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  "They're close," I inform him, and that's all it takes for the man to wake up fully - he doesn't ask how I know, trusting my judgement and pausing only briefly as he sits up to look at me, and take note of how close we're positioned.

  Something changes in his eyes, his lips thinning into a hard line as his mind relays him a message not intended for me, and there's fear in that expression as he turns his eyes away, pushing himself back to his feet and shaking slightly.

  He does his best to hide that fact, but I notice how much his hands shake as he takes a quick swig of his canteen. What I can't figure out, while we're packing again, is what he's afraid of.

  Recon One, or me?

  With a very clipped let's go thrown my way over his shoulder he leads the way back out into the woods, and as I follow in his wake I wonder exactly what it was that made him pull away from me like that so suddenly, when he'd finally begun opening up. I'm left to follow his retreating back, none the wiser with the dogs on our tails and a million questions bouncing in my skull.

  The most obvious one being what the hell happened to this man to make him this way?

  For a while there's silence as we run through the trail, our pace almost doubled from the one of yesterday thanks to the not-so-friendly incisive at our backs. The barks fade in and out of existence, getting louder and fainter throughout the afternoon.

  We don't talk for a solid hour or so, though I'd be quicker to say it was about three hours, before Seb stops dead in his tracks and steps into the bushes without a single word, leaving me to follow him or remain there like a sitting duck. Of course, I follow the man into the bushes and he immediately signals for me to crouch down in the foliage, creeping forward and hissing at me to be quiet.

  Heart pumping adrenaline through my veins as I follow carefully behind him, I watch his tense posture and his movements that are precise and calculated, leaving no room for the macromite to shine from beyond the protection of the cloak. He's done this before, I realize as I pause behind him, heart beating in my throat as I strain my ears for the hints of life.

  It's faint. Very faint, and as I hold my breath and wait for something to happen, I hear it: voices. When I realize they're here, my blood chills and it feels as if the temperature around us drops an extra five degrees.

  I can't see the men, but somehow that doesn't reassure me. I know they're there, and the fact alone that we can hear them is proof of how close we actually are to them.

  How?

  Seb looks like he knows why, his jaw clenching and his fingers curling into fists as he crouches behind the shrub, listening to the conversation as acutely as I am.

  "...and I don't even know why we're bothering with the north!" one of them is saying, a man's voice. I can just about imagine him throwing his arms up indignantly. "The facility is closer to Mexico - why don't we just station ourselves at the border and wait for them to cross? What's so fucking special about these two Carriers?"

  Seb's form is starting to take on a strange quality. The air around him seems to be thickening slowly, tinted a light red hue with white and black particles - very similar to what I saw back at the facility. His eyes, though, from the pupils to the sclera, looks as if someone openly bled on them, their colour changing as well to a reddish hue. His brow is furrowed in concentration, frowning.

  I have to step back when it starts expanding, stepping to the side slightly as he keeps his eyes rooted to the same spot between the bushes. I peer through the foliage, and there they are.

  Recon One.

  I was half-expecting them to look like the Vigils, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Their suits cling to their skin very much like ours do, a thin line of macromite running along their bodies and shining a muted light, much less perceptible than ours. They have heavy combat boots on their feet and a utility belt strapped to their waist and looping around their right shoulder, holding guns, grenades, and ammo clips. The helmets are the standard, however, with the visor pulled over their eyes to sort of hide half their face, even though you can still kind of see it in the right light. It's black, though, instead of white.

  "One of them has something the big guys want," the shorter of the two announces, each man around six feet tall. He's holding his gun in his hands, but the barrel is pointed down to the earth and isn't in any way a threat. "They've never seen anything like it - and the other's been hiding his all along somehow, and they want to know how."

  "Don't move a muscle, Quinn, no matter what I do," Seb hisses quietly, his eyes riveted to the men. I snap my head in his direction, having about half a dozen problems with that. "I mean it - you can't control your gift yet, so just wait here. Got it?"

  The man doesn't let me finish; instead he slips off his pack and, in the same movement as the noise attracts the attention of the soldiers, he disappears.

  I can hear the alarm blasting in their ears the moment he steps through time and space, their heads turning in the direction I'm still hiding in. My instincts scream at me to run, to bolt and forget his warning, but a smaller voice tells me to wait and that he told me to do it for a reason.

  They step towards the bushes, guns levelled at them, and I hold my breath and count the seconds. Carefully they step closer, and as the wind makes the red haze lingering beside me fade, Seb doesn't reappear.

  Three.

  I shrink back into the shadows, thinking that it'll help me remain invisible to their eyes, and the taller man pokes the barrel of his gun through the bushes.

  Two.

  It hovers scant inches from my chest, my heart jumping in my throat as I watch the weapon with wide eyes, biting my lower lip.

  One.

  Just as he peers into the bushes, hands still cloaked with the red haze I'm becoming familiar with reach out and grab his head, snapping it to the side so quickly his neck snaps and he falls to the earth, lifeless. The mist clings to his pale skin like tendrils, and as the second man turns around to face the source of the attack Seb kicks him in the groin, making me wince as he goes down, clutching his pride. With another quick flick of the wrist the man is breathing no more.

  I'm still pressed against the tree, breathing hard as I watch the man grab both of their wrists and disappear into that mist again, leaving behind no trace of any of them - the wind carries off the remains of his passing.

  My heart is jumping in my chest, promising cardiac arrest soon enough, and with the caution of a frightened animal I slip off my pack and step out of the brush back onto the path, alert to the tiniest of movements and ready to bolt. When Seb appears again at my side, I almost lash out with a cry of complete surprise, but it quickly fades as he falls to his knees and bows forward, about to fall to the eager earth below.

  So I manage to catch the man before he can embrace the ground, lying him down on his back and lifting his head onto my lap so I can press my fingers to his neck and check his pulse.

  "I'm... I'll survive," he snaps, trying to brush off my hand from his neck, but he's as weak as a kitten - and I'm not saying that for no reason. His feeble attempt at moving my hand has just about the same strength. "Really, Quinn. I'm just tired... though I sent up a flare with that. We got to keep moving."

  He tries to stand, failing hopelessly and clinging to my side with grim reluctance after I catch him again, holding his side against me to keep him upright.

  "You can't walk anywhere like that," I comment, and he swears.

  "I know that!" he snaps, turning an icy glare on me - his eyes are back to normal, leaving me to assume that that was a physical attribute of his gift. "We still need to go! They know where we are now, and if we don't get underground soon, we're dead men."

  I return the glare just as easily, and that seems to surprise him. He looks genuinely surprised a second, boneless in my hold as I turn to face him fully, my anger flaring.

  I'm sick and tired of him treating me like he's on his own. One moment he acts one way, the next another, and he doesn't even seem to trust me one iota despite the signals I was getti
ng. I hate how he's trying to be a friend and a stranger at the same time.

  "You listen here, Sebastian," I hiss, so close to his face that our foreheads almost touch. His eyes are wide as saucers, rendered speechless. "I've had it up to here with your attitude! You act one way and then act an entirely different way, and I can't even tell if we're friends or foes in your eyes. Yeah, okay, you've lived through hell and I genuinely feel like shit for you, but it's as if I'm the only one trying to be openly honest here!

  "If you don't trust me at all, I'd really fucking appreciate it if you'd tell me right now, Nine, because I'm so fucking done I'm overcooked. If you don't want me around, fine; I'll fucking leave, I swear I will, and you can go around hopping through time as much as you want to." His lips have parted, while my eyes have narrowed and my fingers have dug more and more into his biceps. He looks almost terrified. "Tell me right now whether not you trust me enough to protect you, Seb. If you don't, I'm walking out. I don't need this."

  Then, his features contort into genuine pain, the emotions in his eyes conflicting between fear, pain and defiance.

  "If you knew what I lived through," he starts, his voice shaking remarkably as he tears his eyes away and lets them fall, "you'd understand."

  "Then make me understand!" I snap, shaking him enough to make his teeth rattle. His eyes are watering and the pain is winning above all else. "I want to help you!"

  "I know you do!" he shouts back, looking back up. A stray tear rolls down his left cheek, and he doesn't wipe it away. "I want to do the same with you, but trusting someone like that isn't easy for me anymore! She destroyed me, Quinn; she left me broken and bleeding and terrified, left me all alone in a world with billions of people! No one understood what it was like, no one believed me!

  "Those I turned to thought I was making excuses, even my fucking family! Do you have any idea what that's like - don't say you do, because I know you don't!" He's crying openly now, salt water streaming down his face. His exhaustion is written as plain as day on his face, and his agony even more so. "I trust you, okay? I don't want you to go away! I want you here with me, right here!"

  His shaking hands grab my shoulders just as tightly as I'm gripping his arms, and he swallows thickly.

  "I want... I want you to know that I can't stand the pain of the memories. That I'm trying so hard to forget my past and live my present - I like you, Quinn. You're an amazing guy and you calm me, you really do and you're the first person in over a decade to be able to do so. You've even managed to turn me into a blubbering mess," he laughs once dryly, without humour, before his eyes fall downcast and his grip loosens, threatening to fall. In a small voice, barely a whisper, he finishes his thought. "Please don't go, Quinn. I don't know what I'd do if you left me."

  The way he says my name, almost as if it's something precious, makes all the anger evaporate. My fingers relinquish the painful grasp they clung with, and his words, every last one of them, the echoes of his monologue bounce through my skull.

  My hands, of their own accord, find his hair and push it from his face, making him look up at me, tear-stained face painted with pain. The kind of pain that shatters a soul, and the picture of agony that I've, to this day, never forgotten.

  I use my thumbs to wipe the trail of water from his eyes, and the man shakes his head with a small sound of protest before he buries his face in the crook of my neck, clinging to my shoulders again and sobbing. When I wrap my arms around his waist and hold him against me, the broken man in my arms wraps his around my neck and pulls himself closer, if that's even possible. You couldn't fit a hair between us.

  We stay like that for a few minutes, my hands on his back rubbing soothing circles that carefully coax him to calm down, and he only parts with one last piece of knowledge about this event in his life as he attempts to regain his composure.

  "Her name was Sarah," he tells me quietly. "She was my girlfriend."

  Finally, once he's exhausted himself, Seb pulls back enough to look at me in the eyes, offering a tired smile. A smile that speaks volumes about his experiences, and how he's tired of dragging them around as if they define him. I return the gesture, and he frees a hand to wipe his eyes.

  "You're important to me," he admits, the warmth of his underfed body comforting in ways no fire could be. While my hands rest easily on his hips, the gesture as natural as breathing, his left hand remains behind my neck, teasing the hair on my head with a single finger as he smiles. "Don't forget that, okay Quinn?"

  I nod, and he looks down to where his hand lies, the smile melting away.

  "...I got scared this morning, when I saw how close we'd already gotten," he informs me, and the question I'd been wondering to myself is finally answered, to my relief. "I'm sorry. I just... it's hard for me to trust people."

  "You can trust me," I press, bringing my hands up to hold his face in place so I can see his eyes. They widen slightly. "I promise you, Seb, I'm not here to hurt you; I just want to protect you and help you, if you'll only let me help you. I don't want us to be strangers."

  He nods a little, the skin of his cheeks darkening a little as his eyes flicker across my face.

  "Okay," he whispers, "okay. Alright. I... thank you, Quinn."

  Once that's settled, we both quickly realize that he's in no shape to walk anytime soon, completely exhausted in more ways than one. So I offer to carry him on my back, and after a brief debate we decide we have to leave one of the packs behind. He pulls one onto his shoulders once we sort through it and bring the bare necessities, and then I haul him onto my back.

  To tell you how much he weighs, I'd say no more than forty pounds wet. Sixty with the pack - he's so underfed it's not even funny anymore, bones protruding from his skin and poking me as he grips me as tightly as he can.

  "Dude," I grunt, getting used to the weight. He rests his chin on my shoulder, looking at me, "we seriously need to get some meat on your bones."

  "Why, so you could eat me like the big bad wolf you are?" he teases, and I flash him a grin as I walk in the direction he points me to, towards the east.

  "So I can ravish you," I shoot back, laughing at his expression afterwards. I don't think he knows what to make of that statement, and I pull away in the opposite direction of one of the clones.

  He's using a bit of his energy left to make paradox doppelgangers of us, copies of us from an alternate time line where we've headed in another direction. He says that'll distract Recon One long enough to get us to the tunnel, and scatter their troops completely.

  The moon has risen by the time I find it, and with a grateful sigh Seb stops the whole paradox clone thing and slumps forward in utter exhaustion, mumbling directions at me so I can find the hidden entrance. It's concealed behind a seemingly impassable wall of bushes and trees, and when I'm through it's a steep decline into the earth, old railroad tracks beginning in the gloom when the light of the moon no longer filters through.

  I use the light of the macromite of our suits to see, and when the land flattens out he makes me walk for a while longer, turn a left into a dead-end, and tells me to set up shop here. I leave him behind long enough to get some firewood - sneaking back up to do so and gathering enough for the chilly evening - and once I get a good fire going there, and we've eaten and drank our fill, Seb curls up in our one sleeping bag and is knocked right on out.

  For a while I stay up, watching the man sleeping in the orange glow of the firelight that is giving his skin a rosy hue and the blue glow of the macromite, before I slip in beside him and fall asleep to the sound of the firelight and his light snoring.

  Close Your Eyes and be damned by what you see

  SEBASTIAN

  I wake in a panic, feeling as if I'm still trapped in that nightmare for a moment, tensing when I feel arms stronger than mine wrapped around my waist and holding my back to their owner's chest. Then I recognize the warmth and the presence, relaxing back into the embrace Quinn has pulled me into during my sleep.

  Honestly, the man's qu
ite into physical contact.

  "It's only me," he whispers, the tunnel we're in as dark as the darkest hour of the night save for a small beam of blue light peeking from under the blanket and cloak piled over our bodies every once in a while as we breathe. I nod, closing my eyes and letting my other senses guide me instead.

  The thick scent of the dirt around us, as well as aged wood and undisturbed air; the sounds of the night barely reaching us in this infinite darkness; Quinn's breathing near my ear, his breath fanning over my skin and raising goose bumps over it; the warmth his body and mine have provided, trapped between the blankets and the ground.

  "I know," I breathe back, my hands finding his resting by my navel and covering them, squeezing lightly. He laughs once quietly, really close to my ear, and I smile into the darkness.

  This is okay. I like this - so unlike what I'd been subjected to, more loving than what she'd done...

  Apparently I'd been saying that aloud, because I feel him press his lips to my spine at the base of my neck and I can feel his frown. A shiver threatens me, but I keep it in check.

  "What did she do to you, Seb?" he asks, the tone of his voice pleading. Begging might actually be a better word, full of curiosity and concern and pain - as if not knowing is actually hurting him. "...please?"

  This time I shiver, his breath ghosting the very spot his lips still linger on, for more than one reason. I'm torn between two cardinal desires - to lean into the embrace, more intimate than what I've ever known and a thousand times less forceful, leaving me all the room in the world to escape; and to pull away from this man, this man who's cyanide personified and is holding a dose of that very poison for me to take. His sultry voice is promising protection and pleasure and happiness, at the price of pain.

  I lean in.

  I let him hold me, fingers tightening on his hands before releasing them, and his arms cradle me fully, pressing me against him. And I let him.

  My biggest desire, beyond all else, has always been to be wanted. To be accepted and loved.