Those That Wake 02: What We Become (29 page)

“Stop.” Laura bowed her head and held her hands up. “Just stop for a goddamned minute.”

They watched her, Rose consciously or unconsciously sidling closer to Mal.

“Could you excuse us, please?” Laura said. She was looking at Aaron, but it was clear whom she wanted to be with.

Rose’s eyes became instantly desperate. It was not lost on Laura that she was asking to speak to this girl’s (maybe) boyfriend alone, and in her own apartment on top of it. But her personal quest could not end, no new mission could be undertaken, until she and Mal had their moment.

“Uh . . .” The awkward syllable filled the room for too long as Aaron expelled it. “Okay. You might want to, I don’t know, make it quick or something, since there’s some sort of important stuff going on.”

“Shut it,” she told him. “Just give us an hour.”

Shaking his head in bewilderment, Aaron started toward the door.

Rose wasn’t moving, but Mal touched her shoulder, and when she looked up at him, he nodded stoically. Gripping her own arms across her chest so hard that Laura could see the tendons straining, Rose went to the door.

“Listen to me,” Aaron said as he came to Mal. “You have no idea what she’s gone through to get to you.” He looked up into the giant’s melancholy face. “Don’t screw this up.”

Aaron walked on, opened the door, ushered Rose out, and followed, closing the door behind him.

Laura and Mal looked at each other across the empty room.

“ARE YOU WITH HER NOW?”
Laura asked, and it sounded painfully childish in her ears. Were they in junior high? Had she just spotted him coming into the cafeteria with another girl? Or was this actual life and their love had once been the most important thing in it? She immediately corrected herself, nearly tumbling over her own words. “Are you in love with her?”

“No.” Mal was a stone statue, his unreadable countenance cracked with scars.

Her own face was held together with no small act of will. She didn’t let tears come, kept her lower lip from trembling. But she could not outwait his silence. This moment was supposed to be filled with joy. It was all she had right now.

“Was there anything else you wanted to say?” she asked. “Because, you know, we’ve got like fifty-nine more minutes to fill here.”

Nothing specific changed in his face, but something in her perception of it adjusted. Perhaps a small but crucial memory slipping back into place, a formula for how to pull from Mal’s granite expression some meaning. She found the muscles in his jaws, saw them clenched like he was bracing for a blow, saw the line of his shoulders harden. Mal, as ever, was fighting. What he was fighting, and why, was still out of her reach.

“Mal, it’s me. You don’t have to fight yourself around me. You don’t have to hold anything back. We built a life together, made a future all by ourselves. Stop fighting and remember me.
Are
you in love with her? If you are, I need to know it.”

Mal held his tension, and it was such a struggle, she could see the muscles of his stomach starting to quiver. He was holding something in with all his might, and why would he hold it back unless it was her worst fear realized? Then, just before she could bear it no longer and her own internal dam was about to crumble down, his dark eyes suddenly seemed to become liquid. His jaw and shoulders relaxed, as though an enemy had just left the room.

“There’s only you, Laura,” he said in a cracking whisper. “There’s only ever been you.”

She was in his arms, his strong, gentle, protecting arms:
home
.

“I don’t work right without you, Laura.” His face was pressed into her hair, and she could feel his breath on her temple when he spoke. “Everything is in a fog. I don’t move right or think right. Things . . . things fall apart.”

“Mal . . .” She breathed the word out like it was the secret of the universe. “I was living in a dream. I was buried so deep in a lie that I didn’t even know it. I didn’t even know you. And you were still what kept me going, what pulled me out of it. You drove me on against everything in the world so I could fight my way back to you.” She looked up into his beautiful, sad, imperfect face. “That’s how much I love you.”

She felt his arms clutch her tighter. It was almost painful, but she wanted him to hold her tighter still.

“Laura, I—”

“No,” she said. “We don’t need to talk anymore right now.” She took him by the hand and walked him to the bed and put her hands on his firm chest and pressed backwards until he sat and then lay back.

She climbed in beside him, crushing up against him in this tiny little bed that was barely large enough for him alone. The warmth and firmness of his body brought back sense memories and sent waves of joy coursing through her, a joy more genuine, more immediate than she’d had in a year, maybe ever. She rested her head on his chest and listened for the quiet thunder of his heart. The thunder slowed as they lay there, calmed her as it had from the moment she first heard it in a tiny motel room on an obscure highway outside of a nowhere town, and as it had kept her world together all the time since, until it had inexplicably vanished.

His powerful arm, wrapped around her, drew her to him, and they found each other again, with an intensity and passion that astonished Laura.

Afterward, she found his heart again and lay there, sinking into a happiness that had been so distant, she didn’t even know it was gone. But it was hers again. Somehow or other, she and Mal would cast their future from it and never lose each other again.

Her head clogged with happiness, she faded into a welcoming darkness.

“Laura.” Mal’s voice pulled her from the edge of the world. What a wonder it was to have
his
voice bring her around. “Laura, I have to tell you something.”

“Tell me,” she said drowsily.

“Your memory,” he said, his voice heavy. “Your life.
Our
life.”

“You don’t have to say it, Mal. It didn’t take much to figure it out. We always knew Remak could be ruthless. Did he use me as a bargaining chip, promise to bring me back if you cooperated with him?” She could scarcely imagine Mal’s pain. She’d thought her own life had been an agony over the last year. “He’s gone now, and I’ll never be able to have it out with him. I don’t know if it makes me sad or angry or . . . or what.”

Mal sat and swung his legs over the side of the cot. His movement forced her into a seated position, too, and they sat there, side by side, in the empty room.

“Laura. He didn’t.”

Needles of ice raced down Laura’s back.

“No,” she said. “Don’t say anything else, Mal.”

“Remak was the one who went into your mind and changed things. You and your parents and everyone who could help bring your old life back. He even went into your dog.”

“Stop, Mal. Stop now.”

“But it was me. I made him do it.”

Laura’s heart clenched and froze solid.

“Our life was a ruin,” Mal said. “We couldn’t keep things running straight. Every time we had a break, took a step forward, someone or something would come along, and we would have to stop everything, to fix it, to manage the world’s problems, because the world didn’t even know it had them. We weren’t living a life. You were so sad, Laura. Every day I woke up and saw your pain. I would come home and see you watching movies of your parents.”

Laura glared at the floor, terrified to look up, to move her body an inch.

“I couldn’t bear that happening to you,” he said, barreling on. “But what we were doing, it couldn’t be abandoned. And I had no life to go back to. We were trying to keep away from Remak, keep away from his demands, his endless tasks. But I found him and I promised him that I would take on any one job he asked if he would fix your life. Give you back what you had once, what made you happy. He said it would be hard, that it might not work, that it wasn’t what you would want. But he knew he would need my help someday. I made him do it. To make you happy again.”

Laura’s muscles tensed, twitched, wanting to move in every direction at once. She came up from the cot, walked across to the wall, her fists clenched, her body hunched. She stood there just a moment, staring at the cracking, water-stained wall, and then she spun on him.

“I
was
happy. I was happy with
you
.” She was beyond rage. “And that sham of a life Remak created, it nearly drove me insane. We fought together every day, Mal. We became adults together. And you sent me
back?
”

“I didn’t—”

“How
could
you?” Her eyes were hot with tears and hatred. “How could you take away my choice? Life isn’t about being happy all the time. Life is finding out how you can make the world better and turning yourself into that. Sometimes that’s happy and sometimes it’s miserable, but you get to choose how you do it and who you do it with, and you
took that away!
You might as well have raped me.”

Mal’s head bent and his body shrank beneath the onslaught. But the embers of her rage only burned brighter.

“Don’t you see what you took away? Do you remember Isabel? Isabel who died in the mountains, shot by your friend Brath? Do you remember Mike, who gave up his life for all of us? They’re gone, and my memory is all that honored them. I thought about them every day. Every
day
. Did you? Without me, you made them disappear. Them and me.

“We
are
our memories, Mal. We
are
our memories. By taking mine away, you destroyed me.”

Life had gone from Mal. He sat there, inert and empty. She would have laid a comforting hand on anyone else in the world who looked like that.

But for Mal, she did not.

ROSE AND AARON SAT IN
a booth in the back of the diner. Erica, the waitress who alternated shifts with Rose, delivered their food with a weary tread, forced a smile out for Rose, and slunk back into the kitchen. The diner was empty but for the two of them. It was filled with an uncomfortable silence that echoed that of the street, cleared of people, the air heavy with something imminent.

Aaron examined his eggs with a half-absent contempt, much as he had taken in the diner itself. Part of his attention, however, seemed focused elsewhere, forever internal, as if he were here, but also somewhere else much more important at the same time. It did not stop him from laying into his food with the appetite of a starving man.

“Is he your boyfriend?” he asked between hurried bites. Such was his eternally diverted attention, Rose was not sure at first that he was speaking to her. She started when she realized she was meant to answer.

“No,” she said, staring down at her own food that had, and would, go untouched.

“Lucky thing, that,” Aaron said. “You do not want to go up against Laura.” He shoved more eggs into his mouth, chased it with toast. He was putting it away so fast, there was no way he could even be tasting it. “Underneath all the soft, touchy-feely crap, she’s a serious pain in the ass.”

Rose’s sense of Laura was only that Laura was better. Prettier, stronger, smarter. Willing to stand up for herself. Rose shrugged, a barely perceptible wisp of a movement.

Aaron’s attention was consumed completely by something inside him then, and it was as though he left the table altogether. Rose sat uncomfortably across from him. Mal had no cell phone and was subject to deep, sullen moods, but his attention did not wander with such random, jerky abandon. Aaron was the first person she had spoken to at any length who had one of those cellpatches. Without an object that visibly claimed his attention, talking with him was almost like talking to someone who fell into narcoleptic seizures.

Her eyes wandered. An MCT truck rumbled by outside. Had her mind not been overcome with other concerns, Rose might have pondered its strangeness. The MCT only brought heavy ordnance like that out when there was a large-scale operation going on—“urban pacification,” as their spokesmen often called it.

“Weird,” Aaron said from inside himself, and then, suddenly, was talking to her again. “So how are you involved in all this?”

“I . . .”

“I got the whole business with Mal and Remak and the Old Man. What I mean is, how did you get pulled into this in the first place?”

The words formed in her head, but she held them back as she always did, afraid to give a part of herself up to the world. With luck, Aaron’s attention would wander again before she had to.

“Hel-
lo?
” he said, bothering to look up from the last of his meal and trying to catch her eyes.

“Mal helped me once.”

“Helped you what?”

Her eyes flickered up, caught him staring, hurried back down to her dish.

“Helped you eat a meal? Helped you cross the street? Helped you knock over a liquor store? Helped you what?”

“There was a man.” Fighting her desperate grip, the words escaped her as little more than whispers. “Mal stopped him.”

“Really?” Aaron threw down his crumpled napkin on his plate. “Why’d you need his help?”

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’ve got two arms, two legs. A brain in your head, I’m assuming. You look like a fully functioning human being. Why do you need somebody else’s help?”

The words lit her up like a live current. She had always assumed that her failings were apparent on her face and body like a disease. As the shock passed through her, she looked up to find Aaron’s eyes, to look in them, only for an instant, and see her reflection there. But when she did, his attention was once again gone from her.

“There’s something going on,” he said. “It’s all over the place, suddenly. There’s too much happening to be a—” His eyes clicked back to her. “Are you seeing this? Christ, pick up your damn cell.”

She took her cell out, keyed it for a newsblog. The latest headlines sprang up on her screen.

At three different subway stations throughout the city, five different people were pushed in front of oncoming trains at exactly the same second.

A child and his mother had pushed the boy’s father out of a fifteen-story window in Midtown.