Chosen Ones Page 9
Ines’s brow furrowed. “No—he came home last night and disappeared into his room right away. But it worked. It must have.”
Sloane felt the irrepressible need to sleep, suddenly.
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Ines said, shrugging a little. “If the world is breaking—that girl floating toward the sky, my God—maybe we’ll need magic to fix it.”
“If anything, magic is what broke it,” Sloane said darkly.
“You hate it so much,” Ines said, nodding to the knot of scars on Sloane’s hand. “But you’ve never explained why.”
Sloane put her hand under the lip of the counter. “I don’t hate it, exactly,” she said. “I’ve just seen what it can do.”
“So have all of us.”
“Yeah.” But Sloane didn’t mean the Drains or the leveling of the tower or even the death of the Dark One. She meant the taste of copper and salt on her tongue as she had surfaced after the Dive.
Her coffee had run out, and only foam was left.
11
THAT EVENING, Sloane got a text from Esther: Nice jab. Bert would be proud. She included a link to a blurry cell phone video of Sloane punching the Dark One acolyte. The still image in the article was of Sloane with teeth bared, her fist up by her face. Sloane looked herself over, the sheen of sweat on her pale face, the weird hollowness to her eyes. It was an expression she had seen in the mirror often since the Dark One’s death.
“Shit,” she said aloud. Matt had just gotten home from a coffee meeting with Eddie. He was hanging his coat up in the closet.
“There’s a video of the punch online,” she said.
“What a shock,” Matt replied, closing the closet door. He had the sleeves of his powder-blue shirt rolled up to his elbows.
“I’m not sorry, you know,” she said. “That guy was a piece of shit. He deserved it.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“I was defending you,” Sloane said.
“Yeah, and that is the issue,” Matt said. “I don’t need you to defend me, Sloane. I can take care of myself.”
“But you weren’t going to,” Sloane said. “You’re so—passive about stuff like this—”
“Passive?” Matt laughed harshly. “Passive? What do you think I’ve been doing every day since the Dark One fell, exactly? Twiddling my thumbs?”
“No, of course not.” Sloane scowled. “But guys like that—”
“Are not my problem,” Matt said. “They’re easy to spot and easy to avoid. My real problem is contented people who smile while refusing to lift a finger for anyone who isn’t them. That’s who I spend every day fighting, trying to get them to fucking do something. And it would be really nice if my fiancée could understand that instead of making things harder for me.”
“How the hell did I do that?” Sloane snapped. “It’s my picture that’s in the news, not yours.”
“Yeah, it’s your picture, but now those assholes and their ‘message’ are in the news again, and they get to be victims this time! You came at them out of nowhere, threatened them with a knife—”
“I didn’t threaten anyone with a knife!”
“That’s not what the picture of you holding a knife looks like. Do you think that shit doesn’t come back on the rest of us? That if you’re violent to protect me and Ines, that doesn’t make us look violent too? And we don’t get to bounce back the way you do! We get to sit here worrying if a bunch of extremists are going to burn our houses down.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Well, it must be nice to feel that confident,” Matt said. “But I don’t. I don’t get to lose my shit and punch a guy, I don’t get to mess up. I am always failing someone, all the time.”
All the anger seemed to go out of him at once. He sat down on the couch and slumped over his knees. The ice pack Sloane had been using for her swollen knuckles was wedged between the cushions, no longer frozen.
She wanted to comfort him, but she didn’t know how. She had never seen him so tired, so . . . disappointed. In the world, in himself, even in her. She sat next to him on the couch, her hands clasped over her knees. The television was off, so she saw them reflected in the black screen, Matt’s head hanging low, Sloane stiff and upright.
“He called you ‘boy,’ ” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” Matt said, turning his head so their eyes met. “What else is new?”
“What was I supposed to do, just let him talk down to you?” she said.
“I mean, for one thing, you were supposed to stay in the golf cart.” He raised an eyebrow. “What’s going on with you lately? You charged at him like a bull even before he said anything. It’s like you want to set the world on fire.”
Esther had asked her that too. What’s going on with you? The answer, of course, was waiting in the bottom drawer of her desk, the stack of FOIA documents she had stashed there.
Like he had read her mind, Matt said, “Esther told me about your FOIA request.”
“God, Esther.” Sloane pressed her hands to her face briefly. “I’m never telling her anything ever again.”
Matt waited. There was something about his posture that irritated her. The defeated sag to his shoulders. It would have been better if he had yelled at her.
“I requested the Project Ringer documents,” she said. “I wanted to know everything I could. It’s my life, and they have all these . . . records of it.”
“I understand wanting to know,” he said. “I just think it’s weird you didn’t tell me. And that you mentioned it to Esther before me.”
“I was going to tell you right away,” she said. “But then I read more and—it was upsetting.”
“And what? You didn’t want to upset me?”
She shook her head. “That’s not it.”
“Tell me about it, then.” He sounded earnest, but Sloane knew him too well to be fooled. He had used this tone when they fought the Dark One. She remembered one particular evening—they had been trying to track the Dark One when he was just a man, not a shadow in the middle of a Drain. Ines had been following a promising lead that had yielded nothing. Tell me what happened, Matt had said. But it had just been a moment of quiet before he erupted. The struggle had drawn them all as taut as an overstrung harp. She had not realized that the strain of living with her lately, or maybe of the Ten Years Peace celebrations, had affected him so much.
“Sometimes,” she said, taking her time, “when I’m upset about something, all you want to do is tell me why I shouldn’t be.”
“And that’s bad?”
“It makes me feel crazy! Like I can’t trust my own reactions to things.”
“We all need people to help us see things from different perspectives.”
She rolled her eyes. “You think I don’t make myself consider things from other angles?” She had spent a lifetime reacting and then questioning the reactions—a lifetime of second-guessing, self-interrogation, badgering her brain into thinking about things the right way. “You think I can’t?” Her volume was rising. “Did you ever consider that when I’m upset about something, it might be because it’s worth getting upset about?”
“This explains why you haven’t been yourself lately,” Matt said. “I wish I’d known, I—”
“Your problem is you think this isn’t myself,” she said. “Just like you think a day imprisoned by the Dark One was a pleasure cruise and I should be over it by now and . . . getting giddy about wedding dresses or something!”
“Yeah, you know what? I think you should have spent the last ten years doing the work to move past everything instead of wallowing nonstop and holing up like a hermit.” Matt had snapped, the harp string broken. “I have never once suggested that it should be easy. I have only ever asked you to try, and to stop acting like you’re the only person in the world who has pain.”
They both went silent. Sloane’s cheeks burned. She warred with the impulse to storm out, knowing it would only make her seem even more like the child h
e had accused her of being but also desperate to hide from his chastisement. Every time she thought she understood what she didn’t know about him, could never know, she remembered that was impossible.
Matt’s phone buzzed, glowing through the pocket of his jeans. He turned off the ringer. She breathed deep, remembering the photo still of the punch, the emptiness of her eyes, her gritted teeth. The stray dog in her.
“Man, the way you see me.” She huffed a laugh. “How can you want to marry someone you see as such a selfish child?”
“Sloane—”
Sloane’s phone, face-down on the coffee table, sounded out the first few bars of “Good Times, Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin—her ringtone for Ines. She reached down and turned off the ringer.
A second later, Matt’s phone started buzzing again. This time he answered it. “What, Ines?” Matt said.
He listened for a moment and then wilted, his body folding into his desk chair.
“Oh God,” he said. He covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Albie’s in the hospital,” he said to Sloane, then returned to the call. “No, I’m sorry, we’ll be right there.”
12
HAVE YOU SEEN him since the Drain site?” Matt asked.
They were in Matt’s BMW on their way to the hospital, stuck at the world’s longest red light. Or that’s how it felt to Sloane.
She looked out the window. “No, I haven’t.”
It had rained, so the multicolored neon from the credit union on the corner glimmered on the road. The shush of car tires on wet pavement and the roar of the car’s diesel engine started up again when the light turned green. Neither of them had put on the radio to fill the silence.
“I’m sorry if I—” Matt began.
“Please, don’t,” Sloane said, covering her face with a hand. “I’m just . . . let’s just focus on Albie.”
She had discovered an origami penguin in a bag of flour the week before. All the creases had been sharp, which meant it was one of his old ones. But still, he had thought to put it there, knowing it would make her smile. Sometimes she felt like Albie was the only person in the world who knew her. And it was because he wanted nothing from her, not sex, not love, not secrets. There was no currency between them.
Ines had not said why Albie was in the hospital, but Sloane had a few guesses. An accident, maybe; it was always possible. It could also have been unknown repercussions from the magical device he had experimented with at the Drain site; they understood so little about magic, it would not have shocked Sloane to know that it was actually harmful, like radiation, and only got worse with prolonged exposure. But the best guess was predictable and painfully human: Albie had relapsed and overdosed.
Matt pulled into the parking deck at the hospital, and he and Sloane fell into old patterns. She was better at navigating new places—spotting and interpreting signs—and had better instincts about the layouts of buildings and public spaces. Matt followed along, chasing her heels to the walkway that led to the emergency room, then the waiting room, where Ines was sitting, her eyes red.
“I found him an hour ago,” she said, checking her phone to verify the time. “I guess he kept an old stash. Or went out for a new one when I wasn’t paying attention, I don’t know. The doctor said it’s probably not more than he used to take, but he’s been clean so long he can’t handle that much anymore.”
“So it was an accident? He wasn’t—trying anything?”
“Can’t say for sure. He’s not an idiot; he probably knew it would be too much.”
Sloane was listening, but she was also watching the other people in the waiting room. They were glancing over at them. Whispering. Shifting in their seats to take out cell phones.
“What was he like when he came back from the Drain site?” Matt said.
“Not good,” Ines said. “But making a good show of it. He said he was just worn out, and it was late at night—I didn’t think to check up on him—”
“It’s not on you,” Matt said. “You’re not a mind reader. No one expects you to be.”
“Hey,” Sloane said, jerking her chin at a twenty-something man with gel in his hair and his phone held out like he was recording video. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Slo . . .” Matt said.
She crossed the waiting room and plucked the phone out of the guy’s hand as he was fumbling to put it away, his eyes wide. She swiped to find the video, deleted it, then tossed the phone back into his lap. It hit him in the stomach, hard enough to make a slapping sound.
“Mind your own business,” she said, voice low.
Matt went to ask the receptionist if there were any spare rooms where they could wait, and Sloane sat next to Ines in silence.
They spent the next few hours in an empty hospital room, Ines sitting on the bedside table, Matt and Sloane in the chairs. Everything was taupe and muted sea-foam green, the same colors as Sloane’s kitchen growing up. Ines turned on the TV as soon as they walked in and changed the channel to late-night reruns of a sitcom she had liked as a child. Sloane’s body still remembered how to sleep through anxiety, so she slumped in the chair, leaned her head back against the wall, and dropped into a doze within minutes, the sound of a laugh track in her ears.
It was around midnight when the door finally opened, admitting a middle-aged woman wearing a lab coat over slacks and a blouse, her hair pulled back and her expression grave.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Dr. Hart. You must be Albert’s friends.”
Ines was sitting up, pushing her hands through her hair. Matt was already on his feet—he had been changing the channel on the television. Sloane was just staring at the doctor because she knew what was coming by the tone of the woman’s voice, by the hesitant curve of her shoulders.
“I have bad news,” Dr. Hart said.
Everything after that was just static on a television screen, the hum of a busy signal. Sloane picked up the highlights: organ failure, Albie, who should contact his family. Dead. The doctor would give them some time, come back later to answer any questions. She was sorry for their loss.
Sloane was just blinking at the two trashcans in front of her, one red, for biohazards, and the other white, for other refuse. On the wall was a drawing of the circulatory system, a man made out of veins and arteries.
There was nothing quite like the Drain for reminding you what people were made of. Sloane had had that thought the first time she saw one happening. The way people peeled apart right in front of you, displaying bone and muscle and internal organs all pressed together in the moments before they came apart. Sloane had an affinity for the mechanical; she liked to see the way things worked. She had always gaped at the complexity of the human body, displayed in such gruesome fashion, in the moments before the reality of death dawned on her.
But the Drain also revealed fragility. How soft people were, how easily destroyed. She had no trouble believing that Albie was gone, factually. His body was like any other, yielding, breaking.
But understanding it, the space he would leave behind—she couldn’t do it.
Dr. Hart had left them in silence. None of them cried. None of them moved. The clock ticked, and the TV droned the late-night news.
Finally, Sloane had to move, had to do something or she thought she might scream. She took her phone out of her pocket and opened her contacts list.
“I’ll call Esther,” she said to the phone screen rather than to Ines or Matt directly. “Can one of you get in touch with Albie’s mother? She’s never liked me.”
Matt was staring at her like he had no idea what she was saying.
“I’ll do it,” Ines said weakly.
“Thanks,” Sloane said. “I’ll go in the hallway; you stay here.”
She stood, her back aching from spending so long in the hospital chair. She thought about the ache, and the squeak of the floor under her sneakers, and the chemical-solvent smell of the air. A nurse gave her a pressed-lipped smile, and she returned it, a reflex.
Sloane didn’t need to wonder about burial arrangements. They all knew what one another’s preferences were—that was the sort of thing they had talked about in the days of the Dark One, the “In case I don’t make it” contingency. Albie’s was cremation. Ashes scattered at a Drain site, didn’t matter which one. No big funeral; he didn’t like crowds.
Esther was at a club when Sloane called; it was hard to hear her over the thrum of the bass. Sloane had to shout at her to get her to step outside. She gave the news like the doctor had: straightforward, clear, concise.
After hanging up, she sank into a crouch, her back against the wall of painted cinder block behind her. She watched the nurses shuffle back and forth in their Crocs and scrubs. She thought of Albie’s trembling hands and how he had shoved napkins at her that day in the bar so she could wrap them around her feet.
She stayed there until her legs went numb.
Chicago Tribune
CHOSEN ONE ALBERT SUMMERS DIES AT 30
by Lindsay Reynolds
CHICAGO, MARCH 18: Albert Tyler Summers, known to his loved ones as “Albie,” died yesterday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of a drug overdose. He was thirty years old.
Albert is survived by his mother, Kathy, and his sister, Kaitlin. His father and brother were killed by the Dark One in the attack on Edmonton, Alberta, in 2005.
Albert was one of the five Chosen Ones who famously defeated the Dark One on March 15, 2010. He was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency, in a cooperative effort with the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency, at the age of sixteen, when the elements of a classified prophecy singled him out as a candidate for the Dark One’s defeat. He was educated and trained in a secure facility with the other four Chosen Ones: Matthew Weekes, Sloane Andrews, Ines Mejia, and Esther Park.