“We could have blown the place up,” Riley said. “With us inside.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“But you were too scared,” Riley said. “Right?”
I’d never admitted it to him. “It doesn’t matter now. We didn’t do it. We both agreed.”
“And then Jude blew the place anyway. With me inside.”
We were no longer holding hands.
“This is why I didn’t want you to know,” I said quickly. “I thought it would be easier—”
“On who?”
I deserved that.
“How do I know this is true?” he asked stiffly.
“It’s true.”
“How do I know?” he said again.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “We didn’t have a choice.”
“For all I know, you’re lying now, and what you said before was true. Or none of it’s true. Anything could be true. I’m supposed to trust you?”
I reached for him, but he knocked my hand away, hard.
“I’m sorry!”
“It’s not that you lied, again,” he said, frost in his voice. “It’s what you lied about.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to know—”
“The truth? Those were my memories, my life. Who gave you permission to screw with that? Do you know what it’s like, not remembering? Like a big, black nothing. You were supposed to fill it. I trusted you.” He screwed up his face, like he would have spit on me, if only he could. “I let you tell me what was real. I believed you. I gave you that. And you shit all over it.”
I didn’t mean to hurt you—my father’s lame words, on the tip of my tongue. I swallowed them.
“I made a mistake.”
This time he caught my hand in mid-reach, his fingers steel around my wrist. “Don’t touch me,” he said, and let go. “You could tell me anything,” he continued. “And I’d have to believe you, right? Maybe you set up Jude. Or both of us, for all I know. Maybe you were working with BioMax the whole time.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“They’re your partners, right? Your allies in the cause?”
My words; his bullets. He was better at this than I would have expected.
And I wasn’t allowed to fight back.
“Jude warned me.” He shook his head, furious. “He warned me not to trust you.”
“We both agreed,” I said, getting desperate. I had to make him understand. “You wanted to stop Jude from hurting anyone. No matter what we had to do.”
He wasn’t listening. And part of me understood that the denials didn’t matter, because he didn’t really believe I was conspiring against him. It was the lying he couldn’t forgive. And I couldn’t deny I’d done that.
“Funny,” he said. “All that time you hated Jude, tried to turn me against him, and now he’s your new best friend. Maybe that was the plan? Get me out of the way?”
“You know that’s ridiculous.”
“So explain why you lie to me, and trust him.”
“I don’t! I mean, I do. Trust you. Not him. He’s nothing.”
Riley laughed. “Or maybe you’re lying again. Maybe while you’ve been screwing with me, you’ve been fucking him.”
It was the ugliest thing he’d ever said to me.
He didn’t mean it, I told myself.
He didn’t.
“Well? You want to deny it?”
“You really want to have this conversation?” I said, patience fraying. “With your ex-girlfriend camping out at the foot of your bed?”
“So we’re both liars,” he said. “I feel so much better now.”
I decided not to think too hard about that one, and trust that he meant he’d lied about her being there, not about why.
“We can start over,” I said. “No lies. You know everything now.”
He stood up. I was losing him.
“You honestly expect me to believe anything you say?”
Maybe I should have begged. Dropped to my knees. Clung to him. I didn’t expect it to work, but maybe I should have tried.
I didn’t.
We stood there, side by side, watching the water. I waited for him to walk away from me, and wondered how long it would take me to walk home from here. The thought reminded me that I didn’t have a home anymore; I only had Riley’s bed, and probably I didn’t have that anymore either.
“Riley, I—”
“Don’t.”
Minutes, hours, I don’t know. Mech bodies don’t get tired; mech legs don’t buckle. We could have stood there forever, as if rusted in place. A monument to something dead.
Finally: “I know you didn’t mean it.”
For a second I let myself hope. But even the anger was better than what was left in its wake. A vacuum. Every word clear, measured—empty.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he added.
“It has to.”
“It doesn’t.” He finally turned to me. Riley’s eyes were deep brown, not the slate gray they’d been when I first knew him. BioMax had done their best to match the new color to the photo I’d given them, but I couldn’t imagine that any org would have eyes like this. And certainly no org had the pinprick of amber at the center of the pupil. Like a keyhole. I watched his eyes and imagined I could see something there that said this wasn’t over, no matter what he wanted me to believe.
But I was done seeing what I wanted to see.
“It’s too hard,” Riley said.
“It” meant “us.”
“So that’s it? Because it’s too much work?” I shook my head. No. No. No. “That’s supposed to be my thing, remember? I run away when things get tough. You stay. I’m the one who likes it easy, who gets everything handed to me—that’s what you think, right? You’re hard, you’re strong, I’m weak. So now who’s weak?”
“I’m not weak,” Riley said. “I’m tired.”
“Of me?” I asked. My voice sounded small, and I hated it.
“Of this.”
“Of us.”
“Come here,” he said, and opened his arms to me.
I wish I could say I turned my back on him. Not because I hated him or because he was wrong, but because it was my turn to be hard. Pride, dignity—invisible things, imaginary things, like the self, like the soul. They distort reality; they get in the way. But they still matter.
I stepped into his arms. I wished I could breathe in the scent of him, that his skin was warm and his chest rose and fell beneath his shirt.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, I thought. We were supposed to be a fairy tale. A cliché of a love story, the princess and the rogue, the lady and the tramp. We had died and come back to life; we were copies who’d found reality in each other. We were machines who’d found love. The circumstances were extraordinary. How could the end be so damn ordinary?
Just another breakup.
Just another broken heart.
If I really wanted him, I would find a way to fix it, I thought.
If I really wanted him, I wouldn’t have driven him away.
But as usual I didn’t know what I wanted. Other than his arms around me.
I wanted that, but not enough to hold on when he let go. Imaginary dignity, maybe. But it was real the way we stood there, alone together, nothing left to say. It was real when we walked to the car in step, side by side, not touching, and drove away, mature, grown-up. Separate.
This is really happening, I thought. This is how it ends. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything.