The Rift Uprising (20 page)

I make my way home and drag myself up the stairs to see Ezra. I push open the bookshelf and stand there. We stare at each other. I can't take it anymore. There is something about being around Ezra that makes me feel strong and weak all at once. At first I cover my face with my hands. I don't want him to see me crying. Not because I'm afraid of being vulnerable in front of him, but because I know it must be so hard not to be able to comfort me, to have to just sit there and watch me hurt. Still, once I start crying, I don't know how to stop. I fall on my knees. I weep. My head hurts, my neck, there's an ache I have that is so deep inside of me, I feel like every cell in my body is eating itself alive. Ezra stands. He walks toward me. I see his bare feet and I look up at him.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I manage through the sobs, “but I sort of wish you would just hit me or kick me. I
don't know how else to touch you. We can't kiss or hug, but if you hurt me, I could feel something besides my feelings. I hate my feelings right now. I can barely breathe. It's like I'm drowning . . .”

I keep crying and it is getting harder to catch my breath. I keep trying to fill my lungs with air, but it's as if there isn't enough in the room. Ezra crouches down and sits on the floor in front of me. “I don't know what happened out there. But don't
ever
ask me to hurt you. Ever. Because it would kill me.”

I curl up into a ball. I get as close to Ezra as I possibly can without actually touching him. He does not tell me everything will be okay. He doesn't offer me any bullshit. He doesn't say anything. I just cry. I cry for what feels like hours and still we don't move. When I finally sit up, all puffy eyed and red faced, I see that Ezra's eyes look even bluer. It's not because they are bloodshot. I think he may have been crying, too. Not like me. I just won a gold medal in hysterics. Ezra is also hurting, and not just for me, but because he might not ever see his family again. He might be a fugitive for the rest of his life. He might have to go back to the Village.

He might get hunted down and killed.

The invisible wall between us somehow feels thinner after that. I can't explain it exactly, but something has shifted. I still want him, but now I want more from him. He's seen me go to a place no one else has and he's still sitting here. In our own way, what we've just experienced feels closer than sex, more intimate than two bodies scrambling in the dark.

“Ready to talk?” he says, his whisper breaking the silence.

“You were right.” I very ungracefully wipe my nose on my sleeve. “The implant does nothing. It did, at first, when they put it in. It was nanotechnology. They recoded my DNA so that I can do all these nifty cool murder tricks now. But the
implant has nothing to do with my abilities. I'm always going to be like this. There is no going back to normal like they promised. Here's the kicker, though. The not-touching thing? That was good old-fashioned brainwashing chased with a fun cocktail of drugs that make you totally open to suggestion and then erase your memory. Basically they made us watch porn and then beat us during the parts we liked the most.”

“Oh.”

I know he wants to say more. I can hear the slight edge in his voice. But he understands, just like I do, that there is little point in raging against something that happened years ago. We are both practical in that way. We have to look forward, not back, if we want to get through this. “That's awful, but it isn't something we can't fix. We can undo that damage. We can fix that. Together.”

“Yeah, well, you should probably start pulling all the research you can on behavioral cognitive therapy. I guess the only good thing is that Edo gave me a lot of the brainwashing drugs they use, so it won't take as long as it probably should. Apparently it only took them four days to make us like this. Which is—obviously—terrifying and gross. But the bad part, or maybe the part that has me worried, is that she gave the drugs up so quickly. I don't know if that was her guilt or something else. I just can't think about it right now. I have to lie down.”

He looks me over, checking for bruises, for blood. “Why? Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

“I made her take it out. You were right about that, too. Except it's more than a tracking device. It's also, wonderfully, a kill switch.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes—that was a fun discovery.” I take a deep breath, hoping not to lose it laughing at the absurdity of the situation.
“Anyway, I also made her put a mirror up there when she did it so I can see how it's done. You know, just in case I have to perform an emergency chip-section on my friends.” I reach into the pocket of my flannel shirt and take out a small black box, about a quarter of an inch by a quarter of an inch. I put it into his hand. “You can take a look at it, but whatever you do, don't disable it. If it goes dark, they'll know I figured it out, and that would be very, very bad.” Ezra gently takes the implant from my hand. He squeezes his fist around it and looks at me. With his other hand, he reaches up, like he's going to touch my hair or maybe my face. I shrink back from his would-be touch.

“Listen,” he says, “I don't know what it's like to be a super soldier, or a killer. I don't know how to do a somersault in the air or what it's like to fight vampires.” Ezra takes his hand back and closes his eyes, shaking his head. “And you don't know what it's like to go through The Rift. To lose everyone you love or care about or to have the thing that you feel like you understand best—for me that would be physics—turned on its head so that the basics no longer make sense. It doesn't matter what we don't know. What matters is that, for whatever reason, you chose to help me that day and I am so grateful. However much time we have together, let's make the most of it. Let's focus on the things we have in common. Let's just be here for each other. I don't know what that looks like, but let's try.”

I nod and rise up to my feet. “I'll be back up in a couple hours. It's funny how the whole brain-surgery thing can take the pep out of a girl. Please do what you can to figure out how to counter the behavior modification.” I push open the bookshelf. I walk downstairs, take a shower, and slip into bed. Sleep finds me eventually, but it is filled with dreams of sex and bruises—the vampire's mouth on my neck and a gun in
my hand. The green light of The Rift is everywhere, and even when I awaken, the scent of pine and sap lingers.

When I walk up to Ezra's room, he's at the computer. He's got my chip in a glass. It doesn't look like he's done anything with it so far, which is good. The thought of him tinkering with that thing fills me with dread. I'm going to have to get used to carrying it with me at all times now and keeping it safe when I'm fighting, like I don't already have enough to worry about.

“Sit down,” he says, gesturing to the bed. I furrow my brow. “Don't freak. I'm not going to try to make out with you. I've started with the research and I think I know where to begin. Here . . .” Ezra hands me a pad of paper and a pencil.

“Are we going to
draw
sexy things? Gotta tell you, stick people are about as much as my skills allow in that department.” I smile weakly.

“No. You are going to write a list of everything that makes you feel safe and calm. Divide the list into your five senses. And really think about it, especially the things that made you feel that way before you became a Citadel, before you even got the chip. It could be a particular song or singer, maybe you have a stuffed animal that—”

“I don't have a stuffed animal,” I interrupt.

“No, I didn't think so.”

What the hell does that mean?
But I begin to write anyway, categorizing each item by placing them in double-outlined boxes I've drawn according to my senses. When I'm done I hand it back to him.

“That took fourteen seconds, Ryn. This is serious. You could break every bone in my body and that's a best-case scenario.”

I shrug and point to my head. “Super brain,” I say sarcastically as I hand over the paper.

He raises his eyebrows when he sees that it's filled. “Buffy? The Vampire Slayer?”

I narrow my eyes at his raised eyebrows.
Nobody fucks with my love of Buffy.

“Clearly Buffy and I have some things in common. I suppose you could make an argument that Angel and I are more similar, considering that every time he has sex he turns into a monster. But no, Buffy and I have a connection.” He reads the rest of the list and sighs.

I start to fidget. Suddenly I feel like I've failed some sort of test. “Look, I'm not an intellectual,” I explain. “I do read. A lot. But I read things that help me escape. Were you expecting Nietzsche? Or that I write up papers in my spare time about eastern Europe and the rise of nationalism? Or that I love to spend my Sunday afternoons staring at modern art? I'm not a scholar. I'm a soldier. And the things that make me feel safe and calm are banal.
Harmless.
I don't need the extra stimulation.” I bite my lip and hunch my shoulders a little. I'm embarrassed and I'm annoyed that I'm embarrassed. Ezra is really smart. I'm smart, too, but I've done nothing, really, to stretch my intellectual muscles. If we're being technical, I didn't go to school past the eighth grade. I don't get to go to lively seminars with amazing professors who help me reframe the world, like he does—or did, anyway. And from what Edo told me, a lot of my knowledge is rote memorization, not actual applied learning.

Apparently Ezra makes that realization, too. “I'm sorry, you're right. This is a judgment-free zone. Besides, you do have NPR on that list. And some cool classical stuff.”

“Whoa, easy there, Mr. Snobby. I can also speak fifteen—wait, now sixteen—languages,” I say in perfect Arabic with a smile.

“Fine. I won't make a single comment even about the items on your list. The thing is, to me, you're incredible. Sometimes I wonder if you're even real. It's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that you like
Doctor Who
. It's so . . . normal. Well, normal for a dork ass like me.” We both smile at that. “Grab one of those pills Edo gave you and then go and get some of your dad's clothes.” It's an order, but he made it sound like a suggestion. I nod and leave.

When I'm back, I look at the red pill in my hand. Edo could have been lying. This could be poison. It could even make me more violent. I don't remember taking any pills that week when I was fourteen, so they must have dosed our food or water. I suppose they could still be drugging us that way. It could be in our protein shakes. Shit, for all I know, they could be pumping it through the ventilation system at the base to make
everyone
there more compliant. This cluster fuck just gets bigger and bigger. But I can only solve one problem at a time. I quickly swallow the pill. Maybe it will kill me. Right now I'm more afraid of living my entire life without ever being able to be close to anyone, about what that would do to me. That scares me way more than dying. I wait ten minutes. Nothing happens. If it was going to kill me it probably would have by now. I feel the pile of sweaters I took from my dad's closet. They're on my lap, and I pull one up and put my nose into the wool. This smell, this is safety, this is love. With my face pressed into this sweater, I am a little girl again.

Ezra holds out his hand, and for a moment I think he wants me to take it. But I realize he wants the sweater. I give it to him and he puts it on but doesn't say anything. He angles the computer monitor so I can see it from the bed. He logs into Netflix—I had given him my account so he wouldn't go out of his mind being alone all day—and chooses
Buffy
.

“Wait,” he says before I press Play. “This won't work if you try to fight it. That's what you do, right? You feel attracted or turned on and then you and your brain have an epic fight for control. That can't happen. You might even need to say some of this stuff out loud. In fact, you should, like a mantra. You have to acknowledge that this is who you are, that this is how you're wired, and that you
can
be different. You have to say that nothing bad will happen if you allow yourself to be touched. You can't fight this the normal way. You have to surrender a bit, admit that it's a weakness, and push through it. Can you do that?”

I think about what he's said, and maybe it's the red pill, but I get it. I can't fight. “Yeah.”

He nods, presses Play, and the TV show begins. He comes to sit down on the bed, both of us surrounded by pillows. At first all I can think is:
Ezra is beside me
. Close, but not touching. I'm glad he's here. What's more, I don't feel like killing him, which to me is a win, considering that I can feel the heat that's coming off him. We watch an entire episode this way. I can feel myself relax some. Ezra is right here, so close that I can smell him. But of course, it's not Ezra I'm smelling—at least not completely. Some of it is my dad.

“Okay, start talking, Ryn.”

I wince. I don't want to say what I'm feeling out loud. It's mortifying. But if this is what it takes to get it done, I'm going to have to buy in.

“I like it that you're next to me. I know that if you try to kiss me, I will hurt you. But I am safe here with you. I don't need to hurt someone I want to be close to. There is something wrong with my brain that makes me lose control when I am attracted to someone. This is a problem only I can fix.” I look at Ezra, wondering if I've said enough.

“Go on.”

Guess not.

“I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not—”

Ezra interrupts me. “Stop saying that, please. I'm worried that it will become some sort of reverse self-fulfilling prophecy. You only have to acknowledge that there is a part of you that is not working right and that you understand that. The key here is to feel close to someone
and
feel safe at the same time. It's not that you might hurt me—that's not the issue. The issue is that
you
won't be hurt.”