James 3
James
Everyone looks up in unison.
Roman roars in the background, then tackles a throw pillow, but I don’t really hear it. I feel like I’ve gone slightly deaf. An update from Warner means there might be an update about Rosabelle, and I’m suddenly concrete, the smile dead on my face.
Fuck.
Nazeera scans her pager. “We’re meeting in an hour. Attendance is mandatory.” She glances at Adam and Alia. “Not for you guys, obviously.” Then, to Winston: “Or you. Just me and Kenji and James.”
“And me,” says Gigi from the other room.
“Not funny,” her mother calls back.
“And me, Gigi?” Roman asks his sister, tugging on her dress. “And me too?”
“You’re too little,” she says to him matter-of-factly.
“No, I BIG,” he insists, his face crumpling.
“You’re both too little,” Adam shouts.
My heart is pounding harder.
I feel like I can’t move.
“It’s in their blood, man,” Kenji says quietly to my brother. “That Anderson DNA runs deep.”
“She’s five,” says Adam, agitated. “He’s only three—”
“I want go,” says Roman, his head popping up above the couch. “DADDY CAN I GO?”
“No,” Alia and Adam yell at the same time.
Roman slowly retreats. He and Gigi turn to each other, sharing an aggrieved look of the disenfranchised, the cruelly oppressed. Roman then releases a louder roar and launches himself at another throw pillow.
I’m still trying to calm down.
“Where are you guys meeting?” asks Winston. “Not here, right?”
I’m feeling staticky, like there’s too much energy in my body. Like I need to go for a run. Climb a mountain. Jump out of a plane.
I glance at Roman, currently wrestling inanimate objects, and I suddenly understand him.
“We’re meeting at my place,” Nazeera says. She looks up and accidentally locks eyes with Kenji instead of Winston, and the two of them turn abruptly away from each other. “Warner, um, didn’t say what the meeting is about, but I think we can all guess.”
“Your place,” I say, suddenly out of breath. “Okay. Your place. Does that mean—Did he say if—I mean, is she going to be there?”
“He didn’t say, and I don’t know.” Nazeera exchanges furtive glances with the others, her expression tight with sympathy. Or pity.
Either way, I hate it.
“James.” Nazeera again.
I look up, scattered.
“If I had to guess,” she tells me, “I’d say definitely not.” She sighs. “Honestly, it might be healthier at this point to just accept that you’ll never see her again.”
These words deliver me directly to hell.
I haven’t seen Rosabelle in five days.
The last time she and I were forcibly separated was by Warner’s decree.
She’d been unnaturally dead for three days and detained in the hospital.
The time before that was also Warner’s doing: she was in prison for almost ten days and I wasn’t allowed to so much as say her name without facing punitive action.
This time, Warner had nothing to do with it.
I haven’t seen Rosabelle in five days because she doesn’t want to see me. She doesn’t want to talk to me.
She doesn’t even want me near her.
A spasm of pain branches across my chest.
I don’t know what happened. It’s all a wild blur.
We were at the warehouse; it had been a setup; we were ambushed; she’d been attacked; we were separated.
I found Kenji and several others hanging from the ceiling in steel cells, bodies forced into a strange cryosleep.
I’d freed Kenji and finally fought my way back to Rosabelle through the hellish maze of the warehouse, but when I found her she was covered in blood and badly wounded, and when I unmasked the guy responsible for attacking her, he turned out to be her long-lost fiancé.
Sebastian.
I still don’t know his full name. I wish I’d kept that damn wedding invitation instead of using it as kindling. All I know is that he’s here, freshly arrived from Ark Island.
He claimed he’d come to take Rosabelle home.
Warner showed up with a battalion just minutes after that and directed the troops to take over. They cleared out the Sebastian trash and Rosabelle was carted off to recovery, and—
And I haven’t seen her since.
Apparently, at some point in the middle of all this chaos, Rosabelle struck a deal with Warner: she told him she’d give him all the intel he wanted just as long as they kept me away from her.
I didn’t believe it.
I couldn’t.
It’s true, Warner said to me. And it wasn’t my idea.
I still think emotionally attaching yourself to her is a fatal mistake, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s now under our protection.
It’s no longer productive to waste time keeping the two of you apart, not now that she’s become an active asset, and especially not now that it’s clear you were right to keep her alive.
But these were the terms she asked for. I’m not trying to punish you.
I’m merely holding up my end of the bargain.
I’m the bargain.
Me.
A citizen of the Ark and trained mercenary of The Reestablishment finally broke her silence on the priceless secrets of our greatest enemy in exchange for nothing more than the definitive erasure of my existence from her life.
Tore my fucking heart out.
No one would tell me which hospital she was in; no one would tell me how she was doing or when she’d be released. No one would let me get near her. I’m not even allowed to ask questions about her. It’s an actual matter of security now: officially authorized; legally enforced.
The crumbs I’ve collected indicate she was discharged from recovery a couple of days ago; and circumstantial evidence seems to suggest she’s back at Nazeera’s house, no doubt sleeping on the cold ground every night.
This detail has been haunting me.
Of all things, I can’t stop picturing her curled up on the hard, empty, dusty floor in Nazeera’s guest room.
I know for a fact that Nazeera never got around to buying her a mattress.
There’s definitely no food in that fridge.
There are maybe two water glasses in Nazeera’s cabinets, both of which are likely borrowed.
She has no dishes. No trash can. No utensils.
Maybe some plastic spoons and three napkins courtesy of old takeout.
Rosabelle will slowly starve.
No one will remember to feed and water Rosabelle, because Rosabelle never complains, and because Rosabelle would probably die before she asked for a free meal.
She’s probably freezing every night. She’s probably still wearing the thin scrubs they gave her in recovery.
She probably doesn’t have more than the shitty toiletries they hand out at the hospital.
Rosabelle doesn’t ask for help.
Worse, she’s done such an excellent job convincing everyone she’s bulletproof that no one will ever assume she needs it.
She’ll just stand in a corner, literally dying, and everyone will call her an asshole for being quiet and unlikable.
No one cares whether she’s fed or warm or safe or bleeding.
I don’t even trust Nazeera to remember to give her a blanket.
Hell, I don’t even think she owns an extra pillow.
I exhale, hard, pushing my hands through my hair.
Obviously, I’ve tried talking to Nazeera about this, but she isn’t allowed to discuss it.
I’ve been driving myself crazy.
There’s nothing I can do, Warner said to me.
I may not understand her reasons for these terms, but I intend to stand by them.
You know better than anyone that the stakes are astronomical.
She’s disclosed more about the synthetic intelligence apparatus of Ark Island in two days than I’ve been able to piece together in ten years.
In exchange, this is what she wants. No contact.
No contact.
No fucking contact.
This made so little sense to me I thought someone had reached into my brain and ripped it out.
“Hey—James.” Kenji is studying me. “You okay?”
“What?” I take a sharp breath, looking up. “Me? Yeah. Fine.”
At first, it was easy to distract myself—work myself into the ground in the aftermath of so much disaster. I tried not to think too hard about my heart shattering. I’m good at that; I’m good at compartmentalizing.
I do it all the time.
In fact I lied to myself a little more each day, telling myself that there’s a lot to process with Sebastian, that she probably just needs some space, that we’re all super busy right now and she probably didn’t mean that she never wanted to see me, because why would she never want to see me—and anyway we’re both living on campus now, so we’re bound to see each other at some point, right?
As if she were the kind of person who went for leisurely strolls or drank casual coffees.
I haven’t so much as seen her shadow.
Now that the worst of the wreckage around us has been managed, there’s less to distract me from my own damage. My control has started to slip. And when I pull up the floorboards to peer at the festering wounds I’ve buried in my mental basement, I feel like I’m being killed, over and over.
I startle at the touch of a small hand on my leg, my pulse racing. But when I see the look on Gigi’s face, I automatically force a smile.
“Hey, I’m okay,” I say to her. “Everything is okay.”
I pick her up, gathering her in my arms as I smile wider, practically deranged, and Gigi only stares at me. She presses her finger into my cheek again.
My fake smile softens.
“So, I, um, I just realized I’m not actually hungry,” I say into the void, my voice so bright it’s scaring me. “I think I’ll take the first shower instead.” I give Gigi a quick kiss on the head and set her down.
She continues to stare up at me.
Everyone, in fact, is staring at me.
The full force of this intensity reminds me so much of Rosabelle’s searching stares that I feel a little lightheaded.
No, I feel sick.
“You haven’t taken a single bite,” says Alia, subdued. Her fork is limp in her hand. “Are you sure you don’t want to eat something before you go?”
Kenji frowns in concern. “Yeah,” he says. “You should sit down. Have a waffle.”
“No, that’s okay,” I say tightly, backing up a step. My deranged smile is getting worse. I feel it unhinging me. “I’m good. Really.”
“Uncle James you want to play my dinesaur?”
I startle and look down, surprised to find Roman at my feet. The emotional intelligence of these kids is astounding. Roman shoves the sharp plastic toy into my leg, each painful stab an unspoken word of concern. “You be small dinesaur, I be big dinesaur.”
“Oh, yeah, I’d love that,” I say to him, my voice pitching weirder. “I’ll have my people call your people and we’ll schedule a time that works for you, okay? But I want to be the big dinosaur.”
Roman scowls at that. He shoves the plastic toy into my leg again, harder this time. “No. I be big dinesaur.”
“That seems unfair,” I explain. “Since I’m much bigger than you.”
“NO,” he shouts, pointing at himself. “I BIG DINESAUR.”
“James. Seriously.” Adam is looking at me. “You okay?”
“What? Yeah.” I shake my head. “Of course. Why are you guys staring at me so much? I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” says Winston, calmly cutting into a stack of waffles. “You’re having a mental breakdown.”
“He’s not having a mental breakdown,” says Nazeera, her voice hard. She says this like it’s an order. Like she’s willing this to be true.
“Gigi,” Roman shout-whispers. He staggers over to his sister and takes her hand. “Gigi, whatsa metal bakedown?”
“It’s when your brain is having a bad day,” Gigi whispers back, not missing a beat. “It happens to grown-ups sometimes.”
“Oh, he’s definitely having a mental breakdown,” says Winston, spearing a piece of waffle. “I would know. I have them all the time.” He sits back, then gestures to me with his fork. “Just look at him.”
They all turn to look at me.
“Stop,” I say. “Stop looking at me. I said I’m fine—”
“Daddy?” says Roman.
“Yeah?”
“Daddy!”
“Yes, Roman?”
“Daddy, I have metal bakedown?”
“No, Roman.”
“You have metal bakedown, Daddy?”
“Any minute now.”
“Adam,” Alia says, shooting him a look.
“You know what?” I say loudly, my psycho smile straining. “I think I’ll take that shower in my own house. Give you guys some space.”
“We don’t need space,” says Kenji, unflinching. “You should stay here. Where we can keep an eye on you.”
“Like I said, I’m fine,” I insist, but my face is starting to hurt. “Anyway, I could use the air. Nazeera, I’ll meet you at your place. I’ll see the rest of you later.” I nod at Adam and Alia. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“James,” Kenji tries again, looking a little crushed. “C’mon, man. Tell me you’re not actually messed up over this girl. Tell me you knew, deep down, that you could never have something real with her, that she was never going to—”
“No.” I cut him off, the word harsher than I intended.
Everyone recoils.
“James.” Adam looks stunned.
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” I try to soften; try to resurrect my smile. “I’m fine. I’ll see you all later.”
I gather up the kids before I go, crushing them to my chest until they’re both screaming to be free of me. I manage to hold on to what’s left of my composure just until I open the front door, when I catch a wisp of Nazeera’s hushed voice—
“—really don’t know,” she’s saying, sounding intense. “Apparently she told Warner she still wants to marry the guy.”
I take this like a fist to the face.
“What?” I hear Adam say.
“I know, it’s awful,” Nazeera whispers. “From what I can tell, she’s bartering intel in exchange for his release into her custody. She wants Warner to let them go back to the Ark together. For their wedding.”
My body feels strange, like it’s made of guitar strings, like I’ve been strummed too hard.
“Poor James,” Alia says quietly.
“Poor James?” Winston hisses. “What the hell did he think was going to happen? Falling in love with a fucking mercenary—”
“Wait,” says Adam. “Wait—so she’s been engaged to some other guy this whole time?”
“Yeah,” Kenji answers in a low voice. “I mean, we knew she was linked to this dude, but she’d made it seem like it wasn’t a real thing—”
I’ve gone numb.
I feel like I might be someone else, somewhere else.
I pitch slightly and catch myself against the doorjamb, dimly registering the dull sound of impact.
Despite all this I still wait to see if there’s more—steeling myself for greater punishment—but the house has gone suddenly quiet.
Like maybe everyone realized I was still listening.
“James?” Nazeera calls out tentatively. “You still there?”
I rush outside, slamming the door shut behind me.