Gone (21 page)

That was it. That was all she could take. Loki's confession was the fatal blow to her emotional armor, and she could feel it happening now. She could practically see the cracks spreading out in dark black branches all over her skin. She could practically feel her heart ripping slowly at the seams, crumbling down to the pit of her stomach. The truth was pouring in through all the cracks, flooding her to the gills: Jake wasn't coming back through that hallway. He was never coming back again.

No, she couldn't stay in this moment. If she lived in this moment for one more second, she would surely end up in pieces on the ground. Pieces too small to ever be put back together.

Without another thought, she shot up off the floor and bolted down the hallway, leaping the fallen door and hurling herself down the stairs in huge leaps. She tried to erase Loki entirely from her memory with every step, believing for the very first time that she would never see him again.

She crashed through the doorway of Skyler's building and took off down the street. She had to run faster and harder than she had ever run before. She had to outrun this moment. If she let it catch up with her, she would be blown to bits.

Trying to outrun her past was like trying to outrun a tidal wave or a flood of biblical proportions.

I
have to thank God for the remnants of my sanity. And by “God,” I mean Chris Rodke. Because without him I'm not sure I would have seen it. I'm not sure I would have come to terms with the simple fact:

I am not sane. I have not been sane for a very long time. Not since I was a young man not much older than Chris.

I know now why I was so anxious to kill that boy. It was not just that he was another painful reminder of the offspring I will never have. It ran much deeper than that. Looking at Chris was like looking in a mirror. And I was sickened by what I saw.

I saw a boy who despised his favored brother with all of his heart. A boy who felt so invisible, so ineffectual, so shunned by the family he loved that he wanted to see them hurt. He wanted to see them dead. He wanted to prove his power, and his inferiority complex grew like a cancer
into a tragic God complex. It is amazing the things we cannot see in ourselves that are so glaringly obvious in others.

It had all sounded so laughable to me. A boy referring to himself as “God,” giving himself this ludicrously bloated identity to mask some shattered adolescent ego. It sounded truly pathetic. Until I realized… that boy was me.
Pathetic.
A man who calls himself “Loki,” the Norse god of the underworld. How small I must have felt on that fateful day in 1990 when I announced my own deification. How very small…

There were really two mirrors looking back at me in that limousine. Two young men… two images of my tragic schizoid past. Jake, God rest his soul, reminded me so much of a young Green Beret named Oliver Moore. More than I think I even understood. His unyielding strength and independence and intelligence, his uncommon command of the martial arts at such a young
age, his naive ambition to transform himself into some kind of all-American “superspy.”

And Chris Rodke reminded me so much of a demented young agent named Oliver. Pride as a disease. Pride turned into megalomania and envy and a vengeful killer instinct. An insatiable need for control.

One boy was the man I could have been… and one was the man I had become-a man who needs to repair his ravaged psyche and repent for his sins. It wasn't just Chris I wanted to murder. It was that mirror image. I wanted to shoot enough holes in that mirror to make me disappear.

But only I can make me disappear. The devil in me, that is. I have to seek help. I have to heal myself. I can't even imagine how many lucky future souls have been spared now that Chris Rodke has been put away. I only wish I could say the same for all the poor souls who have crossed my path for the last twenty years.

They have not been so lucky. And I will never be forgiven.

I am so sorry, Jake. You will never know how deeply sorry I am for bringing you into my ugly world. You are the one who should have been-the one who should have had a future, just as Oliver Moore should have been the man I am today, instead of the sick thing that I have become.

But you were right, Jake. You were right. We wanted the same thing. All we wanted was to see Gaia safe and sound-finally out of harm's way. And with the Agency picking up Robert Rodke at his office and me starting down the path to righteousness… I think we've done it. I think we've finally given Gaia the future that she deserves. She deserves what you and I have given her, Jake. She deserves to be free.

If
I could actually stop for a moment…

If I could allow myself time to think, then this is what I'd be thinking:

I loved you, Jake. I did. More than I could admit, more than I could face, more than I could deal with. I know I lost faith in you somehow. I felt you giving over to Loki and I didn't know how to stop you. I didn't know how to save you from it. But I think I know now why you did it. I think I know why you fell under his spell. You just wanted the same thing I've wanted since I was six years old….

To be a hero.

You thought my uncle was some kind of hero. You thought you were following in his footsteps. You just wanted to
save
people. And you did, Jake. You saved me.

I wish to God that you'd been spared my curse. The curse of Gaia Moore. If anyone on this earth was a match for it, it was
you. You have more force in you, more strength, more power than anyone I've ever—

No. Not
have. Had.
You had more force in you. Past tense now. All that force was ripped away. Because of me. And I'm not sure I can live with that. I'm not exactly sure how I'll ever move forward now that I've let fate take you away. You always fought for me, Jake. And you fought side by side
with
me. No man has ever done that the way you did. And I don't think I'll ever let another man try. I'll never fight side by side with another man. I'm not even sure I'll ever let another man into my life at all. I don't think I could take the pain of losing him. Not after you, Jake. Not after you died just to save my life.

I did love you, Jake. I honestly did.

No. I
do.
I do love you. Present tense.

But I can't think about it
now. I'm sorry, but I can't. Remember? This is all what I'd be thinking
if
I could stop for a moment.
If
I could allow myself time to think. And I can't. I can't stop and I can't think. To put it in no uncertain terms: if I stop… I think I'll die.

GAIA COULD FEEL THE CITY CRUMBLING behind her with every step. Trying to outrun her past was like trying to outrun a tidal wave or a flood of biblical proportions. Like a mountain of violent water nipping at her back, looming ominously close to crashing down over her head and swallowing her whole. She had never even realized how far she could run if she truly believed her life depended on it. Her feet felt like raw meat, and her entire body was sheened with a thick layer of sweat, but she had run with every ounce of her will for more than a hundred blocks.

She had sprinted past the empty Village School, past the empty Niven town house on Perry Street, past Gray's Papaya, past at least ten Krispy Kremes. She could imagine them being ripped from their foundations by the wave, being smashed to pieces like cheap insignificant toys, crashing into each other, turning into nothing but broken chunks that threatened to crush her from behind. She had sprinted through Washington Square Park, where the wave had pried the Arc de Triomphe from the ground and all the stone chess tables. It was all crumbling down.

Her mother's body was in the wave, along with Mary's and Ella's and George's and now Jake's. Their corpses were being thrown violently from side to side,
like toy dolls stuck in the undertow. And Gaia felt like she would be next.

Or maybe she
wanted
to be next. Maybe she felt like she deserved it. Of course she deserved it. She was the reason for all their deaths—maybe even her mother's in a way. Who knew? Maybe if her parents hadn't had a daughter, Loki wouldn't have gotten so murderously jealous? Maybe all the carnage in Gaia's wake never would have even started? Maybe the entire world would have been spared the curse of Gaia Moore.

I am so sorry, Jake. You have no idea. You will never know. Never.

Memories of Jake were flooding her head. Now he had been sucked into the wave—just another body in the collective Gaia wreckage careening toward her. She flashed back to their days in the park, the fights they had fought together, the fights they'd had with each other… The flashbacks were getting stirred into the tragic soup, along with her memories of Mary—their night at the Thanksgiving floats and those long, endless walks where they'd laugh and laugh about nothing.

But all those thoughts only made her run faster. She couldn't face any of it. She couldn't allow herself to stand still. If she truly considered how much she would miss Jake, she was doomed. If she thought for
another minute about Mary, she was done for. She could
not
allow herself to go back in time anymore or that wave would eat her alive. It would be the end of what little sanity she had left. It would finally be time to toss her in that padded cell and throw away the key. For
real
this time.

If she could just make it all disappear. If she could just pound her staff down in the middle of Bleeker Street, like a West Village Moses, and part that bloody sea of dead souls and demolished buildings—watch it pour onto either side of the street, just like in the Charlton Heston movie, leaving her on a dry, narrow path that was safe for her to walk through. There had to be some way to make it disappear. All of it. She had to disappear….

And then, quite suddenly, she stopped running. She stopped right smack in the middle of Houston Street and doubled over, grasping her thighs as she stared at the gutter and heaved for breath.
She
had just had a revelation.

If I could disappear…

The irony was almost too much to bear.

The Rodkes had been planning her disappearance for weeks. They had already laid all the groundwork. They had said all her goodbyes. They had carved out that dry, narrow path she'd been yearning for. The path to the promised land—also known as
somewhere else.

To escape. To leave it all behind and never look back. That was the answer.

Skyler Rodke had inadvertently given her this tremendous gift. The devil had somehow shown her the path
out
of hell by mistake. He had already put a period on this part of her life. And Gaia was going to use it. She could make his fake story true—minus, of course, the Florida part. She could leave New York City and start an entirely new life in a place that had stars at night. A place where nobody knew her name or her genetic makeup. A place where her past wouldn't haunt her to death.

A new place. That was it. It was time for a new place.

And suddenly that tidal wave didn't seem so ominous anymore. She had simply been looking at it wrong. She'd been looking back at the water with apocalypse-colored glasses, filling it with the properties of death and destruction. But she had her symbols wrong.

Waves and waters and oceans… The last time she checked, they didn't represent death. They represented
rebirth.
Baptisms and beginnings, not endings. The wave wasn't going to swallow her up in her past. It was going to wash her past away.

Gaia took a deep breath and turned around. She could see it now. She could see it right up Sixth Avenue. Not blood and death and disaster. She could see the way out. And it was time to start running.

“GOD, WHERE DO YOU THINK WE'LL all be five years from now? Ed…?”

“Huh?” Ed wasn't listening. He had stopped listening to everything about two hours ago. The entire world had drifted about ten feet away. It had all turned into a very bad drive-in movie, barely visible, hard to hear, and filled with pointless, cheesy melodrama.

Half the class was standing on the street outside the Supper Club like a pack of seals barking. The prom was over, but they were trying to drag it out for as long as they possibly could, which was particularly ridiculous given that they would all just end up at the same after party at Allison Rovitz's. Still, they were trying to milk this moment for all it was worth, whining their drunken good nights—each one more clichéd than the last. “I'll miss you so
much
after graduation” “I love you.” “I never told you this, but I always loved you.” “I never told you this, but I loved you, and then I hated you, and then I loved you again.” “I never told you this, but I always wanted to have sex with you…. Are you drunk?”

Even Kai had fallen prey to the sentimental disease. She had caught the “where will we all be in five years?” bug that was floating through the crowd. So Ed pretended not to hear her.

Where would he be in five years? He honestly didn't care. What he cared about was now and how dismally depressing now had turned out to be. The truth was, he was lying his ass off to himself again. He didn't really think the tearful good nights were so cheesy. Proms were made for tearful good nights. It was just that there was only one tearful good night he'd wanted—only one that would have truly meant something to him. And it wasn't going to happen.

Somehow that fact seemed to nullify so much of his past. It cast this hideous pall over his entire relationship with Gaia Moore. He could have lived without the kiss. He had already learned how to live without her kiss. But the friendship… that was something else. That had been the foundation for everything. And if Gaia thought their friendship wasn't even worthy of one last goodbye, then Ed couldn't help but think that he'd projected a great deal onto what they had. All those milk shakes… all those bagels and Froot Loops and chili dogs at Gray's. From that first exchange in the hall to the most amazing night of his life and every day and night in between… if he couldn't look back on the two of them as soul mates, then he would have to pretty much give up on the concept of “soul mate” altogether. If he and Gaia weren't it, then there was clearly no such thing. And what he wanted most now was not to discuss where he would be in five years. What he wanted was to go home
and lie down in his tux and try to dial down his general expectations of the world in preparation for college.