“Which rule would that be?”
“Drawing my life force.”
“It was either break the rules or die.” His smile is self-deprecating. “Regrets, Miki?”
“No.” I shudder at the thought that he might have died there.
“Then why are you so pissed?”
He’s goading me. I can feel it. I won’t give him the win. I force my tone to stay calm and even as I say, “I’m angry with you for bringing me into the game and then not getting out, not being safe, away from all of this. For wasting your chance. And I’m angry with you for not telling me the truth, for not warning me about the consequences of what we did.” I would still have made the exact same choice, but I wouldn’t have gone in blind. “You knew you’re not allowed. They told you that after . . .” My words trail away. I don’t need to remind him how his sister died.
But he says it for me, repeating a fragment of the story he told me once before, his tone hard and liquid-nitrogen cold. “You can say it, Miki. After I killed my sister. After I made like a Drau and sucked the life out of her, changing my con from red to yellow and hers from yellow to red. I traded her life for mine.”
There’s the Jackson I know: moody, bossy, cocky, a little scary, and chock-full of self-hate. And even though I haven’t forgiven him for what he did to me, I can’t bear to see him suffering.
It’s one thing for me to be pissed at him, something else entirely for him to be so angry with himself.
“You were twelve years old, Jackson. It was your first mission. You were dying, terrified. She told you to do it, that it would be okay. She was your big sister. You were used to believing her, to doing what she said. Why would that time be any different?”
“You think that excuses me? Cuz I sure don’t. I killed my sister and then I got hauled in front of the Committee, warned that if I ever did the Drau thing again it would be game over. Then next chance I get, I do the same damn thing and almost kill you.”
“But you didn’t do it willingly. I made you. I forced you. I—”
“You offered it, Miki. Dangled the hope of survival in front of me, but I’m the one who grabbed hold and hung on. None of this is your fault. It’s on me. It’s all on me. And the worst thing? I fed off you like fricking Dracula, knowing that you might end up just like Lizzie.” He snaps a half-rotten apple off the tree and lobs it hard against the patio. It splatters, leaving bits of white and brown and red dotting the stones. “I keep telling you I’m far from good, and you keep ignoring the message.”
“I think my therapist would say you have a really bad case of survivor’s guilt,” I say.
Jackson barks a laugh, then stares at me, shaking his head. “How do you do that? Make me laugh even when I feel like total shit?” He pauses, then says, “You’re like my personal dose of happy.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WE SIT ON THE BRANCH FACING EACH OTHER, QUIET. THE leaves rustle in the breeze.
“I heard you screaming,” I say. I can’t interpret the look Jackson shoots me. “Tell me what happened when you didn’t respawn at the pizza place with me and Luka.”
He reaches over to tuck a stray wisp of my hair back behind my ear. “After Detroit, the Committee pulled me directly to meet with them. They said I was done with the game. Finished. Out.”
“Happy news.”
“Yeah, for all of about a second. But with the Committee, there’s always a catch. Turned out, the catch was that if I go free of the game, the price is you.” He holds up a hand when I start to point out that he knew that already; he knew all along he was trading me for his freedom. That was the whole point. “I don’t mean that you’d have to take my place as leader,” he says. “I mean I’d have to give you up entirely. I wouldn’t get to remember anything about you.”
“Oh . . .” The Committee already told me that, but the fierce expression on his face as he says it puts a different spin on things.
He strokes the backs of his fingers along my cheek, my jaw, my lips, like he needs to touch me. “And if that didn’t suck hard enough,” he continues softly, “they were going to arrange it so my family would move again. You’d be excised from my mind and I’d just . . . disappear from your life.” He huffs a dark laugh. “Guess they didn’t want to risk me seeing you, maybe triggering some memory . . .”
“You think that would be possible? That you could recover memories they took?”
He lifts his brows and turns his hands palms-up in a who-can-say gesture.
“But even if they took you out of my life, I would have remembered you,” I say slowly.
I would have missed him and mourned his loss.
Would my world have gone gray again, or am I stronger than that now?
My gaze locks on his and I get the feeling he knows everything I’m thinking.
“I told them it wasn’t a trade I was willing to make.” His mouth shapes a tight, close-lipped smile. “They told me I didn’t get a choice. Consequences of breaking the rules. Their decision, not mine.”
“That must have gone over well. You being such a complacent, easygoing kind of guy.” I pause. “Then what?”
“Then they pushed into my head. I went a little crazy. Pushed them back out. I think that freaked them out. They pushed harder. I pushed back. It wasn’t pretty.”
“I felt it.” I shiver chases through me as I remember his screams.
His eyes widen. “I didn’t know that would happen. I would never want you to go through that, not even secondhand.” He pauses. “I was thinking about you, holding on to an image of you with everything I am, refusing to let them take that away. That must have made me project my thoughts without intending to.”
Thoughts. Emotions. Agony.
He’d done that before when he dreamed of the car accident that he was in with Lizzie, the one that brought him into the game. He somehow projected it to me so I dreamed it right along with him.
I almost tell him about my hallucination, about thinking I saw Lizzie in the game, then decide not to. Later. This moment is about him and me. “You wouldn’t let them take your memories of me, but then in typical Jackson fashion, you decided it would be okay if I sacrificed my memories of you. You didn’t think I might want to have a say?”
“You weren’t available to have that discussion.”
He did what he thought was best. He’s been part of the game, a leader, for so long, it’s become intrinsic to who he is now.
“And I wanted you out of the game,” he continues. “Out, and safe.”
As if any of us will ever be safe until the Drau are gone.
He leans so close I feel his lips against my ear as he whispers, “I would do anything to keep you safe, Miki. Anything. Remember that.”
I do remember. He almost died taking a Drau hit meant for me.
“So you were going to win my freedom by sacrificing yourself and having them make me forget. That wasn’t your call to make, Jackson.” I reach for him, pull back, clench and unclench my fingers. Finally, I lay my palm against his chest, close my eyes, and just let myself feel the steady beat of his heart, the warmth of his skin. “So what happened after you pushed them out of your head?”
“The Committee tried a different tack. Went all reasonable on me. Tried to coax their way into my brain. Explained that I’m dangerous if I don’t obey the rules, that maybe it’s better for everyone if I’m out. What’s to stop me from draining any one of my teammates to stay alive if my con goes red?”
My breath comes out in a sharp whoosh. “You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?” He bares his teeth in a savage smile. “What do you call what I did to you?”
“You didn’t force me. I offered. I gave it to you. And you didn’t drain me. You took just enough to stay alive.”