Stray (32 page)

Aiden releases a gust of air; he’d been growing more and more pale.

“What?” Kitty hauls herself up on my arm and finally looks at the wound. Bright pink splotches bloom on her cheeks and her voice shrinks. “Oh.”

“
What?
” Jamie shakes the gun in frustration.

Davis ducks. “Careful!”

“Your sister will live,” Ethan says. “The bullet has ripped the skin. There is a little blood but we can clean that up. Some antiseptic ointment and a bandage should suffice. Perhaps some paracetamol for the pain.”

“Thank God,” Aiden says, taking an unsteady step towards the couch, his face grey, his shoulder soaked red, “you’re okay–” His expression turns blank and he crumples to the floor.

Aiden is not dead, though he lies unmoving, unconscious in his own blood. It stains my jeans, my knees. I’m there. My hands touch his chest, his face, staunch the wound. Hot, viscous pooling between my fingers. I’ve done this before. I remember the forest, the moonlight, Jamie and a gun. My ears ring. Everything looks and sounds distorted, giving me that head-in-a-fishbowl feeling again. Aiden isn’t dead. He isn’t dying. I know it.

Ethan soothes in German, a clipped and comforting rumble of incomprehensible words. His hands are bigger than mine; quick, efficient, confident, managing hands. I think, these are my father’s hands and this is my brother’s body and my ears ring. I think of Miriam in the hospital bed and the plastic tube in her throat and my ears ring.

Miriam isn’t dead.

Aiden isn’t dead.

I am not alone.

My breathing is loud, shallow and loud.

“Good.” Ethan’s voice breaks time like an icepick, releasing me into the present. The disorientation lifts and I can see and hear clearly. Aiden lurches on my lap, swearing and awake as Ethan finishes the last stitch. His good hand scrabbles for mine and we lock fingers. I squeeze with him against his pain.

He’s okay. It’s going to be okay.

“Very good.” Ethan unpacks fresh bandages, but before wrapping Aiden’s shoulder he takes a cylinder from his kit and thumbs a button on the side. A needle extends neatly from the flat end. Without preamble he sticks it in the crook of Aiden’s elbow. Aiden gasps but manages to hold still.

“What–” It’s hard to unstick my voice. “What is that?”

Withdrawing the needle, Ethan folds Aiden’s blood-streaked arm up over the insertion site and holds the cylinder to the light. The needle retracts and he frowns at the window and tiny digital display. He turns it so Aiden can watch as his blood is dispersed into some sort of white cloudy solution in the barrel. “This will tell us what you are.”

The whole room grows still and I’m conscious for the first time of Jamie restraining Kitty on the couch, while still trying to point his gun at Davis who is sitting on the floor. Even the Proxy has stopped whimpering, Felicity back at her side after fetching Ethan’s kit. There had been noise, a lot of noise I realise now, voices arguing. Kitty arguing, furious with Jamie for holding her back. Now there is silence. A collective leaning in.

Realisation comes slowly at first, a gradual tipping then a throat-closing dive to the point. The whole point. The reason for every decision I’ve made since I felt the tether break in the emergency room, Aiden convulsing in his own blood under the impact of my KMT. The moment I knew in my bones that my blood had counteracted the mutation in him. He was no longer a Stray. My certainty, faith and need, now called to trial and I’m not ready. Not remotely. I have to bite my tongue to keep from crying out, “Wait! Not yet. Not yet.” This isn’t how I thought it would be.

What was I expecting?

This is the whole point and it’s happening now.

Now.

Ethan offers the cylinder to Aiden. Aiden struggles to sit up. I help him, my arm around his chest, his head heavy and damp on my shoulder. His hair smells of cheap motel soap, sweat, blood, dust from the attic. He swallows, unlocking his fingers from mine to take the cylinder. He tries not to shake it, his fingers slippery with blood. My pulse beats hard against Aiden’s back and I watch Ethan’s face, his dark green eyes, his lips pressed, his breathing shallow.

“What does it say?” Aiden asks, his voice dried out. “How do I know?”

“It will change colour,” Ethan says softly. “If you are deactivated, it will clear.”

I can’t fill my lungs properly, my heart moving higher with each beat, becoming a clamour at the top of my throat. I’m not ready. I’m not ready. We’re coming to it too quickly. Aiden doesn’t even know who he’s talking to. We should wait, let him recover, sit down reasonably, explain things. “How long does it take?” I ask.

“A minute or two.”

We sit and stare, the red thread of Aiden’s blood separating, spreading, dividing and blooming like algae behind the glass.

Shallow, shuddering gulps for air, his and mine.

“And if it’s not clear?” Aiden finally says.

Ethan lowers his head. “If it turns completely red, then the mutation is still active.”

There is more blood than white solution in the cylinder window.

“Right,” Aiden says.

Ringing fills my head.

“If it is–” Ethan says, almost a whisper, “you have a choice.”

I bite my lips, pressure building in my head, my vision blurring.

Ethan reaches into his kit for a small metal container and opens it. There is a preloaded syringe. I know without asking that it’s poison. What else can it be?

“No.” I shift, jostling Aiden, making him hiss with pain as I pull him tighter against me. I can’t see the cylinder or the glass, just a red smear through my tears. “No.”

“Evie.” Aiden grips my arm, turning his head. “Hey, come on.”

“He’s not – he’s not a dog.” My voice is pressed thin. “You – you can’t just – put him down.”

Aiden presses his forehead to my cheek. “Evie. Come on. This is okay. Better here with you.”

Kitty’s cry rises eerily from the couch. Jamie murmurs, trying to comfort her. The Proxy is silent. Felicity too. Davis watches unmoving by the wall. Benjamin lies unconscious on the floor, oblivious. Ethan draws a long breath, a tremor in his body, tightness in his jaw. He hesitates then rests his hand gently on Aiden’s shoulder, away from the wound.

I can’t stand it.

“There’s still time.” I grab Aiden’s hand, shaking the cylinder. “It’s not done yet. I know you’re deactivated. I felt it when it happened.
She
felt it.” I point savagely at the Proxy. “She felt it in the KMH. They all know it. This will prove it. We just – we just need to give it enough time, that’s all.”

I shake Aiden’s hand again, rubbing my thumb over the glass window. The cloudy white solution is gone. There is only red but I know it will clear. It has to clear because I know. Aiden is good. He’s not a monster. He’s my brother. It’s not his fault. The red will clear.

Aiden drops his hand, leaving the cylinder in mine. “Evie.”

“Wait.”

“It’s red.”

“It is not done.”

“It is,” he says and a shiver runs through him. “It’s okay.”

Ethan lifts his head, his eyes stricken.

“
Wait
.” I jerk roughly behind Aiden, pulling him away from Ethan. “This is insane. You know I’m right. You know he’s deactivated. It’s not fair. He’s your–” I cut off, blinking at his warning look. “He’s your responsibility. You have to help him. He needs to be properly tested. This hardly counts, one stupid field test. We need to take him in.”

Ethan shakes his head. “You do not want Aiden to go to Affinity, Evangeline. Not like this.”

“The agreement was to – to bring him in and – and do things properly.”

“The test is not faulty. There is no margin of error.”

Aiden leans his head back against me, his muscles relaxing. “I don’t need to go anywhere, Evie.”

My sobs come hard, bruising, breaking me open. I fling the cylinder to the floor but it doesn’t smash. It bounces and rolls past Benjamin, stopping at Davis’s outstretched boot. He draws his foot away as though it might contaminate him. I press my face in Aiden’s hair. “Then we run.”

Ethan and Aiden sigh at the same time in the same way.

“I’m not running.”

“We could do it. Ethan would let us.”

“Your brother does not wish to run,” Ethan says.

My heart slips, a scrabbling at the brink and beneath me plunging nothingness. “Don’t do this. Please. Aiden … don’t.” I curl myself around him and bury my face in his neck, my wrenching sobs shaking us both. “I want you to stay.”

He reaches his good arm up and back to hold me, a stupid pretzel of limbs. A cocoon made hot by my haemorrhaging grief. Sweat, tears and warm blood. I cling and shake. He strokes my head. His steady pulse beats against my eyelids where I press my face beneath his jaw. Alive. Alive. We stay like this, locked away from the others, breathing the same air, and I’m falling and falling and never finding the ground. He brings his mouth to my ear and begins to whisper. He tells me that he’s sorry, he’s sorry and he wishes it could be different, for me, Miriam, all of us together. He sighs and grins and tugs my hair and says I suit it short and that if I want his honest opinion as a brother, I could easily do better than Jamie and then he chuckles and I saturate his neck with my tears.

“Is it weird,” he whispers, “if I say that I love you?”

“No.” I hiccup and sob and shake.

“I don’t want to be, you know, weird.”

“It’s not weird.”

“Good.” He nods against me. “Well, I do.”

I sniff and hiccup and squeeze him. “Same.”

He chuckles again and sighs again. “I wish I had kissed her. I could have. I wanted to.”

“I’ll tell her.”

There’s a pause, a long pause, then he says, “Okay.” And I know he’s saying it to Ethan and I squeeze my eyes tight shut and press myself close to him and wait.

“Um …”

The voice isn’t Ethan’s.

“What, um, does purple mean?”

Davis?

“Purple?” Ethan says.

My head comes up. “Purple? What’s purple?”

Ethan, poised trembling with the preloaded syringe in his hands, straightens, red-eyed, tear tracks down to his thick stubble.

Davis points at the cylinder, knocks it with his boot. “That is, or it was. It’s sort of mauve now.”

Everybody watches. Nobody moves.

“Mauve?” Jamie comes to life from his frozen hold on his weeping sister. He stalks across the room and scoops the cylinder into his hand and squints at the little window. “Like a bluey-lavender.”

“Give it to me.” Ethan thrusts his hand out. Aiden and I unwind, both of us sniffing and wiping our faces. When Jamie draws near, handing Ethan the cylinder, his eyes meet mine, haunted, searching, pained. He steps back as though not wanting to invade our private inner triangle. Ethan stares at the cylinder, lips parting.

“What does it mean?” Aiden asks, sounding half-strangled.

“It is still changing,” Ethan says.

“But it’s not red,” I say, bright spots popping before my eyes.

Ethan raises his head, the closest thing to a smile I’ve ever seen pulling at the corners of his lips. “Not red.”

“I’m not …?” Aiden says.

Ethan clasps the back of Aiden’s neck, producing a husky sound almost like a laugh. “You are not a Stray.”

Aiden’s mouth opens slowly, his expression wiped blank. Ethan squeezes and pats the back of his neck then releases him to give his full frowning attention to the changing liquid. My chest fills with air and keeps filling until I’m dizzy with it, as though my head might detach and float to the ceiling like a helium balloon.

Not a Stray
.

Kitty has managed to get herself to the end of the couch, her splotchy pink face alight with hope. “So, he’s okay? He’s deactivated?”

“It would need to be clear and colourless like water to indicate Deactivation. A Shield would produce a see-through pale blue. This is clearing but the colour is much darker.” He offers it to Aiden, who takes it in his trembling hand and holds it up to the light. It is completely see-through and the colour is a perfect, shimmering, midnight blue. “Before the mutation, Assets who produced this colour reading were known as Strikers. I do not believe this has been seen since the first-generation trials.”

Aiden sits propped up on Nan and Pop’s bed, pillows with lace doilies stuffed behind his head. “What was I supposed to do?” He throws an arm up and winces at the movement. Sweat glistens on his chest, the bandage holding his arm like he’s about to pledge allegiance to the flag. He’s agitated, impatient, his eyes moving to the closed door, waiting for Ethan to come back and tell us it’s time to go. “She was just sitting there on the doorstep when I got here. I tried to make her go but she’s … impossible and unreasonable and …” He gives up, like the effort of describing Kitty is exhausting in itself.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I pitch my forehead into my hands, chuckling at his spoken and unspoken words. Impossible, unreasonable and a bit wonderful too. Kitty’s all that and then some. I can’t help laughing, a little unhinged by my relief and disbelief and the sheer intensity of my pleasure in just being with him. A fierce, jealous pleasure in looking at him and thinking
brother. My brother. Twin
. Ownership and belonging mixed with the bewildering shock of what we almost lost. I want to take him home right this minute and regress, build forts and fight over the remote. I know I can’t get back any of the things we’ve missed in childhood but my hope for the future is a recklessly soaring thing.

I should rein it in. We’re not exactly home free. There’s the Proxy to return, the Executive to appease, Miriam to restore, incidents to explain, proofs to be laid on the altar. There’s probably a barrage of hideous examinations for poor Aiden to go through, but my hope is far beyond and far above these minor obstacles, already circling our future lives with Miriam, who the Proxy will have no choice but to save. Life as a family.

“What?” he says, catching my grin. His usually tidy hair’s a dishevelled mess that kind of suits him. He hasn’t shaved in days. He looks rugged and handsome with most of the blood scrubbed off and I feel weirdly proud and glad that Kitty likes him – I can tell she does. He deserves to be liked. Even though that whole thing is a messy knot of complicated with a Jamie-shaped ogre guarding the threshold, I can’t help feeling that anything’s possible.