5. PULSE
Lawson—
There’s barely enough of Aidan to hold back the chill of the wall, but heat still seeps into me through our threadbare shirts. This is so not the time to be enjoying body contact. Not with Aidan so fragile, the wall so rough, and a gun in my hand. But damn if the peace Aidan radiates doesn’t make me want to slip inside that one and share skin.
There’s no calm like that in my world, not since arriving in D-town. No, never. Aidan feels like shelter, which makes no sense. Aidan can’t protect anyone, can’t protect self, won’t be able to protect me if my plans go awry. But even still.
“Not even funn—”
“Shh.” My elbow hits Aidan’s throat, too hard.
Aidan chokes. I’ve cut off air as well as words, probably bruised that one’s windpipe. I ease up, turning my head to press my teeth into the meat of my arm, hiding my wince and getting a clear sightline on the figure poised in the center of the tracks. A tremor moves through me.
“Hey, you!” The GG commander’s uniform makes her a darker shape cut out of the night. She lifts an ultrasonic blaster over her shoulder.
It’s so surreal that I just stand there as the muzzle angles toward us.
“Move!” I follow up my order by darting across the tracks and rushing the second wall. Halfway up, I glance back to make sure Aidan is following.
Nope. Aidan remains frozen, gaze locked on the blaster.
My heart rate kicks up a few notches. If she were to hit that trigger, pressure would build in Aidan’s eardrums. Then there’d be the roiling nausea, lungs in agony and, finally, complete nervous system break down.
My feet hit the gravel between the tracks and the wall; I’ve jumped back down. I take off running toward them. If she presses the trigger, it’s got to be me she hits.
“Stop right there.” But she’s not focused on me as she pulls an old-world semi-automatic from her belt and aims it at Aidan.
My vision swims. My mouth dries out. I cover the last of the distance and get in the way.
A spray of bullets goes off, pop pop pop with a silencer. Gravel shoots up into the air and falls around us as I grab Aidan’s hand and practically drag that one up the second wall. Turns out the little Bee can climb with the right motivation. We’re over and down the other side in minutes.
“Hey!” The Commander calls again as our sneakers pound the pavement, but she doesn’t pursue.
No more shots are fired, and high-intensity sound does not blast into us from behind. She knows we’ll be back. What are we going to do, run for the wilderness? We’d just get picked up by one of the military patrols and dragged back for rehabilitation, if we were lucky. If toxic groundwater and genetically modified predators didn’t get us first.
We run bent at the waist. I follow a zigzagging course, avoiding the busier streets of Urban Center 63. It’s not until we reach the first abandoned housing district that the uneven rasp of Aidan’s breath breaks through my focus. I’ve set easy pace, for me, but Aidan has been running full out this whole time.
Not that Aidan would even think of complaining. Obviously, I’m the only one who cares about that one’s well-being. It’s down to me to take care of us both, so I slow to a stop in the deeper shadows of a porch.
An old swing hangs on two remaining chains, half the seat drooping to the porch. Strong gusts of wind drag it back and forth with a scriiitch, screeech. Aidan sits down next to the low end of the swing and wheezes along with the noise.
I slouch against the nearest pillar of the porch and, instead of staring at Aidan, squint at the stamp on the door. The green paint is so bright it practically glows in the dark. This house is scheduled for demolition on DECEMBER 26. But the weather’s so weird, I’ve lost track of what month we’re in.
“Any idea where we are?” Aidan asks.
“I grew up here,” I lie, out of habit. A habit that’s never bothered me before.
“Here?” Aidan indicates the porch swing with a tip of the shoulder.
“No, not right here. In this neighborhood.” I wave vaguely beyond the houses across the street and focus on not shifting my feet. “Over there.”
I never tell anyone where I really grew up. I’ve never wanted to. Not until a second ago, and now it’s too late.
Aidan leans chin on knees. “Are we going to your house first, then?”
“No! No, I’m never going back there.” I fold my arms, but truth slips past my gritted teeth, as if it can wash away the lies. “My father died there. In the quake.”
Aidan only nods in understanding and doesn’t pry. We’re D-towners. We come from disaster, trauma, and loss. We all have things we don’t want to talk about.
Like when, in the next moment, I ask, “So…where are we going?”
And Aidan blurts an address, then looks anywhere but at me, I get it. Aidan didn’t mean to tell me that secret. Not yet.
But all I say is, “Tough neighborhood.”
“This too.”
I give Aidan a hand up. Those thin fingers feel brittle in mine, like if I hold on they’ll snap in my grip, but if I let go someone else will break them. Aidan pulls away.
I set a walking pace this time, listening to Aidan’s breath to make sure I’m not going too fast. We both step softly, creeping though no one’s around.
The street is empty of cars, toys, everything. There aren’t even any fallen leaves. None of those in D-town either, but that’s because there are no trees there. These trees have trunks too big to wrap our arms around, and tall, with thick roots that buckle the cement.
I catch myself dry-washing the hand Aidan held, and I stick my hands in my pockets to keep them still. My fingers brush a lump of putty in my left pocket.
Underneath our quiet footsteps and quieter exhales waits a hungry silence. A void, empty of The Dance, waiting to be filled by the next sonic pulse. Usually when I leave D-town my ears strain for that fading beat, the ball of nerves in my stomach tangling and growing with each step. Then between one stride and the next the bass disappears, and I stand as if naked and waiting to be touched.
This time, silence snuck up on me.
I glance over my shoulder, as if the pulse isn’t invisible, inevitable. Like I can see it coming. My palms begin to sweat, and I scrub them on my jeans again. I pull the lump of putty out of my jeans and hold it out to Aidan.
“Earplugs?” I offer.
Aidan gives a head-shake. Not surprising, since no one has ever taken me up on the offer. No D-towner likes the idea of being snuck up on. I stick the putty back in my pocket.
“We’d better hurry,” I say.
Aidan breaks into a run, and I lope after. We’ve barely reached the top of the big hill when the sky begins to lighten. I swear softly, scanning the expansive roadway and the weed-choked hillside.
We absolutely cannot stay where we are. It’s the middle of nowhere, shelter-wise. Citizens may not drive to work anymore, but there are always people with reasons to travel. I can’t let us be seen on the road. We need to go down the hill itself, which means bushwhacking. The plants might provide some cover, but only if we want to meet the spiders and such that live down among the stalks.
“We can make it,” Aidan says.
“Nature doesn’t hold to your morals, you know.”
Thanks to genetic-modification, there are insects out there that were never meant to exist at all. I swallow to settle my stomach.
“We can make it.” Aidan points to the thick clouds in the east. “There won’t be a visible sunrise and it’ll take a while to get light.”
“And if we run down the road we’ll make it,” I insist.
“That’s reckless.”
Looking at Aidan fills my stomach, my chest, my throat with shards of pain. Bruises color that one’s face and other visible skin, a watercolor painting of layered brown and yellow-green, purple and vivid red. Dried blood forms a dark crust under one nostril.
It makes me brave.
“Love is reckless,” I
blurt.
Or maybe not so brave. I take off running before Aidan can reply.
Just off the bottom of the road, a patch of scraggly wildflowers grows from parched soil. I stop there, chest heaving. On the petals of a purple flower crawls a lone honeybee, escaped from some bee farm. Aidan careens after me, arms windmilling.
“Put that thing away,” Aidan snaps, joining me.
We both flinch at the tone. I glance down at my hand. When did I pull my gun?
“Had to cover you,” I say. It might be true. My reflexes are pretty ingrained, and being exposed on the road like that did put Aidan at risk. But the next part is definitely a lie. “That’s why I went ahead.”
I ran because…
Because I’m…
It makes no sense.
I’m terrified of you.
“Never wondered,” Aidan gasps, breath all kinds of out of control.
“What’s wrong?” I demand.
“Pulse.”
My brows pinch in confusion.
“Pulse,” Aidan repeats, barely even a whisper. “That’s why you…”
I risk a step closer. “Why I what?”
“You know…” Aidan waves a hand back up the hill.
And that’s what I get for being a liar.
“Aidan, what do you feel right now?”
“Huh?”
“How do you feel? Peaceful yet energized? Excited about the day?”
Aidan’s chin moves a centimeter back and forth. No.
“Then there was no pulse, okay?” I lean in. “And whatever it is you think I did—”
Wild sound wraps around me as our eyes meet. The mingling rasps of our breaths. The chitter of insect legs rubbing together. The call of a frog hidden in the weeds. Wind rushing down the avenue.
My knee hits the cement with a pinprick sting of pain. Air rushes out of my lungs. Tears wet my cheeks as warmth fills my chest. All the little tensions in my body unknot. I reach out blindly, gasping for breath. Aidan is a blur standing above me, haloed by the sunrise, as I throw back my head and laugh and laugh. I search that one’s face, looking to share the moment.
Aidan gazes back serenely.
“Come on.” Just the hint of a smile plays around Aidan’s mouth. “That was the pulse. We need to keep moving.”
Aidan was able to pinpoint the exact moment of the pulse? Aidan is amazing. I can never do that. Wait… How can Aidan do that?
I flatten my palm against the ground for leverage and my pinky touches silky softness, distracting me. I glance down and blink, the destruction in front of me out of sync with the way I feel inside. I’ve knelt on the purple flower, smashed it against the earth.
The bee lies still beside it. It must have stung me and died. I stroke the tiny body. Then I smooth out the broken blossom and lay the bee to rest on the soft petals.
“Well, here we are,” Aidan announces.
We’ve jogged down a bit of gravel, I’ve helped Aidan over a low fence, and we’ve passed under a bridge only to find…this. Aidan starts laughing.
“So…” I press my lips together but can’t stop my answering smile. “You grew up in a field of corn?”
“I guess they bulldozed the whole neighborhood.” Aidan wipes away tears of mirth, but that one’s eyes keep crinkling with the beginnings of another laughing fit.
Yup, the entire thing—every house, every corner store, every pawnshop—would have been cleared away, leftovers burned, and the ground re-planted. Damn inconvenient, those GG.
“And I don’t suppose,” I ask, “that the chains were hidden somewhere where we might dig them up?”
“Well…they were in our basement.” Aidan bursts into laughter again.
But after an hour spent shoving and itching our way between rows of corn, while stomping on the ground hoping for a hollow sound, Aidan has to admit to not remembering exactly, or even approximately, where their house used to be.
“Sorry,” Aidan says, crouching to scratch at insect bites.
I catch that one’s hands. “Stop that. You’re making your ankles bleed.”
Aidan freezes. “Sorry, again.”
I let my hands fall and step back. An apology from Aidan seems wrong, like the world tilts out of balance. So many people owe Aidan. That one should never say sorry for anything.
And I probably should have thought about the First Consensus, but I didn’t.
“Don’t worry about it. Look, was the headquarters in this neighborhood too?”
“No.” Aidan waves a hand toward the outline of mountains in the distance, indicating that we have to go even farther from D-town. “We can go home, if you want.”
“Not on your life, little Bee. But we have to get to—”
Whop, whop, whop.
“Get down!” Aidan grabs my hand and yanks.
I let myself sprawl on top of Aidan as the helicopter passes overhead. It feels like falling. It feels like I’ve been waiting for this all day.
Warmth. Heartbeats pressed together. Aidan’s parted lips, glistening with moisture.
The whop-whop fades too quickly. I should get up. Instead I lie there braced on my hands. Aidan’s hipbones press against me, closer than dancing at The Dance. We’re not doing that, but my body doesn’t seem to know.
Aidan scrambles out from under me, and I jump to my feet, angling my hips away.
“It’s gone. I know where we can hide out.” I stride back toward the bridge without waiting for a response.
What did I just do?
When I step onto the asphalt of a GG neighborhood, Aidan pulls up short, and so do I. It’s confusing, seeing Aidan’s D-town clothes among round houses built in patterns of overlapping circles. The dwellings here are made of pale brown recycled amalgam. The geometric gardens have curving earthen benches, and painted intersections lend a festive atmosphere. Aidan’s feet are planted firmly in rich, black soil.
Dammit.
“We left tracks,” I say. “Take off your shirt. Come on, hurry.”
Aidan stares. “You first.”
It’s a dare, or a promise. I’ve never taken off my shirt so fast.
Aidan licks lips, then nods decisively. That one moves awkwardly, pulling both arms into the shirt before struggling out of it like a butterfly fighting free of a cocoon. Aidan’s shyness turns the simple act of undressing into torture for me. The breeze soothes the hot, prickling skin of my chest, shoulders, back. It does nothing for what’s happening below my waist—again.
I should look away. I should. I—
Skin, darker than mine, comes slowly into the light. The sight hits me like a bucketful of ice water, only shrinkage below my waist now. I should have expected this, prepared myself. Air hisses between my teeth.
That tawny skin, finally bare from the waist up and, bloody shit. I make fists, squeezing until my arms ache. I know what D-town is like for Bees, but… I’m shaking. So many bruises and scars. There are marks all over Aidan.
I turn away, jogging, almost running the way I came. Don’t cry!
I stop at the edge of the corn and walk backward hunched over, rubbing out my tracks with my t-shirt. Aidan falls in beside me and does the same.
No pity. Don’t act like it’s unattractive.
It’s not. It’s just that I can’t live in a world where that happens, but I have no choice. What can I say? Aidan lets that happen.
When we step back on the street, I grunt. “Not perfect, but at least they don’t know how many of us there are.”
“Looks like someone dragged a dead body,” Aidan jokes.
I keep staring straight ahead. “Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“Well, if one of us dies, it better be me. Because there’s no way I can carry you.”
I round on Aidan. “That’s enough.”
“Don’t you think going in there is a good way for one of us to end up dead?” Aidan indicates the neighborhood with a thumb. “Or worse?”