Chapter 16
The porch light glowed yellow in the chill air. A few insects flew in lazy circles around it, barely missing each other as they turned, throwing blurry shadows across the furniture as he climbed the steps. All of the apartments were on a single floor. The population was low enough now that there was no shortage of space.
The old wooden stairs creaked gently at him as he rose over them, feeling the cold seeping in through the cracks in his garments. The door loomed before him, an old wooden affair that had somehow missed remodeling when converted the old farmhouse into modern apartments.
Through the door. The hallways was dark, lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb at the opposite end of the hall.
He trudged down the hallway to his apartment, which was unlocked by his glasses ahead of him. He pushed the door open. Mary was sitting on the bed with her back to him. Oh blast. He’d had a dinner date with her. He’d forgotten about it. His glasses should have reminded him. Ah yes. He’d shut them off for a while. He hadn’t wanted to think.
He started to walk over to her. Her shoulders were shaking. He gently touched her on the shoulder. She turned her head and looked at him, face streaked with tears. Her eyes were red and angry.
She glared at him.
“You broke your promise.”
“Look, I’m sorry about dinner. Something came up, and-“
“I’m not talking about dinner!”
Her voice was raised now, her cheeks flushed.
“You promised me that you could move on.”
“What?”
“I know about the wormhole experiment. You’re trying to go through!”
Damien looked at her vaguely. He didn’t need this. He didn’t want to think. He just wanted to lay down and sleep for a week. He felt the latent embers of dread mutating into anger and beginning to warm.
“So what if I do?”
The last part hadn’t sounded like him. His constructs weren’t taking credit for it either. He wondered distantly who was talking.
“You’ve been logging on and accessing Rose’s communication protocols every single day!”
Ah yes. Stupid, really. He should apologize.
“It’s none of your business who I talk to!”
She was crying in earnest now, tears rolling now her red face. Why had he said that? That wasn’t what he’d meant to say.
“You made me a promise that you could move on, and then you broke it without hesitation. What kind of person does that make you?”
He frowned. The little ember of anger throbbing dully in his check was sparking now, flaring, sending running trails of fire through his mind.
“Your one to talk. There’s a lot you’ve been lying to me about.”
She was shaking her head now, mouthing words, begging him not to continue.
He was pacing now. He was aware that he was being cruel. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this. His constructs were screaming at him not to do this.
Somehow, for some reason, he did it anyway.
“Those implants. That mural. What kind of a monster were you? And why are you so afraid to tell me?”
And then she was on her feet and running at him. She struck him across the face, and he was on the floor, face bleeding from where she had slapped him. She stepped backwards, shaking badly and slumped against the bed, looking horrified. Shaking her head. Starting to apologize.
But he didn’t care. He was terrified of her, for the first time. And then he was out the door, and he was running, running, running out into the chilly darkness of the night.
You can’t run forever. He wanted to, but the tight layers of tissue over his ribs felt like they were tearing with every step, and the tightness in his chest was crushing him. He couldn’t stop. Along the fracture in his leg, sparkling streams of pain shot up from his ankle. He kept running, staggering now, gasping for breath. He wanted to run forever.
Eventually, it occurred to him that what he was running from lived in his head. He could no more outrun it than he could outrun his own mind.
When that occurred to him, it was as though some alien force of will that had been animating his limbs and forcing his steps went out of him, and he sagged against a tree. He lay there for the longest time, breathing raggedly in the darkness. Every gasp scorched his lungs with frost, every muscle burned like fire.
He wanted to sleep. Sleep, he thought, and you didn’t need to think. But if he slept out here, dressed in these clothes, he would probably die. It was snowing again. He gathered what wits he had left, and got to his feet. The snow crunched dry under his shoes as he walked. He wasn’t sure quite where. The side of his face was aching, the pain of the wound dulled by cold.
Somehow, without really intending it, he found himself near Mary’s apartment. There was no light on in the window. She wasn’t home. Again, without having any clear idea where he was going, he began to walk and found himself in the park where they had gone after the first date.
He sat down on the bench, and looked across the street. The silver flowers might help him sleep. He didn’t care too much if he froze. He wasn’t too interested in living at the moment.
The flowers were dead. Long silver stocks withered at their base, and the majestic blossoms were dry and dead and covered in frost.
To Damien Grey, the world seemed hopeless, and pointless. He didn’t care. At that moment, the stars could go out and the universe could die of entropy. He wanted no part in it. The sky blazed gray overhead, and he wished he wasn’t under it. Suddenly, there was a light in his eyes. He couldn’t see for a moment, and then his eyes adjusted to let him see the figure of a man squinting down at him.
“Need some help, son?”
He made a non-committal grunt.
“I wouldn’t ask, only it’s pretty cold out here, you don’t have a jacket on, and you seem to be well on your way to hypothermia. Also, you’re technically loitering.”
He reached down, took Damien rather kindly by the hand, and took him somewhere warm. Damien followed behind like an obedient child. He didn’t particularly care where he was.
The steam of the warm air flared across his glasses lenses. His extremities tingled as the heat ran across their surface, warming the frozen nerve endings. The militia man sat him down at the table. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and his face immediately began to hurt.
The left side of his face was an ugly red color, and swollen. The bulge ran down his face, inflating the left side of his lip. Around the edges, the red welt dissolved into the muted purple and greens of a bruise. In the center, a livid red cut showed where the force of the impact had split the flesh. He looked half-dead.
A bowl of soup was put in front of him. He ate it automatically. He wasn’t hungry, but he could see no reason why not. As the warmth of the soup sat hot and solid against the inside of his stomach, he felt as though his brain were beginning to unfreeze. A few sluggish thoughts began to shift in his mind. As he gradually became comfortable in his surroundings, he felt his glasses beginning to work upon his mind again, shaping his thoughts, forming patterns for him. He began to feel alive.
He noticed that someone was attempting to apply first aid to his cheek. They had swabbed away the blood, and were applying biotic treatments and anti-inflamatories. She seemed to be talking to him.
“Your lucky your jaw isn’t broken. What hit you? I’d say you got hit by a cab, but it’s the wrong shape..”
“It wasn’t a cab.”
He was mildly surprised to find that the voice was his.
“It was Mary.”
The room froze. It wasn’t so much a full stop as it was a kind of rapid deceleration. Conversations ran down, people stopped walking around, phones were set down.
“Would this be Marian Grimigeschict?”
“Yes.”
The sergeant who brought him in sat down at the table. He looked fifty, and must have been much, much older. His voice was soft and kind, but his eyes were deep and complex and curious. And now they were filled with pain.
“Och, Mary. She keeps trying to outrun herself, but there are some parts of a person you can’t leave behind. I’m sorry you got caught up in it.”
Damien nodded non-comitally. His head was still a blur. He didn’t want to think about the events of the evening. The world was wrong, somehow, and he wanted no part in it.
“Would you like to stay here tonight?”
One of his constructs cut him off accepting. Mary would be gone by now. He should go home.
“I’ll go home, thanks. I’ll take a cab. Thanks for helping me.”
“No problem. I’ll send an officer by in the morning to check up on you.”
“I don’t think you’ll need to. I’m feeling better. I think I might have been a bit concussed. I’ll message you in the morning to let you know I’m okay.”
He added the last sentence in response to a look of concern on the officer’s face.
“Okay, then. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. I’m okay. Thank you again.”
At his apartment, the door was still open. He sat down on the bed, and was stunned to find himself asleep within seconds of shutting tired, swollen eyes.
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Continue to Chapter Seventeen
