Rosabelle 30
Rosabelle
“You’re making a mistake,” I say, my voice calmer than I feel.
“No,” Warner says. “In fact, I finally understand why you don’t want James to come near you.”
“You don’t,” I insist. “You don’t understand—”
“You lose control of this corpse facade around him,” he says, nodding at me. “You lose your ability to weather pain, to withstand suffering.”
I reel back.
“If you can understand that,” I say to him, “why would you consider jeopardizing my armor? I can’t leave for the Ark without—I—I have to be able to manage Sebastian. He has to be the one to take me home. I need him to marry me and I have to be able to survive it—”
I almost clap my hands over my mouth.
Warner sounds murderous when he says, “You have to be able to survive it?”
“You don’t understand,” I breathe. “You—”
“I do understand,” he says angrily. “After weeks of frustration and confusion, I’ve finally figured out why James was the only one who could really see you.
I finally understand why his assessments of you were always so different from the assessments of others.
I thought he was being reckless and impulsive; I thought his judgment was impaired.
But it’s clear to me now that he saw something in you that you always manage to shield from everyone else. ”
“No—”
“I finally understand why you didn’t take off at the airfield.
I finally understand how he returned you to your body in the hospital—how the very sound of his voice seemed to calm you down.
” Warner’s eyes narrow. “You can’t predict your behavior around him.
You lose restraint when you’re near him.
That’s why you fell asleep in his arms. That’s why you told him far more than you were ever willing to admit to your own father. ”
My lungs tighten.
“And I know,” he says quietly, “why you’re so talkative now. I know why you were hysterical in the hospital. I know why you care about saving our soft, loud world. I can’t believe I couldn’t see it before. You’ve done a fine job hiding it, Rosabelle. Well done.”
“What are you talking about?” I whisper.
Warner locks eyes with me, then drives a blade through my chest. “You love him.”
I’m a bell, rung too hard.
I feel dangerously unsteady, my heart rate rocketing inside of me. I’ve never even allowed myself to think these words. I haven’t even allowed myself to draw near this wildfire in my chest, this persistent agony.
Every thought of him delivers me a little death.
If this is love, I hate it.
Heat presses against my eyes, unbidden, and I blink fast. “There’s no—there’s no victory for you in this ultimatum. You have no idea what kind of damage you would do to your nation by letting him get close to me.”
Warner’s eyebrows lift a little. “My nation?” he says. “That seems like a gross exaggeration.”
“I don’t exaggerate,” I snap, fighting to gather myself. “And you still don’t seem to understand: I am your only chance at survival. The only way to kill the second wave of The Reestablishment is to kill Klaus.”
“If that’s what’s necessary, we’ll do it together.”
“No,” I nearly shout. “I am the only one who can make it on the Ark. I am uniquely built to survive its landscape. Penetrating the inner sanctum of the regime is next to impossible. It can only be accomplished through an undetectable stealth operation that must be carried out well below the sight and senses of every living creature on the island, whose recordings are uploaded in real time to Klaus, and who will flag an inconsistency in the environment at once. A single misstep could cost me everything—”
“That doesn’t mean you need to shackle yourself to a monster—”
“I’ve been shackled to monsters all my life,” I cry.
“And for once, this one might be useful. I need Sebastian’s help to get back on the island without provoking suspicion.
He comes from a powerful family. He has influence.
He could delay the death sentence awaiting me on the Ark.
” I shake my head. Try to control my voice.
“Why can’t you understand? Becoming his wife is the only leverage I have left. ”
Warner’s eyes only get colder. “You really think this is the only option?”
“I know it is.” I take a breath. “I’ve spent the past ten years learning how to navigate a merciless surveillance state that no one from this loud, ridiculous continent could possibly understand.
Compromising my ability to remain invulnerable is to compromise my mission, which is to forfeit the entire world, much less the freedoms you so desperately desire in The New Republic.
You can’t get involved, and you can’t allow James to come near me.
I need to be fully sheathed in my own body, and he—I—I can’t—”
“Do you have any idea what this would do to him?” Warner says. “Never knowing how you really feel? Thinking you’d betrayed him?”
“I’m trying to save him.”
“I don’t think he would see it that way.”
A wave of nausea overwhelms me. “I refuse to discuss this.”
Warner studies me in the silence.
“Even if I were to consider allowing you to launch a mission on your own,” he says, “I’d still need to know what you intended to do. If you’re unwilling to tell me the full shape of your plans, I’m unwilling to trust you. And if I can’t trust you, we have no deal.”
“You have no choice but to trust me,” I say, struggling not to shout at him.
“It should be enough for you to believe that I have sufficient motivation to kill Klaus. It should be enough for you to believe that I am, in fact, entirely qualified to act on behalf of a people who have no idea that their enemy even exists, meanwhile The Reestablishment knows not only their blood type, but the very texture of their skin—”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re a people who live in a dreamscape,” I hit back.
“What do you think happened to the databases? The registries? The DNA samples?” My right arm trembles as my anger rises, and I clench my fist. “Ten years is not long enough to outgrow your enemy. Ten years is not long enough to erase and replace the population. The information might be incomplete, but The Reestablishment has been harvesting human skin and organs for decades—”
“You think I don’t know that? You think we haven’t scoured every inch of their laboratories and hideouts?”
“No, I don’t think you have,” I argue. “In fact, I’m positive you still haven’t been able to find everything they left behind.”
His expression clouds over. “Are you implying that there might still be active laboratories or research facilities embedded in our landscape?”
“I’m not implying it,” I counter. “I believe it’s inevitable.
We have teams of cryobiologists back on the Ark.
Hundreds of freezers full of cryogenically preserved organs—where do you think they came from?
The Reestablishment is obsessed with the fusion of organic and synthetic materials—and I think they’re plotting something now.
They were testing something when they put your people into those cryosleep chambers.
They might’ve been harvesting something.
Whatever they did that day, I don’t think they’re taking those samples all the way home. ”
Warner’s eyes darken.
I shake my head at him. “You still think you can wage war against an entity capable of merging your mind to a synthetic force under its command. Do you not understand?” My breaths are coming in harder.
“They’ve lost their appetite for resistance.
Their plans are purpose-built to circumvent resistance.
They don’t want to wage war. They intend to colonize your mind. ”
“That won’t happen,” he says. “We won’t let it happen.”
“You won’t even know it’s happened,” I argue desperately.
“There are agents currently executing missions all over the continent—and you’ll have no way of knowing whether they’ve occurred, because the explosions are meant to be undetectable.
When they hit, the supernatural powers that affect the three percent of your population will suddenly disappear—”
“Two percent,” he corrects me. A muscle jumps in his jaw. “Roughly eight million people on the continent possess some kind of preternatural genetic mutation.”
I meet his eyes. “Great,” I say. “That makes things worse. You definitely won’t hear about it when it happens, not right away.
Because for most people, nothing will change.
The few affected in the staggered attacks will think they’re having a bad day.
A bad week. It’ll take a while for people to notice that something has gone wrong on a massive scale.
” I pause. “Will they believe you when you tell them that a ghost was responsible? That an invisible, unseen force stole into their skin and snatched the supernatural power from their bodies without a trace?”
His scowl deepens.
“The mutations that once backfired against the system will be erased from history,” I tell him, “returning the populace to a docile, defenseless state. Within six months, all affected civilians will submit to the full gene edit, which prepares the soil of their minds for the implantation of Klaus’s control.
When this happens: your world, as you know it, will be over. ”
He stills. “What does that mean?”
“It means the obliteration of resistance,” I say angrily.
“They’ll be able to plant their thoughts in your head and you’ll believe the ideas are your own.
You’ll think it was your idea to put down your weapon.
It was your idea to let them control you and cut you open.
It was your idea to choose servitude. It was your idea to deny your own organic intelligence.
You’ll be convinced that this is, in fact, freedom.
Freedom to stop trying, to stop fighting, to submit to the great artificial power: let it think for you, let it feel for you, let it tell you who you are—”