“Out,” he echoed. Controlled. Steady. Everything I wasn’t.
With a loud, almost painful release of breath, I admitted, “I want to go Outside.”
For a moment, I was seized with immense, cathartic relief just from having said these words aloud. But then I noticed his face, his shadowed eyes and clenched jaw, and even heard the shift of emotion in his voice. “Anya—”
“No,” I said, allowing my voice to rise, allowing all this tension to finally break through the siphon of my throat. “Don’t you dare take that tone with me.”
“What tone?”
“You know what tone. This gentle condescension of yours.”
Wincing to himself, looking almost stunned by his inability to anticipate this conversation, Kai reached for my hand. “Anya, please. I’m not trying to be condescending. You’re clearly upset, and I guess I’m hoping to calm you down.”
“I thought you liked that about me. That I feel things, express things.”
“I do.”
“Then don’t ask me to calm down! Ask yourself why you are not mad!”
“I don’twantto be mad.”
“Because they took it from you—”
“No one took anything from me, damn it!” he snapped, clutching the front of his shirt as if his chest was hurting him. “I chose it. I did it. I’m the one to blame. Just because you can’t accept that you did this to yourself—” He broke off with a little gasp, shutting his eyes. When he opened them again, they were red and glassy, like he was struggling to hold back tears. “I’m sorry. Anya, please, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did,” I said, and now I was the steady one, the one standing tall and giving language to my most inward, almost unrealized thoughts. “And you are right,” I told him. “I am scared. I am self-distracting. I am avoiding the consequences of my actions. But you cannot convince me that there is nothing wrong with this place. They find us at our most vulnerable, and they give usmagic.And we’re supposed to do what? Find the strength to say no to it? When you’re hurting and someone offers you a way out, is there really a choice? Is there anyone out there who’s going to say,No please, let me suffer? I quite like it actually.Don’t you see it? That’s why they do the assessments first. To see if we’re okay. And if we’re not, they slip us a flyer. New innovative method. Successful patient stories. Here we can make you new. We can take it all away. It’s fucking immoral, Kai, that’s what it is!”
“How?” he demanded, desperate to understand and be understood in return. “How is it immoral when they get nothing out of it?”
“They get control,” I seethed. “They get power over us.”
“And what’s the alternative? To keep this technology to themselves and let us walk around hurting each other without ever taking accountability for our actions? Is this themoralthing to do?”
“At least it’s honest,” I clipped, my face hot, everything hot and ruined.
“Well, unfortunately, Anya, a society can’t sustain itself on honesty alone.”
A pang went through me, a sharp, stabbing sensation in the middle of my chest, and I heard my voice cracking, “And how exactly am I supposed to know that, Kai? Everything I knew, they took it from me. My understanding of this world, of you, of myself, comes from mere instinct. There’s no logic to it. There’s no logic toanyof it. And now what? I’m supposed to go back to work like nothing happened?”
Surging forward, breathless, Kai took both of my hands in his and pressed them to his sternum. “Then let’s go to the Center and get your memories back. Or at least find out what happened to you. No matter what it is, we’ll go through it together. I’ll be there. I will not leave you.”
Wrenching myself free, I shouted at him, “Stop saying that! Stop treating me like I’m some lost puppy that desperately needs you to survive!”
For a long, heartrending moment Kai only looked at me, eyes wide and darting. Then, very quietly, almost as if talking to himself, he said, “That is not how I see you.”
Something softened inside me, guilt stirring in my blood. “Then how do you see me?” I asked.
He laughed under his breath, a curt, bitter sound I’d never heard from him before. “Oh, I don’t know, Anya. Maybe as the woman I love. The woman I’m hoping to spend my life with.”
It seemed to be such a simple thing. The feeling between us. So why was it so hard to hold on to it? If this was the single most indisputable truth of my life, shouldn’t it be absolute? Was truth absolute in itself, or was it only in theory, by definition? Was the truth of what was happening here something challengeable once brought into reality? Because in real life, there was his truth and there was my truth, and although both seemed to be right individually, they became wrong once they were forced to coexist.
I was seized by such anger then, a deep, personal need to rage at the world, becausewhydid it have to be like this? Why did everything have to become so warped and debased? His beliefs, mine, the impassable territory between us.
Then I said the words without even hearing myself, without even understanding what I was saying, “If you love me, you’ll come with me.”
And this, too, hurt him, I could see, although in a different way. “And if you love me, you’ll stay,” he threw back, his face contorting. “Do you like this answer? Emotionally manipulating each other? Fuck, Anya, what are we even doing here?” He paused and covered his eyes with the heels of his palms, pressing them in so hard that for a moment I wanted to scream at him,Stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.But the words, tender as they were, never left my mouth, and when he looked at me again, he was like the ocean outside, unsteady but powerful, capable of great beauty and even greater disaster. “We know nothing about the Outside,” he continued grimly. “How we’d survive,ifwe’d survive, the circumstances under which these people are forced to live. We know nothing, except that they have technology beyond our level of understanding. Technology that, after being exposed to it for the duration of a single procedure, you losttwenty-sevenyears of your life. How am I supposed to protect you from something like that? What do you want me tosay, Anya? That I would follow you to the ends of the world even if the end meant something terrible? I would.Fuck, I will. But this isn’t what you really want, is it?”
In resounding silence, we stared at each other, more tormented than we knew ourselves capable of being. But of course he was right. Of course I was being rash and unreasonable and immature. Of course I was running toward the darkness seeking light. I could not help myself. It was my nature, it seemed, to always run when things became too hard, too real.
