Authors: Abigail Collins
“You may not be able to feel that,” Holden says, “but you can still
see
it. And you can remember what it’s supposed to feel like, right? You’re right here with me, talking about the memories you used to
love
, and you’re telling me that you don’t feel
anything
?”
“Now,” Rin whispers from behind me. I stand still, frozen in place, watching Dori’s hands shaking as he raises his gun.
“Dori, you’re still in there somewhere – I know you are. We can still get out of here.” The desperation in Holden’s voice rises alongside Dori’s gun. “We can find someone who can fix my legs
and
your mind, and we can have the life we always wanted together. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”
“Yes,” Dori says flatly. “But it’s impossible.”
“
Now!
”
Rin pushes against my back hard and links arms with me, pulling me along with her as she runs to the door. I try to turn around, telling her that we have to help Holden – and Dori, if we can – but she’s a lot stronger than she looks, and I’m too weak to fight her right now.
“Please, Rin, stop! We can’t just leave him in there! He’ll – ”
I never get to finish my sentence. As soon as my hand touches the back of the door, a gunshot cuts off my voice and stops me. Just before the door closes behind us I see a spray of red across the floor and down the walls, and I know that Digits do not bleed.
Chapter twenty-six
The door creaks shut behind us, and I immediately push Rin away from me. I stagger a few feet, then collapse onto the grass, my lungs heaving and my entire body shaking.
“What were you
doing
?” I spit out. “We could have saved him! We could have saved
both
of them!”
Rin walks towards me slowly but purposefully, with a serious expression on her face that doesn’t at all suit her childlike appearance. She pulls me up by my elbow, her strength surprising me even though I know that all Digits are stronger than humans by design, and drags me along behind her as she makes her way towards the entrance to the gates around the compound. I struggle against her until she lets go of my arm, but she still keeps uncomfortably close to me. If it weren’t for my knowledge that Dori will come after us next if we stay here, I wouldn’t go with her, but I don’t think I really have any other options right now.
“No, we couldn’t have. Holden was not planning on leaving; not once he saw Dorian. And Dorian had no intention of letting us all escape. Death was inevitable.”
“So you
knew
Holden was going to die and you just
let
it happen? You let him be your sacrifice, without even trying to think of a way to save him?”
“It is not that simple,” Rin says, sighing and quickening her pace; in my tired, disoriented state, I can barely keep up with her. “I did not know for certain that Dorian was going to be intercepting us. But yes, I did not believe that your friend would be able to leave with us.”
We reach the front of the gate before I can respond. I am filled with emotions – anger at Rin for lying to me, sadness at Holden’s death and Dori’s destruction, and confusion over everything that has happened to me since I arrived here – but they are all replaced with a singular sensation of dread when I see that the only exit door is blocked by at least half a dozen armed Digits, with all of their guns aimed at me and Rin.
I chance a side-long glance at Rin, but she’s staring straight ahead and doesn’t acknowledge me. She doesn’t look frightened, or even surprised – there is a cold determination in her eyes, and her hand has already found its way to the handle of the gun at her waist.
Just as she pulls out her weapon and begins firing it at the barrage of enemies before us, the door to the gate swings open behind them and a fresh wave of bullets pours in through it.
As shots ring out from behind them, the guard facing us begins firing in tandem. I manage to dodge the first bullet that flies haphazardly towards me, but the second one clips the side of my thigh as it passes me. Rin is hit twice, but she reacts no more than she did the first time I saw her injured. I recognize most of the Digits firing against us; some of them are security guards I’ve passed on my way to and from my cabin, and others are supervisors I’ve seen only once or twice hanging around outside of the Main Lab during training.
They are all trained guards – excellent marksmen. But they are blindsided by the attack from behind the gate, and barely have enough time to raise their guns before they are each struck in the back and sent toppling over. I don’t know if they’re dead or just injured – or if Digits can even die – but none of them so much as twitch as Rin leads me over their strewn-out bodies and back to the outside world.
I take a deep, shuddering breath as I pass through the iron gates. The air out here is the same as it is in there, but it feels different somehow. Cleaner, maybe. Purer.
I suck in several breaths greedily, filling my lungs until they feel like they’re going to burst. My knees give out and I fall forward, catching myself with the palms of my hands and keeping my body bent towards the ground until the dizziness passes. This time, Rin lets me heave and shake without interrupting me, though I almost wish she would.
After the final shot explodes in the air, the two Digits closest to the edge of the wall push the gate closed; it crushes the foot of a fallen soldier with a disgusting cracking sound, and one of the Digits on our side of the wall steps forward and kicks it out of the way.
There is no blood on the ground – no injured wails or scattered carnage. The only physical proof that a fight even took place here are the bodies splayed out on either side of the wall, some with broken appendages or bits of artificial skin torn away in places. I look around and see that four of Rin’s allies are dead – or whatever it is that happens when a Digit is destroyed – and six others remain standing.
Now that the fighting is over, all eyes are on me. I’m being watched, scrutinized, judged by all of these strangers who just slaughtered what could either have been my enemies or my only allies; I’m glad to be outside of the compound, of course, but my head is swimming with thoughts of what might happen next. These people will expect me to go with them, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
“We will discuss everything later,” Rin says, as though she somehow knows what I was just thinking. “But for now, we need to leave. It’s not safe for us to stay here.”
I know she’s right, but as we board the small train-car waiting for us just down the road, I can’t help but wonder if there’s any place that’s safe for me to be right now.
***
“Try not to flinch, okay? You’ll feel a little pinch, but it’s important that you don’t move. I’ve got to get to just the right spot if you want this to work.”
I nod and bow my head, balling my hands into fists on my lap in anticipation. I remember how much it hurt when Tesla put the microchip inside of my neck – I imagine taking it out will feel just as bad.
Rin introduced me to her companions almost immediately after we boarded the train, though I still don’t remember a couple of names, and some of them are easy to confuse with others. There are three women and three men among the surviving soldiers, and the fact that there are more females in my company calms me somewhat. They all seem kind, and their faces are gentle, but I know better than to be deceived by looks. Tesla, for example, has a beautiful body, but that’s the only thing about her that’s beautiful; inside, she’s hideous.
Flynn is the name of the Digit in charge of removing the tracking device from the back of my neck. She has tanned olive skin and brown eyes that glint gold in the light; her hair is dark brown and cut so short that at first I mistook her for a man. Her voice is pitched higher than I expected it to be, but she speaks slightly less formally than most of the other Digits I’ve encountered thus far, especially Rin.
There is a small needle in Flynn’s hand, connected to a tube that looks vaguely similar to the syringe Tesla used to inject the microchip inside of me. It disappears behind my head, and a second later I feel a sting as it sinks into my skin. The pain is bearable, especially since I have already experienced it once and expected it this time, but it’s the burning sensation after the needle is removed that really bothers me. My neck feels hot and itchy, but I know that if I touch it the pain will only get worse.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, uncurling my fingers as the bite from the needle begins to fade.
“Sure, sweetheart; you can ask me anything. I might not always know the answer, though.”
She grins and stows the needle back in the case it came from, along with several other small instruments that I recognize from the raised trays in the medical rooms at the compound. There is a scalpel, like the one Tetra sliced my neck open with, a pair of strangely angled tweezers, and a device that looks kind of like a small screwdriver. I want to assume that these items are being used for different purposes here than they were in the camp, but I can never be too cautious.
“What… what are you feeling right now?”
She looks at me curiously for a moment, then says, “I’m feeling a little anxious, I suppose. And I’m glad we accomplished our mission and got you out of there alive, but we lost almost half of our men, and that… that makes me a little sad, too.”
I think back to what Tetra said, about the Digits still being able to feel some of the emotions that they could when they were human. But then I remember the cold, lifeless look in Dori’s eyes, and I can’t believe it’s true that he still had any of his humanity left in him then. He loved Holden with all of his heart, and if he could still
feel
that, then he would never have raised a weapon against him.
“You’re thinking about your friends, aren’t you?” Flynn asks. I must look confused, because she explains, “Rin briefed us on what happened before we intervened. I am so sorry. We didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt, and we thought we had drawn out all of the guards.”
“Dori wasn’t a guard,” I tell her. “He was one of my friends. And the man he shot down was the same man he was in love with when he was human. What… how could he have done that? The Dori I knew would
never
have…”
“He couldn’t control himself,” Flynn interrupts me gently. “He hesitated, didn’t he? You must have seen some kind of emotion in him, even if he didn’t act on it. His mind may have been his own, but his body… You couldn’t have done anything to stop him short of deactivating him.”
She says ‘deactivating,’ but her tone suggests she means
killing
.
“But… can’t you guys turn your emotions on and off? That’s what I was told just before Rin showed up – that you
have
emotions, but not very many, and not all of the time.”
The more I speak, the more stupid I sound to my own ears. I have so many questions, it doesn’t really matter if I get an answer to this one; it’ll just bring up a dozen more, and I’ll be stuck even deeper in the dark.
Flynn opens another compartment in her carrying case and pulls out a heavy roll of gauze and some bandages. I slip my jacket off down my arms without being asked to and push the straps of my shirt down to just below the injuries Tetra gave me; there is blood on my collar, and the slash marks extend from the top of my ribcage to my neck. I wonder how much longer it would have taken Tetra to kill me if Rin and Holden hadn’t shown up when they did.
“We can,” Flynn explains as she unrolls the gauze. “But that’s like turning off our minds as well. It’s kind of like going on autopilot – we become purely logical creatures. But it’s difficult to do it, and not all of us can. You’ve seen the chips in our foreheads, correct?”
I nod and bite down hard on my lower lip as she begins removing the soiled bandages from my chest; they stick to my skin and tear bits of dried blood off with them, reopening the wounds and sending jolts of pain through my body. Flynn furrows her eyebrows and does her best to be gentle, but the cuts are so deep and numerous that I don’t think there’s anything she can do make them feel any less painful.
“Well, to put it simply, those chips are what connect our human minds to our mechanical bodies. It’s a difficult process to explain, and if any one step is incorrect, the experiment will fail.”
I understand what she’s trying to tell me, and why she won’t come right out and say it. She’s telling me that there are such great numbers of people being recruited to join the Digit army because very few of them will even survive the operation. I know I’m not smart enough to understand exactly how a person becomes a Digit, but that’s less important to me than knowing
why
.