Here’s where things get interesting. She places the last of her clothes inside the drawer, closes it, then takes a seat on the bed, facing me. Like we’re about to have a very serious talk.
But she must not know where to start, because she just looks down at her feet for a moment.
“You’re allowed to be mad at him, ya know.”
She looks up. “I know. Trust me, I was.”
“Youwere. But you’re not now. Because you’re OK. Nothing bad has happened to ya. So you think…I should be grateful. I should let it go. I should forgive.Because that’s the grown-up thing to do. That’s the mature thing to do. But you know what, Clara?”
“What?” Her voice is very small all of a sudden.
“It’s fine to forgive him. Because that’s forward momentum on your part. But you don’t ever want to forget that.Ever. Because when you get home?—”
“How do you know I’ll get home?”
I laugh. “Because… well, if I say I’ll get ya home, then you’re just going home. Somehow, some way, we’ll get it done. And when you get there, and you see him, it’s totally fine to love him again. But Clara, you can’t evertrusthim again. Not after what he did. He failed, mate. Hefailed. And he didn’t do it honestly, ya know? Like ya said, he didn’t hatch some harebrained scheme to save you that would never, ever work. He just… gave up.”
Her eyes have been locked with mine this whole time and this is how they stay when she speaks. “You wouldn’t give up, would you?”
“Well”—I smile here—“I’ve fucked up my life plenty, you saw it all on my discharge spectra. But I do my best, at least. I tried to save them. And when I couldn’t, I did the right thing. Even if everyone else says it was wrong.”
“Can I ask you questions about that?”
I blow out a breath. I really don’t want to talk about that day. But if I don’t, she’ll just wonder about it. And this wondering will fester and turn into resentment, which will pop up at the most inopportune time. That’s always how it happens. So I might as well just say yes.
I lean back into the chair cushions and shrug. “Sure. Ask away.”
“What were they infected with?”
“Code.”
“What’s code?”
“It’s like… a neurological virus made specifically for augments. It doesn’t affect humans. If you were there, it couldn’t get inside you because you’re not wired like me.”
“Even if your stuff doesn’t work anymore, it can still infect you?”
“I don’t know, actually. I had a whole team of cyberneurologists look at me afterward and half of them thought I wasn’t affected because my augments had already failed.”
“What did the other half think?”
I chuckle. “The other half thought I was a traitor. That I had found something there on the other side of the veil. Something that protected me, but that I was keeping secret. And that I set the whole thing up to kill my own people.”
Her face goes very crooked as she thinks this through. “How in the world could they come to two completely different conclusions like that?”
“How? Well, that’s just simple human nature right there, Clara Birch. The nature of the whole universe, I think. There always has to be an enemy. Ya can’t ever have peace. It’s one against the other.”
“We had peace. I mean, in my Tau City, there were no conflicts.”
“I doubt that. But maybe it’s true. It’s just far more likely that ya never saw the conflicts. Ya see, it’s just the way of things. There’s always two sides. And both sides lie. That’s the whole problem with choosin’, ya know? You’re never on the right side because they’re both nothing but a bunch of liars.”
“So that enemy you were fighting when your team got infected?”
“What about it?”
“Who were they?”
“Who?” I think about this for a moment. “Well, they weren’t exactly a ‘who,’ but more like a ‘where.’ Ya see, in the Omega Outlands the veil is thin, but also heavy. It can poke through.”
