts and emotions, which won't confound him the way they did the Committee. That's an advantage that Jackson will have over them. No matter how much he pretends not to feel, I know he does. Deeply. So once he's in, I
doubt I'll have much in the way of privacy, and I won't be able to use emotion to push him out the way I did them. I force a smile. “This is going to be interesting.”

His lips draw taut. “Yeah.”

Okay, then. “When you questioned . . .
them
. . . did you find out things about them? Private things?”

He frowns. “I never really thought about this before, but no. I just got answers to my questions.” His expression tells me that something about that snares his interest. It snares mine, too.

“Because you were so intent on those questions that all you heard was the answers?”

“Could be. Or maybe they feel nothing,
think
of nothing except killing and hate.”

“I don't—” I don't think so, but there's no sense arguing the point now. He'll be inside my head, seeing my thoughts, knowing what I know soon enough. I wonder if his opinion of the Drau will change once he experiences what I did: the Drau's pleas, her terror, the horror of her death.

“I'll try to stay on topic, Miki,” he says softly. “Try not to see anything . . . private.”

I wait for him to do something, to start the process, but he doesn't, and it hits me that he still isn't convinced. Or maybe he doesn't want to be the one to start. Maybe he's offering the first serve to me as a courtesy. But if that's the case, it's the wrong approach. The rules of this game aren't rules I know.

“It'll be okay,” I say. If I'm honest, that's as much a
reassurance for myself as it is for him. When he still makes no move, I cup his cheeks and lift my lips to his, intending only a brief touch, a reaffirmation of trust.

But Jackson has something else in mind. His arms come around me like steel bands, drawing me tight against him as he lowers his mouth to mine, his lips firm and soft. His fingers tangle in my hair. He deepens the kiss, his lips parting and slanting on mine, tongues touching, heat coiling through me. He tastes like chocolate and mint.

Miki.
His voice inside my head, followed by images and emotions, things he's seen that he wants me to see. He's done this before, melded his thoughts with mine so I could experience his memories, see myself through his eyes, the girl with the long dark hair standing in the crashing waves at Atlantic Beach. I see her now, see
me
now. The way he sees me.

But this time, it's more than that, deeper. I
feel
what he feels, every receptor in my body alive to sensation as he sends me his thoughts in words and images and emotions.

I see things he chooses to show me, the way he experiences the world. The exhilaration of the cold air on his skin. The way my hair feels to his touch. The way my lips feel beneath his. The way I look when I laugh, head thrown back, teeth flashing. The way I look when I sleep, curled up on my side, hands tucked under my chin. I see myself on missions, strong, fast, smart.

I see the girl he sees, and she is me.

Jackson touches the edges of my mind, looking for a
way in, not like when the Committee forced icy fingers into my temples and the base of my skull. Jackson's touch is gentle, testing the boundaries, slow, easy, like we have all the time in the world.

The air around us is cold, but I am warm from the heat of his body, his kiss like a fire inside me.

I open my heart, open my mind, an invitation. I don't feel him walk through the door, but I know he's there. I balk, backtrack, try to pull away. What made me think I could do this? What made me think I should?

He fires questions at me about the Committee and the Drau, about Lizzie and the conversation we had, too fast for me to follow. I panic, trying to scramble for answers.

I don't—

I can't—

He repeats them, slower, gentler, finding his pace as I find mine. And there are other questions, too—questions about me, the things I like, the things I don't like, questions about me as a little girl, birthday parties and balloons, Sofu, Gram, kendo, all the things I've never told him because there hasn't been time or he hasn't asked or I haven't thought about them in so, so long. But those more personal questions are faint, like echoes, like he's holding them on a leash.

Curiosity. I feel it. He wants to know everything about me, but he's holding back, keeping himself from digging deeper than I want to let him go.

“Where's the mystery then? A girl has to have some
secrets,” I say, except I don't because his lips are on mine, my lips on his, the flames between us burning bright, licking at my limbs. Still, he hears me. His low laughter is effervescent in my blood, filling me until it runs over the brim.

In the way that thoughts do—popping up unexpectedly with no rhyme or reason—a memory surfaces of him shirtless in the tree behind his house, the planes and shadows of his abdomen, his arms, his chest.

Now his laughter has a tinge of swagger.

I focus on the things I need him to know, about the Drau who begged for mercy. About Lizzie and everything she said. About the Committee and what happened when I stood alone before them, the way I thwarted them, my fears of the next time I'm summoned to face them and what they might do to me then.

He knows what I know. He feels what I feel.

Carly. Dad. So much worry. So much pain. He takes it inside himself, shares in my burden.

I'm here.
He is. He's here, holding me in his arms as I hold him in mine.

The gossamer thread connecting us wavers and Jackson begins to withdraw. I'm cold without him. I don't want him to go, not yet. So I follow him, one careful step at a time.