I can give him right now.
“You’ve worked so hard, Tanner,” I murmur. “Made so many discoveries, so many strides in research. You have so much value in our society. Unlike me.”
I freeze. Crap. The last two words slipped out accidentally. But maybe he won’t notice. Maybe he’ll be too distraught to think about anything beyond himself.
But he does. He sits up and pulls out of my arms. “How could you think you don’t have any value?” he says in a low voice. “You are so loved. By Mikey, Angela, everyone in the Underground community. As an outsider, I see this so clearly.”
“That may be, but they love Callie more,” I shoot back and then sigh. I didn’t mean to do this. I didn’t mean to shift the attention to me. But now that the words are here, hanging in the air between us, I can’t just leave them. “That sounds bratty, doesn’t it? I swear to you, this isn’t about sibling rivalry. I don’t care that they put my sister on a pedestal because I put her there, too. It’s about whose life should’ve been saved.”
Pressure builds behind my eyes, and I blink, trying to push the hurt back inside. Trying to keep the hot liquid from boiling over. “Callie knew one of us had to die, in order to prevent the vision of genocide she saw. And she unilaterally made the decision to sacrifice her life in order to save mine,” I say, trying to explain the truth inside me. The knowledge I’ve always understood and lived with. “But she made a mistake. Everyone knows that, even if they don’t say it. If they were given a choice, they would’ve chosen her instead. They wish she had saved herself instead.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I refuse to believe it.”
“Don’t you see? Everybody who cares about me loved her first. My mom. Angela. Even Ryder. He didn’t know her well, but he grew up hearing stories about her. Feeling the force of her legacy. If they care about me at all, it’s because she loved me. Because I’m her little sister.”
“That’s not true,”’ he says slowly. “I care about you, and I never knew her.”
I give him a scathing look. “You don’t care about me. You’ve told me so enough times.”
He grabs a stick and digs in the dirt. Back and forth, back and forth. The rhythm is soothing, even mesmerizing. I wrap my hands around my knees. If it meant I never feel this ache in my heart again, I’d lose myself forever in the motion of that stick.
I assume we’re going to drop the subject, but then he looks up at me. “This is…hard for me,” he says haltingly. “I know I’ve sent you mixed signals. I know I pushed you away. I even said you weren’t my type, for Fate’s sake.” He shakes his head, disgusted. “I’m surprised you didn’t see through that in a nanosecond.” He pushes the stick through the dirt a few more times. He’s now dug a rut six inches deep. “The reason I did all those things was because…the opposite is true.”
I wrinkle my brow. “What do you mean?”
“I like you too much.” The words tumble out in a rush. “As soon as I came up to you at the hoverpark, I felt…this thing. This sense that I had known you before. That you had meant a lot to me. I know, I know. It sounds crazy, and I swear, nothing like this has ever happened to me before. It freaked me out. When I brought it up, you brushed off the feeling, so I knew it was all in my head. I knew you didn’t feel the same way.”
He tosses away the stick, replacing it with his hands in the dirt. “Believe me, when you grow up the way I did, an orphan nobody wants except for the brilliance of your mind, you learn how to build walls. I guess that’s why I kept trying to push you away. That’s why I made that absurd statement about you not being my type, when nothing could be further from the truth.”
My heart’s pounding so loudly it’s about to burst out of my chest, but he scoops up two fistfuls of the earth as though he doesn’t notice. The dirt trickles through his fingers. “I was just trying to protect myself, Jessa. I never meant to hurt you. The last thing I wanted was to make you feel worthless.”
He reaches a hand toward my face and then hesitates. Maybe because his fingers are dirty. Maybe because he’s not sure if I want this particular touch. Just a few minutes ago, my arms were wrapped all the way around his body. He was halfway across my lap. But that was different. That was comfort, while this is…something more. Something crazy and wonderful and real.
I grab his hand and bring it to my cheek, dirt and all.
Closing my eyes, I just experience his fingers against my face. This boy. I should feel like such a brat, complaining about not being loved for the right reasons, when he hasn’t been loved at all. But he doesn’t make me feel bratty. He makes me feel…worthy. By being here. By being me. I don’t have to redeem myself in some way. I don’t have to prove I deserve my sister’s sacrifice. I just have to…exist.
I swallow hard. No one’s ever made me feel this way before. The feeling is too big, too much. It’s so large it might swallow me whole. Part of me wants to give him everything. And that scares me more than Limbo itself.
When I open my eyes, he’s looking at me. And in his eyes, I see a girl who is stronger and braver and more beautiful than I could’ve ever imagined.
“I’m going to kiss you, Jessa,” he says in a strained voice. “Not because I’m trying to fulfill our fate. Not because you happen to be right here. But because I want to, more than anything else in the world right now.”
I lick my lips. “I want that, too.”
And we don’t talk again for a very long time.
29
Later, someone shakes my shoulders, and I jerk awake.
“We fell asleep,” Tanner says, dark circles rimming his eyes. “We have to get to Callie. She needs you to send a memory every thirty-six hours to maintain the bond. It’s been…” He taps on his wrist com. “Twenty-nine hours.”
I sit straight up, my grogginess evaporating. Maintain the bond. That’s just a pretty way of saying: keep her tethered to this world—and alive. But there’s no need to panic. Not yet. “Seven hours. That’s plenty of time. The TechRA building can’t be more than a few miles away.”
“Yes, we should be fine.” But he gnaws on his cheek, as though there’s something else he wants to say.
“What is it, Tanner?”
“I have a bad feeling,” he says, and the words hit me like a slap. Tanner doesn’t operate on feelings. He relies on data and analysis and logical conclusions.
“Dresden’s finally gotten what she’s wanted for so long,” he continues slowly. “Things are going to change. I’m just not sure how.”
“Let’s go to Callie, then.” The anxiety saturates my veins and begins to seep into my muscles, my nerves. “We have to make sure she’s safe.”
We move through the streets, as quickly as we can on our own feet. The bullet trains are shut down; the moving sidewalks are still. Instead of showing the latest news, the holo-screens plastered against the skyscrapers play on a loop the footage of Chairwoman Dresden’s announcement. What’s more, every other holo-screen is dented, as though metal sculptures or wooden benches have been hurled at them.
“ComA’s issued a lockdown on Eden City.” Tanner scrolls through his wrist com as we move from the shadows of one building to another. “The rioters have spilled into the city, ripping up park patches, destroying government property. So there’s an enforced curfew until they can figure things out.”
I see movement in my peripheral vision and pull Tanner behind the corner of a building.
“Did you see that?” I pant. Either my heart’s racing—or it’s his. I can’t tell with our chests pressed together like this.
“ComA patrols.” His lips barely move, and the words are the slightest breath against my mouth. “With electro-whips. Searching for curfew violators. We can’t let them see us.”