Intrepid (25 page)

You say she’s guilty, but of what? Being born? Is it her fault that others manipulated how she was made? She couldn’t help her beginnings any more than you or I could.
 

Consider this. The Manifesto says, ‘It is not the rhine that makes the fruit, therefore it is not the body that makes the human.’
 
So I ask you, what is it that makes us human? Sure, in some ways we all look similar, but there are so many biological differences among us that how is it possible to say we are all made the same?
 
This girl simply has biological differences, but she still contains within her the possibilities of humanity.
 

More importantly, she still contains within her innocence, and she has done nothing to indicate a destructive nature. To convict her of a crime that may or may not exist is heavy-handed and unjust, to let fear drive us into action is weakness, and to solidify theory as fact is unscientific.
   

What’s done is done.
 

The girl exists.
 

I just hope she can forgive us when she discovers what we’ve done to her, for the time will come when she’ll learn the truths behind the lies we’ve told her.
 

—Geronimo,
 

—S-1, V-1.
 

Chapter Thirty

I opened my eyes and felt the weight of Liam’s forehead on mine. Each hot breath that landed on my cheeks burned currents of Energy through me, and when he finally opened his eyes to look at me, so many conflicting feelings collapsed into my heart.
 

Liam’s eyes traipsed between cerulean and turquoise. They almost seemed to swirl the way mine could, but I didn’t think I could trust my vision. Nothing about what I was seeing or feeling made sense. His jaw set his lips in a steady embrace, and I almost reached up to touch them because I had a feeling there was a softness to his lips, even if they were pushed together in such a firm expression of anger. My senses began to return, and I heard every drop of water as it fell to the wooden floor of the deck and every rasp of breath that neither of us seemed to be able to catch.
 

When Iago spoke from the balcony above, Liam dropped his grip on me. Then, Iago spoke again. It was the first time I understood what he was saying, and I tugged at my earlobes, willing my hearing to fall back into place.
 

“Did y’all do that?” Iago asked. He was looking out into the water, and whatever he saw was making him tremble.
 

I took a step back and tried to breathe. “Do what?” I managed to ask.

“Texi,” Liam said. He leaned his back against the rail and glared at me as he gulped in air. “She almost got attacked by an otter-shark.” I stared at him as his eyebrows furrowed. I couldn’t decipher the reactions racing across his face. Then he lost it on me. “Never go swimming without all your senses
ever
again! I yelled for you! Do you have a death wish? Because if you do, let me know so we can quit wasting all this time on you!”
 

The admonishment struck a different nerve as his face shifted from anger to what looked like hatred. Who was he to boss me around? “Get over yourself,” I said. “You have no right to—”
 

“Seriously?
Seriously?
Are you really that stupid? Are you really that—”
 

Iago interrupted. “Guys! Stop it! Look.” The confusion in his voice startled me enough to make me look up at him. He pointed out into the water, so I turned and ran to the railing next to Liam. We both sucked in scared breaths, and I gripped the railing with my fingernails.
 

The ocean was afloat with millions of brilliant fish, belly-side up, swimming in their own death. Liam let out a whimper that transformed into an angry growl. Then something hit the other side of the deck, and I ran to look over the opposite rail.
 

The “otter-shark.”
 

It was about the size of a killer-whale, with the body of a shark and a hairless otter-shaped face. The face was huge, and the slack-jawed expression of death made its sharp teeth protrude out of its black lips.
 

“
That
almost
ate
you!” Liam yelled. “Never close yourself off to any sense so completely unless you know it’s safe to do so!” He stalked back inside and slammed the sliding door behind him. The shivering glass noise rang in tiny vibrations against my ears. I wanted the glass to shatter like I wanted the world to shatter with me inside of it. I couldn’t pull my eyes from the beast, and I couldn’t care that Liam was mad. The only thing I could care about was the question repeating in my head: How could I cause that much death?
 

I didn’t see how Iago got to me, but suddenly he was next to me saying, “It’s okay. You were afraid for your life.”
 

But I knew it was something else. Before we Hopped, it was almost like Liam and I sucked up all the Energy and life from everything around us. I looked at my hands, flipping my palms up and down and stretching my fingers out. They looked like they always did. Slender and knobby at the same time, with young wrinkles cracking the skin. I couldn’t have done that much damage on my own! It wasn’t possible.

“You’re safe now.” Iago laced his fingers into mine so that I had to stop stretching them in and out. He tried to calm me with the gesture, by showing my hands how to relax into his. The rumble of the engine fired up, and I shook along with the boat. “Liam’s just moving us before the sun starts baking all the dead fish. It won’t smell pleasant after a few hours,” Iago explained, but I didn’t hear.
 

I replayed what happened over and over again in my head as the boat cut through the dying colors. I’d been blinded by the sun as it came up, and I swam with my eyes closed to it. It felt so good to not see, that I turned my hearing down so silence became the only thing I heard. Even the smell of things faded away, because I only wanted to feel how the liquid interacted with my skin. I felt every grain of salt in the water and every lick of movement by the fish. I felt the sun seep into my skin and transfer Energy into the world, and I stayed within the peace of it until eventually I didn’t feel anything at all. Iago had told me it was possible to turn down one sense in order to heighten another, but it turned out I could turn down more than one at a time. It was another freakish side effect that I kept to myself because I was thankful for it. I didn’t want anyone to dirty up a gift like that with words like mutation and abnormal.
 

The truth was, turning down most of my senses was the closest I felt to the Nothing without having to enter it. With everything being so chaotic, I found myself craving the Nothing more often than not. In the Nothing, I didn’t have to think about missing Ringo, Papa, Lindsay, and Mrs. Ortiz. I didn’t have to think about how I’d never see Sully again or admit that the reality of his betrayal cracked my heart in ways that could never be explained. And, most of all, I didn’t have to think about all the secrets still being kept from me and all the new things I still had to learn to accept.
 

Then feeling came back into my toes, and I felt a larger swishing in the near-distance. Then I felt arms wrap around me before we entered the Nothing. I was still without my other senses, so I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t smell. I could only feel arms and heartbeats and explosions. A deep and steady want filled my gut, and I needed to devour all the Energy that existed in the place it shouldn’t have existed at all. I couldn’t figure out how there was so much of it, nor could I figure out who held me in their arms. It could have been anyone who’d grabbed me, and I could have ended up anywhere. What if Sully’d found me? What if I’d been taken by a Shadow Boxer?
 

When we reappeared, the arms solidified, and my body became itself again as my senses adjusted back into place. Whoever it was smelled like sea-salt and sunlight, and I kept my face buried in his chest, afraid of who I’d see when I stepped away. I hated the part of me who wanted it to be Sully. The way the muscles tightened around me made me feel safe, like nothing could get to me if I just stayed locked up in them. Sully used to make me feel that way, until all of a sudden, he didn’t.
 

I didn’t want to open my eyes, but when I did, Liam’s face blurred into focus and my skin tingled in soft, secret ways. There was something kind and wanting in his eyes, and I’d never seen anyone look at me like that before—not even Sully when he leaned in to kiss me that night. I wanted to stretch out Liam’s look so it lasted forever, but Iago’s voice shook me out of it. The rest of the world adjusted back into reality, and Liam’s face darkened into shades of angry hatred before I came face to face with all the destruction I’d caused.
 

The aftermath of what I’d done was too much to accept, but I made myself remember the drifting, dead otter-shark and the millions of colors I’d drained out of existence.

“What did you see?” I asked Iago and pulled my hands out of his.
 

“There was a bright flash about thirty feet from the boat, then the two of you Hopped onto the bow.” Iago reached over to pull a towel from one of the cabinets and wrapped it around my shoulders. “That otter-shark was insane. You were just trying to protect yourself, Texi, but this is an example of how much we still don’t know about you. I know the past few days, you’ve gotten tired of me reminding you how cautious you need to be, but this should show you we have reasons to be worried.”
 

Something didn’t make sense about the conclusions he was drawing. What had happened went beyond trying to protect myself. I had the answer right at the tip of my tongue, but it wouldn’t solidify into thoughts and words. I stared out at the water, feeling my legs shake underneath the weight I put on them until the boat settled into a new spot. The scenery was the same as this morning except for the lack of dead sea creatures.
 

“Let’s go somewhere,” Iago said as he twisted my wrist to pull up the screen from my bracelet.
 

“Now’s not the time.”
 

“You don’t have much of a choice on this one,” he said as he entered the coordinates and pressed the button.

I was afraid to enter the Nothing again, because entering it in Liam’s arms reminded me there were things I didn’t understand about it. For the first time, imagining dissolving into it was terrifying rather than freeing. But when Iago pushed the button, the Nothing was as it always was. Peaceful and empty beyond empty. Though Iago held my hand, the feeling of his skin against mine did not exist, and I was truly and infinitely alone.
 

When we completed the Jump, we stood on a ledge that made me gasp. “What is this?”

“The nickname on record for this Vein is Prickly. We are technically on S-840, V-1200-L/34234, Stag.” It was an attempt to keep teaching me about coordinates, but I couldn’t concentrate on something as mundane as numbers. This lack of concentration didn’t stop Iago from continuing his explanation. “The Knowing will take a moment to equalize here, because we didn’t do an Interim Jump to a Strand first. You might feel dizzy or nauseous for a minute, but I think you can handle it.”
 

I waited for the dizzy feeling he spoke of to overtake me, but nothing happened. I noticed that Iago’s face held traces of pale like his body was adjusting to new air, but I was strangely, perfectly fine. Maybe I didn’t need to adjust like the others. It was probably yet another perk of being some type of mutant. I made another mental note to come up with some better way to describe myself besides “mutant.” Continuing to think of myself as one was bound to give me a complex. Then I put my fingers on my wrist to find the Culture Pulse.
 

Thump-thump. Thump-tha-thump. Thump-thump.
 

It had a different feel from the Vein we were on to learn Culture Pulses and from the water-logged planet I’d spent the last week on. Despite the fact that there were no signs of anyone around for miles, life was everywhere here. Then the zip-line of time ripped me into understanding, and I witnessed the slow and steady starvation of an entire people. I didn’t cry this time. Instead, I withdrew my fingers from my wrist and tried to harden my heart to it. I’d had enough doom and gloom for the day, and I was going to have to get used to the pain of Culture Pulses sooner than later.
 

When Iago spoke again, his face was no longer clammy. “When I first learned to Jump, I used to come here when I needed to clear my head. I like that this spot is approximately where Texas is back home. The entire west here is covered in desert until the point where Austin should start. The civilization on this continent exists up where our Canada is, and the Austin skyline should be there.” He pointed up, but where the skyscrapers should have been, there was nothing scraping the sky except gigantic cacti. It was a cactus forest, and prickled, green plates lived in glops of colonies, building up to the size of trees. There were giant boulders here and there to break it up—hills that had been broken down by wind and time. They made perfect viewpoints to see that the prickly pears stretched out as much as they stretched in with pears that hung like bright, red apples.
 

“There’s a beauty in dying,” Iago said. “I know it’s hard to understand, but views like this couldn’t exist if Veins weren’t Stagnating. Plus, when a Vein begins Stagnation, it only means that the Multiverse is redirecting its Energy elsewhere, towards a more promising Path. We have to believe there’s hope in that because it means there’s a Path to find.”
 

I examined his face. There was so much belief written there that it made me feel guilty for feeling even an ounce of despair or distrust. It was just that there was something wasteful to me about accepting a Vein’s death so easily. Why discount so many human lives just because they were dying? It felt like going into a nursing home and unplugging anyone past the age of sixty, because, hey, they’re going to die anyways. It didn’t add up, even though I felt the truth of what Iago said so deeply in my heart that it hurt in too many ways to count.