Fear My Mortality (14 page)

I managed a smile. “I dunno. You could fling me over one shoulder and vacuum with your free hand. I’m sure you could manage.”

The serious look on his face changed into a sudden grin. “Don’t tempt me.” Then, “Seriously, Ava, I can’t put you down on that, and it’ll take too long to clean up. We need to figure out what’s going on with you.”

I sighed. “Upstairs. To the left. My parents left my room intact.”

We were there in what felt like a couple of seconds. Too soon for me, although I wondered what I feared most. Part of me didn’t want him to let go of me, as though the buzz was all that was keeping me alive. The other part of me didn’t want him to step foot in my room. It wasn’t like a boy had ever seen it.

He pushed open the door and rested me down on the bed. The softness of my butterfly quilt replaced the warm tingle from his body.

“Do you have a spare blanket?”

I frowned at him. “If they’ve left Josh’s room alone, there’ll be one in there. Why?”

He was already gone and returned in seconds with the quilt from Josh’s bed in his hands.

It meant they’d left Josh’s room intact, and I felt a sense of peace about that as Michael pulled the blind closed, tucked the blanket over it, and then flicked on the lamp, snatching up one of my t-shirts from the floor to fling over it, dulling its brightness.

He shrugged when he found me staring at him. “I don’t want the light to be a beacon for every Basher around.” He gestured at my back. “Let me take a look.” He said it like an order, but I heard a question.

In answer, I turned onto my side and flicked at my shirt, giving him permission to lift it. “How bad is it? No. On second thought, don’t tell me.”

There was a pause. “What did you do to yourself?”

I almost cried. “What did
I
do? It wasn’t me—it was
them
. All that flying glass. And that bullet, I swear it missed me by nothing. What do you think I did? Broke out my favorite dance routine for them? What I did was hide in the corner. And then … and then … ” I didn’t want to remember it, running over glass, climbing the roof, finding out Josh knew all along he could die …

Michael was quiet. I listened to the silence, hearing nothing outside, slowly becoming aware of the damp on my back, the deep ache of the wound.

He finally spoke. “I, um … I kind of don’t know what I should do. There’s a lot of blood and it’s not going away. Wait a minute.” There was another pause, and I sensed movement. I turned just enough to see him move toward the dressing table and pull open the top drawer.

“My underwear isn’t going to help.”

He jumped away from the drawer and went bright red, and his reaction surprised me since I figured mine wouldn’t be the first he’d seen. Or, at least, that was my assumption, but I realized there was a lot I didn’t know about him. All I had were assumptions, and the more he spoke to me, the more I realized none of them might be true.

He said, “I need something to wipe your back clean. So I can see what’s wrong.”

I pointed, and the pain between my shoulder blades made me wince. “Try the second drawer. I’ve got some old cotton tops in there.”

He came back with a white singlet, and I tried not to shrink away from him when he touched the wound.

“There are two pretty big flaps of skin here. They’re each about three inches along, but only a quarter inch deep. You were lucky the glass didn’t puncture your lungs.” I turned again to catch sight of him run his hand through his hair.

He met my eyes and shook his head at me.

I sighed. “I think you have to stitch me up. With a needle and thread. You took Home Studies, right?”

“Yeah, I know about stitching. But what if it doesn’t work for you?”

“Well, it’s all I can think of!” I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, it’s just that you get to zip yourself up, but I don’t. I need a bit of help doing that.”

He took a deep breath. “Got a needle and thread?”

“There’s a kit downstairs. On the kitchen table.” I bit my lip, hoping he wouldn’t ask where I got it. “It’s got medical stuff in it. Stuff that can be used by someone like me.”

He pressed his lips together, his eyebrows drawing down. I waited for the difficult question, but all he said was, “Okay.”

He was gone before I could say anything else and I dropped my head back onto the pillow. The pain in my back had deepened. I wondered how dirty the glass was, whether I was getting sick. Every now and then there’d be a story on the news about someone who got dirt in a wound that closed up too soon and they had to have it cleaned out. What did they call it—infection? One time there was a kid who healed too fast around a bullet. His brain started to go funny, so they got a bunch of hot-shot surgeons in to operate. Nobody ever said whether the kid was okay afterward, but the surgeons were all over the news.

My face was clammy. Sweat pooled under my chest. Something wasn’t right with me, I knew that much. I stuffed my face into the pink butterfly that covered most of the pillow and waited for the next disaster.

A tap on my shoulder made me leap off the bed, slamming into Michael.

“Ava!”

I registered his face and the tingle where one of his hands rested on my shoulder, stopping me from startling further. He was half on the bed, half off, and he seemed to be waiting for me to relax. “Sorry. You were asleep.” His hand moved to my forehead. “I was kind of worried.”

“What? That I’d died or something?”

He removed his hand and I missed the cool tingle as he shrugged. “I brought up the box.” He gestured to the dressing table and the blue container sitting there wide open. Then he lifted his other hand to show me the contents.

A vial of black liquid rested in his palm, the golden scorpion partly visible.

He wasn’t smiling and there was something tense about his jaw. “Where did you get this?”

I couldn’t tell him because then I’d have to tell him about Josh, but the truth was I didn’t really know where it had come from, where Josh had got it. I bit my lip, trying not to remember the green room and the needle filled with black liquid and how I’d thrown myself against the wall after they injected me. How I’d
cracked
the wall after they injected me. I said, “You know what that stuff is?”

“Do you?” He said it carefully, as though he was saying one thing and asking another.

I narrowed my eyes at him while uncertainty and wariness warred against each other on his face.

He said, “It’s my dad’s research. He’s done a lot of work for the government—tranquilizers, nanobots, tracking technology, but this … ” He eyed me. “This is seriously classified. It’s called nectar, and it’s still experimental. Only a handful of people know about it, including Cheyne. It’s supposed to speed regeneration, decrease rehabilitation time, completely remove pain from the dying equation. It’s supposed to make everyone like me. And more. Stronger. Faster.” He looked down at the bed. “Dad’s still testing it.”

They’d tested it on
me
. “So it makes normal people heal faster?”

“Way faster.” Then his expression changed, and I knew what he was thinking.

“No.” I shook my head and scooted away from the little bottle, right over to the opposite edge of the bed. “I’m not drinking that.”

“If you take this, you might not need stitches. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but it’s worth a shot, right?”

I stared at him, knowing that what he said was true. After they’d injected me with nectar in the Terminal, the wounds on my forehead and neck had healed. If I drank it now, the rip in my back might heal, too. But I shook my head because of what else it did to me: blurred vision and uncontrollable strength, so much energy inside me that I burned from the inside out. “I can’t drink it.”

I’ll set fire to the house.

“Stitches are really going to hurt. You need to try this first. Drink it. If it doesn’t work, then … then I’ll stitch you.” He leaned over and pushed the vial at me. The scorpion seemed to leap out at me.

I shoved his hand away and pressed my lips together.

“Please drink it!”

I shook my head, glaring at him.

In response, he ran a hand across his forehead and studied the ground for a moment. His fists clenched and unclenched as if he was trying to control himself. His next words were quiet. “I need you to drink this because I can’t … I can’t do this—stitch you up—if I know it’s hurting you.”

I stared at him, stricken, biting my lip. I didn’t know what he would say or do if I told him what happened when I drank nectar. That I became someone—something—else. Something fiery and uncontainable. That we wouldn’t have to worry about lamps because
I
would be the beacon drawing the Bashers to my house.

“I can’t drink it. They gave it to me at the recovery center when they tested me and it … it does weird stuff to me. It won’t just heal me.”

A wary look replaced the frustration on his face. “What do you mean—weird stuff?”

I struggled to find the right words. I remembered what it was like at the recovery center when Reid gave me the first injection of nectar. I’d healed and the pain had disappeared, but then the splotch on the wall had turned into a rose and the room had filled with things that weren’t real—vines and a scuttling scorpion like the one on the vial. Everything had shimmered, I couldn’t focus, my vision had been so bad I’d even thought one of the guards was Michael.

I looked into his eyes, begging him to understand. “It changes me. It makes me strong—unbelievably strong—but I can’t control it. It’s like having all the fire of the sun trapped inside me, and it has to come out.” He was about to speak, so I hurried on, not sure if I was making sense. “And I can’t stop it. It forces itself out of me. It makes me do stuff. Crazy, insane stuff, and it’s really not good.”

How could I tell him I’d burned so hot that I’d breathed fire?

I tried to draw breath, the words tumbling out of me. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry that you have to stitch me up. If I could do it myself, I would, but I can’t reach, and I know it’s going to hurt, but I promise I won’t cry.”

I stopped and stared at my hands in the sudden silence. If I was really honest with myself, it wasn’t the nectar I was afraid of.

It was what Michael would think. I had no idea what would happen if I drank it. I only knew what happened the first time: that I broke a metal chair with my bare hands and crushed a man’s chest just by shoving him. I wasn’t going to drink it in front of Michael and scare him away. Or worse—hurt him somehow. Not that anything I did could probably hurt Mr. Restart-My-Heart-In-Three-Seconds. “I’ll be brave. I promise.”

He sat down, studying the vial in his hand. It looked as if a million thoughts raced through his head. “Dad said nectar is like immortality trapped in a bottle. I don’t think it’s meant for people … like you.” He looked grim, his face ashen. “I’m sorry they gave it to you. I won’t make you take it if you don’t want to.”

He crossed to the cupboard, put the bottle into the medical box, and firmly closed the lid. “Okay. You’ll need to hold on to something.”

I turned onto my stomach and pulled my hair out of the way. I exhaled fully. “Just get it done.”

I sounded a lot braver than I was. I turned my face away from the needle and thread he pulled from sealed packages because I didn’t want to look at them.

The needle entered my skin and I was not prepared at all. There was nothing to save me from this pain. I couldn’t even stamp my feet or thump my fists. After the first involuntary twitch made the pain intensify, I had to stay very still.

So I shouted instead. “I’m not brave. Not at all. I lied. I am going to shout. A lot. Until you’re finished.” I yelled each word like I wanted to yell at my parents for leaving and at Josh for dying. Like I wanted to yell at every person in my street who left silence around me, and every person who would look at me like I was an outcast. But I stayed still—for the ten thousand years it took Michael to stitch me back together.

I knew it was over when his hand rested on my shoulder again, soothing vibrations on my trembling skin. “Sorry, Ava.”

“Sorry for helping me? Don’t be.” I bit out the words, my teeth chattering. I wiped my palm across my sweating face, ready to sit up.

“No. Sorry for this.”

The wash of liquid across my back preceded a bone-deep sting, so sharp that the sensation burned all the way through my lungs and out the other side of my ribcage. I launched myself off the bed in reflex and found myself crouched on the floor under the window, facing Michael. He stood very still on the other side of the room with an uncorked vial in his right hand and a stopper in his left.

It was the bottle of nectar.