James 6
James
The roar of hot water helps deafen the chaos of my mind, but not nearly enough.
I tilt my face up to the showerhead, allowing the reverberating sounds to close over me.
Water sluices down the naked planes of my body, steam lifting off my skin as the bracing scents of jasmine and eucalyptus diffuse in the humid air.
Soap suds have long since dissolved down the drain, but I still can’t seem to calm down.
My muscles won’t release; I can’t shake this anger.
In fact, the situation only seems to be getting worse.
I can’t fucking breathe.
I press my hands to the cool slab of the shower wall, bowing slightly as the water pelts my back.
I feel like I’m trapped inside myself, hemmed in by the limitations set for me by other people. I’ve outgrown the walls of my own body; I can feel myself straining against these edges, splitting apart at the seams.
I want out.
No one will let me out.
My hands close into fists, knuckles digging painfully into stone. Wet hair cuts across my eyes. Water snakes down my arms, drips off my nose.
I don’t know what to do.
No.
My jaw clenches.
I know exactly what to do. I need to find this motherfucker and tear him to pieces.
No one will tell me where he is.
I shove away from the wall, sweeping the hair off my face as I try to take a deep enough breath. Every painful thought I’ve fought to deny these past five days is battering me all at once.
Something is wrong.
I know it. I can feel it. Rosabelle is putting herself in danger.
Something is wrong, and I’m not allowed to do anything about it.
Something is wrong, and no one is listening to me.
Over and over, my voice is ignored; my opinions are dismissed; my feelings are mocked.
I’m told to shut up, sit down, get my head checked.
I’m sick of it.
Everyone is always shouting at me to grow up, but no one seems to understand that if they want me to push up above this soil they have to step off my fucking roots in order to let me grow.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
The thunder of the water seems to suddenly multiply, and I realize it’s my own blood roaring in my ears.
I can’t stop thinking about her.
I can’t stop thinking about the fear on her face.
I can’t stop remembering the way she stared at him, paralyzed, drenched in her own blood.
I can’t stop trying to imagine where she is right now.
I’m worried she’s alone with him somewhere.
I’m worried he might try to hurt her again.
Just the thought that he might put his hands on her—
My heart rate spikes.
I shut off the water too hard.
I stand there in the steam, chest heaving, soaking wet.
When I find that bastard I’m going to nail him to a wall and cut out his tongue. Rip out his eyes. Saw the limbs off his body. I want to listen to him try to beg for mercy.
I step out of the shower in rising fury, dripping everywhere. I don’t feel the cold air on my heated skin. I can’t—I can’t function like this. So angry I can hardly speak.
My hands tense and release.
I grab a towel.
I dry myself off without registering I’ve done it, the motions automatic and distant. I glance at myself in the fogging mirror before I push open the connecting door to my bedroom, steam resolving in slants of bright noon light. I wrap the towel around my waist, hot and unsteady.
My head is pounding.
I suddenly can’t remember what I’m doing here. I can’t remember why I came home. My heart is beating so fast my mind is glitching.
My pager buzzes on the bedside table, and the sound is a cold collision with reality.
The fear and fury ratcheting through my body are slowly dissolved by revulsion. I can feel my expression darkening as I study the traitorous device.
It buzzes again.
And again.
The notifications coming through have only gotten worse. I’d glanced at a few before stepping into the shower, and after reading some of the messages the shower felt more necessary than ever. I should’ve taken a dip in bleach.
Not every unknown number threatened to rip off my clothes as part of some delusional fantasy, but a disturbing majority of faceless strangers expressed in explicit detail exactly how they’d like to use my body for their own enjoyment.
As if I weren’t already having a shitty day.
I don’t know who these people think I am.
It’s fucking violating.
Worse, I have to sort through miles of this shit in order to find actual messages from my team or family members. There are real notifications still coming in, and everything is entangled. I’m not in the mood to be dealing with this right now.
Obviously, there’s been a serious security breach.
I need to talk to Warner.
Our central comms were hacked in the lead-up to the recent chaos and infiltration from Ark agents, who used our systems to feed out false data in real time.
They drew our troops away from the situation at the warehouse by overblowing the disaster at the hospital.
The explosion, it turned out, was real. But the stories of dozens of casualties and burn victims being murdered: all a horrible exaggeration. A diversion.
Rosabelle had been right.
I tense all over again at the thought of her. Renewed pain pierces my sternum, and I clench my fists so hard it hurts. I have to fight to close off that branch of my mind, and it’s getting harder by the hour.
I exhale shakily.
Teams have been working nonstop these past several days to get our previously hacked comms back up and running—but last I checked, everything had been fixed. We were authorized to use our pagers again.
Clearly, there’s been a complication.
I collect the buzzing pager without glancing at the most recent notifications, then cross my bedroom to the adjoining sitting room, soft carpeting giving way to wood floors and the plush rug anchoring the space.
I toss the pager on my desk with no small amount of bitterness, and it skids across a stack of papers, knocks into a leather tray, upsets an arrangement of pens, and finally meets resistance against the solid base of a table lamp, disorganizing the otherwise meticulous system.
In this regard, Warner and I understand each other perfectly: I’ve always been organized. He didn’t have to drill the habit into my head.
Nazeera’s life gives me fucking anxiety.
Even as a kid I hated disorder; even when I didn’t know how to create efficient systems I did my best to cobble together some semblance of stability in the chaos. Living with Warner just gave me the tools to level up.
Adam is the only messy brother in the family.
Socks on the floor; plates abandoned on side tables; mugs of old coffee moldering in his bathroom; his pockets full of random shit.
I don’t remember him being like this growing up, but I can’t say for sure; it might’ve been a dormant quality.
Technically, we never really lived together full-time, not unless you count the first few years of my life when my mom was still alive.
Adam enlisted when I was still a kid.
Most of the time, I was alone in our little apartment.
It was my job to keep it clean, organized, and running to the best of my ability.
I only learned a few years ago that Adam was the kind of person who could pull on a wrinkled shirt straight out of a laundry basket—and worse, couldn’t tell you right away whether that basket was full of clean or dirty clothes.
That’s when I learned to stop asking follow-up questions.
Now, the first thing I do when I visit his house is wash the dishes inevitably piled up in his sink.
Alia still seems to love him, though.
Lucky guy.
I sigh into the relative silence, my pager intermittently buzzing against my desk. I consider putting it on silent again, but I’m trying to gauge the messages per minute as they come in, hoping the situation will slowly die down.
For now, it seems to be getting worse.
The harsh light of midday pours into the room through the nearest bay of windows, and my tired eyes linger briefly on the details of my life. The warm tones; the luxe textures. Velvet and suede and marble. Dark wood. Distinctive details.
Most are vintage pieces I’d had restored.
A brass reading lamp. An antique mantel clock.
A leather couch. An old record player. An onyx side table.
The intricate, handwoven rug underfoot. The custom floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining the walls contain my carefully amassed collection of vintage books, all recovered from the pre-Reestablishment era.
To be clear, I’ve read none of these books.
I just like to look at them.
My wing of the house is a little like its own contained apartment.
We had to make extensive changes to all the houses in The Waffle, retrofitting traditional, established structures to suit our modern needs—and we were able to customize the layout in a lot of cool ways.
It didn’t surprise anyone that Warner wanted the property with the most privacy.
Bonus for me.
Our yard gives way to gentle, rolling hills and wild landscapes on three sides. Kenji and Winston are in the house next door, but there’s enough distance between our doors and windows to pacify Warner’s need for space. Inside the house, similar rules apply.
He and Juliette occupy the opposite wing, where they’re spread out across multiple rooms, one of which was recently transformed into an office so Juliette could more easily work from home.
The bedroom and nursery are as far away from my rooms as the architecture allows, which is the only reason I haven’t been freaking out about the idea of a baby crying all night.
The nursery is kind of a secret.
Warner knows about it, of course; he just doesn’t really go inside.
Every time he so much as crosses the threshold into that room he looks like he might have a panic attack.
I’m the one who offered up the manual labor necessary to build it out.
Warner prefers to stand in the doorway and tell me exactly what I’m doing wrong, which reminds me—
I cast an instinctive glance at the clock.
Shit.
I head into my closet, ignoring all my nicer clothes to pull on simple technical gear. I reach automatically for my denim jacket before remembering it’s gone.
My breath stalls in my chest.
I stand frozen a moment before the neatly arranged shelves and hangers, trying to shake off the inrush of memory. I’d given that jacket to Rosabelle because she was cold. The last time I saw her in it, the denim was painted with her blood.
No.
I can’t do this.
I slam that mental door shut so hard I swear I feel the impact in my teeth.
My hands are a little unsteady as I pull a different jacket off a hanger.
It’s a vintage leather bomber, the lambskin battle-worn and soft.
I sense the creeping winter chill as I shrug into the article, still fighting to calm down.
I adjust the rust-colored fur collar around my neck, then convince myself to look in the mirror.
I see nothing.
I feel blind.
A sharp knock at my main door startles my head back into gear. I blink, my reflection coming into focus. Dark hair, blue eyes, jaw tight. The scowl on my face is so severe I look more like Warner than ever.
Another knock. “James?”
I straighten at the sound of her voice, then move without thinking, crossing the rooms in an instant. Juliette never knocks on my door these days.
In the fifteen seconds it takes me to grab my buzzing pager off my desk, silence it, stuff it in my pocket, and reach the entry, I’ve already managed to think up twenty different ways something horrible might’ve happened, so when I open the door to find Juliette smiling brightly in my direction with all her limbs intact, I’m both relieved and wound up.
She appears to be holding a piece of tissue to her forehead. This only confuses me more.
“Hey,” I say, a little breathless. “What’s going on? You okay? What happened to your head?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she says, then grimaces. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you. Are you busy?”
“No.” Big lie. Warner is expecting me to be at Nazeera’s house in ten minutes. There must be a ton of urgent notifications waiting for me in between all the filthy messages on my filthy pager. I really need to check in with Kenji. “What’s up?”
Juliette shifts her weight. Her smile wavers. She shoots me a nervous look, then moves her hand away from her face to reveal a neat cut above her eyebrow.
My anxiety goes through the roof.
She’s bleeding.
“I could use a little help,” she says quietly.