Divided (2 page)

“And it’s why I’m definitely going today,” I say. And whatever it is—the worry that still comes through in his voice, my conversation with Naya about having to do more if counseling doesn’t work, the way it alarmed me more than reassured me—has me freshly determined to put the past behind me for good. I squeeze his arm again.
Trust me.
“So I should get going now, okay?”

“I’ll finish up here as quick as I can. Do you want me to come pick you up after I’m done?”

“No, I’ll just see you when I get back.” It’s approaching early summer, getting warmer by the day, and getting home from the Grid on the train won’t take long. I don’t want to ever take it for granted or forget how hard-earned it was—this ability to move freely, going wherever I want, whenever I want, without fear of being hunted by someone who looks just like me, simply because only one of us is allowed to exist.

I tilt Chord’s head down until our lips meet again. This time I let the kiss go on, and only the mild jeers from a handful of students walking by has the two of us breaking free.

“If you change your mind about the train,” Chord says into my ear, “call my cell. Even if I’m not done here, I’ll come get you.”

I sink my hands into his hair, a brown so deep it’s only shades removed from the dark depths of my own, before starting to ease myself loose. Easier to think when we’re not touching. “Go. And don’t do
all
the work.”

Instead of letting me go, he tightens his grip, his hands around my waist. “Quinn is going to owe me big-time,” he says, sounding resigned.

“Come by later. If you want to, I mean. Tonight.” My words are still clumsy in moments like these. When I feel stripped to the bone, asking for more.

“Okay.” Chord’s eyes roam my face, hotter on me than even his skin felt. “I want to.”

A voice from down the hall makes me jump. It’s Quinn, his head peering out of a classroom. Wavy brown hair that goes down to his chin, eyes a light gray. He’s registered for Baer’s weaponry class but is often so behind in his other classes that he misses as many sessions as he makes. “Hey, Chord, we better get moving on this thing if we’re going to get out of here anytime soon,” he calls out to us.

Chord sighs. “Sorry, West. I should go, too.”

I nod, and we separate. I turn away to leave but then stop. Look back at him. The compulsion to watch Chord until I can no longer see him, to be absolutely sure that he’s safe, is as strong as it is sudden … and a bit unnerving.

He’s fine, West.
You’re
fine. No more Alts.

Right before he steps into the classroom and disappears from sight, he turns back, too. He smiles at me. I’m just being paranoid. I lift my hand in a slow, careful wave, and then he’s gone.

A slight tingling in my marks has me curling one hand around the strap of my bag and shoving the other into my pocket.
The marks are the past. They’re no longer who I am.

But I can’t shed them, either, and by default, neither can Chord.

Walking past the last clusters of students still lingering in the halls, I push open the heavy front doors of Torth Prep and step out onto the campus.

I look up at the sky and it’s a perfectly clear blue. Only when I tilt my head down a bit do I see it arcing across the horizon—the slash of black as familiar to me as the sun, and as steadfast.

The barrier is what separates us—those who live here in Kersh—from the area out there known as the Surround. Erected by the Board, the huge iron wall keeps the city safe from the perpetual state of war just beyond it. Of course, the price for our safety is that we must always be ready to fight if the barrier is ever breached. Which means only the strongest soldiers are worthy of taking up some of the limited space here—of eating the hard-grown and hard-raised food, drinking the water that needs to be constantly filtered. The Board decided the best way to weed out the weak was for soldiers to have to face down their worst enemies, those who would make the ultimate challenge.

Themselves.

Or, as the Board calls them, Alts. An Alternate version of each person.

I beat mine months ago. Sometimes it feels much longer than that, those hours of hunting while being hunted almost blurred out by the hours I spend in art class or hanging out with Chord or Dess or my friends. But sometimes, when I’m distracted and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, the first person I think of is not always me.

Making my way across campus to the inner ward train station across the street, I tell myself I’m moving fast because of the afternoon heat that is already starting to cool, the need to get on the next train so I won’t be late, to unload the weight of my bag from my shoulder.
Not
because of the feeling I still sometimes find hard to shake—that I continue to be judged by all those I killed and am found guilty of taking far too much, survival or not.

There’s a car waiting up ahead, pulled over to the curb. It’s a black sedan, nondescript, and too expensive-looking to be from around here. The low, persistent hum in the air—the engine is still running—surprises me. Fuel is far from plentiful in Kersh, especially in the poorer wards. Jethro isn’t the poorest—that would be Gaslight—but we’re not Leyton either.

Before I draw even with the car, it starts moving again, slowly steering back into its lane and continuing on until it’s gone from sight.

I cross the street behind it, nearly running now as I get closer to the station; a train’s just pulled up.

As I board it and find myself some standing room and watch the suburbs give way to the Grid, I don’t give the car another thought.

“West, any changes from the last time we talked?” asks Julis.

“Yes, it’s—there
is
something new. And I wanted to talk to you …” Damn. I forgot how hard it is to actually say out loud the things I’ve seen in my head. It means inviting someone else in and letting them judge me, too.

“A new nightmare?” Julis asks quietly.

I nod, suddenly feeling more exposed than I have since I first started coming to Julis’s office, and it’s hard to not squirm in my seat. My counselor comes across as casual and nonthreatening, and combined with her actually not being ancient and her often-unorthodox, freewheeling approaches, she’s pretty popular as far as Post-Completion Treatment doctors go. With her softly dyed blond hair—the color makes me think of early-spring sun—and her jeans and casual T-shirts, she’s hardly intimidating. I like her enough as far as head doctors go, but she’s still associated with the Board, and only the fact that she’s bound by doctor-patient confidentiality is why she knows I used to be a striker.

“Go ahead, West,” Julis says from where she’s sitting in the chair across from me. “Start however you like.”

“I saw
her
this time.” My Alt.

“Ah, I see.” Julis pushes her glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose. “Are you surprised?”

“No. Well, only that it’s taken this long for her to show, I guess, considering how she was such a big part of everything that happened.”

“Any theories on that?” Julis asks.

“
You’re
the doctor.”

She laughs loudly, the way she always does—for as long as I’ve been seeing her, Julis has never been one to hide her sense of humor. “And you’re the one who’s getting tired of having nightmares,” she says gently after her laughter subsides.

My nightmares. Being chased from behind. Being hunted again.

I exhale, look at my nails. After a very long minute, I speak again. “Maybe it means I had to make my way through everyone else before being ready to deal with her …” I trail off at that, unable to hide my discomfort at having to guess, at not knowing myself enough to be sure.

“Anything else?”

I scratch the palm of one hand. “Or that it means I was wrong when I thought I was okay with killing other people’s Alts to learn how to kill my own,” I say slowly. To go numb so I could stop thinking about what happened to Luc.

A few seconds of silence. Then Julis says, “Want to write out the nightmare? It might help you put in perspective why she’s showing up.”

I glance up at her. “You think her being there is more important than the others?”

“I think that’s something for you to figure out, West.”

“Right.” I press the tip of the stylus harder against the tablet I’m holding in my lap. A spiral of pixels unfurls across the screen—the words
Warning! You’re pressing too hard!
—scroll across, and I force my hand to relax. I know Julis is waiting to see if I have something else to say, but my thoughts are muddled, still frustratingly tangled, so I stall by looking around the office like I haven’t been coming here for weeks. Since mid-spring, when the nightmares refused to go away, and I couldn’t deny them anymore.

No pretentious scholarly certificates anywhere; instead the walls are covered with prints loud with color. Thin bamboo mats cover the floor, and there are green plants placed everywhere, all of them real. PCT docs don’t get rich on salaries funded by the Board—I saw some pretty sad offices when the worker from the Board’s Post-Completion department took me through the building to show me my options—but Julis really does seem to like her job. And for an office in the Grid, this place is way better than the norm.

Julis reaches over and takes another tablet from her desk, synching it to mine so whatever I write on my screen will simultaneously show up on hers. “Let’s make that list again, West,” she says. “The names of the people you see in your nightmare. And then we’ll tackle the nightmare itself.”

“None of that’s changed, except that I saw her this last time.” But I start writing anyway. It’s part of the treatment, the physical act of writing out the nightmare. Not just typing it out but actually making the hand write out the loops and dashes. The theory is that the exercise of writing out the nightmare means eventually coming to understand it, that it normalizes everything about it until its potential to cause fear is gone. I’m still waiting for it to kick in.

Their faces flash bright in my mind as I write out the names of those who show up in my nightmare. Chord. Luc. Dess. My parents. Ehm and Aave, though not as often as the others. The faces of those I assassinated as a striker. My Alt.

“Now write down what takes place in your dream,” Julis says. “Step by step, right up until you wake up. I know it’s not fun, but breaking the process down into simple actions will help take away the nightmare’s ability to scare you.”

I’m walking down the street, heading toward my house. It’s dark out, and cold, so I know it’s winter. There is a bloody knife in my hand, and I’m trying to clean it off with my shirt, kind of like the way people will use their shirts to clean their glasses. It’s strange because the knife says I’m still a striker, but at the same time, I also know I’m already a complete. Which doesn’t make much sense, writing it down now, but in the dream it just does.

I’m aware of Julis looking up from her screen to watch me as I write, but I don’t look up. Just keep putting the words down, keep hoping that this time they will finally seem more like someone else’s story so reading the words won’t be like reliving them.

There are footsteps behind me, but I keep walking. I don’t know why I’m too scared to even turn to see who it is, but I am. I can tell in my dream that I don’t want to know who it is. But the closer I get to home, the farther away it seems to get. Like how dreams can do that, make ordinary things weird, bending all the rules. So now I’m running, and the footsteps behind me are, too, even though I can’t actually hear them.

“Details, West,” Julis murmurs. “They’ll help tie it all together.”

The shirt I’m wearing is one I wore when I was a striker. I remember it because it was the one where Chord I remember throwing it away in a restaurant in Leyton because it was stained with blood. I don’t know if it’s stained in the dream because I’m wearing a jacket over it.

My hands hurt from the cold, and that’s why I’m having a hard time cleaning the knife.

The air smells like snow right before it falls, sharp and thin. It hurts my nose to breathe too deeply.

My heartbeat is loud in my ears, and I’m out of breath as I run. It all seems so real. It feels like I’ve been running for hours, which is crazy, but even when I’m asleep, I still totally believe it.

My hand is cramping around the stylus. I flex my fingers.

“Do you want to take a break?” Julis asks.

I shake my head. I want to get this out, and I’m sure Julis’s even asking is a sort of test, that she’s trying to figure out if I’ve managed to take in any of this counseling at all. Because if I have, I shouldn’t be willing to walk out again, to be okay with being a failure at this point.

“So what do you hear at the end?” she asks.

The words are coming more slowly now. They’re always a bit harder for me to write, this part of the dream when I’m most terrified and nearly blind with panic. The worst is that the part of me that knows I’m dreaming can’t do anything to wake up, either, no matter how scared I am. It’s only after I turn around in the nightmare that it finally lets me go.

I force myself to turn around, and this is where the dream changed, this last time. Instead of Chord or Luc or one of the Alts I killed standing there just watching me, always so close no matter how far or fast or long I’d run for, it’s her.

Julis sets her tablet back down on the desk and motions for me to pass her mine, too. “Here, let’s just have you talk for a bit now.”

“I don’t mind writing it out, Julis.” But I hand my tablet over, anyway, knowing I’m just protesting because I like talking about any of this even less than writing about it. Julis can be big for talking out new developments.
Let’s shoot the shit the old-fashioned way,
she’d said once.

She tosses me a small bag of candy from the stash she keeps in a goldfish jar on her desk. My favorites, which I’m sure she knows. “So. Let’s have at it, West. What happened after you turned around and saw your Alt?”

I open the bag of candy, begin to pick out the blues. “Normally that’s right when I wake up. But she … talked to me.”

Julis leans back in her chair. Waits patiently.

“She said that she’ll always be with me,” I say, trying to sound normal, pretending that a cold chill isn’t trying to crawl up my spine at the memory of her face and voice. So like mine, but not. “She said that she’ll never leave me alone.”

“And?”

I frown. “And what? Am I weird for being freaked out? Who wants to have their dead Alt talk to them in their sleep?”

“I didn’t know you believed in ghosts, West.”

“I don’t. Just … sometimes.”

“Like when?”

“I don’t mean with her, or Luc, or Ehm, or Aave,” I say carefully.

“So you mean … ?”

“I mean the Alts I killed, when I was a striker.”

“Ah.”

Not sure what to say next, I start sifting out the brown candies from the pile in my hand. Only reds left, already beginning to stain my palm.

“West, think back to a few sessions ago, what you said to me about why you see the people that you see.”

“Shame. Guilt. Learning to live with both.”

“Good, solid reasons for you seeing them, yes? So your Alt showing up …” She leaves it at that, and I know she’s waiting for me to fill in the gaps.

“Maybe seeing her means I’m just working out the fear still,” I finally say. “From being on the run. The more I see her, the faster the shock value goes down. Like exposure therapy.”

Julis tugs a thread from her sleeve and lets it float to the ground. “What about the idea of her being an
active
participant in your healing?”

“That makes no sense.”

“What she said to you is absolutely true—she won’t ever leave you alone because, dead or not, she is always going to be a part of you.”

I lift an eyebrow. “This is that technique, isn’t it? When you tell me to reimagine the nightmare into something that can’t scare me.”

“No, it’s not that. This isn’t necessarily a new nightmare. Having your Alt appear at the end doesn’t change the structure of your regular dream.”

“It hasn’t really worked, anyway. I’ve written out so many different versions—like I’m going to Chord’s house instead, or going to school. It’s like boring fan-fic or something.”

“I think you seeing your Alt is a significant step, West,” she says, leaning forward in her seat, her hands clasped in front of her. “I think you already know that, too.”

I shake out more candies into my hand without eating them. “That maybe I’m finally ready to face what happened, and that’s why it took her this long to show?”

“Ask yourself why you’d want your Alt to say something like that to you. What kind of response do you think she’s looking for?”

“In other words, if it was the other way around and she was the one who was still alive, what would I want to hear from her?”

“Your Alt
is
dead, West. She’s simply a reflection of something in your own head. Reason it out, just as you reasoned out why you were seeing Chord and your family and those Alts you killed.”

For a long minute, I stay silent, letting what Julis told me roll around in my mind, trying to knock answers free. “I guess if she had won and I were the one who died, I would want her to be okay with me always being a part of her,” I eventually say. “Physically, we were the same, you know? And even though she’s the worthier one after all, she has to understand that I make up a part of her; however she beat me, I helped push her to do that, too, in some weird, twisted way.” The words feel right as they pour out, and suddenly I don’t feel nearly as lost as I did when I first stepped into this office today. “My Alt showing up in my dream means I have to accept that I owe
her
my life, too.”

“No one ever said this Alt stuff was simple,” Julis says. Her words are light, almost a quip, even though her tone isn’t light at all.

“It’s not, at all. Sometimes it seems … hopeless.”

“You’re not hopeless, West. And I think you are really on your way. Today was a good day, remember that.”

“Okay, what now?” I ask her, crumpling the empty candy wrapper in my hands, then immediately smoothing it out again. Restlessness, relief, confidence that there’s an end in sight—that’s what I feel now. “I’m really ready for all of this to be over.”

“Again, none of this is simple.” Julis leans down in her seat, picks up the garbage can from below her desk, and holds it out to me. I toss the wrapper inside. “So go home, do your writing exercises, and I’ll see you Friday for our next session.”

The late-afternoon crowd swarms around me as soon as I leave the office building and step onto the sidewalk. Rush hour is always chaos here in the Grid, and practice has me diving expertly into the mass of bodies and moving with the flow before I get knocked aside. Noise is constant and all around, alive in its own right—chatter, traffic, footsteps on dirty pavement. The heat of the day is giving way to the cooler temperatures of dusk.

Through the propped-open door of the restaurant across the street, the smell of fried noodles and brown house sauce wafts out. It is strong, mouth-watering, and reminds me that it’ll be dinnertime when I get back. It also reminds me that I didn’t go to the store like I should have this past weekend. I do a mental rundown of what food I have in the house and I come up empty. Crackers, hot sauce, a bag of fresh bell peppers in the fridge, iced tea—not much of a meal.

And Chord might be coming over.

And I want to see him.

A sudden wave of sheer giddiness ripples right through me, catching me so off guard that I almost stop walking. I’m grinning like a fool and notice people passing by turning to stare at me—an old woman who smiles in reaction, a mom with two kids in tow, irritated at having to navigate around me, a boy a bit younger than me with encoded eyes who has no expression at all. I cover my mouth with my hands, but the smile lingers behind my fingers, a new and fragile thing. I guess it’s a smile that knows I’ll see Chord soon and that I’ll finally be able to tell him something good about counseling for once. Julis says it’s a breakthrough, a corner being turned. And even though I don’t know what’s going to happen next, things feel like they are moving in the right direction, closer to the way they’re supposed to be.