Chapter 26 #2
‘For what it’s worth, I know she loves you too.’ Weirdly, they don’t use past tense. I wonder if they’re still using it to cope. ‘I’ll leave you to eat. Goodnight, Harper.’
‘Night, Nik.’
It’s almost midnight when I’m done washing my plate and I’m ready to sleep. Outside, the storm has simmered into a barely existent drizzle, but the crimson clouds promise a wet night. Thank God Niko came for me today.
I’m halfway to my room when my feet slow. I see Tia everywhere I go. The kitchen counter where we used to sit. My bed, where we’d drunkenly kissed. The living room sofa, where Tia would spend movie nights curled up in her adorable pyjamas.
Yeah, I need a second outside to breathe.
The Lain Co. roof puddles with water, but I stay safe and dry in the tiny shelter at the entrance to the roof. Thunder rumbles and the sky splits into a brutal downpour. Dread spikes my chest for an awful second at the thought of having to comb the city in the driving rain.
Not any more. No, I’m home now. I don’t have to be alone. I have Niko, Kiran.
Tia . . .
Tears prickle in my eyes, but I don’t bother wiping them away when there’s no one around to witness it.
The lift door opens behind me, barely audible over the storm. Probably Niko, or Kiran. If I keep watching the sky, they won’t have to see my tear-streaked face.
‘Kit?’
No. The ghosts of my memory have congealed into reality. It’s a hallucination, and that hurts. I don’t turn around. Leave me alone, please.
‘Harper.’
‘Go away.’ My voice cracks. I’d hallucinated Tia in the first couple of days, of course. There was little other way I knew how to cope. But I shed the habit quickly by blanking my mind and pretending it was all a faraway dream, so I do the same now.
When I turn, though, my stomach drops. Tia’s still there, and she’s never looked more real. Why does my imagination have to be so cruel?
‘I’m here,’ Dream Tia says, as if she knows what I’m thinking.
‘What do you want from me?’
Dream Tia takes a step closer, until we’re barely an arm’s length apart. ‘Kit, you can touch me and you’ll know I’m real.’
‘I watched you die.’ The words leave my mouth so twisted, so bitter. ‘Don’t fucking do this to me. I can’t handle it.’ It hits me that I’m talking to thin air, but it’s more therapeutic than I expect.
For some reason, Dream Tia looks as if she’s going to cry.
‘Oh, kit,’ she whispers, and then she closes the gap between us and crushes me in a hug and Dream Tia becomes Real Tia, Alive Tia, warm and safe and it smells like her and feels like her and there’s her moonstone necklace digging into my cheek and the familiar curve of her neck and my knees collapse and Tia has to hold me up and none of it makes sense because Tia isn’t meant to exist any more.
What if this is a simulation? What if this is someone in disguise?
But Tia whispers in my ear and I know it’s her and I don’t care how she survived because all that matters is I’m not alone any more.
TIA
I know Harper is home the second I hear the footsteps in the corridor. I’ve been migrated from the hospital to my bedroom, and Kiran promised me he’d try to get Harper home today.
Still, it feels so satisfying when I recognize Harper’s presence immediately – by the irregular regularity of her footsteps, the way she opens doors silently because she’s used to slipping around unnoticed, but still lets them bang closed because she always forgets the Lain doors are self-closing.
I was hoping to knock on her door to surprise her, but suddenly the footsteps fade and—
Silence. Mind-numbing, all-encompassing, large-as-the-universe silence.
She’s gone.
I open my eyes to stare at my bedroom ceiling, the glaring red dot of the smoke alarm, the soft glow of light from the window.
I push myself out of bed, burning cold floor against the soles of my feet, a dull ache in my bones as I slip on sandals and hobble out of the room. ‘ALFRED, where’s Harper?’
‘She has left for the rooftop. Would you like me to notify Niko that you’re ambulating?’
‘Don’t tell Niko anything about me for the next hour, thanks.’
Thunder rumbles through the building, masking my steps while I slip through the dark hallways and past orderlies with medical carts and roving doctors with clipboards. Nerves knot themselves in the base of my gut, crawling up my throat as the lift ascends to the rooftop.
When the lift doors slide open, the battering of rain crashes over the silence of the lift, roaring in my ears as I step out.
A figure stands at the grey boundary between dry and wet, face turned to the thundering sky, shoulders slumped in submission, a palm extended into the rain as if to beg for penance.
I step closer, my footsteps masked by the purr of thunder. ‘Kit?’ I call.
The figure freezes. Their hand drops to their side, shoulders slump, and Harper turns.
Her eyes look glazed over, and she dismisses me like I’m just a spectre. Perhaps, to Harper, I am. So I step closer, and there’s so much unspoken that it fills the three-metre space between us until it’s nearly as loud as the droning rain.
It’s hard to keep my lips from trembling. It’s harder to refrain from reaching out to hold Harper’s hand, touch her skin.
Two metres. The words bounce between us, humming with half the intensity of the sky around us, spiralling into a youngling tornado, beginnings of chaos.
Harper doesn’t seem convinced that it’s me, and she looks like an abused animal, recoiling from me as if she’s scared. She looks shattered.
Here we are, I think ruefully. Two broken people.
One metre. I can feel Harper’s presence thrumming through me, beckoning for my attention, just like it’s always been from the start: magnetic, tangling, absolutely demanding my full focus, two gravitational fields ensnared in each other until we’re – we’re what?
Less than a metre.
Then Harper opens her mouth and her voice is painful and her words are worse, so I gather her in my arms and I say ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I’m here.
’ I hold her together like a broken porcelain doll and it’s hard to keep the pieces in place, but I do my best. There’s no way of guessing how long we stay like that, and at some point I start rocking back and forth gently. It seems to calm Harper a little.
‘How are you alive?’ she says against my chest.
I press a kiss to her head. ‘I have a metal heart, remember? All I had to do was switch it off for a bit to fool you guys. The sword couldn’t penetrate it, and it cauterized most of my wound so I couldn’t even bleed out.’
Harper is silent for a bit, then she sobs – no, it’s a tear-choked laugh. She curses and buries her face in my shirt and curses again. ‘My God, you’ve turned into a trickster. Fuck, you turned into me.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ I tug a lock of hair out of Harper’s tear-sticky face. ‘I’m sorry it turned out like this. The second it went wrong . . .’ I knew it wouldn’t end well. I thought we’d lose each other. I’d been terrified.
Harper must sense it, because grief curves the ends of her eyebrows, and she pushes away from me. ‘We’re not ideal.’
‘We’re not ideal,’ I echo. The reminder of it stings. ‘We keep hurting each other. We’ve been hurting each other for a while, and I don’t know what to do about it.’ My voice wavers. Part of me hates myself for being weak; another part of me craves the relief the weight of the words offers.
Harper’s lips part. ‘Maybe it’s selfish, but I want you even if it hurts.’ Sadness carves an unfamiliar expression on her face, turns her usual smirk into trembling lips, shallow breaths.
When she kisses me, all I can taste is the salt of her tears.
‘Sorry,’ Harper whispers as she presses a kiss to my tear-stained cheek, a kiss to the forehead, shaky breath. Sorry. Hand sliding down my forearm to lace her fingers through mine, a kiss to the jaw, trembling with a suppressed sob.
Overhead, the sky cries along. Heavy drizzle, a cough of thunder, then a tempestuous storm all at once. Sheets of grey batter the roof overhead, roaring over my heartbeat in my ears.
Harper pulls away. Her hands come up to cup my cheeks. She opens her mouth to say something, but another clap of thunder steals her words away, and I watch her lips move desperately.
‘What?’ I yell over the rain.
Harper’s jaw clenches, her face still twisted from crying. She lets go of me.
One step backward, another, and then she turns and runs straight into the storm.
‘Harper!’ I call, but she keeps running until she reaches the centre of the roof, and she turns to face me. Rain batters her sodden immediately, her figure a slash of defiance against the roiling night.
‘I don’t care if it hurts!’ Harper shouts, her voice barely travelling over the rain. Lightning flashes and thunder rolls, reminding me we’re on the top of a fifty-storey building in the middle of a thunderstorm.
‘Are you trying to die? Come back inside!’ I scream, but Harper throws her arms out.
‘Let it strike me!’ Clothes clinging to her body.
Her hair plastered over her cheeks, her voice raw.
The lightning cracking across the sky again, a warning.
Harper doesn’t even flinch. ‘Better me before you! Don’t you understand?
I’m sick of being scared for us. I lost you and it felt like I lost myself.
I don’t want to be without you, please. Don’t leave me. ’
You’re an idiot wars with I love you so much, and the next thing I register is rain against my back, driving into my shoulders and my skin, a wave crashing over me, a clean slate.
When I kiss Harper again, it tastes of first rain striking earth. Her skin is slippery under mine, and I can’t feel what’s wet and what isn’t. Rain drowns my senses and waterlogs them until it’s just my lips and Harper’s and I don’t know where I end and Harper begins.
All I know is that I belong here, my feet soaked in my fuzzy slippers, the rain startlingly painful against the back of my neck, my arms tight around Harper.