The End and Other Beginnings Page 4

  But he did wake up.

  He woke up during the last week of summer, when it was so humid that I changed shirts twice a day just to stay dry. The sun had given me a freckled nose and a perpetual squint. Senior year started next week, but for me, it didn’t mean anything without him.

  When Matt’s mom said it was okay for me to visit, I packed my art box into my car and drove back to the hospital. I parked by the letter F, like I always did, so I could remember later. F was for my favorite swear.

  I carried the box into the building and registered at the front desk, like I was supposed to. The bored woman there printed out an ID sticker for me without even looking up. I stuck it to my shirt, which I had made myself, dripping bleach all over it so it turned reddish orange in places. It was my second attempt. On the first one, I had accidentally bleached the areas right over my breasts, which wasn’t a good look.

  I walked slowly to Matt’s room, trying to steady myself with deep breaths. His mother had given me the number at least four times, as well as two sets of directions that didn’t make sense together. I asked at the nurses’ station, and she pointed me to the last room on the left.

  Dr. Albertson was standing outside one of the other rooms, flipping through a chart. She glanced at me without recognition. She probably met so many people during last visitations that they ran together in her mind. When she turned away, I caught sight of her nails, no longer sky blue but an electric, poison green. Almost the same color that was chipping off my thumbnail. A woman after my own heart.

  I entered Matt’s room. He was there, lying flat on the bed with his eyes closed. But he was only sleeping, not in a coma, I had been told. He had woken up last week, too disoriented at first for them to be sure he could still function. And then, slowly, he had returned to himself.

  Apparently. I would believe it only when I saw it, and maybe not even then.

  I set the box down and opened the lid. This particular project had a lot of pieces to it. I took the table where they put his food tray, and the bedside table, and I lined them up side by side. I found a plug for the speakers and the old CD player that I had bought online. It was bright purple and covered with stickers.

  Sometime in the middle of this, Matt’s eyes opened and shifted to mine. He was slow to turn his head—his spine was still healing from the accident—but he could do it. His fingers twitched. I swallowed a smile and a sob in favor of a neutral expression.

  “Claire,” he said, and my body thrilled to the sound of my name. He knew me. “I think I had a dream about you. Or maybe a series of dreams, in a very definite order, selected by yours truly . . .”

  “Shhh. I’m in the middle of some art.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Forgive me. I’m in the middle of recovering from some death.”

  “Too soon,” I replied.

  “Sorry. Coping mechanism.”

  I sat down next to him and started to unbutton my shirt.

  His eyebrows raised. “What are you doing?”

  “Multitasking. I have to stick these electrodes on my chest. Remember them?” I held up the electrodes with the wires attached to them. They were the same ones I had used to show the art class my brain waves. “And I also want to stack the odds in my favor.”

  “Stack the . . . Am I on drugs again?”

  “No. If you were on drugs, would you be hallucinating me shirtless, though?” I grinned and touched one electrode to the right side of my chest and another one under it. Together they would read my heartbeat.

  “No comment,” he said. “That’s a surprisingly girly bra you’re wearing.”

  It was navy blue, patterned with little white and pink flowers. I had saved it all week for today, even though it was my favorite and I always wanted to wear it first after laundry day.

  “Just because I don’t like dresses doesn’t mean I hate flowers,” I replied. “Okay, be quiet.”

  I turned up the speakers, which were connected directly to the electrodes on my chest. My heartbeat played over them, its pulse even and steady. I breathed deep, through my nose and out my mouth. Then I turned on the CD player and set the track to the second one: “Inertia,” by Chase Wolcott.

  Inertia

  I’m carried in a straight line toward you

  A force I can’t resist; don’t want to resist

  Carried straight toward you

  The drums pounded out a steady rhythm, the guitars throbbed, driving a tune propulsive and circular. My heartbeat responded accordingly, picking up the longer I listened.

  “Your heart,” he said. “You like the song now?”

  “I told you the meds would mess with my mind,” I said softly. “I’m just getting used to them, though, so don’t get too excited. I may hate the album again someday.”

  “The meds,” he repeated. “You’re on them?”

  “Still adjusting the dose, but yes, I’m on them, thanks in part to the encouragement of this guy I know,” I said. “So far, side effects include headaches and nausea and a feeling that life might turn out okay after all. That last one is the peskiest.”

  The dimple appeared in his cheek.

  “If you think this heartbeat change is cool, I’ll show you something even more fascinating.” I turned the music off.

  “Okay,” he said, eyes a little narrowed.

  I stood and touched a hand to the bed next to his shoulder. My heartbeat played faster over the speakers. I leaned in close and pressed my lips lightly to his.

  His mouth moved against mine, finally responding. His hand lifted to my cheek, brushed my hair back from my face. Found the curve of my neck.

  My heart was like a speeding train. That thing inside me—that pulsing organ that said I was alive, I was all right, I was carving a better shape out of my own life—was the soundtrack of our first kiss, and it was much better than any music, no matter how good the band might be.

  “Art,” I said as we parted, “is both vulnerable and brave.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed, right next to his hip, careful. His hazel eyes followed my every movement. There wasn’t a hint of a smile on his face, in his furrowed brow.

  “The last visitation is supposed to give you the chance to say everything you need to, before you lose someone,” I said. “But when I drove away from here, thinking you were about to leave me for good, I realized there was one thing I still hadn’t said.”

  I pinched his blanket between my first two fingers, suddenly shy again.

  Heartbeat picking up again, faster and faster. “So,” he said, quiet. “Say it, then.”

  “Okay.” I cleared my throat. “Okay, I will. I will say it.”

  He smiled, broad, lopsided. “Claire . . . do you love me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I love you.”

  He closed his eyes, just for a second, a soft smile forming on his lips.

  “The bra is a nice touch,” he said, “but you didn’t need to stack the odds in your favor.” He smiled, if possible, even wider. “Everything has always been carrying me toward you.”

  I smiled. Reached out with one hand to press play on the CD player. Eased myself next to him on the hospital bed, careful not to hurt him.

  He ran his fingers over my hair, drew my lips to his again. Quiet, no need for words, we listened to “Inertia” on repeat.

  “I didn’t come here to skewer you,” she said, low and throaty. “Unless you give me a reason.”

  She uncurled her fingers so the weapon would retract. It made a click click click as all the gears shifted, but she still heard its low hum as she brought her hands up by her ears to show she meant no harm.

  She was in a bar. A dirty, hot one that smelled like smoke and sweat. The floor was covered in a layer of stale peanut shells, and every surface she laid a hand on was sticky. She had busted her way in the locked door a minute or two earlier, since it was much too early for the place to be open to customers, just shy of 10:00 a.m.

  The only person inside it wasn’t human—which wasn’t a bi
g deal, unless they were trying to pretend to be one. Right now they were standing behind the bar with a rag in hand, as if it stood a chance against the grime.

  “Not afraid of getting skewered by some kid,” they said. If she hadn’t been who she was, she would have called them an average man, even a boring one. Their face was rough with a salt-and-pepper beard, and there was grease under their—very human-looking—fingernails. But they had all the telltale signs of digital skin: flickering when their eyes moved, a still chest, and a shifty quality, like they didn’t belong in their body.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “I find a healthy amount of fear improves somebody’s likelihood of survival.”

  Flickering, flickering, as their eyes moved.

  “What can we do to improve yours, then?” they said.

  She smiled, all teeth. “Why don’t you take off your little costume so I can get a good look at you?”

  The ET shrugged. Twice. The first time was a human shrug, a Whatever, if you insist. The second time was a bigger one, to shuffle off its digital skin.

  For a time, as a kid, she’d thought the skin was just a projection, like a hologram. But Mom had explained that wouldn’t work—if it was a bigger creature, it would get itself into trouble that way—knock glasses off countertops, hit its head on doorframes, jab people with a spiked tail, whatever. The digital skin was more like . . . stuffing some of its matter into an alternate dimension. The skin was real, but it also wasn’t. The ET was here, but it was also someplace else.

  She didn’t have to understand the science of it, anyhow. She just had to know what to look for.

  The ET burst out of its skin like stuffing coming out of a busted couch cushion. Matter bubbled up from the split, gelatinous and glowing purple-blue. For a second it just looked like a heap of purple crap, but then it started to take shape, a massive torso that oozed into squat legs, a bulging head without a neck to hold it up. And stuck on the front of that head like sequins from a Bedazzler, a dozen shiny black eyes.

  The smell hit her next, like a cross between stinkbug and sulfur. It was lucky Atleigh had come across a few purpuramorphs last year, because she knew to keep her face passive. They were harmless unless you commented on or otherwise reacted to their stench. Then things could get ugly.

  Well. Uglier.

  “Thanks for obliging,” Atleigh said. “You know, most ETs don’t bother to wear a digital skin unless they’ve got something to hide.”

  She lowered her weapon, slow, and slid it back into the holster on her belt.

  “What is it that you want, kid?” the purpuramorph asked her, in a low rumble, almost subvocal. Purpuramorphs were one of the few offplanet races that didn’t need some kind of tech to speak like a human. Their vocal cords—buried somewhere in that purple mush—were actually similar to her own, somehow.

  Atleigh took her phone out of her pocket and lit it up. On the screen was a picture of a woman with long hair—the same auburn color as Atleigh’s own. She had deep lines in her forehead, and a glint in her murky green eyes, like she was telling you to get to the goddamn point.

  “You seen her? She was in here last week sometime.”

  A dozen glittering eyes swiveled toward the phone, and Atleigh schooled her features into neutrality as a wave of odor washed over her, so pungent it almost made her eyes water.

  “And if I have?”

  “I just need to know if you spotted her talking to anybody,” Atleigh said.

  “My customers are guaranteed a certain level of discretion,” the purpuramorph said. “I can’t go violating that just because some little girl asks me to.”

  Atleigh’s smile turned into more of a gritted-teeth situation.

  “First of all, I’m a little girl who can make your insides come out of you before you even notice it’s happening,” she said. “And second, that woman is my mom, and she’s dead now, so if you don’t tell me who she was talking to, I might do something out of grief that we’ll both later regret, get me?”

  She rested the heel of her hand on the holster at her side.

  “So what’s it gonna be?” she said. “Carrot, or stick? Because I gotta tell you . . .” She drew the modified gun, hooked her middle finger in the metal loop just under the barrel, and tugged on it so the mechanism extended the needle again. Click click click. “I’m pretty fond of the stick, myself.”

  A couple of minutes later, Atleigh slid into the driver’s side of an old green Volvo, patted the urn buckled into the seat next to her, and started the engine. She knew exactly where she was headed next.

  Atleigh Kent was a bounty hunter, and her bounty was exclusively leeches.

  Not all extraterrestrials were leeches—in fact, 99.9 percent of them weren’t. Most of the ETs who settled on Earth were decent enough, and made things more interesting. When Atleigh saw pictures of the way her planet had been when there were only humans on it, she was always struck by how boring it was, all the same texture, like a bowl of plain oatmeal. It was better now, with beings of all shapes and sizes and colors, hearing half a dozen languages burbling or beeping or buzzing when you walked down the street.

  She mostly dealt in the ones who had something to hide. Digital skin was illegal for a reason—mostly people wore it when they were on the run from something. But leeches . . .

  Well. Leeches were a different story. They were a predatory race. They attached their silvery, centipede-like bodies to a person’s spinal cord and took control of their body and brain. As long as they kept the back of their neck covered, they could pass for human perfectly, absorbing the host body’s knowledge and experiences and integrating it into their new, joint self.

  Meanwhile, the host suffered in silence, suppressed by the alien until they apparently fizzled out of existence. If the alien was attached too long, and then detached, the person was just a vegetable. Their bodies could go on living, if cared for, but their minds were gone.

  All the alien races were vulnerable to leeches, but none more than human beings, their ideal prey. The easiest hosts to suppress, for whatever reason.

  It had happened to Atleigh’s father. He—well, it hadn’t really been him, but they hadn’t known that at the time—had lived among them for weeks, dodging their mother and pretending at fatherhood. Then their mom had discovered the thing on their dad’s neck, and tried to stab it with a kitchen knife, and he had bailed.

  They had gone on the hunt, as a family, the two little girls too young to remember much before the endless road trip their childhood turned into. Their mom had learned everything she could about the thing that had claimed her husband. It had taken her years to find him, in a lonely gas station in Iowa. Then she had ripped the thing off his spinal cord and gutted it. But their dad never came back to himself.

  Atleigh had helped dig his grave, right there on the side of the road, by the mile marker, so they would always know where to find him. And since that day, she had been determined to save the human race, one leech at a time.

  Lacey Kent’s hand went to her throat, to the buttons that fastened her collar closed. Just checking on them, as she had done a dozen times in the past ten minutes as she waited for the shuttle to reach the station.

  There weren’t many students on the shuttle from the American Selenic Military Academy, and none that Lacey knew personally. A few teachers—including the famously volatile arachnoid, Mr. Zag—a few parents visiting ailing or troublesome children, a couple of fulguvore emissaries from their home planet, and of course, Lacey herself. She was in her sixth year, a secondary school transfer, so she didn’t quite have the posture that the lifers had—she could stand up straight, sure, but when no one was looking, she sagged like an old tree.

  “Headed home, Ms. Kent?” Mr. Zag’s metallic voice asked. Arachnoids spoke through a complex system of pincer-clicking that no human had yet been able to decipher, so Zag had a voice box hanging from his pedicle. Even though the voice was computer-generated, Lacey thought she could hear some judgment in it. After
all, she was going home in the middle of a semester.

  “Yes, sir,” Lacey said. “My mother just died.”

  “My condolences.” Zag’s pincers were clicking. Lacey had never gotten used to the sound. She hadn’t been in Zag’s class since her first year at the academy, but she still shivered when he spoke to her, the response Pavlovian. “Though perhaps it is some relief that you will not have to tell her—”

  “I appreciate the sentiment,” Lacey said, cutting him off. She didn’t want to hear about all the things she wouldn’t have to tell her mother now, because it just reminded her of what she wouldn’t get to tell her.

  Zag’s multiple eyes blinked at her, but he seemed to get the hint, and fell silent.

  Finally the chime went off for docking, and Lacey went to the window to look down at Peoria, Illinois, one of the shuttle’s few stops. Peoria had once been home to a major machinery manufacturer that had later moved to the Chicago area. The population of the city had dwindled almost dangerously until the local government made a bid for one of the space academies. Now, by all accounts, Peoria was booming.

  Lacey didn’t care much about the city either way. She wasn’t from there—wasn’t from anywhere, really, unless you counted the back of her mom’s old Jeep. Her official place of birth was a town in Minnesota, and even that was just a word she wrote on official papers, not a place she felt much tied to.

  She spotted the wide stretch of the Illinois River, the bridge that spanned across it, and a cluster of low buildings before the shuttle docked at the station. Then she was heaving her bag—packed carefully so nothing would wrinkle—over one shoulder, and walking through the doors to search out her sister.

  Atleigh wasn’t hard to find. Most families of human military students were downright proper, moneyed, all pressed collar shirts and shoes that made snapping sounds on tile. Atleigh was wearing dusty black boots—one with the laces fraying so the top of the boot was flappy around her calf—blue jeans, and a red plaid shirt over a gray T-shirt with a few holes in it. She had chopped off all her hair, so it was like a boy’s, with a wave in the front where it was a little longer. She was pretty without meaning to be, freckled by the sun, and taking too big a bite out of a Snickers bar, so it bulged in her cheek.