Unforgotten(85)

48

UNSHAKEN



The lamps have all been turned off in the guest room. The only light emanates from Cody’s computer and the various monitors surrounding Zen’s bed. I’ve asked for five minutes alone and, surprisingly, Kaelen has granted it.

He and Cody wait in the living room. When I left, Cody had gone back to playing a game—a different one this time. Clearly something more modern because for the past five minutes, life-size three-dimensional street fighters have been battling each other in the middle of the living room. They look so real, I don’t know how you can tell the difference between the game and reality.

Maybe you can’t.

Maybe this is all a game.

A game about a sixteen-year-old girl with golden-brown hair and purple eyes who can lift heavy objects, run like the wind, speak every language, mentally calculate like a computer. Who is beautiful and strong. Who was created by science to be perfect but whose life is far from it.

In this level, she is forced to find a cure to save the boy she loves while being tormented by the company who made her. If she is to survive and move on, she must find the missing scientist, the only one who knows how to save her soul mate, all the while trying to fight the strange, inexplicable, and completely unfounded attraction she feels for the agent who was sent to apprehend her.

And then, when it’s over, regardless of whether I succeed or fail, I’ll simply switch off the console and go back to my real life. Whatever that may be.

If only …

I close the door quietly behind me. I can still hear the sounds of death and avatars falling in the next room from Cody’s game. I try to block it out. To focus everything I have left on the boy in front of me.

The one who found me brainwashed and helpless on the other side of that concrete wall. The one who convinced me that everything I knew, everything I ever knew, was a lie. The one who risked everything to take me away from it all.

The one who saved me.

And now it’s my turn to save him.

I pull a chair up to the side of the bed and sit down. Zen’s eyes are closed. His chest rises and falls in an uneven rhythm.

“Zen,” I begin. But it quickly occurs to me that I don’t know what to say. I’ll be leaving in a few minutes. With Kaelen. I’ll be going to find Maxxer. Going to find the cure.

But I don’t really want to explain all that to him. For one, I’m not sure he can even hear me. But mostly because, if I somehow can’t return, I don’t want that to be the last thing I ever said to him.

The truth of the matter is, I can’t be sure that I’ll ever come back here.

Although he’s never said it outright, I’m confident that Kaelen’s mission wasn’t just to get the cure from Maxxer and then leave me to go on my way and live out my life with Zen. He has his own motives. His own plan outside the one we’ve created together.

And I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to outsmart him. Outmaneuver him.

“I’m like you … Only better.”

So what do I say to Zen now? How can I possibly describe what I’m feeling?

I’m scared isn’t enough.

I’m sorry isn’t enough.

Even I love you doesn’t seem like enough.

And goodbye will only make me lose my nerve to go.

My time alone with him is running out and I fear that I may have to leave him with only silence.

But somehow, from somewhere inside me, the answer comes. I know what I have to say. The only thing I can say.

Although they are borrowed words and stolen letters, the meaning—the soul—belongs to me.

I press my lips together to keep myself from shuddering as I slowly reach out and press two fingers to the center of his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose. My throat is constricting. Tears are burning my eyes. But I manage to recite the entire poem—our poem—in a clear, unbroken voice.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

I hear the creak of a footstep on the other side of the door. Kaelen coming to tell me that my time is up. I expect the door to open but, surprisingly, it remains closed, allowing me a few more private seconds with Zen.

I bend down close to his ear and whisper, “I am not shaken.”