Chapter 36 Sem #2
“Do you remember the first time we met?” she asked, and I couldn’t understand why everything in her voice, her body, the gentle way she touched me, felt like goodbye.
“Of course. I’ll never forget that day for as long as I live.”
“That’s good.” Her eyes closed, and when they opened again, my chest caved in at the sadness in them. She touched her forehead to mine the same way she had with Mal moments before. “Because you will have to remember it for me.”
I pulled back. “Why?”
She blinked, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“It’s the only way, Sem. He’ll kill you.
He’ll put Mal and me on metal tables for the rest of our lives.
” There was true fear in her eyes when she looked back at Mal’s family.
“I can’t live like that. They’re in there.
I can feel them, their suffering. They want this to end. ”
In an instant, I was hurled back through time, standing next to a different bedside, my patient, locked inside her body, screaming to be released.
“Promise me.” Elanie fisted my shirt in both hands, her eyes wild and pleading. “Promise me you won’t let that happen to me too.”
“What are you asking me, Elanie?” Because if she thought I’d ever willingly decommission her, she didn’t understand me at all.
Footsteps pounded down the tunnel. I felt for Lars, still standing guard outside the door, awe and subservience sparking out from him.
“He’s coming,” Maximus said, hobbling to Mal’s side to place a hand on his shoulder. “This is the end, my friend. Are you ready?”
Mal inhaled deeply, looked to his family one last time, and nodded.
Elanie’s soft hand caressed my cheek, vanilla and cinnamon bombarding my senses, like she was pumping the scents out to soothe me. Stars, maybe she was.
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” she said. “Except to let me go.”
“No,” I insisted.
“Just for a little while. When it’s all over, you can find me again. I know you can. Promise me, Sem. Promise you’ll find me.”
“What’s she talking about?” I begged Maximus as a deep pressure shrouded the room, a sound like an FTL drive spooling up to jump thrumming off the walls.
Maximus’s shoulders fell. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But we have no time.”
Gol’s footsteps grew louder, closer.
I turned back to Elanie, my heart battering my ribs. “Why won’t anyone tell me? Please, tell me what’s happening.”
Another tear slipped down her cheek while Maximus said, “Gen-1s were designed with endgame protocols.”
Something Gol had said tickled at my memory. Gen-1’s had self-destruct sequences, atomics, and—
“No.” I shook my head at her. “No, Elanie. Not that.”
“I knew it was there.” Mal’s voice was quiet, haunted. “Deep inside me. But I had not felt it in many years.”
“An EMP.” The words fell hard from my lips, landing between us like a missile, reducing me to rubble. That’s what Maximus had done to Mal. He’d repaired his EMP. “Elanie, you’ll be wiped.”
“But we will live,” she said fiercely. “You will live.”
“At what cost?” I closed the distance between us, every moment we’d spent together racing through my mind, every moment that meant everything to me, every moment she would no longer remember once the EMP was activated. “You won’t know me. You won’t remember. I won’t survive it.”
She pulled my face to hers, kissing me over and over, her tears salty on her lips, on mine.
“We must do it now,” Maximus growled. “There is no time.”
“You can’t ask me to do this,” I said, meeting her stare, refusing to imagine what it would feel like to look into her eyes and see someone who didn’t know me looking back. “I can’t let you go. I love you.”
With the saddest smile I had ever seen, she said, “I know.” She brushed her lips over mine.
“And I have loved you since I saw those tiny blue and red sailboats on your underwear.” When she gazed up at me, the sorrow in her eyes broke me in half.
“You’ve asked me twice now. And I’ve yet to give you an answer.
But it’s yes, Sem. If you died, I’d miss you.
I’d miss you so much, so thoroughly, so deeply I’m not sure I’d ever find my way back to the surface.
And this is how I keep you alive. Because you will survive this. You will survive without me.”
“Please. Please don’t leave me.” I whispered it like a prayer, though I knew it was futile. No Saints would hear me down here.
“I’m not leaving. I’ll just be lost, but you can find me.” She kissed me again, looping her arms around my neck while the lock on the door slid free. “You can find me, remind me. Don’t lose hope. Don’t give up on us. Mal has—”
The door flew open, and Gol’s menacing bulk filled the frame. He moved toward us, his steps certain and ominous, two power syphons dangling like shackles from his hands.
“Do it now,” Maximus cried. “Avenge your family.”
When Lars aimed his prod at Maximus’s skeletal form, the master mechanic assumed a fighter’s stance.
Elanie’s eyes were huge and filled with fear. “Find me, Sem. Promise me.”
And as I held her close, surrounding her, protecting her with my body, my love, with everything I could, I said, “I will. I promise.”
I’d barely spoken the words when a wave of indescribable pressure rushed through the room. In the space of a breath, the beat of a heart, the world around me, including the woman in my arms, went completely and terribly still.