Dualed (21 page)

Chord clears his throat. “I can just tear off the sleeve. If you want, I mean.”

“You can’t,” I murmur. An odd sense of lightness, the painkillers really taking effect now. “I don’t have another shirt.”

Many seconds of silence between the two of us, alive and electric. “Lie down on the bed, then.” Chord’s voice, low in the half dark. “It’ll be faster if I do it.”

So I lie on my back and I can’t breathe as he unbuttons the front of my shirt. His hands feel warm, even through the fabric. My eyes don’t leave his face as he works, and from the set of his jaw, I don’t think he can breathe, either.

When he’s done, he carefully slips one half of the shirt over my shoulder and down my arm, just enough so he can see the bullet wound. Self-consciously I try to cover what I can of my
bra with the other half of my shirt. Why does it have to be one of my more sheer ones, the kind that only just hides my skin? My face is as hot as fire, and Chord’s careful to keep his eyes averted as he messes around in the med kit beside him on the bed.

“You ready, West?” he asks, finally facing me. There’s something shiny and silver in his hand. Tweezers. And they look sharp.

“Yeah,” I lie. “This is going to hurt, isn’t it, even with the painkillers?”

“Probably. I hope not. I’m sorry.”

I shake my head. “Not your fault. It’s fine.”

A few minutes of biting back my whimpers pass before one particular jab has me unable to keep quiet any longer. I gasp. “Are you sure you can do this?”

“Yeah, I am.”

I hiss at the pain and clench my teeth against the feeling of having my shoulder turned inside out. I want more painkillers, but I’ve already taken as much as I can and not overdose. Another long minute passes. “Where did you say you learned how to do this?” I ask him.

A low grunt of concentration. “I didn’t.”

“Are you kidding me? Please tell me you’re kidding me.”

“Relax, West. I saw a SIM of this once.”

“A
what
?”

“A SIM. You know, a simulation, a mock-up. I used to play this RPG all the time with Luc—”

“An RPG?”

“Role-playing game, West. How can you not know—”

“Chord.”

“Well, one of my main characters was an extreme surgeon. Trust me, this is nothing.”

“I guess whoever said video games were a waste of time was wrong,” I say mildly.

Chord laughs, but softly, so as to not jar his hand or my shoulder. “Yeah, I guess.”

I think of how he and Luc spent hours taking unnameable components apart, then putting them back together in different ways, their fingers deft and sure as they handled diminutive tools, chips, bits of material. The way they slung strange words back and forth, a dialect I couldn’t be bothered to learn. Parallax drives. Clover cables. Syntactic boards.

“But I don’t know if using tweezers to play around with gears and wires and whatever else is quite the same thing,” I say to him.

“I’m the best you got.” He takes a second to grin at me. “Though I don’t doubt you could do better, if you weren’t so messed up already.”

“So long as we’re clear on that,” I say.

“Good. Now quit complaining.”

“You’re digging a bullet out of my shoulder,” I remind him. “I’d better be allowed to complain.”

“Not to me,” he says. “I don’t want to hear it. And quit moving, too.”

“I’m
not
moving.”

Another soft laugh. I let a few seconds go by before telling him.

“By the way, thanks. For doing this, I mean.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Though we’re almost there.”

A final shooting wave of agony, rising above my soothing cloud of painkiller-induced numbness, has my entire arm convulsing in reaction. I utter a low moan and fight the urge to curl over onto my side, to shield my shoulder from further damage.

Chord exhales loudly. The release of his tension is palpable.

“Okay, I got it.” He holds up the tweezers to the moon in the window. Pinched between its tips is a small slab of silver. The bullet would be nice and shiny if it weren’t still coated with my blood.

I take it from him, this minute ball of mortality. Rolling it between my fingers, I feel grateful, relieved, and disgusted that I even let it happen.

I drop the bullet on the dirty carpet. It makes no sound as it disappears into the cheap plastic fibers.

“Finish, Chord,” I say to him quietly. “Please.”

The rest goes much faster. The med kit is surprisingly well stocked. Along with the painkillers, there’s rubbing alcohol, packaged swabs of antibiotic cream, a roll of gauze. A bottle of expired penicillin from which I swallow a couple of pills. Nothing for the stitches Chord thinks I need, so he makes do with a lot of gauze and butterfly bandages.

“West, if these don’t hold it together …” He doesn’t finish the thought as he positions the last of the sticky, H-shaped coverings over my shoulder. But I know what he’s thinking.
If these don’t hold it together, we might have to go in
.

No hospitals. No records of how much she’s hurt me, of maybe being put under to be worked on—and having her track
me down, find me defenseless. “They’ll hold, it’ll be fine,” I tell him.

He says nothing, in reluctant understanding of my fear. Gently he helps me pull the shirt back onto my shoulder, not looking at anything other than my chin as he buttons it up.

The last button done, Chord smooths back my awful hair with heated eyes and a low sigh. Still saying nothing, he starts to clean up around me. I stay on the bed, my shoulder pounding despite the medication, and let my eyes roam the room in an effort to distract myself.

There really isn’t much to see. We found the ground-level apartment on the west side of Gaslight. A cold breeze kicked in as we went by, and the white tag on the knob on the front door beckoned us like a flag of surrender. Though I knew Chord didn’t want to stay so close to where she last saw us, it was obvious I was in no shape to search farther out.

So here we are. The studio is older than old, the layout cramped and outdated. A main room cluttered with cheap knickknacks and stacks of yellowed, dog-eared books. A closet of a bathroom, a kitchenette with too little room to move, let alone cook. The previous owner has been gone for a while, and the air is stagnant with disuse. I don’t think it was an active Alt, though—the contents of the studio don’t fit the profile of a new co-op or a young student. I think it was just a person who lived and died alone, and while his body was cleared quickly enough, his apartment fell by the wayside. Gaslight’s clearing division must be either backlogged or massively understaffed.
My stomach is aching with hunger. It growls.

Chord walks over to me. “I’m going to run out and get you some food. You’ll sleep better if you eat something.”

“Where are you going to go?” Whether it’s from hunger or anxiety at being left alone or just from him leaving, I can’t tell, but my insides suddenly clench up.

“There’s a twenty-four-seven down the street. They’ll have something hot, even if it’s only something from the warmer. Maybe some coffee would be good?”

I look at him, and I think I’m more stunned than he is when his face goes blurry. I’m crying, but I can’t be bothered to wipe the tears away. I don’t know why exactly, except that it seems foolish to attempt to hide them from Chord.

“What is it?” he asks in a low voice. I can tell he’s at a loss. He’s not used to dealing with tears of any kind. I don’t think his brother, Taje, was one for crying, especially after their parents’ accident, when he shut down and refused to feel much of anything.

I have to tell him. He’ll know soon enough. But it’s so hard—knowing how bad I screwed up, no matter what the excuse. “Chord, I lost the gun.”

“The gun.”

“Luc’s gun. Mine, I mean.” I can still feel it, how he pressed it into my hand. “I left it behind. In the alley, after seeing her. Him. Both of them.” My words come in a purging rush, leaving me hollow. “I think I was in shock, from the blood and everything. I don’t even remember how I … I can’t believe I would ever—”

Luc, I’m sorry. You died thinking it would keep me safe
.

Chord sits down on the bed next to me. He’s awkward now, all angles and limbs and clumsy movements. It reminds me of when he was younger, before he grew into himself. These days he is tall, lithe, still lanky but muscular at the same time, with a kind of tensile strength that he didn’t have back then.

He reaches behind him, yanks at something caught underneath his jacket. He pulls it out and places it in my hand.

For a second, the weapon feels almost strange, almost out of place. But then just as quickly the sensation is gone, and the gun has settled into its groove again. It’s nestled perfectly across my palm between fingers and thumb.

At least I wasn’t shot in my right arm. It’d be useless, then.
I’d
be useless.

“Thank you.” I put the gun down on the bed next to me. I still can’t quite believe my eyes. I was so sure it was lost for good. “
Again
. I owe you big-time.”

Chord shakes his head. “You don’t owe me, West,” he says, sounding almost angry. He turns away, to see anything other than me. “I made a promise, but that’s not the only reason why—”

“You don’t need to do this,” I blurt out. It shakes me, to see how his promise weighs on him. Why do I let it tear at me so much? “I don’t need you.” A lie, way too huge for either of us to believe anymore.

One side of his mouth twists, and when he turns to me, his expression is furious and full of frustration. Want. “You do, but you don’t want to, and that’s what’s killing me! Do you know what my first thought was when I saw that you dropped that gun?” Chord’s voice is low, soft and dangerous. “I wanted to
leave it. I wanted to throw it into the ocean, or into the Surround. I wanted to bury it so deep even Luc couldn’t tell you where it was. I wanted it anywhere else except in your hands. Somewhere so far away you would never find it again.”

I’m barely able to think. “Why would you—”

“Because maybe then you’d let me help you. Maybe then you’d want me to stay.” He gives a tremulous, drawn-out sigh, then he turns away from my frozen stare, looks down at the ground, and runs his hands through his hair. When he says my name, it is rough and agonized. “West.”

I’m breaking apart from the inside out. “So why did you take the gun back with you, then?”

“Because.” His face is haunted, too old. “What if it all went wrong on me? You wouldn’t have it to protect yourself … and you still wouldn’t want to see me.”

“I do want to see you,” I whisper.

Chord doesn’t say anything. I guess he’s trying to figure out if it’s more lies or the truth this time. It’s both.

“I wasn’t that far behind you, you know,” he says carefully, his emotions in check again. “And when I saw that you’d found her, I started watching her instead. Not because I wasn’t worried about you, but because I was wondering what she would do if she actually saw you.”

“Maybe I was just following her. Not to attack, but to see where she was heading.”

He laughs, harsh and grim. “No way. I know you. You had the advantage of surprise. It wouldn’t be like you to not use it.

“And I stand by what I said earlier,” Chord continues. “About her being so different from you, even though you look
the same.” A frown on his face, and his brows crease with the memory. “When she was standing there with him, her striker—
your
striker, I mean—and we looked at each other … I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so …”

“Cold,” I finish for him. “I remember you saying that. Before.”

“It wasn’t that she was just cold, though. It was that there was nothing else there. Seeing that emptiness on her face, how it was so much like
yours
—” He breaks off abruptly, then continues. “Even when I saw you kill—when I saw you
strike
that one time—you couldn’t ever be like that.”

“But I
should
be like that,” I say before I can stop myself.

He blinks at me. “What do you mean?”

“That’s how
I
should be, Chord.” Just saying it out loud makes it more real. That she can beat me in will alone. “It wasn’t emptiness you saw in her face—it was determination. To kill me before I kill her. She doesn’t doubt that she can do it.”

“Wait—”

“Chord, if I mess this up, it’s like I’m failing my family, somehow. I’m the last one left. What if my best isn’t good enough? What if her will to stay alive is just … stronger than mine?” I swallow and force the words out. “What if she really is the one who deserves to win, and I’m the weak one after all?”

In the thin moonlight, his eyes burn. “You’re not weak, West. You’ve always been a fighter, for as long as I’ve known you. Since we were little kids. You’re like … I don’t know … a bulldog refusing to let go.”

“A bulldog.”

“Well, yeah. You’ve always been so stubborn. Even now I
worry all the time, thinking it’s that streak in you that’s going to get you hurt.”

Or you, if you get in the way, if you get any closer
. My chest goes tight.

“Here.” I thrust the gun at him, grip first. “Take this with you when you go. Strictly self-defense. She might be out there. Or the striker she’s hired, if that’s who he is. Even if you can’t shoot that well.”

“I don’t need it.” He gestures to his jacket pocket. “I have my own.”

I’m stunned. Chord’s a complete. He doesn’t need … “You’re carrying it with you? Why?”

“I started to carry again when I began tracking you.” He smiles crookedly. “Even if I’m ‘the worst shot in Kersh’ as Luc used to say, it was good enough to scare her off. When some maniac starts running down the street with a gun in his hand, and he’s coming right for you, instinct says you should probably leave. Even if your Alt is right in front of you.”

I lift one eyebrow, my eyes scanning his features, trying to imagine what his face must have looked like to scare her off so badly.

Chord’s brown eyes, closer to amber in certain lights. His mouth generous, as easy to laugh as it is to tighten with emotion. Square chin, angled jaw, dark hair that’s always messed up. I know his face so well. And it’s his alone, no one else’s. Nothing about it could ever truly scare me.