Levi blindfolds me, like the Jedi I’ve always wanted to be, and begins to attack. The first hurdle is just getting out of the way. I focus on his heartbeat and the heat signature his body gives off. When he lunges, eventually I get the hang of spinning away, ducking and rolling in a different direction. As cool as this is, it won’t actually help us defeat the Daithi. Together, Levi and I come up with strategies that will help us strike immediately after deflection. For this, we use not only combinations of punches and kicks from very strange angles, but our knives as well. Guns would be the most useful, of course. I’m never above just shooting someone, but if things go down the way they did with the Spiradaels, we’re going to need to fight them off long enough to talk to them.
We don’t bother leaving the room for dinner. We stuff our faces with the tasteless gel cubes provided by the SenMachs. They will give us the nutrition we need and save us valuable time. Besides, I’m not in any mood to deal with Ezra. I’m actually enjoying today. It feels good to be doing something I’m actually good at as opposed to all this fumbling around, second-guessing every word I say and how it will be interpreted.
When we move on to the Akshaji for the first time, I begin to feel truly afraid. I had been worried up till this point and anxious, of course, because of the sheer volume of puzzle pieces the altered Roones were trying to put together. The Akshaji are barely Citadels. They’ve been enhanced, certainly, but it’s clear they see the Rifts not as a call to duty, but as a form of endless entertainment.
The language does not take us long to learn, and soon we’re able to converse in Akshaj as we study their fighting. But while learning Akshaj is easy enough, learning how to defend yourself from and beat a race of Citadels with six hands at the end of six arms is another story entirely. Levi and I use the sensuits to give us the illusion of this, a visual, just so we know what to avoid and how, but other than looking terrifying, it’s a fairly useless way to train as the four “pretend” arms just kind of hover. In the end, Levi and I devise a high/low strategy and just have to hope it will work.
We spar, taking turns being Akshaj. As humans, we aim for the feet and calves in an attempt to get them off balance, on the ground preferably. Alternately, we go right for the head and throat, aiming killing blows there or using the leverage of what’s around us to jump up and straddle our legs around the necks. Again, guns are always a bonus, but in the case of the Akshaji, we wonder if machetes or scimitars wouldn’t be preferable. It would be a lot easier to just hack off those extra appendages than try to avoid them.
It is near midnight when we finish, but our day is hardly done. We ask Doe to show us any pertinent documents about the Roones that might help us. I had Doe download their entire database when I was on their Earth—unbeknownst to them, of course. We ask Doe to look for anomalies and inconsistencies in the data when compared to the story we were given by Iathan. Doe shows us videos, official documents, health records, experiment hypotheses, the various species the Roones spliced with their own to create the “altered” Roones and the Karekin. Doe assures us that the story Iathan told us is the truth, or at least, the Roones’ version of the truth. The altered Roones would have a very different take on things.
So, for all of Iathan’s arrogance and posturing, he wasn’t lying. We can trust him as an ally. This should make me feel better, but for some reason it doesn’t. It’s so obvious from the research that a civil war was inevitable. I saw it coming years before it actually arrived. Politicians at one another’s throats, rhetoric and propaganda about superior species. There were demonstrations and marches and strikes. The Roones didn’t like what was happening to the Immigrants. The Roones practiced civil disobedience, but it was their civility that was their downfall. There is no reasoning with crazy. There is no compromising with tyranny. None of them thought in a million years it would get to where it would, and when it did, the Roones were more offended at first than they were tactical.
When we finally finish, I feel tired in a way that I haven’t for a while. It is the exhaustion of a full day of hard work, of goals accomplished and the odd clarity you can sometimes find through busywork. I stretch my legs out on the carpet, flexing the arches of my feet and rolling my neck clockwise to get the kinks out. Levi is sitting on the only chair in the room. His back is resting against it, but there is an intensity to his gaze that lets me know he’s far from relaxed.
“What?” I ask him hesitantly.
“We have to talk about this, Ryn. You need to tell me what the hell is going on with you and Ezra, because it’s messy and it makes us all look bad.” I don’t answer Levi right away. Instead, I walk over to the tall leaded-glass window. It is pitchblack outside and all I can see is my reflection. Why don’t these windows open? It’s not like the Faida would be worried about someone falling out. I inspect the seams, I run my fingers over the cool metal, and I hear the window shift and creak. I move my hand away and the sound stops. I wave my hand over the window again and this time it swings open fully. Motion sensors. That’s the kind of thing you might want to tell a guest.
I open the remaining three windows and a cool breeze rushes in to wash away the stale air. There is the faintest smell of eucalyptus and burning wood. The night creeps in slowly like a tired ghost. It’s one thing to see the hour and quite another to actually feel it.
“I had sex with him,” I tell Levi boldly. There’s no point in lying. Ezra and I were together—though, perhaps, the reality was our togetherness was more of a technicality. Still, I believed I loved Ezra and maybe I did or even still do, but it was an indulgent love. It was selfish and myopic, as almost all first loves are.
Yet I also cannot deny that there is—and always has been—something between Levi and me. I can’t say for certain what it is, though Levi seems to have a better idea of it. I also know that he hasn’t allowed himself to feel much of anything for years, which means his feelings cannot necessarily be trusted. His emotions are just unfurling. They are gilded petals, bright and shining, too fragile yet to pluck and examine.
I watch his body change with this admission. His knuckles turn white as they grip the wooden armrests. His back molars grind together, squaring off his jaw. “Okay,” he says softly. “Then what happened.”
I bite the corner of my lower lip. I don’t want to talk about this with him. It’s none of his business. But … it is his business, and he’s right to ask. There’s too much obvious tension among us three right now, and that puts us at a disadvantage. Whatever we feel for each other, at this moment us humans have to put up a united front here. What’s at stake is just too important.
“Everything changed. I don’t know,” I say as I shake my head. “He said there were rules. That once we’d been together like that, we were a proper couple and that I couldn’t deprogram you anymore because it wasn’t right to be intimate with someone else.”
I watch as Levi gives a giant exhale out, as if there had been a weight pressing down on his chest and now his lungs were finally free to let go of a breath fully. “So, basically, he gave you an ultimatum.”
I undo the topknot from my head. “I don’t blame him. He’s not wrong,” I say as I let my long hair fall. I rub my fingers into my scalp to help relieve the pain of having it pulled back all day. “He just could have handled it better. I mean, I really thought he understood me. I thought he would have known for sure that I don’t respond well to that kind of pressure.”
Levi slides off the chair and crawls toward me on the floor. “But that’s because he doesn’t know you. You guys knew each other for a couple months and there were only two weeks of that time where you were actually together, right? Isn’t it possible that the deprogramming sort of fucked with your ability to have perspective about him? Isn’t there a really good chance that the love you feel for him is mixed up with a bunch of other things?”
A laugh escapes my mouth. “And don’t