Stray (11 page)

“Did he hurt you?” Jamie asks, not looking at me, his voice low and lead heavy.

“No.” I wallow in the view of his profile, the flecks of gold in his hair, the play of light and shadow defining his cheekbone and jaw. He needs a shave.

“Benjamin’s my friend, but … I wanted to kill him.”

“Least you got to punch Davis.”

He draws his knees up and examines the red skin on his knuckles. “There’s that.”

We sit in silence for a while and it hurts to breathe.

“So, you ran.”

I sink inside. How can I tell him I want to help Aiden when he’s cost the Gallaghers so much? Jamie’s not cruel. I know he regrets I’ll lose my brother – that Miriam will lose a son – when Affinity find out. We’ve talked about it before, argued about it, but deep down he believes in the protocol. A guarantee that Aiden will never put another family through what his went through. “I guess I freaked out. I knew it would all be over: us, Aiden, my future.”

He nods, appreciating the weight of my admission. He knows what it’s like to have his life turned upside down by the Affinity Project. But he’s also nodding because he believes I’ll accept the way it has to be. I let him believe it because I don’t want to argue with him and ruin our goodbye.

He doesn’t attempt to reassure me or say everything will be okay; he knows it won’t be.

“Sorry I got you grounded.”

I give a soft snort. “Wasn’t your fault.” Then I realise if he heard the part about me being grounded he can’t have missed the rest of my argument with Miriam.
I love him … I do love him!
The whole street probably heard.

Moments before Tesla and his team arrived I’d been freaking out upstairs, hotly embarrassed at my blurting. I don’t feel like that any more. I’m glad I said it. Glad he heard it. Because I won’t be able to say it again. Not now. I shudder and sigh.

“I shouldn’t have stayed last night. If I wasn’t here when they arrived, they never would have known. We’d have more time.”

“Felicity would have figured it out. She saw you in my memories.” I shake my head a little. “You’d think with the way they go around zapping uteruses, ‘affiliating’ wouldn’t be such a big deal.”

He doesn’t laugh. It isn’t funny. “They only sanction relationships between people whose signals won’t amplify.”

I figured that was the deal. Miriam went on enough about the danger of our signals being more susceptible to spontaneous Sparking. I remember the Warden referring to the phenomenon with disapproval in her voice. Affinity likes everything tidy. Mature Shields “deployed” into “active-Spark zones” for Supply Protection only, thank you very much. It’s all about the Primary Objectives. Acquisition of Assets. Elimination of Strays. Which leads me back to Aiden.

Aiden and Jamie and the end.

I think of Miriam’s dark prophecy from only hours before, that love is sacrifice and sometimes that means ripping your own heart out to do what’s right. I know that’s what’s coming, the rip and the bleeding out. “Told you we should’ve done it last night.”

He drops his head, his shoulders vibrating, a quiet chuffing laugh. “You did.”

My eyes sting with unshed tears and I stare at the bandaid at the base of his hairline, the swelling beneath. I hate it. Hate what it represents. I should be grateful that he has another choice, that he can be free. It’s not too late, whatever Benjamin thinks. We haven’t
been together
. Jamie can deactivate … but I can’t think about Helena. I
won’t
think about her. I shove her from my mind by touching him, brushing my knuckle down the side of his neck. Sweet electric tingling hums through my arm. His collar hangs loose, revealing a vibrant splash of colour, the angel in ink. I stroke him there too.

He sighs. “I don’t know how to do this.”

Neither do I. “Let’s not make speeches.”

“I’ve never liked that rule.”

I dig my fingers up into his hair and he leans into my hand. “Let’s just say goodbye like normal. We can pretend.”

He turns his head in my palm. “Denial?”

I nod and he kisses my fingers.

“I left my boots upstairs.”

“I’ll get them.” I push up, wincing with pain.

He rises beside me, groaning and rubbing his stomach. Lifting his T-shirt, he shows me the round red mark by his navel the same shape and colour as the one on my chest.

I suck air through my teeth. “I thought he hit you on the head.”

“The eyebrow was the bookshelf after Davis sent me flying.” He makes a jabbing motion with his hand and I picture Davis ramming the baton into Jamie’s stomach.

I want to put my hand over the mark but that would make me want more touching and I turn towards the stairs. He follows me into the hall and we nudge aside books and junk mail with our feet. I make the first step when he catches my hand and turns me around. The extra height brings us nose to nose and he moves in till our bodies skim surfaces. I’m all sensors, every part of me grieving for his signal, his scent and the current flowing through us. He twines his fingers through mine. “Do you know what they say in the sanction?”

“About … about choosing?”

“The actual words of the sanction are: I see you, I know you, I choose–”

“Jamie … you can’t.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you what the words are. For interest’s sake.”

“You’re not saying them to me?”

“Of course not.” His lips quiver but he smiles and I don’t feel the ache low in my belly or the throb in my neck. I shouldn’t but I press myself against him, chest, stomach, heat. He fans his fingers over the arch of my back. I watch his grey eyes grow darker, desire expanding his pupils, the sight of it bittersweet.

“Tell me, then.” I smooth my hands over his arms, picturing the bands of Latin that circle his biceps and wish I was touching his skin. “For interest’s sake.”

“I see you, I know you, I choose you,” he says, his voice a low murmur. “As you choose me and know me and see me as I am, I bind myself to you in trust, This is what I believe, It is the truth that I choose as you choose me.”

“That – that is interesting … like – like vows or something.”

Jamie’s chest fills against mine. “Do you know they have to say it multiple times in the ceremony, like a mantra?”

I shake my head, blinking rapidly. “Why?”

“They wire them up to a monitor, it reads their brainwaves, and they have to keep repeating the ceremonial words, maintain eye contact and touch, until their signals reach an accord. It can take hours.”

“An accord?”

He slides his hands up my body then down over my hips, slow exquisite sweeps. “It’s what they call the optimum signal mix for an affiliation. Apparently the mantra works like synapse hotwiring, or something, repeated affirmations to imprint the signature of their partner into their cerebral cortex.”

His breath is warm and sweet on my mouth. I’m half-drunk. “Complicated.”

“Very.” He touches his lips to mine. “As soon as the accord is established they seal it with ceremonial acts.”

I pull my head back to look at him. “Such as?”

He raises his eyebrows.

My mouth pops open. “In front of everyone?”

He shakes his head, a small smirk and his gaze moves over my face, lingering on my lips.

“It doesn’t say anything about, you know, love.”

His eyes lock back on mine, penetrating, impossible to look away from. “Love?”

“I mean they’re beautiful words for a psychotic, tyrannical organisation and all, but shouldn’t it say something about love?”

“Most of them have only just met. They have a sort of courtship for a couple of weeks.”

“It’s arranged?”

“You heard Tesla; they put you in the database. Not just for Deactivation, but sanctions as well.”

“Hell.”

“It’s not compulsory.”

“Meanwhile the people who really are–” My voice cuts out.

“Really are …?”

“Connected. The people who really are connected are kept apart.”

He nods, a sad, wry twist at the corner of his lips. “We’d get halfway through the mantra and their sensor display would explode.”

I start to smile but it’s a bruised, powerless thing that crumples and falls. He cups my face, brushes his thumbs across my wet cheeks, gives me his mouth, kisses soft and deep, heat and salt, a study in the art of it, his gift for it, a blessing in kisses until I’m shuddering in his arms with weeping and wanting and the futility of both.

“This is what I believe,” he whispers, lips to mine.

“Jamie,” I groan. “Don’t say it.”

He brings his mouth to my ear. “Miriam was right, what she said to Ethan about me.”

He loves Evangeline
.

He’d heard her.

I lower my head against his neck, agonised.

“No matter what.”

“You can’t say that,” I sob. “Not no matter what.”

He wraps me in his arms. “Too late.”

I cling to him, my hands pressed to the ridges of his scars as I shake and spend myself in tears, but I can’t comprehend the loss, not really. It felt like this when they told me Mom – April – would die. I couldn’t take it in while she still lay in her hospital bed, smiling through her suffering. My tears are for the shock of it, the taste of it, the fear of deeper pain to come.

He kisses my hair and holds me until I grow still. “I should go.”

I pull back, sniffing and wiping my eyes, unable to look right at him. “I can drop you home.”

“I’d rather run,” he says, his voice rough. He touches his fingers to the thin scar at the top of my brow where he marked me in childhood – pushing me into the river – then drops his hand.

“I’ll get your things.” I suffer a brief glance at his face and make my way upstairs, half-blinded. When I reach the landing, I hear the back door click and I know he’s already gone.

We sit in the car, buffeted by gale-force wind, sleet hammering the passenger windows. Spectators making their way to an interstate hockey final clog the Sunday traffic, flags and scarves and excited honking, unfazed by the weather. Today I hate hockey. I hate fans. Miriam taps her thumb on the steering wheel, glaring at the back of the tour bus in front of us. She checks her watch for the hundredth time. It’s two and half hours from Burton to the detention centre in Roxborough. I google-mapped it. Our visiting slot with Aiden is for three. It will be the first time we’ve seen him since the hospital.

Miriam tried for an appointment after Tesla and his team left yesterday, but it had been too late in the afternoon. I doubt I could have pulled myself together anyway, having fallen apart completely after Jamie left. I had put myself to bed, refusing to speak or acknowledge Miriam when she came in to check on me. I’d only gotten out of bed today because she said we could go and see Aiden. My head swims from sleeplessness and exhaustion. I’m weak from hunger but too nauseous to eat, too anxious, the bagel Miriam brought for me still on the dash in its paper bag.

I pump the volume button on my iPod until the sound hurts my ears, shifting in my seat, trying to ignore the cramp in my abdomen and the clamped feeling in the base of my skull. Benjamin’s procedure left two rash-like marks on the skin above my ovaries. The wound from the tracker implant has knitted closed. I can touch it, the pea-shaped thing, but it makes me squeamish; a foreign presence in the back of my head. I worry when my heart beats too hard that my anxiety will cue a call from Tesla. My paranoia has him sitting at a monitor, interpreting incoming data about my Electro-Telepathic whatever hand poised over his phone, ready to deploy Davis and his baton at the hint of a blip on the readout.

I hug my jacket closer around me, ignoring Miriam where she sits gripping the steering wheel, straight-backed, knuckles white. The traffic crawls and I use my cuff to wipe a porthole in the condensation and glare out the window. I’m supposed to be on the lookout for the off ramp. My sigh mists the glass and I have to wipe it again.

A light touch on my arm. Miriam gestures; she wants to talk. I steel myself and pop my earbuds out.

She looks pent up. “We’ll need to find a shopping mall or something after we see Aiden.
They’ll
have a record of our movements, geographically speaking, and if we’re out here I don’t want our only stopping point to be a psych unit at a detention facility.”

“You think they’re spying on us right now?”

She sighs. “It’s not like that. No one’s sitting and watching you on live GPS. They respond to extreme fluctuations in your reading. Remember their Primary Objective is to protect their Assets. They want you safe and out of trouble. I’m just saying it’s sensible to avoid a record of questionable movements.”

“So we’re just being careful?”

“Listen,” she says, gritting her teeth. “I’m not going to pretend we’re visiting Aiden without an agenda, but it’s not up to you. I have connections–”

“Who?” I stiffen, immediately on alert. “The German guy? Tesla won’t even help
me
. He sure as hell isn’t going to help Aiden. You can’t tell him, Miriam. You can’t trust any of them.”

Her mouth thins. She knows I was eavesdropping on their conversation in the hall. “I didn’t mean–”

“They’ll
never
let Aiden live.”

She exhales through her nose. “I don’t want you involved.”

“I’m already involved. Besides, if they find out you’ve tried to help him, it’ll make things worse when you face the Executive. It makes more sense if it’s me. Aff–” I cut off at Miriam’s warning glance. Forbidden words. I clench my teeth before trying again. “
They
can’t throw the book at me if I haven’t been through
training
. You’ve told me that before.”

“You’re underestimating them.”

“You’re underestimating me!”

“No!” She thumps her hand on the steering wheel. “I’m not! I know exactly what you are capable of and that is why I am telling you to stay out of it!”

“He’s my brother.”

“He’s my son!”

I clamp my mouth shut and dig my nails into the upholstery, willing myself to calm down, but I’m not done. “What exactly does discipline look like?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“So you go before the Executive, give an account of your actions and then what, they slap you on the wrist?”