Chapter 2 James
James
When my pager goes off for the third time, I unearth it from my pocket and chuck it angrily into the ocean.
Kenji looks up, stunned.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he says, his heavy boots kicking up sand as he rushes toward the shoreline. He shields
his eyes against a cool glare of sunlight. “That’s government-issued tech. You can’t just throw it into the nuclear-infested
waters—”
“Too late,” I mutter, glowering at the unsorted test tubes before me. I’m perched on one knee, sinking slowly into cold, damp
beach. Judgmental shorebirds stare at me. Crows caw rudely overhead. I’m tired and hungry. My head hurts.
It’s possible I’ve never been so pissed off.
To be fair, I’m not sure anything could’ve made this day better. It’s wet and blustery and smells like sewage. Nests of seaweed,
jetsam, and decomposing fish surge in and out with the tide. I slot the sand and sea samples into my kit and listen to Kenji
curse colorfully into the wind.
Over the past decade we’ve dedicated great resources to reviving natural bodies of water, monitoring and rehabilitating marine life.
It was one of the many reasons we decided to leave the landlocked middle of the continent and move back to a temperate, coastal area: Juliette, my sister-in-law and revolutionary icon, wanted to be able to keep a closer eye on the ocean.
Obviously there are entire departments dedicated to this work, but once every quarter Warner sends some poor bastard out here
to make sure the samples we collect match up with the samples we receive. That’s just like him: always checking everyone else’s
work. Looking over everyone’s shoulders. He can’t trust people. He needs to micromanage everything—
“All right,” says Kenji, stomping unevenly toward me through the sand. “Enough of this shit. You’ve been in a pissy mood for
over a week now, and I’m tired of it.”
“I’m not in a pissy mood.”
Kenji’s pager goes off, blaring with a sound I’ve lately begun to associate with rage. He glances at it, sighs, and silences
the notification. “Look, I’m sorry you went and fell in love with a psychopath—”
“I’m not in love with her,” I say sharply.
“Oh, great, what a relief,” he says, faking a smile. “Here I was, worried you’d developed feelings for a professional mercenary
of The Reestablishment—”
“Jesus.” I drag a hand over my eyes.
“—after she’d effortlessly scammed you into bringing her into the heart of the resistance—”
I look up at the sky, exhaling.
“—in order to execute your family and potentially massacre the population”—he holds up a finger—“but only after she slaughtered a few of our people and tried to kill me first—”
“Stop.” I glare at him. “I’m sick of this conversation. I’ve heard enough of this shit over the past nine days.”
“Oh, wow, you’re counting the days, huh?” Kenji raises his eyebrows. “Tell me something: Are you counting the hours and minutes,
too? Measuring your life against the last time you had a Rosabelle hit?”
“Shut up.”
“I will not shut up. You think I don’t know what it’s like to be this pathetic? I am this pathetic. Why do you think I agreed to come out here in this shitty weather to babysit you while you do a job a worm
could do?”
“What?” I frown, forgetting my anger a moment. “Bro, worms don’t even have hands.”
“Rude of you to hold that against them,” he says, crossing his arms. “Worms turn garbage into compost. Worms do more for the
world than you do. Worms just eat dirt and mind their business. Worms need a better marketing campaign.”
I peer up at him. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Do I seem okay?” he snaps at me. “Are you not hearing me? I’m freezing my ass off on this gross beach talking about worms.
No, I am not okay. I’m hiding from Nazeera.”
“Right.” I give him a loaded look. “Because she tried to say hi to you.”
“Yes, because she tried to say hi to me, and don’t you dare take that fucking tone with me, as if you have any right to judge. There’s only enough room on this planet for one of us to be acting like a hormonal teenager right now, so I suggest you pull yourself together. This is my time to shine.”
“Whatever,” I mutter. “I’m not acting like a hormonal teenager.”
“You’ve been in a shitty mood ever since Warner locked up your fascist girlfriend for espionage, murder, and conspiracy to
commit murder—”
“I’m in a shitty mood because he stripped me of all my security clearances!” I shout, rising to my feet. I drop the remaining
test tubes in the sand. “I can’t leave The Waffle without a permit. I can’t reenter without an extra layer of screening. I
have to flash my ID everywhere I go even though everyone’s known me since I was a child.” I gesture to the samples arrayed
before me, rigid with anger. “I can’t even do this simple job without you breathing down my neck. It’s humiliating—”
“You messed up, kid,” Kenji says. “You don’t get to complain.”
I laugh bitterly. “Great. Thanks.” I drop back down to my knees and swipe the samples from the ground. Sand clings to my fingers,
making me irrationally furious.
Kenji stalks over, looming above me.
“You think things are bad now?” he says.
“You think your life sucks because you’ve been demoted?
You have no idea how much worse things could get.
Keep this up and Warner will punt you so far down the food chain you’ll end up working the information booth in the city center, handing out pamphlets in a hot dog costume. ”
A ghost crab scuttles by, startling me, making me angrier. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“The hell he wouldn’t,” says Kenji. “You have no idea what that man would do. He’s so mad at you right now I’m surprised he
hasn’t kicked you out of his house.”
Now I roll my eyes.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Kenji says, pointing at my face. “This, right here—this is your entire problem. You think this is a joke.”
“I don’t think this is a joke,” I say, fury forcing me upright again. A breeze unfurls across the beach, clinking the glass
samples against one another. “My entire problem is that everyone thinks I think this is a joke—”
“Look, I don’t have time for this. I’m trying to save your life right now. Get your shit together. Warner isn’t the only one
pissed at you. We were all counting on you. We all thought you were smart enough—”
“If you thought I was smart enough, you would’ve listened to me when I had something to say. No one takes me seriously. No
one respects my thoughts or my theories or my instincts—”
“Clearly, we can’t trust your judgment.”
“That’s bullshit!”
“I gave you one job,” Kenji says, rounding on me.
“A simple, straightforward job. I told you to get the mercenary to supermax because I couldn’t—because she’d lodged a knife in my leg—and you had the singular, first-class audacity to show up holding her hand with cartoon hearts popping out of your fucking eyes—”
“I wasn’t holding her hand!”
“No,” says Kenji calmly, unsheathing a rare, focused anger. “You’re right, you weren’t holding her hand—you were carrying
her in your arms like she was some kind of wounded princess—as if she hadn’t been recently discovered beside the eviscerated
remains of a fellow patient and the slaughtered bodies of our friends—”
“It’s not that simple—”
“It’s exactly that simple,” he says, raising his voice. “While I was getting my wounds healed you thought you’d take your
girlfriend on a romantic stroll between murder and prison. You gave Samuel shit for putting cuffs on her, as if she deserved
better. You stood guard over her like she was some kind of vulnerable innocent, talked to Warner like he was beneath you—”
“That’s not—” I drag my hands down my face. “Look, it wasn’t like that.”
“James, I love you, but fuck you if you think you can talk to me like I’m an idiot. If it wasn’t like that, then what was
it? There are cameras in the tunnels, dumbass. You’re lucky there was no audio on that security footage, because if there
were words to set to a melody, one of us would’ve already mixed it into a shitty song just to ruin your life. You think this
is humiliating?” he says, nodding at me, then the test tubes. “This is us going easy on you.”
I blow out a breath, squeezing my eyes shut. Heat moves up my neck, singes the crests of my cheeks.
Kenji chucks something at my face without warning, and I react instinctively, catching the small plastic packet before realizing
what it is.
“Eat something,” he says, irritated. “I’m going to do you a favor and assume you’re being an asshole because your blood sugar
is low.”
As I turn it over in my hands, I feel my head catch fire.
Gummy bears.