Intrepid (29 page)

I looked back to where Santiago rested. “Come on, dude,” I pleaded. “I need your help to find her.” I tried to pull up the tracker on Santiago’s bracelet, but the signal had been deactivated. She was gone, and we were in no condition to go after her. How had we lost her? It was a question that wouldn’t stop revolving in my head.
 

Nobu’s whale theory flooded my thoughts, and now that Texi was missing, all I could see was how impossible the situation was. It was as if Nobu was sitting right next to me saying, “You’ll find her when you’re meant to.” But maybe I wasn’t meant to. Maybe I’d failed the one job I’d spent my entire life preparing for.
 

How do you find one person in the shadow of infinity?

I propped up Santiago’s head with a cushion on the lounge chair and stumbled towards the kitchen for water and a rag. Maybe if I cleaned his wounds, it’d kick-start the healing and he’d wake up.

But when I got to the galley, loss hit me in the gut. I punched the marbled counter of the kitchen with my palm over and over again. There was a thwack-thwack-thwack as the hand suctioned and un-suctioned against the stone, but even the feeling of hard granite on soft skin couldn’t hurt me more than the hurt rampaging through me.
 

The mammoth-bears.
 

They were huge orbs of organic beings, and I’d sucked them dry of life. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. In the cave, I’d closed my eyes, felt the pull, and converted their Energy into something else. I shot it out into the storm and heard the snow pick up new currents inside the clouds. I heard the rumble of an avalanche from the sky as it bucketed down at the mouth of the cave. In that moment, I felt all of their strength flow into me. I felt like I could destroy the entire cave with my bare hands if I just thought to do it.
 

But as their bodies fell limp in huge sacks of fur around me, I tasted a different Energy. One that was familiar. One that was terrifyingly weak.
 

I let go of the pull.
 

And Santiago… he was in his own bulking heap on the ground.
 

I remembered the cold being everywhere as I crumpled onto my knees, trying to catch a running breath. Santiago was on the other side of the fallen mammoth-bear, and I had to climb over its limp body to get to him. The only thing I could think of was to get Santiago out of there before he woke up and saw what I’d done.
 

I’d been so mad at Texi yesterday morning over how much death and destruction I thought she’d triggered within the universe, but all along it’d been me. I was the one with Destruction in my veins. I had been scared for her, I’d wanted to protect her, and I’d destroyed in order to do it.
 

In the cave, I did the same thing for Santiago.
 

Was I like her? Was I a hybrid too? How could they keep that from me? There was information I was still missing, because being the same thing as Texi just didn’t make sense to me.
 

I hovered my fingers over the gashes that still vibrated on my chest. I’d never seen anything like them. The blood that dripped around the edges was being sucked back into the body like I’d put a vid on a snail-paced reverse. The red drops retracted back into me, and the throbbing receded with every drop that returned. All the Energy within me was still hot to the point of being pleasurable, and I couldn’t hold on to any one emotion, because
everything
was running through me.
 

There was a truth somewhere to be found in my marathon thoughts, but I couldn’t slow them down enough to figure it out.
 

I’d lost her.
 

How?

I closed my eyes as the pink skin kept closing around the muscles. I slid down to the ground and laid down so that the cold floor touched every inch of my back. I tried to stay calm and count to ten the way Corbin had taught us to do as kids. “When the world’s about to explode, count to ten. A lot can change in ten seconds if you let it,” he used to always say.
 

But ten seconds passed, she was still gone, and Santiago was still hurt.
 

I heightened my other senses so that I heard every wave as they crushed themselves against the boat, and I could smell the shift of air when it happened. I reduced the tingle of feeling on my skin, and although I knew I was still healing, I lost the throbbing feeling of pain that existed everywhere outside of me.

Infinite minutes slid by, and I stared up at the light bulbs that hung on mosaicked, miniature chandeliers throughout the entire kitchen. The community that lived on this boat seemed to have left everything in amazing condition. In my imagination, I could trace every item back to the moment it was carefully chosen. The people here obviously had time to prepare for the end of the world, because no detail was rushed or left to chance. Corbin never told us how they found the boat, and sometimes I wondered what finally wiped out the people who lived on it. Were there bodies or bones when Saltadors commandeered it? Or was everyone gone and washed away?

My eyes skimmed the tables that rested in deep rows. Nobu and I always sat at the one to the left wall. There was a nook there that blocked off the other tables with their mocking emptiness. Something about all the missing bodies always bothered us.
 

As a kid, I made up all kinds of stories about the Geetians who lived on
Geeta
, because in every nook and cranny, I could see the ghosts of their lives: pictures in albums, art hung on the walls, annotations in the margins of books, tattered toys in the playroom. There was a row of five posts in the middle of the expansive kitchen that were the only dividers between the prep area and the cafeteria tables, and little lines climbed up them like ladders. They marked heights, ages, and names like Henna, Coum, Yuna, and Varter. I thought of those kids all the time, and I wondered what it felt like to know you were the last children of humanity—the last hope for an entire dying people.

Is that what Texi had become?
 

I had to ask myself again. Did I share her burden? Was I like her?
 

I wanted Texi back, and I wanted to rewind time. I wanted to go back to the moment we stood on the bow of the boat—before I got mad at her. Maybe if I hadn’t lost my temper, she would have confided in me. Maybe she wouldn’t have run off like that if she thought she could trust me.
 

She was gone.
 

Gone.
 

What was I supposed to do now?
 

“Go back to what you know,” I whispered to the ghosts who sat along the benches of the galley. “The beginning will help you figure out the end…”
 

Texi

The Humanitarian Project Trials

I do not wish to stir up fear, although fear we must in this case!

I, for one, am afraid that the Calvary has done more than what we’ve discovered. Who is to say that there are only ten of these subjects out there? Who is to say that there was not more than this one experiment we’ve uncovered? I believe it is in the interest of humanity that the Elders of the Gaian Order undertake investigations into
all
aspects of the Calvary’s business…

—Dr. Anastaisa Einsteino, High Chancellor of the Shadow Boxers

—Seventieth Generation of Dr. Alberta Einsteino,
 

—S-1, V-1.
 

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Trees trapped in the warm colors of the sun. It was fall wherever we’d landed, but the temperature was still held captive by a polite summer. The leaves shifted in and out of every possible shade of crunch, and I could practically feel the colors crumble under my bare toes when I walked. To say that this new warmth was a relief would be an understatement, and I was thankful to let feeling drift back into my skin and realization drift back into understanding.
 

“What are you doing here?” I asked.
 

The gloved hands pulled back the hood and yanked off the goggles. “I’ve missed you,” Lindsay said and wrapped me into a hug.
 

“I don’t understand.”
 

She smiled and stepped back to take off her bulky jacket. “It took you long enough. I’ve been watching that spot from the cave for hours!” She tossed the jacket on the ground along with the goggles. Even though she wore normal clothing underneath it, her image felt off because the black pants and green shirt were too plain for how stylish she normally looked. “We don’t have much time, but I’ll do my best to explain.”
 

“You’re a—”
 

“Saltador? Yes.”
 

“Are you a Shadow Bo—”

“No.”

“A Calvar—”

“I represent the Nothing, not some misguided political party.”
 

I took a shuddering breath. There was yet another group at play in all of this, as if there weren’t enough people with agendas to figure out. Lindsay’s dark eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen them before, and it triggered memories of jokes and laughter and secrets.
 

Secrets. This meant that like everyone else, she’d kept so many from me these past years.
 

“Before you get too confused, I need to promise you something. My friendship with you has been as real as anything else you’ve seen. I know a lot of things these days don’t feel all too real, but know that how I felt for you was. Regardless of everything, you are a sister to me.”

I took a step back and felt the crunch of new leaves beneath my feet. I didn’t know how to respond or how to trust just yet.
 

“I grew up in the same universe as you, and we’ve always known where you were. Why do you think that is?” Lindsay asked. She was like me. She could travel the Multiverse, and like everyone else, she knew things I did not.
 

“Who is we?” I asked instead of answering.
 

“We call ourselves the Balance when people feel they need a label. Humanity is simplistic like that. Nomenclature makes people feel like they understand things, even when they do not. The Calvary. The Shadow Boxers. The Gaian Order.
 
We need definitions to put everything into their neat, little boxes, but there is nothing neat about factions that get misdirected and shrouded in the chains of rigid beliefs. Politics is just the tug-of-war between ideals, and, because of this, it ends up being true that nothing productive gets done. Maybe this is true for the Balance as well, but we feel that the others have lost the bigger picture.”
 

“Which is?”

“You, Texi.”

My lips trembled at the idea. Whoever the Balance was had a purpose for me, but perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised me. Everyone seemed to have a plan for me whether I wanted to participate in their plans or not. I was starting to realize I needed to choose the one I wanted to follow. I couldn’t just keep letting everyone else map out my life for me.
 

I could listen though. I could gather as much information as I could and do the best I could with what I was given. So it wouldn’t hurt to hear Lindsay out. It’d just be another perspective on my situation.
 

“Iago’s with you, right?” she asked.
 

I opened my mouth to answer, but didn’t know if I should.
 

“It’s okay, Tex. I won’t try to sway you one way or the other. In fact, you can go back to that silly boat anytime you wish, but I hope you stick around long enough to chat. We only have a few minutes anyways before I need to go.”

The boat. She knew we were on
Geeta
? What else did she know?
 

I wanted to shift back into the ease of conversation with her, but I didn’t know how to. This was not the Lindsay I knew, and I was not the Texi she knew.
 
But she smiled the smile I’d seen a million times before and said, “I’m so glad the mutation worked. I would have been devastated to have lost you—not because of what you are, but because of who you are. I believe that no life is accidental. Even if it is made at the hands of man, the Multiverse is ultimately responsible for everything in existence.”
 

I shook my head. It felt like I had water in my ears. “You only have a few minutes, and you start with that?”
 

“Same ol’ Texi. Never gives anyone a break, huh? What I’m trying to say is that whether or not Gaians believe your creation was justly done, you exist despite all odds. Despite the fact that people have tried to kill you your entire life, and despite the fact that you had a seventy-five percent chance of dying from the mutation, here you are. Whether people want you to exist or not, you do. If the Multiverse had wanted you dead, you would never have beat the odds.” Lindsay began to peel off the gloves that were still on her hands. She pulled at them finger by finger until her slender hands were free.
 

“And what about you? Do you believe I should exist?” There was an answer to that question that would cost me a great deal of pain, but I needed to know if she meant me harm.

“Of course. What the others fail to consider is that perhaps you are simply the next step in human evolution. They call you a mutated hybrid, but all that means is that you are two separate things that came together to create one. If that’s the definition we go by, then we are all hybrids that have become one from two. That’s how reproduction works, after all. Traits are passed down generationally from two people to make one, and here we are from ape to man.”
 

I shook my head. “Easy for you to say. You’re not a mutant freak.”
 

Lindsay laughed. “You know, you really need to stop seeing yourself so negatively. Try on a different title for size.”
 

“Like what?” I asked.
 

“Remember, all this got started because some of us were genetically altered. Different isn’t bad, Texi. It just forces you to be brave while others cower and fearless while others quiver. The original Explorers? Their existence caused a lot of debate in the beginning, much like yours is causing now. They were Intrepid, and in my mind, I’ve always seen you as such. Stop calling yourself a hybrid-freakazoid-mutant-weirdo, and remember that you are meant to be Intrepid.”