Chasing Before (31 page)

“But she didn’t die.” I remember Nate saying that she had come back to town.

“No. When she hit the water, I panicked.” Neil exhales loudly through his nose. “But then she surfaced, and
she was laughing. She begged me to jump in too. But I couldn’t. When she waded over to the bank and toweled off, she said that meant I was scared of commitment. Like Nate. The bridge was a test, and I failed. She never did come back to church, and she refused to answer my phone calls. I saw her at school, but we were never alone again. And after she graduated, she went to college in New York. I always wondered if she used me to get back at Nate. But I really loved her.”

I’m so conflicted. My heart goes out to Neil for what he went through, but I can’t reconcile it with the way he always took the moral high ground. “There was nothing wrong with you loving Gracie,” I tell him. “And you shouldn’t feel guilty for having sex with her. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

He raises his eyebrows slightly, and waits for me to say more.

“What I can’t understand is all your talk about the importance of virginity and waiting until marriage. Is it something you said so they wouldn’t judge you at church?” I’m curious how he’ll answer. “I mean, how can you even sign that pledge if you’re not actually a virgin?”

“I rededicated my virginity.”

“I don’t know what that means. How do you ‘rededicate’ your virginity?”

“I heard a speaker at one of our youth conferences talk about it once.” Neil’s tone is defensive. “And it made sense to me.”

“Okaaaay, so they encourage you to rededicate your virginity?”

“I wouldn’t say they encourage it. It’s not a ‘get out of jail free’ card or anything.” He manages a self-deprecating laugh. “But it’s an option for those of us who messed up. Giving into the sin once doesn’t mean you have to continue to do it.”

“Are you saying that even if Gracie had become your girlfriend, you would have made this rededication pledge? Or did you make it because if you couldn’t have sex with Gracie anymore, then you didn’t want to have sex with anyone?” Every muscle in my body tenses, waiting for his answer.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“I bet you’re still in love with her. I bet that’s the real reason you don’t want to marry me. I’m just a poor substitute for Gracie.”

“I never said I didn’t want to marry you,” he protests. “I said you wouldn’t want to marry me. And look—I was right, wasn’t I?”

“I don’t know, Neil. I really don’t. This is too much for me to process right now. Because guess what? Lying is a sin too.” I turn my back to him and close my eyes. “I think it would be better if you went home.”

“But—”

“Please,” I say wildly. “I need some time alone.”

Neil gathers his clothes, gets dressed, and puts his shoes on. His retreating footsteps are followed by the slamming of my front door. Only then do I allow myself to cry.

thirty-four

THE MEMORY ENDS. When I come back to myself, I’m lying half on top of Neil, half on the floor. I’m too stunned to speak, and for a minute Neil must be too. The next Morati strike can’t be far off. But then Neil pushes me away. Roughly.

“Where the hell did that come from?” He glances from my face to the ruffled bed skirt, and his eyes widen. “You were hiding that memory globe under your bed, weren’t you?”

“I’m not the only one good at hiding things. I confessed all my sins to you, but you kept secrets from me.” Well, not my most recent sins, but that’s a technicality.

“You put the rest of us in danger so you could keep viewing memories. How could you keep evidence to
yourself? You might as well be in league with the Morati.”

“You’re wrong. In fact, today I caught one of the Morati. I saw into her true memories, and she’s in custody.”

Neil gets up and paces the room. “But what about the rest of the Morati? You don’t want them to be caught—not when they are supplying you with your memories.”

“That’s not true. I want them to be brought to justice as much as you do.” Even if I am one of them.

Neil laughs bitterly. “Right.” He stalks over to the table the Morati put there. Its intricate filigree makes it stand out from the rest of the furniture in the room. “I think it’s pretty telling that you kept their table.”

“They stole our memories. I just wanted to know what happened between us.” I may not like that Neil lied to me or that he had sex with Gracie, but at least it’s out in the open now. In reality his actual confession hurts less than the fact that he didn’t feel like he could confide in me. Trust is the basis of any relationship. Maybe we grew apart because he wouldn’t trust me and I somehow picked up on it on an unconscious level. Maybe that’s what has been driving me to regain my memories to find out the truth.

“It looks like Nate was right about us breaking up. Does that make you happy?” Neil asks.

“We don’t know that for sure.” I finally stand. “We need to view more.” Once we have the whole picture, we can heal our relationship. We can close the gap between us and truly be together.

Neil shakes his head. “When will it end? When will
you understand that what matters is not what happened then but what is happening right now?”

But he tried to hide what happened then. If we hadn’t viewed that memory, then he might never have told me. “Were you ever planning to tell me about Gracie?”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” Neil says. “I’m going outside for a walk.”

His non-answer is one blow too many. And it fills me with rage. I pull the skep charm out of my shirt with such force, the chain breaks. My whole body buzzes, and I hurl the charm at the wall, aiming for his photo at the center of my collage. The charm falls with a soft thud onto the carpet, but at the same time there’s a metallic scraping sound as a ripple of energy the size of a Frisbee opens up, obliterating Neil’s photo in a bright light and melting the other photos it touches.

As we watch, the ripple expands outward, the circle of light growing larger, consuming nearly all of my collage.

I gasp and drop my arm. The circle flickers and fades, and then it’s gone. I sprint to the now almost bare wall, run my hands over the surface. It’s hot to the touch, and the ripples have left a circular pattern of grooves, like the ones found at all the Morati’s later bombing sites. My knees wobble and threaten to give out as I try to recall the chain of events that led up to the other bombings after I viewed memories. Each time electricity ran through me right before the energy blasts.

“What the hell was that?” Neil chokes out. He looks at me as if I’ve grown horns and a forked tail, and for all I know, maybe I have.

“Did an electric current hit you just now? Or before? When the other bombs hit?” Before the library bombing, he bent over and clutched his stomach. I’m sure of it.

“No. Why?”

If I am the only one feeling the electricity, then maybe it’s coming from me. Maybe
I
am the bomb. But I wasn’t anywhere near the other bombing sites, so I don’t know how it’s possible.

“I—I don’t know.” The ripples of energy appeared when I threw the skep charm at the wall. I pick it up off the floor and examine it closely. It’s an ordinary metal charm on an ordinary gold chain. It must be a coincidence. Unless it’s not. When Autumn saw my charm, she thought it was an obol. Megan said obols are what Careers use to travel between levels, and I found out later that they have to use the regulated portals in Areas One and Three. But what if this particular obol can open portals anywhere? If that’s the case, why wasn’t Nate opening portals anywhere he pleased? Or was he? I am so confused.

“Is that your skep charm?” Neil asks, reaching out his hand for it.

I snatch my arm out of his reach and tuck the charm into the pocket of my capris. If it holds such power, I have to keep it safe. “Yes. Not that you care,” I snipe at him.

“Where did it come from?” He’s mystified, and wary.

We sit next to each other on the end of my bed, and the fight goes out of me. It’s time to tell him the whole story. No more lies. I explain that Nate dropped it in the brimstone jail while dumping a demon into the hellhole,
and that I was there visiting Julian. He tries to interrupt me, to ask me questions, but I barrel on, needing the momentum to carry me through. I theorize that it could have been me who caused what we thought were bombings, but that might actually have been unstable portals that opened via some mystical combination of viewing the memory globes and touching the skep charm, though I have no idea how this happened or why. I admit that it sounds far-fetched, and that I could be totally misreading the situation. I stress that probably only the Morati know the truth and that’s why we need to talk to them. But I don’t tell him what Julian told me, about my being eight percent angel. How could he handle that, when I can’t come to terms with it myself?

When I stop talking, he doesn’t reply for several minutes. He’s so still, I almost think he’s somehow perfected Furukama’s trick of turning into a statue. Finally he tilts his face toward me.

“Maybe we should break up,” he says, and the words I dread the most in the world are out in the open.

I’m so light-headed, I might float straight out the window. “You don’t really mean that, do you?” I ask, my voice shriveled. Oh God, I shouldn’t have told him what I did. I’m such an idiot. Of course he doesn’t want to stay with someone as evil as I am.

“Yes. I do.” He sighs. “There’s something off about you.”

So that’s it, then. We’re broken up. I’m utterly numb.

“I’m still me,” I squeak.

“Are you?” Neil turns to face me full on, his features hard,
though his eyes are still kind. “I sensed a change in you after you viewed that first memory globe. And now it’s like you’re possessed. You have this singular obsession with your memories, and you don’t care about anything or anyone else.”

“I care about the memories
because
I care about you.”

Neil shakes his head. “Why did you have that memory globe under your bed when you had the suspicion it might cause more destruction and endanger more lives?”

“Why didn’t you turn me in after the first memory globe?” I counter. “I think on some level you wanted me to view them.”

“I trusted you to do the right thing.”

“Trust?” I almost laugh. “You want to talk about trust? You didn’t trust
me
with your secrets, but you trusted the Felicia who existed in that memory.”

Neil walks over to the far corner of the room and plucks one of the few remaining photos from the collage wall. It’s the one of Autumn and me in Iceland, and it bubbles and curls up on one side, where it was scorched. “That Felicia is a myth. She always has been. The Felicia you are now is the only one who counts. She’s the one holding all the power.”

If that’s true, why do I feel so powerless?

He doesn’t get that I’d give anything to be that myth, because she’s the one who knows what really happened to us. And knowledge is the real power. I flop backward onto the bed. “You’re wrong.”

“Felicia, listen. Because I want you to understand this.” He returns to my side and takes my hand in his. He lightly
traces the love line on my palm, sending calming vibes up my arm. “I wasn’t hiding that memory from you because of Gracie. I was hiding it because of
me
.”

“What do you mean?” I sit up.

“I’m questioning everything, because nothing’s like what I thought it would be. I’ve lost my compass, and I don’t know which way is north, or if I should be headed that way.” He draws in a shaky breath. “Your faith in me was the only thing keeping me going. It was wrong of me, but I didn’t want you to stop thinking of me as a good person. And I thought that if you saw that memory, you would. I’m sorry.”

He looks up at me warily, as if bracing for my condemnation. But he’s right that my expectations of him were unrealistic. By sticking to my highlight reel in Level Two, I curated a Neil memory museum, framed him as a masterpiece. Now, confronted with the real boy next to me, I realize he’s just as much a work in progress as I am.

I squeeze his hand. It was enormously difficult for him to lay bare his soul like this. All at once I understand what Neil has been trying to tell me. Goodness is a series of choices, every day, not a static character trait. But if he thinks a single choice in his past defines his worth, then we both need to change our concept of what “good” is. “I’m sorry too. And for the record, you’re more than good enough for me.”

He smiles sadly. “You’re good enough for me too.”

“Maybe not yet. But I want to be.” I stand up. “First I have to tell Furukama about this energy blast I created. And about its possible connection to the obol and the memory globes.
Maybe he’ll know what’s going on, or at least what we should do about it.”

“Right now?”

“I’ve already waited far too long.” I bet that Furukama is still in the brimstone jail, interrogating Emilia. We can add this to his line of questioning.

He stands up beside me. “I can go with you. If you want.”

“You’d do that? Even though we’re broken up?”

He draws me into a hug. “No matter what happens, I’ll never stop caring about you.”

“Thanks, but Furukama would probably prefer that I come on my own. He’s a very private person.”

Neil nods. “Good luck.”