The place came down around us. Debris knocked about our feet. The opening above beckoned us forward. A sliver of sky beamed at us through the widening crack. Wider and wider it grew. The golden hue of the setting sun. The concrete slabs. The hand on my shoulder. The girl crying in his other arm. Her screams made my head ache.

  The world blurred around me, all too fast, all too loud, and much too bright. Nausea bubbled up, and I doubled over in response. A weightless feeling was accompanied by a throbbing pain radiating from my skull. Someone set me down. More importantly, they were shaking me.

  “Lana, Lana,” he said. “Don’t fall asleep.”

  “I’ll deal with it tomorrow,” I grumbled, shutting my eyes.

  “Hey, Lana, I’m serious,” he said. “You hit your head pretty good.”

  Then he was talking to someone else. Not the girl. Was there someone else with us? I propped myself up, squinting into the distance. It was a lonely place. Empty, barren, and long forgotten. Something whirred to the side. Round things. Watching us, maybe.

  “Gabe?” I asked. “Where are we?”

  “Back up top,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t move, help’s on the way.”

  “I’m going to rest for a minute,” I said, lying back down.

  “We have to keep you conscious,” he said.

  My arm ached too. The sleeve was soaked through. My hand got covered in it when I grabbed at my wound. The fluid was red and sticky. My blood, maybe.

  “Sing me a song,” I said.

  Silence surrounded us. My senses drifted away from me. In the throes of weightlessness, I heard a deep, resonant hum. It was a rumbling thing, comforting like a warm blanket, and then a second smaller voice joined it. I was back again. Those voices melded together, feeling awfully like home, until sirens overtook them, and my shooting pains erased the world around me.

  Scattered footsteps pounded the ground around us. I was overcome with a feeling of elevation, then sliding. Doors slammed shut. My left arm was aching. My right arm was probably broken. It sputtered, but not much else. Useless. Straps held me down. Opening my mouth to protest, I strained to sit upright, but another hand gently wrapped around my shoulder. Reassuring, maybe. Someone was there.

  “Relax,” he said.

  I blinked up at him. Ethan’s normally neat hair was askew. Behind his glasses, his eyes were fogged with emotion. Even his tie was out of place. It seemed like lately, I’d gotten rather good at making my big brother cry. Both of us were breaking out of our carefully constructed personas. We both wore masks in our own way. Sometimes I wondered if he just wore his better.

  “Am I seeing things, or are you really here right now?” I asked.

  “I got worried,” he said.

  “You’re not a combatant,” I said.

  Ethan was more of a thinker than a fighter. Even if he was any good with a gun, he wouldn’t have been itching to use it. Some of us worked better behind a desk. I worked better in the field, moving and on my feet. I’d never forgive myself if he got hurt because of me, but I expected him to forgive himself when he couldn’t protect me. Double standards, I guess. I never said I was fair.

  “I don’t take chances I don’t need to,” he sighed. “I didn’t go inside.”

  He leaned back against the wall of the ambulance’s interior, pushing his glasses out of the way to rub at the bridge of his nose.

  “You never come,” I said. “What changed?”

  “After what happened last time… I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any regrets,” he said.

  “That makes two of us then,” I sighed.

  It shook him pretty badly when I lost my arm. With how close those bullets were to my head, I could have easily died. The only thing that saved my life was Zenith’s hubris to draw it out and the timing of when backup arrived. It could have been worse, and then I wouldn’t still be here dealing with the consequences. What a mess.

  “So even you get scared,” I said.

  “Was that a secret?” he scoffed.

  Despite the pounding in my head, I grinned weakly. It was a bittersweet smile, the kind I always made when shit hit the fan and I couldn’t believe I expected anything else.

  “Where’s Gabe?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Still with the girl,” Ethan said. “He didn’t want to leave her alone.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  That was just like Gabe, dependable as ever. I’d said it before, and I’d say it again: there wasn’t anyone else I’d rather trust my life with. The details were still foggy for me, but some of them were clearing up a bit. Mostly, the part where we were on a mission to find a missing girl. After some thermoimaging led the way, we tracked her down to an abandoned subway station. Cassie was the girl outside. The android was the girl inside — her true desires leaking out through a distorted mirror.

  “She’s stable,” he said.

  “Then it wasn’t all for nothing,” I sighed. “Comforting.”

  When we found her, she was in bad shape. Nerves will do that to you; so will barely eating and hiding from the sun. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d be taking a ride in a different ambulance. She’d need medical treatment. From the looks of it, she was dehydrated, tired, and rattled, but otherwise none the worse for wear. They’d probably let her out after a physical and some IV fluids. Maybe a Band-Aid to top it all off along with some doctor-prescribed bed rest. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t need much more than that.

  “What happened to your arm?” he asked.

  I remembered falling, but after that, it became a blur. It was like I fell over and woke up already up top, shaken, but still alive and mostly in one piece.

  “I don’t remember; you’ll have to ask Gabe,” I muttered.

  We sat in silence for a while. My aching head was glad for the reprieve. I always felt like I had to be on, alert, and ready for anything. There wasn’t time to so much as blink when lives were on the line. I had to think on my feet and make a move at a moment’s notice. Head trauma, sleep deprivation, or otherwise. Any gaps always left me feeling shaky in my skin. It was part of why I didn’t drink other than when it was expected of me. The rest of the reason was that the taste bothered me unless it was drowned in sugar and juice.

  I didn’t trust the world to stay still for me while I put myself back together. I never felt safe, not really. The ambulance slowed and rocked as it rounded a corner. A siren wailed off in the distance. Someone else’s problem this time. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. Maybe it really was time for me to rest.

  “I wasn’t there for you,” he said.

  Whatever they were giving me for pain was finally kicking in. Took long enough. The hair stuck to the back of my neck with sweat. Relief took the place of where shock had left. I watched the straps hanging from the gurney sway with each bump in the road.

  “There’s only so much you can do as a voice in my head,” I said. “It is what it is.”

  He looked at me and crossed his arms across his chest.

  “Is it?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. We both knew that we were running out of chances to avoid the things that needed to be said.

  “Do you think she was looking for home or hiding from it?” I asked.

  He looked at me quietly. It was the kind of question we were all trying to answer in one way or another. Even if you were surrounded by people who were supposed to love you, you could still feel out of place. Alone. They could poke and prod you, dress you up the way they like, and tell you who to be. They could recoil when you showed them your true self, and no matter how hard you tried to show them who you were, they could still look at you and see someone else.

  “The girl or the android?” he asked.

  “Either,” I said. “Both. Doesn’t really matter.”

  Whether it was friends, family, or lovers, it didn’t really matter. All of it was the same. Loneliness didn’t discriminate. Everyone wanted to be seen, even if they said otherwise. The two girls, one metal and one flesh, were both running from something and looking for somewhere else. The android was brutalized and left for scraps before Cassie ever got to it, and it followed her around like a puppy, acting out her innermost desires distorted through a lens of inhumanity. Cassie wanted to be who her people were but picked the one special interest that they would never approve of. She just had to be the nail that stuck up, and you know what they say about nails that stick up — they get hammered down.

  “She wanted to matter to someone,” I said.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” I asked. “Maybe anyone.”

  Ethan scrunched his brows. Maybe he thought I was still delirious. Maybe I was. If I was, I wouldn’t be the best judge of it. The loose items in the cabin swayed slightly with each bump in the road. I closed my eyes and listened to the gentle rattling of the drawers in the cabin.

  There was something nagging at me like a persistent fly refusing to stop buzzing around my head. What was it? Could it be the girl? No, I knew where she was. Gabe? He was fine too. Then was it what to do next? No, there was really only one option. We had to wait for them to patch me up and for the girl to calm down before we could ask her anything. All those questions were answered, so what was left?

  “We weren’t alone,” I hissed. “Where is she?”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “We were fighting someone down there,” I said. “A woman, maybe.”

  It was still a blur to me, but that didn’t stop me from trying to put the pieces together.

  “Don’t. If she survived, we’ll worry about it later,” he said.

  I wasn’t convinced she was dead. In my experience, things never stayed dead when I wanted them to. No, not old feelings or regrets, not even the ghosts of memories I’d rather forget. Least of all, were people considering Zenith had just come back from the dead, carried on in spirit through the woman we just left behind. Ideas, like people, were neither good nor bad, but with the right persuasion, they could infect others like parasites and eat them from the inside out. If you were lucky, they didn’t take you down with them.

  Gabe’s voice came through our Irises. I’d nearly forgotten about him and didn’t take the reminder as well as I hoped. The straps on the gurney pressed into my heaving chest.

  “She’s got something on her.”

  I settled my breathing; I’d have plenty of time to panic later.

  “What is it?” Ethan asked.

  “A phone,” Gabe said. “Hidden in her waistband.”

  No one used handheld phones anymore. How old-fashioned. We shared a look with each other. Considering how anti-technology her community was, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the thing wasn’t even connected to the cybersphere. We just had a treasure trove of information land right in our laps.

  “Looks like we have our next lead,” I said.

  “Not you,” Ethan said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  I almost complained, but he shot me a look that made me think twice about that.

  “Alright,” I said. “I’ll let my big brother take care of me for once. Fill me in once you dig through that thing. There’s nothing I hate more than being kept in the dark.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of doing it any other way,” he said, grinning.

  Sometimes I forgot how dependable Ethan was too. It was subtler than with Gabe because he wasn’t right by my side pulling me from danger, but we’d be lost without him too. No, I’d be lost without him too. I never wanted to be alone.

  pigeonprioress.