Coda (19 page)

“Because I hated you not knowing. Because of today. Because I want you to hear us.”

She laughs, a harsh sound with no humor in it. “I don’t know whether to be pissed at you for being selfish or happy that you’re actually admitting what you want for once in your life.”

“I want lots of things, okay? But not all of us are born into a life of luxury. Not all of us get everything we ask for.” It’s a low blow. I know it before the words have left my mouth and still can’t stop them.

Haven’s eyes, resolutely closed until now, snap open. They’re wet, shimmering. “Fuck you, Anthem,” she hisses. A sharp pain shoots up my leg where the heel of her boot catches my knee.

“Wait. Haven, wait!” I scramble off the bed, stumbling a little, and get to the door in time for it to slam in my face. I hope the twins didn’t hear that. When I get to the living room, the front door is still vibrating on rickety hinges.

“Did Haven go home?”

I turn and see Omega’s innocent smile. I can’t leave them. “Yeah.” I nod, forcing away the need to chase after her. “Yeah, she’s gone.”

My bed smells like her. I sleep on the floor, imagining heeled boots near my head. Her scent wafts down to cover me, a blanket not big or warm enough. Everywhere I go, I see her in the places she isn’t: the club, my apartment, outside Corp headquarters waiting for me even though I’ve asked her not to. Tabs go unanswered, and I don’t know how to find her any other way. The upper-Web isn’t huge, but its luxurious towers are tall enough to hide her.

When they ask, I tell the twins she’s busy, that she’ll be back to visit them soon. Like it wasn’t lying that got me into this mess in the first place.

Tracking doesn’t help. I do it anyway because I can’t risk another visit from the guards, and each time, I hang up the headphones with a mixture of relief and disappointment. At work, thinking of her sucks more energy than the wire plugged into my neck jack. Numb, drained, I go through the motions of caring for my family: cooking, telling bedtime stories, and force-feeding my father.

Word of another tracking death filters down from Quadrant Four. Anger blooms in my chest and wilts just as quickly.

The band gets the rest of my fractured attention, though I think they wish they didn’t. Yesterday, during practice before the show, I actually managed to reduce Phoenix to tears with my criticism of her playing. A first, but not one I took more than an instant of pride in.

Alone, I head back to the CRC. Without Haven’s toys all I can see are the memories I’ve always had access to, but today those matter less than my own. I stand in front of the viewer, flipping idly through my mother’s life, remembering Haven here beside me. The hologram glitches and reforms back into a drab room, a bed, a final good-bye.

I promise
.

It was the last time I ever saw her alive, though she hung on for a few hours after that. I’ve never watched beyond this, never wanted to, and I don’t know why my hand reaches now for the controls to flick forward. Maybe nothing can be as painful as what I saw the last time I was here.

Only the figure beside the bed changes. I was in the kitchen with the twins, as far from the bedroom as I could get and away from my parents behind the closed door. Their mouths move, saying things I can’t decipher and really don’t want to, but I see him take her hand and then, as if that’s not enough, move from the chair to lie beside her.

She smiles, and so does he. They fall into silence. It only takes another few minutes before her eyes close, as if she’s just falling asleep, and a few seconds after that for my father to realize what’s happened.

It’s not the first death I’ve witnessed recently. There’ve been too many of those—violent, sudden, and lonely. I watch as my father leans in to kiss her forehead, and I pull the chip from the viewer, put it back in the locker, and leave.

“Dude,” Scope says from the stairs outside my building. “Spill it. What’s wrong with you?”

I finish the last of my juice and sit down next to him. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Yeah, sure,” he scoffs. “That’s why Haven’s not around anymore. You think I haven’t noticed? I’m not always, you know, busy.”

“That explains why it’s taken you a week and a half to ask me.
I’m not the only one who’s different around here.”

He shrugs. “Figured you’d pull your head out and fix whatever you did on your own. You haven’t, obviously, so I figured I’d give you a hand.”

My skin prickles. “What makes you think it was something I did?”

“Uh, because we both know Haven? That girl takes more of your shit than anyone should ever have to. She spends all the time she can with you and treats Alpha and Omega like they’re her own brother and sister. If you two want to dance around each other forever, that’s up to you, I don’t care, but you can at least remember how fucking lucky you are to have her.”

“Ease into it, thanks.”

“Not my style.”

“We had a fight. And don’t talk about me behind my back.”

“Don’t change the subject. What happened?”

Sighing, I lean back and relish the pain of the cement step digging into my back because it makes me feel less tired. “I told her. She kind of freaked out on me.” Scope doesn’t know about what Haven did with my mother’s chip, what I found out that day, and I don’t tell him now. It just makes everything worse.

“That’s it?”

“Are you kidding? That’s not enough?”

“No.” He shakes his head, his dark eyes examining my face. “It’s more than that. Yeah, she’s gotta be angry that you kept this from her. I could’ve told you that was going to happen. Pretty sure I did, actually. But this is Haven, and you know she’ll forgive you once she’s cooled off. You’re”—he grabs my arm—“I don’t fucking believe you.”

“What?” I ask, pretending I don’t know what he’s talking about and wishing he didn’t know me so well. I deserve his disgust.

“You’re happy to have total strangers come and watch us. You let Crave and all the others in on this even though we don’t know them and Crave’s a damn
guard
, but you don’t trust her? And now you’re worried she’s going to go tell her father or someone because she’s mad at you? Damn it, Anthem, this isn’t just about you anymore, okay? Everyone’s looking at you for the next move, and you’ve been walking around in some kind of fucking fog. We need her. Pixel and I trust her even if you don’t, and Phoenix and Mage would if they knew her. She knows more about the Corp than any of us. Don’t you think we should give her the chance to help?”

Now that it’s been given voice and isn’t just a wisp of dark thought in my head, I can fully appreciate what an asshole I’ve been, how stupid that fear is. Scope’s mouth opens, closes, opens again.

“I probably can’t say anything you aren’t already thinking,” he says finally. “Has Haven ever given you a reason to think she’d do something like that?”

“No.” He’s right about all of it.

“You know you’re an idiot, right?” Including that.

“Yeah.” I swallow. “I want her,” I say. “It’s just too late.” I don’t care what promises I made to my mother. She was wrong.

His hold on my arm morphs from angry grip to reassuring touch for a second before he pushes himself from the stairs. “Okay. I’ve gotta get home. Stop yelling at Mage and Phoenix. I promised them I’d say that.”

One side of my mouth curls up. “I will.”

Scope looks at me for a long time. “Well, that’s why I got the brains and you got the looks. Wait, no, I got those, too,” he says, grinning as he walks away. I sit there for a while, watching people pass by. Fear has spread like disease, carried by the truths and rumors of what the Corp is doing. The faces I see are gray, pinched, showing
the signs of not tracking enough.

No wonder the guards are busy.

I’m careful to be nicer to the others when we meet at the club on Sunday. Phoenix is holding a grudge, but I think it’s just because she’s bored while Mage and the drummer in Crave’s band are adding something new to Mage’s kit.

Practices aren’t really private anymore. Crave and his friends mill around the club along with two more bands that have come out of hiding in the past few weeks. Looks that I think are meant to be surreptitious get sent my way all afternoon. It’s time, or there isn’t much point in continuing to be here. The insidious campaign to gather more people in this room has taken us as far as it’s going to go.

We have to be smart. A few hundred of us marching up to headquarters would be a spectacle for the few minutes before we all got shot or dragged off to have headphones clamped over our ears until that most special of tracks deafened us forever. Even if, by some miracle, they didn’t do either of those, a protest wouldn’t accomplish the kind of change I’ve read about. The Corp has no reason to alter their ways; there’d be no pressure from anyone they can’t quash.

It might still be worth it. The twins would hear about it from someone. I just wouldn’t be the one to tell them.

I want to be, though. If we can’t change the Corp’s mind, we have to change the Corp itself. Get rid of all the people who are responsible for this. Lock President Z and the Board up somewhere they can’t hurt us anymore.

Dreams, because we’re not ready yet. Anyone important at the Corp is so well-protected there’s no way to get to them. We don’t
even know what they look like. Something is missing.

I am
really
not the person who should be leading this. The crowd should scream someone else’s name.

Pixel follows me into his office, saying nothing as he scans his wrist at the console and leaves me alone again. I enjoy the silence for a few minutes, trying and failing to resist the track waiting for me. Every week it gets easier to be the focus of a growing number of eyes, but I still need this false courage. Maybe this will be the one that erases Haven from my mind for more than thirty seconds, or maybe my problems will disappear, along with my speeding pulse. A slow, acoustic guitar starts a simple, three-chord progression in a rhythm like water lapping against the edges of the Web.

Pink. That’s all I can see until it darkens to blood red, dissolving into spatters on glass. I smell her skin, her warm, shaky body in my arms, loving and hating that she needs me as much as I need her. Lying on my bed, her hair splayed across my chest, each fine strand like the hairs on a violin bow that drags across quivering strings. The sound gets harsher, each note struggling for air. Drag, drag, drag, like the breath from my chest, and what does become music is wet, sloppy, and sticky with blood
.

The siren starts and oh fuck, the pain, I can’t. Knives stab at my ears. I can’t. There’s only pain, and this is it. I’ll never hear anything again. My music is gone and the only thing my voice is good for anymore is screaming, screaming
—