Page 48 of Repossess My Heart

“Fuck shut up Michael! I can’t think with you in my head!” He yells, for a moment halting my panicked scrambling. My hands find purchase on the handle of the blade embedded in my mom before I can think better of it. I careen back a little too far in my attempt to remove it from her leathered and mummified face, sending me plummeting off the bed and onto the floor and her head on to me.

I scream again. I scream so loudly my throat strains, making the sound cut off and go silent. Nine appears before me, tossing what he’s left of CeCe on the bed while he jerks my face towards his, his hand branding my chin.

Everything goes still,Igo still as his boot perches on mom’s head, “I know I’m not starting off this boyfriend thing well. To be honest, I’ve never had a girlfriend before but I can see that dismembering your things and stabbing your mom's corpse isn’t a step in the right direction-“

“I’m not your fucking girlfriend, you absolute monster!” I yell back in his face, trying and failing miserably to wrench my jaw free from his grip. That icy bite of his eyes fills me with so many conflicting emotions it makes my head swim.

“Reverie, sweetling, shut your beautiful fucking mouth unless you have something useful to say to me. I don’t want to have to crush her skull.”

“I- I my mom… oh god I think I’m going to be sick.” As if on command, bile surges up my throat as he grips my hair holding it taunt and out of the line of fire just in time for me to lean forward emptying out my already empty stomach.

I’m panting by the time I’m finished, and his thumb finds the corner of my mouth wiping away the spittle there. “You were saying?”

“The ones in the Down control everything and everyone. It’s… it’s not the Above, it’s never been the above. When CeCe was dying-“

“Who the fuck is CeCe?”

“My bot… my care bot, she did something to me. She put that tech inside me, and the next few days were… hell. I got so sick I thought I was going to die, but then I went to sleep. It must’ve been for a really long time…” He’s silent, his chest heaving, so I continue allowing myself to spew information, any I have. I ruin everything he knew about his world.

“When I woke up, I was different,enhanced.I could tell when people were close, people that were connected to the Down. Embedded with their tech. I also knew things, like the fact that our entire world is based on lies. I knew how their systems operated and how to shut them down. When we were in the Down, my whole body felt like it was crawling, like I was going to explode if I didn’t leave. I saw layouts and maps; I got stronger when I was down there.”

“Because the bot that implanted part of its nanotech in you was the primary care bot of the family that runs the down…” he says it half to himself, his eyes glued to mine but not seeing them. My hands find his wrist giving it a squeeze, hoping he doesn’t disassociate again. He’s still got his boot on mom.

“The family that runs everything Nine…”

“Nathan.” He whispers, still looking straight through me.

“What?”

“My name is Nathan.” With that his foot leaves my mom’s skull, his lethal body slumping down in front of me, his back pressed into the mattress. His hands band around my ankle like a vice, and I let him slip somewhere else. Somewhere I can’t reach him as my heart thuds erratically in my chest.

You don’t look at all like a Nathan.

Nathan

This time when I’m huddled inside the closet, I’m staring directly at him and he at me. We don’t speak at first, allowing the symphony of agony outside the doors to narrate our silence. The man that raised me, the one that trained and fed and prepared me, killed her, the woman he helped so much in the end. It makes so much sense, too much sense. He loved her…

Until she got too close. Until she saw too much..

It was all right under my nose all these years.

A sick, guttural laugh escapes my lips, and it doesn’t stop. I laugh and laugh and laugh until I’m breathless and then I scream. I scream and I laugh until there’s no air left to fuel either and I fall back into silence, staring at Michael’s battered face.

“What now? I think you’re losing your mind.”

I nod, “Yeah, I think I am too.”

“What will you do Nate?”

“Kill them,” I laugh again, even though my throat is sore, “All of them. Changing things now is a waste of a perfectly planned genocide. Either way, I’ve already sent the Down on its crash course of destruction. No sense in dragging her back into harm's way just to rip him cock to cocksucker. She almost died down there, without my permission.”

“That doesn’t sound like you at all.”

“I’m not me, never was.”

“What are you then? Are you Number Nine, Nathan? Her fuck buddy? The son of a whore?”

“I’m a spark…” the more I speak the brighter, stronger the words feel.. “I’m the carcass of a badly burned child. This world teaches us to be a tool of cruelty before they teach us how to read. To accept all things vile and wrong regardless of status. It doesn’t matter what I ended up as, only what I’ll make of them. They will be victims of that cruelty only moments before that bitter burnt child burns them to ash.”

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