Fear My Mortality (20 page)

“All right, but our dinner will have to be apples and oat bars.”

I giggled, and it was a wretched sound. “We can pretend to be horses.”

“No.” Michael’s arm tightened. “Don’t do that. Don’t pretend. You have to think about what’s real. Do you understand? What’s real. You’re not an angel. You’re not made of light. You’re Ava. You’re the girl who dances and builds walls. You’re the girl who picked up the knife. You have to think about all that. Focus on that.”

I didn’t understand, but I listened anyway. “Tell me.”

“You’re Josh’s sister. You walk to dance class. You’re the girl who can die.” His voice got all raw and he said only one more thing before he stopped talking. “You scare me.”

I kept my head down as his arms remained around me in a solid circle, the only thing that wasn’t shaking. I tried to focus on the calm of his words, soak up the new silence. I squeezed my arms against my knees, pulling them into my chest, and smothered my own breathing. He said I was the girl who built walls, so that’s what I did.

For the next ten minutes, I built a wall, one block at a time, until it was eye height in my mind. The pressure on my brain lifted a fraction. It was enough for more of his words to register because something struck me as really strange. I unfurled to find him watching me, his arm still resting across my shoulders.

I bit down hard on my lip, not sure if the words would come out straight. “How did you know about the walls?”

It was clearly not what he was expecting, but a small measure of relief passed across his face. “Get better and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me how to get better.”

“Believe in yourself.”

That was it? I tried to shake my head, but it was already shaking, so that seemed pretty pointless. “I have to get moving.”

He took my shoulders as if he was going to wrestle me if he had to. “We can’t go anywhere while you’re like this.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I struggled to make him understand. “Back there. After the explosion, I jogged up and down the street and the nectar started to go away—the effects of it, I mean. Then when we were running, before we got here, I felt okay. Now that we’ve stopped, it’s getting worse. I have to move. I have to shake it off.”

“Well, you can’t go running laps around here. You’ll stir up the addicts.” He shot a hand through his hair. The look on his face was scared and worried at the same time. Then his expression cleared. “You could dance for me.”

I choked back a laugh that came out as half a sob. “Yeah, sorry, I left my pole back at my burned-down house.”

“No, I’m serious. I never saw you dance.” He pulled me upward. I dropped his jacket next to the tree as my body lifted, weightless in his arms. He spun me outward, and then back again, as though he’d had dance lessons himself.

I smiled despite myself. “You’re kidding.”

“What’s that look for?” He paused, before taking hold of my waist and moving me backward to the rhythm of a ballroom waltz. “A guy isn’t supposed to know how to dance?”

“
You’re
not supposed to know how to dance.”

“Why not?” He shrugged as he spun me around again. “Mom taught me.” He pulled me back against him, but now his face was pensive, the lightness gone. “That was before she left.”

His body was warm against mine, his hands as strong as any trained dancer, strong enough to crush me, but his hold was so gentle it brought tears to my eyes. If only I could go back to the moment his hands held the knife and step between him and my brother.

He reached out to stroke the side of my face and I realized that he was wiping a tear from my cheek, his expression as drawn and damaged as I felt. Dancing with him had dulled the buzzing of every cell, the movement lulling me into thinking there was nothing wrong with me.

I pushed away from him. “I can’t dance anymore. Why don’t you just let me run laps around this tree or something?”

He was back to wary and removed. “Who says you can’t dance?”

I scrunched up my shoulders. “Everybody. Ms. White. If I hurt myself … ”

He laughed so loudly that it hurt my ears. “Hurt yourself? Ava, your legs were blown off today. I don’t think it gets any worse than that.”

I looked down at the ground—at my new feet encased in second-hand shoes. They wanted to move, to dance, to
breathe
.

Michael didn’t touch me, but his voice was a whisper against my heart. “Nobody can tell you to stop dancing. It’s your choice.”

“If I end up with a syringe stuck in my hands, it will be your fault.”

“What are you talking about—your hands? You’ve got shoes on.”

“Hah! You were right when you said you’d never seen me dance.” Just to show him, I did a standing backflip. It was a stupid thing to do without stretching first, but my body didn’t seem to mind. Instead, it felt good, the rush of air and the sense of space—the illusion of control. I expected to wobble and crash on the landing, but I didn’t. So I tried another one. It worked and I smiled.

I started to run through one of my old routines—one of the really technical ones where I had to get everything right. I didn’t though. I stopped every time I got something wrong and ran over the moves, step by step, again and again. The repetition soothed, the movement calmed. I focused on every bend, every stretch, the finest point of my feet and the broadest span of my arms, the quickest spin, the slowest split. I lost count of the number of times I tempted death-by-diseased-syringe when I planted a part of my body on the ground. I leaped, spun, extended, kicked and twisted my body into a glorious pretzel, only to slide out of it, jump and spin again, sliding through the murky grass as if it was the smoothest dance floor. My lungs pounded out air, but my heart beat slower than I thought possible. I forgot all about nectar and the agitation of running and the horror of losing my legs. I even forgot Michael was there.

I came to a quiet stop and found him leaning up against the tree. I was suddenly transported back to the Terminal, to the Mirror Room. Except this time Michael didn’t look bored.

“Your dad was right. You do dance like a moonbeam.” He sauntered over to me, pushing my hair out of my face and running his hand through it. “Your hair grew, too.”

He let the strands drop over my shoulder and I could see how much it had grown: at least five inches since that morning.

A prickle of fear crept up my spine as his hand lingered over my shoulder, not quite brushing my neck. My mouth was suddenly dry, my voice a bare whisper. “Do you think the nectar made my hair grow when I healed?”

He nodded. “Heaps.” But he looked at me very intently as if nectar and its effects on my hair were the last thing on his mind. As if he wanted to draw the deepest thoughts out of my head and claim them.

“Ava … ” His other hand captured my waist as he said my name.

This time when he touched me, I felt it—the
zap
.

I never thought I’d be so happy to feel that sharp sting. I was myself again. I couldn’t help but smile and wince at the same time. He must have caught the wince because he paused, giving me the chance to break away from him.

Run away, Ava.
I took a step back. “You said you’d tell me about walls.”

His face fell as if he’d forgotten all about it. As if he’d
wanted
to forget all about it.

“You said you’d tell me how you knew.”

“Yeah … um … ” He looked down at his feet, shuffled a bit, and then looked at his hands, not meeting my eyes. “How about you ask me something else instead.”

I frowned, not liking the evasion. “Something else? But you promised.”

He looked around again as if he’d find something to distract me. He must have come up empty because finally, he met my eyes. “Ask me something else. Please?’

I didn’t want to ask him something else, but the look on his face made my think twice about pressing him. He probably thought I wouldn’t be okay, that I wouldn’t get better, so he’d never have to tell me how he knew what was inside my head. Still, I wasn’t about to let him get away that easily. I folded my arms. “All right then, what did that guy back there—Jeremiah—what did he mean about you being an immortal?”

Michael paused, and I glared. “Don’t skip out on me.”

He exhaled. “Did you know that some ancient Seversandian tribes used to ritually kill their babies?”

“You’ve got to be joking. That’s even worse than Implosion.”

“They believed it was necessary to weed out the weak. To guard against extinction.”

“Okay. That’s pretty horrible, but it doesn’t answer my question.” I scowled at him. “You can’t get out of two questions.”

“I’m getting there.”

I nodded to let him know I’d listen.

“Those who didn’t regenerate fast enough were buried in specially-made tombs and left to fall into a death-sleep.”

My eyebrows rose. There was something on the news once about a kid who wandered away from his parents in the national park without food or water. His body had shut down into some kind of preservation state—they called it a coma—not dead, but not alive either. Apparently, he could have stayed that way for a hundred years or more before his body died.

Michael continued. “Only the fast healers were allowed to live with the tribe. It was survival of the strongest.”

“That sounds a lot like the Bashers,” I said.

“The Bashers think they’re descended from the tribes. They want to recreate a society where only the strongest survive.” He slid to the ground and rested against the tree. “Dad used to talk about the tribes. He was an anthropologist before he went into big business. He did his Ph.D. on tribal culture. He even went to Seversand on some international goodwill exchange years ago—some of their academics came here to study how we manage our resources and he got to go there and study their military culture. He was totally into observing the biological basis for killing. It’s why he helped design the Terminal. When I was small, he used to call me his little warrior. He called me one of the immortals.” He caught my eye. “Crazy, right?”

I knelt beside him and reached out to touch his shoulder, but he shrugged away from me as if he couldn’t stand to be touched.

“When I was a kid I just thought it was talk. But the thing is … the tribes … with what they did, after a while, there weren’t any slow healers left. They got stronger and stronger and people lived for hundreds of years. Not just 400 like most people do. But 700, 800. Nothing made them sick, nothing hurt them. They were the closest thing to immortal.”

He picked at the hem of his pants. “The Bashers wanted me to join them, but I said no. As if I would even think about it after what they did to my family. But sometimes I wonder if I’d joined them … maybe I could have protected my brother.”

The Basher girl back at my home had said that Michael’s kind were everything the Bashers were fighting for. If he was immortal, they would see him as the strongest, the most worthy. And yet, he’d rejected them. “You don’t know that. They would have expected you to hurt other people just like your brother.”

He shrugged again as if it didn’t matter. “Maybe I’ll live a long time. Maybe I won’t. But that’s what Jeremiah meant.”

I didn’t let him shake me off this time. “It’s okay.” I met his eyes. “Really.” I didn’t know how to tell him that he and I were opposite sides of the coin—opposite ends of the spectrum. In a perfect world, maybe we would balance each other out. I struggled for the words and finally found them. “I’m a freak, too.”

He looked at me with something dark in the back of his eyes. His face reminded me of a storm right before the first thunder. Then a spark lit behind his expression and a smile broke through. “We’re both just freaks of nature, huh.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest. “I feel much better than before. Do you think we should get moving?”

“I don’t know, Ava. Let’s just stay put for the rest of the evening. Just in case. Okay?”

I stared out at the thick bushes and the cracked concrete pathway running through them. I didn’t like the idea of staying. Now that I wasn’t out of my mind, the park was beginning to give me the creeps. Before I could say anything, someone lurched out of a bush a few feet away. He had tan arms, a weathered face, and scraggly gray hair, but he didn’t notice us as he lumbered past, fixated on something I was sure nobody else would ever see.

I waited for the stranger to disappear back into the trees before I tugged on Michael’s arm. “Are you sure we shouldn’t keep moving today?”

“We could, but the next safe place is a long way from here on foot. We should start out in the morning.”

“You mean there’s actually a ‘safe’ place waiting for us out there?” The corner of my mouth twitched upward, trying really hard to lighten the weight that settled in my chest.

He rubbed his jaw. “Starsgard,” he blurted, as though he’d been thinking about it a lot longer than he’d wanted to say. “I think that’s where we should go.”

I frowned. “Across the border?”

“Nobody can follow us or make us come back. Drones can’t enter their airspace.”

“But it’s … ”
So far away
. Even if we made it that far, we had no way of knowing whether they’d let us in. Starsgard was locked down, guarded against Evereach on one side and Seversand on the other. I remembered the picture plastered outside the dance studio, of the towers in the background, so tall they might actually touch the stars.