Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13) Page 17

  Harmon chuckled. “That was a foreign policy coup, you know. ‘Hey, everybody, there’s this race of humans that have superpowers, and you probably don’t have any, but just in case, here’s our expert to help you.’” His shoulders moved up and down in silent appreciation of a joke I didn’t find funny at all. “Thanks, by the way.”

  “Were you actively trying to break me then or was I just another cog in your machine?”

  “A cog,” he said with a shrug of utter indifference. “You hadn’t become a liability yet, so why not use you like an asset until depleted?”

  “I dunno, human decency?” I stared at him, and got nothing in response. “Sorry. Forgot who I was talking to.” He favored me with a ghost of a smarmy smile, and I started the scene into motion.

  “I’m leaving the agency,” Scott said again, probably because I was wearing a really dumbstruck look. I’d been blindsided by this one, because …

  Well, because I took it personally, but didn’t have the emotional energy to express my hurt.

  “Okay,” I said, staring at him through bleary eyes. Seeing myself from outside during this moment, I could almost see the wheels spinning in my head, trying to gain traction and come to grips with this.

  My boyfriend—my love—was leaving me.

  “I just need to move on,” Scott said, glazing right over how I felt to excise his own feelings. “Sticking in this—it’s not good for me. I don’t think it’s good for us, either. We hardly see each other. When I’m not on assignment, you are—”

  “Okay,” I said, fatigue showing in my face, as I still tried to push past those burgeoning hurt feelings to put this together.

  “—so if I go to work for my dad, I’ll be here in town,” Scott went on. “That way, when you come back, at least I’ll be here. One less messy schedule to coordinate, you know?”

  I just stood there, blinking.

  “This is some high quality fare,” Harmon pronounced, and the scene paused again as I looked at my own face, scrunched up, squinting, so dazed I didn’t even have the ability to wear my emotions on it. Unless confusion was the sole emotion I had been feeling, and I didn’t rule that out. “It almost beats this manhunt of yours wherein you try and catch the World’s Stupidest Couple, bandits so dumb that they call each other “bae” unironically … and you manage to get shot in the back of the head by them.”

  “You want to talk about that again?”

  “No,” Harmon said sullenly. “By all means, let’s resume watching your idiocy of the past rather than hash through the idiocy of the present. This is probably more interesting, in any case.”

  “It’s so nice to know you care,” I said.

  “I don’t,” Harmon snapped, sounding like a child about to have a tantrum. “But this situation is intolerable. If I’d known this was how it was going to be I’d have let you kill me on that iceberg without bothering to transfer my memories and consciousness into your body.”

  My brain felt slow, like I was adopting the sensation of the me in the memory. “Is that what you call a soul drain? Sounds less agonizing than what it actually is, I guess.”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it,” Harmon said, walking in a tight circle. The world around me seemed darker at the edges, as though the corners of the room were having the light siphoned out of them. “And yes, I call it that. Because that’s what it is. Stop your drain too soon, all you get is memories. Consciousness, though … that’s the real prize. That’s where you get your rush, when you absorb someone all the way.”

  I shrugged. “To be honest, it feels good all the way through, but yeah, I guess it’s like a bonus or a sense of completion or—uhm, something less appropriate—when I absorb someone fully. You’re not a prize, though. Worse than anything I ever got out of a cereal box.”

  “Hmph,” Harmon said. “So … how does this end?” He nodded at the other me, the one still trying to concentrate on what Scott had been saying, the me that was frozen in emotional purgatory, without much emotion to expurgate.

  “You know how it ends,” I said. “He leaves the agency.”

  “Yes, I know,” Harmon said impatiently. “But entertain me and explain it, will you? For heaven’s sake, you’re just so dull.”

  Time resumed, and I stared at Scott, wavering as the emotional punch hit home. “You’re … leaving …?”

  “So dull,” Harmon said again.

  “It’ll be better for us,” Scott said, that weight on him now gone. He’d been so worried about what I was going to say that now that he’d gotten it off his chest, he felt … excited. It was evident in his face.

  “Not working together is going to be better for us?” That was the best response I could come up with.

  “In the long term,” Scott said, sounding a little more defensive, “yeah. It gives us more time to spend together because we won’t both be running to hell and gone all the time.”

  “No,” I agreed, “I’ll be doing all the running to hell and back.”

  “Well, Reed will, too,” Scott said.

  I rubbed my fingers along my face, feeling the tension in my scalp tissue as I did so. Man, I was a wreck in those days. “For now,” I said. How long was this before Reed and I had that falling out over my sheer viciousness? Couldn’t have been more than a couple years. It all felt like a blur, like the darkness encroaching on the memory around me was chewing at the edges of my ability to put events into sequence.

  “I don’t think this is a big deal,” Scott said.

  That broke through my facade of fatigue. “Oh, well, if you don’t think so, then I guess we’re okay.” I sounded snottier now than I remembered being at the time.

  “She’s got her teeth out,” Harmon said.

  “There’s nothing to be mad about,” Scott said, backpedaling a little.

  “I like how you’re telling me how to feel,” I said. “Please, go on.”

  “Uhhhhm …”

  “It’s nice to see that even before you scooped his brains out and I bent him like a pretzel, he was still an idiot,” Harmon said. “Honestly, I worried after he started to fail at the job I set him to that maybe it was something I had done—but no. He was always a moron. Such a relief.”

  I withheld my own commentary, the only rebuttal to which I could think of was something lame, like, “Yeah, but he was my moron.” Instead, the scene kept playing as Scott got frustrated and finally responded.

  “I don’t know what you want from me, Sienna. I don’t want to do this job anymore. And it has nothing to do with you.”

  “Well, I’m your boss,” I said snarkily, “so I doubt it has nothing to do with me.”

  “Aren’t you sick of the fight?” he asked, the air seeming to deflate out of him. “First we tried to prevent genocide—”

  “With some notable success, given we’re still here.”

  “—and then we had to go to war with Sovereign—”

  “Also successful, in that it ended with him in a lot of tiny, dragon-shredded pieces.”

  “—now we chase down criminals,” he said, sighing wearily. “When does it end?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “When do you think crime will be over? Just round to the nearest decade.”

  “Is this really what you want to do with your life?” he asked, probably not meaning to be disdainful but hitting the mark fully anyways.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked. “When you were growing up, this is how you imagined you’d spend your days—”

  “Well, no,” I said, “because I honestly thought I’d probably spend my days continuing to train and getting locked in a metal box when I pissed off my mom, but once I was free to leave my house … yeah. This is what I wanted to do.” I swallowed heavily. “It’s what I’m supposed to do. It’s my mission.”

  “Nice to have a purpose in your life,” Scott said, staring almost blankly. “How much of this has to do with guilt for all those people Wolfe killed?”

  “Some,” I said
. “I don’t know. I haven’t assigned percentages. It’s my obligation. My job.”

  “I don’t want it to be mine,” Scott said, shaking his head. “You want it to be your beat, more power to you. All I see is the two of us riding this plane to the ground—”

  “Is that a metaphor? Because we did actually ride to the ground once—”

  “But not on a plane. We fell out of the plane, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I get all these flying and plane-related things confused sometimes.” I put my hands back on my face. They were cold and felt good against my temples. “All right. Okay. You don’t want to do this anymore. Fine.” I looked up at him with a near-blank stare. “What are you going to do?”

  “Join the family business,” he said, and I started chuckling right away. “What? It’s an honorable profession—”

  “So’s being a geisha, but I don’t see you grabbing a kimono and that plaster face paint.”

  “Low blow.”

  “What? I can’t hit you for doing that thing you swore you never wanted to do?” I folded my arms in front of me. “Scott … you were the guy who was jazzed to get an offer to become an M-Squad trainee when I was still trying to figure out how cars worked. Life changed you? The war changed you? Fine. That’s fine. You’re a big boy, and I can’t tell you what to do with your life. If you want to go work for your dad … rock on.” That wasn’t at all how I felt, and he could see it in my face, hear it in my voice. “Just don’t expect me to be super excited because you realized that my line of work isn’t for you. Because to me … it just feels like another way we’re different. Another thing, among many, that we don’t have in common.”

  “I would have assumed you had lots in common,” Harmon said. “Monster truck shows, for instance. Professional wrestling, for another.”

  “You really are quite the elitist jackass, aren’t you?”

  “We still have lots in common,” Scott said, putting his hands on my shoulders. It felt condescending, so I shrugged out of them. “We do. We’re in love—”

  “Scott, we don’t see each other.”

  “But this will help—”

  “Whatever,” I said, finally collapsing on the bed myself. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I closed my eyes.

  “Do you want me to stay?” he asked, shuffling back and forth on tentative feet, hands in his pockets.

  “Not really,” I said, and rolled over so he couldn’t see my face. “Not right now.”

  “Okay,” he said, stung. “Okay, I’ll … I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Perfect,” I said, and opened my eyes to look out the window.

  “You want the lights on or off?” He was poised at the door.

  “I don’t really care.”

  He clicked them off. “Good night, Sienna.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to feel something, wanted to have something swirling inside other than obvious, stinging pain, but I was just too tired. Symbolically, I would have loved to stay awake all night, worrying about our future together, something which had seemed so assured only a week earlier.

  Instead I fell asleep within two minutes, completely exhausted, as Gerry Harmon and I watched my past self sink into oblivion, unable to even muster up the energy to cry.

  42.

  June

  “There’s a cop behind us,” Ell said as they rattled up I-75 in that puke-smelling SUV, half-gagging as they went. They should have been used to the smell by now, shouldn’t they?

  June wasn’t. It was rank and gross and just made her want to throw up again. The panic flowing from Ell in the driver’s seat helped center her, though, turning her attention to her rearview. “I don’t see ’em.”

  “A few cars back, directly behind us,” Ell said, sticking up his head to look. “Florida Highway Patrol.”

  June turned all the way around in her seat to give a look. She peered past a sedan, then a Dodge minivan, then a mid-sized SUV that looked like a Ford Explorer, and then past that—

  “Oh,” she said. Sure enough, there he was. It was actually the Ford. Hard to tell in the afternoon sun, but the Explorer was multicolored. She did a double take. It wasn’t coincidence that he was right behind them, was it?

  “They’ve got our car description,” Ell said, running fingers through his hair, which had dried after the sweat and stress of the bank job, forming almost a helmet-looking mess on the front of his head. “He’s probably following us.”

  June swallowed hard. “What are we going to do about it?”

  Ell got that wide-eyed, panicked look. “I dunno. What can we do?”

  June thought about it a second. “You could blow him off the road. If he’s after us, it’ll take care of him. If he’s not … he won’t know what hit him.”

  Ell just stared at her. “That could kill him, June.”

  “Probably not, though,” she said, adjusting the spaghetti strap of her tank top. It felt itchy. “I don’t know.” She put her face in her hands. “I just—I don’t know what to do anymore. Do what you want. Let him follow us if you don’t care what happens.”

  She only had her head down for a minute before she heard it, the crash of a car, squeal of tires, someone honking. She looked up and saw the police cruiser veering off the road at high speed. Its front wheel hit the shoulder and it spun, slamming sideways into a tree where a copse began about twenty feet off the freeway.

  “Hell, you did it,” June said, not really believing he’d done it.

  “Yep,” Ell said, sounding stricken. “Hopefully … that’s the end of that for a while.”

  “Yeah, let’s h—” But June didn’t even get the words out before she saw blue lights flashing somewhere behind them, farther back than the first car had been. And she knew right then that no, this wasn’t anywhere close to over.

  43.

  Scott

  Her pulse was barely there now, and no matter how Scott held those plugs of blood in, a little watery ooze kept trying to creep its way out from Sienna’s unhealed wounds. It should have surprised him how slowly her body was healing, but he felt too sick to dwell on it much. It was obvious, now.

  She was dying.

  At the rate she was going, she wouldn’t even last the night.

  44.

  Sienna

  “If you don’t stop complaining, I’m going to sit here in silence while I die so that I can at least have some damned peace,” I said as Harmon wrapped up a whinefest about this latest memory I’d started. “I’m sorry my life has been so dreadful that you can’t possibly stand it one more second, but unfortunately, I can’t speed up this dying thing, so either watch or get lost, will you?”

  “Why couldn’t I have been stuck in the dying parts of your brain, safely out of reach, with the others?” Harmon asked, glancing over at the frozen Scott, this one from a few months after that initial memory where he’d quit the agency. “On the other hand, they’re probably having an orgy right now, and I’m not sure which would be worse.” He let out a long sigh. “Why is this happening to me?”

  “I ask myself the same question,” I said, “but the only answer I’m coming up with is that I’ve already died and this is my well-earned hell.”

  “Why, that would make me the devil, wouldn’t it?”

  “You said it, not me, but I don’t disagree.” I tugged on my hair, enjoying the pull against my scalp. If I could still feel this, I probably wasn’t dead, was I? Though things were getting steadily darker around us.

  “You’ve felt something similar to this before, haven’t you?” Harmon asked. “Death, I mean.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you meant carnival games.”

  “The time that the yokel family imprisoned you in your own body,” Harmon said. “Was it like this?”

  “Don’t you know, mind-reader?”

  He made a soft sighing noise. “No. You’re so brain-damaged I can’t read you or anyone else, remember?”

  “No, it wasn’t like this,”
I said. “There I was surrounded by avatars of the people I felt guilty about getting killed. I met a weird version of my dad, too, and he helped me fight against the—whatever the hell was happening there. It was a dream state, not a chance to rewind and revisit my dying relationship with Scott.” I stared at the awkward, paused scene of he and I, again in my little room, teed up for another verbal brawl. “Why do you think I’m reliving this, specifically?”

  “Because your own memories are too damaged to inhabit?” Harmon shrugged. “Because it’s a specific focus of your guilt that was stirred up in the last twenty-four hours? These are all just random guesses. I may know how people think, but that’s a soft sense. The physiology of the brain, the science of it … that’s more the territory of someone like Cassidy.”

  “Hm,” I said. “If I’m that brain damaged, why do I remember my life? Shouldn’t I have forgotten … I dunno … my name, my address, that time my mom threw a slinky at my knuckles because I mouthed off about her ass being fat?” I shook my head. “Looking back, that was some bad karma. I’m paying for that one now.”

  Harmon just rolled his eyes. “Again … I don’t know the science. All I know is that you’re dying, and I can’t reach the outside world.”

  “Great,” I said. “Just great.” I looked back at the vision of myself squared off with Scott.

  “So what’s this week’s episode about?” Harmon asked with an air of disinterest.

  “Hummmm,” I said, trying to recall. “There were so many.” I set the scene in motion.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” I said, sighing in plain exasperation.

  “I want you,” Scott said, as though it were both simple and obvious. “I want to see you, Sienna. More than I do.”