BZRK (BZRK 1)

e once her heart was back to something like a normal human rhythm. “How are we supposed to do this?”

He might have made a leering joke of it, but that was not Keats. No, he wasn’t that guy. Not someone to miss a huge and terrifying truth or hide it behind evasions.

“I’ve been inside your brain,” he said. “But I still don’t know you. And now here we are.”

“Suddenly you’re all I have,” Plath said. “My family. My whole life. And now here we are.”

“What are we to each other?”

Plath shrugged. She shook her head, breaking contact with the gesture. She sat back down on her bed. Keats remained standing. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you this, but right now I don’t really give a damn. My whole family is dead. My mom from the usual: cancer. But my dad and my big brother, murdered. By them. By the other side.”

Keats nodded. “I figured that out. I figured out who you are. I think I know your real name, even, I heard it on TV. But I’ll call you Plath, anyway. I don’t want to slip up.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were dry. The demodex could stop trying to swim. The tears were being absorbed into dry flesh and evaporated into dry air.

“It’s a reaction to trauma,” she said. “What just happened between us.”

“We’ve just been yanked way out of reality. Away from our homes … violence … blood everywhere and scared pissless. And this. Things in my head, I feel them still, even when they’re supposedly asleep, I know they’re there.”

She nodded.

“And Jin says that’s it, they’ll be in our thoughts from now on,” Keats said.

“Our little six-legged children.”

That brought a completely unexpected laugh from him. She smiled in response.

“They die, and we go mad,” Keats said. “Maybe … maybe I’m not supposed to tell you, but like you said, I don’t give a damn: my big brother is in a madhouse right now. Chained. Raving.”

Plath narrowed her eyes. “He was part of this?”

“They tell me he was very good. I imagine he was. He was the strong one. The brave one. Me, I was …” He trailed off, sighed, and sat down beside her.

Their shoulders touched. That was all, but she wanted so badly to lean her head against him. This boy she didn’t really know.

“I’m not a vulnerable person,” Plath said.

“Everyone’s vulnerable. I’ve seen that up close.”

“I don’t make friends that often,” Plath said. “I think I’m kind of a bitch.”

He smiled and looked down in an unsuccessful effort to hide the smile from her. “I think that’s maybe not a bad thing when you’re with this crowd. In this situation.”

“Listen to me,” she said. She looked straight at him until he returned the gaze. Their lips were inches apart. “I don’t fall in love. So don’t expect that.”

“I guess I do. I have that inside me, I mean, falling in love. I’ve never been. But I feel it inside me. So I guess you’d better expect that from me.”

She remembered his lips on hers, and they were not tea-stained wax paper. That memory was somewhere else, still there, but this was a new memory and even more real.

He moved closer and she let him. He surprised her then, because his kiss was not the urgent, charged kiss of before. It was tender and infinitely gentle. He pulled away before she was ready for him to do so.

Keats stood up. “The idea is not to hope. They want us to be focused. Under control. Maybe Jin and Vincent and the rest are good people. Maybe they’re trying to do what’s right. But they aren’t me, and they aren’t you. And maybe they can press us into this war of theirs, but they can’t tell us how to feel.”

She locked eyes with him. And as if they were making a sacred pact, they nodded, and smiled sheepishly, and Keats left.

(ARTIFACT)

Just hacked Swedish intel. Expected data on blondes in saunas, hah. Mostly looks like unencrypted junk. But there was something weird. I saw a posting by TinyTIMPO2 last week on nanotech and thought this might be interesting.